Three pledges. All real real.

On a fixed income, small things are not small. The seaside summer is one of the few affordable days out left in Clacton, and a family of four should not need a mortgage adviser to buy four ice creams on the front. A 99 that costs £2.50 is a tiny daily reminder that the numbers stopped adding up. Capping it is a joke with a serious point underneath: the cost of ordinary pleasures has quietly outrun ordinary wages, and the people who feel it first are pensioners and families. The Count has noticed. The five parties who did not stand have not.

Auto-renew is a tax on forgetting, and it falls hardest on people who are not online all day fighting a cancellation maze. Older voters in particular get signed up to things they never meant to keep, then charged quietly for years. Making renewal an active choice, a thing you say yes to rather than a thing that happens to you, puts a few pounds a month back in the pockets of the people least able to chase a refund. It is a small rule that would return real money to real households in Clacton. That is the whole point.

The joke is the modesty. The point is that “at least one” is one more than the gap between what is promised and what gets built for a lot of people. Clacton has an older population, a lot of it on fixed incomes, and a housing market that does not work for the young people who grew up here and would like to stay. Fundraising surpluses from the Count’s campaigns go to the housing charity Shelter, which is the sincere version of the same idea: housing is the quiet crisis under everything else, and pretending otherwise has not built anyone a home. One real home beats a thousand imaginary ones.