Who will come second in the fight for freedom?

David Davis's resignation has triggered not just a byelection but a scramble for publicity

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• 
• • Ian Jack
  • The Guardian,
  • Saturday July 5, 2008

An idea has got about that by resigning his parliamentary seat and standing in the consequent byelection - like a bungee-jumper's suicide bid or Joan of Arc on a pile of wet faggots - David Davis has alerted us to the dangers of an overweening state and jerked awake a dormant passion in the English soul. "As I see it," Jan Morris wrote in this newspaper last week, "Davis's display concerns not just political liberty but liberty of the mind, of the identity, of the spirit ... nothing less than a view of life itself, which civilised peoples have so painstakingly fashioned down the centuries ... a few more generations of nagging and surveillance and we shall have forgotten what true freedom is."

Can it be so? Is Davis fighting for our liberty? Of all the views I heard in Davis's former (soon to be present) constituency this week, that was the rarest.

The nearest expression of it from a potential voter in Haltemprice and Howden came from a brisk silver-haired woman passing the Tory stall at Cottingham market: "He'll get my vote. A man of integrity at last!"

Cottingham lies at the far eastern end of a constituency that stretches along the north bank of the Humber from Hull to Goole. Founded by 6th century Anglo-Saxons, it once claimed to be the largest village in England but is now joined to Hull by suburban sprawl. It has a 14th-century church, a pleasant market square and approachable inhabitants.

Several of the 26 candidates were stalking the main street; the electorate of Haltemprice and Howden is bunched at each of end of the constituency, so Cottingham on market day offered the prize of an unusual amount of pedestrian traffic. As well as the Tories, the Green party, the Miss Great Britain party and the Socialist Equality party were there, and the independents Eamonn "Fitzy" Fitzpatrick and Thomas Faithful Darwood. Nobody had seen Mad Cow-Girl (Official Monster Raving Loonies) or Ronnie Carroll (Make Politicians History), the latter absence a personal disappointment to me because I remember paying sixpence to hear his song Say Wonderful Things to Me ("I think you're wonderful too") on a jukebox in 1963.

I went for a drink with the Green party candidate, Shan Oakes. Because the pub garden was quiet - two women murmuring over two pints, three or four smokers reading - and because Ms Oakes' voice had still to moderate from full canvassing pitch, our conversation was easily overheard. People joined in - an impromptu focus group.

Long-haired man in a T-shirt: "A lot of people round here want the 42 days [maximum detention without charge]. Yeah, they say, go for it. Make it more! I still can't see Davis being ousted though, which is a shame because I think he's a total dipstick."

Respectable elderly woman: "I can't see what all the furore is about. I've not heard anybody I know talking about it."

Younger woman: "I agree with CCTV cameras. We need more of them. The kids in my area - there's no stopping them. And the police do nothing - nothing ever happens."

T-shirt man: "Haven't you got CCTV in your street then? Aren't they studying the pictures and following up all those leads?"

Younger woman: "The camera's broke."

Elderly woman: "I think Davis wanted to be in the public eye. Knight-on-a-charger sort of thing. He certainly never asked his constituents."

Younger woman: "Violation of human rights! Don't talk to me about it. I think it's time that Britain was Britain again. I'm sounding racist here, but I'm not. I know there's not a lot of our culture left, but they've got to respect our culture."

In the street, sheltering in a doorway from a sudden downpour, I met a parish councillor. How about Davis? "A good constituency MP, but what he did was absolutely wrong. It's costing us money, and for what?" Simon Reevell, a barrister, who is helping the Davis campaign, thought the "what" lay partly in the raising of public awareness about the fallibility of DNA and CCTV evidence. A meeting held by Cameron and Davis the previous evening at South Hunsley school had yielded a stimulating discussion with sixth-formers over the 42 days question - "the young are interested". There is no lack of famous names. Tony Benn has been up to give Davis his support and appears in the campaign literature. Reevell said Bob Geldof was due, "and he's the next best thing to Nelson Mandela". The only question is, who will come second?

My money would be on the Greens; they have a timely manifesto. Third, fourth and so on, is anybody's guess. Miss Great Britain is a friendly young woman from Belfast, Gemma Garrett, who has cousins serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and wants better pay for the troops. She also stood in Crewe, where she said she was in tears most of the time because the Labour party made fun of her spelling. In Haltemprice, a mischievous reporter asked her about the West Lothian question, which her minder, Robert de Keyser, thought completely below the belt. Miss Great Britain is his brand, so it might not be too sceptical to think he's spending £35,000 on her campaign to attract publicity. But then publicity is what all of them are after. Stand as a reporter in Cottingham market and you are as a lamp to moths.

Fitzpatrick, a 58-year-old fruit and veg dealer, came all the way from Northampton by taxi to pay his £500 deposit and stay 10 days in a small hotel. His message is: "Forty-days detention is a reasonable act for unreasonable people. I love my liberty; an honest man has nothing to fear." Tom Darwood, a carpenter, has travelled from Essex also at the price of his deposit and some nights in a B&B. As I understood it, he has the perfect CV (wasn't Joseph also a carpenter?) to become Britain's first elected sovereign, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or (his voice grew hushed here) the Pope. What troubled them most was obscurity.

If only because of her lack of exhibitionism, Jill Saward stands out among these independent candidates. She wasn't in Cottingham market. We met at a hotel in Hull, where she said she was "petrified" by the thought of approaching people in the street and talking to them. "My way is getting alongside people waiting at bus stops and having a chat." In this election she personifies the most articulate opposition to Davis's stance. In 1986 she was raped by burglars at her father's vicarage in Ealing. Since then she has campaigned for better help for rape victims. She wasn't impressed by Davis's small attention to this issue when he was shadow home secretary. She wants more surveillance, more CCTV, more DNA testing. "We don't live in nice old Magna Carta England any more,' she said.

On the one hand, an argument that says the state is becoming too powerful. On the other, a fear that it is increasingly weak. Haltemprice will elect David Davis because of his party, but the popularity of his beliefs will remain unproved. As an independent newcomer campaigning for liberty he might struggle, like Miss Great Britain, to save his £500.