Local Elections: Canvassing in Britain’s poshest ward
Out delivering on Cromwell Road
This article was originally published in Liberator
Nestled between Kensington Palace and the Natural History Museum lies the sleepy council ward of Queen’s Gate. Home to London’s first Whole Foods, the Daily Mail and Evening Standard offices, the ‘community’ is a milieu of mansions and town houses belonging to the urban elite, interspersed with French cafés and Italian apéro spots.
It’s Blue. Bluer than the safest Tory council seat in Buckinghamshire. Full of Remainers and bankers, it also hosts a handful of mansions belonging to Russian oligarchs and Saudi Arabian royalty. So as a Lib Dem, fortunate enough to live here, what in the world possessed me to stand?
I was desperate to get out and canvass in the first election since lockdown was lifted. The loss of my father to Covid and being stuck at home for so long had taken a huge toll on my mental health. A passionate Remainer himself, he enjoyed every twist and turn of my political career. Our dinner chats would be over the Brexit drama unfolding, before racing to the couch to switch on Newsnight.
My name now printed on the ballot paper spurred me on and I knew I could learn something from running in such an atypical Tory seat. In the end, my first campaign left me with an even greater passion to bring back integrity into local and national politics.
***
“Kick those lying Tory b******s out!” blared a resident through the intercom with a few days to go. “You can do it, Blaise. No one’s worked as hard as you! You will make it! Inshallah!”
It wasn’t hard to pick up on an anti-Tory wave last year. The first few months were plagued with Partygate, lobbying and sexual abuse scandals, and the divisive plan to send refugees to Rwanda. Johnson’s credibility was so shorn that there were rumours of regicide if the Tories performed badly in the locals. And badly they did, as Labour took control of Wandsworth and Westminster and the Lib Dems swept to victory across the country. Everywhere of course, but Queen’s Gate.
In the run up to polling day, I felt genuine momentum in the specifically anti-Johnson sentiment throughout the ward. By May 2022, the Partygate revelations had fully emerged and sent shockwaves throughout the Conservative party. Yet I still faced the peculiar reasoning that “if Johnson goes, there’d be no other Tories to do the job, so we have to show our support”.
They still recognise what Johnson did was despicable. But Johnson’s backers successfully concocted a narrative that “he got the big calls right on Brexit, the vaccines and Ukraine”. As I stand against Johnson himself in Uxbridge, disproving this would be my biggest but not impossible battle. Small on the ground today, I hope to ramp up our Hillingdon campaign team in the same way I did last year in Kensington and prove that integrity matters.
We’d lost a huge chunk of activists after 2019, so I had to grow a local campaign team from scratch. We brought activists from all over Kensington and canvassed streets that had never heard from us before. I even hosted a fundraiser raising over £3k in our living room. Don’t think Dad would mind!
We also went for the most cost-efficient strategy of having only one candidate, instead of three, stand in a handful of the most winnable wards, except for Earl’s Court (where we did remarkably well in getting two councillors elected and missing out on a third by just six votes!).
By doubling the vote share and getting a healthy 34% of the vote, I can hold my head up high-ish. The point is we built something out of nothing and could be a real contender next time round. But more importantly, I figured out what mattered to residents in one of the poshest parts of London.
“It’s a joke” fumed one resident as soon as I mentioned cycle lanes. In the summer of 2020, one of the Mayor’s ‘cycle superhighways’ was due to run along the length of Kensington High street. Bollards were erected to cordon off the borough’s only protected cycle lane, unfortunately at the same time as four sets of building works took place.
Even though cycling numbers more than doubled, £350,000 of public money was spent tearing them down and fighting the subsequent judicial review spearheaded by the charity, Better Streets for Kensington & Chelsea, which is still ongoing. An embarrassing U-turn for the Tory led council perhaps, but car drivers in Kensington rule the roost.
“I’ll vote for you if you reverse the ban on racing” scoffed a millennial as he gestured to his Lamborghini. As I weaved in and out of grand Georgian terraces and leafy mews, hopped over ornate gates and shoved pamphlets in the letterboxes of eye-wateringly expensive properties, it was clear there were no council homes in Queen’s Gate. And the most trouble I faced as a canvasser was from the private security cars that patrolled the deathly quiet streets, as residents clearly felt their homes were just too nice for the police to protect.
Local issues, if there were any, rarely came up on the doorstep. “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. I just don’t trust you lot.” screeched another resident out the window. I don’t think he was talking about the views of individual councillors on LGBTQ+ rights.
Unsurprisingly, Labour didn’t put up a fight here, as their efforts were focussed up in North Kensington and the area surrounding Grenfell, a stark reminder of the deep inequalities across the Royal Borough.
By the time polling day came around, I was feeling ambitious if not a bit deluded, that I might just nick one of those three council seats off the Tories. Our telling operation soon fell apart, as there was no way we could find enough people to man the ward’s two polling stations for the 15 hours polls were open.
Telling for myself, I arrived in the morning to find myself sitting face to face with Twitter’s troller-in-chief, Lord Moylan. A former councillor for this very ward, he went onto become Johnson’s ‘ideas man’ in City Hall before getting his peerage and the green-light to become a Brexit Spartan in the Lords. And despite my brimming optimism the night before, an endless cavalcade of Tory voters shuffled past one after the other muttering there’s no way in hell they would vote for anything else.
After some cordial banter with Moylan, and enough accusations that I don’t believe in Britain, I went on to manically knock on as many doors as my knuckles and knees could hack before heading over to the Town Hall for 10 o’clock.
Exhausted and questioning all my life choices, I banged on the door of a French family with just ten minutes to go, crying out that there was still time to vote. “Merde!” I heard yelped from inside. “Mes clés!” The mother had jammed her keys and couldn’t open the door. I offered to knock it down lest she be deprived of her suffrage in a local election. After some frantic jangling we prized the door open, and I practically dragged her to the polling station with less than two minutes to spare. All to find out that she couldn’t vote as she was registered in the neighbouring ward at the property she owns and was just renting her flat in my ward. Only in Kensington.
With the polls closed, the night had only just begun. I rushed over to the brutalist Town Hall building to watch the count until 6am. However much meticulous supervision there is by the council staff, human error is still possible and it could still come down to a handful of votes, like in Earl’s Court. I sidled up to my table, to watch over the counting staff. The Tories were already there, suited and booted, like Secretaries of State in waiting.
The main hall was electrified with a swarm of party apparatchiks buzzing around, geeing up their candidates and council officials barking orders at each other. Wave after wave of ballot boxes were dumped onto long tables, with candidates and agents looming over them as the counting staff filtered through the ballots.
‘Block votes’ were separated out from the rest of the pile. This was where a voter had given exactly three votes to one party. As I was the only candidate standing for the Lib Dems, all my votes came from the ‘non-block votes’ pile, where one council official had to read my surname out 548 times.
Again and again, a jolt of encouragement and sometimes disbelief that I was racking up so many non-block votes each time my surname, Baquiche, was read out. Wilting after an hour, I misheard the name blur into something sounding like the Arabic ‘back-shish’ (بقشيش), meaning ‘tip or bribe’ specifically regarding political corruption. Oh, how I could’ve done with one now! Inshallah!
***
Hearing the name so often reminded me of my father. The very week that Johnson partied in Downing Street in January 2021, was the week my siblings and I argued with each other over whether to go to the hospital for his last days. Just to pass on kind thoughts, to hold his hand, to say goodbye. No, we should follow the rules.
Has there ever been integrity in politics? Does it even matter in a local election? Johnson’s making and breaking of the lockdown rules are not relevant as to whether the council is run well. But not one of those Tory councillors had the courage to call for his resignation.
In Uxbridge, it could be a very different story. A guilty verdict from the privileges committee would mean a by-election. If Johnson runs again, he could face a similar wrath of ‘Posh Tories’ determined to send a message to the government that even if they think Hillingdon Council is run well, integrity still matters in politics.
I still hold out that post-Johnson, his brand of spinning dishonesty as ‘authenticity’ will die out. I hope his loyalists who turned a blind eye to his rule breaking will have tarnished the party so much that they become so unelectable, even the Queen’s Gate die-hards will stop voting for them.
I hope people will believe that the Lib Dems are no longer a protest vote, but a serious party of government. I hope there’ll be a tide of yellow in true blue Kensington and Chelsea. I hope integrity will return to British politics and be valued as an electable asset. I hope. Inshallah.