Yesterday I was offered a ticket to go and see West Ham play Reading this afternoon. I turned it down, partly on the basis that if I went, we would lose, but more due to the fact that I had already promised my friend Tracey Crouch, Tory candidate for Chatham & Aylesford that I''d go and give her a hand delivering a residents' survey to the good burghers of Chatham this morning. And if I pulled out she'd lynch me. True to form, the Hammers won 3-0.
Tracey managed to get no fewer than thirty four people to come out to help her deliver more than 20,000 residents surveys this morning. Most of them were locals, but she is the sort of person who inspires tremendous loyalty in her team and several of her colleagues from her time as David Davis's chief of staff turned out too, having come down from London. Chatham & Aylesford is the sort of seat the Conservatives need to win if they are to have any chance of forming a government. Boundary changes have not been kind and she's got a notional majority of 4,000 to overturn, so she needs the Party to be performing strongly. She gave me the area around Dale Street in Chatham to deliver, thinking that was highly amusing.
The funniest moment of the day came via my West Ham blog. I had written a post explaining I wasn't going to the match, and then a reader called "Rooster" posted a comment saying he lived in Chatham, and what do you know, two minutes later he wrote this...
As I wrote that post the Tracey Crouch newsletter entered my letterbox. She will get my vote, she is ten times better looking that the Labour candidate.
West Ham fans are people of impeccable taste, dontchathink? Pity Tracey is a Spurs fan. Nobody's perfect. She does have a very good blog, though. Exactly what a candidate blog should be like.
