The Secret Tory Candidate: I’ve already written my concession speech. I’ve no idea what I’ll do next

Eerily, I’ve hardly seen my Labour opponent and their supporters in recent days. I suspect they have had a direction from Labour HQ that they’ve got this seat in the bag and that their resources are best deployed elsewhere. Based on everything I’ve heard before today, I imagine that will turn out to be the correct choice.

It’s only a matter of hours now until I’ll find out the result – and whether I’ll be back in Parliament or jobless come next week.

I am quietly confident that we’ll outperform the national swing here, which has become my focus. But there’s now only a very, very limited possibility that we could have a massive surprise here and win. I just want a respectable defeat. If I lose by 7 or 8 per cent, I can live with that.

I’ve already sketched out a concession speech, and I’m hoping to be able to say that my defeat was quite narrow. When the result is in, I’m not going to hold back about our national campaign and the fact that we will have lost as a result of being insufficiently conservative.

I’ll spend the rest of today trying to get our supporters out to vote. At the end of last week we changed our strategy to focus on targeting the people we know are Conservative voters. I’m knocking on doors with a very small team. Unlike in 2019, we haven’t had mutual aid from other seats because there just aren’t the numbers of activists willing to help.

We’ve got campaign centres in different parts of the constituency. I started door knocking at 9am and will probably carry on until a couple of hours before polls close. Others are delivering letters to our voters. If it doesn’t seem to be having much of an effect we might just stop earlier.

A couple of hours before polls close I will go for a drink and some dinner. I definitely won’t go to the count when it opens at 10pm – I’ll be watching the exit poll with a group of friends. I’ll get updates from people at the count on how it’s going. I’ll then head to the count in the early hours so I can just come in at the moment the result is going to be declared and walk straight onto the stage.

Particularly if it’s going to be a difficult result and you’ve got crowing Labour activists, you want to minimise your time there.

After the declaration I’ll join some friends and activists to watch the results come in over some drinks. Then I plan to get five or six hours’ sleep before waking up to face reality.

MPs who are voted out have a four-month winding-up period for our offices, during which we can keep on a member of staff to hand over constituency casework. In that time I will also have to move out of my constituency home.

I haven’t planned what I’m going to do next. I might go abroad for a little while. But I do want to see what’s going to happen in the Conservative Party. If a leadership candidate I support takes over from Rishi then I might want to work for them.

I’m incredibly political. And I absolutely will not be leaving politics at all – not even in the short term.