After a while you forget: was I up for Portillo, or had I gone to bed? I think I’d gone to bed. Abbott, Boateng and Bernie Grant, in bed, I definitely remember that. And Powell, accordingly, out. Was that – what? – ’87? What even was that? 1997: where the hell was I? 2010? That was the one that landed us with Cameron and Clegg, yeah? Am I right? But the 1992 general election – I definitely remember that one. That was unforgettable.
I remember getting the first Tube home and listening to the Today programme before getting a couple of hours sleep
I was in my twenties. Short of cash, as always, I managed to get a job as a polling clerk and as a counting assistant – double bubble. I no longer have the pay slip but I think the total for the two shifts, from six in the morning till about six the following morning, was at least £50, which was handy money. Nice little earner. (My other nice little earner at the time was putting up fences around synagogues and Jewish schools: I knew a bloke who’d got the contract; business, even back then, alas, was booming.)
The polling station was in Canning Town. This was when the Isle of Dogs was being systematically demolished and ‘Docklands’ was being developed, so the place was an absolute mess, everything was run down, there were building sites everywhere, cranes on the horizon. I think it was an infants’ school we were in, or maybe a church hall. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was near the old Royal Oak, which famously had a gym above the pub: my granddad used to box there. Everyone used to box there: Terry Spinks; Terry Lawless, the trainer; Lloyd Honeghan, he was a fantastic fighter. My dad grew up down the road, so it felt like home, even though by then we’d moved out into Essex. Nice new estate, car on the drive: we were a part of Thatcher’s home-owning democracy.
Polling day itself was uneventful: we arrived early, set up the crappy little booths, put out the signs, sharpened the pencils, and then it was a long day of checking the voters’ electoral numbers against the lists, issuing the ballot papers, and then closing up, dismantling the whole thing, and handing over the ballot boxes. I remember there was a little bit of argy-bargy with some people who were upset because they weren’t registered to vote, but that was a problem for the presiding officer, who was a little bloke, but authoritative. All right, mate. Keep your hair on. And then, when we were done, I went down for the count, East Ham Town Hall, which is still there, miraculously, on Barking Road, which hasn’t been flogged off, though presumably it’s only a matter of time – luxury flats for overseas investors, or whatever. Lovely building. Unnecessarily nice. The opposite of now. The family silver, sir? Certainly, help yourself. The count itself was literally just counting, counting, dull, dull counting, except with a lot of highly agitated people looking over your shoulder. Like school, but worse.
I remember getting the first Tube home and listening to the Today programme before getting a couple of hours sleep: it looked like the Tories were going to win, which seemed impossible. This was supposed to be Labour’s unlosable election: the Tories had been in power for more than a decade; there was a weird new prime minister in place, who no one had voted for; the economy was in a mess; and Labour were ahead in the polls. But at the very last minute the Tory party machine got into gear. There was Jennifer’s Ear. There was the Sheffield rally: did Kinnock say ‘We’re all right’ or ‘Well, all right’? Who cares? It didn’t matter. The press swung in hard behind Major. Was it the Sun wot won it? Or longer-term demographic and societal changes which meant that people like my parents, the white working-class, had basically lost touch with Labour forever? Again, it didn’t matter. I got up, brushed my teeth, and went back to work, £50 better off. Nothing changed. And I haven’t thought about it since.
I used to believe that elections were about the battle of ideas, about ideology. Or, at least, about contesting models of how to manage the economy. Or – honestly, at one time, I actually thought this! – about moral values. But elections are not won or lost merely on the strength of ideas. They’re not won on charisma either, or mere entertainment value, or populist appeal: if they were, Farage would already be prime minister. I’m no John Curtice, but even I can tell that elections are won and lost for all sorts of reasons, including the recitation of cant slogans, catch-phrases, half-truths, and base appeals to the electorate’s fears and fantasies: Labour Isn’t Working; Things Can Only Get Better; Make America Great Again; £2,000 Extra Tax Per Household.
Back in the 1990s, I was reading Milan Kundera. Which was hardly unusual then. Everyone was reading Milan Kundera. His work had started being published in English translation in the 1980s: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Immortality, in those sexy Faber editions. I found him a bit kitsch, to be honest, but reading Kundera eventually led me to Josef Škvorecký and Bohumil Hrabal, and then back further to Čapek and Hašek, who were all much more to my taste: lighter; darker; funnier. But Kundera wrote better than any of them about the art and craft of writing, precisely because he was so smug and ponderous: he was made for pontificating. In an essay in a book called The Curtain he writes that ‘Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable […] stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-truths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.’
So, anyway, I can tell you exactly where I was back on election day, 1992, which is a long way from where I am now, but exactly the same place we’re all in during every election, because it is indeed immortal and the breeding ground of non-truths: we’re in rats’ alley.
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