project – a troubling experience. There I was being driven around my borough bothering people with Conservative propaganda, and I expected them really to hate me for it.
But, as with the rosette, I had been genuinely surprised to find that people either ignored us or had only given mildly annoyed looks – because of the noise, I suspected. There had been some vaguely approving but amused smiles, of the sort given to morris dancers or people rattling tins for Cats Protection, but no one had thrown a brick at us or even flicked a V-sign.
Robert had been at the wheel and, with a wry smile, had written out a script for me on the back of an envelope from the water company. The script read: ‘For Cleaner Hospitals, Vote Conservative’. If I got bored with that, Robert said, I could change the line to ‘For More Police, Vote Conservative’. When I shouted, maybe a little bit sarcastically, ‘Vote for Marco Forgione – your LOCAL Conservative candidate’, Robert said, with an enthusiastic cackle, ‘That’s a good one!’ Marco, as part of his election strategy, was indeed claiming that he was a local man, although this struck us as a somewhat unusual claim to be making, given his strong family and business links to the West Country.
Nobody would have been able to make out a word I was saying, however, since the distortion and feedback from the clapped-out battery-powered valve amplifier was so extreme. At one point I wound down the window of the car – it was a warm day – and that produced a persistent, whistling feedback so sweet and sustained that it could have formed part of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo.
As Robert drove and I shouted – sometimes relieving the boredom with ‘For Cleaner Police and More Hospitals, Vote Marco Forgione’ – I thought how pointless it was to shout at people in this way. It seemed to be nothing more than a habit among local political campaigners which dated back to a time before television, when a megaphone was the only way to communicate with people in large numbers or over a distance. Now it was just a noisy but empty ritual, one of the things you did at election time.
Eventually I was invited into the belly of the beast – the back room of the Richmond Conservative Association office itself. I was given a desk and a telephone and a telephone canvassing job. I had to convince Richmond’s Tory supporters to show up at a public meeting with Michael Howard and also confirm that they would turn up to vote on election day.
The inner sanctum – the size of a decent sized sitting room – was windowless and dominated by a long boardroom table in the middle of the floor. Around the table sat six elderly women stuffing leaflets into envelopes. From one wall a chocolate-box portrait of the Queen looked on, and on another hung an oil painting of the Houses of Parliament. The place was dingy and threadbare, yet this was the nerve centre of the Conservative operation in Richmond.
‘Chris is just going to make a few phone calls for me,’ said Marco, grinning in a sickly way. ‘Is that OK, ladies?’ There was no reply. I sat down facing the wall and picked up an ancient telephone with a curly wire, keying in the numbers and working my way down a list of Tory sympathizers. Another element of this ring round was to ask if they would help with electioneering. The majority of those who answered the phone sounded very old – many with ailments which they used, quite reasonably, to excuse themselves from helping out with political activity.
The routine went something like this. I would say: ‘Hello, is that Mrs Smith?’ Then one of the six ladies – they were watching my every move – would interject with something like ‘Oh, I know her, she can’t help – she’s terribly crippled.’ The ladies would talk about me as if I wasn’t there: ‘Why have they asked him to phone all these people,’ they would say. ‘I know all of them, they are all my friends.’
Sometimes, I got through to a younger, and presumably able-bodied, Tory supporter, who would make excuses to get out of helping with the campaign. The ladies would then cheer themselves up by making vitriolic personal comments about the person on the other end of the phone, along the lines that he or she was a traitor, hypocrite and fair-weather supporter who had been only too keen to help when the Tories were riding high.
As I worked down the list, I began flipping through a script left by the phone. It was obviously to be used when cold-calling people. Among the various instructions was a crib sheet to be used if the person on the other end of the line was a Lib Dem who might just be persuaded to vote Tory. There was some very negative, personalized stuff there about Jenny Tonge, the retiring Liberal MP, claiming that she had stepped down as MP ‘probably because of her stance on hard drugs’.
As for Susan Kramer, the new Lib Dem election candidate, the script made it clear I should emphasize that she was an ‘outsider’ and a ‘foreigner’ who had ‘few links with Richmond’ and had ‘lost in other constituencies’. The script also said Kramer was Hungarian, although why all this should matter, particularly given that Marco’s links with Richmond didn’t seem particularly strong either and he was of Italian extraction, was anybody’s guess.
Taking a momentary break from phoning the existing supporters, I turned to face the ladies and said: ‘It says here that Kramer is Hungarian. I didn’t know she was Hungarian.’
‘She’s a Jewess,’ one of the ladies replied, ‘but we aren’t allowed to say that. We get told off if we say that. So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.’
The next day I was out of the office and back on the road. A Tory convoy had been organized, with the aim of ‘blitzing’ Barnes, the well-heeled, faintly bohemian area which much of the BBC’s top talent calls home. By mid-morning a cluster of four or five cars – expensive but boring mid-range saloons – had parked up at the rendezvous point. Some of the cars had blue balloons attached to them and a couple had ‘Vote Conservative’ posters in the side windows.
As the housing density in the area was so low – the ultimate luxury in London – there was no need for parking restrictions, and consequently no danger of getting a parking ticket. The line of parked cars was soon noticed by two local Anglo-Indian boys, about eight and nine years old.
‘Who are these people?’ asked the younger one, possibly attracted by the balloons.
‘The police,’ the older one asserted.
‘What are they doing?’
‘They are doing a survey of people,’ he stated categorically. Bored, they returned to slurping ice cream and dropping litter on the street.
Eventually, the Battle Banger hoved into view, with the amplified voice of Lampshade Pam broadcasting noisily through a loudspeaker tied to the roof rack. She sounded like Björk with a mouth full of marbles talking through a fuzzbox. Her message was simple, if not very easy on the ear: ‘VRNNRTT KORNSVVVKKNNNITIVE VRRRNNNTTT MMMMNNNAEEKKKOW FOOORRRRGEE OWWWWNEEEEE.’
The Battle Banger trundled up the street and abruptly came to a halt. Pam, sitting in the passenger seat, was thrown forward. The car was decked out in an array of ‘Vote Forgione’ posters with blue helium balloons trailing behind, some of which had already started to deflate. Marco jumped out of the car to meet the team.
The man behind the wheel of the Battle Banger – an aggressive-looking middle-aged activist – leaned across Pam, wound down the window and growled a garbled message to the effect that we were to follow him down to ‘The Glebelands’ in central Barnes. There was great excitement among the Tories. This was the patch of Susan Kramer, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Richmond.
Kramer lived in a mansion – the £5-million type – close to the centre of Barnes village, the expensive heart of the area. ‘It’s time to really put the boot in,’ said one canvasser with enthusiasm. ‘Yeahhhh,’ agreed the driver of the Battle Banger, with grim determination: ‘let’s
