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Below, as promised in yesterday’s blog, are 10 tips based on my experience of being a candidate in a public meeting to select a PPC. There is one massive caveat – I obviously do not know why people voted the way they did in a private ballot over various rounds. This is simply my take of what seemed to work for me and it may or may not reflect how I actually came across to the audience. Many of the points may seem ridiculously obvious (and a few may seem repetitive), for which I apologise, but this is how I saw it. 1. You can learn a lot very quickly by talking to local people so take as much time off work beforehand as you can. Just about every single person I spoke to during the week before the primary gave me something I could potentially use at the public meeting. For example: • the Polish waitress I chatted with the night before was an excellent source on living costs in Cambridge • the local religious minister that I spoke with not only gave me useful information about working in the third sector but also about the pastoral care of students • some (politically non-aligned) friends with two young children gave me a wealth of information about catchment areas, maternity services and anti-social behaviour 2. Other people’s tips can be very useful. You clearly realise this already if you are reading this. But I found the account of the Esher and Walton selection at http://thenewblue.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-esher-amp-walton-open very useful. Another excellent source, especially for the Cambridge seat but with wider applicability, is the blog by Richard Normington (Cambridge’s former PPC) at http://blog.richardnormington.com/2009/11/advice-to-potential-candidates.html. Among the points Richard makes are the importance of being willing to move to the constituency and the need to work with any existing Tory representatives, such as councillors, even before the selection. 3. If possible, try and provide a personal, a local and a national angle to your answers. For example, on climate change, you might say how you attempt to tackle climate change in your personal life, what more should be done locally to challenge climate change (eg by the council) and what more the Government should do to head off climate change nationally (or even globally). There is a trade-off to make between overlong answers and keeping to this general rule of personal/local/national so you need to decide carefully when to deploy it. 4. Many people are turned off by professional politicians and people who have never done anything other than politics. So the fact that I spent, for example, five years as a teacher was immensely useful in answering the questions, especially in Cambridge where education is such a big issue. But the opposite is true as well: most politicians are really good at answering questions on just about any topic and watching them do this at first-hand is also incredibly important. I agree that we do not want professional politicians to dominate Parliament, but many aspiring MPs would still benefit from at least a short stint watching a frontline politician at close hand. 5. The biggest mistake I made, according to one experienced observer, was to talk about education too much. As a former teacher who now works on education policy, the questions naturally flowed that way and I wanted to play to my strengths. But it may have been an error to choose education as the topic for my final three-minute winding-up speech as well as the answer to a question about reducing waste. No one should resort to topics they don't really understand, but I spent almost eight years working on pensions-related issues and didn’t mention the topic once. 6. Check out important meetings on local issues that are taking place in the days before the selection. I attended a meeting of councillors from two areas of the city, which covered planning issues, anti-social behaviour and local sports facilities. I have to admit that, in the end, I did not use any of the information I gained at this meeting but it was definitely useful to have in reserve. 7. You can learn a lot very quickly and people will try to help you. I had a week to increase my knowledge about Cambridge and, while I cannot pretend that I became an expert on specific issues in that time, I did pick up more than I had expected to at the beginning of the week. I emailed a school federation asking if I could meet a head teacher or one of their deputies, but – despite the short notice – I was offered a meeting with the Executive Principal of the whole federation instead, which turned out to be incredible useful. 8. Go only for those seats you really, really want. I applied to Cambridge because it is my absolute dream seat: a beautiful, historic, liberal, open, university city that is small enough to have a community feel. I have no doubt this came across in my application and it meant I had no qualms about promising to move to the city before the new year – in fact, we were contemplating moving here even before the seat came up so, for me, it was a perfect fit. 9. Run a website. As someone who is not that tech-savvy, I found it surprisingly simple and quick to establish a website – the longest wait was for my address to appear in Google searches. (It helps that I have a Mac, as it has a built-in program called iWeb which does all the hard work for you.) Setting up a website gives focus to your campaign, gets you mentioned by local and national bloggers and gives you a reason to email or telephone people, as well as somewhere to direct people when they want to know more. In my case, it also encouraged local activists to approach me, which helped enormously. 10. There was lots of additional preparation I had wanted to do but which I did not – in the end – have time for. For example, I had meant to knock on a random selection of doors to hear local people’s views and I had meant to cycle around large swathes of the constituency beforehand. I never got round to doing these tasks and, while I could have tried to do them on the last evening before the public meeting, I decided to go out for dinner instead. So my final point is: set yourself realistic expectations and make sure you relax before the meeting so that you are ordering your thoughts rather than cramming your brain at the last minute. http://thenewblue.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-esher-amp-walton-openhttp://blog.richardnormington.com/2009/11/advice-to-potential-candidates.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1
Possible tips for open PPC selections
Sunday, 13 December 2009