Three scholars with their sights set on Westminster explain what drives them to aspire to a career in politics

Source: Eleanor Bentall

Tim Valentine is professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is standing as the Green Party candidate for Faversham and Mid Kent

“The Green Party has never retained its deposit when standing for Parliament in Kent – we want to change that.”

As the Greens’ parliamentary candidate in the rock-solid Tory seat of Faversham and Mid Kent, Tim Valentine has modest hopes for next week’s general election.

Winning the 5 per cent of the vote needed to hang on to his £500 deposit would be a massive achievement for the professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is one of a handful of academics standing in this year’s general election, mostly in unwinnable seats.

“I saw the bookies had the Conservative candidate here as 100/1-on to take the seat,” says Valentine, who notes that his own odds to overturn the Tories’ 17,088-vote majority and win the seat aren’t even listed.

However, as he canvasses potential voters in Faversham market on a sunny Saturday afternoon in April, there is no sign that Valentine is disheartened by his slim hopes of becoming an MP.

Here, well-heeled Londoners weekending at their second homes peruse antiques stalls. The town’s most famous resident, Bob Geldof, strolls past unhurried as local townsfolk flit between the independent high street stores.

Outside the town’s 16th-century guildhall, a reminder of Faversham’s illustrious past when Henry VIII moored his fleet in its now silted-up harbour, Valentine stops shoppers young and old to ask how they will vote.

“You’re saying we don’t need an army,” says a Faversham resident who is unimpressed by the Greens’ plans to scrap the Trident nuclear weapons programme and shrink the UK’s armed services to a small-scale “home defence force”.

“If we don’t stand up to Putin, who will?” he adds, as Valentine valiantly tries to engage him on other issues, such as the need to crack down on tax avoidance and to support the NHS.

Approached by a painter and decorator working on a nearby derelict store who wishes to discuss support for small businesses, Valentine extols at length the merits of paying a £10 minimum wage.

In fact, the tradesman wants the current £6.50 rate reduced, as he says he can hardly afford to pay it to casual labourers. Valentine will not budge on the topic, arguing that firms will retain skilled staff if they pay them better.

Does Valentine find the switch from academia to electioneering difficult? In his specialist field of facial recognition studies, he is an esteemed international authority who has advised the FBI and the Metropolitan Police on identification issues.

Appointed a professor aged just 36, he has also acted as an expert witness in several high-profile cases of disputed identity, including the appeals of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and of Barry George, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando.

But that means nothing on the streets of Faversham, whose inhabitants see him as just another local politician asking for their vote. As a Green in deepest Tory Kent, the knock-backs far outweigh the positive responses.

Does that bother Valentine as someone whose opinion, at least professionally, is normally in demand?

“I’ve been an environmental campaigner for a long time, so I’m used to speaking to people – some support you, some don’t,” he says.

“If someone is upset at what you’ve said, I know it’s unlikely you’re going to change their mind in one go, but you might leave one idea with them.”

Being the only local candidate is one way that Valentine believes he can improve on the 2 per cent of votes (890 in total) that he gained when he stood in 2010.

With Sir Hugh Robertson, the popular former Olympics minister, vacating the seat after 14 years, McKinsey management consultant Helen Whately has been parachuted in to the constituency by the Conservatives.

Labour has drafted in Michael Desmond, a councillor from Hackney in London, and the Liberal Democrats are represented by David Naghi, a councillor from Maidstone, which is a 30-minute drive west of the constituency. The Ukip candidate, Peter Edwards-Daem, lives near Maidstone.

On local issues – from the state of double yellow lines in the market to potential plans to dredge the harbour and revive the boat-building industry – Valentine does well with voters.

“I don’t drive, so I’m not happy they’ve moved the outpatient services in Faversham to Whitstable recently,” says Muriel Buck, 77, who says she always votes Green.

With Green Party membership in Kent quadrupling in the past year to 1,300 – a rise thought to be attributable partly to its opposition to fracking – Valentine believes he can do better than before.

“Until a few months ago we had only 30 members in Faversham – we now have 130,” he says.

Today, a team of about 20 party activists gathered in The Market Inn are primed to knock on doors and deliver flyers. Valentine’s wife, Viv Moore, who is also a psychology academic at Goldsmiths, is advising them on how to get leaflets through odd-shaped letterboxes.

A number of green-painted spatulas are distributed to help the party faithful accomplish this tricky task.

“Some letterboxes are surprisingly spring-loaded,” explains volunteer Gavin McGregor, who says it is easy to get fingers trapped while distributing party literature.

But he believes that it is worth the effort: there are votes to be won.

“Faversham is Tory, but it’s quite quirky,” says McGregor. He thinks that the Greens’ support for the town’s numerous independent shops will chime with some Conservative voters.

While Valentine’s supporters knock on doors in target streets in Faversham, he works the town centre.

Outside Shepherd Neame, Britain’s oldest brewer and Faversham’s largest employer, he explains how academia has played a big part in his conversion from Labour supporter to Green candidate.

While working at Durham University in the early 1990s, he became involved in a campaign to stop the burning of hazardous waste at a cement kiln near his home in Weardale.

He eventually bought shares in the company behind the scheme so that he could speak at its annual general meeting.

“I discovered that owning shares opens a few doors and helps to influence decision-making,” he says – a principle he has attempted to apply to the UK higher education sector’s main pension fund, the £48 billion Universities Superannuation Scheme, which covers about 300,000 university staff.

As a leading figure in ShareAction, a charity that “promotes responsible investment by pension funds” and has campaigned for the USS to divest itself of its fossil fuel assets, Valentine has been active in promoting green issues to his academic colleagues.

“We know we need to keep most of the world’s oil and gas in the ground if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, but the USS is heavily invested in Shell.

“Shell’s entire business model is based on extracting large amounts of these reserves, so its success is contingent on damaging the environment,” he says, adding that academics’ views on this issue must be heard.

Valentine has been stepping up his campaigning in Faversham as the election approaches. He is “working a lot of evenings and weekends” in addition to his university commitments, he explains.

He won’t win, but he believes that he can establish a platform for a future candidate to one day take the seat and establish the Green Party as a significant political force.

“It’s true blue Tory country, but if there is no Green candidate, people can’t vote for us.

“If we don’t do the groundwork now, we won’t be able to win seats when our chance finally arises.”

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