Well folks, you heard it here first and direct from the keyboard of the man himself.

It now seems, from a comment posted to this very blog, that the vote rigging ’scandal’ at the Oxford University Student’s Union to which Birmingham Lib Dem leader, John Hemming, referred to in his testimony to the recent Election Court in Birmingham was none other than…

… the fact that he was beaten for the post of Student Union secretary by a dog!

John neglects to mention whether, at the time, he considered petitioning the High Court in the ‘Votes for Winalot’ scandal although a spokesman for the National Canine Defence League has gone on the record to state the John was ‘barking up the wrong tree’ with his allegations and that the dog was obviously the better candidate by virtue of having a ‘better political Pedigree (Chum) than its rivals’.

John, it seems, didn’t quite get the hang of this whole ’student life’ business - not that that comes as much of surprise considering that his biography shows him to have won a scholarship to Birmingham’s King Edward’s Grammar School, an institution that’s well known locally for it high academic standards…

…and its student’s wholesale lack of social skills.

A short autobiographical fact of note is that your erstwhile correspondent - that’s me folk - was once heavily ‘tipped’ for a place at the same school but refused, point blank, to have anything whatsoever to do with the place or the examinations required for entry.

In fact there’s nothing overly unusual in a student union voting in a dog as its secretary. As some will no doubt remember, back in the late 1980’s, students at the University of East Anglia elected a gerbil, named Kevin if I remember correctly, as Student Union President. Kevin was subsequently disbarred from office by virtue of his inability to give the student body the expected annual President’s address.

Not long afterwards, as I recall, students at another university overcame this particular procedural problem by electing a talking Pinball Machine which had little difficulty in making its address, even if this amounted only to suggesting that students should try a game of pinball.

The interesting point in all this is that the election of animals and/or inanimate objects to officer positions in a Student Union, something that most former university students would readily recognise as the kind of fairly routine absurdist joke that students are prone to at times when the student politcos start to take themselves a bit too seriously, has been interpreted by Hemming as evidence of ballot rigging rather than a sign of his own obvious unpopularity amongst his fellow students, leaving him seemingly rather traumatised by the whole experience.

In the circumstances, what else can one say about this whole episode but ‘Look, John. The dog won. Get over it…”