Corruption and nepotism have been endemic in the Labour Party for years, and today it’s worse than ever.”Mr Cowdell’s spur-of-the-minute manifesto includes “capital punishment for murderers, clinical castration for rapists and paedophiles …” Less controversially, he advocates a “return to full employment”. But perhaps the best proof of his socialist credentials is that he tried to get his election deposit paid for by Social Security They turned him down. “Parliament expects the votes of poverty-ridden people,” he declares indignantly, “but denies them the right to stand!”"You’d have been better off applying for a job-seeker’s allowance,” says his wife.It’s safe to assume that, out of friendship or sympathy or confusion, Alan Cowdell will pick up a few hundred votes tomorrow And Ted Rowlands will be back with another socking majority. And apart from that reliable reflex of loyalty to the tribe, few of Labour’s loyalists will be able to tell you exactly why.Reigate in Surrey is as different as possible from Merthyr Tydfil, but it is another constituency where tribal loyalty is beginning to look anachronistic. And here, perhaps, it is truly beginning to unravel.Historically, the Tories are a more successful tribe than Labour, perhaps because no intellectual acrobatics are required for them to absorb people of different incomes, classes or levels of attainment: given a steely belief in self-improvement, respectability and convention, just about anyone can belong. Eavesdrop on the chatter of the party faithful before a campaign rally and one quickly understands that under the pink perms and navy blazers this is a coalition of classes. But the class lines remain, and lend the tribe a dangerous fragility.

It is the issue of Europe that is now splitting the tribe into pieces.In Reigate, the question of what size the pieces are going to be will be settled tomorrow. Sir George Gardiner, Reigate’s Tory MP for the past 23 years, had a majority of nearly 17,000 in 1992, but in February he was deselected by a meeting of his constituency party for his Euro-scepticism and disloyalty to John Major (he called him a ventriloquist’s dummy – Gardiner claims to have been the first to introduce the now-famous dummy into the European debate). Gardiner responded by quitting the Tories for the Referendum Party, standing as candidate for Reigate.Last Friday and Saturday he was to be found out and about in the town in the company of a donkey. His successor as Tory candidate, Crispin Blunt, had made the error of telling the selection committee: “You could put up a donkey as the Conservative candidate for Reigate and it would win.” This was Gardiner’s way of capitalising on Blunt’s mistake. It was also his way of defying the Tories’ belief that Reigate will continue to behave tribally, whatever the worries about Europe.

Although the Tories’ disagreement over Europe is on policy, according to Sir George its manifestation is social. “The toffee-nosed tendency demands loyalty to the party line,” he told me when I finally managed to separate him from the donkey. What exactly did he mean by “toffee-nosed”? “They are concentrated in the northern part of the borough,” he explained. “The well-to-do people, the so-called Chipstead Mafia, the people who live in Walton on the Hill next to the golf club – a lot of the agitation against me has been cooked up at the 19th hole. It all becomes clear when you fly over the constituency – these are the parts with lots of swimming pools.”Some are very strong pro-Europeans; others just thought I wasn’t up to it socially.