These are the activities that were undertaken by the candidates and their political parties in the lead up to the 2005 general election.
Events prior to the announcement of the election
Labour election poster controversy
In the run-up to the election, the Labour Party circulated posters it was considering using in the campaign to the subscribers of its email contact list. One of these, which was intended to support Labour accusations that the Conservatives had not fully costed their economic policies, featured the slogan "the day the Tory sums add up" together with images of flying pigs featuring the faces of the Conservative leader Michael Howard and Treasury spokesman Oliver Letwin. Both Howard and Letwin are Jewish, and the Labour Party was accused of encouraging Antisemitism; the Labour Party denied any such implication, but withdrew the posters.
A separate poster depicted Howard as a hypnotist with a watch on a chain, and the caption "I can spend the same money twice"; this was seen by some Conservatives as a depiction of either Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, or Fagin from Oliver Twist, and in either case therefore similarly anti-Semitic. The Labour Party said the poster was intended to remind voters of the character of incompetent fictional hypnotist "Kenny Craig" from the television comedy Little Britain.
Margaret Dixon NHS case
Another prominent feature of the pre-campaign was what journalists dubbed 'The Battle of Margaret's Shoulder', in which the Conservatives highlighted the case of Margaret Dixon, a Warrington pensioner whose shoulder operation had been cancelled seven times. She had written to the Health Secretary Dr. John Reid about her situation, but he had not replied, and so she looked to Michael Howard and the opposition party for help, who readily seized the opportunity to highlight a failing of the National Health Service. Soon after the matter was brought to national attention Mrs Dixon finally had her operation, but damage had been done.
Howard Flight
On 24 March 2005, The Times printed extracts from a tape recording made at a meeting of the Conservative Way Forward group in which Howard Flight, then Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, said that there was room for a Conservative government to make further savings on public expenditure than it was promising in its election campaign, and that the cuts that had been chosen to commit to were selected based on those that were more "politically acceptable". Flight's comments were used by the Labour Party in an attempt to justify its claims that the Conservatives were planning to substantially cut government services, which had been greeted with scepticism by the media, and Flight immediately resigned his post, eventually to have the Conservative whip withdrawn and his candidacy as Conservative MP for his seat blocked. It later emerged that the tape recording had been made by a Labour Party member who had somehow attended the meeting, giving rise to Conservative allegations that Labour was using illicit tactics.
Security and integrity of the ballot
The period immediately before the 2005 general election has seen increased concern about the integrity of the electoral system in Britain.
Postal voting has been permitted in United Kingdom elections since 1918. In 2001, after a recommendation by the Home Office Working Party on Electoral Procedures, the government with the support of the other parties changed the law so that applicants for a postal vote no longer had to state a reason why they were unable to vote in person, so making postal voting available "on demand".
On 4 April 2005, Richard Mawrey QC (sitting as a judge in an Election court) declared the result of two wards in Birmingham from the 2004 local elections there void by reason of "widespread fraud" in postal voting committed by the successful Labour candidates. Other local cases, most notably in Bradford, have seen accusations of postal voting frauds committed by other parties.
Mawrey stated that he found the system of postal voting to be insecure, and expressed his concerns about whether the government was intending to prevent fraud. Nick Raynsford, a Minister in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, told Parliament that the government would commit £10 million to improving postal ballot security.