I want this blog, as well as being an interesting social experiment, to cover, and get people’s views on, all sorts of social, political and topical issues. So, having had three unguided conversations with people that had wandered freely (if haltingly), I decided to give my subjects (or victims) some direction today.  As he’s been the man in the headlines this week with it being the Labour party conference, I chose Ed Miliband as the topic. What did people think of him? Had the conference and his ambitious speech changed their perception of him?

I have to admit, I copped out a bit today. I said that I was asking them out of curiosity because I was writing something about Miliband, which although true (this), does break my rule of not mentioning the blog a bit. In future, I’ll just plunge in without explanation. This whole experience is quite a learning curve. It is a lot easier to approach people when you have at least some semblance of an excuse though, and the two I spoke to today reacted well too.

For my part I managed to suppress the childish smirk I feel coming on whenever the PA announces the tube’s destination as ‘Cockfosters’. It’s the way the woman says it.

The first man I tried was a professional looking type, in smart casual dress, standing with a briefcase between his feet.  I went straight in: can I ask you a question? What do you think of Ed Miliband? He said he didn’t know much about him and hadn’t seen any of his speech to the conference a couple of days earlier. Besides, “David [Cameron]’s my man anyway.” Still, he said democratically, “It’s important that the Labour party has good leadership.” Did he think it had it? He wasn’t sure. “I wanted the other brother to win.”

After he got off a couple of stops later, I approached a middle aged woman sitting at the end of a row. She looked pleasantly surprised to be asked, “Oh I don’t know much about him,” she replied at first. She’d been on holiday for a couple of weeks and hadn’t been keeping up with the news or seen his speech. “They’re all talk though, aren’t they?” Who, all the politicians or Miliband in particular? “The lot of them really.” She insisted she didn’t know that much about it, maybe I should ask someone else?

No way, she was by far the friendliest and keenest person I’d encountered so far and we carried on chatting a bit about her holiday and the unseasonable weather that was making the tube feel humid, sweaty and slightly contagious, but somehow less formal, with her asking me questions and enquiring about my life as well. Perhaps it was that she worked in a university and was used to being around a lot of young people (25’s still young right?) but she was also clearly just a very friendly person. I hope I find more like her!

She must have known more than she was letting on at first as suddenly she got back on topic: “Ed Miliband, isn’t he the guy who wants to do something about tuition fees?” I told her he had proposed lowering them to £6,000. Did she think that was enough? “Well it’s better than £9,000, isn’t it?” This was obviously an important issue for her, and affected her personally. “It’s alright for Oxford and Cambridge but who’s going to pay that to go to [my university]?” Would it be enough to make her vote for him? She said it would, she used to be “a sort of liberal but that would probably sway it for me.”

Well, there you go, one floating voter won for Labour there then, and a great conversation for me; we covered a lot of other things briefly, including the “terrible” riots, a university strike this week and had a few moments mutual huffing about the Lib Dems before we said a friendly goodbye when I had to get off. I left feeling that both of us had made each other’s day that little bit better.

What came back to me afterwards was the first man’s parting shot about Miliband’s presentation as he was getting off the train. “He’s not a natural, is he? Not like David.” When your supporters refer to you by your first name, you must be doing something right, and I think Ed Miliband is quite a long way off from that yet.