Spent most of the day in the Islington Conservatives’ office printing our campaign leaflets using an incredibly annoying machine called a Riso.

This is a large and noisy machine that prints only one colour at a time – black, blue, red etc. and obviously hates me as kept giving me paper jams when trying to feed the paper back in. I gave up using red in the end. Not really our colour anyway.

There is also an antique paper folding machine that wants to eat my fingers when I’m not paying attention. Despite that it was all rather more relaxing compared to walking up and down streets all day so I actually felt a bit more refreshed this morning.

While it would seem that the very best use of our time would be to pay someone to do all this and actually get out there ‘pressing the flesh’, there are quite strict electoral laws about the amount of spending that is allowed per candidate during the five weeks of a campaign.

Between our three candidates that equates to about £1,800 in total for an electorate of 8,500, which isn’t much at all. So sadly even if a passing billionaire decides to donate to our campaign now we can’t even spend more than that (please note: any generous billionaires should contact me via the website).

You can spend an unlimited amount of money up to the five-week point but then the public have barely been talking about the election until now so the impact is limited.

What’s more annoying is that we couldn’t really have these ready in advance as needed to wait for the official Conservative Party manifesto to come so we could match their pledges.

I’d have to say that while containing many good ideas such as reducing the size of the state it seems rather cautious overall. Though this is perhaps not surprising considering the main aim is to win power and should be viewed in comparison to Labour’s manifesto in 1997 which was equally non committal.