L et no one say that this election is going to
be the same as the last. We are winning back what I call the buggy vote. That is the middleclass mums and dads pushing prams. I don’t know quite why, but I attach terrific political significance to the opinions of these representatives of ‘hard-working families’. There they are, ferrying their precious cargoes, our nation’s future, and they must be heeded. They have reached the age — thirties, forties — when they are the pivot of society, simultaneously required to have a care to their parents and their offspring. Last time, as I recorded in 2001, I found they were almost all going for Tony. They wanted good local schools, they wanted good hospitals, they thought that Labour was the party to deliver, and they thought Tony was a man after their heart. I called them Tony’s Tories, and wrote that the Conservatives would never recover unless we had something better to say to them. This week, prowling the streets of Dorchesteron-Thames, I find three mums in a row, all with prams, who say more or less the same: ‘I voted Labour last time but this time I’m going for the Tories.’ Bingo! It’s a phenomenon! I am so excited that I call an immediate halt to canvassing (it’s freezing and drizzling) and my party goes into Dorchester Abbey for a spot of meditation and thanksgiving.
If you don’t know Dorchester Abbey, one of the key religious centres of Saxon England, you should get there immediately — perhaps for the forthcoming festival of English music. Once inside we whisperingly canvass the stone effigies (rock solid) and admire the mediaeval frescoes. Then I see I am standing on a tombstone, and my eyes mist at the inscription, and a lump forms in my throat. ‘Reader, If thou hast a heart fam’d for tenderness and pity, contemplate this Spot. In which are deposited the Remains of a Young Lady, whose artless Beauty, Innocence of Mind and Gentle Manners once obtained her the Love and Esteem of all who knew her. But when Nerves were too delicately spun to bear the rude Shakes and Jostlings which we meet with in this transitory World, Nature gave way. She sunk and died a martyr to Excessive Sensibility.’ She was Mrs Sarah Fletcher, and she died aged 29 on 7 June 1799.
Excessive Sensibility! That is the last thing a modern politician can afford. We must be like post-nuclear cockroaches. We must be able to take anything — like the moment when I thrust out my hand to a woman and she said, ‘Sorry, no, I am not going to shake your hand. I am a socialist and I must stick to my principles’ and then she shut the door in my face. You’ve no idea how embarrassing that is, in front of all your fellow canvassers. I mean, where in Marx does it say that a socialist may not shake hands with a Tory?
Mind you, I have had a lot worse. Only the other day I was canvassing in Teignmouth with my 64-year-old father when a supporter came up and looked at us both, grinning in our rosettes, and then shook my hand and cried, ‘I do so enjoy your son’s articles in the Telegraph!’ As compliments go, I found that pretty hard.
And on the subject of Excessive Sensibility, this is an appeal to all loyal members of the Henley Labour party, who are putting on a frankly feeble performance. The Labour candidate in Henley is an apparently charming Asian lawyer from Scotland called Said, and he is working very hard. He is also working entirely alone, as far as we can tell. On three separate occasions he has been spotted standing on street corners, and he has been all by himself, and handing out his own leaflets. It’s outrageous! I have lost count of the number of good people who are prepared to profess their loyalty to Blair from the safety of their own doorsteps. Are they not willing to have the courage of their convictions, and go out and help Said? Are they embarrassed about something — the way Blair lied about the war, perhaps? Socialists of Henley, unite!
Another reason I think this election will be very different from the last is that some of my oldest friends and colleagues in journalism have started to say ‘we’ about the Tories. It is one thing for Bruce Anderson to say ‘we Tories’. Bruce is a party man. But I was talking to a certain brilliant and intemperate (in print) redheaded columnist, and I could have sworn that I heard him use the first person plural so many times that it was incontrovertible. If the formerly Tory press is starting to call the Tories ‘we’, then things are definitely looking up. Mind you, I have another old friend, a writer of great elegance, whose byline has long been a synonym for thoughtful Conservatism, and he speaks with mounting disdain of ‘your party’. I have always had him fingered for a secret Liberal.
Like almost every other Conservative candidate, I bet, I have been rung constantly in the last ten days by the BBC to see whether I am willing to say anything about ‘Michael Howard’s policy on immigration’, so that they can get some pathetic ‘Tory split’ story going, and paint the Tories as extreme, divided, blah blah blah, in the manner approved by Alastair Campbell. The best rejoinder I have heard was from my father (Tory candidate for Teignbridge, in case I forgot to mention it) who said to some pesky questioner: ‘This immigration business is a (pause, cough) tricky one. It is very important not to exaggerate the (cough) problem, but it is certainly real. Here in Devon we have to cope with people who come from as far afield as (cough) Somerset and even Wiltshire. I am having some difficulty living down the fact that I was born in Cornwall.’ Collapse of questioner.
All winter I have been jogging a certain route in Oxfordshire, but now I find the farmer has ploughed the field, and I am forced to hop across giant slabs of earth, gleaming like fish bellies where the plough has cut. It proves very taxing, especially when talking on the mobile. One moment I am leaping from clod to clod; the next I am rolling in a nettle patch and receiving severe urtication. If I could find the right Esther Rantzen personal injury lawyer, I could probably sue the farmer for failing to provide adequate notice of his intention to change the topography of my route.
Here is the last great unbeatable argument, the argument that destroyed the Tories in 1997. I meet a man in Labourheld Reading East. He’s black, about 60, and he’s switching to us from Labour. Why? ‘It’s time for a change,’ he says. Amen.
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