When we visited, the Rodmell village cricket team was, not surprisingly, a reflection of the village’s new population of commuters and people who worked in finance. They were not very serious about cricket, and did not seem to know each other particularly well. The team included several accountants, an ‘estimator’ (whatever that meant), the aforementioned finance director of the multinational energy company and the director of a primary healthcare trust. They tended to commute to big city offices during the week, and play out the role of stout yeoman or country squire at the weekend. One of the team told us, ‘I never played cricket until I moved here – it is just that this field is here so we think “why not use it”?’
The locals were kitted out in pristine old-fashioned cricket whites, caps and cable-knit jumpers of the sort that had not been worn by anyone serious about cricket for decades. In contrast Blackboys, who were regular players, wore modern Nike-style gear, with their names emblazoned on their backs, like today’s professional cricketers. It had taken the Rodmell team a long, long time to find a date in their diaries when they were able to put a team together, perming a squad of a dozen or so from the male population of approximately two hundred.
Rodmell versus Blackboys turned out to be a ridiculously one-sided match. Blackboys batted first, and within minutes their batsmen were confidently dispatching the ball to the boundary. Rodmell’s opening bowlers were not bad, and looked as if they had played plenty of cricket long ago at school. But when the pair had each bowled their maximum number of overs, several unskilled pie-chuckers had to take their turn bowling. Further diminishing Rodmell’s chances of winning the match, their fielders were hopeless. Later, the consensus was that they had dropped a total of nine catches, and also received injuries ranging from getting hit in the face by the ball to tripping over.
As Blackboys’ innings went on, their batsmen were soon whacking the ball clear out of the ground at will. They played their shots with increasing power and verve and eventually the ball rocketed straight at the spectators in the pavilion, missing David and me – and also the skull of a six-year-old child – by millimetres before smashing a neat cricket-ball-sized hole in the glass of the pavilion door. After a couple of hours, Blackboys were 196–1. Had this been a five-day test match they would have been on track to declare at 3,000-odd runs for, say, eight wickets.
It was a big target, and when Rodmell came out to bat they didn’t look as if they would meet it. In fact, they were bowled out for forty-three. Reactions to the drubbing seemed to vary. Some of the very worst performers were self-effacing and tried to turn it into a joke, but others were clearly irked and there was a very uncricket-like snippy feeling in the air, with the slightly better players exuding resentment towards the passengers and no-hopers. It was not as though Blackboys were up to much either. The Rodmell game was to be their first win of the season and, two months and nine games later, it remained Blackboys’ only win of the season.
The last Conservative Prime Minister John Major is famous for a speech in which he quoted George Orwell on the English love of village life. ‘Fifty years on from now,’ Major had said, the country would still be a place of ‘long shadows on village cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’. By the time we arrived in Rodmell ten of those fifty years had elapsed since Major left the scene. And in Rodmell at least we discovered that his vision had already vanished almost entirely.
According to a plaque on the wall of the twelfth-century church, the last burial in the graveyard at Rodmell had taken place in 1992, the year John Major was elected Prime Minister.
It seemed to us that, however you wanted to define it, there was very little in the way of Conservatism in Rodmell. Farming had been replaced by agribusiness and the village had become part reluctant tourist attraction and part estate agent’s dream – thatched-cottage living on the edge of a city and only half an hour’s drive from Gatwick – a picture, we reckoned, repeated all across the rural (or once rural) south of England. The rosy image people liked to have of the countryside was of a timeless, gentle place of seasonal rituals, home to farmers, craftsmen, vicars and parochial, patriotic yokels. The reality, as it appeared to us, is that it was populated by number crunchers and workers in the ‘knowledge industry’, most of whom had not a local outlook but an international and strongly pan-European one.
THREE Dam Busters and Morris Dancers – Woodbridge, Suffolk
After the 2005 general election defeat, and the arrival of David Cameron as leader, the Conservative Party quickly reduced the amount of energy it spent talking about criminals and the need to be tough on them. The thinking was that banging on about crime linked the Tories, in the public mind, to a past generation of boggle-eyed authoritarians who wanted to bring back hanging and corporal punishment, and who were unhealthily obsessed with all that sort of thing. In the hope, presumably, of making the Conservatives sound more approachable and less nasty and weird on the subject, one of Cameron’s first significant acts as party leader was to give a speech saying the public needed to try to understand criminals. This scored headlines saying Cameron wanted everyone to ‘hug a hoodie’.
But how would all this go down with the grass roots, many of whom, I reckoned, believed that cracking down on criminals was one of the main things that being a Conservative was all about? Some of the right-wing law and order fundamentalists had, in fact, already deserted the Conservatives and joined the United Kingdom Independence Party – UKIP for short – originally formed in a wave of disgust over the pro-European stance of the Conservative Party and the political classes generally. So when I read that UKIP was to hold a conference devoted solely to the subject of law and order, it seemed like the chance to get a good insight into a type of red-blooded law and order enthusiast who thought it was no longer right or proper to support the Conservative Party.
The conference was held in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge at the end of May 2008. It wasn’t hard, as we parked up outside a supermarket, to find the conference venue. All we had to do was follow the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and the theme from The Dam Busters, which formed part of a medley of patriotic tunes being blasted out from a public address system inside a community centre, and flooding out into the supermarket car park through open emergency exit doors.
There were about sixty people inside the hall – all of them white and mostly elderly – sitting in rows of cheap plastic and tubular steel seats, facing a stage. Looking down from the stage was a row of six grim-faced UKIP leaders and luminaries who resembled a latter-day politburo reviewing a Red Square parade from the top of Lenin’s tomb. They sat behind a trestle table decorated with the red and white Cross of St George flag and a Union Jack. My arrival with David seemed to cause a stutter in the proceedings. We looked so out of place that it seemed the folks on the stage were, we thought, wondering whether they ought to confront us in some way, or perhaps stop proceedings to ask us who we were and what we thought we were doing.
But they said nothing and just sat staring at us as the patriotic music faded and things began to get going. The introductory speech of welcome was given by John West, a very thin man wearing a shapeless suit, on the lapel of which glinted an enamel Union Jack badge. John spoke with a harsh, nasal cockney accent and his eyes had a slightly faraway look. His delivery was the percussive jabbing of a megaphone-wielding street politician or market trader. ‘Now then – why’re we holdin’ a confrunce on loranorder?’ John asked. ‘It’s cos we’re losin’ the war on crime … a hundred and thirty million crimes are committed in Britain, every sinkle year.’ John ploughed on, throwing out the welter of similarly alarming statistics and doom-laden killer factoids which, we were to discover, were very much the hallmark of UKIP speech-making. John spoke quietly, but his message boomed and echoed around the mostly empty hall thanks to overamplification. ‘Do ya remember David Camrun’s advice to hug a hoodie?’ he sneered. ‘Huh! So much for the Conservatives