TO BROMLEY, then, for a sizzler of a day in the by-election. I refer to the weather rather than the politics but we can always hope. For yesterday David Cameron, or DC as everyone in his team now seems to call him, whooshed in by train on a mission to bring some glamour to Bob Neill’s campaign.

“DC may have a few TV crews with him,” Dave’s advance team warned Bob’s team as we sweated outside Bromley South station. Bob had no crews with him, though he was being circled by a man with a mobile phone.

Suddenly DC appeared, in the magical manner that he has worked so hard to achieve. “Bob!” cried Dave, in a way that reminded me of the Bev and Kev advert. Bob scurried forward. He was about a foot shorter than DC. It was almost a comedy handshake.

Bob looks exactly as you would expect a Tory candidate would in the days before anyone knew what an A-list was. He is white, middle-aged and male. The fact that he is vertically challenged must surely be a plus, though I’m not sure that, in itself, this would be enough to compensate for his otherwise blatant non-diversity.

“Shouldn’t you really be a woman?” I asked Bob as we collapsed in the shade while DC did some interviews.

“I can’t do much about that,” cried Bob, delighted to be interviewed, if only by me. “I’m not going to be the Jan Morris of the Tory party!” He then glanced at his stomach which, to me, looked fine. “I can do something about the paunch though.”

Eric Forth, whose untimely death prompted this by-election, would have approved, for he hated the politically correct, a phrase he used only with a sneer. But who knows what he would have made of the DC visit, which quickly snowballed into Fellini-esque chaos. The only time DC and Bob shut up was when they met a deaf voter and then they all began making frantic thumbs-up signals at her.

No one was safe from political assault: a postie, a barber, a man from Benjys who identified himself as the “sandwich man”. Dave did draw the line at kissing a baby. “It’s a bit early for that,” he said, by now jacketless, a fine line of sweat down the back of his expensive white shirt. “Hello, do you do men?” he asked at a hairdresser’s. I bet he never says it again: he is ruthless about such mini-mistakes.

DC hurried by an Ann Summers shop (I can’t think why). A Lib-Dem spy joined the group, trying to get us to go see Ming Campbell, who was apparently also campaigning in Bromley, though no one, including the spy, seemed to know where. It seemed a bit lax.

We were all boiling but Dave put his jacket back on for more interviews. “What’s important about local elections is that they are local,” he said, as people with furry microphones nodded.

The only question anyone had for Bob was whether he lived in Bromley. “No,” he said, “but I will move here.” Now I winced. That was an expensive answer, for it’s not cheap around here.

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