The Eastleigh By-election

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.