The people's choice: The constituency where winning seats is more about personality than party policy

"Hi, I’m Dr Rosena,” says the bounciest, keenest person you’ll ever get to meet in a stairwell on a December night in south London.

Fighting her third election in Tooting, in the borough of Wandsworth, in not much more than three years — after a 2016 by-election and the 2017 general election — Rosena Allin-Khan is knocking on doors for Labour with a practised energy that could power half the capital.

She wears trainers so she can sprint from house to house, she cheers her gaggle of canvassers on with promises of kebab roti rolls before bedtime — “Pasta is for the weak”, she cries when one suggests it — and she loves the place where she was brought up, which she has now represented in Parliament for almost four years. Allin-Khan is the sort of candidate her opponents must hate to face: she has a story for every street.

One council block is on the site of the maternity hospital where she was born; another is where her best friend at school used to hold sleepovers. She went to the local comprehensive, trained as a doctor and still works as a junior doctor at the A&E at St George’s Hospital, Tooting (“It says something about politics that working a 12-hour shift in A&E feels like a break”).

She’s fighting what she proudly calls a “hyper-local” campaign under the simple slogan “Vote Rosena. Vote Remain”. Brexit is a big issue in a borough where 75 per cent voted to stay in the EU, and she was one of the few MPs to vote against triggering Article 50 and the withdrawal process.

It’s true that she’s out canvassing people who are mostly recorded on her team’s canvass sheets as saying that they would vote Labour in the past, but door after door opens to friendly faces who promise her their support this time, too.

“You won’t remember, but you did help us,” one couple say quietly. She actually does remember, and they are impressed.

So happy is the mood that it’s like taking part in the shiny political equivalent of a John Lewis Christmas ad, and you almost forget the big, bleak thing that’s missing.

Allin-Khan is campaigning for a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but his face doesn’t appear on the sparkly “All I want for Christmas is EU” cards she is popping through doors.

Not showing your national leader on leaflets has become a thing for all the main parties in London, but it is as if Allin-Khan is running for a different kind of Labour — the dreamy one a lot of people would like to imagine exists, rather than the one which actually does.

A voter breaks the spell. He is angry. “I’m never going to vote for the disgrace of a Labour Party again,” he tells a canvasser.

To her credit, or maybe just to impress a journalist, Allin-Khan goes back into the smart, well-maintained council block to knock on his door.

“Politicians are all the bloody same,” she’s told, predictably. Labour wants to tax the company which employs him out of business, his Jewish friends hate Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, a second referendum would betray democracy, the Labour Commons Speaker rigged Parliament (Allin-Khan can’t persuade him John Bercow was actually a Tory) and “true Brits” are being let down.

Allin-Khan, whose father came from Pakistan and whose mother was Polish, dodges that last remark about Brits and they part on friendly terms, although without his vote. “Maybe he’ll think about who stood at his door and had time for a chat,” she says, hopefully, afterwards.

But it’s harder to hide from the fact that she isn’t a Corbyn-type candidate in a Corbyn-led party. “We have to rebuild” after the election, she says, when I ask what might come next — though she adds that she wants a majority Labour government because it has promised a second referendum.

I wonder if she actually believes that. Not everyone thinks Labour can be rescued. At the other end of the Northern line, another brave and impressive person who started the year as a Labour MP alongside Allin-Khan is ending it wearing a bright-gold rosette and fighting for the Lib Dems. “Tell this lady I am voting for her,” says one man pushing through a crowd to promise Luciana Berger his vote. Others come up to take selfies.

In theory, she doesn’t have a chance here. Previously the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, she is now standing in Finchley and Golders Green, where the Lib Dems got only 6.6 per cent of the vote in 2017. But standing outside Golders Green Tube station, with former party leader Vince Cable alongside her wearing a white woolly knitted hat in place of his usual trilby, you can sense something interesting is happening.

Berger was driven out of Labour by anti-Semitism and a loathing of what Corbyn has done to the party, and she’s fighting hard to win her new seat with a message that it’s her or the Tory. She uses polls on a bar chart to convince people of it, in classic Lib Dem fashion.

On the random sample at the Tube station, the message is getting through. “For me it’s not about Brexit, it’s about Corbyn,” one passer-by says, promising his support. “Luciana, I normally vote Labour; I’ll back you but I’m not happy with your policy on Brexit,” says another.

A lot of her supporters, but not all, are Jewish. “For my people, their existence in this country is on the line,” says one city worker sorrowfully. A couple of Labour members are campaigning for her, repulsed by attitudes in their party. She’s promised votes by people who say they mostly vote Tory, too. Even so, it would be a massive upset for her to win.

These are two scenes in a troubled election. In Tooting, Allin-Khan, who spoke out powerfully against Labour anti-Semitism, is fighting to make Corbyn PM. In Golders Green, Berger is trying to stop him.

Both hate Brexit. Both are being opposed by the other’s party. There’s something flawed about a political set-up which divides their forces — and the person who might benefit is the man they both say they are against more than anything: Boris Johnson.

On Thursday, Allin-Khan should hold her seat easily, even though Labour failed to take Wandsworth council, which covers it, from the Tories last year. A lot of her local activists are working to hold nearby Battersea, a marginal, and win Putney, where the Lib Dems are fighting hard too. If the Conservatives squeeze through the middle of this confusion, Johnson will probably be on course for his majority.

But will it happen? This is the “none of the above” election, and a lot of people will spend the next three days trying to work out which leader and party they can tolerate. Maybe some will change their minds, though a lot of votes have already been sent in by post.

That’s why, in this election, high-profile and committed local candidates could bring upsets, overcoming the resistance of national polls.

Allin-Khan and Berger are clearly gaining support because of who they are, not because of the party they stand for. So are former Tories Dominic Grieve in Beaconsfield and David Gauke in South West Hertfordshire.

In the Midlands another ex-Tory, Anna Soubry, running for The Independent Group For Change, shouldn’t be forgotten as she fights to stay in Westminster and stop Brexit.

But every so often the national decision cuts through as a reminder that voters know they are choosing a prime minister as well as a local MP.

“It’s been nice talking to you but I wouldn’t want Corbyn to knock on my door,” one tells Allin-Khan — and that’s why Tory hopes are highest as the temperature drops, rain and snow are forecast and Britain prepares to decide its future on Thursday.

@julian_glover

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