Moments after Mark Reckless knocks on a door in Oliver Twist Close a deep, persistent, growl can be heard from just behind it. Reckless turns round anxiously, caught somewhere between not wanting to look a Westminster cissy in front of his Ukip canvassers and a natural desire to make a dash for it. He hangs around for a couple of seconds before deciding his honour has been satisfied.
“I think we can move swiftly on,” the MP says. “Hmmngh.” Reckless finishes every sentence with hmmngh. He is either recovering from a cold or has developed a nervous tic around the Guardian.
A red Vauxhall pulls up just round the corner in Magwitch Close. Three teenagers in hoodies get out, take one look at Reckless and his team and make a dash for their front door, which they slam behind them. The driver, who could be their mum, struggles in her heels and Reckless traps her before she can reach sanctuary.
“I’m Mark Reckless, hmmngh,” he tells her. “Will you be voting Ukip, hmmngh?” The woman looks as if she is not entirely sure if she is awake let alone caught in the eye of the Rochester by-election, and mumbles something non-committal before joining the others indoors.
“I think we can mark her down as an M, hmmngh,” Reckless says. “M is a soft Ukip vote, hmmngh. K is a definite one, hmmngh.” The M hmmnghs will be getting another visit. The woman in Magwitch Close may have a persecution complex come Thursday.
For someone whose libertarian ideals sent him running into the arms of Ukip, Reckless campaigns with the attention to detail of a Brussels bureaucrat. Nothing is left to chance; in his hands, Rochester and Strood is less a collective of people than a grid-map of votes to office.
Reckless tries to be friendly but there is an awkwardness to him. However much he wants to appear to be for the people of Rochester he will never be quite of them. The separation of roles is clear; they are his mission and he is their saviour. At heart, he can’t help but be the very thing he most wants to get away from – the professional politician.
It is Ukip’s Catch-22: the more seriously the public takes it, the more organised a party that has always attracted those who dislike political organisations becomes.
For the moment, though, everything is more than holding up. At one end of Rochester high street, the headquarters of the Conservative candidate, Kelly Tolhurst, had just a few long-faced people mooching around inside: they appear to have already given up. At the other end, at the Ukip office, people were queueing up to canvass – including a few Ukip MEPs prepared to get rather more stuck in than the many Tory cabinet ministers who have sneaked down to the city in the past few weeks to knock on 10 doors before rushing back to London on the train.
“I’m just waiting to be told what to do,” says James Carve, MEP for the West Midlands. Really? That doesn’t sound very Ukip. “It isn’t really,” he admits. “But we’re all doing our best to learn.”
Some are managing rather better than others. Ukip’s official mascot, Roque the Rhodesian ridgeback, makes a lunge for another dog. “Oh dear,” his owner says, “Must have been a female.” There’s a bit of tutting in the background.
Being anti-women is very old Ukip. Nigel Farage was recently photographed in a Rochester pub without a pint and with some women: the new party apparatchiks have even got to him.
The uneasy mix of old and new Ukip is on view elsewhere. An elderly couple who used to vote BNP mill alongside a fed-up Labour voter: everyone seems to know what they don’t like but few have any clear vision of what they want.
“Cameron and Miliband are useless,” one of them says firmly. Will Nigel Farage be better? “Oh no. Nigel doesn’t want to run the country. He just wants to shake things up a bit.” So who would run the country, then? There is a long pause that turns into a silence.
It’s a void that even Reckless won’t fill. Would Ukip be part of a coalition? “I don’t think so, hmmngh.” Are there any Ukip candidates you couldn’t work with in parliament? He doesn’t appear to hear that question. Nor does he hear the cries of “get me out of here” coming from Jim Carver, who has been taken hostage inside the house of a man he has canvassed and will not be released until he fully explains Ukip’s policy position on the NHS.
“He may be some time, hmmngh,” says Reckless. “I think we should head back without him, hmmngh. It looks as if it will rain soon, hmmngh.”
That’s more the Ukip spirit we know and hmmngh.
