The Dutch reporter was now completely thrown. ‘You do not seem to me to be very much like a Tory Man,’ he said, evidently wondering what to make of all this gibberish about gay people.
‘That’s right,’ I said, brightly. ‘I am normally a very strong Labour supporter, but I don’t like some of the things Tony Blair has been doing, like the war in Iraq. Same as you in Holland. So I have decided to give out some leaflets for the Conservatives to see what will happen. And also I am partly doing this as an experiment. To see how they will react to me.’
The Dutch reporter was, again, lost for a moment. Finally he said: ‘Noooohhh – I’m not believing this, that a left-wing man can be voting for such a very right-wing organization as the Conservatives Party, I have never heard of this. This is not possible.’ But then a light bulb seemed to go on above the reporter’s head, and he added with some incredulity: ‘Can I film you saying all of these things? About you being a Labour man who does not like Mr Blair any more?’
‘Sure,’ I said. I delivered the lines to camera, while wearing my blue rosette. I added the news that Greg Dyke, the socialist former Director General of the BBC, had earlier that day told Old Labour people such as himself to vote Lib Dem in order to give Tony Blair a good kicking. I went on to explain, for the benefit of Dutch television viewers, that Dyke’s advice was a waste of time because, without a proper proportional representation system, the election was a two-horse race.
‘In this election when the votes are counted it either means Tony Blair is going to be Prime Minister or Michael Howard is gonna be Prime Minister,’ I summed up. ‘So if you don’t want Howard you are stuck with Blair. And vice versa. And that’s the fact of it and all the rest is just hot air.’
The reporter didn’t seem entirely convinced that this could motivate my apparent overnight journey from left-winger to right-winger, but he had a new angle on the election and was grinning from ear to ear. He gave a thoughtful and appreciative ‘Hmmmmmm’ which seemed to say, ‘I know you are up to something, but I am not quite sure what it is.’
Michael Howard didn’t seem to be a particularly popular character with the local Richmond Tories, and the name of the then Tory leader was hardly mentioned during the campaign in Richmond. For a party which often created a cult of personality around its leaders – from Churchill to Thatcher – this was odd. Howard was, however, due to arrive in Richmond to give a boost to local campaigners, and that gave me and David the chance to see at close quarters how the Tory leader’s spin machine operated. The morning rendezvous point was Richmond Green, an open space in the middle of the town. When Team Marco – including us – arrived, a flunky from Conservative Central Office confronted our group.
The flunky was much younger than anyone else among the gathering Tory campaigners – maybe twenty-five. He was unsmiling and yakked on a mobile, which he had clamped to his ear, continuously. His telephone conversations employed modern lingo and jargon, spattered with the f-word, just like a normal person of his generation.
Howard’s motorcade drew up and parked in a side street without much fuss. There were three or four vehicles led by a black shiny car containing what looked like security men and more officials from Central Office. Howard’s own car came next, unmarked but bearing the unmistakable sign of power and money – darkened glass windows. Inside was his fragrant blonde wife, Sandra, along with some more helpers. Bringing up the rear was a navy blue minibus full of the journalists and TV cameras, and behind that another unmarked car, presumably full of yet more secret police.
A whole gang of Tory heavies emerged from the cars, including a squad of pushy media minders from Central Office. Like the flunky we had seen earlier, these apparatchiks were much, much younger and more dynamic than the Dad’s Army of local Tories we’d so far been involved with. They had about them the look, manners and vocabulary of tabloid journalists – as though they had been seconded from the Sun for the duration.
Two or three bored-looking camera crews emerged from the minibus. The BBC’s man, the vulpine James Landale, strode about looking imperious and tremendously unimpressed with everything. But the star – far more luminous than Michael Howard – was Trevor McDonald, who, as well as being a top newsreader, was also a resident of the East Sheen ward. Trevor began walking about in stately fashion, waving regally to those passers-by who recognized him. Last out of the minibus were the lower-status non-TV hacks, including a young male newspaper reporter with a punk hairdo from the Press Association, and a plump and jolly female reporter for a local radio station.
Howard emerged from his car wearing a mirthless smile and shook Marco’s hand. There was no small talk – no ‘How’s it all going, Marco?’ – just straight on to ‘Right! Where am I supposed to be walking? Let’s get started!’ The walkabout kicked off, with Howard first pressing the flesh with the local Tories, shaking hands and pepping them up. ‘Thank you verrr much for coming here today,’ he said in his curious sing-song voice.
The Tory leader looked frightful – caked in so much make-up to the point of appearing like a waxwork dummy, with strange jerky, wooden movements to match, and a faraway look in his eyes, as though he was running on autopilot. His wife Sandra was beaming at everyone all the time in a way that seemed to suggest she was about to say something, but she never did. Not once. Not even a ‘Hello’. She was completely mute, yet remained in a state of apparently continuous imminent pronouncement.
The hacks understood that they had to wait for the brief ritual of party leader patting local party workers on the back to take place before the real business of the walkabout began; it was all part of a game they had played many times before. Howard and Marco then marched off around Richmond Green and towards the high street at a cracking pace – almost a jog. The Sky TV News cameraman filmed every moment, jogging backwards as he shot them from the front, shuffling sideways like a crab. The Central Office people seemed very annoyed that there was such a tiny turnout of local supporters and began bossing me and the others about. ‘No, no, no!’ they would bark. ‘You need to get in much closer behind Michael … Much, much closer.’
People twenty yards away would clock the blue rosettes and TV cameras and cross the street to get away. There was only one way, the Central Office officials seemed to have decided, to make sure Howard could be filmed interacting with passers-by. And that was to pounce on the more unwary as they emerged from shop doorways.
It worked like this. Howard would stop chatting to Marco – mid-sentence – and then swoop on an unsuspecting punter coming out of a shop and, to the bewilderment of the punter, initiate a conversation. The press pack, Central Office minders and Marco’s local Tories would then bunch up, with the hacks pressing forward, trying to earwig the conversation, and hoping for a gaffe of some sort to come tumbling out of someone’s mouth.
When Howard swooped – and it was a bit Dracula-like, as he tended to be taller than the older shoppers he encountered, the younger ones having already scuttled off – the victim would quickly spot the cameras and the hacks with notebooks, and then try to get out of the way. If escape was impossible, the victim tended to adopt a bemused, ‘game for a laugh’ expression, perhaps realizing that they were going to be on TV and wanting to look amenable and as normal as possible. A few seemed to recognize Howard, but none seemed to recognize Marco.
At one point Howard descended on a scruffy man who was probably in his seventies. The man was wearing cheap clothes – a baseball cap, soup-streaked tracksuit top with out-of-date Arsenal insignia, badly fitting jeans and scuffed trainers – and carrying his shopping in two grubby plastic bags. The old boy started talking about how he lived on the nearby Ham estate, claiming there was a lot of trouble there, with lots of youths hanging around and swearing, ‘throwing bottles about’ and generally making his life a misery.
Howard listened for a bit and then butted in, outlining a plan to cut the welfare benefits of parents of kids that had been reprimanded for anti-social behaviour. ‘We have some very tough measures for dealing with the yobs you are talking about,’ he said, edging away. But the man came back, a quizzical look on his face. ‘What about putting them