For good measure my son, then at primary school and something of a wag, had drawn a primitive skull and crossbones on the poster with a marker pen, and I had frustrated a further plan of his to add a black plastic skull and crossbones pirate flag. Various spiders and other insects had taken up residence in the soggy hardboard and my teenage daughter had added a Labour Party leaflet, secured with Blu-Tack. Mould was beginning to invade the edge of the placard and it was, all in all, starting to turn into a sort of voodoo totem poll with all sorts of political bunting and tat flapping from it. If it had stayed up long enough maybe somebody would place a human skull on top, like one of those props from Apocalypse Now.
At one point during the campaign there was a gathering of my wife’s family at a house a little further down the street. I had been amused to see various non-political in-laws, cousins and nephews walking past the sign and looking at it in vaguely anxious perplexity. When I arrived at the party they seemed frosty at first, but said nothing about the blue carbuncle. I then explained The Project, swearing them to ‘semi-secrecy’ (whatever that meant), and they warmed up considerably.
One brother-in-law, who used to work for a giant pharmaceuticals company, said he knew that a form of temporary insanity was a common side effect of the medicine I was taking for my kidneys, which could also bring on a sort of instant physiological and neurological old age. He had, before I explained The Project to him, genuinely thought that the drug therapy might be the reason for the appearance of the sign.
When I got back to the house, I told David that we had chalked up the first truly scientific conclusion of the project. The conclusion? That normal, middle-class professional people – who had normal, responsible jobs with big firms – now honestly thought the most obvious explanation as to why somebody might switch their vote from Labour to Conservative was acute drug-induced insanity.
Michael Howard lost the 2005 general election and handed Tony Blair a third term in office. It was an open secret that Blair would in due course hand over to Gordon Brown. It did seem in a way that the Conservative Party of old had passed away and would require a complete relaunch. Marco increased the Conservative vote in Richmond slightly, achieving a swing of 1.9 per cent to the Tories from the Liberal Democrats.
A couple of days after election night we attended an excruciating thank-you party for the Conservative campaigners in Richmond. We met up again with all the characters we’d come across during our time inside Marco’s campaign – Robert, Lampshade Pam, some of the ‘iron ladies’ I had worked the phone with, Hugo the sign guy, Marco himself and a group of very old Tories whom I had not seen during the campaign. Most people seemed either very depressed, or they were so old they were past caring.
In defeat Marco made pretty much exactly the same speech as he had made four years earlier when he stood in Yeovil during the 2001 election (we looked it up on the internet). His spiel made it sound as if he was planning to stay and fight another day. In fact, Marco left both the area and politics itself soon afterwards, taking up a job as the marketing man for a technical college in Kent.
As the party was winding down an elderly and slightly deaf Tory – who looked well into his eighties, if not older – invited us to the Richmond Conservative Association’s annual dinner. It was easy to remember when the event took place, the old guy said, because it was always held on the Queen Mother’s birthday. One of the younger Tories (in his fifties) explained, shouting the information into the old man’s hearing aid, that the Queen Mother was dead. The old man replied with a fearful and utterly lost look: ‘Oh! Are you sure? How terrible. Are you sure? How did that happen?’
Coincidentally, the Richmond Conservative Association’s annual dinner was due to take place in an Italian restaurant called San Marco. It was an appropriately named venue as Richmond was soon to be sans Marco, since he was about to depart to pastures new. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Richmond Tories were pretty much sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans taste, sans Marco – sans everything.
1 I am much better now.
TWO Village Cricket People – Rodmell, Sussex
‘Rural England is the real England, unspoilt by factories, financiers, tourists and hustle,’ wrote A. G. Macdonell in England, Their England, his classic 1933 novel. The book concerns the exploits of a young Scotsman, Donald Cameron, as he tours southern England and some of its more conservative byways. The most famous episode in the book is a blow-by-blow account of a cricket match between a gang of First World War invalids from London and a team from the village of Fordenden, still hailed by many critics as one of the greatest pieces of sports writing. The episode was, though, anything but fictional. Literary historians have established beyond doubt that the match Macdonell describes actually took place in the village of Rodmell, in Sussex, not far from Brighton.
‘The entire scene was perfect to the last detail,’ Macdonell wrote of his visit to Rodmell. ‘There stood the Vicar, beaming absent-mindedly at everyone. There was the forge, with the blacksmith, his hammer discarded, tightening his snake-buckled belt ready for the fray.’ According to Macdonell, the locals in this idyllic hamlet sat around the cricket pitch with tankards of ale while ‘blue and green dragonflies played at hide and seek among the thistledown and a pair of swans flew overhead. An ancient man leaned upon a scythe, his sharpening-stone sticking out of his velveteen waistcoat. A magpie flapped lazily across the meadows. The parson shook hands with the squire. Doves cooed. The haze flickered. The world stood still.’
After my experiences in Richmond the world of Conservatism just appeared a bit sad to me. The party and its followers hardly seemed worth writing about, except, perhaps, as an exercise in gloating. A year passed, during which I saw off a near fatal illness, which got worse before it got better, and which had made my life such a misery during the 2005 election campaign.
Meanwhile, David had been off on another project, investigating the world of Sierra Leonean war criminals and, on the side, writing about the lifestyles of gangsters and the super-rich for glossy magazines. After the 2005 election Tony Blair’s government had become so unpopular that the Conservatives, still unpopular themselves, started to creep up on the inside of Labour in the polls, giving them an outside chance of once again forming the government of the country. Michael Howard stepped down from the Conservative leadership and handed over to the much younger, more media-friendly figure of David Cameron. Cameron began to work his magic, at least at the level of national politics and television, and the Conservatives looked like coming to life once again as a force in their own right. What interested us was whether things were changing at the grass roots of the party and, more broadly, in the attitudes of ‘small c’ conservatives who might support the party.
A second stage of our Tory journey thus began, and it was to take place against the backdrop of the growing unpopularity of the Labour government and incessant talk in the national media of a rightward shift of the political tectonic plates of the country. We had entered what was for us the alien world of Conservatism through the front door of my local Conservative Association office. We now planned to re-enter by the back door of day-to-day life among conservative people. Our itinerary was to include gatherings of the Women’s Institute, bank holiday pilgrimages to Winston Churchill’s house, agricultural shows and village fetes, polo matches and summer garden parties, rubber chicken circuit fund-raising dinners, and immersion in a ‘Nimby’ campaign in Oxfordshire. This, we felt, was the ‘real’ or ‘small c’ conservative England on which the fortunes of the Conservative Party ultimately rested. Rodmell, the focus of Macdonell’s journey seventy-five years ago, seemed the best place to start – especially as we’d learned that the village still had a cricket team. So we went to the village to watch