This is the latest in ConservativeHome's new ongoing series in which each week a different PPC provides us with an insight into life as a candidate and gives us a flavour of their own campaign and interests. If you are a candidate and are keen to be featured, please email Jonathan Isaby.
This week’s diary is written by Richard Cook, candidate for East Renfrewshire, the Scottish constituency formerly known as Eastwood. Having fought Glasgow South in 2001, Richard contested East Renfrewshire in 2005, when he reduced Labour MP Jim Murphy's majority to 6,657. The seat is unchanged for the next election, meaning that Richard requires a swing of 7% to oust the Secretary of State for Scotland (in the equivalent seat at the 2007 Scottish Parliament election, the Conservatives were only 891 votes behind Labour). He served as Vice Chairman of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party from March 2006 until May 2008, represents Conservative Friends of Israel in Scotland and is Director in Scotland of the Campaign Against Political Correctness. He also writes a regular blog.
Saturday 28th March
Get up to a host of text messages and voicemails about a Telegraph (Scottish Edition) story I had helped with the previous day. Basically Glasgow City Council owes East Renfrewshire Council more than £600,000 and our Labour MP, Labour MSP and Labour Council have done nothing to get us this money from their Labour colleagues in Glasgow, despite a Court of Session judgment in early December 2008. My call for Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy, to spend less time manufacturing political spats with the SNP, by going on overseas junkets, and more time fighting for the people of East Renfrewshire seems, somehow, to have been cut from the story.
It’s a bright sunny morning - ideal canvassing weather, given the thousands of households I visited over the winter in pouring rain and the freezing cold. Unfortunately I have to attend a West of Scotland Conservatives Training Day. Four breakout sessions covering Get Out The Vote, Fundraising, Media Communications and Delivery Networks – followed by a rally speech by Jackson Carlaw MSP – take us through to lunch. I am then joined by my new Association Chairman to meet with the formidable Marion Little to review progress in East Renfrewshire on a number of fronts. From Marion’s feedback it appears we are making some positive progress on canvass activity and delivery network and she provides me with some very useful support in telling my Chairman what’s expected of him and his new team.
Fighting any marginal seat is difficult but Jim’s elevation to the Cabinet provides a new set of challenges, not least of which is the amount of money the Labour Party are pumping into his campaign for re-election. Direct mail and telephone blasting seem to be their weapons of choice and from what I hear it seems Labour are up to similar tricks in other Cabinet members’ seats. As we cannot compete financially, we need to be cleverer in the way we approach campaigning on a local level.
Come home to find my now heavily pregnant wife watching yet more rubbish on TV, giving me the ideal excuse to get back out to watch Scotland v Holland at my local tennis club. Until February of this year, I was President of Giffnock Tennis, Squash & Hockey Club and steered it through a massive development programme. There’s a lot to be proud of at the Club including the 48 inch widescreen TV on which the sixty or so of us are able to enjoy watching Scotland being humbled by a bunch of Orangemen.
Sunday 29th March
It’s my wife’s birthday and I am told in no uncertain terms I am expected to spend a day at home. Elaine and I are expecting our first child in July and she is keen to start laying down a few rules now in the hope that they will carry forward to my diary management once little Cookie is born. To be fair to Elaine, she is incredibly tolerant of the Tory Party and my antics given I have been a candidate continuously for more than 5 years, having pursued reselection as Westminster Candidate for East Renfrewshire using the Fast Track system following the 2005 election.
The papers make interesting reading in the run up to the G20 in London and thanks to yet another Labour Cabinet member being linked to having made incorrect expense claims. Inevitably there are plenty of emails flying around later in the day about Jacqui Smith’s husband and the adult films he bought on MP expenses. For goodness sake, if the Home Secretary is getting this sort of stuff on her expenses, just how deeply entrenched is the abuse culture at Westminster among her party colleagues?
Monday 30th March
Back to the daily grind of business and the familiar challenge of balancing daytime political commitments in the local community with the need to earn a living. Not an easy challenge to do effectively and without the support of my business partners, (Donald and David), I simply would not be able to dedicate as much energy during business hours to the East Renfrewshire campaign. They are tremendously supportive and their input to the campaign has been invaluable.
As the clocks change, so does the campaign. Summer time means a rapid step up in campaign activity and it also means a lot of people have more opportunity to help. With the clocks having changed only yesterday, this is really the first evening to canvass for more than a few minutes from tea time till dusk, so we scheduled our first Mass Canvass evening for 5.30pm. Turnout is surprisingly good, with two Councillors joining Jackson Carlaw MSP, his son Logan and Association Vice Chairman Tariq Parvez and me through till 8.30pm in a ward in which we lost ground between 1997 and 2005.
Local issues dominate on the doorstep, with increasing school class sizes, the dreadful state of local roads and pavements and the lack of police time dedicated to tackling youth disorder all regular complaints.
Tuesday 31st March
Text for my next In Touch is due with Scottish Conservative Central Office later in the week and as usual I am well behind on production of material. Fortunately there are plenty of local issues to go on again so it doesn’t take long to pull things together.
Manage to squeeze in a couple of hours door canvassing in the afternoon. It seems to me that the public simply couldn’t care less about the G20 or MP expenses, preferring to concentrate on the demise of their local area and desperately looking for someone to stand up and articulate the need for political leadership in East Renfrewshire in order to deal with the problems we face.
If the part of Newton Mearns I canvassed is a barometer of what people are thinking across East Renfrewshire, you can forget the political saying that it’s “the economy stupid” that unsettles an electorate; here it’s “the state of our roads stupid” that is motivating people. Thank goodness I am able to point them to my ‘Report a Pothole’ feature on the East Renfrewshire Conservatives website. Judging by the overwhelming response this feature gets every time we put out a leaflet advertising it, local people clearly agree with the assessment of the National Audit Office that East Renfrewshire’s roads are the worst in Scotland.
Spend the evening telephone canvassing with my Association Deputy Chairman, Margaret Macdonald, in areas where we need to recruit leaflet deliverers - with some notable success.
Wednesday 1st April
Fly to Bristol on business in the morning and hire a car to get me across to Wales in the afternoon. The world being the small place it is, my Blackberry doesn’t stop ringing and emails don’t stop coming through, so no rest for the political wicked.
Listen to PMQs in the car and am struck yet again by the lack of any answer from Gordon Brown to any questions posed by opposition MPs. I think David Cameron was right to offer to meet with the PM and Nick Clegg to thrash out an MP pay and remuneration deal now rather than wait for any enquiry to report.
For me the issue is simple. If the item you are buying does not add value to your constituents, then the taxpayer should not be asked to pay for it. So no buying of barbeques, no new kitchens and no Sky TV (given Sky News is available on Freeview). When it comes to housing allowance, why not continue to allow MPs to buy property on the basis that the interest on their mortgage is paid for by the taxpayer but when they retire or lose their seat any profit from the sales of the property (after any expenses incurred during the lifetime of the purchase) is paid back to the taxpayer or is made available to charities in the constituency of the member whose investment into the property derived the financial benefit?
It really is a pain to be tarnished by the same brush as MPs claiming fortunes from the taxpayer. People forget I’m not a politician, I’m still just a member of the public. I’m a businessman who aspires to being a politician in order to change things for what I believe would be the better. Candidates start at a £10,000 per annum disadvantage to incumbent MPs who have a public sponsored communications allowance to kick start their campaign every year.
Thursday 2nd April
The G20 dominates the day as far as the media is concerned but my focus is on arrangements for our major fundraiser.
On
2nd May we are holding a 30th Anniversary Dinner to celebrate the
election of Margaret Thatcher (pictured here during a visit to the constituency in 1992) and her Conservative Government and I
have sponsors to attract and tables to sell. This really is going to
be a unique event with a personal touch paying dividends when it comes
to sales. I explain to people that Lord Forsyth is to be our guest
speaker and that we need the names and address details of guests for
security reasons: people seem to understand the scale of the event we
are putting on.
Visit the venue later in the day to undertake some menu tasting and discuss some staging issues. The beef main course is superb, as is the dessert, which I suggest should be renamed "Maggie’s Delight". Jackson is in his element going over every detail of an event like this, from flowers to menu to pipe and jazz band. We are pitching our ordinary ticket price at a very modest £55 each while selling corporate tables (with additional benefits for those taking them) at £1,500 per table.
The final message to all is that this is a special event they will not wish to miss - for more details simply contact me or Sally in the constituency office on 0141 639 2686 or by email.
Friday 3rd April
Finally get a chance to spend some time through the day in the Conservative office and catch up on letter writing. Next week sees the start of a new local campaign to consult with local people on the fate of local playing fields and organising teams of local people to hand deliver letters to every local resident takes some considerable time.
Had been due to meet up with Father John Keenan, Catholic Chaplain to Glasgow University, for tea during the evening - but he is called away at short notice. Spend the evening delivering leaflets to new deliverers in Neilston to make good use of some unexpected time.
Saturday 4th April
Not quite as good a Saturday morning as the week before, in fact it’s pouring with rain and I have six Scottish key seat candidates visiting to canvass with me today. Fortunately by the time everyone arrives and we get out onto doorsteps, it is more like an annoying drizzle than driving rain.
Scottish key seat candidates’ meetings take place every six weeks or so and provide us all with a chance to review our campaigns and to have our advisor examine whether we are properly focused or simply busy fools.
Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell, is among our number and I split us into two teams and send each to an area that has not been canvassed for a number of years. This includes my own street and it is interesting to see which of my neighbours is not a natural Tory.
After a couple of hours on doorsteps, and now thoroughly wet, we go to a local hotel for a working lunch. Until now our group and its meetings have been kept quiet – not because we have anything to hide, just simply because it works better that way. On this particular occasion we have asked [leader of the Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament] Annabel Goldie MSP (with whom I am pictured her) to join us for lunch and she press released her attendance as coming to speak to candidates in order to put us on a war footing in anticipation of a snap election – oops!
Our discussions are lively, as ever, with the majority still believing the election will be in May/June 2010. Annabel briefs us on the Scottish Parliament policy commitments we will be taking into the next Westminster General Election and, with the assistance of David Mundell, provides us with details of manifesto preparation from a “tartan” perspective.
Whatever the final result, Scottish key seat candidates are being given a very useful forum to share best practice and our external advisor is simply fantastic both at our meetings and at all times in-between.
Grab a quick drink at the tennis club on the way home, only to find that our neighbouring bowling club had Jim Murphy and [local Labour MSP] Ken Macintosh in attendance at their Open Day. Nip up to the chippy for a pizza (stone-baked not fried) and back to the wife who insists on watching Primeval. Much to my amazement, I actually enjoyed it and am forced to reassess my regular claim that all Elaine watches is rubbish.
Next week's Diary will be written by Annunziata Rees-Mogg, PPC for Somerton and Frome. Last week's was written by Leah Fraser.
