Poll Position

Written by HSJ and published in HSJ on Fri 15th Apr 2005

'You have to move everything around to get the politics in. You come out of it totally shattered'

Perhaps the signs weren't good from the start. At a mock election while he was still at school Steve Sollitt ended up on the losing side. Mind you, he was standing for the Conservative Party.

'We had to fill in a little questionnaire and they divided us up by policy,' he says. 'They put me in the wrong one. I was the only member of the Tory group to be against nuclear weapons.'

Which party won? The Liberal Democrats. Twenty years later - and more than 10 years after he first became a local councillor for the Lib Dems - the Southampton University Hospitals trust management executive is preparing to stand in his third general election campaign (he finished third in Portsmouth North in 1997 and Basingstoke in 2001).

He has not been successful yet, but he is nothing if not enthusiastic, even though he faces an uphill struggle to snatch victory in the constituency of Southampton Test, where he lives and works.

'You always go into a campaign wanting to get the best possible result. There's always part of you that would like to win. It's like playing tennis, squash, football - whatever; you want to win.'

Although the job is to present the right image to the electorate, get the best result and help any neighbouring candidates with a strong chance of securing a Lib Dem victory, Mr Sollitt's main target is to improve on the party's performance at the last election in his constituency.

You can tell he is a numbers man. He reels off the percentages for how the party stood nationally in the opinion polls at this point before the last election compared to the impending one and compared to the vote it ultimately attracted. Extrapolating to the forthcoming election, he talks about the possibility of a national percentage vote in the high 20s. In his constituency, that could produce a big swing.

The tenacity and motivation are evident. He illustrates his intention to persevere with the case of the sitting MP, Labour's Alan Whitehead.

'Alan lost here three times. At his fourth attempt he won,' says Mr Sollitt. 'There's a lot to be said for standing again and again in the same place, which is what I am planning to do. I'm at the stage now where I want an element of continuity. I want to live within, work within and be part of the community I want to represent.'

The political awareness of Mr Sollitt's teenage years led him to join the Lib Dems in 1993: 'Like many people who join political parties I wanted to see things change.'

He never had it in mind to be a local councillor, but in the end circumstance dictated it. 'Six months after I joined, my local councillor told me they were not restanding and asked me if I would like to do it. And at 23 it was a bit like "oh, um, all right", so I got elected in 1994.'

Shortly afterwards Mr Sollitt got a job working as a financial accountant for the party itself, commuting daily from the south coast to its London head office.

'You had meetings with [then leader] Paddy Ashdown,' says Mr Sollitt, with hushed reverence. Over the next five years the combination of local activity and access to national-level politics prompted him to step up and become a parliamentary candidate.

It is a staged process that is similar across the main parties: a questionnaire, an assessment day, approval as a candidate and then applying to vacancies in constituencies for selection by local party members. Once you are selected the hard work begins: mailings, meetings and running the gauntlet of doorstep challenges.

'You end up having this interesting juggling act of your job, your home life and the politics in the middle. And the politics has this habit of taking over everything if you are not careful and you have to move everything around to get the politics in. You come out of it totally shattered,' he says.

At the 1997 election he didn't sleep for 36 hours, and when he did he was woken by a phone call from his mum to tell him about the famous two-vote victory by fellow Lib Dem Mark Oaten in Winchester. In 2001, his constituency result was announced at 3.30am - 'it's difficult to string about three words together at that time in the morning.

Inevitably, the morning after can be a difficult time. 'You build and you build and you run on enthusiasm through the campaign and election day. The day after is like a void. It's very difficult to describe. You get yourself really up, because you have to, and then afterwards you just breathe.'

Full Text can be found at

http://www.shop.hsj.co.uk/mini/election2005/Feature2_poll.htm