“Hmm,” says Caroline Lucas. “That’s not meant to be happening.” We’re outside the Co-op at Brighton’s Seven Dials roundabout and a bus has just driven over the lowered kerb that has just redesigned by the local Green council. It’s just about all that isn’t going to plan, though. Even the wind that threatens to blow all the campaign leaflets off the stand she has just set up has been kept under control thanks to some clay flowerpots – what else? – that have been borrowed from a local hardware store. Or rented, to be more precise.
“I had to pay a £4 deposit in case any got broken,” says Tom Hayek, a volunteer who has taken two weeks of his annual holiday to help get Lucas re-elected as MP for Brighton Pavilion. “My wife thinks I’m mad,” he adds. A lot of the country felt much the same about Brighton when its constituents elected Lucas to become the country’s first – and only – Green MP in 2010. That the Greens have become a far more credible political force is almost entirely down to Lucas.
And that is, in part, both her and her party’s current dilemma. However much Natalie Bennett has improved since her “brain fade” moment, she is still not the leader most of her party would want. Bennett has had to take two days off from the campaign trail this week after losing her voice and it’s quite likely the Green poll ratings have gone up as a result.
Lucas is the face and voice the Greens would like to see carrying their message around the country. She has proved a tough, independent-minded MP who has punched above her weight in Westminster: she has attracted a letter from a wide-ranging list of 40 celebs, including Sir David Attenborough, Joanna Lumley and Lily Cole, urging voters to re-elect her even though they don’t necessarily support the Greens. And it is nearly impossible to find any Westminster politician from any party who has a bad word to say about her. “That’s very flattering,” she laughs. “Though I can’t say I reciprocate those feelings for every MP.” You could call that living her values.
Lucas doesn’t trash Bennett. “The Green surge has happened under her leadership,” she says, loyally. But neither does she disguise the main reason she stepped down. Lucas won Brighton Pavilion with a majority of only 1,200 and it remains a very tight marginal. Rather than diluting herself by campaigning nationwide, she has chosen to spend most of the past six weeks in Brighton fighting for every vote. “It’s so close here,” she says. “It’s giving me sleepless nights. Any politician fighting a marginal who says they aren’t knackered are lying.”
The irony for Lucas is that many of her difficulties come from her own side. The Greens, who are running the local council without an overall majority, have not made themselves universally popular in the city by getting into a fight with the rubbish collectors, which resulted first in a strike and then in a work-to-rule protest.
It’s a complaint Lucas hears daily. “The council were actually trying to resolve a difficult situation in which there was a huge disparity between living allowances for male and female council workers,” she says. “But when people see litter piling up …” The rest of the sentence is left unfinished.
It’s an all too familiar narrative of the Greens setting out with the best of intentions; one which the local Labour party have been all too keen to try to exploit with the twitter hashtag #Caroline’sCouncil. “It’s politics,” she shrugs, “and for the most part everyone has been playing fair. In the last two weeks, though, it’s all been getting a bit nastier with Labour trying to make out the constituency is a three way marginal and that a vote for me will let in the Conservatives. It’s nonsense. The Tories have all but given up here.”
Looking around the constituency, I don’t see a single window with a Tory poster in it. Lucas is winning the window campaign by 70-30.
Purna Sen, the Labour candidate, appears to have set up a stall 100 yards round the corner from Lucas’s. “I suppose it could be a coincidence, but …” Lucas smiles. (Later, I find out that it was a coincidence, and that Sen and her supporters were not setting up a stall nearby but waiting for a lift to take them elsewhere.) But it is Lucas who get all the attention. In Brighton, she is something of a celebrity. Everyone knows her – “You don’t mind me calling you Caroline, do you?” – people wave to her out of car windows and almost everyone stops either to chat or tell her they are going to vote for her.
Students ask for selfies. Lucas looks a bit sheepish but seems happy enough and tugs her fringe down. “Why do you do that?” I ask. “I dunno,” she says. “My hair has always been the bane of my life. It’s so thin.” Her contact lenses might be another of her crosses as one falls out and she does her best not to look as if she is squinting while one constituent tells her a harrowing story of domestic violence.
Within half an hour, the Labour camp has moved on and Lucas is still reeling in the punters. An art student asks if he can take a series of photographs he wants to turn into a Hockney-style collage of her. Another man buys her a chocolate frog. It couldn’t be be more Brighton. Lucas looks genuinely baffled by the frog. “I’m not sure whether I should keep it, frame it or eat it,” she says. She settles for eating it. “I’m hungry.”
So what happens on 8 May? “I can’t bring myself to think of that,” she says. “It makes me feel sick. But if I win, we’ll hopefully have another celebration like last time.” And if she loses? “I’ll curl up under the duvet for the day.”
• This article was amended on 29 April 2015 because an earlier version misnamed Tom Hayek as Chris Hayek. It was further amended on 1 May 2015 because an earlier version said Purna Sen had set up a stall 100 yards round the corner from Caroline Lucas’s. After publication, we were informed that Sen and her supporters were not setting up a stall there but waiting for a lift to take them elsewhere.
