Just when you thought it couldn’t get any stranger...

THE TIMES

Just when you thought the Norwich North by-election couldn’t get any stranger, it does. Yesterday began with the Labour candidate, Chris Ostrowski, being rushed to hospital with suspected swine flu. This left Lord Mandelson (for it is he) at the railway station with no candidate to meet him. Their visit to a Sure Start children’s centre, where the teddy bears were all lined up in anticipation, was cancelled at the last moment.

Mandy consoled himself by scuttling over to do a little spinning at the BBC before heading back to London, away from the contagion. As I write Chris (no one yesterday could pronounce his last name) is at home, in quarantine. The other candidates, who, worryingly, saw him only the night before at a hustings, have sent their best wishes.

It is as if Labour is jinxed here. The by-election was already dominated by a man who wasn’t running.

Dr Ian “Gibbo” Gibson, the maverick and beloved local MP, quit in disgust after a party kangaroo court decreed that, because of his expenses, he could not stand for Labour in future. No one has heard from him since, though a shadowy group known as “Friends of Gibbo” claims that he backs Chris Thing.

Who knows? So, yesterday I found myself in Norwich with a Labour void, a Lib Dem with the wonderful name of April Pond and the Tory über-smooth wunderkind Chloë Smith. It is widely assumed that Chloë will win the vote tomorrow, overturning Labour’s 5,459 majority. Certainly the Tories have been pouring people in: I even ran into one MP at a service station yesterday on the A11. “Norwich bound!” he trilled at me over the unleaded pump. “We were all told to do four days!”

I was due to see Chloë later but, first, it was off to a printing plant to see the Lib Dem superstar Vince Cable and Ms Pond. Bizarrely, it wasn’t even in the constituency. All became clear when I heard April introduce the owner to Vince: “This is my brother, David.” It turns out that April has seven brothers and sisters.

She also has a moat. Yes, really. The water theme was hard to escape. It was raining on us as I asked April (surely her middle name should be Showers) Pond about her moat, which I have seen on Google Earth. April, 47, a local businesswoman, points out that hers is a good luck story. “I was born in a council house and grew up in one with my seven brothers and sisters. I lived part of my life in a caravan in a field.” A few moments later she added: “My brother started his life in a drawer in a caravan!”

Then it’s off to Aquaterra, an oil and gas engineering company that, as a novelty, was actually in the constituency. Chloë, aged 27, arrives with Ken Clarke, aged 69. They walk around the workshop, minding the generation gap, running out of things to say. Ken looks at a huge ring: “That looks like a very large screw,” he notes sagely.

If Chloë wins, she would be the youngest MP and the only Chloë in the Commons. I find her depressingly machine-like already: smooth, safe, serious. “I am standing as a very clean candidate,” she says, looking squeakily so. “I am a fresh face.”

Well, up to a point. She is a “business consultant” but, for the past year she has been working for the Tories in Westminster. “I’ve never tried to hide that,” she says, her voice as smooth as a pebble in a fast-running stream.