DAY 158 - PORTOGRUANO TO ODERZO: 18.4 MILES (36,800 STEPS)

27 September, 2011

18.4 miles (Total: 1538.4 miles) 36,800 steps (Total: 3,369, 401 steps)

The campaign is building some momentum and to keep up with it, never mind on top of it is a bit of a challenge. It is a constant trade off between making the progress required to get back before the Rio Olympics and responding to emails, telephone calls and the need to maintain the web-site.

I am glad to have an opportunity for a Skype conversation with Michael Green, the long suffering and incredibly patient project manager for the walk, to talk through priorities and I feel more settled about the balance I need to achieve after that.

The entire support team of Gary Streeter, Michael Green, John Glen, Alison Hardy, Nigel Double, Xuelin Black, are all leading very demanding lives themselves and volunteering their support to the project, but without them the project would have come off the rails somewhere in the suburbs of Athens, if it had ever left the station.

Their efforts are augmented by the wonderful support I get from other friends and family.  My parents (now they have figured out Skype and are sure that it is absolutely free!), my brother David, who is a whiz on directions and the correct gear, Rob and Di Parsons, who always seem to call at the right moment to encourage me on the way, Peter and Richard Vardy (more tomorrow) and my sons Matt, who as a basketball coach in the US manages to motivate me so much when I listen to him I want to go out and run the next stage, and Alex who keeps me entertained, up to date with happenings in the premiership and always keeps my feet firmly on the ground.

Monday this week was a very big day as we had our first full-time member of the team join us—Julia Spence, an Intern who has been generously and graciously assigned to us by CARE. Julia will work out of Gary Streeter’s Office at Westminster and will be a huge help in keeping us all co-ordinated – especially during the next few months and the campaign intensifies around the formal moving of the UN truce resolution at the General Assembly by the UK government.

In many ways it feels quite similar to an election campaign, with us gradually getting the machinery in place in the run up to polling day, always feeling you are chasing events rather than in control of them. When the election campaign is called, there is always a rush of enthusiasm and then there are the weeks when nothing seems to be happening, but everything is happening—leaflets are being designed and printed, posters are being prepared, canvass returns printed, fight fund appeals launched and then it all builds to a frenzy in the run up to polling day.

I have been a candidate in several big campaigns, but this is different because we are not all gathering in the Campaign Centre every day to brief each other on what is being done and what needs to be done—it is difficult to build the esprit de corps when the candidate is 2000 miles away, although many of my campaign managers in the past have suggested that might not be a bad idea if I wanted to stand any chance of winning.

In essence I use the same rough test that I was told by my mentor in my first General Election Campaign back in 1987 (Tyne Bridge) –John Lacy, at that time Head of Campaigning for the Conservative Party.  He said that election campaigns are always about who has the momentum. No campaign is ever static, it is either going forward, backwards or it has stalled.  Ask yourself each day ‘are we making progress?’  Progress is momentum and if you keep being able to say that, then it will build through the electoral equivalent of compound interest. By this test, I would without one shadow of doubt say that we have momentum.  We are making progress and in that most crucial respect our team is winning.