Breaking the Code (11 page)

The high points of my Budget Day have been the Blacon coffee morning (in a house that smelled of urine and disinfectant – a smell I’d never encountered before getting this job, but one to which I find I’m now quite accustomed); sherry with the Dean
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(he drank the sherry; I stuck to orange juice); a talk to some very elderly ladies at the Square One Youth Club on Thackeray Drive; and much the same talk to the Chester Glee Club at the Stafford Hotel. From what I can tell the Budget looks ingenious: the new 20p in the pound income tax rate is attractive and ‘a Budget for recovery’ is a neat phrase. The line we’ve been given is that the tax changes will leave the average punter £2.64 better off. Will he believe it? Is it enough? The income support for poorer pensioners going up by £2 (£3 for couples) is certainly good news – though what most of the crumblies really seem to want is a free TV licence. That comes up on the Chester doorsteps several times a day without fail. Standing on the No. 11 doorstep, with the fair Rosemary towering beside him and the boy Hague [Lamont’s PPS] grinning in the rear, the Chancellor certainly looks happy enough. Perhaps it will do the trick. Who knows?

While I was lunching with the Retired Masonic Fellowship at the Upton British Legion Club, the Prime Minister was closeted with Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace.
Mr Major had a twenty-minute audience with the Queen and the election has been called for 9 April. The game’s afoot. The race is on. The BBC’s poll of fifty key marginals gives Labour a five-point lead, but that’s bridgeable. We can win and, in Chester, we will.

John Smith’s
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shadow Budget has to be good news. The pundits are saying it’ll cost middle managers £1,500 a year. That’s exactly what we need. The Conservative voters who have been crucified by the recession (and I’ve met quite a few and they’re angry) will vote elsewhere this time, but the Tories who are simply wavering (they’ve been bruised, they’re fearful of negative equity, they’re worried about redundancy, but they’ve still got a house and a job), they could come back to us at the last minute, clinging on to nurse for fear of something worse.

The buzz from London is that Jeffrey Archer and Norman Fowler
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are already jostling to be the post-election party chairman and Fergie and Prince Andrew are going to split.
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(I remember a conversation with King Constantine at the time they became engaged: ‘Sarah is delightful, so carefree, such fun. She will be a breath of fresh air at Buckingham Palace. She will be the making of the modern royal family. You mark my words.’)

A week down, three weeks to go. It’s tiring, but it isn’t difficult. There are moments I’m hating – assaulting the commuters at the railway station at 8.00 a.m., badgering the mums at the school gates at 3.15 – but the major part of the process – knocking on doors, hour after hour, a minimum of eight hours a day – is relatively stress-free. You shake a hand, proffer a leaflet, mouth a cliché and move quickly on.

Today our star attraction has been Jeffrey Archer who was both brilliant and ridiculous. We started off with him at the Quaker House where we imposed ourselves on a lip-reading lesson for the hard-of-hearing. The old ladies were charmed by Jeffrey, who gave everyone an autograph and then stood in the middle of the room and boomed at them about
Labour’s threat to the constitution. He was so loud that they heard every word and loved every moment. Unfortunately, when we went down into the street for the walkabout Jeffrey maintained the volume, which certainly won us glances as we strode purposefully through the shopping precinct, but I’m not sure it won us votes. He became a caricature of himself really, beaming dementedly at visibly shrinking passers-by, thrusting his hand out towards bemused tourists and barking at them in turn, ‘Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer. This is your candidate, Gyles Brandreth. Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer.’ Michèle became so embarrassed she separated herself from our group and slipped home. I like Jeffrey. He’s like Mr Toad, absurd but still a star. (And I don’t forget: he put £30,000 into Royal Britain, lost every penny, and never said a word.)

Fun and games on the doorstep today. One woman in Vicar’s Cross dragged me into her sitting room and said, ‘Sit down.’

‘No, I can’t stay,’ I simpered. ‘I just popped by to say hello.’

‘You want my vote, don’t you?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then you’ll sit there while I make a cup of tea.’

‘No, really, I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.’

‘Look, young man. If you want my vote, you’ll sit there and listen to what I’ve got to say.’

At this point Jill [Everett] appeared to rescue me. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to get Mr Brandreth back on the road.’

‘No you haven’t. He’s come to see me. He’s going to hear what I’ve got to say.’

‘Perhaps Mrs Everett could take notes,’ I suggested, edging towards the door, ‘and I’ll write to you.’

‘She’ll do no such thing.’

Jill now attempted to lead me through the door. The woman grabbed me and pulled me back towards the sofa. I gave in. I had no choice. I was there for three-quarters of an hour agreeing on the importance of home births, the shameful undervaluing of midwives and the priority of preschool play provision. As I left she said, ‘I shall certainly be voting Labour.’

Later, in Boughton, one of our activists reprimanded me for shying away from a particularly ferocious dog. ‘You shoudn’t flinch like that. They can smell fear. You should go towards them and show them the back of your hand.’ She did exactly that and the snarling hound promptly mauled her. We had to rush the poor dear to the hospital and I think she’ll need stitches.

The election here seems a million miles from the one on the box. Out there Mrs T. has apparently ‘lifted the spirits of the shaken Tories’ with a rousing endorsement of her successor and the Prime Minister has impressed the troops with his ‘most positive and forceful speech’ of the campaign. Says Norman Tebbit:
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‘At last they’ve stopped feeding him bromides in his tea.’

Michael Heseltine flashed in and flashed out today. We had him for half an hour. We took him to the Meadows for the photocall. He had no idea who I was. We shook hands, we posed for the pictures, I made small talk, but I don’t think he glanced at me once, and while in a lordly way he gladhanded the forty or fifty faithful we’d corralled to greet him he didn’t
engage
with them for a moment. He was grand but not impressive. But I was very glad to have him all the same. I think I have scored on the local issues – nursery education, saving the Cheshire Regiment, more police on the Chester beat – and, notwithstanding Sir Peter [Morrison]’s contempt (‘This’ll cost you a thousand votes. This could cost you the election’), I think I have been right to be seen to be supporting the Heseltine decision on the Green Belt.
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All the old hands say it’s the national swing that counts. Local issues, what the candidate does, all the door-knocking, they make a difference of a thousand votes at most. Of course, here a thousand votes one way or another could well be what decides it. That’s why we’ve got to keep at it. And we do.

Last night we had the Churches Together
Any Questions
at the Blacon Arts Centre. I survived. I don’t think I gave my own supporters the gungho performance they’d have liked: I was too moderate, but my people will vote for me anyway (won’t they?); I was wanting to appeal to any middle-of-the-road waverers. I did my best to disconcert the other candidates by being effusively chummy towards them. The Liberal and the Green I like. The Labour fellow is fairly loathsome and he thinks he’s going to win.

I’m not wearying yet. I’m not drinking either – and not missing it. The days are very strange though, hour after hour of door-knocking, sudden flurries of excitement when a visiting superstar descends, and then getting home and collapsing in front of
Newsnight
to discover the election coverage on the box bears no relationship at all to the issues that are coming up on the doorstep. On TV and in the papers they are talking about nothing except ‘the war of Jennifer’s ear’. It hasn’t cropped up once on the street.

Mr Major brought his soapbox to Chester this morning and it was a triumph. We only had twenty-four hours advance notice and strict instructions not to tell a soul about it. ‘If we can’t say he’s coming, how’s anyone going to know he’s here?’ was my question to Vanessa. ‘We can alert the troops to the fact that we’re expecting a very important visitor whose name we can’t mention and let them draw their own conclusions.’

In the event, our coded signal and the beat of the tom-tom brought out our supporters in their hundreds and we gathered, as instructed, in the pedestrianised part of Eastgate Street at eleven. Equipped with a loud-hailer I stood on a bench in the drizzle and addressed the multitude. This is as close as I get to Agincourt. I don’t think anyone was really listening, but it was fun. Old-fashioned street politics. The rain got worse, but the crowd was good-humoured throughout. There was excitement, a sense of occasion in the air. As the minutes passed and word went round the city centre, more and more people thronged the square. The police reckoned there were 2,000 at least by the time the battle bus arrived. The door opened, we all roared, and the Prime Minister with a grin and a wave plunged into the throng. It was amazing. The crush was incredible. I managed to get right by him and stuck to him like a limpet as we moved through the heaving, cheering mass. We were surrounded by police, TV crews, cameramen, and at the Prime Minister’s right-hand throughout was Norman Fowler.

As we pushed forward, with supporters and shoppers and gawpers pressing towards us, leaning out to touch the Major anorak, reaching out to shake the great man’s hand, Norman Fowler kept up a running commentary, ‘The soapbox is just to the right, John. Look towards the balcony now, see the camera, now wave. And now to the left, there’s some girls at the window, another wave. That’s it, good, good. It’s going well. Nearly there.’ Major then clambered on to the soapbox and made a proper speech – ten minutes and more – all straightforward stuff, no great rhetoric, but somehow phenomenal. Here was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on a soapbox in
the rain telling 2,000 of the people of Chester what he wanted to do for his country. It worked a treat. There was some jokey heckling which he handled nicely. We could have done with more.

Stump speech over, he climbed off the box and struggled back through the crush to the bus. We climbed aboard and off we went, round the bend and down to Nicholas Street where our admirable ladies had prepared a sandwich lunch for the prime ministerial party. Making small talk with him wasn’t easy. Once we were inside the Association Hall his jauntiness dissipated. He seemed preoccupied – which is hardly surprising.

‘How do you think it’s going?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘It’s difficult to tell.’

‘The soapbox is working,’ said Norman Fowler, still bouncy. ‘We’ve spent a fortune – a fortune – on the set for the talking-to-John-Major rallies, but it’s the soapbox that’s stealing the show.’

‘It’s a game,’ said Mr Major. ‘I did a press briefing last week under a banner that said “The best team in a troubled world” and the photographers managed to catch a picture of me during the one moment when I wasn’t smiling under the one word “troubled”. You can’t win.’

Norma was lovely: normal, friendly, chatty with the troops. She thrilled me: ‘I first met you, Gyles,’ she said, ‘at Heffer’s in Cambridge. You were doing a signing session and I queued up to buy one of your books for the children.’ I kissed her, which I fear some of the activists thought rather forward. I’m afraid she might have thought so too.

Fuck. I cannot believe what has happened. This morning when I was having a high old time in the city centre with the John and Norma cavalcade I should have been at Queen’s Park High School addressing the sixth form. I don’t know how the cock-up happened. The school had booked me weeks ago, before the election was called, and somehow we didn’t transfer the engagement from my regular diary to the election schedule. I cannot believe it. I was due at the school at 10.30 a.m. I was to talk and take questions till 12 and then stay for lunch. Apparently the entire sixth form was sitting in the school hall waiting, waiting, waiting – and now the fact that I failed to show and didn’t even let them know I wasn’t coming will have gone round the entire school and back to every one of something like a thousand plus families. It is so bloody annoying. I went round to the school in the afternoon and I’ve got a list of all the sixth-formers and I am writing to each of them personally – but the damage is done. And if it gets to the local press, they will have such fun with it, the bastards.

Today’s poll gives Labour a seven point lead. They’re on 42, we’re on 35, the Lib Dems 19. I’m scuppered. I have just been watching Mr Kinnock amid flashing lights and fireworks giving a triumphalist oration at a rally in Sheffield. He is so awful, and in ten days he’ll be Prime Minister.

The front page of the
Chester Standard
is given over to just the right kind of coverage of the Major visit. Couldn’t be better. Inside, however, there’s a letter that could hardly be worse. It’s from ‘the committee’ of Radio Lion, the in-house radio at the Countess of Chester Hospital, and accuses me of exploiting the hospital and the radio station for political ends. I was invited to be interviewed by them (true), and without forewarning them turned up for the interview with a photographer in tow (also true). I’ve since used the photo in both the local papers and in my election literature – and they want ‘a public apology’ from me for having exploited this non-political voluntary organisation in this way! I hate the letter, because it’s so prominent, because the tone of it is so nasty, but, mostly, of course, because it contains more than a grain of truth. I did exploit them. To get these wretched pictures into the papers I’m exploiting people all the time. It’s inevitable – and I suppose it’s inevitable too that sometimes it backfires. (I’m a bit more cautious about taking advantage of the elderly since I was pictured presenting a birthday cake to a virtually gaga centenarian on what turned out to be the morning of the day she died!) There is a decent letter as well. It is from Terry Bennett. ‘Full marks to Gyles Brandreth. He talks a lot of sense.’ It’s a good letter. I know because I wrote it! Our opponents fill the correspondence columns of the local rags with their tiresome tirades and we need to answer back. Our troops aren’t good at getting round to letter-writing (‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity’) so I have taken to drafting one or two letters a week for them to copy, sign and send.