Our local councillors who’ve lost their seats must be sighing with relief

An angry text exchange between me and a former Tory councillor after she lost her seat has got me thinking.

During the campaign, I asked this lady if she would like to put a poster in my front garden as it adjoins the village green. Even more to the point, next door to me is her main rival, who has a placard fixed to his front wall.

Her reply came back no thanks. She did not want me to put up a poster or placard as it would only make matters worse by reminding the opposition to vote. In terms of the effect on her main opponent, she said it would ‘wind him up’.

This seemed odd to me. Aren’t the different candidates supposed to wind each other up during election campaigns? I asked around my various Tory friends and no one in this area of Surrey could find a poster to give to me. I had people ask, not revealing it was for me, in case the Tories didn’t want the funny woman with the column to be their poster girl, but no, they couldn’t get one either. There didn’t appear to be any.

Driving along the A3 one afternoon, I finally spotted a Conservative poster. It was hidden behind the hoarding signposting an exit: a small blue square, barely bigger than four feet across, positioned right behind the massive road sign, so you could catch only the merest glimpse of it as you took the slip road, and even then you couldn’t really look at it because you were concentrating on taking your exit.

A week before election day, the Tory councillor texted me again out of the blue (pun intended, because if she’d been more into the blue we wouldn’t have been arguing): ‘It was the right call not to do posters.’