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 Caroline Righton, who has been candidate since Decmber 2006 for the newly created Cornish marginal of St Austell and Newquay, which comprised parts of three existing seats - Truro and St Austell, North Cornwall and South East Cornwall. She is not up against an incumbent MP and at the elections in June this year, the Conservatives were marginally ahead of the Liberal Democrats. You can find out more about her campaign on her website.
Saturday August 1st
The weather sets the agenda and torrential rain has made everyone involved in tourism fretful. Mark and I get up early and help serve breakfast to sodden cliff-top campers. Later, our day will end with an incognito walkabout in Newquay to see the problem of late-night revellers.
In between we canvass with regular teams in St Austell in the morning and Newquay in the afternoon. I love canvassing. It’s the most affirming “what it is all about” bit of the job. We do a couple of hours every day. You can’t come away from canvassing in any doubt about whether you are doing well or not, especially in Cornwall, where people are very political and very un-apathetic.
Canvassing sessions take a theme. This morning it is ‘faith” and I’m asked several times if I am a Christian? I am. Where do I worship? All over, but especially on the beach in the early morning, walking the dog. In the afternoon, in Newquay – it’s Europe and whether Mandelson wants Blair to be EU president.
At lunchtime we drive across from the south to the north coast dipping into St Dennis village Garden Show. St Dennis is in the heart of Clay Country and has a strong community. We’ve recently fought off the imposition of a huge mass burn incinerator on the edge of the village. Today though that threat is not present and young and old provide produce, bakes and makes.
Later we witness Newquay at night. Local residents feel under siege as the town’s population grows from 21,000 to more than 120,000 and local services such as police and fire struggle to cope. The town is at the frontline of a national epidemic of binge-drinking and we see youngsters trying to buy booze when they are clearly under-age. I feel for the staff in shops and bars dealing with abuse and as a mother I worry about the safety and health of the lads and lasses heading out on the town, clearly with their drinking heads on. I worry too about Newquay’s reputation taking another kicking from the national media as it seeks a solution.
Sunday 2nd August
Sundays are a day off, usually sacrosanct for family and cookin’ and stuff. But a local farmer has invited me to a Cornish Heritage Trust tour of Castle an Dinas, an ancient fort near our home in St Columb Major. Mark and I join others looking out over a landscape where legend has it that King Arthur and his knights hunted!
Then home to barbeque lamb to feed hungry sons and their friends back from surfing at nearby Watergate Bay. Cooking is my passion but I now only cook on Saturday nights and Sundays. Mark is head cook the rest of the week. (Culinary confidence restored after recent Rick Stein plaudit of how his restaurant in Falmouth, Mark’s Seafood Bar, had been his inspiration. In truth, Mark would cook bangers and mash or shepherd’s pie every night rather than fish.)
In the evening I spend a couple of hours on many emails from Newquay residents and councillors about the problems in the town.
Monday 3rd August
My working day starts at 4.30 am. Years of waking early to work on breakfast TV have left me with an odd body clock. I have to write an article on “Pragmatism” for a woman’s magazine. It's not political but a friend points out that Pitt the Younger described the Conservative Party as the “pragmatic party.” There’s no getting away from the “P” word.
At Cornwall Conservatives office, a new intern starts the inglorious task of inputting the marked register from our recent Unitary elections. The last intern wailed his disillusion that politics had so much administrative work, but with this new constituency we have a lot of data collation and canvassing information which needs constant updating.
I meet with the Chair of a local NHS Trust. We discuss how we would work together when there is a Conservative Government. She is apolitical but I am warmed by such conversations, which are now happening each week with people like her, at their invitation.
I manage (just!) to meet the deadline for my email newsletter which is put together for me by a volunteer who is actually in another country when I send the copy. He gets it out to thousands of people. I’m also now on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing!
Tuesday 4th August
I have written to top retailers about the area’s regeneration plans. We need good stores to show faith. I suspect some of their board members will be holidaying in Cornwall and offer to be their driver to show them the good potential sites. Hooray, today, M&S write back saying they want to find a mid-Cornwall site.
I meet some of my campaign team and we run through plans for the next eight months through to the General Election. It's nearly three years since selection and feels strange to be making final arrangements for the real thing. We’ve gone from having just a handful of helpers to now working out how to best use the many volunteers coming forward.
Wednesday 5th August
It is eldest son Ben’s birthday. Twenty-eight years ago today I know exactly where I was – just a few miles down the road at Treliske hospital in Truro. Mark points out, unsentimentally that, 30 years ago I was working as a cub reporter on a local Cornish paper NOT covering the major story of the Fastnet race disaster, because I was chasing over the remote Lizard peninsula following sightings of vanished MP John Stonehouse. Who could have foretold that three decades later that couldn’t happen with mobile phones, that I’d be standing as MP here or that I’d have a son who would have been abducted by aliens literally! (He’s an actor and played Dr Oliver Morgenstern in Dr Who)
I have meetings at County Hall with several councillors and officers including Mebyon Kernow County councillor Dick Cole. He’s a parliamentary candidate too but we won the day by working together with local people and councillors against plans for the incinerator.
I catch up on the latest news about the discussions being held about how Cornwall Council is planning to deal with its waste. Still a vexing issue that needs radical alternative solutions.
This evening local residents protest at Newquay Town Council meeting about the town’s drinking and late night culture. Liberal Democrat activists are at the centre of the crowd shouting at the Conservative Mayor, John Fitter, one of the most kind, and sincere public servants I’ve ever met and who has been an hotelier in Newquay for more than 40 years. It's too important an issue to play party politics with. I can’t help noticing their party members who were on the licensing committee are conspicuous by their absence at the demonstration.
I want to know what a Conservative Government will do to rein in binge-drinking and anti-social behaviour and ring Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling, who says he’ll come down and meet local people and answer questions.
Thursday 6th August
A day spent on paperwork. I get hundreds of emails a week. The casework I’m getting as a PPC is overwhelming. I wonder what the incumbent MP is doing. Am I getting his over-spill? Recently another Conservative PPC bemoaned the lack of issues he could get his teeth into. Needless to say I didn’t empathise! In St Austell and Newquay I have plenty:
- Newquay is in the front line of the nation’s binge-drinking culture
- The clay area in the constituency is one of the country’s four controversial proposed eco-towns
- St Austell and Newquay are both in the throes of difficult and troubled regeneration plans
- We have some of the country’s lowest wages and highest house prices
- The proposals for the most obscenely huge mass burn incinerator have not yet been fully discounted
- Newquay airport is trying hard to regain its reputation after having to shut for three weeks with the former Lib Dem controlled council management described as Keystone Cops
- We have many dairy farmers struggling with the problem of TB
Friday 7th August
At last Newquay is front page GOOD news. The Conservative-led County council has launched a campaign with police and other agencies which will focus on how the town is marketed, its licensing and enforcement and what the future vision for it should be.
With our plans to give local people a real say in how they want their communities to be run and and Chris coming down, it feels we can start making real progress and offering solutions,
Meanwhile it’s my home town St Columb Major‘s Carnival week with the grand parade not to be missed. I judged the entries at Newquay Carnival which was great fun but at St Columb I just enjoy the spectacle which includes several local Cornish bands, before wandering home for an early night.
Last week's Diary was written by Nigel Huddleston, PPC for Luton South.
