Benjamin Brooks WITHDRAWS from SUSU elections!

Benjamin Brooks, one of the candidates running for Vice President Academic Affairs in this year’s sabbatical elections has withdrawn his nomination for the position in a shock move.

Ben Brooks was running for VP Academic Affairs.

Announcing the withdrawal of his nomination via Twitter just 30 minutes after voting opened, Brooks said:

Withdrawn my nomination for SUSU VP Academic Affiars. Details to follow. If you planned to vote for me I recommend @Jon_Davies27 #votesusu

In the early hours of this morning Brooks had mentioned on Twitter that ‘to be perfectly honest I’m not built for campaigning’ and that running for a sabbatical position was a ‘bad idea in final year (when everyone I know is doing Msci projects’.

Brooks was running against Sami ‘Simples’ Stephenson, Jonathan ‘J.D’ Davies, and Sasha Watson.

The Tab will update this article as soon as more information becomes available.

UPDATE 16.30:

Benjamin has explained his decision to withdraw his nomination in a post on his blog.

Mentioning how he had originally decided to keep his election campaign simple, and different from how he knew other candidates would be running their campaigns, he said:

I would run a low-key campaign driven by my policies and experience, without gimmick or palming people off with soundbites. As the last couple of weeks have progressed it has become steadily clear to me that I could not win the election with the resources at my disposal, so I have today withdrawn my nomination to the position of VP Academic Affairs.

Apologising for wasting the time and support of his campaign team, he said:

I have to extend my deep and sincere thanks to the small group of supporters I have who showed both enthusiasm for my candidacy and who kindly gave up their free time to help me. To you I have to apologise in no uncertain terms for wasting your time and support.

As suspected, Benjamin appears to have had a conflict of interest between his academic studies and his election campaign, explaining that almost his entire campaign team are final year undergraduate masters students that currently have 9am-5pm lectures.

Referring to two of his peers still running for VP Academic Affairs, he also said that:

I feel that the current front-runner in this election race as far as I see it is Sasha Watson. Whilst I think he has some fantastic plans and ideas, I would be happier knowing that someone with a wider experience of the representation system at SUSU is taking it forward to next year. For this reason I am withdrawing to allow those who would have voted for me to reconsider Jonathon Davies for their votes, he is in my estimation the best qualified of all the candidates that are running for VP Academic Affairs this year now that I have withdrawn my nomination.

Despite mentioning that he doesn’t find ‘popularity driven politics to result in the best results with respect to the winning candidates’, Benjamin nobly expressed his thanks towards his 3 previous running-mates:

I would like to thank them all for being amicable opponents and I am glad to have been able to get to know them better over the last week or so and hope that we can remain friends no matter what the end result of this race. I would also like to thank them for keeping to the spirit of the elections and running honest, fair campaigns.

He has also encouraged students yet to vote to read the candidate’s manifestos:

I would say that the best thing you can do for the students’ union is to read through the manifestos of the remaining candidates with care before making your decision.

Here at The Tab, we think it’s an unfortunate and difficult decision that Benjamin has had to make, and we wish him and his campaign team well in their final semesters.