Political commentary

In pursuit of Roy

Ferdinand Mount

10.37. Walk out of Warrington Station. Pretty lady taxi-driver smiles, nice white teeth: 'Where do you want to go, luv?' 10.47. Walk through new shopping-centre decorated with golden suns. Everyone smiling. Raincoat quite unnecessary in Wamngton sunshine. 11.03. Lost. Consult map. Rosy-lipped Policewoman, without my asking or even looking at her, crosses street and asks: 'Are you lost, luv?' 11.07. Social Democratic Party HQ. Smiling girl at desk says would I mind waiting for Mr Jenkins? Doesn't say luv. Must be incomer.

11.08. Smiling elderly lady in a white hat comes in, wants to join SDP, offers £10 note as donation. Girl offers her £1 change (gesture unheard of in political history) on grounds that SDP sub is only £9. Lady in White hat declines £1 with a smile.

Can't take much more of this bonhomie. Even Mr Jenkins is smiling, a little wanly Perhaps, as he comes out of back room. I ask if I can tag along on his trip to the local brewery. With the utmost courtesy, Mr Jenkins explains that he has asked the rest of the press to make their own arrangements. His hosts may regard this as a private occasion. He would not wish to embarrass them.

Warm trickle of shame down spine. Raincoat suddenly seems very hot. The grossness of my request. . . the insensitivity to Warrington sensibilities in general. . . the lack of consideration for Mr Jenkins's hosts in particular. A deep feeling of social inadequacy, no, let us be honest, of cheapness overwhelms the reporter. Mr Jenkins walks briskly out of the office and steps into little red car and buzzes off down Mersey Street — never to be seen again by reporter who stands on blank street hoping to join non-existent entourage. An Irish roadsweeper directs me to a club down the road where he had heard the Politics was going on. But this turns out to be a Labour club, and a huge silhouette Playing a fruit machine in a pitch-dark Passage says simply but firmly, 'They've all gone, lad.'

Warrington keeps her secrets well. The town is tucked away, preserved, content. It is hard to believe that so many of its streets Should still be cobbled and have such roses Spilling out over the back-to-back alleys. Everywhere old men are playing bowls. There are beautiful little early 19th-century factories, in dull red brick with cream facings, and still in business too. The pubs are of later date, in rawer brick, gothicky. Canvassers from all parties claim to have been met with exquisite but uncommunicative courtesy, varied only by the occasional tooger off' to outsiders, which is what we reporters call insularity. But Warrington is an island worth defending. A certain amount of boogering off is desirable.

The only non-white faces I saw were some neatly dressed Asians in the committee rooms upstairs in the Conservative Club. They were laughing too. A rawprawn-faced man comes in to ask: 'Has Arthur Fazakerley delivered the cards?' (Fazakerley: 'border strip field' in Lancashire). Downstairs in the bar, a raw prawn is telling another ditto that he can't be doing with that booger Rawnsley (`Raven's clearing', West Yorks). I do manage to track down Bill Haresnape, the Tory agent (Haresnape: 'poor pasture frequented by hares', Lancs), and the candidate Stan Sorrell, a bus driver from East London.

Mr Sorrell tries to broaden out the argument from the overwhelming and inescapable issue of unemployment. He is keen on law-and-order, though not so keen as to recommend castration for rape and child-sex offenders — as the Daily Telegraph said he did. This view in fact belongs to Mr Daniel Hussey, of the United Democratic Labour Party — one of the umpteen fringe candidates here — who admits 'people cringe at my solution because it is rather terminal, but that is the idea.' So it is. Mere reversible castration would be a weedy liberal copout.

What Mr Sorrell and Mr Jenkins too are up against is the amiable conservatism of the electorate, which appears to be as suspicious of new information as of newcomers. It is true, as one old Warringtonian points out, 'I don't know why they go on about Warrington being traditionally Labour. Before the war it was a Tory seat' — even if a Tory marginal. But since 1945 the Labour Party has undeniably become the party of the status quo, which does not mean that the local Labour Party is flourishing. It isn't. In fact, over the last couple of years the Left seems to have found it fairly easy to gain control. Bert Arnold, the doyen of the local party, was recently removed from office, is upset but is too loyal to speak out. Sir Tom Williams, the retiring MP, is said to have been a bit fed up with the way things were going, but he was too loyal to speak out, although his son has joined the SDP.

Loyalty, discretion, placidity, call it what you like, but the result is that Doug Hoyle Mole or Hollow' in Yorks dialect), a Lancashire man, and formerly MP for nearby Nelson and Colne, seems to have gained not only the Labour nomination but much of the hereditary goodwill.

Now this might seem peculiar, on the face of it. Mr Hoyle is an enthusiastic visitor to Moscow ('Lenin's tomb was a highlight of my visit'), he has denounced the Queen Mother as a 'hanger-on', he adopts the standard left-wing position on everything you can think of. He is a member of the National Executive and had a hand in the recent Labour Party Study Group report on Northern Ireland which gave such encouragement to the IRA. There is no connection between this fact and Warrington's considerable Irish population.

Mr Hoyle would not walk over his grandmother to get elected. However, if co-opted to a study group on grandmothers, he might approve some such wording as 'while insisting on democratic safeguards for senior citizens, we cannot accept that any one group in society has the right permanently to frustrate ordinary working people from exercising their democratic pedestrian rights.'

Yet, at the time of writing, the opinion polls agree, as they have from the start, that Mr Hoyle will get some 60 per cent of the votes — the same percentage as Sir Tom Williams got in 1979 — with Mr Jenkins getting about 30 per cent and the Tories getting 10. This is less encouraging for the Labour Party than it sounds. Nearly twice as many Labour voters as Tory voters in Warrington are so far thinking of defecting to the Social Democrats — the same as the proportion nationally. There is no NorthSouth divide.

Can Mr Jenkins improve on a creditable second place? Rather more intimate assessments of his campaign than this one do not give the impression that he is barnstorming. At most, his campaign would be fierce enough to storm a small lean-to greenhouse.

This, I fancy, is by design, not because of incapacity. He is an incomer, not merely from London, but from Brussels where he is popularly supposed to have accumulated a tidy sum. He must be modest and civil all the more because social democrats are supposed not to carry on the 'stale old party dog-fight'. He must allow his allure to soak into the consciousness of Warrington. I think he is doing this with great skill, but soaking-in takes time, and the one mistake the Labour Party has not made is to delay the writ a potentially fatal extra week.

If the Labour vote is to crumble, it is likely to crumble rather later than that of a Conservative government in mid-term. The Labour Party has on its side the fact that unemployment is and always has been the best issue, but the changing nature of the party cannot stay concealed; Mr Hoyle's ersatz bonhomie cannot help wearing a little thin. For the purpose of self-discipline, if nothing else, this column gives its usual forecast thus: Hoyle 14,000, Jenkins 11,000, Sorrell 3,000. That would be an achievement for the Social Democrats not to be sneezed at.