There is nothing quite
like experiencing historical events first hand, it is nice to be able to say:
“I was there”. The Eastleigh by-election
is, by all accounts, an historic event and on a bitterly cold Wednesday, the
final full day of campaigning, I was
there. My particular experience in
all this was as a volunteer for the Conservative campaign, where prospective
parliamentary candidate Maria Hutchings was having her second attempt at the
corridors of power after losing to Chris Huhne at the general election in 2010 (by
less than 4000 votes). Being an Eastleigh
resident was another way to experience this by-election; and by all accounts,
experience it they did.
Tory campaign HQ had been hastily assembled in the achingly
dull concrete “Mitchell House” adjacent to Eastleigh train station. A location convenient for the many hundreds
of volunteers who flocked from around the country to wear out the constituency
pavements, letterboxes, doorbells and residents. Convenient too, for the elected Westminster politicians
who arrived in spades to lend support to Hutchings; a white board on the wall
recorded each individual and the number of visits they’ve made. Bournemouth MP Conor Burns, who himself lost
out to the Liberal Democrats on this seat in 2001 and 2005, made 11 such visits.
The campaign organisers were welcoming and their operation
was smooth, but not slick; hindered for a few hours by a mains power outage
that didn’t just take out the coffee machine but the printers too. The envelopes of hundreds of pledge letters
had to be handwritten by volunteers and had something of a curious ‘homespun’
effect. It was the delivery of these
pledge letters that was the main task of the last day of the campaign: the
ramming of one final item of election literature through the letterboxes of the
frazzled, jaded and cynical residents of Eastleigh, some of whom had boarded up
their letterboxes in protest.
Political parties only send pledge letters to voters who
have already indicated their intention to vote for that particular party. Their voting intention has been noted during
canvassing carried out earlier in the campaign.
By knowing who’s support can be pretty much guaranteed, effort can be
targeted to the greatest effect in the final days and hours. This is known as ‘turning out the vote”.
Yet, there appeared to be something of a gap between the
‘pledges’ and the reality on the ground.
Letters were going to the owners of properties who had no intention of
voting Conservative. The giveaway in
some cases were the Labour, UKIP or Liberal Democrat posters displayed in their
windows; or the blanket nature of the leafleting in some streets. Whether this was a failure to canvass
correctly, possibly the result of a lack of grassroots support in Eastleigh, or
an organisational or technological ‘blip’, is hard to say.
In the end and unsurprisingly, long-term Eastleigh resident
Mike Thornton beat UKIP’s Dianne James by 1770 votes for a Liberal Democrat
hold. Hutchings, only 1012 votes behind
James, put the Conservatives in third place.
A sigh of relief for the Liberal Democrats, celebrations all round for
UKIP and sober reflection for the Conservatives. Could a slightly slicker ‘turn out the vote’
effort have secured Hutchings second place, certainly a better position with
which to contest the seat in the 2015 general election? And a third placed UKIP, despite huge gains
would be a very different narrative.
