‘Elphicke hardly comes up’: A day on the doorstep fighting to hold Dover and Deal

It’s the  final stretch of the general election campaign. The streets around Deal station are crowded with yard stakes and posters, out from which grins the face of Mike Tapp, Labour’s candidate.

Tapp was selected early in the cycle – he just put up a video marking two years as Dover and Deal candidate – and he’s been hard at work making himself known in the constituency ever since, clearly to some effect.

Several people whose doors I knock on say they’ve met him, and he seems to have unusually good name recognition for a first-time candidate (the many, many pictures of his face probably don’t hurt).

READ MORE: Small boats and Tory mutineers: Can veteran Mike Tapp win Dover and Deal?

The local party are clearly in high spirits for the evening canvas; the group I’m out with includes the 2015 candidate Clair Hawkins, and the 2017 candidate (and councillor for the ward where we’re campaigning) Stacey Blair, along with Tapp himself, who is ebullient and smartly dressed for the evening’s doorknocking.

The pre-session briefing highlights Tapp’s military career – I’m calling on behalf of Mike Tapp, a former soldier – and the leaflets we’re distributing show Tapp at a podium with the words “Border Security” on it.

Labour has often been uncomfortable grasping at nationalist symbols or the immigration agenda, and often over-compensating in ways that seem forced, unnatural and uncomfortable. You get the sense Mike Tapp – whose feed on X shows videos of him enthusiastically drinking pints and singing Rule Britannia – has never been uncomfortable in his life.

READ MORE:  ‘From the flag to the white cliffs, Labour must embrace the symbols of Britain’

Last year, he wrote for LabourList about the importance of laying claim to patriotic symbols, saying that the “hijacking of our national identity has left many of us feeling uncomfortable with displaying these symbols in our campaigning, fearing that it might be misconstrued as aligning with extremist ideologies. As a government-in-waiting, we must firmly reject this false narrative.”

On the doorstep, Tapp keeps getting drawn into long conversations, and at one point re-appears after some time away, explaining that a voter had insisted he come in and see their new parrot (he shows us pictures he’d taken: it’s an African Grey).

Apparently, due to the party’s digital campaign, which runs targeted YouTube ads promoting the candidate, Tapp has apparently become a hit – or, at least, a figure of recognition – with local children who are served the content. The man himself clearly finds this faintly baffling, but is nonetheless pleased.

The response on the doorsteps is positive (fortuitously, I’ve turned up for the session where the local party beats its mid-week record, with two groups managing more than 150 contacts); Labour voters abound, and although a smattering of houses have Reform posters, I spot just one for the Conservative candidate Stephen James.

The defection of the Conservative MP for Dover Nathalie Elphicke to Labour came as a shock (and far from a pleasant one) for many in the Labour Party when it happened earlier this year.

READ MORE: East Thanet: Inside the battle for coastal ex-UKIP stronghold not won since 2005

Local members, however, tell me it has hardly come up on the doorsteps. For a constituency that’s been the forefront of small boats crossings, it’s unsurprising to hear them say that this issue, and immigration more generally, are often mentioned, but they describe it as often being a proxy for wanting to talk about other issues – bad roads, lack of housing, long NHS wait lists.

Tapp has received quite a lot of media coverage, and quite a lot of support from the party and shadow cabinet members (as I so often do, I arrived in Dover trailing the battle bus that had been there a few days earlier).

With the polls looking good for what would technically be a Labour hold, he seems very likely to bring his enthusiasm to parliament in a little more than a week’s time, following Gwyn Prosser (who held the seat between 1997 and 2010) as the next Labour MP to be elected in Dover.

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Read more of our 2024 general election coverage:

Finchley and Golders Green: Can Labour win back Britain’s most Jewish seat?

Small boats and Tory mutineers: Can veteran Mike Tapp win Dover and Deal?

East Thanet: Inside the battle for coastal ex-UKIP stronghold not won since 2005

Sheffield Hallam: ‘Can Labour’s Olivia Blake hold on in Nick Clegg’s old seat?’

Battle of the bar charts in Wimbledon: Inside a rare election three-horse race

Could Labour take ‘non-battleground’ Tory seats across the South West?

Meet NHS doctor Zubir Ahmed, fighting one of Scotland’s tightest marginals

Brighton Pavilion: As Starmer visits, can Labour win the Greens’ one seat?

Labour wants a new generation of new towns. Can it win in Milton Keynes?

Meet Gordon McKee, the 29-year-old son of a welder vying for Glasgow South

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