Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What politicians mean by a ‘great response’ on the doorstep

It’s that time of the year when politicians start posting pictures of groups of people smiling eerily while holding party placards and claiming that they’ve just had a ‘great response’ on the doorstep. 

For the uninitiated, this sounds as though the people opening their doors in each street are just thrilled to see said eerily smiling groups of campaigners striding up their garden paths. For those of us who spend election campaigns following politicians of all hues around on doorsteps, we know that a ‘great response’ is more likely to mean that only three people in a very long street were both in and disposed to opening their front doors. 

The clip that recently went viral of Theresa May knocking on a series of doors of properties whose owners were all out was amusing enough, but it was also pretty standard for any door-knocking session. Not many people are home during the day. Still fewer want a conversation with a politician, not least because they weren’t actually waiting at home for said politician to turn up. If someone really offers a ‘great response’ on the doorstep, it’s most likely that they’re a party member, a journalist whose sad ambition in life is to be asked to do jury duty, phoned by an opinion pollster or canvassed by local parties), or someone who has a problem with their drains and wants to bend the parliamentary candidate’s ear about it – even though the drains are something a local councillor should be sorting.

Many slightly more lukewarm responses involve voters in their pyjamas who are peeved at being disturbed. Slightly hotter responses that campaigners I’ve interviewed have included a Tory MP who walked up to a front door, raised his hand to knock, glancing as he did through the window.

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