Running for office

Abstract

By the time you read this article we in Great Britain will probably have been through the process (or should that be charade?) of a general election when we will all be expected to choose who will represent (or misrepresent) us in Parliament. Any day now politicians will start running around kissing babies and turning up on our doorsteps asking for our support. Currying favour with the electorate they will even offer to take the old and infirm to the polling stations in the hope that such beneficence will encourage their charges to cast their votes for them. And of course they will attempt to persuade us that their party is the only one with the policies necessary to get us out of the economic mire we find ourselves in, omitting to say that politicians helped put us there in the first place. O tempora, o mores!

For the origins of the terminology we use in politics we must turn, as is so often the case, to ancient Greek and Latin for the answers to our questions.