In a brief gap between knocking on doors, Gen Kitchen pauses to consider the paradox of the byelection she is fighting: in a seat with an 18,500 Conservative majority and two decades of Tory incumbency, virtually everyone expects her to win for Labour, and with some ease.
“It does worry me,” she concedes, shuffling the bundle of leaflets she is handing to residents on the estate of 1970s homes in Higham Ferrers, a small market town in Northamptonshire, a few miles outside Wellingborough.
