On being a parliamentary candidate

A reflection on my experience of being a parliamentary candidate.

This piece, and those that follow it, will be written at pace. There may be grammatical errors and typos. Please accept this as the first of many apologies for that.  

There is an abundance of coverage of the general election result available online and I recently gave my own reflection on aspects of the campaign in Waveney Valley in this piece for the Spectator.

What you read less of, however, is what it’s like to be a candidate and what being out on the doorstep is like generally and was like during the 2024 election. While some of what I say here expands on the article linked to above, a reflection on being a parliamentary candidate seems an appropriate place to start this Substack.  

First and foremost, being a candidate was – despite the bruising result – a fantastic experience. It is all consuming and takes over your life, and that of your immediate family, 24/7. In the 48 hours after the count, I was broken physically and emotionally. But, lying on the bed exhausted, contemplating mowing the lawn and what – precisely – I’d now do with my life, my wife posed a question. Would I do it again? My response was, ‘yes but I need to rest first’. Then, I immediately corrected myself, ‘If another election is called tomorrow, I’d do it in an instant’

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what made standing such a great experience. Of course, there’s the honour of having been selected and the chance to represent an area you love. That’s a given. But it’s far more than that. It’s the chance to share and articulate ideas, your own ideas, and win votes by the power of argument or by the power of people believing you are the right person to represent them. Those conversations were always the most rewarding. I’ve every confidence, and I mean no disrespect to Adrian Ramsay when I say this, that if I’d managed to speak to all 71,000 plus people in Waveney Valley, I would have won. The problem is I couldn’t and, bluntly, due to the resources they had, the Greens were able to speak to far more people than we could. Even though this wouldn’t have been with the candidate himself, these conversations have power. People need, and want, to feel heard.

Perhaps I make it sound like I stepped onto a street and the red carpet was rolled out, or, following a flash of the Rout smile, people melted into a Conservative frenzy at the mere sight of me. Believe me, this was far from the case. Doors were slammed, leaflets thrown, four letter utterances were more heavily thrown and I learned some new combinations of insults. I rarely took this personally and, as is often the case in life, people were usually angry about something else and I was the trigger for the outburst.

Sometimes it was something so horribly understandable that an immediate lump appeared in my throat. I lost count of the number of people whose loved ones had died during the pandemic while ‘we’ – because they included me in this by association – were partying in Downing Street. Debates about the rights and wrongs of that period will rage but the raw emotion on the doorstep and the tears in the eyes of the people I spoke to, and those that sometimes came to mine, will stay with me forever. There were similar emotional conversations about Special Educational Needs (SEND) and kinship care but these more easily led to a conversation about policy and improvements we could make.

Of course, there were those who were angry with ‘the Tories’ or about ‘the last 14 years’ and a perception of corruption, incompetence and failure. I’ll come to that more in a moment. Quite often, however, people were angry about something else entirely; they’d had a bad day at work, I’d knocked on their door just as they were going out (or coming home), a loved one was sick or a dog was misbehaving. In any of these scenarios, the last thing you want to see is a leaflet bearing politician.

Knocking on someone’s door is an intrusion. As a candidate you have to accept that, you have to accept that you are in someone else’s space. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t knock on doors, far from it – it’s a necessary part of campaigning and when we do not do it, or do not do enough of it, we are rightly criticised. But as a candidate or campaigner, it’s important to recognise the intrusion you are making and why this may make some people defensive or feel vulnerable. For your own sanity, it’s also important to remember they are very rarely angry with you personally.

Though these difficult interactions stick in the mind, they are heavily outweighed by the positive ones. There was a repeated wide-eyed surprise, bordering on delight, that a political candidate was alive in the wild and knocking on their door. Very often, I was the first candidate to have knocked on their door in decades. This isn’t a criticism of any other candidate (they would have had the same response). It’s a continual frustration for us all. In Waveney Valley there are over 38,000 doors and we knocked on a lot of them, but by no means all of them, and more people were out when we called than were at home. Despite our best efforts, there will be more people we didn’t speak to than we did. Hence, whenever you’re canvassing, wherever you’re canvassing, you can always expect the delight of being someone’s first!

This does speak to what is a clear desire of people on the doorstep to be heard and to be engaged with. In 2024, more than any previous election I’d experienced, a large number of people were genuinely undecided about how they were going to cast their vote. This was true of very politically engaged residents and the less engaged. Of those who were engaged, the conversation usually started with their natural political allegiance and why they were wavering from it. For the less engaged, it usually began with ‘you’re all the same’. It’s in these instances that being a good candidate or campaigner comes to the fore. These are always the most enjoyable exchanges because you get to make your case. More often than not, for me, it worked. I won’t repeat my pitch here – that would be telling – but those who saw me on the campaign trail or at hustings events will know that I favoured honesty and free thinking.

Earlier I mentioned the national picture, the view of ‘the Tories’ and the perception of our legacy since 2010. It would seem strange to write about the 2024 campaign without touching on this. It was the number one issue on the doorstep. The Labour attack line over ‘the last 14 years’ had landed and landed hard. It is not my intention here to write a defence or critique of those 14 years. Over the entire period, we did good things, more good than bad in fact. The massive financial support for residents, businesses and communities, alongside the vaccine rollout, during covid is too easily forgotten. But we have short memories and the last 2 to 3 years were hard to defend – the infighting, the changes in Prime Minister, the decline of behaviour in public office and what, from the outside, felt too often like unspeakable arrogance from a vocal minority of MPs who had lost touch with the ordinary British public, all hurt us. How could it not.

So how did I handle it on the doorstep? Quite honestly, I agreed. I said it was why I was standing there. Because I wanted us to have a better kind of politician because I was determined to be different. It was one of the hardest parts of the campaign, standing there as a candidate knowing – and determined – that you would be different, only to be judged by the conduct of those who didn’t do justice to the office to which they’d been elected. Those individuals who let us down were in the minority. We had some fantastic MPs, many of whom lost their seats for the same reasons I didn’t win. But the public remembered the ones who had let them down and so they should. We lost some votes because we deserved to and that was the hardest thing to accept on the doorstep. Standing there, making the case for something you desperately wanted to do. Knowing you’d be good at it but knowing that the hand you’d been dealt wasn’t a winning one. Sometimes my honesty about this legacy won the day and sometimes it didn’t but I do think people believed me and that, ultimately, was why I could hold my head high in defeat.

Another question I’m asked is what got to me during the campaign? I’m pretty robust but one or two things did pierce my armour. We’re all most protective of those we love. When, within 24 hours of them going up, some huge 8ft by 4ft signs with my face and name on were defaced on the A140, my first thought was not the abuse scrawled across them, it was that I didn’t want my mum driving past a defaced picture of her son. A son, rightly or wrongly, she was proud of. Fortunately, the amazing husband of a friend and volunteer rushed out to take them down before my mum drove past. Another instance was when my wife was delivering leaflets in Haughley, in the final week of the campaign. I wasn’t with her, she was alone, and the resident chose to come out chasing her with the leaflet, swearing at her and thrusting it back into her hand. This happens a lot in politics but when it’s your wife and you’re exhausted, it hits home. At other times, you’re able to inject humour – one particularly potty-mouthed resident emerged on polling day shouting at us for being ‘Green *****’, as if by reflex I replied, under my breath, ‘No, we’re the Tory *****’, and moved on.

The final thing I’ll touch on in this piece, because it’s already getting too long and it would be nice if people read it, is what surprised me during the campaign. The first I touched on in my Spectator article I linked to. It was how little policy mattered and how little manifestos mattered on the doorstep. I always knew that voting was an emotional decision and that we all had our tribal loyalties – much like supporting a football team. I’ve always been Conservative therefore I’ll always remain Conservative. More so than I’d experienced volunteering during previous elections, likely due to the national picture, that tribal loyalty faltered this time out. But when we probed those leaving us as Conservatives for the Greens or those wavering between the Greens and Reform, the responses were somewhere between startling and mind boggling.

Standing face to face with a lady in her 80s contemplating a vote for the Greens, a picture of the late Queen behind her on the wall, I politely pointed out that as recently as 2023 the Scottish Greens had reaffirmed their position in favour of abolishing the monarchy and that, while their detailed policy pages had vanished, I was pretty sure the Green Party was not so fond of said institution. It got worse, her grandson was in the military, a submariner. Here, I thought, I have them bang to rights. The Greens want to abolish the nuclear deterrent, I told her, and the candidate standing against me here has advocated for us leaving NATO. We cycled through several other Green policies, all of which she disagreed with, before she concluded, ‘well, they won’t really do these things will they and they do seem nice’. Considering, but dismissing, a rather pathetic cry of ‘but I’m nice too and we actually agree on things’, I left defeated.

Similar conversations were repeatedly reported. My wife spoke to a man in his 90s, who confidently told her the Greens would stop all the ‘boat people’ and give us secure borders. She politely suggested he look at their policies and if by secure, he meant open, then the Greens were definitely for him. Even more frequent were owners of shiny 4x4s who were blissfully unaware that the Greens wanted to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2027. For the car buffs among you, one owner of a Mercedes-AMG G63 (17 MPG and 369 g/km of CO2 emissions) who confidently told me she was a Green will forever haunt me.

Policy, this time out in Waveney Valley, didn’t seem to matter as much as it has historically. Voting remained an emotional decision, but the overriding emotion was one of disappointment in us as Conservatives and that made people turn a blind-eye to policies with which they disagreed. This sense of punishing us as Conservatives is what led to the ultimate contradiction of the Green-Reform waverer.

The other thing that really surprised me was the team we built and the amazing volunteers, and family members, who turned out to support me. I’d been part of general election teams before but being the candidate is a different experience. You are their champion, and they fully believe in you. It is at once the most humbling and heartening experience. The opinions and views you’ve held for years suddenly carry more weight and your team want to hear them and share them. To be a candidate, you need self-belief but to hear someone else, voluntarily giving up their time, pitching for you and selling you on the doorstep, or using their time to make you a campaign logo or video, is quite something. I won’t name them all here but we made friendships that will last a lifetime and built a team that would walk through fire for each other. I didn’t expect that level of loyalty and nor did I ask for it. As for my family, it’s hard to write about their commitment to the cause without tears forming. My wife, father-in-law, mother and stepfather were phenomenal both in terms of emotional support and support on the doorstep. This wasn’t familial duty, they proactively asked and wanted to help. To be frank, I expected the need for more cajoling on my part and that they pulled out all the stops, amazed me. Looking them in the eye, after defeat, even knowing I could have done no more, it’s hard not to feel that I’ve in some way let them down.

I’ve not even touched on the hustings events, which I loved. It’s where I come alive. There and on the doorstep. Selling yourself, and your party, through the power of oratory and argument. That’s real politics and that’s how we rebuild faith in our party - by listening, by being credible and by making the complex argument. I’ll write more on this journey in the coming weeks.

Reading this account of my experience, you might see more negatives than positives. But being a candidate is more than the sum of its parts. As I said, lying there broken on the duvet contemplating defeat, I’d do it all again tomorrow.