I’ve always had a pretty simple approach to the families of candidates when it comes to campaigning. Remember to thank them for the burden the candidature of their loved one puts on them, and keep them out of political communications.

The latter is always my strong preference. If you choose to use your family in some way as a prop to get elected then how can you reasonably turn around and demand the media and the public leave them alone to their privacy subsequently?

Saying that the behaviour of a teenager at school is none of the media’s business is rather undermined if you’ve previously included said teenager in a photo on a leaflet saying how wonderful your family is, with the implication that this is a reason to vote for you. (Why else include such information unless you think it serves such a purpose? It requires quite remarkably contortions to argue that everything else in your leaflet is about why people should vote for you but you just happened also to include something about yourself without that factor in mind at all.)

It is not a view I carry to extremes. If a candidate goes speak at a school which one of their family attended, I wouldn’t try to censor them from mentioning it in their opening remarks. But it is a view I’ve always tried to follow whenever such decisions are in part up to me.

Important though the local credentials of a candidate can be (and it is something that voters want to hear about and which wins votes), they don’t have to be proven through the family. That is because what people really value is the sense that a candidate is committed to the area, knows the area and is working for the area. Being “local” is a shortcut for all this – which is why even technically non-local candidates can acquire the accolade of being local with enough commitment. That is why living locally by the time of an election also comes out as a vote-winning factor in the research but again, I strongly suspect, not so much for the fact it itself as for it being a really powerful shortcut to indicate something broader. You don’t have to use your family to earn the local points. You do have to work hard to do so.

Which brings me to my regular coverage of Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate selections. (You can find an explanation of what a PPC is here.)

I have followed the same approach and always tried to edit around the quotes from newly selected PPC and the local party which dwell on the PPC’s family. In some cases, I have had to do quite extensive editorial surgery, but it keeps me happy with the outcome.

It does, however, prompt the question of what my readers think of doing this. So over to you…