Oh, how I long for some decent cheering and large public gatherings that go a bit awry, maybe even a well-aimed ripe tomato every now and then – although the law these days strongly frowns on throwing soft things, so I have to be careful what I say, lest I get arrested for sedition by the Milkshake Squad or the Sense of Humour Squad.
I have never seen an election so devoid of real excitement, so lifeless, colorless, juiceless and noiseless. There are hardly any posters. I have yet to hear the crackling, braying sound of a van with a loudspeaker.
It wasn’t always like this. In 1964, prospective prime ministers had to endure the ritual ordeal of the Birmingham Rag Market a few days before an election.
On Tuesday, October 6 of that year, it was the turn of the aristocratic, deathly pale Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He was tougher than he looked and vowed he wouldn’t be drowned out by the market’s nationally infamous loudmouths. “Don’t try to drown me out,” he warned the 6,000-strong crowd. “That won’t work.”
Harold Wilson, the former Oxford academic who poses as a man of the people, faces a crowd in Manchester in 1966
But as the Daily Mail’s Eric Sewell reported: ‘For the first time in his election tour, his troublesome supporters drowned out his supporters. Although he stubbornly persisted, he could hardly be heard.’
The reserved nobleman finally lost his own rag and, his skull-like face red with rage, shouted “Hooligans!” to his tormentors before being escorted through the crowd to his car. In a sweet paradox, most of those trying to drown him out seemed to be peaceful supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Two days later, Labour’s Harold Wilson offered himself for sacrifice in the same place. Posing as a man of the people, the former Oxford academic spoke from a trailer and, by shouting himself hoarse, eventually drowned out the noise of a crowd of 10,000.
And sixty years ago, you might wonder, much of the fuss was about immigration.
These events may seem like they are happening in another country, but in reality it was not so long ago that elections in Britain were real, emotional and fierce battles between two equal parties.
Few people have been hurt by this, and if the election were rougher, rougher, and angrier than it is now, I’d say it was a risk worth taking. People at that time felt that their leaders were more in touch with them, more like them, and that they listened to them more.
When did this die? I suspect that television, which keeps people at home and away from places like Rag Market, sucked the passion out of the streets by 1964.
Yet I remember the indefinable tension, whether of anticipation or apprehension, in the air on the windy night of 31 March 1966, when Wilson (who had won with a four-vote majority in 1964) finally won by a landslide. And I remember the shocked scenes outside Oxford Town Hall on the warm June night in 1970 when, to everyone’s surprise, the Tory candidate won, signalling Wilson’s downfall.
And there was still some fun to be had in the general election when I started reporting on it in 1983.
I was assigned to follow the brilliant, erratic and rather endearing Labor leader Michael Foot. He was doomed to lose, but determined to fight to the end.
Injuries from a terrible car accident twenty years earlier left him looking impossibly clumsy. To make matters worse, he cultivated a hairstyle that looked a bit like William Hartnell’s in the early Doctor Who episodes, and dressed like a street preacher.
He didn’t stick to a script or a timetable. There were no texts of his speeches for reporters to digest, and his speeches often arrived extremely late, meaning they were not shown on television. His entire program seemed to have been designed by Trotskyist infiltrators, who sent him to places where they were strongest.
Kenneth Baker, then a Tory candidate, with his family and a speaker in 1970
Yet he could still remember every detail of British politics since the Great Depression and could still move a room full of people.
One evening he appeared to have slandered his old enemy, Lord Hailsham, over his role in the Second World War by suggesting he was a pleaser. We called Hailsham in the middle of the night hoping for a front-page story, and he just laughed: ‘Oh, Michael can never get over Neville Chamberlain.’
Foot set off each morning, cheerfully calling out, “Come on, my beauty!” to his wife, Jill. At one point, his car crashed into something, but when I jokingly asked him if he would be sitting in the backseat in the future, he immediately flashed back, “No! Front seat, always!”, even though it was the front seat in a cavalcade of disaster.
Perhaps the best moment was when Foot went to Plymouth to speak in a ridiculous inflatable structure on the storm-battered Hoe. Just as he was about to begin, the Speaker rose from her chair and pointed to a figure in the front row. It was Alan Clark, the ultra-Tory rake and diarist, then a Plymouth MP, who was (at least in theory) trying to dethrone Foot.
‘Mr Clark!’ she shouted across the wide West Country, ‘What are you doing here?’ Clark stood up and explained that he could not possibly miss this performance by one of the country’s greatest orators. Then he sat down again and listened. It had been a real privilege to have been there.
Sir Keir Starmer visiting a Hindu temple in London during his general election campaign
There were still real problems abroad during the 1992 election, when my then editor recalled me from my post in Moscow to try to irritate Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who seemed on the way to victory over John Major.
I have sometimes been blamed for his defeat, thanks to a silly row over a Labour TV broadcast that I had reason to believe was unfair. Kinnock would not answer my question at his daily press conference, and when I tried to repeat the question outside the room, his entourage attacked me so vigorously that Kinnock (a very decent man) actually saved me from them.
The scene of the meeting, with my coat, scarf, notebooks and pile of newspapers strewn across a few feet of floor, resembled an assassination attempt. And because the election had been so dull up to that point, the small event grew into a major typhoon of controversy.
I doubt this changed the outcome, but I was on Kinnock’s plane when it became clear on his face, the day before election day, that he no longer thought he could win. And he didn’t.
These events were watched coldly by a new generation of people who were not yet called spin doctors. In 1997 they had started designing a new pageant style. They wanted to prevent news from happening.
No audience would be left unchecked. Contact with the real audience would be strictly limited, if not eliminated. Daily press conferences would be stopped. Reporters would be locked in buses where they rarely saw the leaders they were supposed to be following, and would be taken away before they could question them.
And the Ragmarkt? Well, it seems to have forgotten its days as the noisy cockpit of British politics. A Birmingham Council website promises that it now offers ‘a mix of the latest fashion, fabrics, haberdashery, gifts, homewares and more’.
Well, I still long for the shouting and tumult of a real election.