Like most thinking people, the authors of this book were fascinated, baffled and occasionally repulsed by the dark world of Conservatism in England. Unlike most people, they decided to hold their noses and plunge deeply into this bizarre society and, between 2005 and 2008, they infiltrated the Conservative Party to bring the rest of us the strange tales from a Tory nation that is the sub title of this book.
This is not just about the Conservative party, though, even if the chapters based on the authors’ immersion into the Tory ranks are by far the most interesting. They also describe visits to AG Macdonell’s Rodmell – for the cricket, of course; the madness of a UKIP conference; the Hampshire Womens’ Institute; the Royal Agricultural Society Show; a jolly at Chester racecourse for the Countryside Alliance’s branch in Cheshire and North Wales; the Dagenham town show and Chartwell, the family home of Winston Churchill.
These sections have the feel of Alexis de Tocqueville trying to be objective about the youthful American republic or an English writer on the grand tour recounting the odd customs and practices of a strange and savage race. They are really well observed and ask some fairly profound questions about the nature of both Englishness and the conservative instinct in England. The Dagenham chapter, in particular, paints a picture of a sour scene in which the observers appear to have no respect or affection for the town show and the participants seem to be acting from instinct rather than conviction.
I should point out that the word “English” is deliberate, as this book concentrates on the Saxon marches without straying into the far more interesting Celtic regions but, as neither Conservatism nor the conservative instinct flourishes in these areas, it is a wise choice.
Chris Horrie, who wrote Stick It Up Your Punter: The Rise and Fall of The Sun, Disaster: The Rise and Fall of the News on Sunday and Fuzzy Monsters: Fear and Loathing at the BBC, has tended to field press enquiries about their tour of Tory England and he has given some modest and wry interviews which have tended to concentrate on the utterly horrific dispatches from the blue front line that have already entered the political lexicon.
He and David Matthews, author of Looking For A Fight, about the seamier side of professional and semi-professional boxing, penetrated the once mighty Conservative machine of Richmond Park and found something quite repulsive when they lifted up the damp stones.
That the phone canvassers’ script referred erroneously to the ultimately successful Liberal Democrat candidate, Susan Kramer, as having “just got off the train from Hungary” as an unsubtle code for the implication that she is Jewish is not just wrong at every level but takes us into a deeply dark place where people actually think that to identify someone as Jewish is a spur to spurning them at the polling station.
The appallingly cynical no-hoper standing for the Tories may be the sort of candidate that an honest Labour MP dreams of having oppose him or her but the authors flay him into irrelevance by the force of his own words and note, almost sadly, that he left politics after losing so deservedly in 2005.
The comic genius of the Ugandan election observers and Boris Johnson at large in Clapham during the London Mayoral election may one day achieve the classic status of Macdonell’s village cricket match (in which, incidentially, the Candide-like observer is called Donald Cameron – the real name of you know who) but for sheer numbing horror the goings-on at a golf club near Watford and the antics of Cecil Parkinson at a Conservative Way Forward dinner in Mayfair will take some beating.
A constant theme throughout the book is the foetid stream of racism and nostalgia for the days of the British Empire that still informs Conservative thinking whenever the public are excluded.
Most Tories are old, bitter and untouched by any political ideology that is not expressed as a negative and younger Tories are contemptuous and cynical souls driven by avarice and ambition.
This book is brilliantly and accurately observed and despairing of the attitudes and inclinations of the Tory tribe while recognising that an innate conservatism may well be an English characteristic that can, and does, exist without formal engagement with Conservatism.
Much of this book describes people and situations which are repulsive – and not just to the left-wing reader – but I was enormously cheered by it and by the revelations of the true nature of the Conservative Party.
All Labour candidates and activists should read this and then redouble their efforts to ensure that this shabby band of sotto voce racists are kept caged within their befuddled worlds of West End arrogance, suburban spite and rural ritual.
Stephen Pound
