Nicky Morgan’s record as Education Secretary is coming under fierce attack in the Loughborough market place where she’s campaigning. A furious man is telling activists that he will never vote for the Tory candidate because of ‘what she’s done’. The campaigners brace themselves for a diatribe about Tory education policies.
Instead, it turns out that his complaint is that ‘she’s kept all the kids in school for longer’. This has had a devastating effect, not on the kids themselves, but on the fish and chip shops in Yarmouth and Skegness, where this particular voter cannot now buy a delicious feast as he’d wish. ‘Rubbish!’ he bellows, as one Tory member tries to tell him that a better education is a good thing for children.
Other voters are probably easier to mark as undecided. Many of them really want a good long chat with Morgan or one of her activists, normally about an issue that’s bothering them. It’s not so much ‘can you tell me why I should vote for you?’ as ‘I’d like to vote for you but I’m worried about X and Y’. A number of things come up again and again. Welfare cuts seems to worry a lot of people, many of whom mention Danny Alexander’s leak of the ‘secret plans’ for benefits cuts to the Guardian that morning. A good number are also worried about immigration – I hear plenty of ‘they’re coming over here’ from voters talking to Morgan – even though they then don’t seem to be looking for a Ukip-style close-the-borders policy stance from the candidate. Others want to know about zero hours contracts.
The activists who go out door-knocking in Loughborough confide that something else comes up a lot: gay marriage. It comes up too at a sixth-form event we visit later, where a young voter asks the candidate why she voted against gay marriage and only changed her mind when she took on the Equalities brief in government. Morgan insists she’d changed her mind before then, and that it was partly because she has lots of friends in same-sex relationships (the students laugh at this), and partly because people had contacted her to say that they felt like second-class citizens by being excluded from marriage.
The doorstep complaints are about Morgan’s change of heart on this too, but from the other side: it’s Christians who are furious she now supports equal marriage and say they will vote Tory in local elections, but not for Morgan as an MP. The Coalition for Marriage has been distributing pleasant leaflets entitled ‘NICKY MORGAN’S SAME-SEX MARRIAGE U-TURN’ and instructing voters to ‘use your vote for true marriage’.
Most seats have a standard leaflet informing voters seeking true marriage that their MP has voted for or against same-sex marriage, but the C4M have clearly had to design a special one for Morgan. Still, that hasn’t stopped a couple of members of the Conservative Christian Fellowship pitching up to help out.
Morgan clearly really enjoys her regular market stall sessions. She roars loudly with laughter and tends to have a small queue of people waiting to meet her. She has the best recognition rate of any Tory MP fighting a marginal, and that’s clearly in evidence in this session. At one point, a blue Conservative balloon bursts with a loud bang and a few shoppers jump. ‘We’re shooting people now!’ she jokes, a little too loudly. A couple of women looking at peppers on the vegetable stall next door turn around in alarm.
A Tory activist stands by the campaigning group holding a ‘Nicky Morgan’ placard aloft, rather like someone telling passers-by to ‘REPENT’. Just a few feet from him is a gaggle of Labour activists, who are shouting ‘free heavy duty carrier bags!’ (rather than ‘vote Labour!’) The union-sponsored bags contain a sheaf of party leaflets.
Voters want to talk to Morgan about Labour. They bring up the potential for a partnership between Ed Miliband’s party and the SNP. Morgan is quite happy to talk about the video of Alex Salmond joking about writing a Labour budget (he was taking the mickey out of the Conservative campaign, but the Tories have decided to use it as a deadly serious threat). Others mention ‘that note’ – the one Liam Byrne sent saying there was ‘no money’ – as evidence that Labour would be a ‘disaster’. This candidate has been particularly assiduous in feeding back to CCHQ the lines that are working and the issues that are being raised.
Everyone who’ll take one gets this leaflet:
She also has special leaflets for the Bangladesh community in the town, and her doorstep sessions with these voters tend to involve large numbers of people standing around her to hear her speak, rather than a door-to-door session.
Morgan was nine points ahead of her Labour rival in the last Lord Ashcroft poll of the constituency, which was taken near the start of this campaign. Not much has shifted nationally in the campaign, and the Tories in Loughborough say this past week has been the one where they’ve seen people starting to pay attention. The election address for postal voters went out last Monday, with the address for second electors in each household going out at the end of last week and the election address for every voter going out today. This decision to leave it late was made on the basis that voters wouldn’t be thinking much about the election until now anyway. The Labour addresses went out much earlier.
The broadcasters are sending a good number of journalists to the Education Secretary’s count on Thursday, just in case this election serves up a high-profile scalp in Loughborough. She seems pretty happy about the way things are going. ‘What we need now is a royal baby,’ I overhear her saying to one supporter. Well, she’s got that, at least.
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