PETER HITCHENS: How I long for the rowdy mobs, lobbed tomatoes and crackling loud speaker vans from election campaigns of yesteryear
Oh, how I long for some decent heckling and for huge public meetings that go a bit wrong, perhaps even for the occasional well-aimed ripe tomato – though these days the law frowns severely on the throwing even of soft things, so I had better be careful what I say, in case I am arrested for incitement by the Milkshake Squad or the Sense of Humour Squad.
I have never yet seen an election so drained of true excitement, so lifeless, colourless, sapless and noiseless. There are hardly any posters. I have yet to hear the crackling, braying sound of a loud-speaker van.
It was not always so. Back in 1964, would-be prime ministers had to endure the ritual ordeal of the Birmingham Rag Market a few days before the poll.
On Tuesday, October 6, that year it was the turn of the aristocratic, cadaverous Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Tougher than he looked, he had sworn he would not be drowned out by the market’s nationally notorious hecklers. ‘Don’t try and shout me down,’ he warned the 6,000-strong crowd. ‘It won’t work.’
Harold Wilson, the former Oxford academic posing 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 hecklers drowned out his supporters. Though he stuck at it doggedly, he was quite inaudible.’
The reserved nobleman finally lost his own rag and, his skull-like face flushed with anger, he bawled, ‘Hooligans!’ at his tormentors before being escorted through the mob to his car. In a sweet paradox, most of those trying to shout him down seem to have been peace-loving supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Two days later, Labour’s Harold Wilson presented himself for sacrifice at the same place. The former Oxford academic, posing as a man of the people, spoke from a trailer, and by shouting himself hoarse he eventually managed to overwhelm the racket from a crowd of 10,000.
And 60 years ago, you might like to know, much of the heckling was about immigration.
These events may seem as if they took place in another country, but it really is not very long since elections in Britain were real, emotional, fervent contests between two evenly matched parties.
Few people were hurt by this, and if elections were ruder and rougher and angrier than they are now, I’d say that was a risk worth taking. People in those days felt their leaders were more in touch with them, more like them, and that they listened to them more.
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When did this die? I suspect TV, which keeps people at home and away from places such as the Rag Market, and was already draining passion from the streets in 1964.
Still, I remember the indefinable thrill, either of anticipation or apprehension, which was in the air on the windy night of March 31, 1966, when Wilson (who got in with a majority of four in 1964) finally won with a landslide. And I recall the shocked scenes outside Oxford Town Hall on the warm June night in 1970 when, to everyone’s astonishment, the Tory candidate won, so heralding Wilson’s fall.
And there was still some fun to be had in general elections when I began reporting on them in 1983.
I was assigned to follow the brilliant, erratic and rather loveable Labour leader Michael Foot, fated to lose but determined to fight to the end.
Due to injuries from a terrible car crash 20 years earlier, he looked impossibly doddery. To make things worse, he cultivated a hairstyle a bit like William Hartnell’s in the early Doctor Who episodes, and dressed like a street preacher.
He would not stick to a script or a timetable. There were no texts of his speeches for reporters to crib, and his orations were often wildly late, so keeping them off the TV. His entire programme seemed to have been designed by Trotskyist infiltrators, directing him to places where they were at their strongest.
Kenneth Baker, then a Tory 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 great hall full of people.
One evening he appeared to have libelled his old foe, Lord Hailsham, over his role in the Second World War by suggesting he was an appeaser. We rang Hailsham up in the middle of the night in the hope of a front-page story, and he just laughed: ‘Oh, Michael can never get over Neville Chamberlain.’
Foot would set off each morning, merrily calling out, ‘Come on, my beauty!’ to his wife Jill. At one point his car crashed into something, but when I teasingly asked him if he would take a back seat in future, he instantly flashed back, ‘No! Front seat, always!’, even if it was the front seat in a cortege of doom.
Perhaps the best moment was when Foot went to Plymouth to speak in a ridiculous inflatable structure on the storm-lashed Hoe. Just as he was about to begin, the chairwoman rose from her seat and pointed at a figure in the front row. It was Alan Clark, the ultra-Tory rake and diarist, and at that time a Plymouth MP, who Foot was (in theory at least) trying to unseat.
‘Mister Clark!’ she cried in broad West Country, ‘Whatever are you doing here?!’ Clark stood up and explained that he could not possibly miss this appearance by one of the country’s greatest orators. Then he sat back down and listened. It was a genuine privilege to have been there.
Sir Keir Starmer during a visit to a Hindu temple in London, while on the General Election campaign trail
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 annoy the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who seemed to be cruising to victory over John Major.
I have sometimes been blamed for his defeat, thanks to a mad row over a Labour TV broadcast which I had reason to think was dishonest. Kinnock would not take my question at his daily press conference, and when I tried to repeat the query outside the hall, his entourage fell on me so vigorously that Kinnock (a very decent man) actually rescued me from them.
The scene of the encounter, in which my coat, scarf, notebooks and stack of newspapers were scattered across several feet of floor, looked like an assassination attempt. And as until then the election had been so dull, the tiny event grew into a great typhoon of controversy.
I doubt if it altered the outcome, but I was on Kinnock’s plane when it became obvious from his face, the day before polling day, that he no longer thought he could win. And he didn’t.
These events had been coldly watched by a new generation of people who were not yet called spin doctors. By 1997, they had begun to design a new style of election. They wanted to stop any news taking place.
No audience would be unvetted. Contact with the real public would be tightly limited if not prevented. The daily press conferences would be stopped. Reporters were confined to buses where they seldom saw the leaders they were supposed to be following, and were whisked away before they could question them.
And the Rag Market? Well, it seems to have forgotten its days as the rowdy cockpit of British politics. A Birmingham Council website promises that it now ‘offers a mix of the latest fashions, fabrics, haberdashery, gifts, household goods and more’.
Well, I for one still yearn for the shouting and the tumult of a real election.