Tories On The Streets Of My Town

The first clue I got that the 2017 General Election wasn't going well for the Conservatives was when our local MP turned up in town pressing the flesh two or three weeks before polling day.  They never do that.  Political parties know about voters, and they generally deploy their resources where they are of most use.  This is solid Tory territory so they don't need to do anything here.  The vote is solid and it gets itself out.  I picked up some other straws in the wind as well.  But even so I was swayed by the opinion polls and the general tone of the media coverage and so was as shocked as anyone to find that the Tories had not only gone backwards, but that Labour had been within a gerbil's tail of actually winning the popular vote.
That experience is one of the reasons I have chosen to actively avoid all coverage of the general election and judge it solely on the parties' own literature and what I hear people saying.  And of course, observations of what can be seen on the ground.  So far I've heard one person dismissing manifestos in general as being over-optimistic.  And that's err, it. If the people I mix with are anything to go on, nobody is talking much about the election.   I haven't seen any posters up either.  Not one single one.  Not a sausage.

But today the election burst out in the open with three, yes three, people in Tory rosettes handing out literature in the market square.   One of them looked like his exertions would be placing a further burden on the NHS any day now.  The other two were early middle aged and looked quite normal.   I clocked them for as long as possible without looking weird and they seemed to be attracting nothing but indifference.  Of about 20 attempts to give out a leaflet only 3 were accepted.  I don't know how the activists themselves were judging it, but to my eyes they weren't really making much impact at all.

So my conclusion is the one I should have drawn in 2017 but didn't.  The Conservatives are not doing very well in an area that would expect to be able to take to the bank in a normal election. That doesn't necessarily mean very much.  The Conservative majority around here is very comfortable around here both literally and metaphorically.  The concern may be purely an internal one.  A fairly liberal Conservative MP who has been at loggerheads with his local party has chosen not to fight the seat and his successor may feel he has something to prove by not losing any more support than his predecessor did.

Having no data to go on I don't know how the national campaign is going so I am still frozen in the point of time when I tuned out - when it looked like Labour were heading for the hiding of a lifetime.  I'll keep my eyes and ears open as the sand runs down the hourglass.  Politics has been nothing if not unpredictable in recent years.