GOODNESS knows, the election campaign so far has been dismally short of jokes. But Eddie Mayer on the
PM progamme does his best with the unpromising material available to him, and it was there I caught the nearest thing so far to a flash of comedy, when the sitting candidate in the Devon seat which Boris Johnson’s father is contesting for the Tories, said loftily that “he [Bozza’s dad, that is] doesn’t resonate on the doorstep” .
Leaving aside for a moment the thought that if there was resonating to be done, the Johnsons, père et fils, would surely be the first people you’d think of to do it, I confess to feeling a bit miffed that there hasn’t been more electoral resonance on my own front doorstep. I am, after all, a member of a group, the “school gate mums”, that has been identified by election strategists as a key target when it comes to winning votes.
So far, I have received leaflets from the following: Gary Bushell (formerly of The Sun, now of English Democrats — electoral slogan, Not Right, Not Left, Just English). Thanks, Gary. I’ll bear you in mind.
Then there was the one from UKIP, to which my first reaction as it fluttered through the letterbox in all its magenta and cadmium yellow glory was that the entire party is badly in need of a trip to Colour Me Beautiful.
Rather late — as though they’d got more important things to do than canvass my vote — there came the leaflets of the Conservative and Labour parties. The Conservative is a fresh-faced youth with a neat blond fringe and a cheery smile. He looks about 13. My first reaction, were I to find him on my doorstep, would be to ask if his mummy knew he was out.
At least the rubric on the Tory leaflet begins “I am asking for your vote. . .”— in contrast to that of the Labour candidate, who simply assumes that he’s going to get it, and tells me in a series of strangely verb-free bullet points what he plans to do with it. From the Lib Dems and the Greens, not a squeak. They must think Greenwich a lost cause.
What makes the lacklustre nature of the election campaign in my constituency seem particularly bizarre is the fact that every time I turn on the radio or open a newspaper, I find myself being bullied in the most emphatic terms about voter apathy. Every single election since I have been entitled to vote, I have thought hard about whether to do so. I think about the nature of democracy and, even more painfully, about the suffragettes of my great-grandmothers’ generation, who fought so hard to win me the right to vote. And then I think about the value of that hard-won vote, and the way in which, if I use it, it endorses the party for whom I cast it. And it seems to me that refusing to cast it for anyone is the most powerful statement I can possibly make. It isn’t voter apathy that prevents me from voting. it is voter rage.
The point about political change is that you can’t effect it by wishing or talking about it. You have to put in hours and hours of hard work. I, for example, have to put in many hours of hard work to earn enough money to send my son to a private school. I do this because, like the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition when it came to the schooling of their children, I am bitterly unhappy with the quality of the state education available to me. The fact that I spend so much of my taxed income on my son’s education means that I am unable to save and, since I am self-employed, in a couple of decades’ time I shall certainly be joining the “one in four” people reported to be heading for poverty in retirement.
Meanwhile, the demands on my time have just increased: one of my neighbours, an elderly Polish man who fought for the Allies in the Second World War, was run over two years ago. His knee was smashed and he needed an operation. Waiting list pledges notwithstanding, he still hadn’t has the operation, but his health declined so catastrophically that he had to go into hospital as an emergency. A couple of weeks ago, he was deposited back on his doorstop by a kindly ambulance crew. “Ta, ta, Wladislaw, look after yourself,” they said. And drove off, leaving him, confused and unwell, to do exactly that.
My street, as it happens, is full of tough old ladies who keep their front doors open during the day and look out for one another. So they are cooking and cleaning for Wladislaw — going in to chat and make sure he’s taken his pills — and so am I. Between us I suppose we may keep him going until he’s well enough to have his knee done — though it seems perfectly clear that the NHS is, in effect, waiting for him to do the decent thing and die.
Meanwhile the burden of his care is falling on us, not the politicians with their grandiose claims. “They don’t know nothing about real life, none of them,” said my neighbour, Katherine, as we made up Wladislaw’s bed on the day he came home. “God forgive me but I’d like to see them in his position.”
Which is what I think too. I see the effectiveness of direct action, when a celebrity such as Jamie Oliver or Bob Geldof embraces a cause with passion.
And when it comes to politics, that’s what I, and the ladies in my street, are doing in our own small way. We haven’t got time for grand visions and Westminster politics, because we are too busy mopping up the messes the politicians have made on our own doorsteps, and because we feel completely alienated from them in any case.
Come to think of it, it’s probably just as well that none of the candidates has been round to resonate on my doorstep. By God, he’d go away with a flea in his ear if he did.
Voice recognition
AT LEAST, when the sound of politicians’ voices makes one grind one’s teeth to stumps, there are the strangely emollient tones of the political reporters to soothe the savage breast. Andrew Marr can bang on for as long as he likes about how politicians are fine chaps, really they are, but I remain firmly in the Jeremy Paxman, why is this lying bastard lying to me?, camp.
On the other hand — the peculiar aberration of his faith in politicians excepted — I find I trust every word Andrew Marr says. And Paxo, and Ed Stourton, Eddie Mayer, Nick Clarke, Robin Lustig, old Uncle John Humphrys and all . . .
There is, in short, as Sandra Howard observed this week, something about the voices of news journalists — radio journalists, in particular — that inspires not merely confidence but (goodness, how sad) erotic reverie. In my case, it’s the way Robin Lustig says “goodnight” at the end of The World Tonight that sends me trotting off to bed with a song in my heart.
Unlike Sandra Howard, however, who said that her first meeting with The World at One’s Nick Clarke was “quite a thrill”, I have no ambition to encounter any of these voices in corporeal form. A decade or so ago I was part of a newspaper team working on a feature that involved our shadowing Radio 4 for 24 hours. While fascinating in many ways, the experience was also a terrible let-down.
All those entrancingly resonant voices, matched up with their ignoble fleshy habitations. . . Deary me, who’d have thought it? I know it’s too late now, Sandra, but believe me, you’re better off not knowing. . .
Bloomin’ age
While I’m on the subject of fleshy habitations: goodness how I felt for Marianne Faithfull and her gloom about her fading looks. One doesn't have to have been a great beauty to mind tremendously about the fading of one’s bloom. I remember a tremendously beautiful fellow writer ringing me up when we were both 30, before we’d started on the long slog of child-rearing, to announce drearily that her bloom had gone. “Don't be ridiculous!” said I. “We don ’t have to worry about bloom. We are intellectuals!” Hey ho.
These days I find one can be an intellectual and still mind about one’s bloom. The only remedy, though (as I’m sure Marianne knows if she’s observed the antics of Mick Jagger) is to embrace one’s age, not fight it. She’s not an ingenue any more, for sure. But she’s a remarkably handsome and interesting woman, which is, after all, something to be proud of.
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