Last week, Anna Arrowsmith (aka Anna Span) declared her intent to become the Lib Dem MP for Gravesham. Interesting in and of itself because she was Britain’s first female, and self-avowed feminist, pornographer – here’s the article for the Guardian in which she elaborated on her candidacy. She stands an very remote chance of winning – the seat’s a CON-LAB marginal, having gone Blue in 2005 with less than 700 votes to spare, and one in which the Dems have always come a distant third, but she’s had a lot of press since announcing last Thursday, and with a few thought-out media appearances and some considered policy talk, such a situation can ignite a candidacy.

Of course, badly thought-out appearances and ill-considered policy talk can go straight through ignition and all the way to immolation, but that’s the gamble. The Dems are casting the bones on the possibility that, off the back of the current Party Conference and the televised debates, they’re going to get some momentum going – and those indecisive Con-Lab marginals might just start thinking about third parties, especially those in the media glare.

Her candidacy has had exactly the reaction that you’d expect – Ann Widdecombe thinks that having a pornographer run for parliament is “inappropriate,” while leftie bloggers, like Hopi Sen, reject the fuss as middle-England’s usual strident puritanism, and in the meanwhile columnists in all sections of the media have fallen over themselves chortling at their own clever double entendres and witty conflations of politics and the sex trade.

All well and good, but personally, I’m not convinced that this is a question that really requires a moral dimension – I’m just interested in whether she’d make a good enough politican to be worth voting for. Initial signs aren’t promising; the Guardian article linked to above is, in fairness, a bit of a rambling, narcissistic mess. She claims that she can fix the Westminster boy’s club, on the grounds that she’s “been here before; last time [she] changed [her] industry for ever;” I must respectfully disagree. Anna Arrowsmith may have entered the pornography arena with the best of intentions, but it is no less grubby, fundamentally unrealistic and driven by underlying mysogyny than it ever was – if anything, it’s getting worse. One must question the judgement of anyone who thinks that a single person could fundementally change the nature of pornography from within.

On the other hand, it’s probably fairly safe to assume that she doesn’t have any skeletons in her closet. And she’d probably be a rather more worthwhile MP than the incumbent.