SARK’S General Purposes and Advisory chairman Charles Maitland has admitted his re-election by little more than a handful of votes on Wednesday was ‘too close for comfort’.

Conseiller Maitland placed 13th out of 22 candidates for the 14 vacant seats in Chief Pleas and was only a dozen votes ahead of top loser Tony Le Lievre.

The chairman of what is arguably Sark’s most important political committee polled 69 fewer votes than he did four years ago whereas by comparison his predecessor as GP & A chairman Richard Dewe got within a dozen votes of what both he and Conseiller Maitland polled in 2008 when they tied for 18th place in a 28-vacancy poll.

However, Conseiller Maitland, pictured, said that he was not altogether surprised by his comparative lack of success and added that he had been warned that he was unlikely to do as well as he did in the island’s first general election after the introduction of sweeping political reform in 2008.