Help, help! Canvass, canvass! That was my day yesterday. In the afternoon it became clear that the latest boxes of envelopes and the boxes of letters in our HQ were unlikely to get together without extra help. So – I sat on the phone doing what candidates do: telephoning people and asking them to come down to HQ to get them stuffed! This was really the first time I had called for extra help to get a task done – and people just said yes. It was amazing really – and people are incredibly kind.

Canvassing in Crouch End in the evening. One road was virtually solid Lib Dem and the others pretty good. The reason people gave on the door step for voting for me was overwhelmingly the hard work fighting for the local area. Iraq was occasionally raised – but not nearly as much as in other areas I have canvassed and Hornsey Town Hall came up a couple of times. I asked one woman who raised the issue if she had come to the ‘hustings’ on the Town Hall the night before. She said she hadn’t because she could not bear the group organising it. There seems to be a real split in the community over the ‘who’ – not the ‘what’ – of the Town Hall.

John Stevens, an ex Tory MEP who came over to the Lib Dems some years back, had come over to help for the evening. Two passers by stopped to talk to us – both Tories, both voting Lib Dem. They said that the Tories didn’t want to win this election because there was such financial trouble going to hit in a couple of years time – that Tories wanted Labour to be in government for that downturn – and then they could march in to save the day at the ensuing election. We all have our theories…!