Canvassing with the Mayor of London
“WE ARE LABOUR” bellowed the cherry-red clipboard, thrust into my hand within minutes of arriving at The King’s Head. We were off to campaign in Earl’s Court for Joe Powell, Labour’s candidate for the Kensington constituency. It was my first time canvassing, but armed with a binder, how could I fail?
Today was a bigger day than most. As London’s most marginal seat, we attract Labour celebrities to galvanise volunteers and voters alike. Thirty canvassers showed up at 3.30pm on a Friday with the promise of meeting Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. Along with two other newcomers, I was briefed on the canvassing strategy. The most effective use of time was neither to argue with a Conservative on their doorstep, nor talk for hours with an existing Labour supporter. Today’s focus was to emphasise change for undecided voters.
After our briefing, dark-suited men with tell-tale sunglasses and ear-pieces strode past our group. Behind them, the Mayor arrived with a flurry of grins, handshakes, and photo requests.
I met the Mayor with great fanfare as I accidentally dropped a hundred Labour fliers on the street with excitement. After rootling around with him and a few other volunteers to pick them up off the pavement, I introduced myself and announced that it was my inaugural canvassing experience.
He joked that he had been summoned to commemorate the occasion, which became a running bit of the afternoon. He later name-checked me at the end of a speech to the volunteers, informing them all of my virginal campaigner status, and beckoned me to stand next to him with my Labour banner for the obligatory group photo for Twitter.
He urged us in his oration to avoid complacency, and that narratives around a Labour super-majority were designed to suppress turn-out. He reminded us of voting upsets like Brexit, Hillary Clinton and Neil Kinnock’s Labour loss in the 1990s.
He then trotted off to surprise some Earl’s Court residents with his door-knocking, and the real work began.
When you canvas for the first time, you are paired with a veteran to show you the ropes. My old hand was a young man who worked for the NHS, who confessed that it was only his fourth time door-knocking. We marched on with the pink team to our assigned homes on Lexham Gardens, a ghostly white stucco street that was seemingly devoid of residents. “These are the hardest streets to canvas,” my fellow volunteers told me, because it is so difficult to get into the buildings and no one is ever home. I was primed to expect to speak to a handful of people at most.
As predicted, our first few visits were anti-climactic. Consulting our database, which includes an astonishing amount of information on the names, ages, voting preferences and addresses of residents, we rang doorbells to the response of silence from building intercoms. In these instances, we stuffed fliers into letterboxes, a perilous experience for delicate hands for which my friend advised me to wear gloves (I forgot…).
When we did manage to make it into apartment buildings, we hit dead ends. One woman politely but resolutely committed to vote for the Liberal Democrats, a party that sits between the left and right but is not large enough to form its own government. As they are far from the largest vote share in the Kensington constituency, we remind people that in our first-past-the-post system, a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a wasted one if they would like to see Conservatives out of power.
After hoofing it to the top floor of a building, we were met by an international student who could not vote. We had to update the voter records, as he told us the man we had on our list had moved out a long time ago.
The most exciting interaction was when I suggested we take a detour down Lexham Mews. “Mews” are like lanes with small houses and are a quirk of a bygone era. They were formerly the stables behind grand mansions on the main London streets, now renovated into sought-after freehold homes in nice neighbourhoods.
At a wide-open door, we met a man who was helping his daughter renovate her home. While he was planning to vote Tory, he assured us that his daughter was a Labour supporter. We usually politely walk away if a person declares themselves a Conservative voter, like Homer Simpson reversing into a bush, however I joked that I wished my father would come to London to help me renovate my flat. He said he would have a word.
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Our election is days away and campaigners will be out every day until then, many taking time off work. On July 4th, canvassing focus will shift to getting people out to vote. I’m excited for that auspicious day as it marks my first time voting in a national election – I have never lived in a country where I could vote before, and something so simple as enfranchisement is utterly thrilling.