To stand for Reform in the Norbiton ward of the Lib Dem heartland constituency, Kingston-upon-Thames, was always going to be something of a doomed mission; especially as my opponent in this year’s local elections was Emily Davey, the wife of the party leader. Admittedly, there was a freedom in knowing that I was sure to lose; yet a comment from our youngest Reform activist – “you can’t win in Norbiton” – had somehow kindled in me a kamikaze spirit.

A surprisingly large number of people leave their front doors open during the day. Muslims vote. Those are two things I learnt from the campaign. In this area there seems to be no such thing as ‘a Muslim vote’ but there might conceivably have been a ‘Muslim association vote’; of which more later. And the third thing is that cancel culture is alive and well in local politics.

We endured a certain amount of verbal abuse, coming almost without exception from the indigenous middle classes. Typically, a young woman would emerge from a house to remonstrate once she saw the leaflet and would still be shouting at us as she walked away. We were attacked usually from the Left but on one occasion from the Right; an uneasy interaction with an admittedly drunk man in high-vis trousers who, I started to feel, saw us as traitors. I referred him to Rupert Lowe, whose name he hadn’t been able to remember, and edged away as he was starting to tell me that Nigel Farage is being controlled by Israel.

One of the irrational things about leafleting is that when you get a nasty reaction it creates an aversion not just to the household (who will be listed as a “Do not knock”) but to the neighbourhood itself. There is something territorial in angry self-righteous spirits that puts you off going anywhere near them again. Yet areas which were generally most unsympathetic, virtuously displaying Lib Dem boards and home to our shoutiest accusers, were also areas in which our Reform activists live. I wondered how many households there might be in which some were angrily against Reform while others were silently supportive. Leafleting every household became important.

In one such Lib Dem area we were challenged over the garden gate; you won’t get any support round here, said our two middle-aged inquisitors. That was incorrect; they lived a few doors down from our Reform campaign manager. It’s not good practice when out leafleting to get into political discussions, but we were lured in by their question: what attracted you to Reform? This was the accuser’s trap to expose us as ‘racist’, but it quickly led me on to Net Zero. Were they aware the IPCC has dropped RCP 8.5? This isn’t usually a doorstep talking point, but after a tense exchange on the topic, two things got us off the hook; my response that if Reform did not exist, I would support the Conservatives (i.e., not Restore) and when I told them that I come originally from north Kent they seemed altogether to calm down. I had been identified as part of an indigenous tribe with distasteful ideas, but who couldn’t be expected to know any better.

Later, one of these two men caught up with us again in conciliatory mood, appreciative of an honest debate and acknowledging our efforts. Regarding his friend, the director of a national conservation charity, I later half-regretted the interaction; our position on Net Zero seemed to threaten his beliefs, his livelihood and even perhaps his sense of himself. It felt almost unkind to be an agent of disillusion, even in answer to his own questions. Don’t get into debates while leafleting is the right advice.

Around the corner I saw a man coming out of his house on a Brompton bike; not the Reform type I thought, and declined to serve a leaflet on him. The next day he approached us in the street asking to help us out in the campaign. This was an odd prejudice on my part, as I also ride a Brompton. In fact, if I saw myself coming down the street I would assume I was a Lib Dem. Such is the effect of territorial spirits. Our friend later admitted that his daughter had asked him not to stand for Reform as she thought it would affect her legal career.

As the leafleting went on (we didn’t have the capacity for canvassing) I was starting to feel like the Pied Piper of Norbiton. At least 10 people we encountered along the way offered to join and help us. A young mother originally from the Midlands had been told her small child had white privilege while applying for primary school. She became a dedicated supporter and leafleter after we’d knocked on her door. Another, a sharp and well-informed young Asian man who I thought might have what it takes to become an MP, also planned to join us, while being wary of the threat that would constitute to his work for public sector clients.

There is a north/south divide in Norbiton that is a mirror image of the situation in the country. The further north, closer to the town centre, the more the hostility towards Reform; the further south into the suburbs, the more support. One long residential road marks a sort of north-west frontier between the two territories. North of this frontier are well-to-do streets of Lib Dems and further north of those, blocks of urban flats occupied either by students, or worst of all from a Reform point of view, young urban professionals. Norbiton Hall, a very large complex of flats built in the 1930s on the site of a stately home, which had once narrowly avoided being converted into a dog track and where households are accessible only eight at a time via a resident’s doorbell, is packed with members of the eye-rolling community, several of whom tried to stop us getting in to their stairwell – in one case by an impressive entryphone filibuster (she continued to talk for five minutes so that I could not press the next doorbell). Leafleting there felt like a futile and perhaps even a counter-productive task.

As I started to flag in this hostile territory, praying for relief, a guardian angel appeared. An African-Caribbean man, cleaning the front door windows, told me of his struggles over the costs of bringing up his children, of his multiple jobs and how the locally high council tax felt like the final straw. He saw the need for change. Going from entrance to entrance, as he cleaned the glazing on the front doors, he let me in to each stairwell, relieving the need for any awkward entryphone conversation. He would then help fold our leaflets eight at a time in each doorway. I keep him in mind when I think of why I bothered to stand.

Two small Reform-friendly cafés that offered us respite were both owned by Pakistani Muslims. A subject raised by both owners was the predicament of the former Sussex fast-medium bowler Imran Khan, now imprisoned on false charges in his home country: a man who stood for English-style political rights in the face of military dictatorship in Pakistan.

One of the things you realise while campaigning is that many people are not entirely coherent about politics. Leafleting in a large post-war council estate that was once white working-class but which is in the process of being closed down and re-built, a gentleman opened his door and picked up our leaflet. As he was elderly, poor and Asian we anticipated no difficult interaction and indeed he expressed his delight at seeing a Reform leaflet. Someone from Reform, he assured us firmly, had visited the local Muslim association to secure the block vote. He was charming but we could see that his recollection was fuzzy. Surely he meant the Greens? Or the Lib Dems? Emily Davey, he told us, had visited in 2022, but not this time. Given the number of Muslims I saw going into the polling stations and the result, had there been any block voting (something of which I saw no evidence) it probably went to the Lib Dems.

A few days earlier I had been standing at the presbytery door of our church as a Lib Dem canvasser arrived to check that our priest had used his postal vote. This canvasser started to angle, with a certain amount of plausible deniability, for the church’s block vote; while such a concept would never have been entertained by the priest, the possibility of it didn’t seem to offend the canvasser himself. It was smoothly laughed off by all parties. The canvasser left, disappointed but not disgraced.

Perhaps due to the call to social responsibility that their religion makes of them, Muslims vote. On polling day, at both booths we visited the proportion of Muslims seemed much higher than that of the local population. At another polling station, Asian groups were being bussed in before the 10pm deadline. An irony of our national identity is that among those who make the most use of our democratic traditions and rights are many Muslims.

Another irony is that where anything like ‘white privilege’ is observable, it is among young white women who feel entitled to high-handed and arrogant behaviour, seeing ‘white supremacy’ and such things in other people. We should not be surprised at such contradictions, but parties need to be alive to them.

In Reform branch meetings I encountered not a trace of hate or any animosity towards any group, just a collection of concerned citizens – dull but responsible types who don’t think the country should be run by a grown-up version of the student union. At least five of us were motivated by Christian conscience. Now that Labour is the most favoured party among those who earn more than £100,000 per year, there is a novel for our times, which will probably never be written, about the interaction of social class and overtly expressed political opinion.

On the day after the vote, candidates oversaw the counting of anonymous ballot papers from one side of the table while the other side was overseen by the count supervisor. Fewer Reform vote-counting boxes were put out on the tables than for other parties with a comparable vote, something we pointed out, to the mild irritation of officials. Candidates get tired of the scrutiny just at the one point where fiddling might conceivably take place: the counting of the split votes by the ‘grass skirt’ method. Emily Davey stood over our ward’s table in a proprietorial manner, amassing the votes due to her. Another candidate, Fahima Mahomed, who does an oppositional turn on GB News but is pleasant in person, told me that she had come under sustained pressure from friends not to work for the broadcaster.

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey arrived for the declaration, his car waiting on a double yellow line during the count. Young people buzzed around him in search of opportunity. It is easy to see how, in the absence of ideas or beliefs, one could be drawn to a party merely on the basis of its success. The Lib Dems succeed locally because they succeed; the voters get the highest council tax in London as a reward for their appreciation.

Reform won 12% of the vote across the borough; an above average result. John Curtice said that in areas such as ours, where the Remain vote had been above 60% in 2016, the average vote for Reform in the 2026 local elections was 10%. I was happy with 12% in what is one of the most Lib Dem-dominated councils in the country (they won 44 out of 48 seats) particularly as we were only able to deploy a fraction of the resources that the Lib Dems brought to the campaign.

Chris Larkin is a pseudonym.