True Blue: Strange Tales from a Tory Nation

Chris dedicates his work on this book to Clare, Lotte and Tom.

David dedicates his work on this book to his mother.

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

Preface: ‘No, Janet, It’s One of My Writing Thingies’

One: The Sound of the Suburbs – Richmond, Surrey

Two: Village Cricket People – Rodmell, Sussex

Three: Dam Busters and Morris Dancers – Woodbridge, Suffolk

Four: Get Me the Ugandans! – Wandsworth, London

Five: Houses of the Holy – Henley, Oxfordshire

Six: Floral Jam – Basingstoke, Hampshire

Seven: Cecil Rides Again – Belgravia, London

Eight: Glastonbury for Squares – Stoneleigh, Warwickshire

Nine: The Heart of Clarkness – Kensington, London

Ten: This Land Is My Land – Blenheim, Oxfordshire

Eleven: The Grouchy Club – Mayfair, London

Twelve: Polo Minted – Chester, Cheshire

Thirteen: Rubber Chickens – Watford, Hertfordshire

Fourteen: A Right Boules Up – Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Fifteen: The Charlatans – Hammersmith, London

Sixteen: Majorettes and Export Strength – Dagenham, Essex

Seventeen: Inside the Magic Kingdom – Chartwell, Kent, and Westminster, London

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing!!’ hissed Janet, her eyes flaming with anger and her voice almost incoherent with rage. Voting was drawing to a close in the 2005 general election and Janet, a family friend and longtime Labour voter, had spotted me outside the polling station in East Sheen, in the wealthy borough of Richmond in south-west London. I was wearing a bright blue Conservative Party rosette with the words ‘Vote Conservative’ emblazoned on it. I was also acting as a teller for the Tories, gently hassling voters for their polling card numbers as they went into the polling station, set up for the occasion in a local primary school.

At many a left-wing dinner party poor Janet had listened to me jawing on into the night about some socialist theme or other; I had even droned on to her about left-wing politics during chance encounters on the local streets. To Janet, I was a fellow member of the red team. ‘How can you be wearing that … that … thing?’ she gasped in horror, jabbing at the blue rosette, ‘and after that revolting election campaign!’ Physically cowed by Janet’s onslaught, I tried simultaneously to hide the blue rosette under my anorak – I thought she was going to rip it off – and hunched up in anticipation of a blow.

‘This is not what you think it is, Janet. I can’t really talk about it now,’ I gabbled. To my horror I saw another official Tory teller – an elderly woman with Margaret Thatcher hair and a piercing gaze – was bustling towards us with her blue ribbons waving in the breeze. Again I pleaded with Janet – through clenched teeth and a fixed smile – and gave what I hoped was a begging, puppy dog-like look. ‘Pleeeeze Janet … it’s one of my writing thingies! … we can talk about this later …’

Janet shot back: ‘Oh no we can’t! In fact, make bloody sure you never talk to me again! Have you got that?’ I acknowledged her with a sad and shame-filled nod and must have looked, I realized, like a naughty schoolboy. And with that Janet harrumphed off into the polling booth to cast her vote.

On Monday 11 April 2005 my friend the writer David Matthews officially took up residence at my house in Richmond in what the local tourist board still liked to call Surrey but which was, in reality, part of the sprawling but very prosperous southwestern suburbs of London. And with that one of the most extraordinary episodes in my life began. The two of us had decided to join the already faltering Conservative general election campaign taking place that year and write about it from the inside. It was to be a literary and investigative project, and we would be working largely undercover.

David and I were interested in finding out what sort of person might, these days, become a Conservative activist and what made them tick. That was the official Mission Statement. But we had another, even more powerful, motive. We just thought that ‘joining’ the Conservative Party would grant us access to all sorts of situations which would ordinarily pass us by, and we would get to meet people we would never ordinarily meet. The project, as things turned out, was to last well beyond that election – on and off, in fact, for the next three years.

Supposedly, we reasoned, ‘Conservatives’ should be very ordinary people. That was what the name almost literally meant – sort of ‘ultra-normal’. But just looking at the statistics for membership it became clear that this was no longer true – if it ever had been. Joining a political party of any sort was, by 2005, pretty deviant behaviour. (Admittedly, by the time our journey into Blue Britain was over, the image of the Conservative Party had improved considerably, and we were there to see, from the inside, how that transformation took place.)

But in 2005 the Tories were extraordinarily unpopular, especially with just about anyone under fifty. They struck David and me as more like a weird and unfathomable cult than a once unstoppable election-winning force. This was the Conservative leadership era, remember, of Michael Howard and a pre-makeover Ann Widdecombe, when the party’s claim to represent modern Britain seemed more than a little tenuous. So we saw voluntary activism in the Conservative cause as so unusual that it represented a sub-culture potentially more interesting than the groups and scenes we had reported on in the past – such as football hooligans, Muslim fundamentalists, professional boxers, tabloid journalists, gun-wielding inner-city criminals and the yacht-dwelling super-rich. All of those groups were, to a degree, tricky to understand, but their world-views were, we reckoned, a lot easier to figure out than the mentality of local Conservative activists in 2005.