Flatlanders

I thought it might be of interest - whatever your political persuasion - to know what goes on in an election campaign.  I can only write about what I have experienced, of course, but there seems to have been a general pattern in the four locations and five campaigns in which I've played a small part.  I don't feel what follows will betray any confidences or 'state secrets'.

A candidate can be their own agent and run their own campaign, but it's usual for these to be three people.  It's the Agent's responsibility to see that all the legal requirements are completed and in the right time frame.  In the larger campaigns that I've helped with, in addition to the semi-professional campaign manager, there is also an office manager or supervisor, who makes sure that the office is open, warm, and has enough pens and elastic bands to run the operation and coffee and cake to sustain all who come and help.  As a plan of campaign is devised and adjusted according to progress made, the detailed requirements filter down to the supervisor who will allocate tasks to the volunteers available.

In my delivery days, I became very familiar with boxes of printed matter.  I still have painful memories of a converted church building in north London, where I delivered fifteen boxes of leaflets to an office on the first floor.  By the second or third trip up the staircase, my asthmatic panting was telling me this wasn't a job I wanted to do again - I recall stubbornly refusing it on a later occasion - and at the end of the task, I sat in the van for quite some while before considering I was in a fit state to drive back.

Imagine my feelings then when, on Thursday afternoon, it was announced that a van had arrived downstairs (this office is also on the first floor) with seventy boxes of leaflets.  All available staff were drawn in to form a chain from street to door, from door to staircase and, with two or three people actually stationed on the stairs, a flow of boxes emerged to where the office manager and I moved them from the landing to a place of temporary storage in the general office.

The task was then to transform these into bundles to be delivered by other volunteers to as many houses as possible across the fourteen wards that make up the constituency.  Someone manned the electronic counter - without which the whole operation would have taken at least three times as long - one wrapped the delivery list around the leaflets, another embraced this with a strong elastic band, while a fourth co-ordinated the storage of bundles in (the original) boxes, duly labelled with the ward name and street codes, and placed this with lots of others on shelves ready for collection.

Bricklaying skills

Before any of this could take place, the boxes had to be opened and emptied, which I found myself doing.  My bricklaying skills were severely tested! At best, there were six in the bundling team; when I arrived yesterday morning I found one lady doing it all by herself.  Amazingly, in the extent of about a working day, the whole task was done and some bundles had already been collected in bulk for one of the outlying wards, where they would be farmed out to local volunteers in the area.

And so we come to my title.  I was just coming to the end of a little tidying up when Daisy, our candidate, arrived.  After a brief word with me and my colleague Ray, who had grown up in Bury St Edmunds, she went into the inner office.  As I mentioned last week, I was at school with her mother, so it was no surprise to discover that she, too, was born in Suffolk.  A few minutes later, a man arrived from the street and asked broadly, 'Is the girl about?'  My colleague ascertained that he meant our candidate, and sought advice from the manager.  The man explained that he was on his way home to Felixstowe and had called in on the off-chance of having a word and, perhaps, getting a picture to inspire his local party when he got back.

Daisy emerged and a short impromptu video was produced, and in conversation she observed, "Isn't it amazing that we've got four Flatlanders here in the office all together!"  It's a term I hadn't heard before, but its meaning is clear.  The three of them came from Suffolk and I from only just over the Norfolk border ... all good solid East Anglian stock, and now all engaged in different ways in the same cause.