OF THE 650 UK constituencies in play today, few are as interesting as Hampstead and Kilburn.
The Greater London constituency, which takes in parts of Camden, is the most marginal in Britain with just 42 votes separating the now-retiring Labour MP Glenda Jackson and the second-placed Conservative candidate at the 2010 general election.
Just 841 votes behind the Academy Award winner Jackson was the Lib Dem candidate, making it the tightest and perhaps most interesting three-way marginal seat in the entire UK five years ago.
So tight are the margins that this is one of the seats the Tories will be targeting tonight and the man doing it for them has an Irish connection. Simon Marcus is a second generation Irishman whose father hails from Cork.
“My Dad was born and bred in Cork,” Marcus, a former publisher and keen rugby player, told TheJournal.ie this week as he took a break from a busy final few hours of campaigning.
He came to England in 1948 to become an NHS doctor. We used to visit all the time when we were kids and I really loved it. Many of my family still live in Dublin and it would be great to visit again one day.
Understandably Marcus is not thinking much about Ireland right now. He’s targeting a seat that Jackson has held, boundary redraws aside, since 1992.
She won two Oscars in the 1970s for her roles in Women in Love and A Touch of Class, but she made her name in politics as a vocal critic of Tony Blair, even calling on him to resign in the aftermath of the Iraq War.
The Labour firebrand officially retired when parliament dissolved in March, with former local councillor, Tulip Siddiq, now fighting to retain the seat for Labour. Siddiq has a fascinating backstory.
Her aunt is Bangladesh’s prime minister and her grandfather was the country’s founding president. Her election would provide the rare sight of two political dynasties in two very different countries.
The background of Liberal Democrat candidate, Maajid Nawaz, is just as interesting. He’s a former Islamist turned counter-extremist, who spent some time in an Egyptian jail.
He later renounced extremism, write a book and founded the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank dedicated to anti-extremism, which successfully persuaded senior members of the English Defence League to quit the organisation.
Irish heritage aside, Marcus’s backstory isn’t half as fascinating, but he’s been a campaigning councillor in Camden since 2012. In 2010, he ran in the Barking constituency where he somewhat upset the odds by beating the BNP’s Nick Griffin into third place.
Now he has switched his attention to a constituency which has an interesting demographic mix. The Hampstead end’s high house prices make it a home for big financiers who wear nice suits and work in the City, as well as celebrities and hot young entrepreneurs.
This means that Labour’s proposed Mansion Tax on homes worth over £2 million is a big issue on the doorsteps. The Tories are opposed to the idea, and Marcus has cited it as one of the issues consistently raised on the doorsteps.
By contrast, Kilburn is a more socially deprived area. It has a large number of social housing areas and, historically, large Irish and Caribbean communities. But, according to Marcus, it does not have the same number of Irish ex-pats it once had.
“When I was growing up I knew some Irish families there. But I don’t even think there are any Irish pubs left now,” he said.
Unsurprisingly he believes that he has a strong chance of taking the seat, but it wasn’t always that way.
As recently as January 2014, he told Al Jazeera that while there had been a shift within the constituency towards the Conservative party, it may not have come in time for him to win the seat this year.
But much has changed since then, he argues, citing strong economic growth and a weak opposition:
Ed Miliband has not convinced people he has the answers, the SNP threat has arisen and the Mansion tax is worrying a lot of people here. It is now a straight 50/50 fight.
Despite this, polls indicate that since the turn of the year there has been little in the way of a dramatic shift in support towards either Labour or the Tories. Both are more-or-less tied with around a third of the vote each.
Marcus believes a Tory majority is still possible, but added: “A coalition is probable. I think the coalition with the Lib Dems achieved a lot and I would be relaxed about another.”
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