Caoilte O'Connor[1/2] By 20:00 on the final #ge2024 Monday we knew exactly which five #VoteCorbyn boards were still out and had promises to return from all but one of the board runners. It had taken 90 minutes but we'd got there. There was one board runner we couldn't get hold of. Someone (me it turns out) had written their number down wrong at 17:00. Our materials were packed away in a car and our driver was waiting in a cafe for us to hand the last things in and shut down for the night.
[2/2] Jeremy Corbyn had chosen a nearby curry house to base himself in and we were warmly invited to join him whenever we were ready. At 20:30 on the dot, the last board marched in like clockwork and we were able to confidently say that all our boards were back. My five days of #VoteCorbyn campaigning were over. I was starting a new job the next day and probably wouldn't get time off for polling day. But that was for tomorrow. Tonight I was going for a curry with Jeremy. A fairy tale ending.
[3/3] Jeremy Corbyn's 17:00 team returned long before we had a handle on how bad the problem was so we weren't able to stop and celebrate how well their #VoteCorbyn canvassing had gone. "Somebody gave me £40 to buy us all food", whooped Andrea. Apparently it had gone very well. Our book-keeping had gone less well. It turned out some "Get out the Vote" sheets had the same code as the new sheets we'd been sent later in the day. We persevered.
[2/3] It was easy to text the people who had just gone out, but we still had no idea which #VoteCorbyn sheets hadn't come back from the 11:00, 13:00, 15:00 and 17:00 sessions! Issy started interrogating the spreadsheet, Alessia updated my paper trail and I fed in what actual sheets had returned. Slowly we began to figure out where the gaps were and to text people, inventing our own double entry book keeping system as we went. One of us dubbed it "non-verbal synchronicity".
[1/3] The final #VoteCorbyn canvassing session of the final #ge2024 Monday was assembled and sent out like a well oiled machine. Alessia, Issy and myself juggled team assembly, briefing and paperwork between ourselves like we'd been doing it for years. We only made one mistake and it was aligned with the same mistake I'd been making all day. "We really should have reminded them all to be back by 20:30" opined Issy. "We'd better start texting them now."
[3/3] After twenty minutes of us trying to figure it out, I realised we had a more urgent problem. In 40 minutes the final crowd of #VoteCorbyn volunteers would want to go out canvassing and although I had a plan for reusing returned sheets from earlier, they weren't assembled as boards or in many cases even sorted. Some teams had very proactively split themselves up and so their sheets came back separately. I thought I had maybe five or six boards and did my best to start assembling them.
[2/3] In theory everything had gone perfectly. Everyone got to go #VoteCorbyn canvassing promptly, with the correct briefing and all of the materials. It wasn't until the amazing Issy turned up a few minutes later that I finally began to understand the whole mess I had dug for myself. "Which boards from the earlier sessions are still out?" she asked. "I have no clue," I replied. "I don't have access to the spreadsheet and I don't know if Jonathan had time to collate my paper records."
[1/3] By 17:30 on the final #ge2024 Monday Jonathan was long gone from Newington Green and so were all but one of my boards. We had one small group of stragglers waiting to go out and by chance that was when Jeremy Corbyn himself turned up. I had no idea if the last board was any good, but it didn't really matter - it was all we had. I briefed the last board runner and the team set off looking very pleased with their celebrity #VoteCorbyn status.
[4/4] This cat was "collecting" indepdendent campaigns. As well as the #VoteCorbyn sticker she had a "Leanne Mohammad" tshirt/stickers (Wes Streeting / Newington North) and an Andrew Feinstein (Holborn & St Pancras) sticker. She was planning to complete the London set with a trip to Chingford & Woodford Green for Faiza Shaheen the next day. "Leanne's campaign is the coollest", she assured me (echoing similar sentiments over the last few days). "Watch out for a surprise there on Thursday night!"
[3/4] As we were putting together teams I got to brief the most effortlessly cool #VoteCorbyn board runner of the entire campaign. I didn't have the capacity left for dressing in wit or subtlety myself and was only able to grasp the briefest moment in between briefing her to bluntly ask, "Excuse me! Before you go can I take a photo of your chest?" She humored me and only requested that I kept her head out of it. "I'm still a member of the Labour Party," she said. Photo and explanation to follow.