("When your powerful union convenor turns up on your doorstep to ask if you voted for him," says one local activist, "you are hardly going to tell him you voted for someone else.")In the morass of claims and counter-claims what is clear is that both sides were sensitive to the power of postal votes to decide the contest. "He is a professional politician and has been for years."In the past few months D'Avila has gathered 130 signatures from people who claim they voted for him to back his allegations. But Davis says at least a dozen were not eligible to vote or were not registered as having attended the meeting. He has been convenor at the 4,000-strong Rover plant since he was 26 and a leading light in one faction of the constituency party for years "Jim is no horney-handed son of the soil," says Mark Davis. "Half a mile from the hospital up pulls this Mercedes with Michael Wills inside. They point out that D'Avila has 20 years' local government experience under his belt, including a long spell as Labour's deputy leader on the town council, and has contested a general election before. He joined us for the last half mile."D'Avila's opponents say this is a man who has reinvented himself.

D'Avila remembers the day last year when Wills popped by Swindon to join a protest over the closure of a local hospital "We had walked with the banner for seven miles," he claims. Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi were divas of the same age - though very differing talents - who thought it best to operate with an ocean between them: Tebaldi at the Met in New York, Callas at La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden. Callas was the jealous one, Tebaldi's trademark was a queenly serenity The feud went on for years, and the press loved it. Now, Covent Garden is about to offer us the spectacle of the Two Traviatas, in the form of the fiery Romanian Angela Gheorghiu, and the sweetly vivacious Hungarian Andrea Rost. This, it must be emphasised, is not a feud - though the pair have only brushed shoulders once, and that with no great pleasure - but it's certain to be a contest. Because over the coming months they are taking it in turn to play that supreme Verdian role, the self-sacrificing courtesan Violetta. Gheorghiu, of course, got there first: Sir Georg Solti's well-publicised tears of joy when he first heard her sing, and the rivers that flowed down the aisles when the rest of the beau monde encountered her, signalled her instant stardom.

Her subsequent romance with superstar tenor Roberto Alagna set the seal on it: travelling together, practising together, giving interviews together - as well as performing together - they have turned themselves into an operatic double-act to eclipse all others.Rost, who will be partnered at Covent Garden by the Mexican Ramon Vargas, carefully deflects all talk of rivalry: "Angela has her life, I have mine. We can progress in parallel." But the parallel is oddly close. When Rost made her recording debut as Gilda in Riccardo Muti's La Scala production of Verdi's Rigoletto, her ducal paramour was none other than Roberto Alagna. And there are correspondences in the two women's histories: both were born in the early Sixties (Rost is a couple of years older), both benefited from specialised tuition provided free by the state, both were "spotted" at 14.But there the parallels stop. While the Romanian's budding talent was cheered every step of the way by her doting parents, the teenage Rost had to overcome her blue-collar father's opposition to her career. When fame struck, Gheorghiu ditched her Romanian husband; Rost is still based in Budapest, where she lives with her pianist husband and two children.She was a solitary but happy child, she says in her slow, precise English. She was brought up by her grandmother, while her parents toiled in a factory in a neighbouring town.