AFTER a morning's campaigning with the past Prime Minister, Phil Wilson popped in on his parents in an attempt to reinforce his local credentials.

Labour's hopeful in the Sedgefield by-election helped Tony Blair open the £750,000 sports hall at Greenfield School Community and Arts College, in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, yesterday.

"This is a fantastic facility," said Mr Blair, who played table tennis with 14-year-old Daniel Stones. "It is one of 2,000 around the country that have been built just recently. The whole purpose is to make sports for young people part of their daily lives again."

Mr Blair and Mr Wilson watched the youngsters perform on the trampoline in their turquoise PE kits - a colour suspiciously close to the Conservatives' rosettes.

Most candidates in the by-election, which will be held on Thursday, July 19, are making a virtue of their local connections to the constituency.

The Conservative Graham Robb lives within Sedgefield at Middleton St George, the Liberal Democrat Greg Stone lives in Newcastle, the UK Independence Party's Toby Horton lives near Northallerton, North Yorkshire, and the BNP's Andrew Spence is a farmer near Consett, in County Durham.

Mr Wilson's 82-year-old parents, Ivy and Bernard, live behind Trimdon Labour Club, 250 yards from the house in which he grew up.

Bernard went down Fishburn colliery just after the Second World War and worked underground for 38 years.

"I used to drive the new road headings and the faces," he said. "Fishburn was very, very wet - for a full 12 months or more I worked in oilskins."

He courted Ivy at dances at the Fishburn Welfare Hall and at pictures at the Fishburn Alhambra (now a carpet showroom).

"You used to get three changes a week there," he remembered.

"But the circle was only three steps up," said Ivy, whose mother was an Aycliffe Angel - a munitions worker - during the war.

They married in 1949 and had two children, Mr Wilson, 48, and his 57-year-old brother Alan, a retired firefighter. "We didn't want them to go down the pit, that's for sure," said Ivy. "Why not? Well look at the state of their dad!"

Bernard looks sprightly enough, but he survived lung cancer ten years ago, has three inhalers for his emphysema, and can't move a thumb after a lump of wood fell on it underground.

"I remember my dad being on strike in the late 1970s when I was 13, and going and digging for coal with him on the disused railway lines in the winter," said Mr Wilson. "It's not right people having to do that.

"With that background, you can't be anything but Labour. Politics round here isn't a game, it's serious stuff - you have to do what you can to get a Labour Government elected.