Patrick Simpson

In Slough, Mahboob Khan has been jailed for 4.5 years for his role in a scam that prosecutors described as part of an epidemic threatening to destroy British democracy. No, hold your horses, this isn’t the great news that people are finally being jailed for being too stupid to vote, Mr Khan has evidently committed electoral fraud.

Mr Khan – and five others – used ghost voters to vote for him in Slough’s local election, using postal votes. This was his biggest mistake: the ghosts attracted the attention of Scooby-Doo and the gang, who quickly discovered that they were all the janitor in a white sheet. Besides, the postal voting system is so insecure that he need not have bothered, he might just as well have mailed the final results to the electoral committee.

The fraud was uncovered by Lydia Simmons – the candidate defeated by Mr Khan, who pointed out that at a number of houses up to 19 names, all Asian, had registered in the run-up to the election at the same address, then opted to vote by post. Which is highly suspect, as generally the people living in modern slavery in Europe tend not to bother with voting after working 16 hours a day and being forced to live in a house with 18 other people.

Charles Miskin, who prosecuted the case, said that with the number of applications for postal votes increasing, the electoral system had become prone to fraudsters. Postal voting has been in high demand and as a result there has been a surge of ballot fixing, the like of which has not been seen since Victorian times, he said. Mr Miskin is of course referring to the great electoral fraud of 1876, when Queen Victoria was elected empress of India on the basis of millions of postal votes from England.

During sentencing, Judge Gordon Risius cited are recent Court of Appeal case: For such offences it was said that as long as they are proportionate and not unjust, deterrent sentences are called for. After which he sentenced the guilty to a lifetime of living in Slough, or as John Betjeman put it in his poem Slough:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town –
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week for half-a-crown
For twenty years,

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears,

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.