into it. What made us even more valuable was that hale, hearty and physically fit party workers were especially thin on the ground. These problems seemed to be nationwide but in Richmond the rot was so bad, we discovered, that the party was paying a firm that used Eastern European immigrants to deliver campaign literature door to door. The story appeared in the Liberal-leaning Independent and made out that the Richmond Tories were a bunch of utter hypocrites, employing the very immigrants on whom many right-wingers wanted more stringent controls.
A few days into the campaign I found myself in Robert’s car, with him at the wheel, driving towards yet another canvassing rendezvous point to deliver yet more leaflets (I had put aside my concerns that this was taking bread from the mouths of asylum seekers). During the journey Robert happily recounted stories about his escapades as a Tory campaigner, such as the time he had stood as a candidate in an unwinnable seat in the North East in the 1980s. As Robert told it, one day Cecil Parkinson arrived at a railway station to support his campaign and to speak at a public meeting. According to Robert, ‘Cecil’ had turned up at the station and, instead of saying hello, had pointed at a ‘lady station guard’ and said, ‘Look at the enormous knockers on that!’
As we trundled slowly along Hugo, the other passenger, was not the least bit interested in Robert’s stories. Instead, he was sitting in the back seat, wriggling like an excited puppy and pointing at all the VOTE MARCO signs he had put up in people’s front gardens. Hugo was staggeringly enthusiastic about political signage. As Robert rambled on, Hugo would butt in excitedly with ‘Oooh – look at that one up there! That’s a bloody great position! Everyone will see that! Hey! Three signs in a row! I hope Marco drives this way and sees that! Over the back there, there’s a street you can’t see from here, but there’s loads and loads of signs! Yep, loads of them! Loads of them.’
As we arrived at a busy road junction Hugo pointed out a large but dilapidated house with a big garden, and Hugo shared his plans to persuade the householder to let him plant an enormous VOTE MARCO sign in the front garden. ‘She’s barking mad,’ Hugo confided, ‘and her house is a complete wreck. I think there’s something seriously wrong with her. But I think she might let me put a sign up – she’s mad enough.’ Sure enough, a few days later a gigantic blue sign was securely and proudly standing in the garden, plonked down like the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the moon.
As we drove past a thicket of orange diamond-shaped Liberal Democrat signs along the main road, Hugo filled up with respectful admiration. ‘You know, those Lib Dem signs are much better than ours, the colour is much better and it stands out more. You’ve got to hand it to them.’ After that Hugo decided he wanted to cheer everyone up and badgered Robert – who was telling a very long story about some sort of mishap with John Major’s portable soapbox during the 1992 election campaign – into taking a considerable detour around Barnes Common. This was so that we could see the sign Hugo had erected in the garden of the multimillion-pound mansion that belonged to Chris Patten – the wealthy former Tory minister and last governor of Hong Kong.
‘He agreed to have the sign up straight away,’ Hugo yapped. ‘I met him and he was really nice about it.’ Hugo then insisted we take another detour so that we could see the signs he had erected along the edge of Barnes Common itself. A neat row of blue signs planted amid some brambles came into view. ‘Yes! Reeee-sult!’ Hugo cried, punching the air. He had been worried, he explained, that because they were on common land ‘vandals’ might have pulled them down.
Later that afternoon Robert dropped me off at Tory HQ and I walked the short distance back to my house where I was due to meet David for a spot of evening canvassing. It was five o’clock on a bright spring evening. I turned the corner and was confronted by the sight of an eight-foot wooden pole with a VOTE MARCO FORGIONE – CONSERVATIVE poster stuck to a large piece of hardboard in the style of an estate agent’s For Sale sign. As chance would have it David turned up at exactly the same time and, pointing at the sign, began laughing like a drain.
He watched me look at the sign and then go into a state of shock: ‘Oh f***! Look at that,’ I said. And I kept repeating this two-word mantra, involuntarily burying my head in my hands. Being a coward, I peeped in through the window to see if my wife was in. She was. ‘Oh f***, oh f***!’ My wife is a dedicated Labour supporter (and feminist!) and, even more than this, very committed to gardening and the overall look of the front of the house. She had reservations about the project in the first place. This was not going to play well with her.
I hit upon the brilliant plan of blaming David. It was in fact true that David had agreed to ‘display a poster’ during his original, fateful phone call to Marco. What he had in mind was maybe an A4 poster that could be put in the window and then obscured by shrubbery in some way. Instead, we had ended up with this carbuncle, this Day-Glo Nelson’s column of political shame. In the event my wife, who had grown wearily used to my escapades over the years, displayed a boundless degree of tolerance. She restricted her retaliation to a series of withering looks, adding the observation that the very sight of the sign made her flesh creep.
I mulled over the sign question with David as we drove through Richmond Park to the rendezvous point in Tudor ward where we were scheduled to start canvassing with Marco and his ‘boys and girls’ (our experience to date led us to expect they would actually be mature women). I was feeling very paranoid about it. And I was very paranoid about the sign. I was in a dark place at the time, partly because of the powerful kidney drugs I was on, which had mood-altering and anxiety-heightening properties.1
The Tories were devious, I reasoned. They had obviously arranged for the sign to be stuck up as a way of smoking us out. It was a test. David, who was not on drugs and who had a healthier and less Machiavellian outlook anyway, was more inclined to think that it was just routine idiocy and, perhaps, wishful thinking. ‘These people just go round putting up these signs,’ he explained, adding: ‘It’s a waste of f***ing time and effort. But it is what they do.’ And he shrugged and told me to calm down a bit.
It seemed likely that the Tories thought there was something suspicious about David and me. But we were doing no harm. And what were they going to do if they felt they needed to act? March up to David and say, ‘You cannot possibly be a Conservative – we can tell because you are black’? Some of them might think that, but they were not going to come out and say it.
Notwithstanding the powerful side effects of my kidney drugs, it didn’t always feel great to be deceiving Marco, Robert, Pam and the rest of the Richmond Tories. But, then again, a bit of research on Marco revealed that the image he liked to present wasn’t, as we saw it, always completely in tune with the reality. A quick look on the internet had turned up the fact that when he had joined the Tories in the mid-1990s the party’s national machine had trumpeted him as a prized Labour ‘defector’. But while he had said he had been a Labour sympathizer shortly after studying at university, it soon emerged that he had never in fact been a Labour Party member. There were other inconsistencies and exaggerations in his background, so the last thing he could complain about was people not presenting a full and accurate picture of themselves, politically speaking.
David and I mulled it all over as we drove through Richmond Park to the evening rendezvous in the car park of a sports centre. Marco was waiting for us with a small knot of two or three blokes. A tall man called Frank loomed physically over the proceedings, but the brightest spark was Sean, a forty-something who was introduced as an official of some sort for the party. Sean had all the lists and papers we needed sorted out in advance, and introduced the concept of ‘running the board’ – whereby one member of the canvassing team didn’t actually knock on doors at all but, instead, kept the running total of promised votes up to date.
We were to canvass the Tudor ward, a relentlessly suburban patch with an entirely different feel from the more fashionable Vineyard ward. Housing in the Tudor ward was much more modern, with a good sprinkling of boxy sixties- and seventies-style
