Читать книгу True Blue: Strange Tales from a Tory Nation - David Matthews - Страница 6

Joining the Conservative election campaign was very simple. We just walked off the street into the party’s Richmond constituency office, which was on East Sheen high street, near to where we were living. The Conservative Party’s premises were next to a butcher’s shop and a takeaway pizza place. We had prepared the ground by calling the office the previous day when, to our surprise, the phone had been answered by Marco Forgione – the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond – in person. We recognized the name from the blue election hoardings which were starting to appear in some of Richmond’s more ample front gardens.

When we sauntered into his office – pausing only to wipe our feet noisily on the welcome mat – Marco looked astonished. He rose from behind his desk in that very slow way you see in gangster films, when the bank clerk stands up gingerly while at the same reaching for the alarm button hidden under the desk. Looking well into his forties, Marco had a manic smile, dark hair and devilishly sparkling eyes. His smile revealed a slight gap in his teeth, which gave him his distinctively boyish look. With his mouth open and his eyes as wide as saucers, he struggled to speak before greeting us in a stilted voice.

With the awkwardness beginning to build nicely, a high-spirited OAP named Robert bowled into the room, emitting a stream of completely unfathomable banter and ignoring us completely. We looked pretty out of place, so we later thought that he might have taken us for photocopier technicians or something similar. When Marco cut into Robert’s bonhomie to introduce us, the old gent almost jumped out of his skin. ‘Good grief!’ he said, recoiling as though he’d just stumbled across a nest of rats.

Robert was charm itself and instantly likeable – much more so than Marco, who was pleasant enough, but, like many professional politicians, came over as a bit oily. And Robert had what seemed to us a really killer look – he sported a luxurious Second World War Spitfire-ace-meets-Rajput moustache, slicked-back hair, multi-coloured cravat and a vast blue silk hanky tucked into the top pocket of his brass-buttoned blue blazer.

When Marco introduced us as ‘new members of the team’ Robert twitched with apparent bafflement. Then, composing himself, he launched into a long-winded speech designed to clinch the vote of what the Richmond Tories liked to call ‘a wavering Liberal Democrat’ (we were to hear a lot about these creatures, who seemed to be largely mythical). As Robert waffled off into a shaggy-dog story about the local Liberals, Marco nodded at him with a mixture of patient tolerance, punctuated by a slightly panicked air when Robert began to veer into politically incorrect territory, as he often did.

Robert said that when the Liberals had been in charge of the local council, they had set up a rehab clinic for drug users and alcoholics. But then, he said, the council ‘just had to go one step further – and set up a second clinic just for ethnic minorities’. He paused, as though expecting laughter or possibly applause. ‘Now,’ Robert continued, deciding he had paused long enough, ‘I can see why some Asian women, for example, might need to be treated on their own, because they have their own customs and so on …’

Marco seemed very uneasy with this racially-based talk. But it was something I noticed throughout our Tory journey. Whenever David was present, older Tories would often spontaneously start talking about racial matters. It was like an itch they had to scratch. And it struck both of us as incredibly gauche. Maybe it was just their way of trying to be friendly, or even welcoming.

Perhaps sensing the bad vibes from Marco, Robert suddenly changed the subject. ‘Do you know, in the end it’s all about pavements,’ he said, puffing out his chest, ‘pavements and dog messes.’ Marco relaxed, but started to look bored. At length, Robert explained that since the Conservatives had got back in control of Richmond council they had, cunningly, copied Liberal Democrat tactics and repaired ‘hundreds and hundreds of pavements, all over the place’.

We got the formalities out of the way and it wasn’t long before we were junior players in the campaign to elect Marco Forgione. That meant delivering campaign leaflets or, as Marco liked to put it, ‘blitzing the streets’. We’d seen plenty of politicians using a battle bus for touring from one triumphant PR stunt to another – occasionally they would splash out on a helicopter or even a private jet. But for Marco, transport consisted of the much more modest Battle Banger, which was usually parked outside the constituency office, next to a karaoke noodle bar.

The Battle Banger – an ancient, dented, off-white Rover with a cracked windscreen, barely legal tyres and a peeling tax disc – was a complete heap, and had, we guessed, a resale value of about £150. In the back window was a yellowing Countryside Alliance sticker, which was probably a relic of Marco’s previous incarnation as the unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate for Yeovil in Somerset. The Battle Banger looked as if it had been welded together from two stolen cars and driven down from Glasgow.

The Battle Banger’s interior complemented the exterior: it was a tip. There was litter everywhere – scrunched-up newspapers, sweet wrappers and mud-covered leaflets, along with Marco’s collection of music cassettes. The cassettes included Ibiza Uncovered (The Return); Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits; Classics For a Summer Day; American Pie by Don McLean and, most bizarrely for a Conservative candidate, The Best of Two Tone, by a clutch of late seventies Midlands ska bands. We also noticed a page printed from the internet giving directions to a model railway club in New Malden and, in addition, technical information about the equipment club members owned – types of trains, track gauge and so forth.

Our first day of campaigning for the Richmond Tories consisted largely of giving out leaflets up and down the streets around the Vineyard ward, an enclave of slightly bohemian Georgian streets just to the north of Richmond town centre. The Vineyard ward covered the area of Richmond Hill, which includes some of the most expensive residential property in the country. One particularly upmarket group of Georgian mansions in Richmond Hill sits high up on a terrace overlooking the Thames, from which there is a beautiful view of bucolic woods and flooded meadows in the foreground and the entire county of Surrey in the distance.

We parked up near the Georgian mansions and Robert, with child-like delight, set about getting the Battle Banger ready for a spot of what he called ‘loudspeaker work’. Chuckling softly to himself as his cravat flapped gaily in the breeze, he began to lash the loudspeaker system onto the roof with bits of string. Then he linked it to a valve amplifier which looked so old and battered it might once have belonged to the Troggs. The amp was plonked on the back seat of the Battle Banger and was powered by an oil-streaked car battery which smelled strongly of acid.

As he was going about all this, Robert dropped the ball of string onto the street and it rolled under the car – just the first of a series of minor operational disasters that seemed to bedevil the Richmond Tories whenever they ventured forth into action. Instinctively, Robert tried to retrieve the ball by pulling on the strand already tied to the roof rack of the Battle Banger. It took him a while, and several good hard jerks, before he realized that the more he pulled on the string, the more the ball would unravel. Marco decided he would leave the string problem to Robert, who scratched his head thoughtfully.

Instead, Marco turned to us and, with what looked like a wicked glint in his eye, produced a pair of large bright blue satin ‘Vote Conservative’ rosettes. ‘Do you guys want to wear one of these?’ he asked. We hesitated and exchanged glances. ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he added, a touch teasingly, perhaps thinking this might weed out anyone who wasn’t a true Tory. We had to agree – or risk blowing our cover – so Marco went into overdrive, fussily helping to fasten the rosettes onto our chests. When he’d finished he stood back to admire his handiwork and said with exaggerated pride, ‘There you are … FAN-TASTIC. You are proper Tories now … FAN-TASTIC!’

Later, David and I talked about the moment the blue rosettes were pinned onto us: it was a far more traumatic experience for me than it was for David. As I wandered around the quiet residential streets of Richmond Hill I felt incredibly self-conscious, a bit like a half-hearted novice streaker. I genuinely thought that I would encounter a lot of hostility from people – and get lots and lots of dirty looks and perhaps even worse than that. But I was wrong. I scrutinized the faces of the few passers-by I saw and, as they clocked me, to my surprise there was no reaction at all. It was an important moment of revelation for me. I had enormously overestimated people’s interest in politics and the significance they attached to political symbols. People just didn’t seem to care.

David thought the pinning on of the rosettes was probably an attempt by Marco to play some basic mind games – it was either a wind-up or a loyalty test of some sort. And, being David, he wasn’t going to let Marco psych him out quite so easily, so he had taken the rosette with a beaming smile on his face. The chances of David having an embarrassing encounter with anyone he knew were practically zero, since he was only living in Richmond temporarily. An East Ender by birth, he had recently lived in Willesden, in suburban north-west London before moving to Battersea, south of the Thames. Knowing pretty much only me in this part of London, David would be more likely to bump into somebody he knew in Romania than in Richmond.

But David was uncomfortable, nonetheless, while wearing a blue rosette. On this and other occasions he got stares from other black people that he found a bit unnerving. He said that black passers-by would see him, then the rosette, then do a double-take straight at him as if to say, ‘Fool!’ Richmond’s white majority, David felt, either ignored him or regarded him with the usual air of, variously, fear, resentment or wonderment. His biggest fear was that he would be mistaken for Ainsley Harriott.

A couple of days later I met up with Marco in a down-at-heel pub that nestled among the opulent Georgian homes of the Vineyard ward. There I found him holding court with the day’s campaign team, which now consisted of not just Robert and myself but also half a dozen local stalwarts, mostly elderly yet formidable Tory women. They were part of a larger group of Conservative women who were clearly the engine room of the local Conservative operation. For Robert, the sex ratio was great news as he revelled in the company of all these women and flirted with them constantly, if harmlessly – to the amusement of all concerned.

Marco addressed these iron ladies in staccato phrases, stringing his favourite expressions together in an accent that uneasily mixed received pronunciation with Estuary English. ‘Well,’ Marco said, ‘we are doing very well, vrrrrr well in this ward. Vital ward. Vital! Important. What’s really encouraging? Labour people are coming straight over to us. Not stopping at the Lib Dems. Our vote? Solid. FAN-TASTIC. Lib Dems? Soft! Vrrrr vrrrrr soft!’

As far as we could tell, the only evidence that Labour people were coming straight over to the Conservatives was the arrival on the scene of David and me. Marco was, in fact, basically showing us off as evidence of his dynamic and effective leadership. If people like us – so far beyond the Conservatives’ usual pool of voters – were coming over to the Tories, Marco probably reasoned that his party was heading not only for victory, but for the biggest landslide in electoral history.

But despite Marco’s enthusiasm, the iron ladies listened to him with what struck us as thinly disguised contempt. Their leader was an elderly woman called Pam who looked fragile and fearsome in equal measure – terribly thin despite efforts to bulk herself out with a pea-green padded Barbour-style body warmer. With her weathered features and rural outfit she looked as if she might live on a farm. In fact, she made lampshades and sold them on the internet.

Pam spent a lot of time chatting to her friend Jane, a short, plump woman of about seventy who wore her white hair swept back under a 1950s-style Alice band. Jane seemed to have more intellectual gravitas than anyone else in Team Marco – including Marco himself. Unusually, she talked about politics from time to time, often referring to what she had read in the Daily Telegraph. (It was odd to meet someone who referred to the Telegraph with such reverence and such confidence – doubtless justified – that everyone else in her circle would also have read it that morning.)

Eventually Jane decided to call my bluff. ‘Why have you joined us?’ she said. ‘You don’t look like a Conservative to me. You seem quite nice. Don’t you know we are the nasty party?’ There were cackles all round at this. I repeated my cover story that I was a Labour voter, but I didn’t like Tony Blair because of the war, and that there was no point in voting Liberal because that would only help Labour. Jane listened to this sophistry, blinked, and looked bemused. It struck me that she did not believe a single word.

A few moments afterwards, as if to bring me up to date on the politics of the election campaign, Jane said in a stage whisper of foghorn volume: ‘You know, the Lib Dems are very, very strong here – verrr strong – because they have got a FANTASTIC candidate, a really, really capable candidate – and that makes SUCH a difference … yessss – a really EXCELLENT candidate … such a difference …’ If this was bait, Marco decided not to rise to it. His mobile phone rang and he excused himself before rushing off on some vital mission or other.

Later, following an afternoon of door-to-door canvassing that merely revealed the rock-solid nature of Liberal support in that part of Richmond, Jane complained bitterly about Marco. She said he had been parachuted into Richmond, had no roots in the area and was, generally speaking, a bit of a lightweight. ‘The Liberals know how to do it,’ Jane grumbled. ‘They are like we were years ago. They are at it all the time. Coffee mornings, jumble sales, petitions. We don’t do anything. You can’t just bring the party to life at election time. It won’t work.’

As we canvassed another leafy avenue flanked by expensive houses – territory in which you might reasonably expect the householders to vote Conservative – Jane began to despair. Exasperated, she threw her arms in the air and cried out, ‘There’s nothing here!’ She meant there were scant promises of Tory votes, and added, mystified and almost tearful, ‘All of this was ours when Maggie was in! Don’t they realize that their taxes will go up! What are they thinking?’

My time with the Richmond Conservatives passed quickly and soon I had become a key player in their election campaign – and so, to a lesser extent, had David. With so few keen activists there was a vacuum at the heart of the organization, and we had been sucked into it. What made us even more valuable was that hale, hearty and physically fit party workers were especially thin on the ground. These problems seemed to be nationwide but in Richmond the rot was so bad, we discovered, that the party was paying a firm that used Eastern European immigrants to deliver campaign literature door to door. The story appeared in the Liberal-leaning Independent and made out that the Richmond Tories were a bunch of utter hypocrites, employing the very immigrants on whom many right-wingers wanted more stringent controls.

A few days into the campaign I found myself in Robert’s car, with him at the wheel, driving towards yet another canvassing rendezvous point to deliver yet more leaflets (I had put aside my concerns that this was taking bread from the mouths of asylum seekers). During the journey Robert happily recounted stories about his escapades as a Tory campaigner, such as the time he had stood as a candidate in an unwinnable seat in the North East in the 1980s. As Robert told it, one day Cecil Parkinson arrived at a railway station to support his campaign and to speak at a public meeting. According to Robert, ‘Cecil’ had turned up at the station and, instead of saying hello, had pointed at a ‘lady station guard’ and said, ‘Look at the enormous knockers on that!’

As we trundled slowly along Hugo, the other passenger, was not the least bit interested in Robert’s stories. Instead, he was sitting in the back seat, wriggling like an excited puppy and pointing at all the VOTE MARCO signs he had put up in people’s front gardens. Hugo was staggeringly enthusiastic about political signage. As Robert rambled on, Hugo would butt in excitedly with ‘Oooh – look at that one up there! That’s a bloody great position! Everyone will see that! Hey! Three signs in a row! I hope Marco drives this way and sees that! Over the back there, there’s a street you can’t see from here, but there’s loads and loads of signs! Yep, loads of them! Loads of them.’

As we arrived at a busy road junction Hugo pointed out a large but dilapidated house with a big garden, and Hugo shared his plans to persuade the householder to let him plant an enormous VOTE MARCO sign in the front garden. ‘She’s barking mad,’ Hugo confided, ‘and her house is a complete wreck. I think there’s something seriously wrong with her. But I think she might let me put a sign up – she’s mad enough.’ Sure enough, a few days later a gigantic blue sign was securely and proudly standing in the garden, plonked down like the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the moon.

As we drove past a thicket of orange diamond-shaped Liberal Democrat signs along the main road, Hugo filled up with respectful admiration. ‘You know, those Lib Dem signs are much better than ours, the colour is much better and it stands out more. You’ve got to hand it to them.’ After that Hugo decided he wanted to cheer everyone up and badgered Robert – who was telling a very long story about some sort of mishap with John Major’s portable soapbox during the 1992 election campaign – into taking a considerable detour around Barnes Common. This was so that we could see the sign Hugo had erected in the garden of the multimillion-pound mansion that belonged to Chris Patten – the wealthy former Tory minister and last governor of Hong Kong.

‘He agreed to have the sign up straight away,’ Hugo yapped. ‘I met him and he was really nice about it.’ Hugo then insisted we take another detour so that we could see the signs he had erected along the edge of Barnes Common itself. A neat row of blue signs planted amid some brambles came into view. ‘Yes! Reeee-sult!’ Hugo cried, punching the air. He had been worried, he explained, that because they were on common land ‘vandals’ might have pulled them down.

Later that afternoon Robert dropped me off at Tory HQ and I walked the short distance back to my house where I was due to meet David for a spot of evening canvassing. It was five o’clock on a bright spring evening. I turned the corner and was confronted by the sight of an eight-foot wooden pole with a VOTE MARCO FORGIONE – CONSERVATIVE poster stuck to a large piece of hardboard in the style of an estate agent’s For Sale sign. As chance would have it David turned up at exactly the same time and, pointing at the sign, began laughing like a drain.

He watched me look at the sign and then go into a state of shock: ‘Oh f***! Look at that,’ I said. And I kept repeating this two-word mantra, involuntarily burying my head in my hands. Being a coward, I peeped in through the window to see if my wife was in. She was. ‘Oh f***, oh f***!’ My wife is a dedicated Labour supporter (and feminist!) and, even more than this, very committed to gardening and the overall look of the front of the house. She had reservations about the project in the first place. This was not going to play well with her.

I hit upon the brilliant plan of blaming David. It was in fact true that David had agreed to ‘display a poster’ during his original, fateful phone call to Marco. What he had in mind was maybe an A4 poster that could be put in the window and then obscured by shrubbery in some way. Instead, we had ended up with this carbuncle, this Day-Glo Nelson’s column of political shame. In the event my wife, who had grown wearily used to my escapades over the years, displayed a boundless degree of tolerance. She restricted her retaliation to a series of withering looks, adding the observation that the very sight of the sign made her flesh creep.

I mulled over the sign question with David as we drove through Richmond Park to the rendezvous point in Tudor ward where we were scheduled to start canvassing with Marco and his ‘boys and girls’ (our experience to date led us to expect they would actually be mature women). I was feeling very paranoid about it. And I was very paranoid about the sign. I was in a dark place at the time, partly because of the powerful kidney drugs I was on, which had mood-altering and anxiety-heightening properties.¹

The Tories were devious, I reasoned. They had obviously arranged for the sign to be stuck up as a way of smoking us out. It was a test. David, who was not on drugs and who had a healthier and less Machiavellian outlook anyway, was more inclined to think that it was just routine idiocy and, perhaps, wishful thinking. ‘These people just go round putting up these signs,’ he explained, adding: ‘It’s a waste of f***ing time and effort. But it is what they do.’ And he shrugged and told me to calm down a bit.

It seemed likely that the Tories thought there was something suspicious about David and me. But we were doing no harm. And what were they going to do if they felt they needed to act? March up to David and say, ‘You cannot possibly be a Conservative – we can tell because you are black’? Some of them might think that, but they were not going to come out and say it.

Notwithstanding the powerful side effects of my kidney drugs, it didn’t always feel great to be deceiving Marco, Robert, Pam and the rest of the Richmond Tories. But, then again, a bit of research on Marco revealed that the image he liked to present wasn’t, as we saw it, always completely in tune with the reality. A quick look on the internet had turned up the fact that when he had joined the Tories in the mid-1990s the party’s national machine had trumpeted him as a prized Labour ‘defector’. But while he had said he had been a Labour sympathizer shortly after studying at university, it soon emerged that he had never in fact been a Labour Party member. There were other inconsistencies and exaggerations in his background, so the last thing he could complain about was people not presenting a full and accurate picture of themselves, politically speaking.

David and I mulled it all over as we drove through Richmond Park to the evening rendezvous in the car park of a sports centre. Marco was waiting for us with a small knot of two or three blokes. A tall man called Frank loomed physically over the proceedings, but the brightest spark was Sean, a forty-something who was introduced as an official of some sort for the party. Sean had all the lists and papers we needed sorted out in advance, and introduced the concept of ‘running the board’ – whereby one member of the canvassing team didn’t actually knock on doors at all but, instead, kept the running total of promised votes up to date.

We were to canvass the Tudor ward, a relentlessly suburban patch with an entirely different feel from the more fashionable Vineyard ward. Housing in the Tudor ward was much more modern, with a good sprinkling of boxy sixties- and seventies-style semis with built-in garages. Parts of the ward looked like the remnants of a privatized council estate, with boring looking but good quality cottage-style red-brick semis.

The key thing about door-to-door canvassing, the Richmond Tories emphasized to us, was not to waste time trying to change anyone’s opinion. That would be done by the TV appearances of the party leader Michael Howard (‘God help us!’ I said to David), by the negative smear stuff on the front pages of the tabloids, by the leaflets and by the national billboard advertising campaign (featuring, on this occasion, the vague and frankly useless ‘dog-whistle’ slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’).

Big Frank drove us to the canvassing starting point, a few streets away. I was still feeling a bit sick because of the arrival of the sign at home, and I was at the worst point of my kidney drug therapy, so I was slightly out of it and everything seemed a bit weird and threatening. Big Frank was openly hostile and unfriendly – narrowing his eyes for one heart-stopping moment and saying with real menace: ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Frank’s car didn’t help either. It was a monstrous Mercedes-like affair which seemed hermetically sealed. The mood was tense and there was no conversation. Instead the car was filled with the booming sound of Barry White which happened to be playing on Frank’s choice of easy-listening radio station. For a little while it was like being in a David Lynch movie – sailing through the suburbs in Frank’s hermetically sealed bubble with a bunch of odd characters and this insane sex music blasting over the stereo.

Robert had previously told me all about Tudor ward. It was pretty solid Conservative territory, a ‘Thatcherite’ place where the house prices were steep but not ridiculously so. That was because the transport links to London were no good, interrupted by the Thames on one side and Richmond Park on the other. In a borough which had one of the oldest populations in the country, this was where younger couples could just about get on the housing ladder.

Tudor ward was where the ‘hard-working families’ lived, the typical potential swing voters to whom politicians of all parties like to pay homage. From what we could tell, Tudor people were moderately well off and had white-collar jobs; they were the kind of people who were probably juggling their mortgages and credit card debts while trying to work out whether they could really afford private education for their kids.

Voters around here, Marco said, were sensitive to taxation and changes in interest rates. Once we were on the doorstep it quickly became clear that, although there were plenty of Tories in the Tudor ward, there were also plenty of non-voting former Tories who were still angry with the Conservatives for overseeing interest rate hikes more than a decade earlier. When you met such people they were pretty hostile, in the main, to politics of any kind. We received comments such as: ‘You only come round here when you want our vote’ – as though that was somehow a bad or irrational or hypocritical thing to do rather than an obvious and perfectly reasonable one. It seemed to me and David that these people wanted a straight cash bribe in return for their vote. None of them seemed to exude much ideological zeal or public spiritedness. I had the feeling that with most of them you needed to repeal the law on the secret ballot, so that they could then simply sell their vote to the highest cash bidder.

The official Conservative campaigning materials didn’t really help us deal with these characters. What they were really after was the abolition of all taxes and all laws that adversely affected them, combined with draconian measures against everyone else in the country. The leaflets were vague, and talked about side issues such as hospital cleanliness. What you needed here was something more along the lines of VOTE TORY AND WIN A MINI METRO. To get through the psychodrama of canvassing we developed a technique we came to call ‘Zen’ canvassing, based on the main official slogan of the Conservative campaign which was ‘Are YOU thinking what we’re thinking?’

David and I would repeat this meaningless sentence and then wiggle our eyebrows inscrutably, while noting the perplexed reactions of the householder. One middle-aged woman – who looked a bit Lib Dem – asked, ‘Is this a joke?’ to which I replied, ‘No, no!’ before showing her the slogan on an official leaflet. I coughed and announced, ‘I am canvassing for Marco Forgione and I was just wondering “Are yoooooo thinking what we’re thinking … erm … hmmmm … are you?”’ The woman warmed up and seemed amused: ‘Well, what is that … what are you thinking?’ I said I didn’t know and, anyway, that was not the question. She took a leaflet and said that in fact she always voted Conservative and would probably do so again.

With the first phase of the evening’s canvassing over, Marco and his team gathered on a street corner to tot up the number of likely Conservative votes. There were a lot of shrugs and pulling of faces, and a feeling that they had really just been going through the motions. There was a Tory vote here but there were few signs of enthusiasm. Big Frank enlivened proceedings by telling the story of how a house he was canvassing had been stormed by armed police. Frank said he told the cops, ‘Don’t arrest me, I am only canvassing’ and this witticism was treated by Marco and company as though it were a fresh from the lips of Oscar Wilde. ‘What were they, Frank? Irish? Or Muslims?’ Marco asked.

After this Team Marco fanned out across the ward for a little more light canvassing until it got dark. At one house a woman detained me on the doorstop while she fetched her grumpy teenage son, and then used me as the exhibit in a show-and-tell lesson about how local politics, councils and the entire constitutional system worked. The kid looked at me blankly, then began to smirk in a hostile manner.

By the time I arrived at the pub, everyone had disappeared except David, Marco and a clean-cut Canadian volunteer in his twenties. The section of the pub we were sitting in and the downbeat feel of the bar matched Marco’s conversation. He laid out all the reasons that the Tudor ward householders had given for not voting Conservative. I said I’d found people receptive, but Marco said: ‘The thing is, you can’t believe a word most of them say to you. They will say they are going to vote for you, and then not do it. Others will say they are against you, then they change their minds.’

Then Marco started grilling me about the giant blue Conservative election poster that had appeared in my front garden. Was I happy with it? he asked. I nervously dodged the question – fearing Marco was trying to gauge my true loyalties – and replied that my wife was ‘hopping mad’ because ‘it doesn’t go with the curtains’ and ‘she’s essentially non-political’. That last bit about my wife being non-political was, I think, the only out and out lie I told throughout the entire project. The real reason my wife was hopping mad was not down to mismatched interior décor or political apathy, but because she hated the Conservatives with a passion and now had a huge VOTE MARCO FORGIONE – CONSERVATIVE placard positioned on her lawn.

Apparently satisfied, Marco headed to the bar for a second time. I wondered if he was trying to pump as much lager as possible into us in order to discover the reality behind the shifty demeanours of his latest recruits. He came back with more beer, tossing a packet of crisps onto the table.

‘I knocked on one door,’ said Marco brightly, ‘and this old Glaswegian guy came out. Verrrr much the dyed-in-the-wool Old Labour supporter, and he said: “I don’t like Blair. Not at all. But if you think I am going to vote for a f***ing Welsh Jewboy like Michael Howard you must be f***joking!”’ There was silence, and an agonized pause. David came to the rescue and – as the on-hand race-relations expert – defused an awkward moment. ‘Better put him down as a “don’t know”, then,’ he quipped.

Later I asked David whether he had encountered any racism on the doorstep in Richmond, not just in Tudor ward, but everywhere we had canvassed in the borough. Or indeed, whether people had been at all surprised to find a black man wearing a blue rosette and asking them whether they would be voting Tory. David said there had been hardly any noticeable reaction to his skin colour on the doorstep, or any suggestion that a black Tory might be an oddity.

A few days later I took my first turn at shouting Conservative slogans into the Battle Banger’s microphone, my words being completely mangled as the ancient amplifier and speaker broadcast them around Richmond’s quiet streets.

This, like wearing a Conservative rosette for the first time, had been – despite my commitment to the writing project – a troubling experience. There I was being driven around my borough bothering people with Conservative propaganda, and I expected them really to hate me for it.

But, as with the rosette, I had been genuinely surprised to find that people either ignored us or had only given mildly annoyed looks – because of the noise, I suspected. There had been some vaguely approving but amused smiles, of the sort given to morris dancers or people rattling tins for Cats Protection, but no one had thrown a brick at us or even flicked a V-sign.

Robert had been at the wheel and, with a wry smile, had written out a script for me on the back of an envelope from the water company. The script read: ‘For Cleaner Hospitals, Vote Conservative’. If I got bored with that, Robert said, I could change the line to ‘For More Police, Vote Conservative’. When I shouted, maybe a little bit sarcastically, ‘Vote for Marco Forgione – your LOCAL Conservative candidate’, Robert said, with an enthusiastic cackle, ‘That’s a good one!’ Marco, as part of his election strategy, was indeed claiming that he was a local man, although this struck us as a somewhat unusual claim to be making, given his strong family and business links to the West Country.

Nobody would have been able to make out a word I was saying, however, since the distortion and feedback from the clapped-out battery-powered valve amplifier was so extreme. At one point I wound down the window of the car – it was a warm day – and that produced a persistent, whistling feedback so sweet and sustained that it could have formed part of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo.

As Robert drove and I shouted – sometimes relieving the boredom with ‘For Cleaner Police and More Hospitals, Vote Marco Forgione’ – I thought how pointless it was to shout at people in this way. It seemed to be nothing more than a habit among local political campaigners which dated back to a time before television, when a megaphone was the only way to communicate with people in large numbers or over a distance. Now it was just a noisy but empty ritual, one of the things you did at election time.

Eventually I was invited into the belly of the beast – the back room of the Richmond Conservative Association office itself. I was given a desk and a telephone and a telephone canvassing job. I had to convince Richmond’s Tory supporters to show up at a public meeting with Michael Howard and also confirm that they would turn up to vote on election day.

The inner sanctum – the size of a decent sized sitting room – was windowless and dominated by a long boardroom table in the middle of the floor. Around the table sat six elderly women stuffing leaflets into envelopes. From one wall a chocolate-box portrait of the Queen looked on, and on another hung an oil painting of the Houses of Parliament. The place was dingy and threadbare, yet this was the nerve centre of the Conservative operation in Richmond.

‘Chris is just going to make a few phone calls for me,’ said Marco, grinning in a sickly way. ‘Is that OK, ladies?’ There was no reply. I sat down facing the wall and picked up an ancient telephone with a curly wire, keying in the numbers and working my way down a list of Tory sympathizers. Another element of this ring round was to ask if they would help with electioneering. The majority of those who answered the phone sounded very old – many with ailments which they used, quite reasonably, to excuse themselves from helping out with political activity.

The routine went something like this. I would say: ‘Hello, is that Mrs Smith?’ Then one of the six ladies – they were watching my every move – would interject with something like ‘Oh, I know her, she can’t help – she’s terribly crippled.’ The ladies would talk about me as if I wasn’t there: ‘Why have they asked him to phone all these people,’ they would say. ‘I know all of them, they are all my friends.’

Sometimes, I got through to a younger, and presumably able-bodied, Tory supporter, who would make excuses to get out of helping with the campaign. The ladies would then cheer themselves up by making vitriolic personal comments about the person on the other end of the phone, along the lines that he or she was a traitor, hypocrite and fair-weather supporter who had been only too keen to help when the Tories were riding high.

As I worked down the list, I began flipping through a script left by the phone. It was obviously to be used when cold-calling people. Among the various instructions was a crib sheet to be used if the person on the other end of the line was a Lib Dem who might just be persuaded to vote Tory. There was some very negative, personalized stuff there about Jenny Tonge, the retiring Liberal MP, claiming that she had stepped down as MP ‘probably because of her stance on hard drugs’.

As for Susan Kramer, the new Lib Dem election candidate, the script made it clear I should emphasize that she was an ‘outsider’ and a ‘foreigner’ who had ‘few links with Richmond’ and had ‘lost in other constituencies’. The script also said Kramer was Hungarian, although why all this should matter, particularly given that Marco’s links with Richmond didn’t seem particularly strong either and he was of Italian extraction, was anybody’s guess.

Taking a momentary break from phoning the existing supporters, I turned to face the ladies and said: ‘It says here that Kramer is Hungarian. I didn’t know she was Hungarian.’

‘She’s a Jewess,’ one of the ladies replied, ‘but we aren’t allowed to say that. We get told off if we say that. So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.’

The next day I was out of the office and back on the road. A Tory convoy had been organized, with the aim of ‘blitzing’ Barnes, the well-heeled, faintly bohemian area which much of the BBC’s top talent calls home. By mid-morning a cluster of four or five cars – expensive but boring mid-range saloons – had parked up at the rendezvous point. Some of the cars had blue balloons attached to them and a couple had ‘Vote Conservative’ posters in the side windows.

As the housing density in the area was so low – the ultimate luxury in London – there was no need for parking restrictions, and consequently no danger of getting a parking ticket. The line of parked cars was soon noticed by two local Anglo-Indian boys, about eight and nine years old.

‘Who are these people?’ asked the younger one, possibly attracted by the balloons.

‘The police,’ the older one asserted.

‘What are they doing?’

‘They are doing a survey of people,’ he stated categorically. Bored, they returned to slurping ice cream and dropping litter on the street.

Eventually, the Battle Banger hoved into view, with the amplified voice of Lampshade Pam broadcasting noisily through a loudspeaker tied to the roof rack. She sounded like Björk with a mouth full of marbles talking through a fuzzbox. Her message was simple, if not very easy on the ear: ‘VRNNRTT KORNSVVVKKNNNITIVE VRRRNNNTTT MMMMNNNAEEKKKOW FOOORRRRGEE OWWWWNEEEEE.’

The Battle Banger trundled up the street and abruptly came to a halt. Pam, sitting in the passenger seat, was thrown forward. The car was decked out in an array of ‘Vote Forgione’ posters with blue helium balloons trailing behind, some of which had already started to deflate. Marco jumped out of the car to meet the team.

The man behind the wheel of the Battle Banger – an aggressive-looking middle-aged activist – leaned across Pam, wound down the window and growled a garbled message to the effect that we were to follow him down to ‘The Glebelands’ in central Barnes. There was great excitement among the Tories. This was the patch of Susan Kramer, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Richmond.

Kramer lived in a mansion – the £5-million type – close to the centre of Barnes village, the expensive heart of the area. ‘It’s time to really put the boot in,’ said one canvasser with enthusiasm. ‘Yeahhhh,’ agreed the driver of the Battle Banger, with grim determination: ‘let’s DO it!’ There were now about ten of us in total, and we all climbed into the cars and sped off.

When we arrived in Glebelands, everyone parked in front of the Kramer residence, which stood in a wide, tree-lined street completely devoid of people. The Battle Banger hovered for a while, with Pam on the loudspeaker, chanting with added gusto, ‘FER KLINNER HAIR-SPIT-YULES! MHER PLISS ONDER STRIT! VERT KIN-SEVE-VEET-TEETH’ over and over again.

As Pam’s racket continued, we hung about on the pavement. Ostensibly – with sheaves of leaflets at hand – we were just hoping to talk passers-by into voting Conservative. But as there were no passers-by, it was pretty clear the Richmond Conservatives were simply having fun by trying to annoy Susan Kramer.

After a few minutes, to our complete amazement Kramer’s husband actually arrived on the scene and began talking to the Tories. Instead of starting a slanging match, however, he exuded goodwill and bonhomie. It was a master class in the art of passive aggression. ‘Good morning,’ said Mr Kramer, ‘how is it all going … it’s great to see you all here. This is really fantastic for democracy. Well done, well done.’

This genteel stand-off concluded after a few minutes, following which the driver of the Battle Banger revved up and zoomed into the distance. Fun over, the Tory mob then began to disperse, pounding the surrounding streets and pushing their leaflets – the implied message of which was ‘Vote Liberal and get a gypsy encampment at the bottom of your garden’ – through as many letter boxes as possible on Kramer’s patch.

As we were bumbling around near Kramer’s house a TV crew – meaning one microphone-wielding reporter and one cameraman – turned up. They were from a Dutch news channel and were profiling Richmond as one of the key seats in election 2005. From the standpoint of a Dutch television reporter Richmond, I learned, is an interesting place, as there are lots of opportunities for references to cricket on the green, tea shops, boating on the Thames and so on.

The reporter then asked me off camera why I thought such a prosperous place was held by the Liberals and not by ‘your party, the Conservatives’. I told them the truth as I understood it – Barnes was a fairly trendy area. Lots of rich folk working in television lived there and they tended to be opposed to the Conservatives on moral and philosophical grounds. The Dutch reporter was starting to look bored so in a moment of inspiration I added: ‘Also – gay people.

‘There’s loads and loads and loads of gay people here in Barnes, just like in Amsterdam,’ I added. ‘They’re stinking rich, but they don’t vote Conservative because they’re gay, and I for one very much welcome that.’ The Dutch reporter was momentarily thrown, so, in character, I stumbled and corrected myself: ‘Sorry – I don’t mean that I welcome the fact that gay people don’t vote for us – that is something I regret. What I welcome is that there are such a lot of gay people around here and in the world generally.’

The Dutch reporter was now completely thrown. ‘You do not seem to me to be very much like a Tory Man,’ he said, evidently wondering what to make of all this gibberish about gay people.

‘That’s right,’ I said, brightly. ‘I am normally a very strong Labour supporter, but I don’t like some of the things Tony Blair has been doing, like the war in Iraq. Same as you in Holland. So I have decided to give out some leaflets for the Conservatives to see what will happen. And also I am partly doing this as an experiment. To see how they will react to me.’

The Dutch reporter was, again, lost for a moment. Finally he said: ‘Noooohhh – I’m not believing this, that a left-wing man can be voting for such a very right-wing organization as the Conservatives Party, I have never heard of this. This is not possible.’ But then a light bulb seemed to go on above the reporter’s head, and he added with some incredulity: ‘Can I film you saying all of these things? About you being a Labour man who does not like Mr Blair any more?’

‘Sure,’ I said. I delivered the lines to camera, while wearing my blue rosette. I added the news that Greg Dyke, the socialist former Director General of the BBC, had earlier that day told Old Labour people such as himself to vote Lib Dem in order to give Tony Blair a good kicking. I went on to explain, for the benefit of Dutch television viewers, that Dyke’s advice was a waste of time because, without a proper proportional representation system, the election was a two-horse race.

‘In this election when the votes are counted it either means Tony Blair is going to be Prime Minister or Michael Howard is gonna be Prime Minister,’ I summed up. ‘So if you don’t want Howard you are stuck with Blair. And vice versa. And that’s the fact of it and all the rest is just hot air.’

The reporter didn’t seem entirely convinced that this could motivate my apparent overnight journey from left-winger to right-winger, but he had a new angle on the election and was grinning from ear to ear. He gave a thoughtful and appreciative ‘Hmmmmmm’ which seemed to say, ‘I know you are up to something, but I am not quite sure what it is.’

Michael Howard didn’t seem to be a particularly popular character with the local Richmond Tories, and the name of the then Tory leader was hardly mentioned during the campaign in Richmond. For a party which often created a cult of personality around its leaders – from Churchill to Thatcher – this was odd. Howard was, however, due to arrive in Richmond to give a boost to local campaigners, and that gave me and David the chance to see at close quarters how the Tory leader’s spin machine operated. The morning rendezvous point was Richmond Green, an open space in the middle of the town. When Team Marco – including us – arrived, a flunky from Conservative Central Office confronted our group.

The flunky was much younger than anyone else among the gathering Tory campaigners – maybe twenty-five. He was unsmiling and yakked on a mobile, which he had clamped to his ear, continuously. His telephone conversations employed modern lingo and jargon, spattered with the f-word, just like a normal person of his generation.

Howard’s motorcade drew up and parked in a side street without much fuss. There were three or four vehicles led by a black shiny car containing what looked like security men and more officials from Central Office. Howard’s own car came next, unmarked but bearing the unmistakable sign of power and money – darkened glass windows. Inside was his fragrant blonde wife, Sandra, along with some more helpers. Bringing up the rear was a navy blue minibus full of the journalists and TV cameras, and behind that another unmarked car, presumably full of yet more secret police.

A whole gang of Tory heavies emerged from the cars, including a squad of pushy media minders from Central Office. Like the flunky we had seen earlier, these apparatchiks were much, much younger and more dynamic than the Dad’s Army of local Tories we’d so far been involved with. They had about them the look, manners and vocabulary of tabloid journalists – as though they had been seconded from the Sun for the duration.

Two or three bored-looking camera crews emerged from the minibus. The BBC’s man, the vulpine James Landale, strode about looking imperious and tremendously unimpressed with everything. But the star – far more luminous than Michael Howard – was Trevor McDonald, who, as well as being a top newsreader, was also a resident of the East Sheen ward. Trevor began walking about in stately fashion, waving regally to those passers-by who recognized him. Last out of the minibus were the lower-status non-TV hacks, including a young male newspaper reporter with a punk hairdo from the Press Association, and a plump and jolly female reporter for a local radio station.

Howard emerged from his car wearing a mirthless smile and shook Marco’s hand. There was no small talk – no ‘How’s it all going, Marco?’ – just straight on to ‘Right! Where am I supposed to be walking? Let’s get started!’ The walkabout kicked off, with Howard first pressing the flesh with the local Tories, shaking hands and pepping them up. ‘Thank you verrr much for coming here today,’ he said in his curious sing-song voice.

The Tory leader looked frightful – caked in so much make-up to the point of appearing like a waxwork dummy, with strange jerky, wooden movements to match, and a faraway look in his eyes, as though he was running on autopilot. His wife Sandra was beaming at everyone all the time in a way that seemed to suggest she was about to say something, but she never did. Not once. Not even a ‘Hello’. She was completely mute, yet remained in a state of apparently continuous imminent pronouncement.

The hacks understood that they had to wait for the brief ritual of party leader patting local party workers on the back to take place before the real business of the walkabout began; it was all part of a game they had played many times before. Howard and Marco then marched off around Richmond Green and towards the high street at a cracking pace – almost a jog. The Sky TV News cameraman filmed every moment, jogging backwards as he shot them from the front, shuffling sideways like a crab. The Central Office people seemed very annoyed that there was such a tiny turnout of local supporters and began bossing me and the others about. ‘No, no, no!’ they would bark. ‘You need to get in much closer behind Michael … Much, much closer.’

People twenty yards away would clock the blue rosettes and TV cameras and cross the street to get away. There was only one way, the Central Office officials seemed to have decided, to make sure Howard could be filmed interacting with passers-by. And that was to pounce on the more unwary as they emerged from shop doorways.

It worked like this. Howard would stop chatting to Marco – mid-sentence – and then swoop on an unsuspecting punter coming out of a shop and, to the bewilderment of the punter, initiate a conversation. The press pack, Central Office minders and Marco’s local Tories would then bunch up, with the hacks pressing forward, trying to earwig the conversation, and hoping for a gaffe of some sort to come tumbling out of someone’s mouth.

When Howard swooped – and it was a bit Dracula-like, as he tended to be taller than the older shoppers he encountered, the younger ones having already scuttled off – the victim would quickly spot the cameras and the hacks with notebooks, and then try to get out of the way. If escape was impossible, the victim tended to adopt a bemused, ‘game for a laugh’ expression, perhaps realizing that they were going to be on TV and wanting to look amenable and as normal as possible. A few seemed to recognize Howard, but none seemed to recognize Marco.

At one point Howard descended on a scruffy man who was probably in his seventies. The man was wearing cheap clothes – a baseball cap, soup-streaked tracksuit top with out-of-date Arsenal insignia, badly fitting jeans and scuffed trainers – and carrying his shopping in two grubby plastic bags. The old boy started talking about how he lived on the nearby Ham estate, claiming there was a lot of trouble there, with lots of youths hanging around and swearing, ‘throwing bottles about’ and generally making his life a misery.

Howard listened for a bit and then butted in, outlining a plan to cut the welfare benefits of parents of kids that had been reprimanded for anti-social behaviour. ‘We have some very tough measures for dealing with the yobs you are talking about,’ he said, edging away. But the man came back, a quizzical look on his face. ‘What about putting them all in the army?’ he growled. ‘What do you think about that?’ The media scrum tightened, sensing that Howard was now in potential gaffe territory.

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 alarmingly, and in fact was leaning at an almost 45-degree angle into the garden. Much of it was covered up by an out-of-control clematis, growing profusely in the unusually wet, warm spring. Nobody in my household had vandalized the sign, but if nature wanted to knock it over nobody was going to stand in the way. And, as Hugo the sign guy had bitterly regretted, Tory poster printing was done on the cheap and so the colours were starting to fade, heading towards a sort of Ecology Party turquoise green.

For good measure my son, then at primary school and something of a wag, had drawn a primitive skull and crossbones on the poster with a marker pen, and I had frustrated a further plan of his to add a black plastic skull and crossbones pirate flag. Various spiders and other insects had taken up residence in the soggy hardboard and my teenage daughter had added a Labour Party leaflet, secured with Blu-Tack. Mould was beginning to invade the edge of the placard and it was, all in all, starting to turn into a sort of voodoo totem poll with all sorts of political bunting and tat flapping from it. If it had stayed up long enough maybe somebody would place a human skull on top, like one of those props from Apocalypse Now.

At one point during the campaign there was a gathering of my wife’s family at a house a little further down the street. I had been amused to see various non-political in-laws, cousins and nephews walking past the sign and looking at it in vaguely anxious perplexity. When I arrived at the party they seemed frosty at first, but said nothing about the blue carbuncle. I then explained The Project, swearing them to ‘semi-secrecy’ (whatever that meant), and they warmed up considerably.

One brother-in-law, who used to work for a giant pharmaceuticals company, said he knew that a form of temporary insanity was a common side effect of the medicine I was taking for my kidneys, which could also bring on a sort of instant physiological and neurological old age. He had, before I explained The Project to him, genuinely thought that the drug therapy might be the reason for the appearance of the sign.

When I got back to the house, I told David that we had chalked up the first truly scientific conclusion of the project. The conclusion? That normal, middle-class professional people – who had normal, responsible jobs with big firms – now honestly thought the most obvious explanation as to why somebody might switch their vote from Labour to Conservative was acute drug-induced insanity.

Michael Howard lost the 2005 general election and handed Tony Blair a third term in office. It was an open secret that Blair would in due course hand over to Gordon Brown. It did seem in a way that the Conservative Party of old had passed away and would require a complete relaunch. Marco increased the Conservative vote in Richmond slightly, achieving a swing of 1.9 per cent to the Tories from the Liberal Democrats.

A couple of days after election night we attended an excruciating thank-you party for the Conservative campaigners in Richmond. We met up again with all the characters we’d come across during our time inside Marco’s campaign – Robert, Lampshade Pam, some of the ‘iron ladies’ I had worked the phone with, Hugo the sign guy, Marco himself and a group of very old Tories whom I had not seen during the campaign. Most people seemed either very depressed, or they were so old they were past caring.

In defeat Marco made pretty much exactly the same speech as he had made four years earlier when he stood in Yeovil during the 2001 election (we looked it up on the internet). His spiel made it sound as if he was planning to stay and fight another day. In fact, Marco left both the area and politics itself soon afterwards, taking up a job as the marketing man for a technical college in Kent.

As the party was winding down an elderly and slightly deaf Tory – who looked well into his eighties, if not older – invited us to the Richmond Conservative Association’s annual dinner. It was easy to remember when the event took place, the old guy said, because it was always held on the Queen Mother’s birthday. One of the younger Tories (in his fifties) explained, shouting the information into the old man’s hearing aid, that the Queen Mother was dead. The old man replied with a fearful and utterly lost look: ‘Oh! Are you sure? How terrible. Are you sure? How did that happen?’

Coincidentally, the Richmond Conservative Association’s annual dinner was due to take place in an Italian restaurant called San Marco. It was an appropriately named venue as Richmond was soon to be sans Marco, since he was about to depart to pastures new. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Richmond Tories were pretty much sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans taste, sans Marco – sans everything.

¹ I am much better now.