Elections do funny things to people. Some candidates start spouting promises they know they will never be able to keep if elected, others deny ever having had anything to do with controversial matters or now-unfavourable decisions.

But the one that seems to throw councillors, their highly-paid officers and even the lawyers into almost complete pandemonium is the purdah period.

As far as I have always been able to work out, purduh stretches from the time an election is officially called until the time the polling stations close, and basically stops council staff doing anything which could be seen to promote one political party over another.

In other words, it is no big deal.

It should be straightforward enough, but of course our friends at Hertsmere Borough Council like to make things complicated, and so we stumble across a peculiar little intricacy of this year’s campaign.

For some time now the authority has broadcast meetings live on the internet, largely to save residents the bother of a trip down to the civic officers, and also to ‘improve e-communications’. A nice enough idea.

But that arrangement has come to an end to make way for purdah, and so tonight’s full meeting of the council, like last week’s executive meeting, will not be broadcast lest a voter sees a councillor say something sensible and thinks ‘right, I’ll vote for him/her’.

Those of you sitting in front of your laptops at 7.30pm expecting to see Messrs Bright, Gamble and Feeney doing their thing, rather than opting for the more sensible choice of watching Coronation Street (insert own soap opera gag here), will therefore be disappointed.

Admittedly it is hardly a cover-up or travesty of Zimbabwean proportions, but still, it is worth wondering why fat cat council executives in their ivory towers think they can make such decisions based seemingly on little fact, knowledge or common sense and without any anticipation that people living in a democracy would then ask ‘why?’.

To highlight the sheer daftness of the decision, I checked out whether members of the public would also be banned from the chamber to stop them being swayed one way or the other? The answer was, of course, ‘no’.

Will the archived meetings from the last six months be removed from the council’s website? No they won’t be.

So why, you may ask, should the webcam be different?

From what I’m told, it appears to come down to how one interprets the word ‘publicity’. Holding a meeting in public does not necessarily publicise any particular candidate, but streaming it live online could.

You really couldn’t make it up, only the council has done exactly that.

Seemingly the same system was run last year during purdah, although why that was seems difficult to ascertain.

I’m told legal advice was sought from other authorities and those people who spend their days studying such things, and after being told that everyone was pretty much doing whatever they wanted, Hertsmere decided to turn the cameras off.

Perhaps the only moral here, other than the fact local authorities have too many staff with too little to do, is as follows.

From time to time a great number of our councillors would do well to remember that they do not have a God-given right to their seat in the chamber. They are elected by us, the public, funded by us, the tax payers, and can be done away with at the ballot box by us, the voters.

In reality it makes little difference whether the meeting is broadcast online — the number of people watching could presumably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

What is more important to remember is that layer upon layer of bureaucracy and legalistic red tape does little to help our elected members in the eyes of their constituents.

While familiarity may breed contempt, a lack of transparency hightens suspicion.

I may yet be proved wrong, but I fully expect there to be terribly low turnouts in most Hertsmere wards up for election on May 1. Perhaps once councillors see only a couple of hundred votes tumble out of the ballot boxes they will realise how their constituents truly feel.