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 Robert Jenrick, who was selected in November 2008 for Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, where is seeking to overturn the 8,108 majority of sitting Labour MP Paul Farrelly and become the seat's first Conservative MP for over 100 years. He studied History at St. John’s College, Cambridge before qualifying as
a lawyer and working for City law firms in London and Moscow, and is
also involved in managing his family’s local manufacturing business. He
took leave from his legal career in December 2009 to fight to win the
seat. Read more about him and his campaign on his website.
Monday 8th March
Monday morning is a chance to catch up after an interesting weekend. Newcastle’s General Election campaign began in earnest on Friday with our first election hustings. We answered good-humoured questions from staff and students at Newcastle College, although I’m not convinced the debate truly engaged the sceptical students in the audience. I wonder whether the national debates will prove as electrifying as the media suggest – I certainly never met many who were thrilled by the Presidential debates whilst living in the U.S.
Sir John Major was in Staffordshire on Friday, supporting our six target seat campaigns (Newcastle, Stafford, Staffordshire Moorlands, Burton, Tamworth and Cannock Chase) as well as the work being done to re-establish ourselves in Stoke-on-Trent. Speaking after dinner in the evening, Sir John was eloquent and laid out a damning critique of Labour’s record. I said in the vote of thanks that if all Conservatives presented themselves with such clarity we would be assured of a new government in May.
A weekend of canvassing followed. Dropping my wife off at Stoke station on Sunday night for her train back to work, it had been another exhausting weekend.
Monday morning I make some calls to colleagues who are campaigning to change the unfair regional quota system that has arisen, whereby 65% of sand and gravel extraction across in the entire West Midlands falls upon Staffordshire. Inevitably this means beautiful Staffs countryside being torn up. I write a letter to members of the West Midlands Regional Assembly who make these decisions (a quasi-democratic body that is thankfully on the way out), urging them to support us and end this crazy system.
Unexpectedly this afternoon, a legal contact calls. He’s an environmental lawyer in Washington D.C. who is co-ordinating efforts in the U.S. to develop the first Green Investment Bank with the Obama administration. I put him in touch with the Shadow Environment team, some of whom it turns out will be in D.C. tomorrow and may be able to meet up. This follows on from bringing together the Environment team with Better Place, an Israeli company developing an electric car system that will soon be on the streets of Tel Aviv and San Francisco. Better Place’s CEO, Shai Agassi is one of the most impressive men I’ve met: he is pragmatic and not a climate crusader and he puts privately-funded technological advancement at the heart of tackling climate change.
Tuesday 9th March To Wedgwood’s famous factory in Barlaston. I had visited the factory and met staff two weeks ago after speaking to a women’s group nearby and come back to tour the new museum. Previously thick snow covered Josiah Wedgwood’s old estate, but today the factory complex is bathed in sunshine. There is however a melancholy feel following redundancies and the sale to a US private equity group. A wonderfully talented figurine painter tells me his skill means little outside the emasculated pottery industry and if made redundant he may end up in one of the many distribution centres that have sprung up locally along the M6, providing jobs, but few skills and lowering the average wage.
I visit three other local manufacturing businesses. They all tell me the same story: they want government to get off their backs, reduce regulation and above all, lower taxes to enable them to compete. Since the financial crisis it seems to be in vogue to pay lip-service to manufacturing, but we agree that the government has neglected manufacturing to our great cost.
What can be done to support manufacturing, they ask? So unpopular and unfashionable has manufacturing become, so weakened by underinvestment and political neglect, there are no easy answers. We agree that we need to stop investing almost all government funds allocated to R&D solely in leaders such as Rolls Royce and GlaxoSmithKline; the Government needs to use procurement contracts to buy goods made in this country and invest time and energy in making sure those companies have customers overseas; and we need to find ways to make graduates want a career in manufacturing and provide much more training focused on manufacturing and not simply retail, IT and other services jobs.
I’ve come to believe that areas like North Staffordshire (and Stoke in particular) need a radical approach, perhaps something on the lines of the old Enterprise Zones to bring in new employers, give them a competitive advantage and a reason to face the future with greater confidence.
End the day delivering invites for our next public meeting until it’s too dark to see the letterboxes and too late to be rattling them. Drive to see my parents, who live nearby, and find them dutifully folding leaflets on the kitchen table – that’s what I like to see. We settle down to go through my wedding albums that have just arrived, bringing back some wonderful, happy memories.
Wednesday 10th March
Up early to receive our next leaflet – a glossy magazine, our second edition this year and the fourth constituency-wide leaflet we’ve delivered in as many months. By the end of March we will have put out over 150,000 leaflets this year, almost all hand-delivered by a small, but dedicated team, all paid for by local people and the generosity of family and friends – we have not sought or received Lord Ashcroft’s funding, not that that prevents the local Labour MP from claiming otherwise. Our leaflets have made an impact, proven that we’re hard-working and local people seem to like hearing from us.
The lorry duly arrives and Nicola, our Association Secretary, has her garage once again filled to the rafters with boxes. We load up the car and I head off to dole them out to long-suffering helpers, who give me a cup of tea and watch apprehensively as I cart in their respective boxes.
Wednesday afternoon is a long canvassing session, usually supported by CF volunteers from Keele University that is in our patch. I’m lucky to have their enthusiastic support. Attending their weekly meetings I’m struck by their pessimism and concern on the jobs front.
Delivering leaflets afterwards along the lanes of Keele village, Janet, the wife of my neighbouring candidate for Stafford, Jeremy Lefroy, spots me and throws on her coat to help finish the houses. Janet, who is a local GP, updates me with the latest on the Stafford Hospital scandal and the Government’s refusal to grant a public enquiry, for which Jeremy has campaigned very hard.
Arrive home to find some roses I’d forgotten I had ordered and plant them in the dusk. After the long winter, Spring has finally arrived in our garden and the first smell of freshly cut grass is in the air.
Thursday 11th March
A morning meeting with a local head teacher and some of the staff. All of us watched Michael Gove and Ed Balls on Newsnight the previous evening and most seem favourable towards our ‘Swedish schools’ policy, which generally proves popular, but is not as widely known or understood as it should be.
Next stop is the village of Audley to see a local activist Anne Glenn, who I met last year when she chaired one of Newcastle’s patients’ groups and who has been persuaded to stand for the Borough Council. Anne is a tremendous organiser and we are putting together a ‘Health & Wellbeing Fair’ later in the month. Anne is encountering all manner of opposition from those surprised to see us active in her part of town after many years when it was considered a ‘no-go-area’. Characteristically she tells me, “like a snow plough, we will push those throwing stones aside while we continue to forge the road ahead!” There is a touch of the Iron Lady about Anne.
I drive to a local care-home to meet the staff and residents. I’ve tried to get around as many of these as possible and each visit is different, some like this occasion are encouraging, with apparently well-cared for and stimulated residents who question me thoroughly, but occasionally they are poignant, meeting those for whom old age has few compensations, bringing dementia and other illnesses, loneliness and varying degrees of lost dignity. Despite being a young candidate I see how much political debate concerns children and young people and how little we discuss the elderly. I wonder whether our generation will face the trials of old age as stoically as those I meet today.
An old friend comes over and we sit up late with a bottle of wine, watching TV whilst printing off maps and bagging them up with several thousand leaflets, before we lug them out into the car in the small hours to be delivered to helpers in the morning.
Friday 12th March
I drive to Stafford to meet my ever cheerful and helpful Campaign Director, Brian Jarvis, to attempt to extract our pledge data from Merlin for a letter we are sending out. Predictably an apparently simple exercise takes a couple of hours… and then the system crashes.
This evening I have the latest in a series of public meetings, this time in the church hall at Basford, a leafy residential area close to the border with Stoke-on-Trent. Turnout is good for a Friday night and the debate is good-humoured. Recently we have had 45 people cramming into a small room, followed by three people sitting awkwardly in the middle of a large village hall. Nonetheless, in each case the reaction of those who come has always been positive. One lady told me that the last time a candidate had held one in her village was Nicholas Winterton in the Newcastle by-election of 1969! I’ve pledged to be the first MP to hold one of these public meetings every month.
I drop my agent, Mark, home and drive to pick up my wife from Stoke station after another week away at work. She has lost too many weekends to leafleting and canvassing and borne it all with good humour. She should have known what was to come when we went to the Party Conference the day after we got married in October! I hasten to add that we later went away on a wonderful honeymoon, but perhaps the tone had been set. We head off to a local Thai restaurant to finally catch up on each others’ weeks, before heading back to our home in Betley.
Saturday 13th March
Up early to print canvass sheets and sort out the clipboards on the sitting room floor listening to Farming Today. Then my wife and I drive to the home of Margo Campbell, a stalwart supporter and the proud mother of Lorraine Fullbrook, our candidate in South Ribble. A group of helpers assembles, including Newcastle’s candidate in 1987, Peter Ridgway, who sensing the opportunity we have to win this time has thrown himself into organising our canvassing with military efficiency.
We head out into the Seabridge area to knock on doors and spread the word. We canvass almost half the ward and leave the remainder for tomorrow.
My impression on the doorstep in a former Labour heartland suggests both a note of caution and reason to be optimistic. Voters ask for a clearer and stronger Conservative message: they want to hear a damning critique of Labour’s failure and clear reasons to be hopeful that things will improve under the Conservatives. There remains work to be done to convince swing voters, but time remains and very many are undecided. And if Gordon Brown were looking to the streets of Newcastle for solace, he would be disappointed. There is no enthusiasm here for the Labour Government, even formerly staunch Labour supporters feel angry and let down and many say they will register a protest vote.
Above all there is a deep and pervading sense of disenchantment with politicians. The real legacy of this Parliament will be the continued and accelerated erosion of confidence and interest in the political process and that will prove even harder to fix than the public finances.
> Last week's Diary was written by Gareth McKeever, PPC for Westmorland and Lonsdale
