Clive Peedell is missing a tooth. One of the front ones. As a doctor, he wouldn’t normally let something like that slide, but he’s been busy: he’s running to be MP for Witney, David Cameron’s constituency, and it’s hard enough to fit it around the day job without wasting time at the dentist’s. With the leafleting and the media appearances and the trek up and down to the Cotswolds from his home in Middlesbrough – to say nothing of his family – there hasn’t been time.
By and large, the gap is manageable. But it becomes a bit of a problem when a photographer asks him to smile for a picture outside a cafe in Witney. He keeps his bottom teeth hidden in a careful grimace. “Cheer up, mate,” he mutters to himself. “You’ll get some votes.”
The constituency is so safely Conservative that barely anyone has bothered to put up a sign. Peedell feels a bit out of place, too, even if his sense of dislocation comes with a touching optimism about his chances.
“I don’t want to be a bloody politician,” he says, fiddling with his rosette. “I’d rather be doing my work in the hospital. But I’m prepared to sacrifice a career I love to do this because I think I can save more lives by affecting the political process. I thought, hang on, the person responsible for what’s happening to the NHS is David Cameron.”
And even if his name and the National Health Action party he cofounded didn’t register in a local poll back in December, he takes comfort from the fact that the same survey found that the NHS was the top issue for voters in the constituency.
Still, there is work to do. “Who’s Peeeee-dell? We’ve got the prime minister round here,” one red-trousered man says, wrinkling his nose at a leaflet.
That’s Clive Peedell’s problem, and his opportunity. His campaign has parallels to the one mounted in Sedgefield in 2005 by the bereaved father Reg Keys. Keys, whose son was killed in Iraq, took 10% of the vote, and used his speech at the count to subject Tony Blair to a lacerating analysis of the decision to go to war. If the NHS is anywhere like as politically incendiary as Iraq was in 2005, Peedell may do respectably well.
Peedell is not the only one pursuing the PM. There’s Chris Tompson, an independent on a Fathers4Justice-type ticket, who has taken to camping on the pavement outside Cameron’s constituency office. Despite his diligence, sightings of the prime minister in the constituency have been few and far between.
Labour candidate Duncan Enright had a bit more luck last weekend, when he spotted the prime minister in Chipping Norton. “We photobombed him,” he says. “It went all right, but you couldn’t really see him in the photo.”
So what would Peedell say, if he could meet Cameron? “I would challenge him on the line he always uses: it doesn’t matter who provides the services so long as they’re free at the point of use. It does matter, because if you have the private sector delivering services, you take money out of the local hospital and give it to a private provider competing against it. That fragments the service.”
Peedell seems to be growing into the role a bit. He smiles, flashing a glimpse of the toothless gap. “You know,” he says, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world for me if I did beat him.”
