Derry man Steve Bradley looking to clean up in Bath

Steve Bradley’s father, Pat, stood at a podium in the King’s Hall in Belfast surrounded by television cameras in 1998 to announce the Belfast Agreement referendum result to the world.

Back then, Bradley snr was Northern Ireland’s chief electoral officer. Today, his son is running as a Liberal Democrat candidate in Bath, hoping for his own place at the podium in the early hours of May 8th.

The fight has been a long one, says Bradley, as he emerges from the Liberal Democrats’ constituency office in James Street West, since he has been campaigning full-time for a year.

“I haven’t had any paid work for near enough a year now. I don’t have a particularly extravagant lifestyle. The car runs on electricity; I haven’t had a holiday in God knows how long,” he says, though he is not complaining.

The Somerset city has been held by the Liberal Democrats since Don Foster created one of the upsets of the 1992 general election by defeating then Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten.

Student

Derry-born Bradley’s connections with the Somerset city – filled with golden-coloured limestone Georgian homes that stand as sentries to the Roman baths that have drawn people for centuries – date back to 1991.

Then he had been a student at the University of Bath, taking a four-year business degree before becoming full-time head of the university's National Union of Students (NUS) branch.

Raised on Culmore Road in Derry, Bradley had left the Maiden City unimpressed by politics, even if he had always seen himself as “more of a natural Labour supporter”.

In Bath he led a campaign to force the local bus company to cut its fares to the university: “It was a cash cow for them. The university is at the top of a hill. You drove there or got the bus.

“Students were at their mercy. We tried to negotiate with them. Then we brought in a small bus company. A massive price war began; the place was flooded with buses,” he says.

The battle became a local cause célèbre: ITV West filmed two documentaries and Private Eye covered it frequently. "I knew we could make it their Vietnam. We couldn't beat them, but we could could drag it out," Bradley says.

Local Conservatives “never answered a single phonecall or letter. It was the Liberal Democrats who came to us and said, ‘We love what you are doing, how can we help?’”

Twenty years on, Bath students still have “the best fare, the highest frequency and late-night runnings, which was something that we brought in then”, Bradley says.

His time in the students' union turned him off Labour: "I didn't like what I saw of Labour. It effectively controls the NUS and has done for years. Jim Murphy [now Scottish Labour leader] was president when I was there.

“It’s a conveyor belt for Labour politicians. I didn’t like the control freakery, all the bad things that you saw during the Blair years before they happened. There was intolerance of any dissenting views, smearing of enemies,” he says.

Following his departure from university, Bradley left for work with Procter & Gamble in Newcastle and, later, with Disney in London, but he kept up his ties with the city.

If buses in Bath had developed his ties to the Liberal Democrats, it was the Iraq War that brought Bradley off the sidelines. "That was a real eye-opener for me," he says.

March

A million people marched in London in February 2003, including Disney colleagues who had no interest in politics: “That really inspired me. I thought people didn’t care. That showed me that they did.”

From there, Bradley contested a Brixton ward in the 2006 local elections. Defeated, he returned two years later and won a byelection, partly on the back of harnessing local anger about a badly performing CCTV system.

Today, Bradley is contesting a seat that should be one of the Liberal Democrats’ safest, but there is little predictable about this election. “We would be confident of winning, but not complacent,” he says.

His Conservative opponent, Ben Howlett, has been gaffe-prone, telling one party association he admired Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams when they asked him to choose from a selection of Northern Ireland politicians. Labour candidate Ollie Middleton, meanwhile, is 18 years old.

“Our main problem is not with the Tories; it is people drifting away to other parties because of disillusion with politics. We used to get a lot of the protest vote.

“The danger is of the anti-Conservative vote being split. A lot of people here don’t want a Conservative MP. The danger is that they wake up on May 8th with one if they vote for a smaller party.”