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 Robin Walker,
who was selected in August 2006 for Worcester, a seat untouched by boundary changes where he requires a swing of 3.4% to overturn the Labour majority of 3,144. You can read more about his campaign to win back the seat once represented by his father, Peter Walker, on his website.
Sunday 11th October
Sunday is for resting, but I always try to spend it thinking through the lessons from the previous week’s campaign and assessing what can be done better in the week ahead. Canvassing over the weekend has shown that some people were inspired by what was said in Manchester at the party conference, but it was a salutary reminder that our here in the real world, many more had heard little or nothing from it. One of my main focuses for this week will be translating the great speeches and the strong policies from Manchester into campaigns relevant here in Worcester.
Monday 12th October
Like many candidates, I keep up a full-time “day-job”, working four days a week to make a living. Combining being a PPC with being a partner of a leading financial communications company, I’m lucky to have two jobs that I find fascinating, challenging and exciting. Being in business means I speak with more conviction and substance to a business audience, but work doesn’t let up just because it’s a busy time in politics and most of this week I am starting at 7am, leaving the office after 6pm.
In lunchbreaks and evenings I work on my next leaflet, bringing the themes from conference home to Worcester and picking up some of the highlights that will play well here.
"Getting Britain working" has real resonance as it's only too often nowadays that I meet people on the doorstep who have recently faced redundancy: they almost always want to work and want a government that will help them into work, rather than keeping them on benefits. Other key themes are providing care for the elderly, supporting our armed forces and restoring public finances, which sit alongside local campaigns for cancer care and opposing the Regional Spatial Strategy.
Affordable housing matters in Worcester. We need new houses to meet local need, but the Government’s top down plans call for tens of thousands in a short space of time - far more than the local need - including building on green fields and flood plains. They are undemocratic, and driven by unelected regional assemblies and Whitehall departments which seem to ignore local feedback. I’m campaigning for local choice and using brownfield sites to meet real local needs.
For this reason I was keen to attend a briefing for PPCs from the National Housing Federation, but unfortunately I have to cancel: my father is currently in hospital being treated for stomach cancer. Being part of a big family it is wonderful how everybody has rallied round, but there is no substitute for visiting personally. I decided that family must come first and sent my apologies. I have met with my local housing associations many times and have good relationships there, which are important when it comes to helping constituents living on their estates.
Tuesday 13th October
Another busy day in the office interspersed with phone calls to local MPs and fellow candidates. In Worcestershire we have a great bunch of local PPCs who often coordinate their activities and work together on campaigns. I am always happy to have an update on the mood in Westminster from my friend and mentor Peter Luff MP.
Expenses are dominating the media again this week and I want to make sure I can take a strong clear line. I also speak to the Green PPC, the only other candidate already running against our Labour MP, to see whether we can come up with a joint statement on expenses along with the line of the ones used in Norwich North. The fact that the Liberal Democrats have not even selected a candidate at this late stage shows what little concern they have for Worcester.
With the leaflet drafted, the next thing is to deal with my correspondence and there is a bulging mailbag to be answered – invitations to various events and dinners; the perennial letters about parking and traffic that are inevitable in a city that was designed long before the car - although each needs careful consideration as these things really affect people’s quality of life; a letter from a Ukipper who wants to argue about Europe – I tell him he’d be crazy to let our Labour MP back in; and one lovely letter from someone I canvassed last week who lost money in Equitable Life. She says having met me she knows that I will do what I can to help and such comments always fire my resolve to do more. Answering these and many other letters takes time but it is worthwhile, addressing people’s concerns, hearing from the people, who at the end of the day, I am campaigning to serve.
Wednesday 14th and Thursday 15th October
We’re really excited about having Ken Clarke visiting this Friday. Most of the planning was done long ago but through the latter half of the week there is plenty to think about. Setting out the order for speeches and making sure we have good auction prizes for our fundraising lunch, thinking up my speech of introduction and confirming all the last minute details of the visit. Fortunately I am supported by a fantastic team and a great office in Worcester. Matt Edmonds, our agent, is a star at pulling together the programme and, by Thursday evening I am happy that everything is in place.
When I visit the hospital on Thursday my father, determined as ever to have his say, dictates me a message for the event. His concise, clear rhetoric is as always an inspiration to me and a challenge to do better on my own speech.
Friday 16th October
Starting out at 6.30am I’m at home in Worcester in good time for my first meeting, giving tea to a member of our local Pakistani community who replied to one of my leaflets saying that he’d like to help. His family always voted Labour but now they are looking for change and he wants me to speak to a meeting of his extended family, as well as to local taxi drivers, on what a Conservative government can do for them. I agree to both and invite him to join our association.
Next stop is a retirement home, Home Nash House, a special place for me as my grandmother lived there for many years. Coincidentally, her old room is now inhabited by one of our most energetic deliverers, Mike. He wields the camera while I speak to residents about our plans to make sure nobody loses their home as a result of needing care in old age. The ladies are sharp as ever and I have a grilling on policy detail. There is plenty of support here and it's good to see that people increasingly recognise me as their candidate, rather than just Peter’s son. There are also plenty good wishes for my father, which I appreciate hugely.
Then on to the big event. We hold our business lunch at Sixways, home of my favourite Rugby team, the Worcester Warriors, who have been taken from a small regional team to premiership success by local entrepreneur Cecil Duckworth. It’s a great facility and I am thrilled that Cecil is able to be there as well as executives from the engineering company he founded, Worcester Bosch, one of our biggest local employers and of our University which Ken and I are going on to visit.
We have a great turnout and when Ken arrives he is brilliant at working the room. My introduction focuses on his huge experience and the contrast between the golden legacy he left as Chancellor and what we face today. His speech is excellent and brings home to our local business audience both the seriousness of our situation now and the fact that only the Conservatives can sort it out. My father’s message goes down well as does a very amusing vote of thanks by Stephen Inman, our Treasurer. As always, the event overuns so Ken and I have to dash off before the auction, but we later hear it's been a great success, raising vital funds to keep the campaign going.
We arrive a little late to our visit at the site for the new Worcester University Business School campus. The local press are all there though and Ken is able to give some snap interviews. Professor David Green, the Vice Chancellor, is there to show us around this project which is turning the historic Royal Infirmary building into a state-of-the-art campus for a new business school right in the heart of the city. It’s just the kind of project we need in Worcester, bringing city, university and business together, and plans for a library that will be shared between the university and the city are absolutely groundbreaking. Our council has supported it and since 2006, when I was competing for selection as PPC, I have been clear that this is a great opportunity for Worcester. Ken was impressed and as a former health secretary was interested to see how an old Victorian hospital is being converted into something new.
Once Ken has departed and I’ve thanked the team from the Business School, we’re off canvassing. This is definitely my favourite part of being a PPC, meeting people, hearing from them and having the chance to talk face to face about the concerns that they have. When I started, three years ago, we only canvassed on Saturday mornings and struggled to get more than two or three people together to make up a team, but now we are regularly turning out six or seven, every Friday evening and Saturday morning. This allows us to cover more ground and make more of an impact. Ably supported by my team and the local councillor David Tibbutt, we get a good response with plenty of "Ps" and "Cs".
Saturday 17th October
I meet the head of our Acute Hospitals Trust in Kidderminster first thing, arriving early when the half-empty hospital building feels like the twilight zone, but when he arrives we have a good meeting. I want to show my support for the local bid to keep head and neck cancer surgery in Worcestershire and make sure that the trust is supporting it too. He assures me they are and that they’ll appeal any decision to move it elsewhere. Local Conservatives campaigned for a new Radiotherapy unit at the Worcestershire Royal Hospital which means fewer people need to travel far for treatment. We now need to make sure surgery stays so that as many people as possible can get their full treatment in one place. I take the opportunity to get an update on other local health issues before whizzing back to Worcester.
My campaign team have been out for an hour when I join them, but spirits are high as we’re getting a good response. It seems to be my morning for getting stuck on the doorstep as I meet a series of fascinating and deeply interested people – GPs, headteachers and civil servants included – all of whom want to talk in detail about our policies. This is a welcome contrast to the atmosphere I remember in the same place in 2001 when many doors would be slammed in our faces. This is one of the smarter areas of Worcester and some people can afford the luxury of supporting Labour or the Liberals but it is interesting that we are seeing even more switchers in the traditional Labour heartlands.
My campaigning week ends, as it always does, with a good pub lunch. It's been a busy week but things seem to be heading in the right direction.
Last week's Diary was written by Susan Wade Weeks (York Central)
