POLITICIANS are often regarded as grey men in grey suits, one party's offering barely distinguishable from another's.

Reg Keys is different. When the people of Sedgefield open their doors to him, a wave of emotion washes over their thresholds.

"My son, Tom, came back from Iraq riddled with 31 bullets," begins his election leaflet.

When asked how he will react to Tony Blair at the count on Thursday evening, he responds: "I will shake everybody's hand but Blair's. I just can't bring myself to do that.

"I would rather saw it off with a rusty breadknife."

He stops, realising emotion is running away with him, and adds: "I will not be disrespectful, though."

This seems typical. He'd never been asked the question before, but, knowing it would come, had planned the answer.

He knows in painstaking detail, how and where his son - he follows the parental habit and refers to him by his full name of Thomas - died.

"We have to bear in mind the 85 of our soldiers killed, the 900 wounded, the 100 seeking psychiatric counselling and the 100,000 Iraqis killed, the whole area destabilised, a breeding ground for terrorism, and £6.5bn that could have been spent on schools and hospitals," he says.

As Mr Keys knocks on doors in Wingate, he is met with emotion. "I'm so sorry...It's very sad...It must be so hard..."

But when the doors close?

"My parents' aged miners' home was opened by Tony Blair, so they won't vote for anyone else," says a middle manager at a car plant. "But I'll think about Mr Keys - although I don't agree the war was disastrous."

A man laying a patio says "something had to be sorted out in Iraq".

"I'll probably vote Labour," he says, "although if they get in they'll probably put up taxes."

Mr Keys says: "It's a very strong Labour seat but there is a genuine sense of unease about voting Labour.

"I started off thinking if I make a substantial dent in his majority it'd be a moral victory, but as it's gone on you begin to feel that this could be a sensation..."

In Trimdon, a pensioner heading for a lunchtime pint says: "I get wrang for calling Blair in the bar.

"The landlord laughs at us, and the woman say 'leave him alone he's all right'."

He adds: "They could put the Bird in Hand dartboard up with a Labour rosette and it'd get in."

A dartboard on the backbenches really would be a sensation.

* Mr Keys and two other bereaved parents whose sons were killed in Iraq are to begin legal action against the Prime Minister in the wake of the publication of the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the war.