UK: Kathy Sheridan, in East Kilbride, Scotland, meets a cleaner who is challenging a Labour defence minister
They cut an unlikely campaign team, the middle-aged candidate in her denim jacket and jeans, the bottoms soaked from the rain, and her young agent with the nose piercing and blazing purple hair. It's the Sunday of a miserable bank holiday weekend and they've been standing outside East Kilbride shopping centre for five hours, with only their bedraggled, bone-weary demeanour to distinguish them from the rest of the glassy-eyed humanity trudging through the mammoth shopping malls.
They have no placards or banners to mark them as campaigners. Their Blair and Bush masks have gone missing and the "ghost" outfit topped with a mask of Adam Ingram (the Labour candidate with a near 30 per cent majority and characterised by them as the "ghost candidate") has been left at home as the campaign seems to be reduced to the agent, her candidate and just two activists this afternoon.
Only a motivation of life-changing proportions could impel an ordinary woman, a cleaner in Pollok shopping centre, into such an unequal contest - but Rose Gentle has one. When her 19-year-old only son, Gordon, under-equipped and raw after only 24 weeks' training, was killed in a roadside blast in Iraq last June, her husband, a construction worker, simply stopped functioning and went on income support.
Rose, fired by grief and rage at how a cause purportedly about WMDs could suddenly transmogrify into one about regime change, threw herself into the anti-war movement.
When an election presented itself, she took aim at the constituency of East Kilbride, a few miles from her Pollok home, and the seat of Adam Ingram, a former minister of state in the Northern Ireland Office, now minister for the armed forces in the ministry of defence.
"Anger made me do it," says Gentle. "I knew Tony Blair was lying about the war from the beginning.
"If my son had died because of WMDs, it would have made a big difference to how I feel now. But he didn't. He died for a lie."
She is accused by Ingram of being a single-issue candidate - indeed he has just used this as a pretext for turning down an invitation to join Gentle and the rest of the candidates in a hustings debate tonight - but she counters this by claiming that "it's much more than that. . . It's ordinary people who are paying the price of the war. Between four and six billion pounds of our taxes have been wasted on this lie, when where it's really needed is in schools and hospitals and pensions."
And the story of Gordon as she tells it could be the story of any young lad from a deprived area left with few choices. It was when he went to the unemployment office for the first time that he met an army recruiting team. Within three weeks he was in training. "When you look around and see what he saw ahead of him here," says Gentle, her voice trailing off for a moment. "He saw the army as a way to become a motor mechanic. Some of his friends round here are doing cleaning jobs in schools."
Louise Taylor, her agent who "didn't even know what an agent was" until a few weeks ago, herself a single mother from Pollok trying to climb out of the poverty trap by education, talks about "high unemployment" but is unable to put a figure on it.
This foggy grasp of the issues is just part of the problem. On the one hand, Gentle has been getting plenty of media coverage here and as a result is a recognisable figure in certain areas.
Women she doesn't know come over to hug her and shed a few tears; elderly men slip fivers into her hand for her tiny campaign fund. She has had activists come to help from all over Scotland.
Several traditional Labour voters say they will switch to Gentle this time. But several others suck their teeth and echo what one called Martin has to say: "I dunno. Rose is a hard case.
"With that Glasgow accent, I just can't see her in Westminster meself."
Her election here would require a miracle and Gentle herself doesn't expect one, although she insists "nobody can have any idea of the effect of this campaign until the count".
But the release - finally - of the attorney general's full advice has buoyed her spirits.
With the aid of funds from the Stop the War organisation, she intends to use the European Convention on Human Rights to take Tony Blair to court over the death of her son and what she describes as "war crimes".
"Whatever happens, I can always say I tried. And it's not over. I'll see Mr Blair in court"
