And Gentlemen in England Now Abed

In honour of the local elections, this week’s blog is a recycling of a piece I wrote about fifteen years ago, itself reminiscing on the 1992 general election. Although it deals with experiences as a Labour Party election organiser, I hope you don’t have to be a Labour Party supporter to relate to it.

Linda and I were joint election organisers for Kings Hedges Ward Labour Party in the 1992 general election. Anne Campbell was standing for the Labour Party in Cambridge and it looked like she had a good chance. Up to the day before the election, Labour appeared to have a decent chance of a majority in Parliament. Somehow, the national majority did not materialise until five years later, but Anne scraped home for Labour in Cambridge.

Kings Hedges ward is a nineteen-fifties and sixties council housing estate on the north side of Cambridge. Tony Crosland, the Foreign Secretary in the Callaghan government, once described it as a concrete jungle. We lived there from 1987 to 1992. It looks a little soulless but those who live there know it has impressive community spirit. The constituency organiser, Mark Hope, did a great job of making sure we were geared up for the general election. The day the election was declared I was cycling round the estate dropping off bundles of leaflets to our door-to-door delivery volunteers.

For a month or so, our dining table had a big map of the ward on it, with streets colour coded as to how thoroughly they had been canvassed. As a big council (or ex-council) estate, we had a large potential labour vote and as a result a generous coterie of volunteers. Every evening, I would allocate streets to the volunteers, and once they were all out, choose a street to canvass myself.

Canvassing is not as interesting as it sounds. You are given a card for a street with the names and addresses of the residents from the electoral register pasted onto the card. To the right of the names and addresses are columns in which the canvasser marks the voting intentions of the residents. It is not your job to persuade people to vote for your party. All you have to do is ascertain who is going to vote for your party, then on the day of the election badger those people mercilessly until they go out and vote. In the Labour Party, the cards are referred to as Mikardo cards after the colourful Labour MP of the 60’s and 70’s who according to Party legend came up with the idea that in campaigning for an election, the important thing is to identify your supporters then make sure they vote. Riding round the town in an ice cream van singing ‘Vote  vote vote for Nigel Barton,’ is pointless, as is trying to persuade people to change their minds on the doorstep. Find out who is going  to vote for you, and then make sure they get to the polling station on the day. On election day, you have your supporters outside the polling stations noting the numbers of those who have voted, in order to pinpoint and call on those ‘promises’ who have NOT yet voted.

Some of our most enthusiastic volunteers, including experienced campaigners, local councillors and so on, did not fully appreciate this principle. One of our smartest local councillors was always getting into arguments on the doorstep. I recall one occasion when I took the odd numbers in a particular street, and Kevin took the evens.   Kevin was on his second house at the time I finished my side of the street.

Mind you , I had a distinctive style of canvassing which consisted of taking a deep breath as the door was opened, then reciting: ‘HellosorrytobotheryouIamcanvassingfortheLabourcandidateinthecomingelectionwonderifyouhave consideredvotinglabouronthedaythankyouverymuchgoodbye.’ And then I would move on to the next house.

One volunteer, a truculent young student had got into a long and futile argument with an equally truculent voter, and had written ‘BASTARD’ in large, friendly letters on the canvass card. I remonstrated, reminding him that the next resident he canvassed might notice this written on the card. He was reluctant to be persuaded, but eventually I induced him to replace ‘BASTARD’ with ‘do not call’ in future.

I had my own peculiar experiences while canvassing. A man in his seventies opened the door to me one evening, and I had only got as far as ‘IamcanvassingfortheLabourcandidate-‘ when he interrupted with, ‘Are you really? Well, up your bleedin’ pipe!’

We had some famous volunteers assisting with the campaign. Leonard Fenton who played the doctor in Eastenders came down one Saturday morning and did sterling work at the local shopping court. Robert Edwards, the famous IVF doctor, came along in his big black Mercedes and crashed into someone’s fence. His generosity of spirit and his larger-than-life persona won us more votes than his poor driving could ever lose us.

At that time the estate was a safe Labour ward and on the doorstep, it was either Labour or Bugger off. After the Iraq war, it became a Liberal marginal, but has since drifted back to Labour. Interestingly, there was a young Tory activist in the ward at the time who was later selected for a safe conservative parliamentary seat in Surrey but at the last minute met and fell in love with a young woman from a family with strong labour traditions. As a result he changed sides, renouncing his conservative selection and became a local labour councillor, foregoing the high office he might one day have held.

Most canvassing takes place between the hours of 6 and 7.30 in the evening. I recall taking some time off work to do some working hours canvassing. It was not a great success. The idea is that it gives you the opportunity to canvass housewives, mothers with small children, and so on. In fact, they always seem to be out at the shops or the nursery, and instead you canvass the strange men who never leave their homes and wear tall woollen hats indoors and out and at all hours of the day and night. Do you remember when you were a child and were off school with measles or a similar infection? Towards the end of the pathogen’s cycle, you were healthy but still not allowed to return to school. The town seemed strangely quiet. Well, imagine canvassing it.

On another occasion, I was doing my usual doorstep speech at my customary machine-gun pace, when the resident invited me in. She led me into the kitchen in which I counted twenty-seven animals before I started sneezing. There were several cats and dogs milling around my feet, and a row of cages on the work-surface containing hamsters, mice, rats and gerbils. I was fairly certain that she was violating some bye-law or other by keeping this menagerie in her house, but she was intending to vote for us, so I complimented her on her collection of chums from the animal kingdom. I drove her to the polling station at around seven in the evening on election day.

We were so grateful for the volunteers from outside the ward, several of whom had brilliant interpersonal skills and made some of our most troublesome customers say uncle. Many of them also had a great work ethic, and would go out and ask for more shortly after having to put up with nasty verbal abuse on the doorstep.

The night of the election was very busy for me, buzzing about in our old VW Polo ferrying our promises to the polling station. I remember feeling slightly guilty about the south Asian people who felt duty bound to vote for us, and expressed their support in very emotional terms,  as it seemed like we took them somewhat for granted. But by and large, election night was a positive experience up to around an hour after the polls closed and we realised that the country had voted Tory again. At a few minutes to ten, I was still driving round the estate picking up supporters who hadn’t voted yet.

Around 9.45 I called on a woman who had declared her intention to vote for us, but she protested that she was a single parent and her two children were already in pyjamas and ready for bed. I drove the three of them at some speed to the polling station, the two-year-old in her arms and the six-year old sitting in silent dignity in his dressing gown in the back of the Polo.

Once the polls had closed, Linda and I went down to the Alex Wood Hall, Cambridge Labour Party’s headquarters, to get plastered as the results came in. And what dispiriting results they were. Another conservative win. Most of us were in tears. I recall one chap asking me: ‘Never mind what do we have to do- what do the Tories have to do to stop people voting for them?’ My desolation the following morning was profound and painful. It was tempered slightly by the fact that after a recount, Anne Campbell had been returned for Cambridge.

And now we come to the title, the quote from Shakespeare. In fact, it’s nonsense. No-one gives  a monkey’s that they weren’t out canvassing in the 1992 election. As in the Agincourt example, the speech is not relevant to those who are not present, it is aimed at those who are. But when I think of speeding up Campkin Road at a quarter to ten with that little family in the car with me, I can’t help swelling with emotion.