As you may have read last weekend, I was chosen by fellow residents to be Labour’s general election candidate for Watford.

I stood in 2015, pushing Liberal Democrat candidate Dorothy Thornhill into a poor third place and stopped Watford being a three-way marginal. 

I would like to thank Chris Ostrowski for building on that success since then.

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Watford has elected a Conservative or Labour MP for well over 100 years, and that’s not going to change with the Liberal Democrats firmly out of the race.

But I don’t want my first column for a while just to be about me or politics.

We’ve all been sweltering in the heatwave this week. It was well predicted and in many ways predictable.  I do just remember 1976 when Britain sizzled.

However, temperatures are in excess of those recorded back then and we’ve had other hot spells, so clearly, no matter what the likes of Donald Trump say, there has been climate change and we can all feel its impact. We need to take it seriously.

As we do the fire at Abbey View, one of the two tower blocks on the Meriden estate.

How terrifying it was for the residents awoken by flames and billowing smoke at 5am last Wednesday and several floors damaged. I am so relieved that nobody was hurt, but the dangers posed by tower blocks are all too real.

Also, this week we have had the odd spectacle of the government putting down a meaningless vote of confidence in itself.  Watford’s Conservative MP Dean Russell loyally and shamefully backed lying Boris Johnson to the very last. Two men with no shame. One down, one to go.