Free Political Suicide by Robert Barnard Page A

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    Antony had fought a seat before, a hopeless constituency in East London (though not as hopeless, he said to himself, as Bootham East was in every respectexcept its winnability as a parliamentary seat). If Antony was willing to put himself in his agent’s hands, at least for the first days of the campaign, it was not through inexperience, but because he felt himself here on terra incognita , a Captain Cook among natives who might turn out to be friendly or unfriendly, but who looked horribly other. Thus, when Harold Fawcett said they were going to spend the day touring the constituency with the loudspeaker van, getting out now and then at auspicious spots to meet the natives, Antony acquiesced.
    â€œIt’ll give people a chance to get to know you,” Harold said.
    â€œQuite,” said Antony. And me a chance to see the constituency, he thought, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. But it couldn’t be put off for ever.
    And so they drove, down from campaign headquarters into City Square (“We all know this is a government that has set its sights on the right targets,” boomed Antony, in a voice that had somehow acquired a classless ring), along the High Street and up towards Kitchener Road (“with a leader whose courage and firmness is admired the world over”); from Kitchener Road into the new private estate of Arden Grove, with its shoddy houses with ridiculous pimples pretending to be bay windows (“I don’t deny we’ve had to take difficult decisions, even unpopular ones”), and from the mortgaged horror of Arden Grove into the borderline respectability of early postwar council estates in Raynwood Terrace, Raynwood Crescent, Raynwood Avenue and so on, testament to the poverty of imagination of the council officers who had dreamed up the estate (“I realize that many of you are not having it easy, butwould you respect a government that bought you off with cash handouts?”). That last bit was unwise: many of the inhabitants of Raynwood estate would certainly vote for a government that bought them off with cash handouts.
    On they went. From Raynwood View they descended into Somertown Fields, a council estate of flats and houses constructed with untried materials in the early ’sixties, and already rickety with numberless ailments, physical and social. Antony, seated on top of his open van, gazed around him with barely concealed horror at the boarded-up dwellings, at the gardens crammed with disused cars, at the front doors ripped off their hinges, at acres of broken bottles, discarded lemonade cans, sweet wrappers, broken toys and old clothes (“What this government represents is the possibility of a new start”). Men in pyjama tops or dirty T-shirts barely covering monstrous bellies stood idly smoking in doorways, while women lounged round seedy shops cackling as they gossiped, and filthy children played in the gutters and jeered at passing cars.
    â€œHere,” said Harold Fawcett to the van driver; “we’ve come beyond constituency boundaries. This bit’s Bootham South, not Bootham East.”
    â€œBloody fool. Turn around. Let’s get out of here,” said Antony, in tones that were flung electronically all over Somertown Fields.
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    Jerry Snaithe was up early, and so were most of his helpers. His agent’s house was too small to act as a convenient campaign headquarters for such a vital by-election, so they had rented a largeish house five minutesfrom Bootham’s centre. Here they got things just as they liked them. Jerry did most of the directing, watched by Fred Long, the party agent, who had seen candidates come and go, and had seen through most of them. Jerry had brought with him a hard core of party activists from London (who were already raising the hackles of the locals), and he assigned them to various campaign officials, or gave them little rooms and long titles of their own. Five