General Election memories 7: 2005

Portsmouth, Hampshire, May 2005

“Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”

This was the Tories’ brilliant slogan for the 2005 election. As it turned out, we weren’t thinking what they were thinking, unless they too were thinking, why have we picked Michael Howard as our leader?

Indeed, half the time we didn’t know what the Tories were thinking. Why had they replaced the unelectable William Hague with the even more unelectable Iain Duncan Smith in 2001? Surely the worst opposition leader of all time, they chose him over the comparatively brilliant Ken Clarke and Michael Portillo. In another eccentric decision, Michael Howard was chosen – unopposed – as Tory leader in 2003. Howard had been an unmitigated disaster as Home Secretary under Major and had actually come last in the Tory leadership contest in 1997 even behind the likes of Peter Lilley and John Redwood.

The Tories managed to be wrong on the key issue of the day too: the Iraq War. They were even keener to go in than Blair was. Like many people I was opposed because a) Iraq had nothing to do with September 11^th b) the Bush administration seemed to have sinister reasons of their own for going in and c) they seemed to have little plan for what to do afterwards.

I even took part in the London February 15^th 2003 anti-war march or at least the first half of it, abandoning it along with one of my friends to go to Pizza Hut (this isn’t mentioned in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday). I felt guilty over this at the time but I’m reasonably now satisfied now that the war would still have gone ahead had we completed the march.

I did a few Labour-y things during my 2001-04 stint in Peterborough. I met the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, went to see Tony Benn doing a talk (then just retired as an MP) and was interviewed for a position to run the campaign of Peterborough MP Helen Clark (she would lose to Tory Stewart Jackson in 2005, the exact opposite of the 2001 result).

Despite all this, I seriously considered voting Liberal Democrat. Only the facts that Helen Clark had voted against the war and the fact that my voting Lib Dem could help the pro-war Jackson win swayed me.

At any rate, I was not in Peterborough but in Portsmouth in 2005, at the very end of a six month Magazine Journalism course at Highbury College. I’d been reviewing films and DVDs for Peterborough-based free magazine ESP and had had more work since doing the course contributing to SFX magazine, the Charles and Camilla Royal Wedding edition of Radio Times, several local mags and (bizarrely for me) a sports journal. I was 28 years old and finally seemed to have worked out what I wanted to do.

The day after the election was actually the day of my Public Affairs exam on politics and government. It was a bizarre dilemma. Were my interests best served by more revision and an early night or by watching the election results? In the end, I did both. The only campaign activity I witnessed was a local debate between the local candidates. The UKIP man had been by far the most entertaining. Portsmouth’s outgoing Labour MP Syd Rapston was a slow-witted man best known for being duped by Chris Morris’s satire Brass Eye into publicly condemning the “made-up drug” Cake.

Some seemed surprised Labour’s national majority dropped by about 100, but, in truth, this was still a good result. I passed my course and returned briefly to Peterborough. I had interviews at Local Government and Inside Soap magazine and did some holiday cover at Radio Times. In June 2005, I was offered a job at DVD Monthly in Exeter, Devon. I had had girlfriends but was single then and thus unencumbered I went down south. I did not know for sure even where I was going to live on the day of my departure.

Ten years on, I have lived in Exeter ever since (2017 update: this is still true).

 

General Election memories 6: 2001

Peterborough, June 7th 2001

One of the big myths Tories that like to make up about the Blair-Brown years is that they were an unholy period of tyranny in which the nation was held to ransom by a debauched and malevolent cabal of godless devils and perverts.

Or at least this is what Michael Gove says.

There are a few problems with this theory, however. Namely:

1. Barely anybody seems to have felt this way at the time.
2. Secondly, if the government was so horrible, why on Earth did the people re-elect the government not once but twice by fairly hefty margins?

Take 2001, usually considered a fairly dull General Election. Labour were re-elected with a majority of 166! This is only slightly less than their famous victory in 1997 and still more than any other victory achieved since 1945, including those won by Thatcher, Attlee or anyone else.

This was partly the Tories’ own fault. No one had had time to forget the balls up they’d made of attempting to run the country under Major. They had also foolishly rejected the popular and experienced Ken Clarke as their leader, opting instead for the foolish and inexperienced young William Hague. These days, Mr Hague is held in high regard after his stint as Foreign Secretary. But he was viewed as geeky and weak when he was party leader. The best that can be said of his leadership is that he was slightly better than his successor Iain Duncan Smith. The main Tory complaint at this time was that Labour was crippling the stock markets with unnecessary restrictions. The Tories would give the markets all the power they wanted. What could go wrong?

But, it should be said, the first Blair Government was a big success too. If I was largely politically inactive for a Politics student at this time, perhaps it’s because I had little to complain about. The government achieved a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, introduced the minimum wage, reformed the Lords, introduced devolution, steered us away from the recession which engulfed most of the world at the start of the century and launched a well meant intervention in Kosovo. To quote the film, The Wild One if asked: “What are you rebelling against?” I too, would have replied: “what have you got?” as it turns out, not much. Labour were barely even behind in the polls for a whole decade.

Not everything was perfect, of course. I disliked the introduction of tuition fees even though they were nowhere near the obscene levels the Cameron-Clegg coalition hiked them up to. I was lucky to be unaffected by them (I started my degree at Aberystwyth in 1996). My four older nephews and nieces were all born while I was at university during this time. Thanks to Cameron AND Clegg, any of them who go to university will pay a far greater price than I or indeed Cameron and Clegg themselves would have done themselves.

I was nearing the end of my academic career in 2001 anyway. I was 24 and about to return to Aberystwyth for the summer to finish my final Masters dissertation on the historiography of the Cold War (zzzzz). In the meantime, I was working part-time at home in the privatised section of Peterborough Passport Office (woeful). I had enough free time to see William Hague entering the Bull Hotel on a campaign visit. His visit was ineffective. Helen Brinton (later Clark) beat the Tory candidate Stewart Jackson to win the seat for Labour for a second time. As the late  Simon Hoggart reporting on Hague’s Peterborough visit put it: “The local Labour MP is Helen Brinton, whom I like personally but whose wide mouth, always slathered with scarlet lipstick, makes me long to post a letter in it.”

2001 is the only election I stayed up all night to watch to date (2017 update: this is no longer true). My parents must have been on holiday as I camped out downstairs with a female friend (not in a rude way) in the living room and watched the whole thing why she mostly slept. I don’t entirely blame her. Compared to 1997, it was a fairly dull night even if the “Prescott punch” during the campaign is still one of the best things to happen in the world ever.

Boris Johnson, David Cameron and David Miliband all became MPs for the first time that year. My old Head Boy David Lammy was already an MP. September 11^th was just around the corner. The 2001 campaign already seems to belong to a more innocent bygone age.