The strange case of the vanishing Labour candidate...
Rainwater gurgles down broken gutters and all I can hear is a squelch-squelch of wet soles plodding along a dog-messed pavement. Dai Davies and Trish Law, however, are brimming with laughter.
If they were a New Labour project you'd call this 47-year old ex-electrician and his widowed colleague a Beacon of Hope, the embodiment of Things Can Only Get Better and all that. Except Dai and Trish are not New Labour now. Oh no. Definitely not.
"Been through four pairs of shoes during this campaign, I have, and three razors, and now I'm on my fifth suit," cries stubble-chinned Dai, two shoes sploshing like a penguin's flippers as he flaps from door to door, shoving People's Voice leaflets through letter boxes. "Get the suits for £37 from the supermarket. Very good, too, so long as you don't stand too close to the sun in them!"
There is no chance of sun today. We are on a rain-swept, wind-ravaged hillside near the Sirhowy Valley and the clouds have closed in for one of their South Wales huddles. The council estate houses seem to crouch into one another for shelter against the filthy weather. Then Trish spots a voter.
"Mornin"! shouts Dai (the voter is elderly, with imperfect hearing). "All right?" And the old man finds his hand being pumped and someone knows someone else's name and it's all suddenly more like a family gathering.
This certainly doesn't feel like what it is: the frontline of a remarkable and ill-tempered by-election which has seen a heartlands rebellion against New Labour.
Welcome to Blaenau Gwent, once one of Labour's safest, now too close to call. When the people go to the polls on Thursday they will have a chance to tell Tony Blair what they think of him and his elite.
It is hard to overstate Blaenau Gwent's Labour heritage. Nye Bevan and Michael Foot were Labour MPs in this melancholy, poverty-stricken area. Merthyr Tydfil, crucible of the Labour Party a century ago, is just a few sodden valleys to the west.
At the 2001 election Labour's Llew Smith, a bookish Lefty, had a majority of 19,313. Then he announced he didn't want to stand again and the Blairites imposed an all-female shortlist on the local party. As candidate, they jemmied in one of Cherie Blair's London friends, Maggie Jones.
Peter Law, a flamboyant local councillor who had been furiously loyal to Labour for decades, was so angry that he stood as an Independent — and won. It was the most striking result of the 2005 election. Mr Law not only overturned a majority of almost 20,000 but ended the night with a 9,121 majority of his own.
Maggie Jones left Wales a flattened, rejected crony. She will be sworn in to the House of Lords in a few days' time.
Peter Law did not live long to enjoy his success. His death from a brain tumour has given Labour a chance to win back this seat it so long took for granted.
To do that, however, the party of Blair must see off the spirited challenge of Dai Davies, who is standing for the Westminster seat, and mother-of-five Mrs Trish Law, who is standing for her late husband's seat in the Welsh Assembly.
They and their People's Voice outfit are tiny and amateurish compared to Labour's mighty campaigning machine which has been 'throwing everything' at the seat, but they quite like being underdogs.
Fifty-something Mrs Law has not found the election easy. "It's been an emotional time," she says, her eyes welling. "We were married for 30 years. Peter's last words to me were 'Be positive', so that's what I'm trying to remain. The people are bigger than the party. That is what Labour forgot."
Some elements of campaigning seem alien to her. She is wearing elegant black trousers and smart shoes which are getting wrecked. But many people recognise her. Peter Law was a big, big man in this area. His gentle-mannered widow has their respect.
Mr Davies, who lost his electrician's job at the local steel plant a couple of years ago (he had joined Labour as a 16-year old), admits he hasn't any job to go to if he loses on Thursday. "I suppose I'll still be walking the streets but picking up litter or something like that instead of electioneering," he says.
He has used all his savings to fight the campaign and is standing on a manifesto of traditional Labour socialism and trying to get Blaenau Gwent its overdue share of European poverty-relief funds.
The hearty activists at his HQ in Ebbw Vale include some of the 21 Labour members who — in an act of cack-handed vindictiveness — were thrown out of the party last year for opposing Maggie Jones.
Some of these people worked hard for Labour for 40 years. Quitting their old party has been almost like a divorce. Former mayor Moira Wilcox says it has been the main topic of conversation over her kitchen table for months. The town's serving mayor, John Rogers, joined the People's Voice campaign last week.
Maggie Jones's name remains a stinkeroo. In the village of Sofrydd, ex-water engineer Nick Jones, 56, says that the imposition of Lady Jones, as she will soon become, was 'disgusting, disgraceful. The Labour leadership think we live in wigwams down here," he says. "They had this seat for generations and look at the place. They ignored it."
Cyril Watts, 83, who did 44 years as a coal miner, explains that he could not bring himself to vote again for Labour. "It's not the party I once supported." Labour seems aware of its image problem. There is talk that Tony Blair was asked to stay away. Labour posters do not say 'New Labour' but 'Blaenau Gwent Labour'.
Gordon Brown swung by last week and the septuagenarian Labour MP Dennis Skinner, the very opposite of a Blairite, put in a brief appearance. Yesterday Owen Smith, New Labour's candidate, came out in opposition to the Trident nuclear deterrent which Gordon Brown has just endorsed.
I would have liked to ask ex-spin doctor and BBC producer Smith about that surprising decision. Indeed, there are many things I would have liked to ask him.
Is it true his salary from pharmaceuticals company Pfizer is £200,000 a year (a vast amount by Blaenau Gwent standards). What does he make of his nickname 'Oily' Smith? Why has Labour been circulating posters aggressively attacking the recently widowed Mrs Law?
It would also have been good to have seen him on the campaign trail, to check what he was telling people and see how electors responded. There is a duty on politicians, surely, to present themselves openly at election time.
Have Labour campaigners really — in a reference to the late and hugely popular Mr Law — been telling electors not to bother voting 'for a dead man'? I'd have liked to have ask Mr Smith.
Sadly Mr Smith would not speak to the Daily Mail. His aides would not even tell me his wheareabouts. A spokesman curtly said that he did 'not have time for national newspapers'.
The Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have sent down some of their big names. David Cameron campaigned last week and, naturally, the sun shone for Wonder Boy. William Hague came and visited a butcher's shop in Ebbw Vale. Didn't buy a thing.
And yesterday I was just retreating from a chippie in the centre of slate-coloured, puddle-drenched Abertillery, where a Vicky Pollard lookalike and her layabout boyfriend were stroking their paunches, when a familiar ginger fringe came bouncing down the street. It was the former Lib Dem leader, Charles Kennedy!
Cheerful Charlie was supporting the Liberals' candidates — but maybe also reminding us all of his existence should Sir Menzies Campbell fall under a bus.
I followed him down to a bus stop where a crowd of damp-haired passengers were awaiting the X15 bus to Newport. They seemed delighted to see him. But as he wandered off a woman asked me: "Who are those people, anyway?"
Very welcoming, the people of the Valleys, but national politics is not their forte.
Can they do it, this small but impressive band of proud, choir-singing, community-based socialists? Come Thursday night, can they repeat the amazing defeat Peter Law inflicted on the London cuckoos who dislodged him and his Welsh comrades from their Labour nest?
Part of me wants to say they'll do it — the romantic part that thrills to their sense of belief, their noble anger at the high-handed arrogance of Labour's central command, their downright decency and openness.
Yet my head says that Labour's bully-boy tactics, its flooding of this constituency with outside campaigners, its controlling disdain for scrutiny and criticism, will prove damnably hard to beat.
Dai Davies and Trish Law may struggle to win the day, but if they do fail they will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that all the honour in this campaign was theirs.
Daily Mail
