“If at first you don’t succeed, give up. You tried your best and you failed miserably; the lesson is: never try”, are the wise words of Homer Simpson. Unfortunately Tom Coker, standing for the Presidency of the Trinity College Student Union for the fifth year in a row, didn’t listen to them. And this year he finally succeeded.

The victory is celebrated by the Facebook group “Fifth Time Lucky” with the question “Is this the greatest story in the history of the TCSU Elections?”

Last week Varsity reported on the response of Trinity students to TCSU’s decision to reaffiliate to CUSU. 20 out of a student body of 600 undergraduates attended a meeting to vote on the reaffiliation. The twentieth vote, without which no move could have been passed, was cast by the Varsity reporter sent to report on the event. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that one of England’s great institutions, founded by Henry VIII, home to 31 noble prize winners and countless great statesmen, authors and philosophers, has a president whose manifesto photo featured him in a PVC dress. In the opening line of his handwritten policy statement he misspelt ‘you’.

Standing for election in his first year at Trinity, his ambitious pledge to improve life in the college was “to show people what happened when skittles are microwaved”. He brought a plate of them for all to see. In the second year his nomination form was ripped up and he was discounted from standing by the then President in a display of remarkable insight. Third year he was apparently “drunk”, and after again meeting with defeat in the fourth year he decided to disaffiliate from the TCSU. Repeated failure did not deter him from trying a fifth time, and succeeding.

So how did this Natsci manage to become Student President of an institution with endowments of several hundred million pounds? “This year there weren’t any serious candidates”, he explained candidly. “Having been in college for four years I have more experience and wisdom.” His manifesto demanded freezing college bar prices for 5 years, and banning an individual named Andy Davies from ever entering the college.

The outgoing president Gavin Johnstone “was satisfied with the general conduct and fairness of the election” but considered it “inappropriate” to comment further. No burnt skittles for him then. Facebook provides some rather more colourful reactions. “Is that a joke? Coker, are you really TCSU president?” says a member of the campaign group. One unnamed source was rather less reticent. “I hear Coker is president? How on earth did this atrocity happen?...I have more respect for the tramp that you knocked out with an orange than him”, he said.

But Coker seems to have a keen regard for political success. He commented that the key to his presidential campaign was “to demonstrate that one, you are better than the other candidates and two, the other candidates are worse than you”. This is surely the sort of political prescience of which Churchill would have been proud.

Calls to reopen nominations have been rejected, so be warned. This is what happens in a democracy when you don’t vote.

Henry Donati