Douglas Carswell

You don't want to do it like that ....

The one thing you are never short of as an MP is advice. From the moment you arrive in Westminster, everyone you find there – whips, lobby groups, pundits – seems keen to tell you how to your job.

"It is so important that you do fiddlesticks", urge some. "The issue that really matters is X", urge lobbyists for X.

"What swing voters really want...." insist many people who have probably never come across an actual swing voter in their lives.

While I admire pollsters for their efforts to measure opinion empirically, the average poll probably bases it's findings on interviews with a thousand or so people. When I tot up my surgeries, surveys, curry nights, coffee mornings, supermarket surgeries, email in box and the rest, I reckon I engage with more constituents than that in a fortnight.

MPs might get lots of advice. But when it comes to good advice, the folk to listen to are in your constituency, not SW1.

Take yesterday, as an example. Should I be in Prime Ministers Questions, joining in the brouhaha? Or, following a gas nasty explosion, ought I skip PMQs and be in Clacton? Cloes Lane, Clacton it was. Talking to those affected by the blast. There will be another PMQs along soon enough.

Speaking at PMQs, or on Newsnight, or on the Today programme is the jam. What an MP does in their constituency – before the people that gave you the job in the first place – is the bread and butter of politics.

Over indulge on the former, without enough of the latter, and you risk political indigestion.

However matey MPs might become with pundits and pollsters in Westminster, there is one crucial difference. We depend on what the punters in the constituency think. They don't. Listen first to the voter.

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