The minds behind the manifestos

D H Lawrence, author, standing for the Conservative Party

It's a very odd affair - very.

One person is chosen to stand for the many, as if it were possible for one man to represent any one other, let alone a multitude.

But let it lie so - I am to stand, then to court the golden mob of the proletariat, and declare what it is, if anything, I can do for you in West Hampstead. So be it.

Certainly there are things that must be done to allow you to keep yourselves decent, to keep yourselves and your families respectable.

Schools and medicines, yes, let there be potions for all, we can play that game together.

But if I am to speak for you all, there is more I must know - I mustn't be a bore, but, on the other hand, I must know.

Let me ask you individually, what is that you want? What dim flame in the darkness does each of you burn for?

What black, electric comprehension in the darkness is your individual desire?

You are silent. You have no answers, you are incapable of real, visceral response in any honest way.

In your inchoateness, you are the people, you are the female principle laid open like a fig spread for my lips to take off the bloom.

Yes, you are the female in all her sudden convulsions and

ecstasies of debasement and

exaltation.

What I offer, all I can in any pure spiritual honesty offer is not, then, more evenings in the cinema for you and more rides in motor cars, and more, maddeningly more kitchen equipment bought on credit.

No - my vision of national regeneration depends on a pure effluence of maleness - what we must have in Britain is the pure duality of polarisation with none of the horrible merging and mingling with that - yes - actually disgusting worship of perfect possession as of a woman worshipping her own infant that the female-mob mentality presents its putrescent mystery.

So you shall be held in the hollow of one will, and it shall be a source of demon-satisfaction that one will holds so many - though in your black subjugation you wear the look of violated slaves, tumbling like swine to your individual damnation.

It is fatal to use the will in this way, it is an obscenity, how should it not be? To throw oneself into the flux of corruption] Dogs] Canaille] Faugh]

Politics is a filthy business. Vote for me]

Arthur Rimbaud, standing for the Ulster Unionists

WHAT shall I say to the people of Belfast? I say 'Orgy]' Every day there will be orgies for all, amorous seizures in the hell of caresses] We shall be idle and brutal and women will minister to our ferocious needs]

Listen: you ask whom am I? In the Shanklin Road and above the dim lough, you ask. So listen: I am the saint praying on the terraces. I am the scholar in the dark armchair. I am the traveller in the violet forest, in the stunted wood. It can only be the end of the world ahead.

Therefore what I say is - dance dance dance] I am an animal and so are you] Debauchery is stupid, but we are stupider] Let us gash our bodies and drink our own blood]

Syphilitics, madmen, kings, puppets, ventriloquists] Let us unveil all mysteries: I possess all talents] Oh, evil, thin men and wicked, pot-bellied men, I shall manufacture gold out of faeces - we shall all have wealth incomparable from our breakfast cereals] Dance and dance and vote for me]

Friedrich Nietzsche, standing for the leadership of the Social Democrats

NO] Impudent rabble] Retarded, sick, depraved debiles] Dotards, fools, morbid fools, victims of seizure in an epidemic of neurotic cowardice]

Irresistibly corrupt and cynically self-deceived spiders in your contradiction of life]

Contemptible prodigals, slaves, hysterical women and rickety children, idiotic decadents, sentimental weaklings, perverted sexual imbeciles, dried-up bookworms, nauseatingly frivolous pseudo-scientists, corrupt and disgusting priests, pathological philistines, swindlers, socialists, rotting cadavers and vulgar, poisonous, epileptic mediocrities.

No] Vote for me.

Miles Kington is on holiday.