Why the Labour candidate with the smallest majority might just win If anyone in the UK started clearing their desk as Theresa May called her snap general election back on April […]

If anyone in the UK started clearing their desk as Theresa May called her snap general election back on April 18, you might have thought it would be Chris Matheson.

The Labour candidate for the City of Chester has the dubious honour of possessing Labour’s smallest majority – he took the Cheshire marginal by just 93 votes from the Conservatives in 2015 – and with the polls as they were six weeks ago, Mrs May’s announcement should have doubled as Mr Matheson’s P45.

Lorelai and Heather Sanson have other ideas. “Vote Labour, vote Labour,” the former chanted, an “I love the NHS” badge pinned prominently on her anorak. As the sisters sheltered from the rain under Chester’s famous Roman walls, Heather then sought to explain her proposal for lowering the voting age; those over the age of 16 should automatically be allowed to vote, she argued, with anyone younger able to take a test to demonstrate their suitability as an elector.

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“I agree with what Corbyn says and I don’t like the Conservatives,” she added. “I just really find politics interesting.”

Unfortunately for Mr Matheson – and Mr Corbyn – Lorelai and Heather Sanson are aged seven and nine.

Chester: A marginal seat Labour must win

While their political engagement is laudable, their mother Stacey will be of more tangible assistance on June 8. She will be voting Labour, unlike at the last election, because of what she sees as damaging cuts and reforms to social care. “I’m a carer and my mum’s disabled, and I can’t keep watching what they are doing to my mum,” she said. “It should be illegal.”

Mrs Sanson, 30, who home educates her children and helps her husband with his work as a motorsport commentator, also dislikes proposed Conservative changes to the rules around small businesses. But local factors as well as national policies have helped decide her vote. Mr Matheson, she said, was a “brilliant” MP after entering Westminster in 2015. “I know people keep saying it is a marginal constituency but I can’t see him losing it. I’ve lived here 15 years and I’ve never known a local MP so involved.”

With the Conservative campaign faltering and polls tightening, could Labour hang on in a seat that Mrs May might recently have expected to take without breaking a sweat? “If the election was purely among my friends, Labour would win by a landslide,” said Mrs Sanson. While she admits to living in an “echo chamber,” her husband, because of his work, does not. He’s convinced the Conservatives will win the national vote easily, she said. And in Chester? “He thinks Chris has got it in the bag too.”

‘Labour has been around to my house but not the Conservatives’

Mrs Sanson and her Corbynite daughters were not alone in their admiration for Mr Matheson, an LSE graduate and former trade union official. Pensioner Barrie Mills won’t be helping him keep his job next week, because he doesn’t want “that idiot” who runs the Labour party to be Prime Minister, but even this lifelong Tory said that his constituency representative was “very nice”. “I don’t know anything about the Conservative candidate,” the 75-year-old added, echoing a comment heard more than once during i’s entirely unscientific canvassing of Chester residents.

“Labour have been around to the house but not the Conservatives.” Asked whether Mrs May will still be in Downing Street on 9 June, Mr Mills was optimistic but not convinced. “I think they will get in but not with the majority they were hoping for,” he said, citing “mistakes” including on the pensions triple lock and winter fuel allowance.

Education cuts protest at the cross, @ChrisM4Chester speaks to the media pic.twitter.com/73TNv5MRXe — shitchester (@ShitChester) March 25, 2017

Joanne, a secondary school maths teacher who declined to give her surname, expressed a similar sense of things not quite going to the Tory plan. “When the election was first called, I thought it was a shrewd move but I’m not so sure any more,” she said. Asked for her reflections on the campaign, this undecided voter said: “I think that Jeremy Corbyn is a much better campaigner than Theresa May from what I’ve seen so far, which is not necessarily what I would have expected. I think he has the ability to ignite passion in people which she seems to lack.”

Chester isn’t as affluent as it might appear

Walking among the tourists who had come to see Chester’s genteel, historic centre, Joanne knows that the city – which before 1997 was safe blue turf and whose previous MPs include Gyles Brandreth – is not as universally affluent as it might appear at first glance. “I don’t think grammar schools are the answer”, she said, when asked for her take on the parties’ education policies, but “I’m not of the standard view that it [education] needs more funding. Sometimes you need to look at the way the funding is spent.”

The 40-year-old does quite like the Conservatives’ proposal to switch free primary school lunches for breakfasts. “That’s probably a better meal to have because you don’t know whether the kids are spending the morning on an empty stomach,” she said. “If there was the funding I would have all school meals free. It’s a leveller; sometimes there’s a stigma attached to free meals.”

Can Labour hold on locally? “Chester is a funny one, it goes backwards and forwards,” Joanne said. This is true, at least in recent years, and those alternations are not always in line with the country at large; the city was one of only ten constituencies that the Conservatives lost to Ed Miliband’s Labour two years ago. If Mr Matheson is to stage what in April would have seemed a most unlikely defence of his seat, it might just be younger voters that clinch it.

‘A sense of younger people getting involved’

Not quite as young as Lorelai and Heather, perhaps, but Suzanne Tankard, a ward manager at the local Countess of Chester hospital, said she has been struck by “a sense of younger people in Chester getting involved.” She counts her sons, aged 24 and 30, in this. “I don’t think they voted in the previous election,” the 52-year-old said. They will be turning out for Labour this time, because of “education and healthcare. They don’t agree with the cuts”.

Among her own friends too, she is sensing a shift of opinion. “I think May took a chance when she called the election because at the time Corbyn was portrayed as a bad leader…But now people are beginning to see him as a leader. Maybe not as a manager, but as a leader who can inspire people.”

Mrs Tankard’s own vote will be going to Mr Matheson, and if her impressions of the mood in Chester are accurate, he might not be out of a job after all. “Initially people were saying Labour was a wasted vote,” she said. “But people aren’t saying that any more.