Boring but vitally important!

I am delighted to have recruited Matthew McGill who will be working part time as an unpaid member of my campaign team. Mat is at the University of Kent studying politics and has volunteered to help me a couple of days a week during his summer vacation.

Although Mat had already helped by joining us on our trip to Norwich North to campaign in the bye-election that saw Chloe Smith elected, Monday was his first day actually working in the constituency.

I picked Mat up at 9.45 pm from Sittingbourne Station and took him to the Conservative office in Halfway where he helped print off the next batch of opinion survey forms and labels. This is an on-going exercise that is proving very valuable; not only am I getting a better understanding of what concerns local people, but I have been amazed at the number of people who have volunteered to help my campaign.

After grabbing a bacon sarnie for lunch, we shot over to Swale House where I had a meeting with Cllrs John Wright and Ken Pugh. Whilst I was in my meeting, Mat sat in an office and got stuck into the task of adding important absent votes information to the marked electoral register that we have purchased from the borough council. After our meeting Ken and I joined Mat and helped him finish off what was a pretty mundane and mind-numbingly boring task!

Mat and I then drove to Bapchild where we had a meeting with my campaign director, John Burke, who set out the programme of work that we had mapped out for Mat over the next few weeks. Later in the month we have another student, Millie Jessel, joining the team and by the end of the summer we hope to have made real progress in our pre-election plans.

As I drove Mat back to Sittingbourne Station, to catch his train back to Canterbury, we chatted about what he had learned that day about the “real” world of political campaigning. He is a bright lad and he had picked up on the most telling truth: the vast majority of the planning and preparation needed to achieve electoral success is boring but vitally important!

I am incredibly lucky to have Mat, Millie and my incredibly talented web administrator, Jess McMahon, on my campiagn team. I look forward to working with them al in the weeks ahead.