They also serve who stand and get beaten

Peter Calder talks to two political candidates least likely to taste success.

"Number 2," says the petite and elegant blonde, tapping a well-manicured nail on the page of the form book.

The punter in the public bar of the Wanderers Club in Coronation Rd, Mangere, nods politely and takes precisely no notice. Just as well.

Vel D'Mere, he will confide later under his breath, "didn't come anywhere" in race two at Riccarton. He backed another horse for a place and it came in.

The woman whose advice was so fortunately ignored hoists herself up on to a stool at the other end of the bar and admits she doesn't know a thing about horse-racing. But she has a beach house at Pakiri, she explains, and enjoys admiring the animals as they gallop along the endless sand.

It is safe to say that not many of the people Sylvia Taylor is hoping will vote for her have beach houses at Pakiri. But the National candidate for Mangere will have none of the suggestion that she - a real estate agent from Meadowbank - has little in common with the constituency she would like to represent.

She hadn't spent much time in the area, she admits, before she won the candidacy, "but I've done a lot of work with youth at risk in Glen Innes. I've always been involved in some sort of charity work."

Mangere is Labour country. This was David Lange's electorate and with the party's biggest electorate majority, the MP, Taito Phillip Field, would seem to have it tied up.

That makes Mrs Taylor, a first-time candidate, one of the election's least likely winners. But, perhaps driven by the eternal cheerful optimism that is an estate agent's stock-in-trade, she is undaunted.

"I know I'm classed as a rank outsider," she says. "It doesn't bother me. I don't care about that. The majority's around 10,000, but if [Alliance candidate] Finau Kolo gets an extra few thousand and I get an extra few thousand, you could have a three-horse race."

In an MMP Parliament, no matter what the electorate arithmetic, no candidate's campaign is wasted. Mrs Taylor knows her job is mainly to boost her party's share of the vote rather than her own electoral chances.

But she talks of aims that are electorate-specific. She chose Mangere because "I thought this electorate had a lot going for it and there is the potential to help a lot of people."

She speaks of sole-parent households whose children "bring home the odd illegitimate child."

"When do you say enough is enough? The Government is the parent of the nation. I would like to say to people, 'Think about what you're doing with your life. And if you're going to have babies, think about how you're going to support them'."

It sounds more like social work than a job for an MP but, says Mrs Taylor, "someone's got to start somewhere."

"I'm not going to weep my eyes out if I don't win. But you might be surprised."

Further east, as the wind whips along the concourse in the Pakuranga Shopping Centre, Patrick Hine struggles to keep the pamphlets from blowing off the card-table he has set up outside the Post Shop.

The Labour candidate with the biggest job on November 27 acknowledges that it "would require an electoral earthquake" to unseat National's Maurice Williamson, whose majority is more than 14,500.

"But if people want to get rid of Maurice we are trying to let them know how."

Mr Hine, a political studies tutor at Auckland University, has a lonely task in the largely affluent electorate. Most voters pass by and, he says, he has to "holler" at them to get attention.

He and his party faithful drop leaflets but he says his campaign is low-key, as befits his prospects. But does he dream of unexpected triumph?

"That scenario does cross your mind from time to time. You have to think about it, if only to make sure that you are ready for it and have got a speech you can make if it does happen."