semis.
The key thing about door-to-door canvassing, the Richmond Tories emphasized to us, was not to waste time trying to change anyone’s opinion. That would be done by the TV appearances of the party leader Michael Howard (‘God help us!’ I said to David), by the negative smear stuff on the front pages of the tabloids, by the leaflets and by the national billboard advertising campaign (featuring, on this occasion, the vague and frankly useless ‘dog-whistle’ slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’).
Big Frank drove us to the canvassing starting point, a few streets away. I was still feeling a bit sick because of the arrival of the sign at home, and I was at the worst point of my kidney drug therapy, so I was slightly out of it and everything seemed a bit weird and threatening. Big Frank was openly hostile and unfriendly – narrowing his eyes for one heart-stopping moment and saying with real menace: ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Frank’s car didn’t help either. It was a monstrous Mercedes-like affair which seemed hermetically sealed. The mood was tense and there was no conversation. Instead the car was filled with the booming sound of Barry White which happened to be playing on Frank’s choice of easy-listening radio station. For a little while it was like being in a David Lynch movie – sailing through the suburbs in Frank’s hermetically sealed bubble with a bunch of odd characters and this insane sex music blasting over the stereo.
Robert had previously told me all about Tudor ward. It was pretty solid Conservative territory, a ‘Thatcherite’ place where the house prices were steep but not ridiculously so. That was because the transport links to London were no good, interrupted by the Thames on one side and Richmond Park on the other. In a borough which had one of the oldest populations in the country, this was where younger couples could just about get on the housing ladder.
Tudor ward was where the ‘hard-working families’ lived, the typical potential swing voters to whom politicians of all parties like to pay homage. From what we could tell, Tudor people were moderately well off and had white-collar jobs; they were the kind of people who were probably juggling their mortgages and credit card debts while trying to work out whether they could really afford private education for their kids.
Voters around here, Marco said, were sensitive to taxation and changes in interest rates. Once we were on the doorstep it quickly became clear that, although there were plenty of Tories in the Tudor ward, there were also plenty of non-voting former Tories who were still angry with the Conservatives for overseeing interest rate hikes more than a decade earlier. When you met such people they were pretty hostile, in the main, to politics of any kind. We received comments such as: ‘You only come round here when you want our vote’ – as though that was somehow a bad or irrational or hypocritical thing to do rather than an obvious and perfectly reasonable one. It seemed to me and David that these people wanted a straight cash bribe in return for their vote. None of them seemed to exude much ideological zeal or public spiritedness. I had the feeling that with most of them you needed to repeal the law on the secret ballot, so that they could then simply sell their vote to the highest cash bidder.
The official Conservative campaigning materials didn’t really help us deal with these characters. What they were really after was the abolition of all taxes and all laws that adversely affected them, combined with draconian measures against everyone else in the country. The leaflets were vague, and talked about side issues such as hospital cleanliness. What you needed here was something more along the lines of VOTE TORY AND WIN A MINI METRO. To get through the psychodrama of canvassing we developed a technique we came to call ‘Zen’ canvassing, based on the main official slogan of the Conservative campaign which was ‘Are YOU thinking what we’re thinking?’
David and I would repeat this meaningless sentence and then wiggle our eyebrows inscrutably, while noting the perplexed reactions of the householder. One middle-aged woman – who looked a bit Lib Dem – asked, ‘Is this a joke?’ to which I replied, ‘No, no!’ before showing her the slogan on an official leaflet. I coughed and announced, ‘I am canvassing for Marco Forgione and I was just wondering “Are yoooooo thinking what we’re thinking … erm … hmmmm … are you?”’ The woman warmed up and seemed amused: ‘Well, what is that … what are you thinking?’ I said I didn’t know and, anyway, that was not the question. She took a leaflet and said that in fact she always voted Conservative and would probably do so again.
With the first phase of the evening’s canvassing over, Marco and his team gathered on a street corner to tot up the number of likely Conservative votes. There were a lot of shrugs and pulling of faces, and a feeling that they had really just been going through the motions. There was a Tory vote here but there were few signs of enthusiasm. Big Frank enlivened proceedings by telling the story of how a house he was canvassing had been stormed by armed police. Frank said he told the cops, ‘Don’t arrest me, I am only canvassing’ and this witticism was treated by Marco and company as though it were a fresh from the lips of Oscar Wilde. ‘What were they, Frank? Irish? Or Muslims?’ Marco asked.
After this Team Marco fanned out across the ward for a little more light canvassing until it got dark. At one house a woman detained me on the doorstop while she fetched her grumpy teenage son, and then used me as the exhibit in a show-and-tell lesson about how local politics, councils and the entire constitutional system worked. The kid looked at me blankly, then began to smirk in a hostile manner.
By the time I arrived at the pub, everyone had disappeared except David, Marco and a clean-cut Canadian volunteer in his twenties. The section of the pub we were sitting in and the downbeat feel of the bar matched Marco’s conversation. He laid out all the reasons that the Tudor ward householders had given for not voting Conservative. I said I’d found people receptive, but Marco said: ‘The thing is, you can’t believe a word most of them say to you. They will say they are going to vote for you, and then not do it. Others will say they are against you, then they change their minds.’
Then Marco started grilling me about the giant blue Conservative election poster that had appeared in my front garden. Was I happy with it? he asked. I nervously dodged the question – fearing Marco was trying to gauge my true loyalties – and replied that my wife was ‘hopping mad’ because ‘it doesn’t go with the curtains’ and ‘she’s essentially non-political’. That last bit about my wife being non-political was, I think, the only out and out lie I told throughout the entire project. The real reason my wife was hopping mad was not down to mismatched interior décor or political apathy, but because she hated the Conservatives with a passion and now had a huge VOTE MARCO FORGIONE – CONSERVATIVE placard positioned on her lawn.
Apparently satisfied, Marco headed to the bar for a second time. I wondered if he was trying to pump as much lager as possible into us in order to discover the reality behind the shifty demeanours of his latest recruits. He came back with more beer, tossing a packet of crisps onto the table.
‘I knocked on one door,’ said Marco brightly, ‘and this old Glaswegian guy came out. Verrrr much the dyed-in-the-wool Old Labour supporter, and he said: “I don’t like Blair. Not at all. But if you think I am going to vote for a f***ing Welsh Jewboy like Michael Howard you must be f***joking!”’ There was silence, and an agonized pause. David came to the rescue and – as the on-hand race-relations expert – defused an awkward moment. ‘Better put him down as a “don’t know”, then,’ he quipped.
Later I asked David whether he had encountered any racism on the doorstep in Richmond, not just in Tudor ward, but everywhere we had canvassed in the borough. Or indeed, whether people had been at all surprised to find a black man wearing a blue rosette and asking them whether they would be voting Tory. David said there had been hardly any noticeable reaction to his skin colour on the doorstep, or any suggestion that a black Tory might be an oddity.
A few days later I took my first turn at shouting Conservative slogans into the Battle Banger’s microphone, my words being completely mangled as the ancient amplifier and speaker broadcast them around Richmond’s
