A CURSORY glance at Labour’s headquarters in King’s Lynn tells much of the predicament facing a local party that, eight years ago, was in the vanguard on Tony Blair’s march to power.

The door is a mottled red, recently repainted to conceal the scrawled “No War” graffiti that appeared one night last month, while in an upstairs window a few posters are the only visible reminder in the whole of King’s Lynn that on Thursday the town and the surrounding area of West Norfolk will go to the polls to elect a new borough council.

In 1995, when Labour swept to power in the area, the party had candidates standing in every one of the borough’s 60 seats. This year, following three defections on the hung council, the party is defending 24 seats and fielding a further 11 candidates, nine of whom are standing as running mates to a current councillor.

The Tories, who see King’s Lynn and West Norfolk as a target, have 61 people standing, of whom 27 are defending candidates, in the borough’s newly-configured 62 seats.

Despite their best efforts at rallying the electorate for its first all-postal vote, Labour activists admit that the atmosphere is strangely subdued. “We used to go down Saddlebow Road in South Lynn and every house would have a Vote Labour sign,” Charles Joyce, councillor for South and West Lynn, said. “It does feel different. It’s very quiet.”

His running mate in the ward, Irene Macdonald, is quick to defend the apparent lack of activity. Mrs Macdonald, the Labour leader of the council, said that since election signs were reallocated from national to local party budgets, they have all but disappeared from campaigning.

Of the 42 wards in the area, Labour is campaigning in just 26, although the party has the added boost of a strong anti-Tory alliance with Liberal Democrats. Yet the threat posed by the Tories, who even put an advert in a local paper asking for more candidates to come forward, is all too real for the council leader. After eight years representing Airfield ward, she has moved to the safer seat of South and West Lynn on the insistence of other councillors.

“I have changed wards because the boundary changes meant I could not win and my colleagues pressed me to move,” she said. “Apart from anything it would be a big propaganda coup for the Tories.”

Mrs Macdonald conceded that a handful of activists were extremely unhappy over the war, causing one potential candidate to drop out and another member to refuse to sign a nomination form.

Among her colleagues at the Labour headquarters, apathy and anti-war sentiment in the community appear to have been felt more acutely. “There have been a lot of people upset about the war,” Slim Wilkinson, the local election agent and a former electrical engineer, said. “But since the fall of Baghdad things have got better. They have started worrying more about why the dustbins are not emptied on time.”

For Mr Wilkinson, defending the rural ward of Wiggenshall, the campaign has offered its usual mix, from the receptive ring-round to the less welcoming door-knock. “For the most part the response has been pretty positive,” he said. “There was this one man who ripped up my leaflet and shouted all sorts of stuff, but I don’t know what he was about.”

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