Sketch: Nick Clegg’s lucky dip
Nick Clegg escaped an earful by knocking on the right doors in Oldham East and Saddleworth.
It was all going so well. Nick Clegg’s ministerial car had swept up the hill on which the implausibly named village of Grotton was situated, halfway between Oldham East and Saddleworth. After the upbeat speech – unusually brief, but then this was early January – the door-knocking began. The inhabitants looked surprised, but not overwhelmingly so, when they realised it was the deputy prime minister standing on the doorstep.
It was difficult to catch anything of the conversations, although at one stage I did manage to hear Clegg answering the concerns of an elderly gentleman on immigration. “As you know in government, we’re bringing in a system… over time we’re going to bring this down to a manageable level,” he said. He had never sounded more Tory.
The voters didn’t seem to mind. What a coincidence that all the doors he knocked on were in! Then I noticed that a clipboard-wielding apparatchik was giving Clegg and the candidate, Elwyn Watkins, instructions on which doors to knock at. Of course! But surely there are unintended consequences of this approach. No wonder our leaders think they are universally popular. Clegg may be in for a rude awakening come Thursday.
He had certainly done all the right things on his 30 minutes of artificial reality: ignoring the media scrum, demonstrating athleticism by telling exhausted cameramen to “keep up” as he marched up 45-degree slopes (that may be an exaggeration); and, inevitably, stopping to shake hands with both police officers and man-with-a-pram.
But it wasn’t enough. As the great whirlwind of cameras, reporters, activists swept down the street, the candidate and party leader at its epicentre, heckling was to be heard stage left.
politics.co.uk detached itself from the maelstrom and bounded up the garden path. An elderly couple had advanced to their window and were starting to make their feelings heard.
“He’s thrown out a guy who was doing a bloody good job around here,” the man complained. He was referring to Phil Woolas, the Labour MP whose demise at the hands of an unusual election court triggered this by-election in the first place. They were angry with Clegg for making promises which, if he eventually got into power, he would never keep.
“Nick Clegg? What do I think of all the liberals?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know,” politics.co.uk replied. What did she think?
Her husband answered for her.
“They make policies but when they get into power they can’t do anything about it. What’s the point?”
This was an elaboration on previous dismissals of the Liberal Democrats. These had focused on the fact that they make policies but, because they are never in power, can’t do anything about it. How seamlessly they had moved across into government.
Watkins was not especially popular either. “This bloke won’t turn up. If he gets in now do you think we’ll ever see him again?” How fortunate Clegg and Watkins didn’t knock on their door. Then we might really have had a story.
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