Will Olmi is a lifelong Wandsworth resident who has lived, worked and been educated in the London borough and stood for election last month.
There are many sensible routes into politics.
Some people study PPE at Oxford.
Some become parliamentary researchers.
Others spend years climbing party structures, mastering policy papers and learning how to nod gravely while discussing refuse collection targets.
I, meanwhile, became a council candidate because I got annoyed with my local council.
That, in simple terms, is the honest answer.
Like many residents, I had reached peak frustration with what I saw as astonishingly poor governance in the borough where I live. Potholes flourished. Decisions baffled. Communication from the council often felt as though it had been drafted by a malfunctioning chatbot trained exclusively on parking fines and passive aggression.
And so, in what can only be described as a meteoric political rise, I went from:
- no party membership,
- to part-time leaflet delivery boy,
- to official council candidate,
in the space of a few short months.
History may record this as one of the least anticipated ascents to public office ever witnessed in suburban London.
What followed was my introduction to the strange, exhausting and oddly heartwarming world of local politics.
I suddenly found myself surrounded by politically savvy campaigners and candidates who possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of ward boundaries, bin collection policy, and tactical voting patterns from 1998 onwards.
With one exception, me.
I arrived equipped mainly with enthusiasm, mild confusion, and footwear wholly unsuited to walking what turned out to be the approximate distance of several European nations.
What surprised me most, however, was the people.
Politics encourages stereotypes. We all carry them around, I certainly did. But spending time with campaigners and activists taught me very quickly that political stereotyping is fundamentally flawed.
The overwhelming majority of people I met were thoughtful, decent, and deeply committed to improving the places where they lived. They gave up evenings, weekends, and alarming quantities of energy simply because they cared.
Of course, there were a few shark-like individuals lurking in the political waters, every profession has them.
But overwhelmingly, I was welcomed into a community of extraordinarily kind and motivated people who believed, often sincerely, that local government could make life better.
That was unexpectedly moving.
What I had not anticipated, however, was the physical punishment.
I used to be reasonably athletic. In my younger years I was a decent sportsman, and I’ve stayed relatively fit. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for the final week of election campaigning.
It was, without question, the most physically gruelling experience I have ever voluntarily undertaken.
By polling day, I had effectively completed back-to-back marathons while carrying campaign literature and climbing endless flights of front-door steps. Thousands upon thousands of leaflets were delivered. More than a thousand doorstep conversations took place. There were campaign strategy meetings, late-night debriefs, emergency printing runs, and endless discussions about swing voters in roads I previously didn’t know existed.
By the end of it I was thinner, creakier, and permanently smelled of printer ink.
And then there were the letterboxes.
Ah yes, Letterboxes.
Before campaigning, I naively believed all letterboxes were essentially the same. An opening in a door. A simple mechanical device. Functional. Unremarkable.
I now know this to be false.
Over the months I developed deeply personal relationships with letterboxes across the borough. Some I learned to love. Others I came to despise with a passion usually reserved for council tax increases.
I discovered, for example, that the ideal letterbox is:
- wide enough for unfolded A4 literature,
- fitted with a moderate spring,
- positioned conveniently at waist height,
- and, crucially, lacking internal brush attachments capable of removing skin from human knuckles.
This is the gold standard of democratic infrastructure.
Second place belongs to the slightly narrower model requiring only one polite fold of campaign literature before acceptance.
But perhaps the greatest joy of all was the dog-activated letterbox.
These were magnificent.
The sequence never varied. One inserts perhaps a centimetre of leaflet through the slot before an unseen canine launches into action with the speed and aggression of a police raid.
SNATCH!
What follows is a glorious frenzy of barking, paper-shredding and ecstatic chaos occurring entirely on the other side of the door.
Every single time, I laughed out loud.
Partly because the whole scene resembled a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and partly because of the tiny adrenaline rush caused by the mild but genuine possibility of losing a fingertip in the democratic process.
In an increasingly digital world, there was something oddly reassuring about this level of automation.
Then there were the old Victorian letterboxes, black iron relics from a time when Britain ruled a quarter of the globe but apparently still couldn’t standardise postal apertures.
These elegant survivors are typically around eight inches wide and three inches high, dimensions which strongly suggest their designers never envisaged modern campaign leaflets, takeaway menus, or indeed democracy itself. They require what seasoned campaigners refer to simply as “the roll”, a delicate manoeuvre involving lightly compressing an A4 leaflet into something resembling a Victorian railway blueprint before attempting insertion.
Mildly frustrating, yes, but oddly satisfying when successful. There is a pleasing little clop as the loose internal flap gives way and the leaflet disappears into the darkness beyond. In local politics, one learns to celebrate small victories.
And then, every so often, perhaps one in every three hundred houses, comes the mythical unicorn of the campaign trail.
Just… a hole in the door.
No flap. No spring. No medieval torture mechanism. No hidden brush designed to exfoliate the unsuspecting. Simply a clean opening allowing smooth, elegant, one-handed delivery. The leaflet glides through effortlessly with all the grace and efficiency sadly absent from most local government planning departments.
One can only dream of a world where these are the national standard.
Naturally, such sensible design has absolutely no chance of ever being adopted in Britain.
But now we move into a far darker and more emotionally charged category:
My top three most hated letterboxes.
In ascending order.
Third place goes to the ground-level letterbox. For me, at six feet, these are less a postal feature and more a sustained assault on the structural integrity of the human spine. By the final week of campaigning, lowering myself toward these tiny brass openings required the sort of slow, mechanically cautious descent normally associated with offshore drilling equipment.
Each delivery became an involuntary referendum on the future viability of my knees.
After several hundred repetitions, I began to understand why so many politicians appear reluctant to lower themselves toward ordinary people. It is exhausting, uncomfortable, and one is never entirely sure one will successfully get back up again.
Second place belongs to the vertical spring-loaded flap, the passive-aggressive coalition government of the letterbox world.
At first glance it appears functional, even reasonable. But the moment you attempt delivery, it reveals itself to be an overcomplicated bureaucratic nightmare requiring cross-party coordination between elbows, wrists, thumbs and occasionally a knee. The flap itself possesses the spring tension of a NATO missile silo, while the narrow vertical opening forces the leaflet into an awkward sideways insertion manoeuvre that almost always ends in failure.
The final product emerging inside the property resembles a campaign promise after six months in office: crumpled, compromised, and visibly damaged by the process.
And finally, in undisputed first place, comes the knuckle remover with brush interior.
This is not so much a letterbox as a hostile border policy.
The outer flap lures you in with false optimism before the internal brush arrangement, seemingly constructed from old chimney sweep equipment and concentrated malice, clamps around your hand like a budget committee protecting pension liabilities.
Successful delivery requires full hand insertion and complete abandonment of personal safety. Withdrawal, meanwhile, becomes a high-risk operation involving trapped knuckles, shredded skin, and the sudden violent snap of the flap closing behind you like a local authority shutting public toilets to save money.
By the end of the campaign, my hands looked less like those of a prospective councillor and more like a Victorian dock worker who had lost an argument with industrial machinery.
I now possess a level of respect for postmen and women bordering on reverence.
Frankly, bring back the Christmas box, I say.
If society can subsidise electric scooters and consultant reports about active travel, surely, we can reward the brave souls who daily place their fingers into mechanical death slots in service of British communication.
Putting my now encyclopaedic knowledge of letterboxes aside, my unsuccessful tilt at councillorship gave me far more than I ever expected.
Firstly, I got to experience election night as a candidate, a truly surreal emotional experience best described as repeatedly alternating between “we are so back” and “it’s completely over” every four and a half minutes.
One minute you’re convinced there’s a great democratic surge building behind you because somebody in a church hall whispered that turnout “looks promising”. The next, you’re staring blankly at a tray of mini sausage rolls trying to mentally calculate whether fourteen votes from a polling district near the library constitutes momentum or total collapse.
The highs and lows came in waves.
Mostly lows.
Then another high.
Then a low wearing a rosette.
I also got the opportunity to help complete strangers during the campaign, people needing advice, reassurance, directions, practical support, or simply somebody willing to listen for five minutes on a rainy doorstep. In the noise and cynicism that often surrounds politics, those moments quietly reminded me what local government is actually supposed to be about.
People.
Not slogans.
Not social media arguments.
Not performative outrage from people with “Senior Policy Thought Leader” in their LinkedIn biographies.
Just people trying to get through life.
The campaign also reminded me, repeatedly and often painfully, that I am no longer a young man.
Should I ever stand again, I will prepare properly. Not with policy briefings or media training, but with a Rocky-style high-altitude endurance camp somewhere in the Andes. Leaflet delivery at scale is not campaigning; it is an ultra-endurance event occasionally interrupted by discussions about parking permits.
By polling day, I was consuming carbohydrates like a Tour de France cyclist and making involuntary noises every time I sat down.
But perhaps most importantly, this strange accidental adventure allowed me to become part of a community.
And that genuinely meant something.
I was welcomed by people from completely different backgrounds, careers, ages and outlooks, all united by one common purpose: wanting to serve others in whatever way they could. I met people who gave up evenings, weekends, sleep, comfort, and enormous amounts of energy simply because they cared about the places and people around them.
Some became teammates.
Some became friends.
A few probably still owe me a pint after making me carry leaflet boxes uphill.
But all of them made the experience worthwhile.
Politics from the outside can look tribal, cynical and transactional. And yes, occasionally it absolutely is. But behind the scenes I found humour, kindness, loyalty, exhaustion, optimism, and some truly heroic tolerance for terrible weather.
So, would I do it again?
Hell yeah!
Though next time I’m bringing better shoes, cowhide gloves, and possibly a chiropractor.
Will Olmi is a lifelong Wandsworth resident who has lived, worked and been educated in the London borough and stood for election last month.
There are many sensible routes into politics.
Some people study PPE at Oxford.
Some become parliamentary researchers.
Others spend years climbing party structures, mastering policy papers and learning how to nod gravely while discussing refuse collection targets.
I, meanwhile, became a council candidate because I got annoyed with my local council.
That, in simple terms, is the honest answer.
Like many residents, I had reached peak frustration with what I saw as astonishingly poor governance in the borough where I live. Potholes flourished. Decisions baffled. Communication from the council often felt as though it had been drafted by a malfunctioning chatbot trained exclusively on parking fines and passive aggression.
And so, in what can only be described as a meteoric political rise, I went from:
in the space of a few short months.
History may record this as one of the least anticipated ascents to public office ever witnessed in suburban London.
What followed was my introduction to the strange, exhausting and oddly heartwarming world of local politics.
I suddenly found myself surrounded by politically savvy campaigners and candidates who possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of ward boundaries, bin collection policy, and tactical voting patterns from 1998 onwards.
With one exception, me.
I arrived equipped mainly with enthusiasm, mild confusion, and footwear wholly unsuited to walking what turned out to be the approximate distance of several European nations.
What surprised me most, however, was the people.
Politics encourages stereotypes. We all carry them around, I certainly did. But spending time with campaigners and activists taught me very quickly that political stereotyping is fundamentally flawed.
The overwhelming majority of people I met were thoughtful, decent, and deeply committed to improving the places where they lived. They gave up evenings, weekends, and alarming quantities of energy simply because they cared.
Of course, there were a few shark-like individuals lurking in the political waters, every profession has them.
But overwhelmingly, I was welcomed into a community of extraordinarily kind and motivated people who believed, often sincerely, that local government could make life better.
That was unexpectedly moving.
What I had not anticipated, however, was the physical punishment.
I used to be reasonably athletic. In my younger years I was a decent sportsman, and I’ve stayed relatively fit. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for the final week of election campaigning.
It was, without question, the most physically gruelling experience I have ever voluntarily undertaken.
By polling day, I had effectively completed back-to-back marathons while carrying campaign literature and climbing endless flights of front-door steps. Thousands upon thousands of leaflets were delivered. More than a thousand doorstep conversations took place. There were campaign strategy meetings, late-night debriefs, emergency printing runs, and endless discussions about swing voters in roads I previously didn’t know existed.
By the end of it I was thinner, creakier, and permanently smelled of printer ink.
And then there were the letterboxes.
Ah yes, Letterboxes.
Before campaigning, I naively believed all letterboxes were essentially the same. An opening in a door. A simple mechanical device. Functional. Unremarkable.
I now know this to be false.
Over the months I developed deeply personal relationships with letterboxes across the borough. Some I learned to love. Others I came to despise with a passion usually reserved for council tax increases.
I discovered, for example, that the ideal letterbox is:
This is the gold standard of democratic infrastructure.
Second place belongs to the slightly narrower model requiring only one polite fold of campaign literature before acceptance.
But perhaps the greatest joy of all was the dog-activated letterbox.
These were magnificent.
The sequence never varied. One inserts perhaps a centimetre of leaflet through the slot before an unseen canine launches into action with the speed and aggression of a police raid.
SNATCH!
What follows is a glorious frenzy of barking, paper-shredding and ecstatic chaos occurring entirely on the other side of the door.
Every single time, I laughed out loud.
Partly because the whole scene resembled a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and partly because of the tiny adrenaline rush caused by the mild but genuine possibility of losing a fingertip in the democratic process.
In an increasingly digital world, there was something oddly reassuring about this level of automation.
Then there were the old Victorian letterboxes, black iron relics from a time when Britain ruled a quarter of the globe but apparently still couldn’t standardise postal apertures.
These elegant survivors are typically around eight inches wide and three inches high, dimensions which strongly suggest their designers never envisaged modern campaign leaflets, takeaway menus, or indeed democracy itself. They require what seasoned campaigners refer to simply as “the roll”, a delicate manoeuvre involving lightly compressing an A4 leaflet into something resembling a Victorian railway blueprint before attempting insertion.
Mildly frustrating, yes, but oddly satisfying when successful. There is a pleasing little clop as the loose internal flap gives way and the leaflet disappears into the darkness beyond. In local politics, one learns to celebrate small victories.
And then, every so often, perhaps one in every three hundred houses, comes the mythical unicorn of the campaign trail.
Just… a hole in the door.
No flap. No spring. No medieval torture mechanism. No hidden brush designed to exfoliate the unsuspecting. Simply a clean opening allowing smooth, elegant, one-handed delivery. The leaflet glides through effortlessly with all the grace and efficiency sadly absent from most local government planning departments.
One can only dream of a world where these are the national standard.
Naturally, such sensible design has absolutely no chance of ever being adopted in Britain.
But now we move into a far darker and more emotionally charged category:
My top three most hated letterboxes.
In ascending order.
Third place goes to the ground-level letterbox. For me, at six feet, these are less a postal feature and more a sustained assault on the structural integrity of the human spine. By the final week of campaigning, lowering myself toward these tiny brass openings required the sort of slow, mechanically cautious descent normally associated with offshore drilling equipment.
Each delivery became an involuntary referendum on the future viability of my knees.
After several hundred repetitions, I began to understand why so many politicians appear reluctant to lower themselves toward ordinary people. It is exhausting, uncomfortable, and one is never entirely sure one will successfully get back up again.
Second place belongs to the vertical spring-loaded flap, the passive-aggressive coalition government of the letterbox world.
At first glance it appears functional, even reasonable. But the moment you attempt delivery, it reveals itself to be an overcomplicated bureaucratic nightmare requiring cross-party coordination between elbows, wrists, thumbs and occasionally a knee. The flap itself possesses the spring tension of a NATO missile silo, while the narrow vertical opening forces the leaflet into an awkward sideways insertion manoeuvre that almost always ends in failure.
The final product emerging inside the property resembles a campaign promise after six months in office: crumpled, compromised, and visibly damaged by the process.
And finally, in undisputed first place, comes the knuckle remover with brush interior.
This is not so much a letterbox as a hostile border policy.
The outer flap lures you in with false optimism before the internal brush arrangement, seemingly constructed from old chimney sweep equipment and concentrated malice, clamps around your hand like a budget committee protecting pension liabilities.
Successful delivery requires full hand insertion and complete abandonment of personal safety. Withdrawal, meanwhile, becomes a high-risk operation involving trapped knuckles, shredded skin, and the sudden violent snap of the flap closing behind you like a local authority shutting public toilets to save money.
By the end of the campaign, my hands looked less like those of a prospective councillor and more like a Victorian dock worker who had lost an argument with industrial machinery.
I now possess a level of respect for postmen and women bordering on reverence.
Frankly, bring back the Christmas box, I say.
If society can subsidise electric scooters and consultant reports about active travel, surely, we can reward the brave souls who daily place their fingers into mechanical death slots in service of British communication.
Putting my now encyclopaedic knowledge of letterboxes aside, my unsuccessful tilt at councillorship gave me far more than I ever expected.
Firstly, I got to experience election night as a candidate, a truly surreal emotional experience best described as repeatedly alternating between “we are so back” and “it’s completely over” every four and a half minutes.
One minute you’re convinced there’s a great democratic surge building behind you because somebody in a church hall whispered that turnout “looks promising”. The next, you’re staring blankly at a tray of mini sausage rolls trying to mentally calculate whether fourteen votes from a polling district near the library constitutes momentum or total collapse.
The highs and lows came in waves.
Mostly lows.
Then another high.
Then a low wearing a rosette.
I also got the opportunity to help complete strangers during the campaign, people needing advice, reassurance, directions, practical support, or simply somebody willing to listen for five minutes on a rainy doorstep. In the noise and cynicism that often surrounds politics, those moments quietly reminded me what local government is actually supposed to be about.
People.
Not slogans.
Not social media arguments.
Not performative outrage from people with “Senior Policy Thought Leader” in their LinkedIn biographies.
Just people trying to get through life.
The campaign also reminded me, repeatedly and often painfully, that I am no longer a young man.
Should I ever stand again, I will prepare properly. Not with policy briefings or media training, but with a Rocky-style high-altitude endurance camp somewhere in the Andes. Leaflet delivery at scale is not campaigning; it is an ultra-endurance event occasionally interrupted by discussions about parking permits.
By polling day, I was consuming carbohydrates like a Tour de France cyclist and making involuntary noises every time I sat down.
But perhaps most importantly, this strange accidental adventure allowed me to become part of a community.
And that genuinely meant something.
I was welcomed by people from completely different backgrounds, careers, ages and outlooks, all united by one common purpose: wanting to serve others in whatever way they could. I met people who gave up evenings, weekends, sleep, comfort, and enormous amounts of energy simply because they cared about the places and people around them.
Some became teammates.
Some became friends.
A few probably still owe me a pint after making me carry leaflet boxes uphill.
But all of them made the experience worthwhile.
Politics from the outside can look tribal, cynical and transactional. And yes, occasionally it absolutely is. But behind the scenes I found humour, kindness, loyalty, exhaustion, optimism, and some truly heroic tolerance for terrible weather.
So, would I do it again?
Hell yeah!
Though next time I’m bringing better shoes, cowhide gloves, and possibly a chiropractor.