Campaigning.

At a recent talk at the RSA, Matthew Taylor told a story of going to his first meeting of his local Labour party. There were lots of boring procedural discussions; under AOB, he asked if they could discuss ways to attract new members to the party. "Oh," he was told by the old hands, "we tried that, but new people only come for one or two meetings and then we never see them again, so we don't bother any more." Taylor didn't go back either.

It is nearly a week since the GLA and London Mayor elections, the only contests which were held in my area (elsewhere, there were lots of local council elections).

I have campaigned before - in the last general election, and for last year's referendum (not a party matter, and I put in quite a bit of work).

I don't like campaigning, but I made a promise to my local GLA candidate last summer that I would help her campaign. (I think political parties have social events in the summer just so they can nab unwary volunteers when the weather is good.) When she sent out an email asking for volunteers,

Dawn will be knocking on doors in Wood Green, alongside Bridget Fox, another of our London Assembly candidates

I thought it was time to keep my promise.

And so I spent an evening campaigning for the local LibDems in early April. It was a couple of days after the London conference, where I has been impressed by many of the speakers (keep an eye open for Yahaya Kiyingi - I hope he goes very far!), so I was feeling pretty fired up, and it was the day that the London manifesto had been published.

Campaigning was a truly unrewarding experience. The main purpose was putting leaflets - "surveys" - through voters’ doors on behalf of the sitting MP. The survey was badly written with leading questions: I was shocked at the quality of the material. And whilst Dawn and Bridget, the GLA candidates, might have been doing something to do with the London election, but I wasn't. I felt I had been conned.

There was little interaction with voters, though this may have been a good thing: the first person I spoke to spent ten minutes ranting about the coalition. A Labour voter who had voted LibDem in the general election (so not much of a Labour voter, then), he called our MP a "cunt who's fucking George Osborne”, and he wouldn't accept that any good at all had come out of coalition - not even that the LibDems ameliorated the effects of a pure Tory government.

The other people I spoke with - and there weren't many of them - were polite, even friendly - but frankly not bothered about politics on a cold, damp Monday night.

Afterwards, all the volunteers went our for a meal. I chatted to the very youthful local party office manager, who was looking for people to help with the campaign for the GLA elections (ironic since that's what I thought we were meant to be doing that evening). He said they needed lots of volunteers; I said I'd happily help, but leafletting seemed a waste of time and knocking up (calling on voters on the day of the election) was worse than useless - I was sure there were more productive ways to use my time and skills. He told me to look out for the emails asking for volunteers.

Which I did. They were all asking for people to go leafletting and knocking up. Worse, they were all very much last minute. It all felt very haphazard and disorganised.

I didn't do any more campaigning.

It may be that I shouldn't bother campaigning; or maybe I should only campaign for things that I really feel are important, like last year's referendum. The London mayor and GLA I don't really feel are important. At least, I didn't think there was any chance at all that Brian Paddick - who I thought was excellent - would be able to break the two party mayoral contest, however important it might be. And I am still not really sure what the GLA does other than hold the mayor to account.

Or perhaps - perhaps I should wait for post-politics - Politics2.0 - to kick in: post-partisan. We live in hope.