Monday morning. Grant Shapps, the enthusiastic Tory party chairman, is sitting in a people-carrier, putting the final touches to a scathing press release attacking his Cabinet colleague, the Deputy Prime Minister.
Press release dispatched, Shapps gets out of the car and embraces his candidate, Maria Hutchings, and the pair set off to canvass. On this sunny morning, Shapps and Hutchings are followed by a large number of photo-graphers, a couple of journalists, a few press officers and a camera-wielding Tory MP. The only problem is there’s hardly anybody home, so it is the retired who are bearing the brunt of this manic campaign war.
Shapps and Hutchings go from house to house with no luck. Then, success! Somebody is in. The door opens, the flashbulbs pop and a startled resident emits a panicked shriek and covers her face. Next up is an elderly lady who opens the door in her dressing gown at midday only to find the nation’s media staring at her.
Later that afternoon I watch another irritated pensioner complain to the bemused Liberal Democrat candidate, Mike Thornton, that he has disturbed her nap. Luckily, the septuagenarian former Lib Dem leader Ming Campbell, a man who appears to appreciate the importance of an afternoon sleep, is on hand to smooth things over.
Eastleigh may look like a peaceful place, but behind the scenes a nasty skirmish is taking place. Those former rose-garden lovebirds, Cameron and Clegg, are locked in battle and there can only be one winner. There can be no coalition compromise here.
All the bigwigs are in town, from left and right, because Eastleigh is the most important by-election for 30 years. Not since the emergence of the SDP in the early 1980s as a serious political force has a by-election threatened to have such far-reaching political consequences.
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