Our newest MP has been talking to The House magazine, along with other recent by-election winners, about the Liberal Democrats’ winning campaign in Richmond Park. She described it as one of the best experiences of her life:
Running in a by-election was one of the best experiences of my life. I am very new to politics, I’ve never been involved in a parliamentary campaign of any kind, I’ve never been a candidate in any election before, so I had no idea what to expect. It was quite a high profile campaign, right from the beginning I was right in the media spotlight. For somebody who had not had any kind of profile of any sort before it was a massive learning curve.
My advice to Copeland and Stoke candidates would be to just go for it. Give it your all over the next few weeks. Go everywhere. Talk to as many constituents as you can. Do everything you can. Put your all into it. Be positive, be optimistic. But also don’t take it personally when people are beastly to you – because they will be.
There were times that she felt frustrated, though. There is a bit of a cultural thing, which is not entirely helpful, in the Lib Dems to treat candidates as though they are simply there to do as they are told. How often have you heard them described as “legal necessities?” Sarah said:
Mine was a high profile by-election, there was a lot of central office input and for me, what I found was that they tended to treat me like a cardboard cut-out. I was the candidate, I got moved from place to place and sometimes they stopped treating me like a human being, which was a bit frustrating.
It was like, ‘Sarah needs to do this, Sarah needs to do that, Sarah needs to do the other.’ I did call them up on it many times but they were just like ‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It wasn’t terrible but it was just one or two times where they did things and I’d be like “What? What am I doing?” And they’d say ‘you don’t need to know’.
There are going to be times in any campaign when people are working flat out and getting no sleep when things will be said that wouldn’t have been said in other circumstances. Campaign staff know what it takes to win. They’ve been doing this for years. They have tonnes of evidence and not always the time to explain everything in detail. If you have been around the Lib Dem campaigns culture and know these things, like former campaigns manager Willie Rennie had been in Dunfermline in 2006, you instinctively understand what is happening. Too much knowledge can bring its own stresses as well, though.
Every candidate sometimes has to take what their experienced campaign team has to say on trust. Every campaign team needs to make sure that their candidate feels properly supported. In my experience, a happy candidate brings joy to everyone and added energy to the campaign, so the goal is always to keep the candidate happy.
We are going to have a fair number of new candidates in the run up to the next General Election. We will have time to make sure that they know exactly what to expect. It is quite difficult to get across the pressures of a rapid by-election campaign at full pelt. It’s such a rare situation.
What we do know about Richmond Park is that the whole team, from literature writers, to front of house organisers, to strategists, to the thousands of members who delivered leaflets and knocked on doors and bought into the idea that we could do it, to an engaging and brilliant candidate, worked together to bring home a result that will be talked about as one of those moments in Lib Dem history. They should all be very proud of themselves.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings