The personal pitch

As a constituent in Oxford West and Abingdon, I was interested in the review by Danny Dorling of Emma Crewe’s The House of Commons: An Anthropology of MPs at Work (Books, 16 April).

I didn’t vote for Nicola Blackwood, who was returned for the Conservatives in 2010, and have no intention of voting for her in the upcoming general election. However, the suggestion, made three times, that she somehow “stole” her seat in the 2010 general election is quite outrageous. Blackwood’s crime appears to have been to determine what issues were of importance to the electorate in the constituency and to address those issues in campaign literature. All electioneering attempts to focus on voters’ key concerns; Blackwood did nothing more than personalise that electioneering to individuals.

We live in a representative democracy. It does that democracy no good if we decry attempts to represent constituents.

David Prosser
Oxford