Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands.  Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party?   There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover.   Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering   anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner.   Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council.   I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance."   That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling.   I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night   that it would be dangerous to bring A&amp;E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign."   I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts.   Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..."   When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.