Oh, how I long for some decent booing and big public gatherings gone a little awry, maybe even the odd well-directed ripe tomato, although nowadays the law severely frowns on the throwing of even soft stuff, so I’d better be careful what I say, in case the Milkshake Squad or the Sense of Humor Squad arrest me for incitement.
I have never seen an election so devoid of emotion, so lifeless, colourless, without energy and without noise. There are hardly any posters. I have not yet heard the creaking and braying of a van with loudspeakers.
It wasn’t always like this. In 1964, would-be prime ministers had to endure the ritual ordeal of the Birmingham Rag Market a few days before the election.
On Tuesday 6 October of that year it was the turn of the aristocratic and cadaverous Conservative leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Tougher than he seemed, he had sworn that he would not allow himself to be silenced by the nationally known market troublemakers. “Don’t try to shout me down,” he warned the crowd of 6,000. “It will not work”.
Harold Wilson, the former Oxford academic posing as a man of the people, addresses a crowd in Manchester in 1966.
But, as the Daily Mail’s Eric Sewell reported: “For the first time on his election tour, his supporters were drowned out by his rioters. Although he stood his ground, he was completely inaudible.”
The reserved nobleman finally lost his patience and, with his skull face flushed with anger, shouted “Vandals!” to his tormentors before being escorted through the crowd to his car. In a sweet paradox, the majority of those who tried to shout him down appear to have been peaceful supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Two days later, Labor’s Harold Wilson turned up to be euthanized at the same location. The former Oxford academic, posing as a man of the people, spoke from a trailer and, shouting until he was hoarse, managed to drown out the noise of a crowd of 10,000 people.
And 60 years ago, you might be interested to know, much of the booing was about immigration.
These events may seem to have taken place in another country, but in reality it was not long ago that elections in Britain were real, emotional and fervent contests between two evenly matched parties.
Few people were affected by this, and if the election had been tougher, harsher, and angrier than it is now, I’d say it was a risk worth taking. In those times, people felt that their leaders were more in touch with them, were more like them, and that they listened to them more.
When did this die? I suspect that television, which keeps people home and away from places like the Rag Market, was already draining the passion from the streets in 1964.
I still remember the indefinable emotion, whether of anticipation or apprehension, that was in the air on the windy night of March 31, 1966, when Wilson (who had won with a majority of four in 1964) finally won in a landslide. . And I remember the scenes of shock outside Oxford Town Hall on the warm June night of 1970 when, to everyone’s astonishment, the Conservative candidate won, heralding Wilson’s downfall.
And there was still some fun to be had in general elections when I started reporting on them in 1983.
I was assigned to shadow the brilliant, erratic and rather lovable Labor leader Michael Foot, destined to lose but determined to fight to the end.
Due to injuries he had suffered in a terrible car accident twenty years earlier, he looked incredibly lanky. To make matters worse, he wore a hairstyle similar to William Hartnell’s in the early episodes of Doctor Who and dressed like a street preacher.
He would not stick to a script or a timetable. There were no texts of his speeches for journalists to fall back on, and his speeches often arrived painfully late, so they were kept off television. His entire programme seemed to have been designed by Trotskyist infiltrators, directing him to places where they were strongest.
Kenneth Baker, then Conservative candidate, with his family and a loudspeaker in 1970
Yet he remembered every detail of British politics since the Great Depression, and could still thrill a large room full of people.
One night, he had apparently slandered his old enemy, Lord Hailsham, over his role in the Second World War, suggesting he was an appeaser. We rang Hailsham in the middle of the night in the hope of making the front page, and he laughed: “Oh, Michael can never forget Neville Chamberlain.”
Foot would set out every morning, shouting gleefully, ‘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 ever take a back seat, he instantly replied, ‘No! Front seat, always!’, even if it was the front seat in a cortege of fatalities.
Perhaps the finest moment was when Foot went to Plymouth to speak in a ridiculous inflatable structure on the storm-swept River Hoe. Just as he was about to begin, the chairwoman rose from her seat and pointed to a figure in the front row. It was Alan Clark, the ultra-conservative libertine and diarist, and at the time MP for Plymouth, whom Foot was (at least in theory) trying to unseat.
“Mr. Clark!” he shouted across the wide West Country. What is he doing here? Clark stood up and explained that he couldn’t miss the appearance of one of the country’s greatest speakers. Then he sat down again and listened. It was a real privilege to have been there.
Sir Keir Starmer during a visit to a Hindu temple in London, during the election campaign for the general election
There was still real trouble abroad in the 1992 contest, when my then editor summoned me back from my post in Moscow to try to upset Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who seemed heading for victory over John Major.
I have been blamed on occasion for his defeat, thanks to a mad row over a Labour Party television broadcast which I thought I had reason to believe was dishonest. Kinnock refused to answer my question at his daily press conference, and when I tried to repeat it outside the room, his entourage set upon me so vehemently that Kinnock (a very decent man) even rescued me from them.
The scene of the encounter, where my coat, my scarf, my notebooks and a pile of newspapers were scattered several metres on the ground, looked like an assassination attempt. And because elections had been so boring until then, the small event turned into a great typhoon of controversy.
I doubt that altered the result, but I was on Kinnock’s plane when, the day before the election, it became clear from his face that he no longer believed he could win. And he didn’t do it.
These events had been observed coldly by a new generation of people who were not yet called image consultants. In 1997, they had begun to design a new style of elections. They wanted to prevent news from being published.
No audience would be left unscrutinized. Contact with the real public would be strictly limited, if not prevented. Daily press conferences would be suspended. Journalists would be confined to buses where they rarely saw the leaders they were supposed to follow, and would be taken away before they could be questioned.
And the rag market? Well, it seems to have forgotten its days as a noisy booth of British politics. A Birmingham City Council website promises that it now “offers a mix of the latest in fashion, fabrics, haberdashery, gifts, homewares and more.”
Well, I personally still long for the shouting and tumult of a real election.
