But Howard smoothly ignored the question. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we do have some very tough measures, some very tough measures indeed, for dealing with yobs who do make life impossible for good, hard-working peepil …’ Before the old boy could push his plan for dragooning hoodied ASBO yobs into a conscript army any further, Howard beamed at him with a smile both brilliant and seemingly devoid of any sincerity whatsoever. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said, ‘must press on, thank you so much …’ Patronizing smiles broke out among the Tory officials.
As the Howard mob shuffled off along the street, the punky Press Association hack broke off to interview a man who had just come out of a betting shop, claiming to have put £100 on Michael Howard to win the election at 30–1. The story of the bet was the only part of the Press Association story that made the local paper and it was very much the comedy highlight of an otherwise completely gaffe-free – and therefore, as far as the journos were concerned, unproductive – walkabout.
Finally, Howard disappeared into a Chinese restaurant for an hour to be interviewed by Trevor McDonald. Everyone else – the less starry television journalists, the newspaper hacks and the plump female radio reporter – was left on the street in front of the restaurant to fend for themselves. It was now pouring with rain. One minder from Conservative Central Office sheltered in the restaurant’s entrance, barring the way like a bouncer. Another started sparring with Radio Woman, saying it had all gone very well and that ‘MH’ had received a ‘really great, warm reception’.
‘Well, come on now, this is not exactly hostile territory for you,’ said Radio Woman.
The Tory press minder replied, in a wounded voice, ‘It was totally solid Lib Dem last time, totally solid, but this time it is really moving.’
‘In your dreams,’ snorted Radio Woman, before announcing that, since Howard would be in the restaurant for a long time, she was going off to get coffee in Starbucks. ‘In your dreams,’ she repeated as she departed.
Later, Howard was due to give a formal speech to supporters at a local community centre. He appeared through a side door and made magisterial gestures to calm the crowd, arms outstretched, smiling and soaking it all up, as his head bobbed up and down like a nodding dog toy. Once or twice, he seemed to point to somebody in the middle distance, as though he was on stage at a vast arena.
In reality, he was only in a tiny hall with no more than a hundred people present, all crammed tightly together by party officials so as to create some atmosphere. However, the deception worked to great effect. When we later saw the two-second sound bite that appeared on television, it really did look as though Howard was addressing a mass rally.
The Conservative supporters lapped up all this nonsense in a manner that was polite rather than ecstatic. Like fans of the Rolling Stones, the greying crowd was holding back until a favourite song was rolled out – then they would really let rip. When, I reckoned they were wondering, was Howard going to get to the signature tune of the campaign – that is, the harsh measures the Tories would take against criminals once they were in power?
‘We are going to put the criminals behind bars – and the do-gooders back in their box’ was the furthest Howard would go on that issue. Box? What box? As far as I could tell, the crowd was confused by this odd remark. It seemed to be one of the ‘dog whistle’ signals that newspapers’ political writers had told everyone to expect; but what the crowd wanted, it appeared, was proper whistles that they could actually pick up without having super-sensitive dog hearing. Such as, maybe, ‘Lock’em up and throw away the key.’
At the end of his speech, Howard received a standing ovation – no real surprise at a stage-managed event such as this – but it was a pretty sad scene. At least half the audience did not even try to stand up, and this seemed to be because they were either very old or disabled. Many of those who did stand up struggled to their feet slowly and with evident discomfort. In some cases, by the time they had made it the ovation had finished, leaving them looking stranded and bewildered. Howard did his nodding and waving rock star thing again and the audience sat down, some of them very slowly. And then he was gone.
Polling day dawned and David and I were roped in for ‘one last push’ as part of the plainly doomed national and local campaign. We were given the task of standing outside the East Sheen polling station – actually the local primary school – and asking voters for their names as they arrived to vote. We had to look up the name on a list of voters and tick them off. The idea was, by process of elimination, to identify known Conservative supporters who hadn’t voted, so that other workers could call them up and persuade them to get to the polling station.
This process, known as tellering, had been organized by John Leach, a stalwart of the Richmond Tories, who had phoned us a few days earlier. (Marco had told him we were ‘living together’ and ‘very keen to help’.) We found Leach’s name surreal, and yet another reminder of how, during our time with the Richmond Tories, truth was often stranger than fiction. Could a Tory organizer have a more comedy name than Mr Leach? To us, it was like a version of Happy Families drawn up by Dave Spart of Private Eye fame – Mr Parasite the stockbroker, Mr Leach the Tory party organizer.
Leachy was another long-in-the-tooth Tory – he was the retired founder and former chief of the Londis supermarket chain. When he called, he said he was planning to drive down to the polling station himself on election day, but in the background his wife could be heard reminding him that he had to go to a funeral. Leachy’s manner brightened, as though he was looking forward to the funeral as a treat, or a really nice day out.
Leachy had delivered to our home, by hand, the complete tellering kit consisting of a notepad, a novelty official Conservative Party biro (made in China), a spare blank blue rosette (without the Vote Conservative sticker) and written instructions. These warned that there would probably be an enemy Liberal Democrat teller present at the polling station, but this should not be a cause for worry because ‘some of them are quite human’.
Tellering was extremely boring. There was a rush in the morning, as people voted on their way to work, and another rush around teatime. In between there were long spells when there were no voters at all. From time to time Leachy or one of his elderly pals would arrive at the polling station and take away the lists of voters I had compiled, tut-tutting about the low turnout in general – which, in an overwhelmingly Tory ward like East Sheen, was a worrying sign. He would sigh, ask, generously I thought, if I wanted him to bring me a cup of tea in a thermos flask and then he would hobble off again.
I got chatting to the Lib Dem teller, who seemed friendly enough but a bit wary of me. He was a retired business studies lecturer at what had been South Bank Polytechnic. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local Tory Party, and kept asking if I knew this or that councillor. Later he was relieved by another Lib Dem teller, an eccentric, elderly bohemian looking woman who was wearing a long hippy-style skirt, a sort of suede jacket, beads and sandals – very much a faded Joan Bakewell look. She had previously made educational TV programmes for the BBC, featuring glove puppets. The Lib Dems, in other words, were living up to their stereotypes just as much as the Tories.
Meanwhile, David was helping to identify promised Conservative voters who had not been ticked off by me and other tellers across the constituency, and then rushing off to knock on their doors and badger them into voting. After the polls closed we met up in the house of a Conservative councillor for East Sheen. The councillor’s front room (standard Georgian furniture, blue silk upholstery, gilt-framed oil paintings, cabbage rose floral explosion elderly female Conservative chintz look) had served as a key command centre in the ward.
There were half a dozen people at the house and we were offered a glass of sherry and a piece of sponge cake. The BBC exit poll was already predicting a national victory for the Labour Party, but the TV wasn’t on. An elderly gent, close to tears, said, ‘We have just not got our vote out. They have stayed at home.’ The others shrugged and agreed. It was hopeless – far worse than the exit polls had suggested. Then, at about 10.30, the councillor suddenly announced that it was getting late and turfed everyone out.
By election day the Vote Marco sign in my garden had drooped