Is it pointless to stand for election in a seat you're bound to lose? Far from it

Want to escape harassment from general election campaigners? Move to a safe seat, and no one wearing a rosette and a terrifying smile will knock on your door ever again. That was the wisdom, and a rule I still thought applied – until Labour, the party that came third in my home town at the last election, popped up on my doorstep bearing pamphlets. I’ve lived in various marginal seats in England for years, but no one had bothered to call before. Now, in High Wycombe, where the Tory MP Steve Baker is defending a safe 9,560 majority, I find campaigners on my step and activists swarming like bees around the market.

Labour were so keen that they started canvassing weeks before the Tories, yet this is shire England, considered safe as houses for the Tories – and in any case, it’s the Lib Dems who are officially “second” in Wycombe. So why on earth is Labour candidate David Williams bothering to trudge up and down our steep hills to talk to electors?

I found him handing out leaflets in the market one Saturday afternoon and started grilling him while clutching my groceries. Every party pretends every seat is worth the effort, but with only weeks to go until polling day, most send their activists to those seats which really could change hands.

Things have changed in Wycombe over the past five years, Williams, a barrister, insisted. The Lib Dem vote has collapsed, and Ukip, who have a strong presence in Buckinghamshire, are chipping away at the Tories. And while the town is in Buckinghamshire, it isn’t all Land Rovers, dyed-in-the-wool Tories and huge diamond-paned homes. Wycombe includes some very deprived areas, and a large ethnic-minority population who are more likely to be suspicious of the Conservatives and back Labour.

“Our own canvassing returns show a lot of disaffection with broken Conservative promises,” Williams says. “The ‘recovery’ not being felt, the feeling Conservatives are doing very little locally, complacency, and an almost invisible Conservative presence on the campaign.”

So perhaps this isn’t an entirely pointless campaign. But it’s still unlikely that Baker is quaking in his boots at the prospect of being unseated by Labour. The point of this seemingly pointless campaign is to build Labour support in a traditionally Tory town for future elections, not to spring a surprise unseating this time around.

Similarly, the Tory activists who clattered excitedly into Clacton this week don’t really think they have a good chance of dethroning their old colleague Douglas Carswell, who is now campaigning for Ukip with a 12,404 majority. Led by Tory Deputy Chief Whip Greg Hands, the activists who took to the streets for candidate Giles Watling insist they really can win. But privately, senior Tories say that’s bluster and the real point of this pointless campaign in the only safe Ukip seat is, firstly, to make the point that Carswell cannot just defect to another party and be left in peace, and, secondly, to start trying to win back Clacton in a few years.

Tory campaigners are also flooding into Vince Cable’s seat in Twickenham, bombarding locals with leaflets and phone calls. One voter was called three times in one day by the Conservative Party. But even if they can’t overturn the Business Secretary’s 12,140 majority the party isn’t conducting a pointless campaign. The value in “decapitation strategies”, as they’re known, is to unsettle a rival party into diverting activists and resources from tighter battles elsewhere, in order to prevent the unseating of a big cheese like Cable.

Sometimes parties end up winning those decapitation campaigns – and this could happen in South Thanet, where both Labour and the Tories are battling to stop Nigel Farage from reaching Parliament. Even if they fail, the damage they can cause to the rival party’s campaigning is usually worth the effort. It’s the equivalent of a crook distracting a tourist in the street while his accomplice picks their pockets.

In some seats, candidates are fighting apparently pointless battles all on their own. Some leave their jobs to do so, even though they will never win – and have no employment to return to come 8 May. The reason anyone bothers to fight these lonely campaigns is to prove to their party that they’re worth a shot for a safe seat by increasing the share of the vote against all odds.

Others might seriously think that they could have a shot at winning. Stephen Twigg was astonished to take Enfield Southgate from Michael Portillo in 1997, having expected to return to his day job afterwards. Like playing the lottery, the improbability of winning makes having a go worth it for some. And after all, the most pointless thing to do is to leave a seat well alone. Then it’ll always stay safe.