To Glenrothes, then, to see Sarah Brown’s campaign in the by-election. It was her first time and the preparations were ultra top secret. Indeed it all felt a bit like an episode of Spooks when I finally got the call. At precisely 4pm Sarah would be going “door to door” in Carden Castle Park in the village of Cardenden. I was to tell nobody. I was given the number of the meeting place (or “safe house”, as I dubbed it).

I parked some way away and walked up a road that seemed, well, rather middle of the road. The semi-detached houses, set back from the pavement, were in various stages of pebbledashing. New, tatty, grey, beige, brown – but all pebbledashed. I couldn’t help but notice the many Labour posters stuck to windows, tied to drainpipes and, even, a caravan. Clearly Sarah would not be in enemy territory.

As I approached the safe house (brown pebbledash), something wasn’t right. Behind it, on a corner, I spied a crowd, bristling with cameras and notebooks. Ah, I thought, so it was so top secret that the whole of Scotland knew. The press officer insisted that we must keep well back. “This isn’t what I say,” he said. “This is what the seven men with guns who protect her say.”

The crowd was restless but then, at precisely 3.58pm, we saw something moving down the street. It was amorphous – a giant blobby amoeba with fuzzy microphones and Labour placards stuck to it – and heading our way. Was it Sarah? Lenses zoomed in. “Yes,” cried one hack, “she’s wearing brown!”

The debate over the colour of her outfit raged, though, as her jacket was a greeny-grey and blended perfectly with the street. I would call it pebbledash. Now cameras were filming us as we watched Sarah’s amoeba progress rather drunkenly down the street. “Newstastic!” cried a journalist as the blob gradually began to look human.

Sarah was in the front, hair swinging away, looking very middle of the road, not to say Middle England, in a demure denim skirt, jacket and green shirt with black suede boots. Of course we weren’t allowed to hear her but, from my door-knocking afterwards, we didn’t miss much. “She’s very pleasant,” everyone said. “She’s very nice.”

Nice. Pleasant. Quiet. “She listened,” said another householder, whose pebbledash sported an unlit neon reindeer. “She’s very beautiful,” said Catherine McNulty, aged 77. “The television doesn’t do her justice.” Catherine, like everyone else Sarah spoke to, will be voting Labour. Why? Because everyone in their various families always had.

You would never know in this street that the SNP are favoured to win this by-election but the visit was not a set-up in the classic sense. None of the nine households had been warned in advance. But I could see Labour canvassers running ahead of her, knocking on doors, finding the occupied Labour households, and then giving other Labour organisers the thumbs-up sign. “Hold them there!” they shouted. The occupants would come outside as if greeting long-lost family, and within minutes Sarah and some other guy (sorry, Lindsay Roy, the candidate) would arrive to make very pleasant chitchat.

The only madness occurred off-doorstep when Sarah would plunge through the now much larger amoeba that was shouting questions at her. Her eyes never connected with us, although she did speak – once. I record her words here for posterity: “I am very pleased to be supporting Lindsay Roy.”

See, isn’t that pleasant? Isn’t that nice? It was, I believe, a total pebbledash triumph.

By-election battleground

— The population of Glenrothes is 40,000. Labour won the seat with a majority of 10,664 at the 2005 general election. The SNP came second with 8,731 votes to Labour’s 19,395.

— The SNP won Central Fife, which covers the same area, in last year’s Scottish elections with a majority of 1,166.

— The SNP needs a swing of 14.2 per cent to win Glenrothes. The Nationalists won the Glasgow East by-election in July with a swing of 22.5 per cent from Labour.

— The seat combines Glenrothes new town with a section of the Fife coalfield to form a predominantly working-class constituency that stretches inland from the north coast of the Firth of Forth.

— After Glenrothes, its main urban centres are the little coastal industrial towns of Buckhaven and Methil.

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