The Meaning of Recognition (24 page)

On Tuesday the spectre the Tories are facing was in plain sight at Clapham Junction station, in the constituency of Battersea. Like Gaul in the time of Julius Caesar (Conservative), the borough
of Wandsworth is divided into three parts: Putney, Tooting and Battersea. Wandsworth is a Tory fiefdom, and if a fiefdom can have a flagship, Battersea is it. Unfortunately for the local Tory
stalwarts, in 1997 it was lost to Labour by 5,300 votes. Not a hell of a lot, but except in the conditions of the then-prevailing apocalypse it would never have happened. On the questionable
assumption that an apocalypse can’t happen twice, a plumply pretty and terribly nice woman called Lucy Shersby has been deputed to get the votes back. If a Nigella-sweet voice and a cuddly
deportment could do it, she would do it, even with the assistance of her local young Tory troops. Their amiably clueless arrangements reminded me vividly of the Labourite dogsbodies on the Foot
campaign trail who couldn’t assemble water, jug and glass into the same position before the visiting orator was on the point of expiring from thirst.

The Battersea junior task force had, however, managed to organize a cardboard sign:
INCOME TAX UP TO 50P ADMITS BROWN
. This powerful device was held up to face the
prosperous crowds of homecoming evening commuters as they poured down the Shopstop chute from the station to the street. The young men in chinos, poplin summer jackets and Timberland footwear had
stepped out of a Ralph Lauren advertisement, the slit-skirted young women out of a re-run of
This Life
. There was the usual London admixture of delinquents, fast-food mutants and deadbeats
of all ages, but on the whole you would have said that this was the middle class at the throbbing peak of its reproductive cycle. Forty years ago – thirty, twenty, even ten – I would
have been able to tell how they voted just by the way they dressed: Conservative. But now you can’t tell, and that’s the Tory nightmare.

The young Tory helpfuls seemed not to realize it was a nightmare, which meant that here was the nightmare compounded. They thrust leaflets into the well-groomed hands of the hurrying horde and
showed no signs of surprise when the leaflets were returned to them as if tainted with botulism. But Lucy was due to receive a visitor, and
he
realized it. Unfolding from a needlessly
small car came the radiant presence of Michael Portillo. Whether he was here to share Lucy’s evident belief that his blessing might swing the vote, or whether he was here in the same spirit
of posthumous defiance that sent El Cid (Loyalist Royalist) riding out dead in the saddle to meet the enemy, was not apparent from his demeanour. Nothing was apparent from that except gentle
manners. A camera can easily make his features look brutal, but seen in real air they look sensitive even in their chunkiness, rather in the way that Michelangelo (Gay Rights) turned Brutus
(Republican Revolutionary) into a pugilist with a taste for Stoic philosophy. Unlike Tony Blair’s smile, which would remain fixed even if perforated by the bullets of a firing squad,
Portillo’s smile comes and goes; but when it is there, it is the smile of a man who has known indecision and suffering, and has overcome both while forgetting neither.

As the commuters continued surging towards us like Labour MPs into the division lobby, Portillo got going with a smoothly practised double-handed meet-and-greet routine, his eyes reassuringly
suggesting that although there might possibly have been some fleeting reason for voting Labour last time, normal service had now been resumed. Portillo can get a lot into his eyes, including
everything happening around him. He spotted me edging up and gave me the tolerant smile for media pests. I pointed to the sign about Brown’s alleged admission. ‘
Did
he admit
it?’ Portillo’s answer was already tried and tested, but he threw in a conspiratorial twinkle. ‘Well, he’s not denied it.’ Instant buddies: that knack of bringing you
in on a secret is one of the most valuable a politician can have. Con men, of course, have it too: but they have nothing else. Portillo’s geniality is real.

Attracted by the splash and swirl of a big fish, a television news crew showed up. Lucy’s team got tremendously excited, and, being so well bred, tremendously shy. One of them – a
tall, gorgeous young man with a circa 1964 James Fox haircut and a closely tailored Heseltine-style blue pin-stripe suit, his whole appearance out of a mould you would have thought was long since
lying in pieces somewhere in a Surrey lane – was audibly puzzled as to the news crew’s provenance. ‘Is it the Beer Beer Sear?’ It was ITN. Imagine the equivalent young New
Labour operative not knowing.

Flushed with their media success, Lucy’s Gamma Force hoplites ushered their guest into a car bound for what they assured him was an even hotter spot, Battersea Park station. Since nobody
else had thought of it, Portillo kindly suggested to the troops that I be guided by one of them towards the rendezvous. The terribly nice young man who got the job managed to get thoroughly lost,
and we saw a great deal of the district before we reached the target zone, where I thought the show was all over. But apparently it had never happened. Though Portillo, Lucy and her praetorians
were all present, there were no commuters in sight. I had memories of Michael Foot being led by sweating local worthies into a Peterborough roller-skating rink populated by a mass meeting of
twenty-six people, two of them holding balloons.

Portillo never even snarled. He told me that there was a more serious gig coming up on the forecourt of a local service station: an interview with ITN about the National Insurance thing. Perhaps
mischievously, he left it to the Battersea bunch to get me there. My two young guides, a male and female who were clearly meant for each other, pooled their knowledge of the area and took me off on
a circumnavigation of the constituency that eventually got us to the destination, which was just around the corner from the departure point. Half an hour having elapsed, Portillo had already
wrapped up the interview. With his apparently infallible courtesy he congratulated the Battersea Young Tory Commandos as if the future of the party lay in their hands: a daunting prospect. He might
have thought he owed me one for putting me at their mercy, because he offered me a trip back to Smith Square, and yes, if I really thought it might be useful I could grill him when we got there.
Shortly he would have to disappear into the depths of Central Office for a strategy meeting, but meanwhile how could he help? With just such grace and style, Thomas More (Christian Conservative)
once bade the executioner to do his work well, but Thomas More knew that he was going to a better life. Portillo has less reason to believe that bliss is imminent, so his faith in humanity must be
deep indeed.

As we settled into the leather chairs, he was already fielding my first question, and what other first question could there be? Yes, he admitted, in 1997 Labour ate into what should have been
the natural Tory vote. After eighteen years the crucial centre of the electorate was fed up, and besides, Labour had done the necessary job of reforming itself in order to take over the
Conservatives’ economic views. ‘In those terms it was an epic political victory for us.’ Since Portillo himself lost his seat in 1997 and must have felt the deprivation keenly,
this was a large gesture of respect. It was also a clever way of glossing the disaster to make it sound like a triumph. As to that, there is some truth to it, although it should be remembered that
Labour was not reformed by Mrs Thatcher’s example, but by the long influence of its own social democrats.

But Portillo was only bantering. He got down to cases when he admitted, if only by implication, that there was no automatically certain base in the landed and business interests to which the
Conservatives could return. Everything would depend on an inclusive view of society that would compete with Labour by offering a real answer to the problems they would never solve by goal-setting
management from the top down. Only ‘the devolution of power and authority’ could give the schools and the hospitals what they were crying out for: motivation. Pay was important, but
motivation was everything. And if every critical issue in every institution had to go all the way up to state level and back down again before it could be dealt with, no amount of tax money would
meet the case, because the people in charge of other people’s destinies would never take effective responsibility if they did not feel that they were in charge of their own. Portillo
expounded these arguments with passion, but even more striking was his lucidity. It might not seem much to say that he is the best mind on the Tory front bench, when he, Hague and Ann Widdecombe
possess the only three faces most of us can put a name to. But even if Kenneth Clarke and Chris Patten were not in purdah or exile, Portillo would still count as a political intellect on a scale
above tactics and even above strategy: a sectional interest can be given up for a national plan only on the basis of an historic view.

The stipulated few minutes had turned into many more and history was what we were now talking about. Flatteringly he asked for an addition to his reading list, and I suggested Alan
Moorehead’s
Gallipoli
, a book that brings out how right Churchill was about the Dardanelles, and how completely the War Council – a Millennium Dome committee
avant la
lettre
– converted a vision for shortening the war into a sure-fire formula for lengthening it. Portillo countered by recommending John Lukacs’s
Five Days in London
, in
which it is stated that Chamberlain had the casting vote in the matter of a possible capitulation to Hitler in 1940, and sided with Churchill for two reasons – because Chamberlain had learned
that Hitler was a bad man, and because Churchill had treated Chamberlain with decency after his ejection from power. So the time to say goodbye was the time to trail my coat. ‘Will you and
Hague have to rebuild the party together after the defeat?’ The smile went off like a light: no irony, no complicity. ‘We contemplate nothing except victory.’

He knows better than that, but he said the right thing, which is the political thing. Out there being led by her eager young troops in the wrong direction around Battersea, Lucy Shersby might
drop in her tracks if Portillo spoke the truth. And anyway, the truth is that you never know. It’s an election for the House of Commons, not the Politburo, and the fact that not even the most
predictable outcome is ever a sure thing is the best reason for voting. And even if you had the power of Nostradamus (Liberal Democrat) to foresee the event, your vote could still affect the
aftermath. If the Conservatives lose in a big enough way, Hague will probably get the push, and there is nobody except Portillo to take his place. But supposing that the Lib Dems do not expand into
the vacuum, and the Tories do well enough for Hague to keep his credibility, it would not necessarily be a bad thing for Portillo, and could be good for the country.

Hague is a born fighter who will do a better job than Portillo of hazing Blair at the dispatch box for the next Parliament, and Portillo as Shadow Chancellor will have the opportunity to work on
the plans that could rebuild the party in the only way it can be rebuilt: by proposing, in detail and without appeal to atavistic prejudice, an inclusive yet demonstrably workable order of social
justice, thus to compete in the centre for voters who are no longer either the prisoners of their background or its privileged darlings. And to those who proclaim that there is nothing interesting
about a centralized politics in which two similar parties are divided only by their proposed methods of achieving the same ends, there is a sharp answer. Those are the only politics worthy of the
name, and we are very lucky to live in an epoch where they prevail.

Just how lucky was revealed to me all over again next day in Sloane Square, where I met one of Portillo’s challengers for the Kensington and Chelsea constituency. If not the most
formidable of his opponents, Julia Stephenson of the Green party is certainly the most unmanningly pretty. In a party whose candidates consist almost exclusively of pin-ups, she stands out for
seeming to incarnate the thesis that being environmentally friendly is good for the skin. In her canvassing outfit of white plimsolls, clinging white pedal pushers and environmentally friendly
velvety green top – it might well have
been
a piece of some environment, perhaps a swamp in Sri Lanka – she sprang along the King’s Road handing out Green leaflets, which
were readily accepted, especially by the men. From her they would have accepted a subpoena. Here was clear case of a born Tory who had gone missing. Her moment of revelation had occurred
‘beside a Friends of the Earth skip in Haslemere. I was looking at the champagne-fuelled haze and I thought
there is more to life
.’ She was right; there is. That’s how
the Tories lost her. Labour hasn’t got her yet, but there is only one way for the Tories to get her back. An appeal to grassroots loyalty won’t do. For her, that grass was never green
enough. She wants a better world for everyone. Michael Portillo will beat her, but the best thing about him is that he has already joined her. She threw her class instincts into the skip, and so
did he.

3. Spontaneous Pint of Beer

For any ageing correspondent whose feet were giving out, the second weekend of the General Election carnival was a time for contemplation, stocktaking and summary. To put it
another way, it was a chance to watch television. Out there on the road you pick up a lot of resonant detail, but the big picture is still on the small screen, because that’s where the
campaign teams are aiming their efforts if they’ve got any sense. Charles Kennedy’s team actually admits it: their man doesn’t tour the regions, he tours the television regions.
Wherever there is a studio, no matter how far flung – Dartmoor, the Lizard, Scapa Flow – he will get to it. And that’s the way he gets to you.

If he stuck to the national stuff, even Kennedy would be defined by how he stood up to getting worked over by Kirsty Wark on
Newsnight
. Though a Wark work-over must feel like being
walked over by a water buffalo in stiletto heels, Kennedy handles it well. But he doesn’t have to care, because he’s already got the telly thing sewn up out there in the hinterland. If
his points go up, you can bet that’s where it comes from.