AS cynics are sure to claim, there may be a smack of gimmickry about Burnley MP Peter Pike's impending innovation of holding a surgery in a supermarket.

And, after all, constituents with personal problems are hardly likely to consider that the town's busiest store and the busiest shopping night of the week are the ideal time or place for pouring out their private concerns.

That said, though, Mr Pike's Friday night Asda experiment is a two-way opportunity -- for voters and himself. And the results could be surprising.

For how many people might otherwise meet or have dealings with their MP? And, for him, it could be a valuable occasion for gathering informative feedback from ordinary people -- of the kind that seldom penetrates the cloistered world of meetings and committees, often among like-minded politicos, in which MPs too easily become confined. They are employed to represent ordinary people, but, as the anxious leaked Blair memos have revealed of late, they can soon find themselves out of touch with them.

The remedy, of course, is to stop tuning in to self-serving spin merchants and trendy focus groups and to go out and listen instead to real people as they go about their lives. And gimmick or not, Mr Pike is doing that by making himself a special offer in the supermarket.

In a similar vein, next door in Blackburn -- and elsewhere about the country -- Home Secretary Jack Straw has kept up a creditable record for the past 17 years of getting up on his soapbox in the street and putting his finger on the public's pulse and having his ear bent by them in the process.

If one of the busiest members of the Cabinet can do this, there is no reason why other MPs cannot also strive to make themselves and the government of the country less remote from the people who elect them and pay their wages.

Sadly, it is perhaps because too few do make the effort that the more diligent ones who do bother to keep in touch with voters can find themselves exposed to cynical claims of gimmickry.