at everyone all the time in a way that seemed to suggest she was about to say something, but she never did. Not once. Not even a ‘Hello’. She was completely mute, yet remained in a state of apparently continuous imminent pronouncement.
The hacks understood that they had to wait for the brief ritual of party leader patting local party workers on the back to take place before the real business of the walkabout began; it was all part of a game they had played many times before. Howard and Marco then marched off around Richmond Green and towards the high street at a cracking pace – almost a jog. The Sky TV News cameraman filmed every moment, jogging backwards as he shot them from the front, shuffling sideways like a crab. The Central Office people seemed very annoyed that there was such a tiny turnout of local supporters and began bossing me and the others about. ‘No, no, no!’ they would bark. ‘You need to get in much closer behind Michael … Much, much closer.’
People twenty yards away would clock the blue rosettes and TV cameras and cross the street to get away. There was only one way, the Central Office officials seemed to have decided, to make sure Howard could be filmed interacting with passers-by. And that was to pounce on the more unwary as they emerged from shop doorways.
It worked like this. Howard would stop chatting to Marco – mid-sentence – and then swoop on an unsuspecting punter coming out of a shop and, to the bewilderment of the punter, initiate a conversation. The press pack, Central Office minders and Marco’s local Tories would then bunch up, with the hacks pressing forward, trying to earwig the conversation, and hoping for a gaffe of some sort to come tumbling out of someone’s mouth.
When Howard swooped – and it was a bit Dracula-like, as he tended to be taller than the older shoppers he encountered, the younger ones having already scuttled off – the victim would quickly spot the cameras and the hacks with notebooks, and then try to get out of the way. If escape was impossible, the victim tended to adopt a bemused, ‘game for a laugh’ expression, perhaps realizing that they were going to be on TV and wanting to look amenable and as normal as possible. A few seemed to recognize Howard, but none seemed to recognize Marco.
At one point Howard descended on a scruffy man who was probably in his seventies. The man was wearing cheap clothes – a baseball cap, soup-streaked tracksuit top with out-of-date Arsenal insignia, badly fitting jeans and scuffed trainers – and carrying his shopping in two grubby plastic bags. The old boy started talking about how he lived on the nearby Ham estate, claiming there was a lot of trouble there, with lots of youths hanging around and swearing, ‘throwing bottles about’ and generally making his life a misery.
Howard listened for a bit and then butted in, outlining a plan to cut the welfare benefits of parents of kids that had been reprimanded for anti-social behaviour. ‘We have some very tough measures for dealing with the yobs you are talking about,’ he said, edging away. But the man came back, a quizzical look on his face. ‘What about putting them all in the army?’ he growled. ‘What do you think about that?’ The media scrum tightened, sensing that Howard was now in potential gaffe territory.
But Howard smoothly ignored the question. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we do have some very tough measures, some very tough measures indeed, for dealing with yobs who do make life impossible for good, hard-working peepil …’ Before the old boy could push his plan for dragooning hoodied ASBO yobs into a conscript army any further, Howard beamed at him with a smile both brilliant and seemingly devoid of any sincerity whatsoever. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said, ‘must press on, thank you so much …’ Patronizing smiles broke out among the Tory officials.
As the Howard mob shuffled off along the street, the punky Press Association hack broke off to interview a man who had just come out of a betting shop, claiming to have put £100 on Michael Howard to win the election at 30–1. The story of the bet was the only part of the Press Association story that made the local paper and it was very much the comedy highlight of an otherwise completely gaffe-free – and therefore, as far as the journos were concerned, unproductive – walkabout.
Finally, Howard disappeared into a Chinese restaurant for an hour to be interviewed by Trevor McDonald. Everyone else – the less starry television journalists, the newspaper hacks and the plump female radio reporter – was left on the street in front of the restaurant to fend for themselves. It was now pouring with rain. One minder from Conservative Central Office sheltered in the restaurant’s entrance, barring the way like a bouncer. Another started sparring with Radio Woman, saying it had all gone very well and that ‘MH’ had received a ‘really great, warm reception’.
‘Well, come on now, this is not exactly hostile territory for you,’ said Radio Woman.
The Tory press minder replied, in a wounded voice, ‘It was totally solid Lib Dem last time, totally solid, but this time it is really moving.’
‘In your dreams,’ snorted Radio Woman, before announcing that, since Howard would be in the restaurant for a long time, she was going off to get coffee in Starbucks. ‘In your dreams,’ she repeated as she departed.
Later, Howard was due to give a formal speech to supporters at a local community centre. He appeared through a side door and made magisterial gestures to calm the crowd, arms outstretched, smiling and soaking it all up, as his head bobbed up and down like a nodding dog toy. Once or twice, he seemed to point to somebody in the middle distance, as though he was on stage at a vast arena.
In reality, he was only in a tiny hall with no more than a hundred people present, all crammed tightly together by party officials so as to create some atmosphere. However, the deception worked to great effect. When we later saw the two-second sound bite that appeared on television, it really did look as though Howard was addressing a mass rally.
The Conservative supporters lapped up all this nonsense in a manner that was polite rather than ecstatic. Like fans of the Rolling Stones, the greying crowd was holding back until a favourite song was rolled out – then they would really let rip. When, I reckoned they were wondering, was Howard going to get to the signature tune of the campaign – that is, the harsh measures the Tories would take against criminals once they were in power?
‘We are going to put the criminals behind bars – and the do-gooders back in their box’ was the furthest Howard would go on that issue. Box? What box? As far as I could tell, the crowd was confused by this odd remark. It seemed to be one of the ‘dog whistle’ signals that newspapers’ political writers had told everyone to expect; but what the crowd wanted, it appeared, was proper whistles that they could actually pick up without having super-sensitive dog hearing. Such as, maybe, ‘Lock’em up and throw away the key.’
At the end of his speech, Howard received a standing ovation – no real surprise at a stage-managed event such as this – but it was a pretty sad scene. At least half the audience did not even try to stand up, and this seemed to be because they were either very old or disabled. Many of those who did stand up struggled to their feet slowly and with evident discomfort. In some cases, by the time they had made it the ovation had finished, leaving them looking stranded and bewildered. Howard did his nodding and waving rock star thing again and the audience sat down, some of them very slowly. And then he was gone.
Polling day dawned and David and I were roped in for ‘one last push’ as part of the plainly doomed national and local campaign. We were given the task of standing outside the East Sheen polling station – actually the local primary school – and asking voters for their names as they arrived to vote. We had to look up the name on a list of voters and tick them off. The idea was, by process of elimination, to identify known Conservative supporters who hadn’t voted, so that other workers could call them up and persuade them to get to the polling station.
This process, known as tellering, had been organized by John Leach, a stalwart of the Richmond Tories, who had phoned us a few days earlier. (Marco
