Leaving home to seek a seat in Parliament.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

WOODCOTE, England _ Driving down a country lane on his way to his next campaign event, Boris Johnson paused at an intersection, lost again.

"Hmmm," he wondered, looking at the road signs around him. "Do you think Cray's Marsh-Wallingford is this way?"

Johnson, a London journalist, is seeking to represent this rural Henley-on-Thames region in Parliament, but he is much more familiar with the streets of London.

He is a carpetbagger in Thursday's national elections, following a time-honored British tradition of seeking office far from home. Unlike the United States, Britain has no residency requirements for candidates, and often little pretense that candidates understand local issues.

Here, many candidates have jumped from seat to seat or have been parachuted into distant districts by the political parties' central offices in London.

Voters usually accept it, and rarely does the phenomenon become a campaign issue in national races.

"Most people don't know who their local MP [member of Parliament] is and could care less," said Patrick Dunleavy, professor of political science and public policy at the London School of Economics. "They're voting for the party."