By Stephen Blease

Last updated 11:40, Thursday, 26 June 2008

So election fever is gripping Haltemprice and Howden. Conservative David Davis has resigned as an MP – and is standing to fill the vacancy he created.

He says he is doing so to highlight the erosion of civil liberties, and in particular the law allowing terrorist suspects to be held without charge for 42 days.

It could be observed that Mr Davis seems to care more about civil liberties than taxpayers’ money. The by-election – due either on July 3 or 10 – is going to cost £80,000, money that might have been better spent on school books or hospital beds.

And Davis’s new-found enthusiasm for civil liberties may puzzle some who have followed his career.

As a supporter of hanging and opponent of the Human Rights Act, he is not best known for hand-wringing liberalism.

Whatever one thinks about locking up terror suspects for 42 days – and a survey of local people by the News & Star found most supported it – it is difficult to see what Davis hopes to achieve.

Does he think a by-election victory in a fairly safe Tory seat will lead Gordon Brown to change his mind?

Davis admitted on the BBC’s Question Time that he has probably ended his front-bench career by resigning.

If he’d stayed in the shadow cabinet, and if the Tories win the next election, wouldn’t he have been in a position to do something about it?

The only result is that he will achieve more publicity for himself, and £80,000 of our money will be wasted.

Neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats are fielding candidates in the David Davis Show. Even Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, who said he was almost certain to stand against him, has now bowed out.

But the voters of Haltemprice and Howden still have an alternative.

If I lived there, I’d be backing Mad Cow Girl, the candidate of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.