A FANTABULOUS word and some fantastic quotes have been used to describe this week's proposed redrawing of the constituency boundaries.

The fantabulous word is "gerrymandering", which was coined in 1812 when Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, rearranged the boundaries in favour of his Democratic-Republican Party.

It was blatant cheating, with the boundaries bearing no resemblance to the way people lived their lives - rather like cramming Barnard Castle, Weardale, Consett and Haltwhistle into one constituency.

The editor of a Federalist newspaper, Benjamin Russell, sketched Gerry's plans on a map, and a passing artist spotted a pattern.

He drew on wings and claws and turned the map into a crazed flying monster "That'll do for a salamander, " he said.

"More like a gerry-mander, " said Russell, and rushed off to get the word into print.

The gerrymander worked. The Federalists received 52,000 votes, but won only 11 seats, whereas Gerry's Republicans received just 50,000 votes, but won a whopping 29 seats.

However, Gerry himself wasn't re-elected as governor. Instead, he became the fifth vice-president of the US, but died in office. Cheats don't always prosper.

Perhaps not a gerrymander, there's still something not right about this week's redrawing. On Thursday, I was in Stockton, which has found itself strangely twinned with Newton Aycliffe. A lady in my audience said in mock horror: "We're a County Durham constituency now. It's ridiculous."

You see her point, even if she did forget that until 1974, Stockton was in County Durham.

The oddest proposal is Barnard Castle and Consett. Barney first got its own constituency in 1885. It has always been large but it has always had North-West Durham above it to stop it oozing into Northumberland.

It spent its first 17 years with a Liberal MP - Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease of Darlington - and the next 15 with Labour's Arthur Henderson. "Uncle Arthur" co-wrote Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution, which Tony Blair dropped in 1994, and became the first Labour Cabinet minister.

After Henderson, and until it was gobbled up by Bishop Auckland in 1950, Barney flipflopped between the reds and the blues.

Its most colourful MP must have been Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a Tory in the Twenties.

His recently-published First World War letters show his utter contempt for his commander, Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston.

"Hunter-Bunter" was one of the war's most incompetent officers - he lost more men on the first day of the Somme in 1916 than anyone else, and gained no land. Yet months later he was elected Tory MP for North Ayrshire.

Headlam despised him. In his letter home from France to his wife Beatrice on January 1, 1918, he said: "I am a wee bit below par today as last night I felt it my duty to go to see the Serjeants' Mess after dinner - which of course meant drinking a lot of filth and smoking a lot of muck. . . so this morning I let myself off Hunter-Weston's farcical parade. He inspected everyone and made an oration standing on a chair. . . The whole thing would have been ludicrous, but this morning was bitterly cold and I did not fancy standing about for nearly an hour watching this madman and listening to his feeble remarks. My masterly manoeuvre of remaining in bed until the show was over has been much admired."

A chap who stays in bed nursing a hangover to avoid an MP's vainglorious speech is my kind of a politician.