We found Leach’s name surreal, and yet another reminder of how, during our time with the Richmond Tories, truth was often stranger than fiction. Could a Tory organizer have a more comedy name than Mr Leach? To us, it was like a version of Happy Families drawn up by Dave Spart of Private Eye fame – Mr Parasite the stockbroker, Mr Leach the Tory party organizer.
Leachy was another long-in-the-tooth Tory – he was the retired founder and former chief of the Londis supermarket chain. When he called, he said he was planning to drive down to the polling station himself on election day, but in the background his wife could be heard reminding him that he had to go to a funeral. Leachy’s manner brightened, as though he was looking forward to the funeral as a treat, or a really nice day out.
Leachy had delivered to our home, by hand, the complete tellering kit consisting of a notepad, a novelty official Conservative Party biro (made in China), a spare blank blue rosette (without the Vote Conservative sticker) and written instructions. These warned that there would probably be an enemy Liberal Democrat teller present at the polling station, but this should not be a cause for worry because ‘some of them are quite human’.
Tellering was extremely boring. There was a rush in the morning, as people voted on their way to work, and another rush around teatime. In between there were long spells when there were no voters at all. From time to time Leachy or one of his elderly pals would arrive at the polling station and take away the lists of voters I had compiled, tut-tutting about the low turnout in general – which, in an overwhelmingly Tory ward like East Sheen, was a worrying sign. He would sigh, ask, generously I thought, if I wanted him to bring me a cup of tea in a thermos flask and then he would hobble off again.
I got chatting to the Lib Dem teller, who seemed friendly enough but a bit wary of me. He was a retired business studies lecturer at what had been South Bank Polytechnic. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local Tory Party, and kept asking if I knew this or that councillor. Later he was relieved by another Lib Dem teller, an eccentric, elderly bohemian looking woman who was wearing a long hippy-style skirt, a sort of suede jacket, beads and sandals – very much a faded Joan Bakewell look. She had previously made educational TV programmes for the BBC, featuring glove puppets. The Lib Dems, in other words, were living up to their stereotypes just as much as the Tories.
Meanwhile, David was helping to identify promised Conservative voters who had not been ticked off by me and other tellers across the constituency, and then rushing off to knock on their doors and badger them into voting. After the polls closed we met up in the house of a Conservative councillor for East Sheen. The councillor’s front room (standard Georgian furniture, blue silk upholstery, gilt-framed oil paintings, cabbage rose floral explosion elderly female Conservative chintz look) had served as a key command centre in the ward.
There were half a dozen people at the house and we were offered a glass of sherry and a piece of sponge cake. The BBC exit poll was already predicting a national victory for the Labour Party, but the TV wasn’t on. An elderly gent, close to tears, said, ‘We have just not got our vote out. They have stayed at home.’ The others shrugged and agreed. It was hopeless – far worse than the exit polls had suggested. Then, at about 10.30, the councillor suddenly announced that it was getting late and turfed everyone out.
By election day the Vote Marco sign in my garden had drooped alarmingly, and in fact was leaning at an almost 45-degree angle into the garden. Much of it was covered up by an out-of-control clematis, growing profusely in the unusually wet, warm spring. Nobody in my household had vandalized the sign, but if nature wanted to knock it over nobody was going to stand in the way. And, as Hugo the sign guy had bitterly regretted, Tory poster printing was done on the cheap and so the colours were starting to fade, heading towards a sort of Ecology Party turquoise green.
For good measure my son, then at primary school and something of a wag, had drawn a primitive skull and crossbones on the poster with a marker pen, and I had frustrated a further plan of his to add a black plastic skull and crossbones pirate flag. Various spiders and other insects had taken up residence in the soggy hardboard and my teenage daughter had added a Labour Party leaflet, secured with Blu-Tack. Mould was beginning to invade the edge of the placard and it was, all in all, starting to turn into a sort of voodoo totem poll with all sorts of political bunting and tat flapping from it. If it had stayed up long enough maybe somebody would place a human skull on top, like one of those props from Apocalypse Now.
At one point during the campaign there was a gathering of my wife’s family at a house a little further down the street. I had been amused to see various non-political in-laws, cousins and nephews walking past the sign and looking at it in vaguely anxious perplexity. When I arrived at the party they seemed frosty at first, but said nothing about the blue carbuncle. I then explained The Project, swearing them to ‘semi-secrecy’ (whatever that meant), and they warmed up considerably.
One brother-in-law, who used to work for a giant pharmaceuticals company, said he knew that a form of temporary insanity was a common side effect of the medicine I was taking for my kidneys, which could also bring on a sort of instant physiological and neurological old age. He had, before I explained The Project to him, genuinely thought that the drug therapy might be the reason for the appearance of the sign.
When I got back to the house, I told David that we had chalked up the first truly scientific conclusion of the project. The conclusion? That normal, middle-class professional people – who had normal, responsible jobs with big firms – now honestly thought the most obvious explanation as to why somebody might switch their vote from Labour to Conservative was acute drug-induced insanity.
Michael Howard lost the 2005 general election and handed Tony Blair a third term in office. It was an open secret that Blair would in due course hand over to Gordon Brown. It did seem in a way that the Conservative Party of old had passed away and would require a complete relaunch. Marco increased the Conservative vote in Richmond slightly, achieving a swing of 1.9 per cent to the Tories from the Liberal Democrats.
A couple of days after election night we attended an excruciating thank-you party for the Conservative campaigners in Richmond. We met up again with all the characters we’d come across during our time inside Marco’s campaign – Robert, Lampshade Pam, some of the ‘iron ladies’ I had worked the phone with, Hugo the sign guy, Marco himself and a group of very old Tories whom I had not seen during the campaign. Most people seemed either very depressed, or they were so old they were past caring.
In defeat Marco made pretty much exactly the same speech as he had made four years earlier when he stood in Yeovil during the 2001 election (we looked it up on the internet). His spiel made it sound as if he was planning to stay and fight another day. In fact, Marco left both the area and politics itself soon afterwards, taking up a job as the marketing man for a technical college in Kent.
As the party was winding down an elderly and slightly deaf Tory – who looked well into his eighties, if not older – invited us to the Richmond Conservative Association’s annual dinner. It was easy to remember when the event took place, the old guy said, because it was always held on the Queen Mother’s birthday. One of the younger Tories (in his fifties) explained, shouting the information into the old man’s hearing aid, that the Queen Mother was dead. The old man replied with a fearful and utterly lost look: ‘Oh! Are you sure? How terrible. Are you sure? How did that happen?’
Coincidentally, the Richmond Conservative Association’s annual dinner was due to take place in an Italian restaurant called San Marco. It was an appropriately named venue as Richmond was soon to be sans Marco, since he was about to depart to pastures new. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Richmond Tories were pretty much sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans taste, sans Marco – sans everything.
1 I am much better now.
