Losing an election by 55 votes is never ideal but when you consider the last time this seat was up for election we lost by 500 odd then you can see that progress is being made. The Tories held West Leigh yesterday on a 26% turnout with 743 votes with the Lib Dems get 688. However the big story wasn’t who won and who came second place but who came third. I shall deal with that is a separate blog post.
I want to say a big well done to the Lib Dem team in West Leigh, who put up a terrific fight. We had people working Virtual Phone Banks, people coming in from Thurrock, Braintree and Colchester, swelling the numbers of local activists attempting to get the vote out. We knew the turn out would be low and the weather certainly didn’t help. The morning and lunchtime was rainy and at around half five we had a ten minute hailstorm that no doubt would have put voters off going out.
However the big LD news is how well we did considering our candidate had what the doctors described as a minor heart attack a fortnight ago. He underwent a by-pass operation on Wednesday and is doing very well in Basildon hospital and if all goes well he’ll be home again early next week.
Special thanks must be made to Leigh councillors Cllr. Crystall and Cllr. Wexham who both worked extremely hard canvassing. I know Cllr. Wexham wrote to 19 constituents who had passed on issues to the party during the canvass, which he then took up with the Council on their behalf. So even though we didn’t win, we still managed to help 19 people with issues that councillors can help out with, isn’t that what it is all about?
Plenty of others to name but I won’t name them all here, they know who they are. The most important thing is clearly our candidates speedy recovery from his by-pass and all the signs are positive. We mounted a strong campaign and ran the Tories extremely close. Had things fallen for us, certainly with the weather and Chris’s health then I firmly believe we’d have stolen West Leigh. That isn’t me typing through yellow tinted spectacles, that is just how it was going.
We can be proud of running a solely positive campaign. We said nothing negative about any party or any candidate. Chris just spoke about what he felt he could bring to the council and what his main concerns were for West Leigh residents. This is how I believe politics should be. I know negative politics works but I just don’t like it.
So anyway, so close yet so far away and now I best write the real news story of the night – the rise of UKIP…
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