Leachy seemed hurt and bewildered by my departure and, on a personal rather than a political level, I had some sympathy for him. His social life seemed, to a large extent, to revolve around the local Conservative Association, whose membership included many very, very old people. I think he saw me, despite my greying hair, as vigorous new blood, and perhaps the first swallow of a new spring of enthusiastic support for the Conservative movement, someone who might help to revitalize the thing he loved.
‘Why have you gone off us?’ he asked plaintively. ‘You know you could have a really great future with the Conservative Party … You did such marvellous work for us during the election campaign … We really need energetic young people like you, you know …’
ONE The Sound of the Suburbs – Richmond, Surrey
Joining the Conservative election campaign was very simple. We just walked off the street into the party’s Richmond constituency office, which was on East Sheen high street, near to where we were living. The Conservative Party’s premises were next to a butcher’s shop and a takeaway pizza place. We had prepared the ground by calling the office the previous day when, to our surprise, the phone had been answered by Marco Forgione – the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond – in person. We recognized the name from the blue election hoardings which were starting to appear in some of Richmond’s more ample front gardens.
When we sauntered into his office – pausing only to wipe our feet noisily on the welcome mat – Marco looked astonished. He rose from behind his desk in that very slow way you see in gangster films, when the bank clerk stands up gingerly while at the same reaching for the alarm button hidden under the desk. Looking well into his forties, Marco had a manic smile, dark hair and devilishly sparkling eyes. His smile revealed a slight gap in his teeth, which gave him his distinctively boyish look. With his mouth open and his eyes as wide as saucers, he struggled to speak before greeting us in a stilted voice.
With the awkwardness beginning to build nicely, a high-spirited OAP named Robert bowled into the room, emitting a stream of completely unfathomable banter and ignoring us completely. We looked pretty out of place, so we later thought that he might have taken us for photocopier technicians or something similar. When Marco cut into Robert’s bonhomie to introduce us, the old gent almost jumped out of his skin. ‘Good grief!’ he said, recoiling as though he’d just stumbled across a nest of rats.
Robert was charm itself and instantly likeable – much more so than Marco, who was pleasant enough, but, like many professional politicians, came over as a bit oily. And Robert had what seemed to us a really killer look – he sported a luxurious Second World War Spitfire-ace-meets-Rajput moustache, slicked-back hair, multi-coloured cravat and a vast blue silk hanky tucked into the top pocket of his brass-buttoned blue blazer.
When Marco introduced us as ‘new members of the team’ Robert twitched with apparent bafflement. Then, composing himself, he launched into a long-winded speech designed to clinch the vote of what the Richmond Tories liked to call ‘a wavering Liberal Democrat’ (we were to hear a lot about these creatures, who seemed to be largely mythical). As Robert waffled off into a shaggy-dog story about the local Liberals, Marco nodded at him with a mixture of patient tolerance, punctuated by a slightly panicked air when Robert began to veer into politically incorrect territory, as he often did.
Robert said that when the Liberals had been in charge of the local council, they had set up a rehab clinic for drug users and alcoholics. But then, he said, the council ‘just had to go one step further – and set up a second clinic just for ethnic minorities’. He paused, as though expecting laughter or possibly applause. ‘Now,’ Robert continued, deciding he had paused long enough, ‘I can see why some Asian women, for example, might need to be treated on their own, because they have their own customs and so on …’
Marco seemed very uneasy with this racially-based talk. But it was something I noticed throughout our Tory journey. Whenever David was present, older Tories would often spontaneously start talking about racial matters. It was like an itch they had to scratch. And it struck both of us as incredibly gauche. Maybe it was just their way of trying to be friendly, or even welcoming.
Perhaps sensing the bad vibes from Marco, Robert suddenly changed the subject. ‘Do you know, in the end it’s all about pavements,’ he said, puffing out his chest, ‘pavements and dog messes.’ Marco relaxed, but started to look bored. At length, Robert explained that since the Conservatives had got back in control of Richmond council they had, cunningly, copied Liberal Democrat tactics and repaired ‘hundreds and hundreds of pavements, all over the place’.
We got the formalities out of the way and it wasn’t long before we were junior players in the campaign to elect Marco Forgione. That meant delivering campaign leaflets or, as Marco liked to put it, ‘blitzing the streets’. We’d seen plenty of politicians using a battle bus for touring from one triumphant PR stunt to another – occasionally they would splash out on a helicopter or even a private jet. But for Marco, transport consisted of the much more modest Battle Banger, which was usually parked outside the constituency office, next to a karaoke noodle bar.
The Battle Banger – an ancient, dented, off-white Rover with a cracked windscreen, barely legal tyres and a peeling tax disc – was a complete heap, and had, we guessed, a resale value of about £150. In the back window was a yellowing Countryside Alliance sticker, which was probably a relic of Marco’s previous incarnation as the unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate for Yeovil in Somerset. The Battle Banger looked as if it had been welded together from two stolen cars and driven down from Glasgow.
The Battle Banger’s interior complemented the exterior: it was a tip. There was litter everywhere – scrunched-up newspapers, sweet wrappers and mud-covered leaflets, along with Marco’s collection of music cassettes. The cassettes included Ibiza Uncovered (The Return); Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits; Classics For a Summer Day; American Pie by Don McLean and, most bizarrely for a Conservative candidate, The Best of Two Tone, by a clutch of late seventies Midlands ska bands. We also noticed a page printed from the internet giving directions to a model railway club in New Malden and, in addition, technical information about the equipment club members owned – types of trains, track gauge and so forth.
Our first day of campaigning for the Richmond Tories consisted largely of giving out leaflets up and down the streets around the Vineyard ward, an enclave of slightly bohemian Georgian streets just to the north of Richmond town centre. The Vineyard ward covered the area of Richmond Hill, which includes some of the most expensive residential property in the country. One particularly upmarket group of Georgian mansions in Richmond Hill sits high up on a terrace overlooking the Thames, from which there is a beautiful view of bucolic woods and flooded meadows in the foreground and the entire county of Surrey in the distance.
We parked up near the Georgian mansions and Robert, with child-like delight, set about getting the Battle Banger ready for a spot of what he called ‘loudspeaker work’. Chuckling softly to himself as his cravat flapped gaily in the breeze, he began to lash the loudspeaker system onto the roof with bits of string. Then he linked it to a valve amplifier which looked so old and battered it might once have belonged to the Troggs. The amp was plonked on the back seat of the Battle Banger and was powered by an oil-streaked car battery which smelled strongly of acid.
As he was going about all this, Robert dropped the ball of string onto the street and it rolled under the car – just the first of a series of minor operational disasters that seemed to bedevil the Richmond Tories whenever they ventured forth into action. Instinctively, Robert tried to retrieve the ball by pulling on the strand already tied to the roof rack of the Battle Banger. It took him a while, and several good hard jerks, before he realized that the more he pulled on the string, the more the ball would unravel. Marco decided he would leave the string problem to Robert, who scratched his head thoughtfully.
Instead, Marco turned to us and, with what looked like a wicked glint in his eye, produced a pair of large bright blue satin ‘Vote Conservative’ rosettes.