with child-like delight, set about getting the Battle Banger ready for a spot of what he called ‘loudspeaker work’. Chuckling softly to himself as his cravat flapped gaily in the breeze, he began to lash the loudspeaker system onto the roof with bits of string. Then he linked it to a valve amplifier which looked so old and battered it might once have belonged to the Troggs. The amp was plonked on the back seat of the Battle Banger and was powered by an oil-streaked car battery which smelled strongly of acid.
As he was going about all this, Robert dropped the ball of string onto the street and it rolled under the car – just the first of a series of minor operational disasters that seemed to bedevil the Richmond Tories whenever they ventured forth into action. Instinctively, Robert tried to retrieve the ball by pulling on the strand already tied to the roof rack of the Battle Banger. It took him a while, and several good hard jerks, before he realized that the more he pulled on the string, the more the ball would unravel. Marco decided he would leave the string problem to Robert, who scratched his head thoughtfully.
Instead, Marco turned to us and, with what looked like a wicked glint in his eye, produced a pair of large bright blue satin ‘Vote Conservative’ rosettes. ‘Do you guys want to wear one of these?’ he asked. We hesitated and exchanged glances. ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he added, a touch teasingly, perhaps thinking this might weed out anyone who wasn’t a true Tory. We had to agree – or risk blowing our cover – so Marco went into overdrive, fussily helping to fasten the rosettes onto our chests. When he’d finished he stood back to admire his handiwork and said with exaggerated pride, ‘There you are … FAN-TASTIC. You are proper Tories now … FAN-TASTIC!’
Later, David and I talked about the moment the blue rosettes were pinned onto us: it was a far more traumatic experience for me than it was for David. As I wandered around the quiet residential streets of Richmond Hill I felt incredibly self-conscious, a bit like a half-hearted novice streaker. I genuinely thought that I would encounter a lot of hostility from people – and get lots and lots of dirty looks and perhaps even worse than that. But I was wrong. I scrutinized the faces of the few passers-by I saw and, as they clocked me, to my surprise there was no reaction at all. It was an important moment of revelation for me. I had enormously overestimated people’s interest in politics and the significance they attached to political symbols. People just didn’t seem to care.
David thought the pinning on of the rosettes was probably an attempt by Marco to play some basic mind games – it was either a wind-up or a loyalty test of some sort. And, being David, he wasn’t going to let Marco psych him out quite so easily, so he had taken the rosette with a beaming smile on his face. The chances of David having an embarrassing encounter with anyone he knew were practically zero, since he was only living in Richmond temporarily. An East Ender by birth, he had recently lived in Willesden, in suburban north-west London before moving to Battersea, south of the Thames. Knowing pretty much only me in this part of London, David would be more likely to bump into somebody he knew in Romania than in Richmond.
But David was uncomfortable, nonetheless, while wearing a blue rosette. On this and other occasions he got stares from other black people that he found a bit unnerving. He said that black passers-by would see him, then the rosette, then do a double-take straight at him as if to say, ‘Fool!’ Richmond’s white majority, David felt, either ignored him or regarded him with the usual air of, variously, fear, resentment or wonderment. His biggest fear was that he would be mistaken for Ainsley Harriott.
A couple of days later I met up with Marco in a down-at-heel pub that nestled among the opulent Georgian homes of the Vineyard ward. There I found him holding court with the day’s campaign team, which now consisted of not just Robert and myself but also half a dozen local stalwarts, mostly elderly yet formidable Tory women. They were part of a larger group of Conservative women who were clearly the engine room of the local Conservative operation. For Robert, the sex ratio was great news as he revelled in the company of all these women and flirted with them constantly, if harmlessly – to the amusement of all concerned.
Marco addressed these iron ladies in staccato phrases, stringing his favourite expressions together in an accent that uneasily mixed received pronunciation with Estuary English. ‘Well,’ Marco said, ‘we are doing very well, vrrrrr well in this ward. Vital ward. Vital! Important. What’s really encouraging? Labour people are coming straight over to us. Not stopping at the Lib Dems. Our vote? Solid. FAN-TASTIC. Lib Dems? Soft! Vrrrr vrrrrr soft!’
As far as we could tell, the only evidence that Labour people were coming straight over to the Conservatives was the arrival on the scene of David and me. Marco was, in fact, basically showing us off as evidence of his dynamic and effective leadership. If people like us – so far beyond the Conservatives’ usual pool of voters – were coming over to the Tories, Marco probably reasoned that his party was heading not only for victory, but for the biggest landslide in electoral history.
But despite Marco’s enthusiasm, the iron ladies listened to him with what struck us as thinly disguised contempt. Their leader was an elderly woman called Pam who looked fragile and fearsome in equal measure – terribly thin despite efforts to bulk herself out with a pea-green padded Barbour-style body warmer. With her weathered features and rural outfit she looked as if she might live on a farm. In fact, she made lampshades and sold them on the internet.
Pam spent a lot of time chatting to her friend Jane, a short, plump woman of about seventy who wore her white hair swept back under a 1950s-style Alice band. Jane seemed to have more intellectual gravitas than anyone else in Team Marco – including Marco himself. Unusually, she talked about politics from time to time, often referring to what she had read in the Daily Telegraph. (It was odd to meet someone who referred to the Telegraph with such reverence and such confidence – doubtless justified – that everyone else in her circle would also have read it that morning.)
Eventually Jane decided to call my bluff. ‘Why have you joined us?’ she said. ‘You don’t look like a Conservative to me. You seem quite nice. Don’t you know we are the nasty party?’ There were cackles all round at this. I repeated my cover story that I was a Labour voter, but I didn’t like Tony Blair because of the war, and that there was no point in voting Liberal because that would only help Labour. Jane listened to this sophistry, blinked, and looked bemused. It struck me that she did not believe a single word.
A few moments afterwards, as if to bring me up to date on the politics of the election campaign, Jane said in a stage whisper of foghorn volume: ‘You know, the Lib Dems are very, very strong here – verrr strong – because they have got a FANTASTIC candidate, a really, really capable candidate – and that makes SUCH a difference … yessss – a really EXCELLENT candidate … such a difference …’ If this was bait, Marco decided not to rise to it. His mobile phone rang and he excused himself before rushing off on some vital mission or other.
Later, following an afternoon of door-to-door canvassing that merely revealed the rock-solid nature of Liberal support in that part of Richmond, Jane complained bitterly about Marco. She said he had been parachuted into Richmond, had no roots in the area and was, generally speaking, a bit of a lightweight. ‘The Liberals know how to do it,’ Jane grumbled. ‘They are like we were years ago. They are at it all the time. Coffee mornings, jumble sales, petitions. We don’t do anything. You can’t just bring the party to life at election time. It won’t work.’
As we canvassed another leafy avenue flanked by expensive houses – territory in which you might reasonably expect the householders to vote Conservative – Jane began to despair. Exasperated, she threw her arms in the air and cried out, ‘There’s nothing here!’ She meant there were scant promises of Tory votes, and added, mystified and almost tearful, ‘All of this was ours when Maggie was in! Don’t they realize that their taxes will go up! What are they thinking?’
My time with the Richmond Conservatives passed quickly and soon I had become a key player in their election campaign – and
