Have emailed you.

As for writing letters to the local press, I’m not sure how much difference it really makes. Nonetheless, the pro-Keen campaign in Brentford & Isleworth had a very well oiled letter writing campaign, a strategy which was based on the assumption that it could hardly do us any harm.

I was referring to the Chronicle, yes (as per my link in my post) – the Keens had been given something of a rough ride by the paper up until about a year before the election (or at least the time when it incorporated the Informer), where it became noticeable that a week wouldn’t go by without a thinly-veiled attack on the running of the council. As I said previously, it got so bad that when they criticised a “good news story” of compensation claims being reduced by 83%, I felt compelled to write to them, although in the end I dithered and neglected to send the letter.

You will see from my posts on this site that I have also on occasion been quite critical of Lord Ashcroft and the Tories’ reliance on him. Not only is he a non-dom, but (allegedly) some of his business dealings have been shady and untransparent, and I believe it is wrong for a political party to give major positions such as a peerage and deputy party chairmanship to someone who chooses not to pay their income tax in the UK.

Nevertheless it is true that Labour under Blair and Brown have also taken significant donations from non-doms, and gave or sold certain such people peerages. Therefore I believe it was foolish for Labour to try to campaign on this issue, based on the old saying “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

Another old saying is “two wrongs don’t make a right”. This I think is what you are trying to do by equating Ann Keen’s expenses claims with Lord Ashcroft funding the Tories.

I defer to your obviously very significant local knowledge, but I find it hard to believe that the Keens’ expenses were not very widely known and condemned in the seat. To be honest, who cares what the local press said, given that so few people read their local paper in London. Of far more significance was the massive coverage given to the story by BBC news (both local and national), and by national tabloids like The Sun.

That’s not to say that expenses lost Mrs Keen the seat – which is pretty impossible to know. For whatever reason, a very large chunk of the Labour vote here wandered off to the Lib Dems between 2001 and 2010, and this is the primary reason Labour lost. What happens to this Lib Dem vote, which is surely going to collapse, will determine who wins the seat in 2015. I would have thought Labour have a pretty good chance.

Regarding Jason’s comment, I’m not sure I entirely agree with the suggestion that the local press took on a left-wing bent. (By the way, Jason, very few people used to read the now-defunct local Times, so I assume you’re referring to the more widely-read Hounslow Chronicle?).

I remember when they reported on a regional poll, they went with the headline “Expenses row MP to lose seat” – the implication being that Ann Keen’s expense claims was the main reason for the poll’s anti-Labour swing. However, as it was conducted across a number of constituencies, this was clearly not the case.

This shows that The Chronicle did have a tendency to turn any issue relating to Ann Keen into an expenses issue. This led to some internal discussion as to whether we should “go nuclear” and distribute leaflets highlighting the fact that her expense claims were, in most years, less than average.

We decided against this because it was thought it would simply increase the saliency of the issue in the minds of voters (rather than successfully persuade people that her claims had been reasonable), so the issue was ignored and we concentrated on her record as a junior health minister. (I’m not on this thread to either defend or criticise her expense claims, by the way, I’m just giving a retrospective insight into the strategy).

Having said this about the Chronicle’s coverage, I still think that expenses were not on the minds of most core Labour supporters when they went to vote. The majority of electors are not politically minded: if they even look at the news pages of the local rag and see something adverse about Ann Keen, that information will not always be imprinted on their minds.

Further more, in their election literature Labour and the Lib Dems by and large failed to ram the message home about her expenses. The issue may also have been obscured by the fact that there were local elections happening.

On those occasions when electors did raise the expenses issue on the doorstep, I would counter with information about non-doms financing the Tory campaign (as well as raising the issue of the allowances claims of some leading Tory councillors).

However, it has to be said that whilst it is true that the Lord Ashcroft factor did have some resonance with voters, somehow it was never quite as ‘toxic’ as the expenses issue.

Regardless, I can tell you that Ann did better than she thought she would, and given that we were always likely to lose this seat it was as well that the sitting MP was the one to lose it (rather than let a new candidate blot his or her copybook with an early defeat).

I think Robin Hood may not give the populace of B&I much credit in terms of political knowledge. It was hard to miss a lot of the controversy – although it was noticeable that the local press switched hard left in the months leading up to the election, focusing on trying to discredit the minority coalition council at every turn (I wrote a letter – unsent – after they turned an 83% REDUCTION in compensation claims against the council into an anti-council rant – see link below), and there was a distinct softening in their stance towards the Keens.

http://www.hounslowchronicle.co.uk/west-london-news/local-hounslow-news/2010/03/30/council-shells-out-850k-for-tripping-injuries-109642-26141940/

This seat will be one to watch in 2015, although I think Mary Macleod will be a formidable competitor, already earning decent reviews centrally and being something of a “presence” in the HoC.