How to lobby anybody you desire

It has been quite some past few weeks for lots of folks recently as they have made their way to our fine capital city to demonstrate and remonstrate regarding certain issues they feel passionately about. We've had the Don't Stop the War Coalition march and the Do Ban Fox-Hunting liberty walk (or perhaps that is meant to be the other way around; I forget now which one was which) and, most intriguingly, we've had hundreds of students lobbying their local Members of Parliament for more drinking money. (You will notice that since Life After the Womb pointed out the ridiculousness of campaigning against capitalism in the capital city, by the way, there have been no demonstrations or marches since - a small triumph for common sense, there.)

Not wanting to feel left out in any way, LATW has also been trying to do some lobbying of its own but has since realised that there is a lot more to this demonstrative technique than meets the eye: to get well-known people to meet you in the lobby of a hotel and then keep them there (thus lobbying them) is really very difficult indeed.

Think about what you need to do in order to achieve this: first of all, you need to find a reasonably sized hotel, not too posh, not too dingy, that has a decent foyer area in which you can detain a celebrity/politician/desired captive without anyone else suspecting foul play. In London, that is a lot more difficult than it sounds - you either have your top-of-the-range, take-out-a-mortgage-to-pay-for-one-night type of place or your greasy-man-with-a-wireless-television-behind-the-counter type establishments. Very little in between.

Second of all, you have to determine a situation realistic enough in order ton convince your unsuspecting victim they are attending something other than what amounts to an ambush - if they suspect they are about to be lobbied, than all plans invariably go to pot. This is probably the trickiest bit of all to pull off: should you invite them along "for an interviews concerning their decision on what constitutes a U-turn", for example, they will not expect to have to wait in a lobby and hence the plan is foiled. If, however, you invite them for an informal lunch to "go through some details of their latest ideas" and advise them to "meet in the foyer of the so-and-so hotel", then you are on to a winner: their guard will be down and the next step is ready to implement.

This step involves actually lobbying the chosen target, to do which there are two alternatives. The first is to actually restrict their bodily movements via the use of some rope and the furniture in the chosen location. Though technically closer to a form of kidnapping than lobbying, it is still an acceptable practise when considered under the lobbying umbrella and overall requirements of the operation. The second, and more widely accepted technique, so that of preventing the victim's escape from the area in which they are standing. This can be done by locking doors, shutting off escalators, cordoning off staircases and preventing any sort of exit whatsoever from the lobby of the chosen hotel. This is the truest form of lobbying known and, though obviously very tricky to actually accomplish, is by far the most satisfying of all demonstrative techniques.

For lobbying lots of people, or indeed a mass lobby of Parliament, let's say, the same approach applies but on a much larger scale. A mass lobby of Parliament, therefore, could be undertaken by either making a lobby out of Parliament and keeping everyone locked in there such that they cannot escape, or by getting each individual MP lobbied in a difference hotel at the same time. Logistically, the latter is a lot more difficult and requires a lot of coordination from the lobbying bodies, but when all is considered could actually be a lot simpler than organising a march across London.

Of course, LATW neglects to mention what it might actually be lobbying people for, but that seems to be the whole point: if you make enough of a song and dance about the marching, lobbying bit, then what you are actually saying seems to matter not one jot - so long as you say it loud enough, people will probably agree.

General elections have been won like that, you know.