Election fever hit our campus a month before it started spreading to the rest of the country. A lot of student union officer posts open up in April, and every year the campus goes into overdrive. Maybe it’s something in the Easter eggs, but when the student union campaign trail is in full swing, we guards see things that would drive an ordinary person to superstition. The sanitary bin contractor finds a gram of coke on someone’s doormat. A first-year has gnomes thrown through his kitchen window. It seems devilry is afoot, and I’m not just talking about the spoof campaign posters that appear with horns photoshopped in.
The ways student candidates try to secure their nomination range from the laddish to the suicidal. The outgoing student union president motioned for the removal of the silent study pods and the bringing in of Time Crisis 3 arcade machines. He was successful: module averages dipped, but now everyone knows how to draw and shoot a pistol with a shower cable attached. And as nominations are secured, the squabbles and trash-talking begin. Cross-candidate tensions can boil over into attacks, which we try to mop up as best we can.
While all this is happening, a bigger, more straight-laced battle for votes is being fought. I’m talking about the staff governor elections, where two people duke it out over the right to attend extra meetings. Faces we’ve never seen before are at our counter, calling us “mate” and asking us to watch their ballot box. This year, it’s a dead heat between a bloke who won’t wear ties, and a woman who won’t canvass outside secure parts of the campus. It sounds eerily familiar.
As polling day looms, it’s the student candidates who can get black-ops nasty. To them, the stakes are as high as a general election, and desperate times call for politics done Klitschko-style. We get incidents where a floor’s worth of blokes storm the flat downstairs, and invert the occupants’ furniture. A couple of years ago, political differences between two housemates led to a 3am dust-up, with one bloke smashing every plate in the kitchen while the other threw a stool through the ceiling.
Whether these high spirits are down to manifesto clashes or PR grabs is anyone’s guess. The student culture secretary, who’d organised bar crawl after bar crawl for anyone voting, was clearly carrying out a psychological experiment. After a few weeks, her followers were so programmed into binge drinking that they’d throw parties at any occasion, even while waiting for a bus. And I’m pretty sure the former sports secretary’s decision to take penalties at 3am in his pants on the campus lawn was non-political.
That said, some of the promises made by student union candidates – particularly those standing for welfare officer – are inspiring. They want to bring mental health into the open. They want to fight for the recognition of the hang gliding society. These are the ones you pray get the job; the ones who might one day break into Whitehall and actually change something.
They even take the time to ask us, the just about managing, our opinion, although we always ask for the same thing we tell the staff governors: more staff. That way, lone guards won’t feel so jumpy when they break up a 2am kitchen study session, which involves five blokes sharing a bong, all of whom are making slurred threats to get you shot. That’s never nice, even when the would-be shooters are so wasted they can’t even open a bag of Doritos, let alone get their mates to run a Glock around.
The best advice I can give both camps is pretend you’re on the Andrew Marr Show. Never say yes or no, and smile when you eat bacon. Above all, make sure people know you’ve got the common touch. If freshers come to you and say they’re tired of being woken up by the fire alarm, produce posters with diagrams that show pasta ideally needs to be cooked in water. If students say they’re on magnesium tablets and want a pharmacy on campus, campaign for the next best thing: free almonds!
Finally, reach out to your electorate. Just like the student frontrunner who, on hearing a row in the street at 10pm, decided to test his diplomacy skills by mediating from his kitchen window. The two girls fighting put aside their differences to bottle him, with the winning shot sailing so fast past his ear it filled his kitchen sink with smashed wall tiles. Politics has always inspired passions, I guess.
Some details have been changed.
