With the local elections looming, there’s a ward in the borough next to mine that is apparently Labour’s No 1 target. “Win this ward,” said a text-plea for canvassers, “and we see the 50-year rule of the Tories next door end.” Obviously, I’d have signed up straight away, except that ward is the borough I grew up in, and I feel moderately confident that I and my ilk made it even more Tory by canvassing there in the first place.
In the 80s, I used to go door to door with my mother. I honestly don’t know if anyone undecided has ever, genuinely, had their mind changed by a party member arriving with a rosette, but I can say with moderate certainty that there is nothing more annoying than being canvassed by a kid from the opposite side, even one accompanied by an adult. Torn between wanting to be rude, and not wanting to be seen as the kind of person who would be rude to a child, Conservative voters would wave us off through a door opened no more than an inch, saying: “True blue, I’m afraid.” Granted, I have no data on this, but the vibe was very much: “You’ve made me 10 times more Conservative than I was five minutes ago.”
For a brief period just before 1997, there was an air of inevitability around a Labour victory, and then canvassing was more like being an employee from the council, standing in a shopping centre with a questionnaire of the bleeding obvious: “Would you like better air quality, or worse?”; “Do you think the future should be brighter, or less bright?” Still, in this pocket of south London, the Conservatives held the council.
There followed a few years when people just wouldn’t answer the door, the citizenry having finally woken up to the fact that, if you aren’t expecting anyone, it’s either going to be a canvasser or someone selling you a cleaning product. Now, of course, everyone answers because they are waiting for an Amazon package, so their first experience of the political interaction is disappointment that you’re not the speciality lightbulb they have been waiting for.
The main purpose of talking to people on the doorstep, now, is for canvassers to be able to parlay what they heard into a point that begins: “What I’m hearing on the doorstep …”
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
