Tricks of the trade
Michael Vestey
Aspiring MPs — as well as their prospective constituents — should listen to a weekly four-part series on Radio Four, Brandreth Rules, part of the consistently excellent The Westminster Hour (Sundays) in which Gyles Brandreth, an entertaining writer and broadcaster, suggests ways of members keeping their parliamentary seats. One wonders if he took his own amusing and sound advice as he lost his seat in the Labour landslide, though I doubt if any number of tricks and effort then would have saved Chester City for him.
Still, it's fun listening to his rules and Brandreth is never dull. The key, he said, was to make your constituents love you by securing your base. 'When the going gets tough. . . and you've been found badgerwatching on the common at midnight, you'll need friends and the friends you'll need most are your constituents.' So rule number one was to know the constituency. Don't be seen wandering around it with a map and don't do what he did, turn up at a football match 30 minutes after it had started because he went, by mistake, to the dog track first.
Rule two was to know the constituents. 'If you only hang out with party activists and councillors you're doomed. However reluctantly, they'll vote for you anyway.' It was important to meet as many normal people as possible. Look them in the face, give a firm handshake and try to remember who they are. 'In time, you'll get accustomed to the dreaded words, "You don't remember me, do you?' And if you bluff your way through and enquire about the family, 'you'll find you're talking to a childless widowed orphan'.
Brandrcth interviewed the Scottish Lib Dem MP John Thurso, whose seat covers a thousand square miles of the Highlands. His grandfather, also an MP, had his own trick. He'd go up to people, grasping them with both hands and say, `Now tell me your name.' And if they replied, 'It's Mr McKay,' he would say, 'Of course, I know it's Mr McKay, it's your first name I meant.' Or if they said, 'It's Jock,' he'd answer. 'I know it's Jock, what's your last name?' Harold Macmillan was given to saying genially to a constituent, 'And how is the old complaint?' which Brandreth thought was asking for trouble.
Saturday surgeries were fraught with problems. According to Brandreth, Glenda Jackson has come to believe that the land is overflowing with the paranoid. She's met many over the years who are convinced they're the target of dark forces. She often tells them to carry a small camera to snap the people trailing them. To meet real people in the constituency Brandreth makes the rather obvious though true point that an MP should dedicate at least 40 Fridays a year to properly planned visits to schools, shops, factories and businesses and every Friday night, Saturday, too, if they can face it, 'a different restaurant: Indian, Chinese and the chippy. Cover the waterfront — and don't forget to tip.'
Never talk politics with constituents, he advises. As an MP you meet only two types of people. Those with problems and those who are right. `Don't give them the benefit of your views. Let them give you the benefit of theirs.' If they're not interested in what you say, they will notice your clothes and your spouse's.' In the Tory shires, hatless wives are remarked upon. And, says Brandreth. `If you must have an affair try to make it with someone who is over age, unattached and living outside the constituency.' He will elaborate on this later in the series.
He also thinks it's important to do good works locally. Go to all the fetes, fairs and charity functions and agree to give out the prizes but 'never, never, never judge a competition. You may well get the vote of the doting mum and dad whose baby you judged to be the bounciest but the kith and kin of the losers will not forget you in a hurry.' Gillian Shepharcl, Tory MP for a large Norfolk seat, told him she took that rule further. She would encourage political opponents to be the judge instead. Sometimes, being mentioned in the local press — pretty vital — can have its draw backs. Handing over her credit card at the local supermarket check-out the woman assistant said, You have the same name as that woman MP. Do you mind having the same name as her?'
Brandreth concluded his first programme by saying, 'Face the truth. Your constituents won't like you if you don't like them.' The late Alan Clark made no secret in his diaries of how much he despised his, and Kenneth Clarke, the former chancellor. said. `I think about half the House of Commons secretly hate their constituents.' He didn't because he thought they were people like him. Brandreth wouldn't name the MP, still serving, who once told him, 'Happiness is the constituency in the rearview mirror.'
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