The next two weeks mark the 360th anniversary of a series of debates that took place in St Marys Church Putney between the new model army and the levellers over the English constitution and who should have the right to vote etc. These marked an important step on the road towards (for men at least) universal suffrage, equality before the law, freedom of thought and the idea that the governments need the consent of the governed to rule.

Stuart King was today selected to be Labour's candidate for Putney, comfortably beating Elisabeth Davies (who came second) and Floyd Millen (third) on the first ballot.
Update [2007-6-28 16:34:56 by Jag Singh]: Stuart's website is at www.stuartking.net/blog

Putney branches have now completed their nominating process, with the following results:

Sian Lloyd-Webber kindly provided the shortlist for the Wimbledon selection in the (long) thread on BAME candidates, so I've posted it here.

• Eleanor Tunnicliffe
  
• Mee-kuen Chong
  
• Dan Lodge
  
• Mark McDonald
  
• Abdal Ullah

Hustings scheduled for 2nd June.

Interestingly, three of those shortlisted have also applied for Putney, and, assuming that that CLP wants a shortlist of six, given that only three women have applied, Eleanor and Mee-Kuen will be shortlisted there.

It's a rather interesting dilemma though: it's pretty near impossible for someone to campaign effectively in two selections occurring at the same time, and if they lose Wimbledon (which selects first) it will, I suspect, be rather hard to convince members in Putney of a commitment to that constituency.

Of course, it could be argued that anyone applying for more than one constituency will have that problem - what makes this slightly more difficult is that these are adjoining seats selecting at the same time where connections across the two boroughs are decent and people will know what's going on in both.

That's not entirely true. Peter Carpenter, the Procedures Secretary for the Putney Selection has been in touch to let me know that the deadline for applications was always set as 13th April. No-one's sure where the 5th came from...