It’s hard to say who was more surprised on election night. The Tory candidate or Gisela Stuart. It wasn’t that we hadn’t fought a good campaign – our returns were actually pretty good – and the sampling that we did on the night looked promising.

But when the national swing of 5 per cent was announced (6.3 per cent in the West Midlands), and then the Sunderland results came out, we resigned ourselves to looking at how much our work had bucked the trend. Victory seemed a distant hope.

Gisela’s smile in 1997 had heralded the Labour landslide as the first televised gain of the election. In 2010 however, with only a 2 per cent swing required by the Tories and at number 39 in their target list, most people thought Gisela wouldn’t be smiling by May 7th. Local Tories had even sent Gisela links to a P45! The 2 per cent swing never came. In fact, the swing to the Tories was just 0.5 per cent.

There were, as always, many factors in play. Gisela had worked the patch assiduously for 13 years. She’s a well respected, hard working local MP. She had a well deserved reputation as an independent thinker and had stuck her head above the parapet on several occasions including during the row about the abolition of the 10p rate of tax and the Lisbon Treaty. But as many hardworking former MPs will tell you, and in times of party political difficulty in particular, working hard quite often isn’t enough.

What differentiated our campaign from those we had undertaken previously was how many people were involved and how trained and motivated those volunteers were. We had started our activist recruitment campaign in 2008 after watching Obama’s incredible victory. Their field organisers had been measured not on number of contacts they made but on how many people they recruited and trained. We set out to do the same.

By the time of the election 2010 we had tripled our activist base through a concerted and strategic campaign. We used all opportunities to identify possible helpers and then followed them up systematically. As the numbers rose we made sure we thanked our helpers repeatedly including a number of social events where the express purpose was to do just that -  rather than to fleece them for every penny they had!

Keeping track of everyone was difficult – so many were non members we couldn’t use our existing system and had to switch to an alternative. At every opportunity we looked to use the skills that people had and slot them in the team at a level where they felt comfortable. People who made suggestions were always asked to take responsibility. Volunteers learned fast in what was a largely flat and open structure – don’t talk about an idea you aren’t prepared to implement.

By polling day we had a larger than expected team (running out of clipboards was not on my worry list at the start of the campaign but on polling day we did). From the outside the operation may have looked somewhat chaotic – and as with all things there were lessons to be learnt – but fundamentally it worked. Knowledge, skills and motivation were in the hands of the many not the few and in the end it was that, combined with a strong well respected incumbent, which made the difference.

By Caroline Badley, Gisela Stuart’s campaign manager