Emails, paperwork, phone calls, emails, paperwork, phone calls. Highlight of day – I have to dash to Marks and Spencer in Muswell Hill to buy food that you can microwave as oven still out of service and likely to remain so for some time. A local resident dashes up to me and says he and his wife have some time now and would like to help with my campaign. Every single person will make a difference …
Back home to – emails, paperwork, phone calls, emails, paperwork, phone calls …
Meet our press officer outside Millbank and we go and do SKY. They have decided not to do a live feed but a pre-record – that was just fine. They edit and take what they want – usually about a nano-second by the time it actually reaches the news.
Tougher on ITV – live to camera – and a proper grilling on our policies. Apart from mangling one set of words – I was pleased because they had gone tough and thrown every possible attack at me – and I lived! I always reckon it’s been a good day if I’m alive at the end of it.
Then off to the crime manifesto launch – all good stuff. It’s me, Charles K and Mark Oaten. Now the big boys have arrived, I become relatively ornamental. I say my piece but Charles and Mark, being the national figures, field the questions – very well I thought.
I go into City Hall to clear my paperwork and emails there and spend some hours finishing a variety of chores.
Then back to a stuffing evening at my house. I like stuffing evenings as it is a mindless task leaving us activists to gossip.
In the middle of all that has been going on, I have had to truck backwards and forwards to the vet several times. My dog, Purdy, ate a whole chicken carcass (bones and all) overnight on Good Friday. It was the first time I had cooked a proper meal since Christmas – and the oven broke. So moral of that story is – I should never cook!
Vet’s fees need a bit of scrutiny is my overriding thought for the day. I have insurance – but the cost is exorbitant. Must have a look at this in due course … but too tired tonight.
Canvassing again with the ‘hit squad’. But today is nice and dry and I have a very pleasant time up and down Southwood Lawn Road. Much as before, several Labour supporters who won’t be voting Labour and several definite LibDems.
As I am chatting on one doorstep, my phone goes. I excuse myself and it is our national press office asking if I will step in for our Home Affairs Spokesperson Mark Oaten who can’t make the live TV interviews the next morning before the launch of our crime policies. It’s always one of those moments – you obviously want to do it, but it is quite nerve-racking. I say yes.
This means I have to cancel my plans to go to the NewRos celebrations at Ally Pally – as I have to study the brief and be up at 5am to get to SKY and ITV in time.
Home to study. My daughter pretends she is the interviewer. Watch out Paxman I say.
My ‘hit squad’ steams in again for a canvassing session. Not sure why it waited all day to start raining at four o’clock on the dot. Never mind – we’re rough and we’re tough – and out we all go.
Lots of Labour members (yes – members) absolutely furious with Blair and wanting to demonstrate their contempt for him by voting for me. Our Labour MP also comes in for a lot of criticism for her staunch Blairite, non-rebellious stance on just about everything.
Thoroughly soaked by the end of canvassing, I knock on the last door of the day. It opens and it is one of those funny moments as the person was famous (a comedian in this case). When you meet someone famous it is always bizarre because of course – you know their face but they don’t know you.
I cover it well – establish that his name is different from the one on my canvass card taken from the electoral register – and offer to find out if he is on the new electoral roll when it comes out in a few days time. He was jolly nice, invited me in and like others has always been Labour but this time thinking of voting Lib Dem. I suggest he looks at various tactical voting web-sites (e.g. www.strategicvoter.org.uk) which are advising disaffected Labour supporters where it is safe to vote Lib Dem without letting a Tory in etc.
I then decide I am wet and cold and have arranged to met team in the Red Lion and Sun pub – which I do.
Two pieces of news from the Guardian.
Today’s paper has an article from Tariq Ali saying he’ll be voting for me – in order to oust the pro-war Labour MP.
Also, I’ve been shortlisted again in the Guardian political blogs of the year competition. You can vote up until 4 April.
Also see some of the online Lib Dem ads are appearing on the Guardian website. Part of our overall stepping up of the campaign to be serious challengers to the other two parties – hurrah!
Today I stay home and bundle leaflets into delivery runs, prepare canvass boards and annoy the children. Major news breaking during the day is the Tory Deputy Chair’s streak of honesty where he reveals on tape that Tories want to cut much more than they’ve admitted in public.
The wheels immediately fall off the Tory campaign. Mr Flight is sacked from his post and then told he cannot stand again. His constituency party backs him at first – and then dumps him.
Now it looks like he’s being airbrushed out of the Tories. Go to Google to check how to spell his surname, bung in Howard Flight, up comes the first link – to his biog on the Tory website. But follow the link … and you get a big blank white space! Have a look at: http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=people.person.page&PersonID=5122
Off to the Purcell Room on the South Bank for an Election Summit – a last gathering of the Lib Dem clan to rally us for the election.
First off is the photo op with Charles. We are meant to stand in a diamond shape of human beings whilst the cameras shoot us from above. TV and radio and lots of papers in attendance. The Lib Dem star is definitely rising at the moment – as we are the ‘Real Alternative’.
I am placed next to Charles at the front of the diamond shape. It’s all very interesting where you get put – I surmise from the number of times I have found myself next to Charles in photo-ops recently that I am either absolutely gorgeous (unlikely) or that the party wishes to promote me as a good thing (quite right)!
Photo over – we go into the hall for a speech from our Charles. The media are allowed to stay for this – and Charles gives it a good send off. It is a confidence thing I think – our policies are good, out position is better than ever before – and the others are less than edifying with their various negative yah-boo style of politics – all giving us a feel-good factor. Let’s hope it translates into votes.
A few of the senior MPs have sidled up to me to say that the buzz in Westminster is that I will win in Hornsey & Wood Green. If enough people vote for me this is undoubtedly true – but I am too much of a grass-roots campaigner with feet firmly on ground to pay too much account to the village gossip (although I think they are right). But it is better than the gossip being in the other direction!
We then move into private session to hear from our campaign genius Chris Rennard and our election campaign manager Tim Razzall.
It’s a good session followed by our various spokespersons giving a three-minute speech on their area and then taking really nasty questions from us. We are all going to face this at hustings during the election – so seeing our spokespersons under heavy fire rehearses the arguments.
I come out to lunch, switch on my phone, to find 15 missed calls. I hate that – I always feel under surveillance and guilty for not attending at moment of call. Too dutiful by far. Most are media – including the Evening Standard who are showing an interest in Hornsey & Wood Green. But there is also an urgent comment needed on the Mayor’s mad proposition to bring powered two-wheelers into the congestion charge regime. We have spent recent years encouraging people to get out of cars onto public transport or onto bikes or scooters – now the Mayor wants to charge them for the change he has been promoting.
Ken has turned into a money-grabbing government lackey. He was great on many issues before he went back into the Labour party. But now his whole joie de vivre has disappeared as he toes the party line and agenda. I think he is unhappy. I don’t know why – but he just doesn’t seem to have the spark he had before.
Back into the lecture hall to be lectured. Several more sessions, our secret polling and campaign advice and then off home to more paperwork and more emails.
I chair the Stop and Search Scrutiny Implementation Panel at the Metropolitan Police Authority. This session is about training and so the head of training and various other Met officers are present to give evidence. I suppose the argument of the day was a continuation of where stop and search policy and implementation will sit in the Met.
Commander Brian Paddick is now heading their working group and hopefully he can ensure the issue is dealt with properly. If it doesn’t find a home and isn’t led by someone with clout – it will go the way of all Met good intentions
The other interest of the morning was on training. I bring up a recent occasion when several of us went to the Commons and passed through the new security scan and body search. One of our number was extremely roughly treated – curt and unpleasant.
I ask whether there is any central emphasis on not being friendly, keeping a formal distance and a sort of roughness and authoritarian manner being a requirement? Oh no – said a very, very senior officer – but you know (and I paraphrase) some of the people going into the Commons behave extremely arrogantly when we have to search them – and after you have had a few of those, well – the people doing the searches are only human…
There was a kind of shock amongst the panel members. For though quite possibly the case the implication was there were lots of rude toffs and we were dismayed that such minor encounters could bring forth such unprofessional behaviour. The implication for how police would behave in a more confrontational stop and search situation was pretty poor.
I point out that we are trying to get to a standard of training where the professional behaviour mitigates against natural instinct – otherwise we will never eradicate discrimination in stop and search.
Also, my personal view is that what goes around comes around, and until the police learn to be a bit better at all their encounters the problems will not get better. It is frustrating at this stage to see how superficial some of the warm words are.
Evening of paperwork and email. Election correspondence is building – and flooding in!
I go to meet Charles Kennedy’s poster van for a photo op. The Lib Dems are launching our 10 Good Reasons to Vote Liberal Democrat poster campaign today. The graphic and the idea behind it I think are fabby. In very bold text in red – it says ‘We oppose’ and then in gold ‘We propose’ and lists the 10 things.
It’s very striking visually as well as making the point that we are a ‘Real Alternative’ – which indeed we are!
It works well – of course the headlines are backed by substantive policy proposals – but as an ex-graphic designer of some 20 years’ experience prior to politics – it is the best graphic I have seen yet…
After our photo op the poster van goes on its merry way around to other Lib Dem target seats in London.
We are celebrating Newroz at City Hall – the Kurdish New Year. This time instead of just one day – the festival is running for two weeks and there are lots of events going on.
To my surprise, I am called to say a few words – which I do. I take the tack of the need for political representation. Their chief lobbyist, Ibrahim, came to see me a while back – and he is certainly doing a fantastic job of raising awareness among the political classes of the variety of barriers and challenges facing Kurdish-speaking people in England.
Relatively recent arrivals, Kurds have advanced very quickly into the infrastructure of society in terms of housing, work, health and education. It was a matter of survival on arrival and the barriers were immense. Twenty years on there are still barriers – like the failure to recognise that numbers of children at schools were not ‘Turkish speaking’ as they had been labelled – but ‘Kurdish speaking’. These problems are now being corrected. Still a way to go until we have a Kurdish GCSE though!
My main message is the need to move on from arrival survival into the landscape of the country. Lobbying is fine – but get involved (with whichever political party suits), get in there and get elected – to council, to Regional Assemblies and to Parliament.
Lynne Featherstone 