Ealing 4 - I met Tony Lit!

Another trip to Ealing last night. There is a real buzz and buoyancy about the Lib Dem headquarters, which is always a good sign. It's the biggest ever headquarters with the biggest ever campaign team composed of the biggest ever Campaigns Officers*.

From the contents of peoples' doorways around Southall Broadway, it again looks like only the Lib Dems are fighting a winning campaign. There are some big - really, REALLY big - Tony Lit posters in and on shops. Shops, however, don't have the vote; and many of them are displaying posters for other parties as well.

It looked like in the past few days the houses I was delivering had received two or three Lib Dem leaflets, one from Labour and one from Respect; the last Conservative leaflet seemed to have been some time ago. I still get the impression that the Conservatives are doing more than this in the Ealing part of the constituency, where they will know from their canvassing and their demographic data most Conservative votes are. The Conservatives clearly aren't doing enough to reach out to the whole of the constituency; this means their campaign can't win, and is about trying to stop the Lib Dems gaining the seat.

Equally, the Labour campaign has surfaced, and is all about how wonderful Virendra Sharma is. Labour, as well as the Conservatives, now have those very irritating speaker cars going around (they don't work! give it up!). Labour, in by-elections, normally try to cling on to enough of their General Election support to scrape in; no sings that their strategy is different this time.

Just as I was reaching this conclusion, finishing off my second delivery round, I spotted three lost-looking Conservatives delivering leaflets to Norman Avenue. Imagine my surprise when they turned out to be the advance guard for the Lit Squad!! There were a total of nine of them, all somewhat surprised to see a lib Dem out on his own. However, they didn't really seem to know where the were going.

I would like to think that the white man in a suit who was saying "They said that, did they?" into his phone in a bombastic tone of voice was Grant Shapps; I certainly gave him a mental kick up the backside just in case.

That was all too much excitement for me, so I went back to HQ and stuffed envelopes for several hours to calm down...

(*Someday I promise to spill the beans on the cruel curry-eating initiation rituals of the Lib Dem Campaigns Department, but not today)