Voters around here, Marco said, were sensitive to taxation and changes in interest rates. Once we were on the doorstep it quickly became clear that, although there were plenty of Tories in the Tudor ward, there were also plenty of non-voting former Tories who were still angry with the Conservatives for overseeing interest rate hikes more than a decade earlier. When you met such people they were pretty hostile, in the main, to politics of any kind. We received comments such as: ‘You only come round here when you want our vote’ – as though that was somehow a bad or irrational or hypocritical thing to do rather than an obvious and perfectly reasonable one. It seemed to me and David that these people wanted a straight cash bribe in return for their vote. None of them seemed to exude much ideological zeal or public spiritedness. I had the feeling that with most of them you needed to repeal the law on the secret ballot, so that they could then simply sell their vote to the highest cash bidder.
The official Conservative campaigning materials didn’t really help us deal with these characters. What they were really after was the abolition of all taxes and all laws that adversely affected them, combined with draconian measures against everyone else in the country. The leaflets were vague, and talked about side issues such as hospital cleanliness. What you needed here was something more along the lines of VOTE TORY AND WIN A MINI METRO. To get through the psychodrama of canvassing we developed a technique we came to call ‘Zen’ canvassing, based on the main official slogan of the Conservative campaign which was ‘Are YOU thinking what we’re thinking?’
David and I would repeat this meaningless sentence and then wiggle our eyebrows inscrutably, while noting the perplexed reactions of the householder. One middle-aged woman – who looked a bit Lib Dem – asked, ‘Is this a joke?’ to which I replied, ‘No, no!’ before showing her the slogan on an official leaflet. I coughed and announced, ‘I am canvassing for Marco Forgione and I was just wondering “Are yoooooo thinking what we’re thinking … erm … hmmmm … are you?”’ The woman warmed up and seemed amused: ‘Well, what is that … what are you thinking?’ I said I didn’t know and, anyway, that was not the question. She took a leaflet and said that in fact she always voted Conservative and would probably do so again.
With the first phase of the evening’s canvassing over, Marco and his team gathered on a street corner to tot up the number of likely Conservative votes. There were a lot of shrugs and pulling of faces, and a feeling that they had really just been going through the motions. There was a Tory vote here but there were few signs of enthusiasm. Big Frank enlivened proceedings by telling the story of how a house he was canvassing had been stormed by armed police. Frank said he told the cops, ‘Don’t arrest me, I am only canvassing’ and this witticism was treated by Marco and company as though it were a fresh from the lips of Oscar Wilde. ‘What were they, Frank? Irish? Or Muslims?’ Marco asked.
After this Team Marco fanned out across the ward for a little more light canvassing until it got dark. At one house a woman detained me on the doorstop while she fetched her grumpy teenage son, and then used me as the exhibit in a show-and-tell lesson about how local politics, councils and the entire constitutional system worked. The kid looked at me blankly, then began to smirk in a hostile manner.
By the time I arrived at the pub, everyone had disappeared except David, Marco and a clean-cut Canadian volunteer in his twenties. The section of the pub we were sitting in and the downbeat feel of the bar matched Marco’s conversation. He laid out all the reasons that the Tudor ward householders had given for not voting Conservative. I said I’d found people receptive, but Marco said: ‘The thing is, you can’t believe a word most of them say to you. They will say they are going to vote for you, and then not do it. Others will say they are against you, then they change their minds.’
Then Marco started grilling me about the giant blue Conservative election poster that had appeared in my front garden. Was I happy with it? he asked. I nervously dodged the question – fearing Marco was trying to gauge my true loyalties – and replied that my wife was ‘hopping mad’ because ‘it doesn’t go with the curtains’ and ‘she’s essentially non-political’. That last bit about my wife being non-political was, I think, the only out and out lie I told throughout the entire project. The real reason my wife was hopping mad was not down to mismatched interior décor or political apathy, but because she hated the Conservatives with a passion and now had a huge VOTE MARCO FORGIONE – CONSERVATIVE placard positioned on her lawn.
Apparently satisfied, Marco headed to the bar for a second time. I wondered if he was trying to pump as much lager as possible into us in order to discover the reality behind the shifty demeanours of his latest recruits. He came back with more beer, tossing a packet of crisps onto the table.
‘I knocked on one door,’ said Marco brightly, ‘and this old Glaswegian guy came out. Verrrr much the dyed-in-the-wool Old Labour supporter, and he said: “I don’t like Blair. Not at all. But if you think I am going to vote for a f***ing Welsh Jewboy like Michael Howard you must be f***joking!”’ There was silence, and an agonized pause. David came to the rescue and – as the on-hand race-relations expert – defused an awkward moment. ‘Better put him down as a “don’t know”, then,’ he quipped.
Later I asked David whether he had encountered any racism on the doorstep in Richmond, not just in Tudor ward, but everywhere we had canvassed in the borough. Or indeed, whether people had been at all surprised to find a black man wearing a blue rosette and asking them whether they would be voting Tory. David said there had been hardly any noticeable reaction to his skin colour on the doorstep, or any suggestion that a black Tory might be an oddity.
A few days later I took my first turn at shouting Conservative slogans into the Battle Banger’s microphone, my words being completely mangled as the ancient amplifier and speaker broadcast them around Richmond’s quiet streets.
This, like wearing a Conservative rosette for the first time, had been – despite my commitment to the writing 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