How to become an MP (In the UK - Located in London)?

Anyone over 18 can stand for election as an MP. All you need to do is when there is a general election, or a by-election in your constituency (these happen to fill the vacancy when an MP dies or resigns), is get the nomination forms, get ten people who live in the constituency you want to stand in to sign them, and deliver those with £500 deposit to the returning officer's office - probably the local town hall. In return you will get free postage for one mailing to every house in the constituency, so think about a leaflet you can have printed to tell all the voters why they should vote for you.

The £500 is to discourage joke candidates. If you get less than one-eighth of the vote, you lose it. If you get more votes than that, you get it back. So if you hear on the all-night election results programmes that "the Liberal Democrat has lost his deposit", now you know what it means - the Lib Dems have lost their £500.

Anyone can do that. But realistically, if you want to get elected, you need to join a party and get adopted as their candidate for a constituency. So that's the first thing to do. What party do you want to represent? Find their local branch, join it and get involved. You'd also better be good at making speeches. If standing up in front of a crowd of people and speaking scares you stiff, find something else to do with your life!

Find out from there how your party goes about selecting candidates. The major ones tend to have a national selection process and choose who looks good to be on their panel of candidates, and then they can pick from that if they want a candidate in a hurry. Which might mean you get considered for somewhere you've never heard of, but you'll need to get to know the area quick! The final say on who is the party's candidate for MP lies with the local party, but the big parties will insist that they select someone on the approved list.

Another thing they often do is that if you look like you would be good, you could be put forward as the candidate in a hopeless constituency. This happened to Tony Blair. He was first selected to stand as the Labour candidate for Beaconsfield, the kind of very Tory area where Labour have no hope of winning, but it's good practice at fighting an election campaign. Do well at that and you can expect a better chance of being chosen for somewhere your party is actually likely to win. At the next election, Blair was selected for the new constituency of Sedgefield, which was virtually guaranteed to vote Labour, and the rest is history.

You could be an MP in your early twenties, but some of it depends on luck - when is a winnable seat for your party likely to come free?