Tim Jones winning the election.[1]
The 2005 Mayoral Election for Tackleford City and Borough was an eventful example of democracy in practice.
After the appearance of The Child caused chaos in Tackleford, and Mayor James Mayor proved to be unable to properly deal with this situation, his re-election was at stake. Thus he had to face several tough challengers in the 2005 election.
The mayoral candidates were:
- James Mayor himself (Literal Democrats). His campaign advisor was his assistant Shelley Winters, who cooked up several zany ideas for the mayor's election campaign, such as the promise to build a monorail, or a giant James Mayor-shaped hot air balloon, displaying the message "VOTE MAYOR - OR DIE - POSSIBLY". In spite of all this, Mayor Mayor lost the election, having only received 45,341 votes.
- Wanda Prune (Progressive Party), who pledged to include at least one dolphin on the city council. Wasn't considered to be a major threat by the other competitors, and accordingly lost with only receiving 3,109 votes.
- Bentley Quorn (Evil Party), who started his election campaign as soon as during the "Child Crisis". His campaign advisor was Elaine Wu. Thus, she was sort of the Evil Party's counterpart to Shelley, though that doesn't really excuse the cat fight the two had on national TV. At the day before election night, Bentley Quorn's popularity took a nose dive, due to his own like-himself-shaped balloon nearly destroying the Gimmer's Crag Animal Sanctuary. The result was that he got the smallest amount of votes in this election, namely 511.
- Tim Jones (Scientific Democrats), local inventor and the man who eventually won the election. He was the one who prevented Quorn's balloon from destroying the animal sanctuary, with the help of one of his inventions, thus proving that he can provide the science as promised at the start of his campaign. He got 59,194 votes.
- Hugo Rodriguez (Scientific Democrats), who was temporarily taking Tim's place as the Scientific's candidate, during a phase in which Tim had lost all his own motivation. But then, Hugo was the victim of a hot apple pie attack that caused severe bodily harm to him (and that was maybe even meant as an assassination attempt), ordered by Quorn due to Hugo's immense popularity amongst the voters. Thus, Hugo chose to withdraw from the electoral race, and Tim was candidate again.
On May 5th, Tim Jones won the election. Unfortunately, he didn't get to be mayor for a full term, due to soon thereafter losing an invent-off against fellow inventor Dai Davies. Tim was exiled to Wales, and Davies (whose henchwoman, interestingly, was Elaine Wu) inherited the mayoral office (which he didn't manage to hold for very long himself).
Another important fallout of this election was that with James Mayor losing his office, Shelley Winters wound up being jobless too. (Tim refused to continue her employment.) This let to Shelley successfully applying for the job as a reporter for the Tackleford Cormorant.
Trivia:[]
Upon meeting Tim Jones in person, Neil Haversham told Eustace Boyce that he voted for Tim back in 2005, because he was his hero. Even Shelley - being the campaign advisor and employee of one of his political adversaries after all - pondered voting for Tim! It is unknown how her final decision was, though.