Local Campaigning

Abstract

Elections are fought not only by national politicians, party managers and their publicity advisers, but also by candidates and activists in constituencies across the country. This chapter examines the development of the methods of communication with the electorate employed in local electioneering.

It had been love at first sight … with the irresistible canvass-cards and the marked-up registers that could not be denied.

Roy Hattersley, describing his boyhood initiation into electioneering in 1950¹

I tried a new sort of bus canvassing — getting on a bus and meeting everyone on the top and bottom decks and getting off again at the next stop. … It has suddenly hit me like a shaft of light that there are such public meetings criss-crossing my constituency all day just waiting to be addressed.

Tony Benn, diary entry, 1963²

Shake hands with everybody, slap backs (where appropriate), take hold of arms (be gentle with the elderly — their joints hurt), pat shoulders, pat babies, pat dogs, stroke cats, make funny noises to budgerigars. Pressing the flesh is essential in any politician’s armoury. … Most of all, make eye contact: look people straight in the face, between the eyebrows, and concentrate on what they are saying. Nothing’s worse than a candidate who can’t hold a gaze and appears shifty. And only kiss people and babies if you are sure (though very old ladies like it), and not if you have a cold.

Advice for candidates on how to ‘press the flesh’, published by Conservative Central Office, 1991³

The local campaign is becoming an arcane irrelevance, a background noise which distracts from the decisive national campaign coming over the box. When canvassers call in the day they deposit rubbish in empty houses. At night they interrupt the election by dragging people from the TV to the door.

Labour MP Austin Mitchell, 1987⁴