Above: Apologies for this picture of George Osbourne (standing), which is very blurred. I didn’t take my camera to the meeting so was unable to get my own images. This picture was taken by a very elderly gentleman with shaking hands (he later e-mailed it to me).
The front page of The Guardian today featured the results of a poll showing that David Cameron’s personal approval rating stood at 42% as opposed to Gordon Brown’s 29% and Menzies Campbell’s 17%.
Whatever you think of politics (and I am always very sceptical) this turnaround in the fortunes of the Conservative Party is remarkable. I hated John Major’s government and thought they were rotten and corrupt. Now it is the Labour Party that appears dishonest, corrupt, war-mongering, bullying, wasteful with public money, contemptuous of ordinary people. The Conservative Party image is fresh, interesting and full of ideas. There was a time, say five years ago, when no-one I knew admitted to supporting the Conservatives. Now everyone seems to be a Conservative.
An example is Jason Kramer, a Finance Manager with a multi-national company in the Midlands. He recently renewed his membership of the Conservative Party after a lapse of several years. Last November he drove down from Bromsgrove to a town near where I live to see Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne talk to a meeting of local Conservatives. At first we were going to meet afterwards for a meal, but I was curious to see the Shadow Chancellor and so he got me a ticket. I was surprised at how easy this was. There were no security checks or police on the door or anything (and no "minders" to suppress dissenters).
Anyway, I wrote this up last November, but for a variety of reasons I didn’t post it (mainly because I didn’t want this site to become too “political”).
The meeting was held at a girls’ grammar school, a 1950s building of brown brick, vaguely Scandinavian in style (as if modelled on Norwich City Hall). The night was freezing cold, a bright moon in the sky. I met Jason Kramer in the little car park and we went in through the front doors, across a vestibule, and into the school hall.
About a hundred and fifty people were at the meeting, most of them quite elderly. The audience sat at individual tables around the room. Three big tables in the centre of the hall were covered in white tablecloths and piled with food. Three big Union Jack flags had been put up, inbetween the long black and white photographs (rather faded) of school form groups from the 1950s and 1960s. A stage filled the end of the room, and a table had been set up on the stage, presumably for the speaker. The doors to the hall were wide open at first, which made the start of the meeting very cold.
We sat at a table where six people (three couples) had already taken their places. We all chatted for a while (nothing particularly political – just chat), and then everyone got up to get food from the buffet tables in the centre or drinks from the temporary bar which had been set up at one end. The food was very impressive – it was all homemade, and there was plenty of it (sandwiches, pastries, pies). There were several MPs from neighbouring constituencies in the room and they went around the tables introducing themselves. The meeting was supposed to have started at seven, but seven-thirty arrived and then eight, with still no sign of George Osbourne. Someone said he had been held up at a previous meeting.
Eventually the Shadow Chancellor arrived, accompanied by the local Member of Parliament. They made a circuit of the room, shaking hands with everyone and asking how they were. Presumably because Jason Kramer and myself were interlopers the local party managers didn’t let George Osbourne linger at our table.
George Osbourne didn’t go up onto the stage but stood in front of it and began talking to the meeting. He mainly focussed on pensions, describing how pension funds had been taxed so that the United Kingdom has gone from having the best pensions provision in Europe to being no better off than spendthrift countries such as France or Germany. He talked about general government spending and how much of the money had been frittered away with no real results.
His talk was punctuated by interruptions from six or seven middle-aged men sitting together. They all looked alike, being short and round (very fat) with striped shirts, dark suits, bow ties (hair longish and grey, most of them had spectacles). I thought at first that they were hecklers who had somehow got into the meeting, but although their interventions were hostile, loud and arrogant, they were fairly courteous in listening to George Osbourne’s answers. After a few of their questions it became apparent that the men were doctors and consultants from the local hospital who had heard about the meeting and come along (there was no controlled entry). They jumped up from their chairs like little fat jack-in-a-box characters. They complained that the National Health Service needed a lot more money whichever party was in power (it was hard to understand what they really wanted other than "more money").
After his talk George Osbourne took questions from the floor. One question about repealing the Human Rights Act received applause from all over the hall. Jason Kramer asked him a very obscure question about money flows (mainly so he could tell people later that he had taken up the issue with the Shadow Chancellor).
There was a vote of thanks, and then the meeting came to an end.
