I had a really pleasant afternoon yesterday, going out with some colleagues to knock on doors in Horsham and chat to voters.I think it may be the first time I have ever done that sort of thing on a Sunday afternoon.  There have been plenty of Saturday mornings and afternoons, Sunday mornings and weekday evenings but I can’t recall ever going out on a Sunday afternoon.

For some reason the Crawley party has always avoided that slot for any organised canvassing.  I don’t know why: whether it is an assumption that people won’t be in or won’t want to talk, or just that party members want their Sunday afternoon to themselves.

Obviously a lot of people were out, but I think that is true whatever time you pick on.  When I was asked what I thought was the best time for canvassing I said that it doesn’t really matter because they are all bad – meaning that you are always going to find half the houses empty.  Or maybe they just see us coming and are all hiding.

Anyway, I found that almost without exception everybody was very friendly.  Not only that, but most people I spoke to said that they were either Labour supporters or at least very sympathetic to us.  There may be an element of politeness at work there, but they did seem to be genuine.

We are not expected to win in Horsham,  but it looks like we have more support than polls would suggest.  I suspect that there is a lot of tactical voting for the Lib Dems going on and more than a few Labour supporters who do not vote because they feel it is not worth it.  It looks like our task is not so much to persuade voters to support us but to persuade supporters to vote – a familiar story.

This is something we touched on when I spoke at Collyer’s the other week.  Some of the students were a bit put out that political parties spend so much time trying to get their supporters to vote rather than engaging with the undecided.  I can see that point of view, but we have to be practical.  No party has as many active members as it wants and you have to use what you have effectively.

You could have long conversations with a dozen floating voters and maybe persuade one to support you (with no guarantee they will actually vote).   In the same amount of time you could have much briefer conversations with a hundred supporters who don’t vote and maybe a dozen or more will vote who would otherwise have stayed at home.

Having in-depth political discussions, arguments even, can be fun but it is a luxury we can’t really afford under the circumstances – the circumstances being low turnouts.   The currently in vogue business jargon for such an approach is something like ‘picking the low-lying fruit’ but I doubt if any of us want to be described as low-lying fruit by political tacticians.

But to return to the point, I enjoyed the friendly reception and it was a timely reminder of why we bother to stand in the first place.