Rhodri... on the surprises of canvassing for Labour votes

BORIS JOHNSON, Mayor of London, made sure that noone would forget he’s still around last week by touring the local radio stations in London and twice using the incredibly inflammatory expression that the government’s changes and caps on housing benefit could produce “Kosovo-style social cleansing” of the less well-off out of the high-rent inner London boroughs such as Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster and that it wasn’t going to happen on his watch.

He certainly knew exactly what effect his words would have, given his long career in journalism.

Are well-off Londoners like him a bit sentimental about the rich and poor living cheek by jowl in those areas of the Monopoly board with the highest property values, like Mayfair and Park Lane?

Or is it perhaps a concern about where are all the cleaners, carers and catering staff going to live, now that servants’ quarters are not actually inside the mansions and merchants’ houses, as they would have been in the old days?

It certainly is true that rich and poor do live in adjoining streets in these high-value boroughs, whether it’s sentimental to want to preserve it or not.

Just after I first got elected in June 1987 I had my first experience of a London by-election.

Within months of the election, Sir Brandon Rhys Williams, the squire of Miskin Manor in the Vale of Glamorgan, but more relevant in this context, the MP for Westminster, died.

I couldn’t believe how you could be canvassing a really grotty block of council flats with almost as many broken windows as unbroken and you turned a corner and, hey presto, you were in a street of magnificent mansions.

Well, the Labour candidate Anne Holmes just lost by about 600 votes, but one memory stays with me.

At one stunning Georgian property, somewhere between a large mansion and a small palace, I bounded up the stairs.

The name of the occupant fascinated me. It was Sir Rodney ffitch.

In all my years of canvassing in Cardiff I had never canvassed a Sir and certainly never met anyone whose surname didn’t start with a capital letter.

Bit ridiculous expecting a Labour vote there, but hope springs eternal.

I could see the double staircase indoors.

Down came a man in a smoking jacket with large cigar in hand.