London--People living in Britain's key swing constituencies have suffered blizzards of leaflets and armies of political canvassers vying for their vote ahead of a knife-edge election on May 7.
"It's awful really, leaflets come through the door even at nine o'clock at night," said pensioner Mary Kate Spencer, a resident of Hampstead and Kilburn -- the closest fought constituency in England.
"I don't even bother to read them."
Interested or not, Hampstead and Kilburn is a prime target for politicians, as the constituency spanning gritty high streets and some of London's wealthiest areas was won by Labour by just 42 votes in 2010 out of almost 53,000 ballots.
The constituency is a toss-up between the centre-right Conservative party of David Cameron, his junior coalition partners the Liberal Democrats, and the centre-left Labour party led by Ed Miliband.
Every seat is crucial in a race in which Labour and Conservative have been tied for months, with neither likely to win enough of the 650 constituency seats to form an outright majority.
In Hampstead and Kilburn, the race is a close one between Labour's Tulip Siddiq -- the niece of Bangladesh's prime minister -- and her Conservative challenger Simon Marcus, a retired rugby player.
The candidate for the Liberal Democrats, a party which trailed Labour here by just 841 votes in 2010, is Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist who now chairs the anti-extremist thinktank Quilliam.
Nawaz is thought to be behind his rivals, his campaign hindered by a video that emerged in the press of him receiving a dance in a strip club on what he has said was his stag night.
Nawaz wrote on his Facebook page that the footage was "vindictively leaked to the press" as part of a "a planned and sustained attack campaign".
AFP
