Peter Robinson joined Labour the day after the election, ready to begin the fightback. Then the emails started. And the texts. And the cold calls

Earlier this year The Onion’s sister site Clickhole published a story headlined The Long Road to the Top: How Bursting Into Various Boardrooms and Shouting, ‘That’s Where I Come In!’ Eventually Got Me a Job As a CEO at a Fortune 500 Company. It made me laugh when I first read it, and the memory of that article made me laugh again on 8 May, as I signed up to become a member of the Labour party.

Why British political parties won’t stop spamming you Read more

It was the day after an election I had expected to go very differently. At 38, I was ready to engage with politics. Better late than never, right? I was energised. This was where I came in!

I don’t know what I was expecting. Would I go to meetings? Would I need a clipboard? Would my membership automatically trigger a red flashing light at Labour HQ? “Don’t worry chaps – Ed has just resigned but the guy who wrote the sleevenotes for Girls Aloud’s singles boxset is finally on board!” I certainly didn’t expect an endless deluge of emails. At first, they were exciting. I can be part of change, I thought. I want to learn! But the emails were unexpectedly numerous. Unsubscribe links promised that it would be possible to change my settings, in order to receive only important emails. The emails kept coming. Every leadership candidate and every mayoral candidate had been given my original details. Spam filters didn’t work because Labour’s senders changed their subject lines and signatures from mail to mail. Faux chatty subject lines were everywhere. “Will you join me?” asked Tom Watson. “You may have heard,” Yvette Cooper teased. “You may think you know me,” supposed Caroline Flint. “It’s official,” declared Tom Watson, again.

Then the SMS messages started: from Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham, Tessa Jowell, and a slightly overfamiliar sender who simply identified himself as Sadiq. One evening, during a rather fraught dinner session with my two daughters, just after the two-year-old had aggressively frisbeed a plate of food across the kitchen, the phone rang. It was Tom Watson’s office. They fancied a chat. I did not fancy a chat.

Sophie Heawood: Labour isn’t working. It’s spamming us instead Read more

On 26 June, the party contacted me by phone, by email and by text. But I reached breaking point courtesy of an email from June Sarpong, a woman best known for ineptly interviewing pop stars on Sunday morning TV, 10 years ago. Sarpong wanted me to know that she thought David Lammy should be London’s next mayor.

I don’t believe one should be precluded from having a political voice simply because one has, for instance, hosted a live Sky1 seance in which Derek Acorah attempts to make contact with Michael Jackson. But what was hitting the Sarpong button meant to achieve? This is not a woman whose engagement with young people – or any people – is likely to be worrying Zoella any time soon. The Sarpong email was the final straw.

The man on the phone at Labour HQ didn’t try to talk me round; he just sent me in the direction of an online form. I filled it in and 10 minutes later I’d received an automated message telling me that my membership had been cancelled. Maybe I have too much experience of the needy, please-don’t-goisms of broadband retention units, but it struck me that all I’d actually wanted was for someone to listen to me. In any case, I was out.

Five hours later, I received a text message from June Sarpong.

Social media reached Peak Sarpong that evening. Searching Twitter for the phase “June Sarpong” – as many of us must surely have done in our darkest moments – I found that I’d not been alone in my frustration. “June Sarpong texted me while I was at a funeral today,” noted one tweet. Another read: “1) Labour are fucked. 2) I miss my PPI spam.” The tweets went on: “Who is June Sarpong and why does she know my name and phone number?” And on: “What next, Anthea Turner texting me to vote for Tessa Jowell?”

How to rebuild a political party – from the ground up | Linda Grant Read more

I’m aware that my decision to leave Labour may prompt hoots of derision from longstanding members who long ago made peace with inbox overload, but I know from discussing my woes with friends that I’m not alone. “I left solely because of the emails,” one friend confirmed. “I have more contact with Tessa Jowell and Diane Abbott,” another noted, “than I do with my mum.” When yet another friend posted on Facebook that he’d received three Labour phone calls and eight emails in seven days and was thinking of leaving because of it, he was advised: “They are the LinkedIn of politics.”

Of those who’ve recently left, I hope I’m not alone in thinking that I’ll rejoin Labour (if they’ll have me) once the leadership and mayoral campaigns are out of the way. This is where I’ll come back in, albeit using a different email address.