Cleggmania hits Watford: Nick Clegg with the Lib Dem candidate
I am pacing up and down Watford’s winding High Street, supposedly one of the longest in Britain, looking for Cleggmania. The whole country seems to be having a love affair with the Liberal Democrat leader, so why not here? Armed with an A4-sized picture of Nick Clegg’s head, I attempt to woo the locals.
Out of 23 people, only 11 can correctly identify Clegg, and only five say they like how he did in the first two televised debates with Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Two actually mistake him for the Tory leader. One calls him a “bastard” but is quite eccentric so I should discount him. Opinions vary: “The TV gave him the opportunity to have his airspace”, “too pro-Europe”, “all right but I don’t think he’s that strong” – but no ringing endorsements. Few of my subjects have actually seen the debates.
Straw polls aside, even a little Clegg bounce could prise Watford from the grip of its Labour incumbent. Outgoing MP Claire Ward, a junior minister in the Ministry of Justice, seized the West Hertfordshire town from the Conservatives in 1997, becoming a young “Blair babe” closely associated with “new” Labour. In 2005, when neighbouring constituencies fell to the Tories, she held on, but now defends a notional majority of just 1,151 from Lib Dem challenger Sal Brinton, with Tory local businessman Richard Harrington close behind. This is a classic three-way marginal, and a top ten Lib Dem target seat with a Lib Dem council. If they can’t take it, Cleggmania is surely a loud-sounding nothing.
Ward is not playing up her chances as we canvass among the upwardly mobile semis and Land Rovers of Tudor ward: “This is not a Labour area”. One man promises to vote Labour but refuses a poster: perhaps because the next three houses all have blue Harrington billboards.
Some bounce for Clegg; others don’t. One woman, told he can’t be Prime Minister, retorts: “Why not?” A traditional Labour voter has gone Lib Dem after the debates: “I think it’s time for a change”.
Ward has a trump card. A pregnant woman says she knows nothing about the parties or the TV debates. But when Claire Ward is mentioned, she remembers the MP has been “fighting for the hospital”. Music to the Labour canvassers’ ears.
Since 1997, Ward has lobbied to keep Watford General Hospital and supports the current building of a PFI health campus there. Both Labour and the Lib Dems have leapt on the comments of neighbouring MP and Tory shadow health minister Mike Penning, who has called for a new hospital in nearby Hemel Hempstead. They say – and Penning denies – this means he wants Watford hospital to close. But NHS “reconfiguration” policy means slimming the trust down from five hospitals to two. Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley tried to defuse the dispute by visiting Watford General and saying there was “no prospect” of acute services being moved out.
“They’re just desperate”, Richard Harrington retorts of the Labour claims that the Tories will shut the hospital. So he would fight tooth and nail to keep it if necessary? “For me, it would be beyond contemplation. I have been told by Andrew Lansley that it will not happen.” For their part, the Lib Dems say Brinton, formerly of the regional development agency, was “instrumental” in getting the new campus.
The Lib Dems have gone all-out to take the seat: they’ve hired an industrial warehouse for the campaign to accommodate extra volunteers, computers and duplicating machines churning out endless leaflets. Nick Clegg has been, and is coming back (Brown has also visited; Cameron is coming). “We’ve got a grassroots organisation across the constituency the others can’t match”, says Candy Piercy, Brinton’s campaign manager.
How do the candidates regard each other? Harrington says the real fight is between himself and Brinton. “They underestimate Claire Ward then,” Piercy retorts. “My God, I respect her as a fighter!” She does not rate Harrington, who is a “nice man but doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea”. A Labour insider agrees.
Labour and the Conservatives both accuse the Lib Dems of descending to dirty tricks. Leaflets put out by Muslim groups accuse Ward of “protecting war criminals” by getting legislation passed granting Israelis immunity from war crimes prosecution. The opposite is true, she retorts. The Lib Dems say the leaflets are nothing to do with them and deny they were distributed commercially along with Lib Dem literature.
This election will hinge on a thousand votes, which are soft Lib Dem, soft Tory or soft Labour depending on who you listen to. Those households will get their doors hammered on polling day: soft votes are, paradoxically, hard to get.
