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Published: 20 May 2010
EXCLUSIVE

THIS is the story of the fall of Glenda Jackson, her final days representing Hampstead at the House of Commons. 

It tells how the Oscar-winning actress was thrown off course by a choppy Conservative attack and drowned by a Liberal Democrat tidal surge so steep that no Labour MP would have survived, let alone one accused of that greatest sin: not living in the constituency. 

In her place, the story would have it, Ed Fordham, a man with a photographic memory of every street in NW3 and NW6, walked through the Commons front door this week, ushering a new era for Camden’s parliamentary politics. 

Except, except. It didn’t happen. For all the Liberal Democrat confidence and the goodwill towards the party on the doorstep in the final days before the general election, the story didn’t pan out as they had dreamed it would.

Instead, Chris Philp held firm for the Tories in the redrawn constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn and Glenda held even firmer, defiantly clinging onto her place in Parliament as if it was her handbag in a street mugging.

In the most unpre­dictable general election in memory, the bookies and the pundits got it woefully wrong and Glenda could afford a few told-you-so smiles when she was declared winner – by 42 votes –  a few hours after birdsong the morning after voting. She still has an office at the House of Commons, 

Fordham, meanwhile, is picking through the bones of defeat, trying to establish where a meticulous game plan went awry. 

On May 6, just past five in the afternoon, I was photographing Philp, the Conservative candidate, and his wife Lizzie voting Dave-and-Sam style at Heath Library. “Who do you think will win this?” Chris asked. I looked at my scuffed shoes: “Sorry Chris, I think it’s between you and Fordham now but I think he might win it.” 

Chris: “I don’t – and watch out, the Labour vote is holding up much stronger than anybody expected.” 

Here we were chatting in a sun-dappled, affluent part of the constituency, a road wilting under a poster war between Lib Dem stakeboard and water-blue Tory posters. It seemed for all the world as if everybody was queuing up to vote against Glenda. It’s clear now that, once with pencil in hand, they were acting very differently. 

For the final five weeks of the general election campaign – a contest which this neck of north London is unlikely to see so fiercely contested by so many again – I was given exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to the Lib Dem offices where hundreds of volunteers launched their biggest-ever assault on the seat.

There they were seemingly stuffing envelopes at all hours, accepting orders from Fordham or his campaign manager Janet Grauberg. I hovered like an overweight fly on the wall in their offices in Kilburn for several afternoons, saw inside secret battle rooms and met the canvassers who were trying to propel Fordham first past the post. 

From this vantage point, it is hard to see what else they could have done. The kitchen sink was ripped from the pipework, loaded with yellow leaflets and thrown at the electorate, and yet Hampstead still chose somebody else. 

This was where Nick Clegg launched his battle bus, Vince Cable visited, heck, even Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, Clegg’s Spanish wife who had ruled out interviews, came to Fortune Green and allowed the New Journal’s Dan Carrier to ask her questions.

Chris was 42 votes short, but Fordham was only 841 behind. Whatever the recriminations about what happened next and the coalitions that were formed, there won’t be a campaign that invested so much shoe leather only to end up with a third place.

Drakes Courtyard was the main base, rented offices that became a leaflet factory. 

An education, the orchestration of deliveries I saw was conducted like a symphony. Canvassers stop at your door and if you indicate you will vote for any other candidate, the deliveries are tailored accordingly. 

So, say “I’m thinking about sticking with Glenda” and the leaflets through your door will be bright yellow, Lib Demmy but concentrate on Gordon Brown’s weakness. 

“I’m probably going for the Conservatives” leads to a daily diet about the Tory threat. It’s not as blindly blunderbuss as you might think. 

In Drakes Courtyard, Fordham slipped from room to room, doling quick orders, issuing tactics, his phone never stopping.

The first time I went inside, he was rapping off the list of African nations he wanted to target around the Kilburn High Road, hoping to draw people to the ballot box for the first time.

I asked whether they would even be registered. “They will be,” he said – and off went a couple of helpers with another mailshot.

Fordham said confidently that he knew “for a fact” he had covered parts of the constituency his opponents didn’t even know existed.

Like an Olympic sprinter training towards a far off 100metres final, Fordham had been gearing towards the events of May 6  2010, for five years. He appeared to have memorised every street and with it every neighbourhood concern. He irritated the established political clique in Camden when he seemed to arrive from nowhere (nowhere = Stoke via Watford). 

Too cocksure, they reckoned, but he threatened to outflank them all by going hyperlocal. He could tell you minute details about every street. He tweeted how much he loved Kilburn, and matched Philp in a billboard war, national weapons in a local conflict. 

“We were thinking back to when the thrust of me having a lead role in the Lib Dem group  in Camden was and I remember it clearly: we were canvassing in Ravenshaw Street and we got the call that Jonathan Simpson [a councillor] had defected to Labour,” he said. 

He told me that in the shock of the defection and the tears over a fish-and-chip dinner, the group fought despair. 

Later, Lib Dems drew up a battle plan to win the local elections of 2006, galvanised by what they felt was the heftiest pokes in the eye. And they did win, short of a majority but the largest group on the council. 

If Jonathan Simpson, who will become Mayor of Camden next week, had lost his seat in King’s Cross in the most recent council elections, as many Lib Dems figured he might, you would have been able to hear the yellow cheer from miles from here. It’s a scene from an alternative history of events.

The day after Nick Clegg’s first TV debate appearance and the birth of so-called Cleggmania, I met Fordham at the Coffee Cup in Hampstead, where he brimmed with excitement. Clegg, a close friend (Fordham was at Nick and Miriam’s wedding), had an unprecedented new profile. We walked to another “base” – Hampstead councillor Linda Chung’s offices – where a YouTube video celebrating this new exposure was made. In hindsight, you wondered if hopes were unfairly raised for Lib Dem supporters that morning.

That said, more than one Lib Dem told me how they felt they had been on course to win in H&K before the excitement over Clegg. “People will just say it’s because of that,” said one. “And we could have won anyway.”

The people in the offices I met were of all ages, the retired teamed with gap-year students. Only one collected an income from it. Some appeared to simply walk off the street and offer to help. A filmmaker came in one afternoon I was there, suggested an idea for a viral video and a couple of days later it was online.

One of the big secrets in Fordham’s campaign was a hidden vault. At the Rosslyn Hill Chapel, where hustings events were often held – events where Chris Philp would often stand up to say he got married in Hampstead and loved the place – a leaflet printing industry was chugging away in the crypt below.

So when Chris took to his feet, little did he know that below him photocopiers were splurting out yellow messages. The machines in there were named after vanquished by-election candidates: one was called Lucy, after former Labour Kentish Town councillor Lucy Anderson.

Other days, I saw Fordham and Co doorknocking on the Rowley Way Estate, and canvassing in West End Lane, the confidence never dulled. Car horns beeped him like a local celebrity. If Labour members had heard a man on a street stall speaking about the overall Lib Dem majority in the Commons that would soon be upon us, their conviction that the Lib Dems had begun to “believe their own spin” would have been reaffirmed.

Certainly, some people who actively said they would vote for Fordham were lying (out of politeness?) or chickened out in the crush of the national election shootout.

By the time Vince Cable arrived the day before the election, even the Daily Mail was calling for a tactical vote for the Lib Dems – just so Glenda would lose her seat.