Politics schmolitics?

In a fit of unad­ven­tur­ous blog­ging, I’m yet again going to men­tion polit­ics. Because blog­ging seems prefer­able to work­ing, at the moment; because, as you’ll have noted recently, I am in a remin­is­cing state of mind; and because, rather unchar­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally, myself and a couple of col­leagues just dis­cussed polit­ics dur­ing our lunch break, and con­vinced a new mem­ber of staff that we were pro­found and intel­lec­tual con­ver­sa­tion­al­ists (whereas usu­ally we talk com­plete bol­locks and come up with as many filthy innu­en­dos as pos­sible). Oh, and of course, because there’s an elec­tion tomor­row. You see, noth­ing gets past me, does it?

1992: The gen­eral elec­tion that year took place dur­ing my Easter hol­i­days from uni­ver­sity. I’d voted by post, which kind of took the shine off my first gen­eral elec­tion as a genu­ine elector, and I put my cross against Labour almost without think­ing, rather than because of any evan­gel­istic belief. Yet by elec­tion night itself, I was con­vinced that, finally, the Con­ser­vat­ive gov­ern­ment that had been a fix­ture of my life since my earli­est memor­ies were on the way out. I was also a fairly ded­ic­ated sup­porter of Neil Kin­nock — because from a party I sup­por­ted in prin­ciple, but that were a com­plete shambles oth­er­wise, he had brought into being a polit­ical force that I could sup­port with my head as well as my heart. (Before any­one men­tions it, I’m well aware that this phrase was used by Tony Blair in his final cam­paign rally speech last night).

Believ­ing that the elec­tion would hap­pen dur­ing term, I’d had grand plans for a huge elec­tion night piss-up back in Hull, but ended up sit­ting at home alone in Lon­don. I drank one hell of a lot of whisky that night, as my emo­tions veered between ela­tion (“Yes! We’ve done it!”) and dev­ast­a­tion (“Oh my God — how did that hap­pen?”). I made some depressed phone calls to friends at ridicu­lous times of the morn­ing — “Dread­ful. Awful”; “Yeah, isn’t it?” — and was vir­tu­ally spit­ting with rage by the time the Tor­ies appeared on our screens for their vic­tory cel­eb­ra­tions. I col­lapsed into bed in a pathetic drunken stupor when the elec­tion cov­er­age fin­ished at 6.00am, and slept for hours. Dur­ing the fol­low­ing days, my dis­be­lief at the res­ult intens­i­fied. I was almost ashamed of my coun­try, as it became clear that many people had lied to the Exit poll­sters when they emerged from the vot­ing booths, too ashamed to admit that they had voted Conservative.

Just a few months after the elec­tion, the vari­ous polls sug­ges­ted that the Tor­ies were already sink­ing in pop­ular­ity behind Labour. I could hardly believe what I was hear­ing. If only there could have been an elec­tion there and then — but, instead, we had to wait another long five years as the Con­ser­vat­ive party fell apart, with min­is­ters too busy arguing amongst them­selves to bother with run­ning the country.

1997: I wasn’t entirely con­vinced by Tony Blair. In fact, I still don’t com­pletely trust him. Yet it was plainly obvi­ous, from the moment he became party leader, that he was going to take Labour back into gov­ern­ment after 18 long years. It was really a mat­ter of when, rather than if — sadly, John Major seemed determ­ined to keep the Tor­ies hanging on by the skin of their increas­ingly rot­ten teeth.

I dashed to my local polling sta­tion on the morn­ing of elec­tion day. I had the added aware­ness that, at the time, I was in a con­stitu­ency held by the Con­ser­vat­ives, but which was a Labour tar­get (I think it was well down their list, to be hon­est, but the land­slide that night was so com­plete that it eas­ily changed from blue to red). On this occa­sion, I had a palp­able feel­ing that my simple act of pla­cing an “X” in a box could actu­ally bring about a change. I spent the day buzz­ing around excitedly, buy­ing just about every decent news­pa­per on the racks to eagerly scan their elec­tion supplements.

How­ever, as in 1992, the even­ing found me sit­ting at home alone watch­ing the res­ults com­ing in. This time, the mood was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. It soon became clear that Labour had achieved a moment­ous land­slide vic­tory. With the res­ult safe, the obvi­ous thing to do would have been to go to bed and get some sleep. But I just couldn’t get enough of Peter Snow’s land­slide graphic, as Tor­ies were bur­ied under a col­lapsing slag-heap of their own mak­ing. I couldn’t get enough of Jeremy Pax­man rel­ish­ing the chance to make lead­ing Con­ser­vat­ives squirm in their seats, as he looked at them dis­par­agingly and crowed, “Well, what now?” And, as everyone’s elec­tion night story goes, every time I con­sidered going to sleep, some­thing else happened that meant I simply had to stay up and con­tinue watch­ing. Wasn’t Stephen Twigg’s express­ive grin and rolling eyes when he beat Michael Por­tillo just one of the greatest TV moments ever?

At 4.00am, I got a phone call. Some friends were com­ing round to pick me up. They weren’t going to miss this moment. They wanted to be in Lon­don, at Labour’s vic­tory rally. So did I. And that’s how I ended up stand­ing on the South Bank end of the Hun­ger­ford Bridge at nearly 6.00am. Corny as it sounds, the sun­rise that morn­ing was abso­lutely beau­ti­ful. We couldn’t really see or hear many of the speeches, but it was more a case of simply need­ing to be there to soak up the atmo­sphere. As people dis­persed, we went to grab a greasy-spoon break­fast, and then spent the day in the centre of Lon­don. It seems unbe­liev­able now, but what I will always remem­ber is the dif­fer­ent feel­ing in the city that morn­ing. Instead of the grim faces of com­muters on their way into work, people were bleary-eyed but smil­ing for no par­tic­u­lar reason. The typ­ical Eng­lish reserve had evap­or­ated, and com­plete strangers were chat­ting with each other. Although we had voted out John Major and his cronies, in effect this was the end of Thatcher­ism. We’d finally seen sense, and got rid of the mad old har­ridan. Ding dong, the wicked witch was dead.

Of course, none of this delight­ful remin­is­cing is provid­ing you with any good reas­ons to go out and vote tomor­row. I was recently asked, “How has the gov­ern­ment of the past four years affected you per­son­ally?” If I’m per­fectly hon­est, because of the nature of my life, I haven’t been pro­foundly affected in a per­sonal sense. But who I vote for shouldn’t just about me and my indi­vidual concerns.

Mar­garet Thatcher’s philo­sophy was always “there is no such thing as soci­ety.” Wrong. Soci­ety is exactly what vot­ing is all about. We may be indi­vidu­als, but we are all a part of a wider com­munity, and every vote is a chance to influ­ence the dir­ec­tion of that com­munity. Go and make your mark tomorrow.