Autumn election?

Party game at the polls

James Hughes-Onslow

Mr Whitelaw recently delighted party workers with a sporting analogy that they can't have heard since the good old Macmillan days. "There shall be no close season this August," he told an audience bulging, like the rest of us, with tiresome statistics. "No snoozing in the sun in September."

It was hardly the language of Selsdon Man or of a Tory Party chairman in the 1970s but stirring nostalgic stuff for the blue tweedy, folk now closing ranks for the next election.

Willie is one of them, a landed country gentleman if ever there was one in Smith Square. He knows what an autumn election really means. He knows that the grouse-shooting and stalking season is with us and any number of shooting-sticks and deerstalkers hats could fall out of the Tory cupboard, Mr Wilson I'm sure, often remembers his first electoral triumph in October 1964 when he caught the entire Conservative leadership with their plus-fours on. October 1974 would not be as embarrassing as that — thanks to Morning Cloud — but maybe agents and candidates, should consider the problem at the grass-roots.

I was a Tory helper at the last election — in Mr Heath's home town of Broadstairs — and the campaign resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned shooting party. The Isle of Thanet is not by any standards a field sports paradise. I saw no pheasants and heard no shots and there is a shortage of those wealthy agricultural eccentrics with labradors that I expected to find in a Conservative constituency. (The most sporting dogs I met were Sydney and Hobart, offspring of the Heath family beagle.) The shooting party life style is an almost prehistoric oddity which probably only survives in those areas with massive Tory majorities —' which makes it seem even odder when it turns up in a south-coast town full of middleand working-class pensioners.

. Land-Rovers, trucks, trailers, a lot of walking, picnic lunches, flasks of coffee, inaccurate map-reading, and arrangements to meet Alderman Hudson who is supposed to know where we're going, and clusters of blue-hatted ladies with boundless energy and mindless chatter, trying to persuade the candidate to stand in a strategic position so that they can deflect fleeing shoppers in his direction, keeping a tally of swaying voters, lobbing easy questions like, "What do you think of the Channel tunnel?" when things get sticky.

The last election came at the end of the pheasant-shooting season — the last game' scarcely hung — so all this expertise was immediately on tap. But what happens when these assets are deployed elgewhere, like the Scottish Highlands?

The Tory candidate for Thanet East, Mr Jonathan Aitken, has the credentials for any country-house party. Ex-Eton and the Oxford Union (though also, in view of the miners' strike, a South Ayrshire colliery), he hired a suite in Ramsgate's biggest sea-front hotel, the San Clu. Life in this brilliantly-named establishment was completely dominated by the movements of Mr Aitken's family, notably his film-star sister and film-star brother-in-law, a sprinkling of ex-debs, a jolly Mr Fix-it who lent his Range Rover for the campaign, and members of the Oxford University Conservative ASsociation who are now stout merchant bankers with harrowing tales of several elections. With this kind of entourage, the nature of a place like Ramsgate is immediately transformed. We even had an Australian psephologist

studying local conditions. Thanet, of all the constituencies in the United Kingdom, had 3 special breed of voter who would indicate to him how the next Australian election would go. I was no better; merely a school friend of the candidate with time on my hands; I becate campaign assistant, which is to say, chauffeur. used to collect all these people from the station; Even if I had never met them before, it wasn t hard to pick them out from the ordinary Ramsgate commuters. Like lunatic, aristocrats pretending to enjeY the cold, we would pile into the Range Rover at about 6.30 am before the sea mist had lifted. We were after that elusive dawn flight of geese --, the early London commuters leaving Broaa; stairs station. This was all very unsuccessful and was fortunately brought to an end by an irate gamekeeper-like ticket-collector. He waved his trade union official's card, stuck copies of Labour Weekly on the station notice board, rang up the Labour candidate wilth sensibly, was asleep, and accused us of poach' ing on British Rail territory. You need hat drinks and food for this expedition. After breakfast the canvassers assembly at the hotel, armed with persuasive material for arousing the indifferent voter, and discussing which beat they will do before lunch. Broadstairs, for instance, with its pensioners, vv„,as generally considered to be easy terrain (mr Heath lives there and gave £10 to pensioners at Christmas). Ramsgate Miners' Club, on the other hand, was a 99 per cent miss but it was good meeting with lively heckling. It showe that the candidate was willing to have a go. It was like ptarmigan after driven grouse, someone said. (You chase ptarmigan over rocky hillsides whereas their stupid cousins the grouse can be made to fly over your heads.) With maps out, lunches, loudspeakers an' campaign literature aboard the Range Rover ward chairmen advise where difficult voters he. They note individual addresses and their poll' tical affiliations. They know the ground. The object was to lure the bored housewife to the front door to meet the candidate. Too muc'' disturbance simply drives them into cover. "Stir them up but don't frighten them," theY told me when I was driving the loudspeaker car. Worrying about lost votes gives new scope to ' the usual paranoia of driving — not stopping fcir pedestrians at crossings is a conspicuous misdemeanour when your car is covered with posters. The Conservatives,' unlike other parties, do make one sporting concession. They don't campaign on Sundays. Possibly the only thing that really frightens a worldly housewife is an unworldly deb in flight. They look very decorative at Publi„C meetings but otherwise have to be put to war" where their ignorance of matters like Inort' gages • and comprehensive schools is not too conspicuous. Our ex-deb band was led hY Georgiana Russell, daughter of Sir John sell, British Ambassador in Madrid, describea by William Hickey during the campaign as possible future Queen of England. From their point of view one of the disad' vantages of a general election, as opposed to al by-election, is that these things are going on al over the country and you can't be at all of them. There was an Aitken cousin fighting in the Midlands so that even family loyalties wer! divided. We learned by telephone that youn, Lord Lewisham was having a tough time LIP north in a mining constituency but that thing! were going smoothly for Hugh Fraser at Star

ford and Stone. Nick Bonsor, future baronet and former Captain of Boats at Eton, lost his seat at Newcastle-under-Lyme but his campaign was an unparalleled social success. Anyone who knows anyone was there.

And the team was never quite complete Without the terrier-like Elsie, always keen and Whimpering and waiting in the foyer of the San Clu before we had finished breakfast. (She lived round the corner from the hotel.) She used to jump into the back seat of the Range Rover before I had time to manipulate the lever which lets down the front seat. She kept up a continus commentary until released to worry her quarry, At the end ot the day the question would inevitably arise, "Where is Elsie?" and someone would be dispatched to find her, miles behind, in a vehement argument with a deeply entrenched Labour voter. Gently the unfortunate victim was prised from her untiring jaw. On election day I learned the most neglected and esoteric craft of all — luring the voter to the Polls by means of a decoy. We were driving the loudspeaker car around announcing that we wanted to help Tory voters who needed a lift to the polling station, an appeal which got little response until an old lady came to her window waving.

"Leave her alone. She's a Communist," a helpful neighbour shouted. But she assured us -that she would vote for anyone who gave her a lift anywhere. Nobody had taken her for a ride since the ambulance took her to hospital. As soon as she was in the Range Rover she began to comment on the buildings that had gone up since that occasion. At the polling station we found that she was in fact registered at a different one and the extended ride to the next Polling station took us past the cemetery where her husband was buried. She got out and paid her respects. She enjoyed her outing and told Ramsgate all about it over the loudspeaker. A piercing crackling voice greeted people who must have thought she was long since dead. Her most Powerful slogan, the only one that really drew them out of the houses and into the polling booths that day, was "Let the Conservatives take you for a ride." The owner of the San Clu, a veteran of the Battle of Britain, had spent much of the cam Paign arranging the victory celebrations which he confidently expected. A colossal swingometer overshadowed all the Hurricanes and

Spitfires which usually dominated the saloon. Fortunately, in view of the results, it proved to be a wildly inaccurate one-sided swingometer Which did little to dampen the high-spirited occasion. Aitken won Thanet East comfortably by 6,000 votes and one of his supporters suf

fered a broken nose in the exuberance outside the court. But down the road in Broadstairs Mr Aeath senior, who told me earlier in the day that he was expecting a majority of sixty in the Commons, was looking very dejected towards the end of the evening.

The San Clu swingometer will not always be wrong. For a good party next time they may need a Conservative victory. I suggest, therefore, that Mr Whitelaw should do more than simply announce whether August and September are the close season. He should get his constituency workers out beating on some• blasted heath. There they would learn to walk uncomplainingly for miles, to eat squashed sandwiches and look absurd in tweeds and silly hats. Over large dinners they could discuss Winds of change, encroaching vermin and the effects of a late spring frost on the food and shelter shortage.

He might even borrow a phrase used by a jocular figure at the 1967 Tory conference that 'since Wilson came to power we've never heard SO many people grouse more."

James Hughes-Onslow has combined his sporting and social interests by writing for the Field and contributing to William Hickey.