Tales from the campaign trail no 1

Hopefully the first of many interesting, amusing and thought provoking blog postings from the campaign trail in Gateshead.

One of our campaigners had a close encounter of the 3rd kind with a Gateshead Labour councillor when out in our top target seat of Lobley Hill and Bensham last night. The councillor in question suggested we have not been putting out any material recently, stating that Labour had "seen nothing" from us. When the conversation was reported to me this morning, it brought a smile to my face! Without giving away too much to my Labour readership about what we have been doing, there has been a certain amount of under the radar activity. So let me just demoralise you Labour people a bit further by telling you that I'm not going to tell you what we have done to contact voters in the ward over the past week. If you haven't found out by now what we've been doing, then I ain't going to tell you!

And now for the inevitably cock up story. When a leaflet is printed, that is the time you spot the mistakes. Most of the time these are typos and you live with them. Except when the typo is in the headline. Fortunately it was a print run of only 700. I quietly went into the office this morning to reprint them and got back to my house with the leafletters waiting for me to deliver them!