@mikey
//I can remember the time when the candidates party wasn't mentioned on the voting slip at all. I would strongly suspect that people going into the booth will just scan up and down and look for the Party of their choice, not a name.//
That is precisely how I behave at MEP election rounds, sad to admit. They never come to your door and I haven't a ruddy clue what they look like*, let alone what their personality/talent is like.
* slight hyperbole. The leaflet comes through the door, there's a photo of someone grinning but, at work, we used to get wall charts of similarly grinning faces on a semi-annual basis, entitled "here is your new senior management team". We were "outstationed", out of London, and we were lucky is we spotted the Grade 5 on his/her annual flying visit. One used to make us gather for a 1-hour speech but that was like having an extra hour added to your backlog.
Would you dish out a £60,000+ job (I'll google for MEP pay rates) to someone based solely on a grinning photo on a leaflet, shoved through your letterbox?
What ARE we doing, when it comes to politics?