It’s raining in Paisley, great slicing sheets that turn the sky grey. Everyone I meet seems perversely proud of this, as though the bad weather in other places just doesn’t try hard enough. At one point, when a momentary break in the clouds exposes the sun, a Labour activist turns to me and says: “See, people go abroad for this kind of weather.”
The fight for Paisley, Johnstone and the surrounding villages west of Glasgow is a microcosm of the broader election battle in May. Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and Labour’s chief campaign strategist, has been the MP here since a by-election in November 1997 (the seat then had slightly different borders). If Ed Miliband ends up in Downing Street, the life of his foreign secretary will be a whirl of red boxes, ministerial Jaguars and negotiations with world leaders.
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