A General Election is not now long away, and already, Boston is shaping up to be an entertaining battleground.
Five candidates have already thrown their hats in the ring for the seat - the current incumbent Mark Simmonds for the Conservatives, Paul Kenny representing
Labour, Boston Borough Councillor David Owens for the BNP, Christopher Pain for UKIP, and an Independent named Peter Wilson.
At the 2005 election, the swing to the Conservatives was 6.4%, with the vote for Mark Simmonds up 3.3% at 46.2% of the poll, and the nearest challenger, Paul Kenny, capturing 32.1% for Labour - down 9.5%.
The result was a blow for Labour, after the result at the 2001 election saw Mark Simmonds poll 42.9% and Labour's Elaine Bird 41.5%.
Worse still for Labour, the website Electoral Calculus ( http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/index.html ) predicts the Tory chances of winning Boston 2010 at 95%, with Labour getting less than half the votes cast.
Their full prediction is for Mark Simmonds to win 50.44% of the votes, Labour to claim 24.67% followed by "minor" parties 9.32%, the Lib Dems 7.97%, and "other" parties 7.6%.
More broadly, Electoral Calculus says that if there were a General Election tomorrow, the Conservatives would be short 24 of majority - which confirms the prediction of the first hung parliament for 26 years.
And it is precisely because there is every indication that voters are finding the choice of where to put their 'X' on the ballot paper not as easy as the main parties would like to think that makes things potentially interesting.
The forthcoming election offers the prospect of sending the major parties a message from Boston in the shape of tactical voting.
As the inevitable bottom line is still a Tory win, there is no harm in voting Independent, BNP or UKIP as a way of sending a lesson.
Certainly, the main parties should not dismiss the BNP's David Owens as they did at the recent county council elections.
In June 2009, Conservative Andrea Jenkyns took the Boston North West seat with 463 votes with the BNP second on 374. At the subsequent by-election, which was forced on a technicality, Miss Jenkyns held the seat with 597 votes, whilst the BNP came within a hairsbreadth of victory with 581 - just 16 votes short of victory.
Posit a similar result at a General Election for Councillor Owens, and the media world and its wife would be heading to Boston and setting up camp to put the town under the microscope.
What would also be most interesting would be if the Boston Bypass Independent Party had the nerve to field a parliamentary candidate. After constantly telling us how wonderful the people of Boston think the BBI is, perhaps their spokesman Councillor Ramonde Newell might be the man to test the party's credibility as a candidate for the Westminster stage.
We think that there may well be some serious tactical voting, and that Boston will be the constituency to present some surprises on 6th May.
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