Crewe & Nantwich Final Push

To Crewe & Nantwich yesterday to help with the Get Out The Vote part of the campaign where Mike & I joined Borough Councillor Eddie Ankers delivering key messages to voters. This time we were in Crewe outside the office where Labour played their prank with Toffs in top hats.
We saw once again a very slick and professional campaign with a very positive response. It's great to be walking down a street wearing a blue rosette and to have drivers tooting horns and waving at you! I didn't speak to as many people yesterday delivering as I did on my previous visit when I canvassed, and so was less able to gain an impression of what the result is likely to be, but if the amount of effort the party has put in and the general anti Labour sentiment mean anything, then there should be a Conservative victory.

Message

Sometimes support comes from the most surprising quaters and in the most unusual form. For a while now I have had a couple of printed panels on my car. On Friday I arrived at the car which I had left in a car park to find a message stuck to the window. It made me laugh and gives me great encouragement!

Mayor Making

I spent the morning at Rugby Borough Council's Annual Meeting and installation of the new Mayor. For 2008/9 the Mayor will be Councillor Bill Sewell, who was first elected in 2002, the same year as me and we were "new boys" together. Bill has been a fantastically hard working Councillor and will make a superb Mayor and ambassador for Rugby. He has chosen as his theme for his term of office "Civic Pride" which he has shown by example in his ward of Hillmorton and which he will lead on in other areas of the Borough. We have a team doing a great job in our town centre but we have other areas which would benefit from a demonstration of pride in our community and there is no better person to make this happen than Bill. I know he and Janet will have a really busy year and will enjoy every minute of it.
Today's meeting represented the very best of local government and there were some very fitting tributes to former councillors and others leaving office. Our outgoing Mayor, Sue Peach, who I worked with as a Councillor and have met at several events across the Borough has always been most courteous and again a terrific representative. Also standing down as a Councillor is former Mayor Bill Shields with whom I shared a ward and who has been an excellent source of advice to me, particularly during my time as a Councillor.

Crewe & Nantwich By-Election

I spent yesterday helping out in the by-election with my brother Mike who was a key member of my campaign team in Nuneaton and will be doing the same again whenever the general election is called. In addition to helping Edward Timpson win, we were keen to see new ideas that havebeen introduced into the party's campaigning. We saw a very slick operation with some superb literature prepared for different groups. We delivered a fair chunk of it in Nantwich, which we found to be a really pleasant market town, before joining Edward and his team for canvassing while accompanied by a couple of national newspaper reporters. There was an excellent response on the doorstep and despite a tough majority to overcome and a great deal of sympathy for the family of a well respected former MP whose daughter has been chosen as the Labour candidate, I am pretty certain Edward will be the first of a new batch of Conservative MPs over the next couple of years.

End of an era for me

Friday was my last full day worked at Central Catering Supplies, the business I founded with my brother Mike over 25 years ago (although I spent the first half of the day in the Benn Hall at the counting of votes in the local elections). It was a day of mixed emotions as I have loads to do within my political career and so I am leaving in the hands of others a company which was originally my baby and has been my life thoughout almost all of my working career. The staff at CCS were kind enough to present me with a superb bottle of wine, Chateau Branaire, St Julien from 1982, the significance of which is that this is the year in which we started the company & although you can't see it, I am pointing at the year on the label. I will enjoy drinking the bottle in celebration of a significant event in the next year or two!

Council Elections - reflections on the results

With Rugby not counting until Friday morning, I took to my bed on Friday evening rather than wait for results. One result I was delighted to hear about was from John Waine, Chairman of Nuneaton Conservatives, where I was Parliamentary Candidate in 2005. Nuneaton is part of Nuneaton & Bedworth Borough Council which was created in 1974 and has only ever had a Labour controlled administration. With 4 straight gains, including John himself ,this Council is now under Conservative control. With this last bastion of socialism in Warwickshire having finally been won, no wonder David Cameron chose to visit on Friday. His visit was enjoyed by all and topped a tremendous effort by Marcus Jones, now Council Leader, and his team.

In Rugby, our gains in terms of numbers of seats were less significant, partly as we were working from a higher base and labour were only defending seats in their strongest areas such as Newbold and New Bilton. This meant that our gains were likely to come from the Lib Dems and this duly happening in Hillmorton which Bill Sewell has turned into a Conservative stronghold. What was more significant within the Rugby results was the magnitude of the Conservative majorities. Take Earl Craven (Binley Woods, Brandon & Wolston). Five years ago the Conservative & Labour votes here were much the same. The Conservative majority has steadily increased over this period and this time Heather Timms majority was around 1000. The move from Labour to Conservative has been progressive and while there was a real mood of dissatisfaction with Labour generally and against Brown in particular at Thursday elections, there has slowly been more acceptance of what we're saying and offering with people seeing us as the party with the vision and ideas to make Britain better.

Council Elections - results awaited

The doors have been knocked on and the leaflets delivered and now we have to encourage our supporters to get out and vote; and then await tomorrow's results. Yesterday I was out with our candidate in Caldecott Ward, Emma Harrington and her County Councillor helpers delivering the last minute leaflet. Emma is standing in a ward where we hope to win a seat from the Lib Dems having been just 40 votes away last year. A great boost was the lady who saw our team and stopped her car to wish Emma well!