General corruption being abundantly proved - indeed it was not very hotly contested - I have to consider whether such corruption may reasonably be supposed to have affected the result.

Mr Price's final submissions were very much directed towards showing that, if sufficient inroads could be made into Ms Simmons's schedule of 112 contested votes, it would be possible to say that the court could not be satisfied that the corruption may have affected the result. Despite the lucid and attractive way in which Mr Price argued this point, he came up against a number of obstacles:

(a)    his client's witnesses having proved a pitifully inept bunch of liars, the inroads into the schedule were few and far between;

(b)    the evidence showed quite clearly that there was a significant number of false registrations which did not appear on the schedule because Mr Quayle had been deceived into leaving the names on the Register;

(c)    the schedule itself was not the full picture: it was only representative of the full picture.

In any event, given the substantial efforts made by Mr Eshaq Khan and his team to rig this election, there is a certain irony in his counsel having to argue that, despite all their efforts, they did not affect the election as Mr Eshaq Khan would have won anyway.

Although it is impossible to make any accurate estimate, it seems likely that the lion's share of the 229 postal ballots cast for Mr Eshaq Khan resulting from the late registrations were the product of this general corruption, certainly more than the 120 of his majority.

In my judgment the evidence in this case is such as to make inevitable a decision that the general corruption involved in the Central Ward must reasonably be supposed to have affected the result.