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Published: 03 June 2010
by RICHARD OSLEY

THREE quiz questions: How many black 25-year-old women have been elected as councillors at the Town Hall? How many councillors work in a health food shop? And how many have fierce fingernails and wear Carrie Bradshaw-style signature necklaces? 

Three points and a VIP ticket to the next Scrutiny Committee meeting up at the council if you answered “none” to all three.

Yet on a different day: Sabrina Francis – who can claim to be all of those things – might have found her way to those green council chamber benches.

The Town Hall is getting more diverse, but it hasn’t yet elected a young woman who is a product of Camden’s own education system and who didn’t go on to Oxbridge or enjoy close ties with important people in a political party.

It hasn’t elected anybody who can instantly name every character in Glee. 

Ms Francis, who lives in Camden Town, was just 34 votes off winning a seat in Haverstock in the delayed council ward election last week. The Lib Dems, including two councillors with strong track records locally, held all three seats. Ms Francis will have to wait.

“It’s true, it has been that a lot of councillors  have looked and sounded the same in Camden,” she said. “There have been lots of men. It is changing but there aren’t lots of them who come from single-parent families and have pulled themselves up by their boot straps. There are councillors who are more controlled, maybe more responsible, about what they say than I would have been. But then you can end up with people who don’t say anything interesting. They become too worried.”

Ms Francis held little back on her Twitter site during the campaign.

A former pupil at Camden School for Girls (“I got in because we lived around the corner, not because I had music lessons when I was six”) Ms Francis said: “People in their 20s don’t feel like they are part of the council. Politics seem far away. They don’t realise that if you don’t like what’s going on with your park, with your swimming pool, then this is all politics at the council. Look at housing, who actually understands how the points system works? Why is the magic number of points 600? Nobody really knows.”

She added: “What was frustrating about Haverstock is that I was brought up in Camden, went to school here. But I kept being told I wasn’t local. People said that I didn’t live in Haverstock and I didn’t care about libraries and parks in Camden, it was ridiculous. I’ve been using them my whole life.”

Labour members don’t want to bicker about why Haverstock ended in defeat but many believe that if the election had been held on the same day as the rest of the borough then the wave of support that swept them back to power in Camden would have also carried Ms Francis  to victory. 

“I’m asked five times a day whether I will stand again,” said Ms Francis. She works in a health food shop in Kentish Town and lives with her mother, who works in a pub. For the next year, she will also be a consort to Camden Mayor Jonathan Simpson.

“I wanted to do something like this to make my mum proud. She was not a big Labour member. There isn’t a line through my family of standing at elections. She talked to me when John Smith died and said that a good man had died but it was me who deci­ded to join. I remember studying the welfare state in history lessons and thinking how could you not have an NHS?”

She said as a student campaigner in Birmingham, where she studied social policy, she had stuck with Labour despite the Iraq invasion.

“I didn’t want all the good things to go just because of Iraq.”

And now she interns at head office two days a week.

She said: “I think the stat is there are more black men in prison than at university in this country. As somebody who could have a black son, that’s worrying. People need inspiring.”

But what about those suited men who dom­inate politics? “I think they are people with opinions about everything too – they are just careful about what they say. It can get meaningless. The same thing happens on Twitter and blogs with Labour people. David Miliband says something, somebody repeats it and retweets it – and then somebody blogs about it.  All they do is talk about Labour. There’s other stuff going on as well and people need to realise that. Don’t they have TVs?”

Top tweets @sabfrancis

WHEN 6Music was threatened with being cut, the number of general election candidates who tweeted that they were fans of station was sometimes difficult to believe.

“Not square me,” the message from middle-aged men seemed to be, “I like  the cartoon band with the man from Blur in it.”

As politicians go, Sabrina Francis presents a slightly more genuine – if sometimes fruity – take on pop culture with her online broadsides. On election day, she declared “Bring It On Bitches” to her rivals on Twitter. In fact her tweets as @sabfrancis have made her a local internet hit with no TV personality safe from her columnist-style TV reviews.

• On killer characters on EastEnders: “Why is Lucas whinging about his wife wearing skimpy clothes on EastEnders when he’s a bloody murderer?”

• On talent show Somewhere Over The Rainbow: “Who’s the one with the red stripes? She’ll blates win.”

• On Junior Apprentice: “Did Sugar have to make this sham of a show because the Tories were whinging about his influence?”

Young ones – Six ‘youngsters’ who did get elected...

Fred Carver, Lib Dem
Camden’s youngest-ever councillor was elected in 2006 aged 21. Definitely not “a suit”, he turned up to some meetings in tracksuit bottoms. Lost out in Somers Town at 2010 elections.

Ben Rawlings, Lib Dem
At just 24, he was a Lib Dem frontbencher at the Town Hall in charge of community safety back in 2006. He tried to  reach out to disaffected teenagers. Stood down in May.

Phillip Thompson, Lib Dem
Elected at the age of 24, he  had quit the council by the age of 26. The lure of a study opportunities in Arizona proved too tempting.

Tulip Siddiq, Labour
Tapped into the Labour Party centrally after working on Gordon Brown’s press team. At 27, she is the youngest councillor ever to take on the culture and leisure brief. 

Georgia Gould, Labour
Her dreams of becoming an MP straight off the bat at 24 were ended after a Labour catfight over the candidature in Thamesmead. Healed herself with gung-ho campaign to get elected in Kentish Town.

Awale Olad, Labour
Another young face at the Town Hall to be elected last month, party has high hopes for 25-year-old in Holborn.