The inner sanctum – the size of a decent sized sitting room – was windowless and dominated by a long boardroom table in the middle of the floor. Around the table sat six elderly women stuffing leaflets into envelopes. From one wall a chocolate-box portrait of the Queen looked on, and on another hung an oil painting of the Houses of Parliament. The place was dingy and threadbare, yet this was the nerve centre of the Conservative operation in Richmond.
‘Chris is just going to make a few phone calls for me,’ said Marco, grinning in a sickly way. ‘Is that OK, ladies?’ There was no reply. I sat down facing the wall and picked up an ancient telephone with a curly wire, keying in the numbers and working my way down a list of Tory sympathizers. Another element of this ring round was to ask if they would help with electioneering. The majority of those who answered the phone sounded very old – many with ailments which they used, quite reasonably, to excuse themselves from helping out with political activity.
The routine went something like this. I would say: ‘Hello, is that Mrs Smith?’ Then one of the six ladies – they were watching my every move – would interject with something like ‘Oh, I know her, she can’t help – she’s terribly crippled.’ The ladies would talk about me as if I wasn’t there: ‘Why have they asked him to phone all these people,’ they would say. ‘I know all of them, they are all my friends.’
Sometimes, I got through to a younger, and presumably able-bodied, Tory supporter, who would make excuses to get out of helping with the campaign. The ladies would then cheer themselves up by making vitriolic personal comments about the person on the other end of the phone, along the lines that he or she was a traitor, hypocrite and fair-weather supporter who had been only too keen to help when the Tories were riding high.
As I worked down the list, I began flipping through a script left by the phone. It was obviously to be used when cold-calling people. Among the various instructions was a crib sheet to be used if the person on the other end of the line was a Lib Dem who might just be persuaded to vote Tory. There was some very negative, personalized stuff there about Jenny Tonge, the retiring Liberal MP, claiming that she had stepped down as MP ‘probably because of her stance on hard drugs’.
As for Susan Kramer, the new Lib Dem election candidate, the script made it clear I should emphasize that she was an ‘outsider’ and a ‘foreigner’ who had ‘few links with Richmond’ and had ‘lost in other constituencies’. The script also said Kramer was Hungarian, although why all this should matter, particularly given that Marco’s links with Richmond didn’t seem particularly strong either and he was of Italian extraction, was anybody’s guess.
Taking a momentary break from phoning the existing supporters, I turned to face the ladies and said: ‘It says here that Kramer is Hungarian. I didn’t know she was Hungarian.’
‘She’s a Jewess,’ one of the ladies replied, ‘but we aren’t allowed to say that. We get told off if we say that. So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.’
The next day I was out of the office and back on the road. A Tory convoy had been organized, with the aim of ‘blitzing’ Barnes, the well-heeled, faintly bohemian area which much of the BBC’s top talent calls home. By mid-morning a cluster of four or five cars – expensive but boring mid-range saloons – had parked up at the rendezvous point. Some of the cars had blue balloons attached to them and a couple had ‘Vote Conservative’ posters in the side windows.
As the housing density in the area was so low – the ultimate luxury in London – there was no need for parking restrictions, and consequently no danger of getting a parking ticket. The line of parked cars was soon noticed by two local Anglo-Indian boys, about eight and nine years old.
‘Who are these people?’ asked the younger one, possibly attracted by the balloons.
‘The police,’ the older one asserted.
‘What are they doing?’
‘They are doing a survey of people,’ he stated categorically. Bored, they returned to slurping ice cream and dropping litter on the street.
Eventually, the Battle Banger hoved into view, with the amplified voice of Lampshade Pam broadcasting noisily through a loudspeaker tied to the roof rack. She sounded like Björk with a mouth full of marbles talking through a fuzzbox. Her message was simple, if not very easy on the ear: ‘VRNNRTT KORNSVVVKKNNNITIVE VRRRNNNTTT MMMMNNNAEEKKKOW FOOORRRRGEE OWWWWNEEEEE.’
The Battle Banger trundled up the street and abruptly came to a halt. Pam, sitting in the passenger seat, was thrown forward. The car was decked out in an array of ‘Vote Forgione’ posters with blue helium balloons trailing behind, some of which had already started to deflate. Marco jumped out of the car to meet the team.
The man behind the wheel of the Battle Banger – an aggressive-looking middle-aged activist – leaned across Pam, wound down the window and growled a garbled message to the effect that we were to follow him down to ‘The Glebelands’ in central Barnes. There was great excitement among the Tories. This was the patch of Susan Kramer, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Richmond.
Kramer lived in a mansion – the £5-million type – close to the centre of Barnes village, the expensive heart of the area. ‘It’s time to really put the boot in,’ said one canvasser with enthusiasm. ‘Yeahhhh,’ agreed the driver of the Battle Banger, with grim determination: ‘let’s DO it!’ There were now about ten of us in total, and we all climbed into the cars and sped off.
When we arrived in Glebelands, everyone parked in front of the Kramer residence, which stood in a wide, tree-lined street completely devoid of people. The Battle Banger hovered for a while, with Pam on the loudspeaker, chanting with added gusto, ‘FER KLINNER HAIR-SPIT-YULES! MHER PLISS ONDER STRIT! VERT KIN-SEVE-VEET-TEETH’ over and over again.
As Pam’s racket continued, we hung about on the pavement. Ostensibly – with sheaves of leaflets at hand – we were just hoping to talk passers-by into voting Conservative. But as there were no passers-by, it was pretty clear the Richmond Conservatives were simply having fun by trying to annoy Susan Kramer.
After a few minutes, to our complete amazement Kramer’s husband actually arrived on the scene and began talking to the Tories. Instead of starting a slanging match, however, he exuded goodwill and bonhomie. It was a master class in the art of passive aggression. ‘Good morning,’ said Mr Kramer, ‘how is it all going … it’s great to see you all here. This is really fantastic for democracy. Well done, well done.’
This genteel stand-off concluded after a few minutes, following which the driver of the Battle Banger revved up and zoomed into the distance. Fun over, the Tory mob then began to disperse, pounding the surrounding streets and pushing their leaflets – the implied message of which was ‘Vote Liberal and get a gypsy encampment at the bottom of your garden’ – through as many letter boxes as possible on Kramer’s patch.
As we were bumbling around near Kramer’s house a TV crew – meaning one microphone-wielding reporter and one cameraman – turned up. They were from a Dutch news channel and were profiling Richmond as one of the key seats in election 2005. From the standpoint of a Dutch television reporter Richmond, I learned, is an interesting place, as there are lots of opportunities for references to cricket on the green, tea shops, boating on the Thames and so on.
The reporter then asked me off camera why I thought such a prosperous place was held by the Liberals and not by ‘your party, the Conservatives’. I told them the truth as I understood it – Barnes was a fairly trendy area. Lots of rich folk working in television lived there and they tended to be opposed to the Conservatives on moral and philosophical grounds. The Dutch reporter was starting to look bored so in a moment of inspiration I added: ‘Also – gay people.
‘There’s loads and loads and loads of gay people here in Barnes, just like in Amsterdam,’ I added. ‘They’re stinking rich, but they don’t vote Conservative because they’re gay, and I for one very much welcome that.’ The Dutch reporter was