Part One

Dateline General Election 2005 – Richmond Park, SW London

Ernie Urquhart and Eric Trollope (not real names) had decided to “join” the Conservative Party after watching Anne Widdecombe on a late night TV programme. She was going on about how the Conservative party of old had changed, and that the party was much more “in tune” with modern Britain, which was a very much changed place. She kept emphasising that the modern Tory was “inclusive” and that it welcomed people from all sort of social backgrounds and of all ethnic origins. For a while the party had been stressing its desire to involve more black people, ethnic people and the poor huddled masses and great unwanted in general and in particular. Join the Conservative Party? After a pitch like that, they decided it would be rude not to.

Urquhart and Trollope had been looking for a suitable media project for a while. For more than a year they had been thinking about what to do media-wise with the general election scheduled for May 2005. It had been suggested to Trollope, for example, by one TV commissioning editor, that he could launch his own political party, stand as a candidate, get hammered and allow the watching millions to have a bloody good laugh at him as a form of ritual humiliation. After this there came the inevitable variation on the make-over show format with an idea called “Make Me A Tory” and “Make Me A Green” etc which involved the reporters being dressed up by Trinny and Susannah-type harridans working under the supervision of a pop psychologist and a media-whoring professor of comparative politics to come up with the “perfect” style for each political type.

All of these ideas seemed too complicated, and so the pair arrived at the wheeze of simply joining the Conservative Party at a local level with as few pre-conceived ideas as possible, and with no greater plan than reporting who the Tories were, what they did and what they were like. To do this they would have to become like anthropologists or, perhaps, wild life documentary-makers like Ernie Attenborough, filming a rare species of Great Ape before extinction. Tory activists were indeed an endangered species, at least in Richmond. There were reports that great ruminating herds (a common sight in the area as recently as the 1950s) had been reduced to an elderly rump, with only one or two breeding pairs left.

To get the idea of the ground, especially as a TV documentary, they would need to be able to sum it all up in a few lines. TV commissioners were confronted with thousands of idea for programmes, and they had notoriously short attention spans. What was needed was a “log line” – as used in Hollywood – which would explain the whole programme in terms that a small child would be able to grasp and, at the same time sell it. After much agonising, writing and re-writing, Urquhart and Trollope came up with:

TWO GUYS JOIN THE TORY PARTY
ONE IS BLACK
THE OTHER IS WHITE
WHAT HAPPENS

Having decided to join the party in principle, there was the question of where. Richmond was immediately on the agenda because it was – or ought to be - Tory heartland. Urquhart had established at least to his own satisfaction that Richmond Park parliamentary constituency, where he lived, was definitely the richest constituency - indeed place – in the whole of Europe – on the grounds that other statistically richer areas such as St Tropez and most of Switzerland did not really count because they were either too small or in they were in the countryside. Richmond was definitely the richest large-scale “community” in urban Britain, he had determined. It had been held by the Conservatives from time immemorial – until the Labour 1997 landslide when it was captured by the Liberal Democrats. Previously it had been the rock solid seat of Sir Jeremy Hanley KCMG, cabinet minister, chairman of the party and friend to many an oil sheik as a minister at both Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

Trollope on the other hand lived in poverty stricken multi-racial Brent – the purely conceptual name for an unlovely stretch of desolation spread along the North Circular Road and better known to locals by unromantic names such as Willesden and Neasden. Brent was only about ten miles away on the other side of the Thames. But it might as well have been on another planet. The first idea was that Urquhart and Trollope would join their respective local Conservative associations, and then contrast their fates in a corny “Tale of Two Cities” way – with the possibility of a “life-swap” twist on the cards as well. Eventually this idea was rejected as impractical and, in terms of a working title, just too Charles Dickensy.

Instead it was decided Trollope would come and live in Urquhart’s house as a lodger or overstaying houseguest for the duration of the campaign and they would campaign together pretty much every day. This new and simplified plan had the added advantage that the pair would be “living together” and the Richmond Tories, in their presumed prejudicial way might jump to the conclusion that they had a couple of right-wing homosexuals on their hands. This was a bonus – adding a new and important sociological dimension to the “social experiment” they were starting to po-facedly claim they were undertaking.

So in televisual terms things had moved on:

TWO SEEMINGLY GAY GUYS JOIN THE TORY PARTY
ONE IS BLACK
ONE IS WHITE
WILL THE TORIES BE ABLE TO GUESS WHICH IS WHICH?

All that remained was the timing of the dreaded moment of “joining” the Conservative Party. It was decided to wait until the end of the first official week of the campaign. This was an awkward period of “phoney war” brought about by all the major party leaders wanting to suspend hostilities for seven days to mark the death of the Pope.

And so on Monday April 11th Trollope officially moved in to Urquhart’s house in a solidly Conservative ward of the Liberal Democrat-held parliamentary constituency of Richmond Park. Later that day Trollope plucked up the courage to phone the local Tory office – situated on a parade of shops next to a Karaoke Noodle Bar and a traditional Meat and Two Veg butchers. Straightaway Trollope got through the Conservative parliamentary candidate himself.

“Hello, Richmond Conservatives… Marco Forgione here…. “

This was a bit of a shock Marco Forgione was the actual parliamentary candidate. It was also the first indication of how depleted and short-staffed the Richmond Tories were. It was hard to imagine a mover and shaker like Sir Jeremy Hanley, the former MP in the good times of the Thatcher years - sitting all alone in a shabby office on a suburban high street on a fine Monday evening at the start of a general election campaign waiting for the phone to ring in case it was some random nutter felt moved to hand out a lot of misleading glossy leaflets about the lamentable standards of floor mopping in NHS hospitals.

Trollope blurted: “Oh yes… Hello… Wow! – Marco Forgione?”

Marco (Forgione always insisted on being called Marco) chuckled with a mixture of smugness and embarrassment and said: “Yes. It’s really me.”

Trollope’s carefully planned script was out of the window and, in his own mind, he was giving away all sorts of clues about what he was really up to. And having started to dig a hole, he did not hesitate to continue.

“I’ve been reading a lot about you…” Trollope said disingenuously, his recent in-depth researching Marco’s background still fresh in his mind. This was another reason for tension and awkwardness. Marco Forgione was a man, the reporters had discovered,who had done a lot of editing of his CV. Forgione butted in with another giggle: “…Only the good things I hope… Anyway, what can I do for you?”

Trollope got back on track: “Well, I’m phoning because I’m interested in volunteering… or even joining the party…”

Trollope was not allowed to finish is his sentence.

“That’s great… that’s rilly FanTastic… What sort of things would you like to do?”

Trollope set out the modus operandi of the project. From the start he and Urquhart were going to present themselves (truthfully) as Labour voters who were disillusioned by some of the things the Labour Government had done. The line was that there was no point in voting Liberal Democrat in order “give Blair a bloody nose”, as many in media-land were suggesting at the time. This made no sense in Liberal held Richmond. There were only five or six constituencies in the country where Labour got fewer votes than in Richmond. Labour had about as much chance of taking Richmond, as the Tories had of winning Glasgow. Labour needed it at all costs to stay Liberal - and therefore out of Tory hands - if they were to maintain their huge majority in parliament. In Richmond at least, by voting Liberal people would not only not be annoying Tony Blair, but they would actually be doing his evil bidding.

As Trollope gave a garbled version of this rationale to Forgione over the phone, he began to sense that the Candidate was not at all interested in this talk of high political strategy.

Marco only began to warm up when Trollope offered to do some leafleting. Marco seemed to suddenly get quite excited, launching off into a lot of boasting and self-justification about how much work he was doing:

“Well, I can tell you we are out on the streets every single day giving out leaflets, or calling people… whatever suits you... I started canvassing at 7.30 this morning and will probably finish, oh, around nine or nine-thirty tonight. We’re out canvassing in Richmond tomorrow…. If you’re interested in getting involved, why don’t you come out with The Team? We’re meeting at the association office at 9.30am… would you like to join us then?”

“Yes, I think so… why not?” Trollope said with Urquhart on the other line smiling broadly and silently giving the thumbs up.

“That’s FanTastic!” Marco said with obviously contrived enthusiasm.

“Rilly FanTastic”.



CHAPTERTWO:

MEETING MARCO


At 9.28 am in the morning of the second day of the first “real” week of the 2005 general election campaign Marco Forgione – The Candidate - was sitting in the front room of Richmond Park Conservative Association surrounded by chaotic piles of paper and other junk, in the company only of his ostentatiously world-weary secretary and an elderly man in a blazer who has a military bearing and a limp and who is, in many ways, is a dead-ringer for the character of The Colonel in Fawlty Towers.

At 9.29 am Trollope barged into the official world of centre-right democratic politics with the unheralded and shambling figure of Urquhart in tow. Forgione may or may not have expected Trollope to turn up. Doubtless he got a lot of nuisance phone calls from mad people, pranksters and political opponents alike. What Forgione was most definitely not expecting was that Trollope would be black, or that he would not be alone. This was obvious from the flash of alarm which at first shot across his face, a flash followed by a bright blush of embarrassment, indecent haste in springing to his feet to grab and pump Trollope’ hand and the over-the-top gushiness of his greetings: “Eric Trollope! …Yeah…. Great Stuff. Great. You made it here. That’s FanTastic… Rilly FanTastic.

The Colonel was less diplomatic. “You’re black…” he barked in his clipped no-bullshit way. Forgione was mortified. Trollope was stopped in his tracks, but remained silent. The Colonel seemed to immediately realize he had made a faux pas. Urquhart meanwhile had been just as thrown by the site of The Colonel and was conscious of gawping at him with the same look of jaw-dropped disbelief the Colonel was directing at Trollope as he discreetly recorded this collision of worlds.

“I mean…. ehhrmm…. what I mean… we were told that a Eric Trollope was coming… but not that he… you… was black,” the Colonel ploughed on, and immediately made matter worse: “what I mean is immigration, you see, is not an issue in this constituency…just not an issue… ehrrmm… ”

There were blank looks all round. Forgione was smiling with manic intensity, using his set of big gappy teeth, evidently thinking about the ramifications of all this. The Colonel carried on regardless.

“… We’ve been told not to mention it… in some of the wards around here… what we talk about instead is the cost of care homes when we meet old people, and how we are going to keep the pavements clean when we meet the younger ones, with babies… or children… “

Forgione is now beside himself with grinning, his wide eyes almost popping out of his head as he clocks first Trollope, then Urquhart, then Trollope again. He is much younger than the Colonel – in his 40s - and is a bit more dressed-down – formal lilac shirt, but open at the collar and with no tie. Forgione’s body language says: Hey guys! Isn’t this mad old coot a hoot! What a character!

“That’s what the Lib Dems do,” the Colonel continued brightly, before becoming suddenly morose, shaking his head slightly and adding with a bitter note: “It’s what got ‘em the bloody constituency”.

Evidently delighted that the Colonel has run of steam Forgione leaps forward from behind his desk, eyes fixed on Trollope with a searching look, and gesturing towards Urquhart “And Eric… er Eric?… who is this…”. Trollope said: “This is Eric , he’s my friend… I mean my housemate”.

At this point there was another and even more painful pregnant pause. As predicted it seemed obvious that both Forgione and The Colonel had jumped to conclusion that they had a couple of shirt-lifters on their hands. It was Trollope’s turn to stumble on: “I mean, he is my landlord… at the moment… I am staying with him for a while... we work together… but not all the time, just for now…”

Forgione dived into the conversation, so keen to get in there before the Colonel that he practically elbowed the old man out of the way and put his hands across his mouth.

“That’s great…,” Forgione said in a way that seemed to imply… Gay people. That’s fine. Lots of Tories are Gay: “Hi there Eric ! Great to meet you!”

“Hmmm Yes…” Trollope ventured as Urquhart and Forgione shook hands. “Ernieis like me, another disgruntled Labour supporter…”. Throughout all this the secretary is just bustling about, ignored by and ignoring everything and everyone.

The awkwardness of these greeting is slightly relieved by the arrival of the extraordinary figure of a sprightly OAP called Robert. Like the Colonel the newcomer has the bearing and air of an ancient military man. But to complete the effect and take it one step further Robert actually sports a World War II spitfire ace twirly moustache, slicked back hair, a multi-coloured cravat and has a vast blue silk hanky tucked into the top pocket of his brass button blazer. All he lacks really, to fit the bill as the perfect central mid-20th century cad, is a monocle and a swordstick. In tribute to his military bearing, 1950s national service mentality, and obvious seniority in the Tory operation Urquhart and Trollope nicknamed him The Major.

At first the Major looks straight through Trollope and Urquhart, possibly assuming them to be delivery men or the photocopier repair team. Marco introduced Urquhart and Trollope as “new members of the team” which left the Major blinking with astonishment, and staggering backwards slightly. When he had recovered, the Major launched into a long-winded doorstep campaign speech of the sort he might use to clinch the switch of a wavering Liberal Democrat.

“D’you know,” he said, “the Lib Dems do some very good work sometimes… very good… I always say give credit where credit’s due... But they go too far. That’s the problem.” With Marco and the Colonel listening intently and nodding in agreement when cued to do so, the Major then launched into a long shaggy dog story about how the Liberals, when they had been in charge of the council, had set up some sort of rehab clinic for drugs users and alcoholics which was “fair enough”. But then “they had to one step further and set up a second clinic just for ethnic minorities…” the Major paused, as though expecting laughter or possibly applause. Urquhart and Trollope just played it cool, resisted the temptation to say “It’s Political Correctness Gone Mad!” and encouraging the Major to go on by screwing up their faces in feigned fascination while emitting a series of inscrutable hmmmms and arrrhhhs.

“Now…,” the Major droned on, “I can see why some Asian women for example might need to be treated on their own, because they have their own customs and so on…”

But at this point The Major was interrupted by The Colonel who said, without apparent irony: “If they don’t like it, they can go back where they come from”.

This seemed to throw the Major off track… “Err yes… but it does show you…”.

“We are not Liberal Democrats anyway,” Trollope said, brightly. He then launched into a detailed exposition of his political philosophy – how he was a Labour man, but he had “had it” with Blair because of the war. Urquhart chipped in to say he was just the same, but he had “had it” with New Labour authoritarianism, with measures like abolishing jury trials and the like. Trollope then explained the whole thing about the pointlessness of voting Liberal Democrat as a protest, with Urquhart chipping in and airing his views on the finer points and injustices of the First Past the Post voting system. Now it was Marco’s turn to do the noddies – listening earnestly and murmuring the odd encouraging “Soooper… Yes… Great… FanTastic” from time to time.

But The Colonel and the Major seemed to be blotting out all this talk. “Do you know – in the end it’s all about pavements,” the Colonel eventually interjected in an irritated way. “Since we got back in control of the council we’ve repaired hundreds of pavements all over the place and that’s what will count with the voters.” Two years earlier the Conservatives had won back control of Richmond borough council from the Liberals.

“That’s right,” The Major confirmed, adding a raft of dull yet incorrect-sounding detail about how neighbouring Hounslow council, which was Labour controlled, was spending much less money on pavements, and that the pavements were “a disgrace”.

It turned out that The Major lived in Chiswick, which just down the river from Richmond. Although this too had been Tory territory until 1997, it was now part of a solid Labour seat and the local Conservative Association to which The Major belonged had given up on it, allowing him to concentrate his fire on the more “winnable” Richmond Park target. Robert appeared to the only remaining activist in Hounslow - the last of the MoHeathcans - or so it seemed. It was hard to figure how old the Major was, because he was so energetic, but Trollope later overhead him heartily tell a group of admiring Tory Ladies gathered in a pub that he had been using his OAP’s bus pass “for more than ten years now”.

The Major and the Colonel’s efforts to outbid each other in making promises about pavement repairs suited Urquhart and Trollope just fine. They had feared a grilling about what they were up to. But it never came. All they had to do basically was stand back and watch these characters let it all hang out. Also, although Trollope was black, he had now been in the room with them for a good ten minutes - there had been no attempt at mugging, drug-taking, limbo-dancing, car theft, terrorism or Voodoo, so perhaps he was not really all that black after all. Also, fifteen minutes had gone by and nothing obviously Gay had transpired between Trollope and Urquhart, so everyone could relax a bit and chow on some more about how hopeless and two-faced the rubbish Liberal Democrats were.

After a while a slightly younger man with ginger hair, a leather jacket and the look, generally, of an ageing teddy-boy arrived and began scurrying about in a more apparently purposeful way. This character checked out as Eric Edwards, the official agent and a Conservative councillor in the neighbouring town of Kingston. Edwards’s arrival seemed to gee things up a bit and Marco – using a series of self-depreciating military gestures – led his “troops” – meaning The Colonel, The Major and now Trollope and Urquhart out of the front door towards Forgione’s car.

Leading politicians often equip themselves with a “Battle Bus”, but in Forgione’s case it was to be a “Battle Banger”. The car was parked outside the Association Offices and it was a complete heap – an ancient, basic, dented, off-white rover Rover with a cracked windscreen, barely-legal tyres and a peeling tax disc. Urquhart reckoned it had a street value of about £150. When he had owned and parked a vehicle in a similar state of dilapidation in front of his East Sheen house, the neighbours had got up a petition to have it towed away. The Battle Banger had a yellowing “SAVE THE COUNTRYSIDE” sicker in the back window – doubtless a relic of Marco’s previous incarnation as the local Conservative candidate for the semi-rural Liberal held seat of Yeovil.

Marco and the two old gents fussed around the car, loading and removing boxes of leaflets. The plan was to drive towards some “key streets” near the centre of Richmond meet up with some other Tories and “blitz” the place with leaflets. They were extremely keen that Trollope should sit in the front seat (where they could keep an eye on him) on the grounds that he was much “bigger” than everyone else. There was much hugely amused banter about how we would all be crushed together in the car, how we were “going to get very intimate with each other”. So Urquhart got in the back with The Major and The Colonel. Forgione drove and Trollope sat next to him. The candidate seemed so agitated by this arrangement that he screwed up an attempted three-point turn, smashing the exhausted into the kerb and almost loosing control of the steering wheel.

Inside, the car was a tip – full of rubbish like some sort of mobile wastepaper basket – litter, old newspaper, sweet wrappers, old mud-covered leaflets and Marco’s collection of music tapes were strewn about. Forgione’s tape collection consisted of Ibiza Uncovered (The Return); Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits; Classics For a Summer Day; Don McClean’s American Pie and, bizarrely, The Best of Two Tone. As a record collection it wasn’t exactly in the Eric Mellor league. Trollope had an immediate vision of Forgione driving up and down the motorway from Yeovil signing tunelessly along with “Baggy Trousers” by Madness and then switching “Drove my chevvhee to da levveee but the da levveee was dry…”. Trollope also noticed directions to a model railway enthusiasts club in New Malden, together with lots of nerdy information downloaded from the Internet about the technical specification of equipment they had – type of steam engines, track and so forth. Forgione did indeed look like the train-spotter type, but Trollope charitably decided that maybe it was Forgione’s kids and not the successor Jeremy Hanley, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who had a “thing” about train-sets.

Campaigning for the day was to take the form of giving out leaflets up and down the streets around The Vineyard – an enclave of slightly bohemian Georgian streets just to the north of Richmond town centre, which included converted alms houses and the like. At one time parts of this area would have been poor and unfashionable, and it retains a touch of pseudo-boho eccentricity – now in the form of a street full of antique shops and private art galleries. It all existed in an affluent ghetto around the back of the wedding cake terrace of Richmond Hill, which was where Mick Jagger and the Who lived in gigantic Georgian mansions with view for “miles and miles” across the verdant Surrey lowlands and up the valley of the Thames. Although this area might once have been hippy-ish – like the more famous “community” of Notting Hill, which the Vineyard resembled, it had been gentrified to an astounding extent and few of the houses were worth less than a couple of million. Just on demographics and earning power it should have been rock solid Conservative. In fact the 2002 council election revealed found it split exactly fifty-fifty Tory-Liberal, with the Labour vote squeezed to nothing in fourth place behind the Greens.

After a short journey which involved literally driving up several blind alleys and then reversing along the entire length of a long street, clipping at least one innocently parked wing mirror along the way, Forgione parked up with enormous difficulty, cursing the local (Conservative controlled) council and its parking policies. The Major immediately bag ged the plum job of looking after the car, and began lashing up a loudspeaker system on the roof, linked to an amplifier plonked on the back seat. Standing on the pavement now Forgione produced a pair of blue rosettes.

“Do you guys want to wear one of these – you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he quickly added.

Trollope, in a slightly paranoid way, thought this might had a loyalty test of some sort, but replied in the affirmative: “Aw go on then… heh, heh in for a penny, in for a pound,” he said. Urquhart followed suit, took the loathsome object and pinned it to the lapel of his anorak and fumbled with the pin. Forgione helped him secure the thing in place.

“There… FanTastic… you are a proper Tory now… FanTastic…”


[CHAPTER TWO ENDS]









CHAPTER THREE:

Marco Forgione is holding court in the saloon bar of a surprisingly dingy pub just off the Vineyard where his canvassing team has arrived for an at least partially liquid lunch. It is a couple of days into the campaign. At the bar two middle-aged blokes with red cheeks and purple noses are drinking. “Who are this lot then?” one asks the other, eyeing the blue rosettes. “The bleedin’ Tories, you tosser,” says the other. “Haven’t you heard? There’s a f***ing election on.”

“Oh yeah…” the first man replies in a dreamy way.

Forgione speaks in strangely clipped and declamatory, slightly hysterical telegraphic phrases. Despite his name there is not a trace of an Italian accent – the result, doubtless, of his expensive public school education. He has been left with an imperfect attempt as received pronunciation and ordinary southern Esturial - a cross between Alan Partridge and Rory Bremner’s impression of Peter Mandleson.

“Well… (Team!)… we are doing very well, vrrrrr well in this ward. Vital ward. Important. What’s really encouraging? Labour people are coming straight over to us. Not stopping at the Lib Dems…. Our vote? Solid. Lib Dems?…soft. Vrrrr vrrrrr soft.” And then his mobile phone rang and he was off on some vital mission or other.

Team Marco has now swelled from the original core of The Major, The Colonel, Urquhart and Trollope to include about half-a-dozen local stalwarts, mostly very elderly and including a contingent of four or five formidable Tory women – The Iron Ladies – who clearly are the mainstay and backbone of the operation. They listen to Forgione with thinly disguised contempt. If Richmond’s Labour voters are indeed switching from their now habitual tactical support for the Liberals, then there is a flicker of hope for his otherwise obviously doomed campaign. This is his best and only chance of winning the seat. And so he is telling everyone that this is what is happening. The trouble is that the only evidence he has for this is the sudden and mysterious appearance of Urquhart and Trollope. Which is both sad and pathetic. Forgione is nevertheless already waving around the new recruits like a couple of hunting trophies, probably mentally sizing them up for decapitation, stuffing and mounting on the wall of his Freemason’s Lodge (or wherever it is that right of center Anglo-Italian politicians go to relax and do harmless charitable work). In a way, in Urquhart and Trollope, Forgione sees his ticket to the big time.

The most significant of the new arrivals in Team Marco is Pamela “Pam” Fleming, deputy chairman of the constituency party and organizer in this part of the borough. Today it is she who is in charge of the vital business of allocating canvassers to streets. Their task is to collect and compile the “returns” – lists of names and addresses taken from the electoral register showing the claimed voting preferences of each household, cross-referenced with the way they were known to have voted last time. The gathering of this information is the core activity of the local campaign. On voting day these lists will be used to find where the potential voters (including “waiverers”) are so that they can be contacted and reminded or encouraged to vote.

Pam has an extraordinarily posh voice and looks frightful. She is terribly thin and tries to bulk herself out with a pea-green padded Countryside Alliance body-warmer hanging loosely over an emaciated and hunched body, giving her the look of an ancient farmer’s wife. Reflective, mottled grease-paper skin is stretched tightly over the pinched features of her face and she peers at the world through tiny, watery bird-like eyes. Her hair is thin, revealing in places a shiny bald pate. She has a look similar to Monty Burns in The Simpsons. The clumps of hair Pam does have left are long and streaked with the multiple colours. Pam turns out to be a very nice, considerate and friendly person. But, at first glance, she looks like an extra who has escaped from the set of a horror film. When Pam later reveals that she designs lampshades and sells them mail order for a living, Urquhart can not resist mumbling under his breath: “I wonder if she makes them out of human skin?”

Pam spends a lot of time chatting to Jane, a plump lady of probably about 70, white hair swept back and held in place with a hair band in the approved Alec Douglas-Home era Young Conservatives style. Jane seems to have more gravitas than anyone else in Team Marco – including especially Marco himself – and, unusually, she talks about politics from time to time, making reference to news items she has read in The Daily Telegraph. Jane, her friend Angela and another ferocious-looking long-retired woman with X-ray blue eyes who used to be a ward sister in a hospital, are soon in their element swapping stories about drug side-effects, hot-flushes, medical cock-ups, operations and symptoms. Urquhart joins in with talk of his own recent kidney disease and mind-altering drug treatment, and they turn out to be very knowledgeable about it all. Illness is by far the best entrée to the world of the very old, and therefore the contemporary Tory party. They think and talk about little else.

Eventually Jane fronted up Urquhart saying: “Why have you joined us? Don’t you know we are the evil party”. There were chuckles all round. But Urquhart kept a straight bat, and awkwardly trotted out a lengthy version of The Line – he and Trollope were Labour people but didn’t like Blair… no point in voting Liberal… etc. At one point Urquhart confessed: “to tell you the truth we are both holding our noses a bit” adding that it was worth it, since they wanted to “send a message to Tony Blair”. Jane listened to this with a crooked and highly suspicious look on her face. It was possible she did not believe a single word of this blather. But if so she was not letting on. She was much more interested in needling Forgione. Pretending to bring Urquhart up to date on the politics of the Richmond campaign Jane says, in an overly-loud foghorn stage-whisper: “You know the Lib Dems are very, very strong here – verrr strong – because they have got a fantastic candidate, a really, really capable candidate – and that makes such a difference… an excellent candidate” – unlike Marco!

Marco did not rise to the bait. But it was clear that these oldsters did not like him one little bit. On the first morning of canvassing The Colonel had continuously moaned to Trollope, confiding: “Forgione might make a good MP I suppose. But he is no good in any sort of management role. No good at all.” And the Colonel knew what he was talking about. Before retirement he had worked in “the business world” as a “logistics man”. But what, he wanted to know, had Marco Forgione ever done?

It was a good question.



CHAPTER FOUR:

A MAN OF NO SIGNIFICANCE

Marco Forgione was born in 1969 in Eton “just up the river from Richmond” as he claimed, the son of Lucio Forgione, an immigrant from the central region of Italy who had settled on the Somerset-Dorset border and gone into the catering business, specializing in society weddings. At the same time Forgione (senior) became active in the Conservative Party.

Lucio worked hard and sent Marco to Sherborne, a Hogwarts-type gothic 16th century public school for boys. Sherborne is one of the more exclusive public schools in the country, and the fees are about £20,000 a year. Marco was at school with the future King Mswati III of Swaziland. As a traditional Conservative and the “last absolute monarch in Africa” Mswati now spends fully 25 percent of the entire national budget of his poverty-stricken fiefdom on the upkeep of a private executive jet.

Other Sherborne alumni include few academic leading lights, but a good number of up-market actors (Jeremy Irons), plumy radio and TV presenters (Jon Pertwee) and professional snobs (Nigel Dempster). Sport is unsurprisingly big at the school. Sherborne school does especially well at Polo – and there is an annual needle-match with Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. School allowed Marco to play a lot of rugby, and to lose his Italian accent. If fact by the time he washed up in Richmond he could, according to another Italian-born Richmond Tory, Forgione could no longer speak the language with any fluency.

Marco did not emerge as an intellectual high-flyer, but he did manage to get into the London School of Economics where took a degree in Geography – a subject widely (and perhaps unfairly) seen at “good” universities like LSE as a way of taking the fees (and, eventually, endowments) of well-heeled but dim public schoolboys.

The world’s multinational corporations and firms of management consultants were not exactly queuing up to engage the services of the graduate Marco in 1993 and so he went to work in an essentially non-political secretarial role for the Labour politician Keith Vaz for a few months. After that he went back to Sherborne and worked in his dad’s catering firm. Although evidently profitable, “Griffin Fine Foods” remained a tiny unquoted company, listed at companies house (UK company No 03570209) and being required to submit only partial accounts and giving its registered address as the parcels office at Sherborne train station.

The nature of its business was officially stated as “catering for weddings and dinner parties” – in other words it was a sort of silver-service Italian takeaway, the main difference being that the food was delivered by Marco, instead of a death-dicing spotty youth on a scooter. At least, with his LSE Geography Degree, Marco would be able to read the A-Z street map. Or would he? According to The Colonel and to his secretary in the Richmond Conservative Association map reading and directions were two of his many defects.

In 1996 Marco launched his political career by appearing at the Conservative Party annual conference in Bournemouth. He was presented at a press conference by the party chairman Brian Mawhinney as “a former parliamentary advisor to the Labour leadership” who had “defected” to the Conservatives because he was “disillusioned by the in-fighting and back-stabbing” surrounding Tony Blair. This was a great story for the Tories on what was the eve of the 1997 election, but the hacks were not buying it. Marco at first said he had joined the Labour Party when he was a student at the LSE, but then admitted that he had never actually been a member – merely a “supporter”.

Even this was not true. He had been born into the bone of the Conservative party. His father was deputy chairman of the party in Yeovil and South Somerset. And when Marco admitted that far from being an “advisor” to the Labour leadership he merely done some filing and general admin work in Keith Vaz’s commons office, the press conference looked like descending into farce. Mawhinney quickly called it to a close. The Daily Telegraph reported proceeding under the headline SHAMBLES AS 'DEFECTOR' PROPAGANDA BACKFIRES. The Labour Party issued a statement describing Forgione as “a man of no significance” and the Telegraph’s political editor said Tory “spin doctors” were back-tracking from the stunt, mounting a “damage control exercise”.

After this setback Marco disappeared off the political scene for two or three years, emerging on the other side of the 1997 Labour general election landslide as Conservative candidate for his Dad’s home patch of Yeovil. During the 2001 general election Marco presented himself as an experienced “businessman” employed as a “manager” from 1996 – 2001. The reality was that he was just helping out in the catering firm, and had only made it to ‘manager’ by sheer nepotism.

On paper Marco did well in the 2001 election. The Tory campaign was dominated by leader William Hague’s decision to make the election a sort of referendum on whether or not the UK should adopt the single European currency, the Euro. Hague was opposing this with a flag-waving “Save The Pound” campaign. This was a tough one for Marco who needed to attract traditionally very pro-European Liberal voters in order to win. He avoided the question to such an extent that a leading anti-Euro campaigning group put him a list of “pro-European” Tory candidates, as opposed to an approved “Eurosceptic” list. Stung by this, and ever the party loyalist, the organiser of Marco’s campaign wrote to the campaigners saying: “I can categorically state that Marco Forgione is committed to retaining the Pound and is generally opposed to further European integration”. Marco was duly re-categorised as a “Eurosceptic”.
The Liberals saw of the Marco threat and kept the Yeovil, but on a reduced majority and Marco got a bigger-than-average swing (six percent). He boasted that this was the biggest swing to the Conservatives in the whole of South West England, and the “second or third” (ie, the third) biggest swing in the whole country. “This success is a testament to the hard work and efforts of my team,” he told the local paper.
In fact the relatively good swing was no surprise and, if anything, should have been much bigger in the circumstances. The seat had belonged to Paddy ‘Pantsdown’ Ashdown, the Liberal leader - SAS war hero and national celebrity who had been tarnished by a sex scandal. Pantsdown had retired, handing the Liberal batten to the lantern-jawed but otherwise far less attractive figure of Eric Laws – a dull former merchant banker and policy-wonk described in one broadsheet newspaper as a “second generation sado-monetarist”. Ashdown had a huge personal following (merely due to the fact that he was on TV such a lot) and his disappearance was thought to have put the seat in play as a possible shock Tory gain. Viewed in this light Marco’s six percent swing seemed very modest indeed.
Straightaway Marco was on the lookout for a more winnable seat, presenting himself as Lib Dem killer, experienced in the ways of the yellow peril out west. But he told the local Yeovil paper: “I haven’t decided yet about what I am going to do, but I think it might be wrong for me to not have another go.” The crucial words here were “yet” and “might”. Within a few months he had decided that it not wrong for him to not have another go, and he was off to Richmond – carpetbag in hand.
After selection as the Richmond candidate, Marco described his profession as “business manager”. Soon after that, though, he began describing himself on leaflets distributed around Richmond as “Director of an environmental charity”. The impression was that this might be something like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth – which would appeal to Richmond’s green-tinged Liberal voters. The reality was that Marco had landed a job as a press officer at the Chartered Institute of Landscape Architects – a trade association for companies which designed public and private gardens. The was not “director” but merely “a director” (of marketing) – one of half a dozen. And the organisation where he was one of several directors was a charity, but in the sense that many such not-for-profit professional associations enjoyed charitable status. And it was environmental in the sense that it existed in the environment (as opposed to in outer space, or at the bottom of the ocean). But an “environmental charity” it was not, really. Marco’s description of his job would have been more accurate if he had said “unqualified press officer for an association of lawn designers”.
At the same time Marco began describing himself as “a young dynamic local family man” and “a local campaign leader”. In one leaflet given out during the election campaign entitled MARCO FORGIONE – REPRESENTING LOCAL PEOPLE, he thanked “thousands of local residents who have supported my campaigning over the years”. The phrase “over the years” definitely gave the impression of a long, long time. But technically it only meant 24 months or more. The use of the plural “years” instead of “year” was an inspired bit of mendacity. At the time this claim was made he had lived in the borough for about 25 months.
Marco was not above using his children to establish his bogus “local man” credentials. In one leaflet he emphasised that his son had been born in the local hospital. The reality, when the claim was made, was that his son was less than one year old. Sometimes the grip on language would slip a bit and Marco would push things too far. In one leaflet he claimed to have been “working with local communities” for “several” years. The dictionary definition of “several” was “more than a few”, so this claim was the area was a simple lie. He should have used “a number of years”. Since two is a number, this would have kept him on the technical side of the truth. It was hard to see why it should count, but he was not “a local man” in any way at all. This was just a lie. He was from Dorset and had moved to Richmond solely to stand as a candidate.
Marco also claimed – as a specific qualification for the job of MP – “an excellent record of success”. Perhaps he meant he had lost to the Liberals in Yeovil with a performance which was worse than expected, but not as bad as it could have been. If this was Marco’s definition of “success” it made you wonder what would count as failure.
On yet another leaflet Marco set out the story of how he had supposedly got involved in politics “by accident”. This was a particularly blatant “pants on fire” job, even by Marco’s standards. What had happened, according to Marco, was that he had been a “non-political” and “local” (ie in Richmond) environmental and community campaigner who had been contacted by some “local mothers” who wanted his help in preventing the “local” Lib Dem council closing a children’s play area. Marco gave the impression that all of this had happened in Richmond. If it happened at all, then it was in Yeovil. And if he had joined the Tory party “by accident” then the fact that his father was the deputy chairman of his genuinely local (ie, Somerset) Conservative Association. He also said that “for the majority of my career since leaving the LSE” he had not been involved in politics. The truth was that he had been continuously involved in politics. His “Labour defector” stunt was of course not mentioned, and he was no longer claiming that he was a convert from the Labour party.
Soon after his arrival in the constituency the local paper accused Forgione of sharp political practice. He had a habit of having his picture taken in a variety of heroic “community activist” poses – futile attempts to save post offices from closure, NIMBY movements against extra runways at nearby Heathrow airport and so on – helping “ordinary local people” who often turned out to be cunningly disguised stooges, drawn from he dwindling band of Richmond Conservative activists. Despite complaints, he continued to do this unabashed. The leaflets Urquhart and Trollope were delivering were full of pictures of beaming “ordinary local people” who, in reality, were party activists (indeed, some of the younger and more photogenic people were used over and over – which was about the only form of recycling Forgione the “environmentalist” had ever been involved with).
Forgione was then accused of going one step further by “planting” Tory activists (disguised as normal people) along the high street in advance of a high-profile walkabout visit to the constituency by Michael Howard which was due to be televised. According to plan Howard would accidentally-on-purpose bump into these people who would then tell him what a great guy his was while the cameras got to work and broadcast the resulting “warm reception” to an uncaring nation. According to the newspaper, the TV reporters smelled a rat when a young mum supposedly accosted at random said “Hello Marco… am I doing this right?” in front of the cameras. Another “ordinary” person they “bumped into at random” turned out to Conservative Party press officer Melanie Larter who gushed forth until a hack from the local paper recognised her. Realising that she had been rumbled, Larter, the paper reported, “giggled, held her hands to her lips and said ‘shush’.” Marco confessed that Larter worked for him, adding: “I didn't know she was going to be there. I was as surprised as you to see her.” When the reporter doubted this Marco feigned hurt: “You cynic! I can absolutely swear with hand on my heart, and I say this as a Roman Catholic.”
One day, early in the campaign, Urquhart had been squashed in the back of the Battle banger as the Major drove and Marco sat in the front passenger seat, speaking into his mobile phone, deeply wrapped up in an interview with a local newspaper reporter, laying it on thick, lying away to whoever it was on the other end of the line: “I don’t see myself first and foremost as a Conservative,” Marco had said. “I have never been a party man. What I am is a local community campaigner.” He added that if was to be “completely honest” he was not as interested in national party politics, or being an MP “just for the sake of it”. He said: “I just find the Conservative Party as a useful platform for the sort things I want to do for the community…”.
Jane, the old sage and cynic, smiled as she listen: “That’s him doing his Liberal Democrat act,” she whispered.

He was Marco Fraudi-Phoney – a man of no significance.



CHAPTER FIVE:

Trollope drove into the street in Richmond where he was officially living (in Sin!) with Urquhart for his time as a Tory to be met with a sight for which he was psychologically unprepared. There standing in the front garden of “his” house was an eight foot wooden pole with a VOTE MARCO FORGIONE – CONSERVATIVE poster stuck to a large piece of hardboard in the style of an estate agent’s For Sale sign. It was 5pm in the evening and he arranged to go out with Urquhart canvassing for the Tories in Tudor ward on the other side of the constituency.

As chance would have it Urquhart turned up at exactly the same time, returning from a spell of jury service that had coincided with the first week of the election campaign and, thus, The Project. Trollope saw Urquhart look at the sign and go into a state of shock: “Oh f***! Look at that,” he said. And he kept repeating this two-word mantra, involuntarily nursing his head in his hand. Being a coward, Urquhart peeped in through the window to see if his wife Mrs Urquhart (not real name) was in. She was. “Oh f***, oh f***!” Mrs Urquhart (not real name) was a dedicated ideological socialist. She had reservations about the project in the first place. So Urquhart knew this was not going to play well with her. Oh f***!

Urquhart hit upon the brilliant plan of blaming Trollope. It was in fact true that Trollope had agreed to “display a poster” during his original fateful phone call to FraudiPhoney. What he had in mind was maybe an A4 poster that could be put in the window and then covered up with shrubbery in some way. Instead they had ended up with this… carbuncle… this dayglow Nelson’s column of political shame.

In the event Mrs Urquhart (not real name), who had grown wearily used to Urquhart’s escapades over the years, displayed a boundless degree of tolerance. She merely pointed out that the very sight of the sign “made her flesh creep”. That it would ruin her innocent pleasure of gardening and arranging pots full of flowers that, she thought, was most unfortunate. Finally Mrs Urquhart (not real name) calmly but assertively warned that if the sign stayed in place for even one second after the polls closed she would personally relocated it about Urquhart’s person in a place where the sun never shines.

The partners mulled over the sign question as they drove through Richmond Park to the rendezvous point in Tudor Ward. Urquhart was feeling very paranoid about it, but he later conceded this feeling was largely pharmacological – a side effect of his kidney medicine.

But at the time he was in a pretty dark place, and fairly certain FraudiPhoney had sussed out the Project. The appearance of sign might be taken by a sane man that he had done just the opposite, Trollope observed. Ah! but that was the point. The Tories were devious, Urquhart said. They had obviously arranged for the sign to be stuck up as way of smoking them out. It was a test. Trollope was more inclined to think that it was just routine idiocy and, perhaps, wishful thinking. “These people just go round putting up these signs,” he explained, adding: “It is what they do”.

Anyway, Trollope said, Old Fraudi was hardly in a position to point the finger. He had been far more devious himself in 1996 – when he joined the Tories claiming to be a Labour “defector”. That was the start of his entire political career. And in the case of FraudiPhoney none of it was true.

Anyhow, what were the Tories going to do? - march up to Trollope himself and say “you can not possibly be a Conservative – we can tell because you are black”. They might think that. Oh yes. But they were not going to come out and say it. No, no, no.

He and Urquhart were not doing anything illegal. And Richmond Conservative Association might be many things, but its members were not apparently violent or dangerous. If they found out what Urquhart and Trollope were up to, they would obviously want to boil them in oil or perhaps hold them in a basement to be bartered for General Pinochet in a prisoner exchange deal. But wanting and doing are different things. He reckoned the worst of it would be a flurry of threatened legal action, a stiffly worded letter to The Daily Telegraph, and pre-emptive blackballing at every golf club in the greater Surrey area.

The pair thus rolled into the rendezvous point, the car park of a sports centre, they spotted Fraudi with a gang of two or three blokes hanging about, and rolled up next to them, crunching the gavel under the tyres like a scene from checkpoint Charlie or a drug deal. This was the Tory late shift – heavier in intent and girth than Lampshade Pam and the Iron Ladies who had dominated the first, daytime canvassing session of The Project.

This time the activity was taking place in the evening, and so there was no excuse for those below retirement age – such as the party’s large contingent of paid local authority councillors – not turning out. Still the gathering was thin.

Looming over the proceeding was the grim figure of Big Frank. But only person of genuinely impressive togetherness and dynamism was a 40-ish man called Sean who was introduced as an official of some sort of the party. Sean seems to know what he is doing and has got the canvassing return sheets all sorted out in advance. He introduced the concept of “running the board” – whereby one member of the canvassing team didn’t actually knock on doors but, instead, kept the running total of promised votes up to date. The previous day, under the bungling aegis of the Pam the Lampshade Lady, this task had no name.

As Sean is going through his professional shmatter Urquhart becomes uncomfortably aware that Big Frank is staring at him with the intensity of a beam of X-rays. Eventually Big Frank looks Urquhart squarely in the face and says: “I’ve seen you somewhere before haven’t I… hmmmm?”


This was entirely possible – perhaps on one of his TV appearances as a pundit, or possibly his picture by-line in a broadsheet newspaper or freely available on the Internet with a Google search. He was pretty sure that Big Frank had at some point canvassed his home in Richmond during a previous election and that he had given a flea in his ear.

But Urquhart just shrugged his shoulders and styled it out. “I don’t think so… no…. you must be mixing me up with somebody else…” At this point, Fraudi leapt to Urquhart’s rescue. “That’s ‘cos you’re a magistrate Frank! He’s probably been up before you in the dock… ha, ha, ha”. In the first of many Tarantino moments, a conversation about jury service breaks out – Urquhart mentions that at the moment he is “in super civic active-citizen mode” – jury service by day, canvassing in the general election by night.

“I hope you are banging them all up and throwing away the key…” Fraudi quips. “Well, sort of…,” says Urquhart.

After these skirmishes Team Marco starts off on the business of canvassing. Tudor ward is part of the Richmond Park constituency – named after a long and winding road of former council owned interwar “cottage” semis called Tudor Avenue, but forms part of the neighbouring local council of Kingston, which is Liberal Democrat held.

Tudor, however, absolutely sold Tory territory, described by French as “bedrock”. In the Kingston council elections in 2002 the Tories beat the Liberals by almost 3-1, taking about 1,700 votes to 600 for the Liberals out of a total of around 7,000 available votes. Labour and the Green were in joint third place with about 200 votes each.

The ward has an entirely different feel to the Vineyard, the place Urquhart and Trollope canvassed on the previous day. The housing here is much more modern – most of it apparently post-war or interwar. There’s a good sprinkling of boxy 60s and ‘70s semis, with built-in garages and parts of the ward look like the remnants of a privatised council estate. The 3,000 acres of Richmond Park block the way to London and there are no easy transport links here to the City or Whitehall. There’s not much feel of bohemianism or gentrification here. Everything is orientated to working in the offices and light industrial enterprises of Kingston and Surrey.

Tudor Ward is relentlessly suburban – not like the Belgravia-with-trees of central Richmond or the left bohemian splendour of “Barnes Village”. This is solid Thatcherite subtopia.

The people here are the “Hard Working Families” (ie White People) of Tory legend – well off, but fairly dull white collar types, big taxpayers - always getting suckered – reliable, respectable, law-abiding, mainstream - almost entirely more middle-aged than old, with mundane anthill jobs – up to their armpits in mortgage and credit card debt, a good slice with their kids in private education. They are very sensitive to tax or changes in interest rates. Questioning on the doorstep shows the real contest here is between Tories and non-voting “ex-Tories”, still sore over the interest rate and poll tax hikes ten or more years previously.

The Team assembles on a street corner to compile the canvassing returns and Big Frank tells a fantastic war story about how a vanload of fifteen police had just stormed a house he was canvassing, bursting in and arresting people just as he was approaching,leaflets in hand. He told the cops: “don’t arrest me, I am only canvassing” and this witticism was treated by Fraudi and French as though it were a fresh gem from Oscar Wilde. “What were they Frank. Irish? Or Muslims?” What was it with this constant ethnic talk – it was like an itch they had to scratch all the time. Frank says he thinks those arrested had “half-Irish, half-American accents”. After this everyone is released for a bit of free form canvassing or leaflet delivery up and down the main road through Tudor ward, with a general plan to meet up for a drink when it got dark.

The pub is a big, old fashioned and un-modernised 1930s roadhouse type, the centrepiece of many an interwar council estate. The bar where Team Marco gathers is largely deserted. The bigger, carpeted part of the pub is packed with people watching a European cup match between Liverpool and Chelsea on a huge screen. The Team has now dwindled to just four people – Urquhart, Trollope, Fraudi himself and a new character – a young - possibly even only 20-something - clean cut Canadian - maybe the world’s only right-wing Canadian. He has the look about him of an estate agent – slim, smart in a casual way, dark blue suit, matching light blue shirt with no tie, very carefully cut short strawberry blond hair.

Fraudi gets the beers in. When he comes back there’s some pretty energetic political talk from Urquhart, who is overdoing it as usual. He’s laying out all the reasons why he thinks the people he has met on the doorstep will not vote Conservative and why, generally, it looks as though “the Conservatives” (not “us” or “we”) locally and nationally had about much chance of winning as “a one legged man has of winning an arse-kicking competition”. Trollope gives Urquhart various looks, trying to get him to tone it all down. We are here in the pub having a beer, Trollope is trying to signal: Aren’t you ever ‘off’? Fraudi listens to Urquhart’s fevered analysis with a tin ear. “The thing is,” The Candidate says finally, in a perfectly bright and friendly way “when you are canvassing, you can’t believe a word most of ‘em say to you. Most of ‘em. They will say they are going to vote for you, and then not do it. Others will say they are against you, then they change their minds…”. It turns out that the politicians are now as cynical about voters, as the voters are about them –Voters! They’re all the same… They’re all as bad as each other… Scum.

Then, without warning Fraudi launches into talk about the poster that has been erected in Urquhart’s front garden. Was it OK to do that? Urquhart dodged the question and truthfully said that his wife was “hopping mad” about it. It was not that she was all that political – she was “essentially non-political” Urquhart said. But she doesn’t like it because “it doesn’t go with the curtains”. Women eh?! You know what they are like. Bloody nightmare! There was much mirth about this from Fraudi who said he “understood entirely” – Urquhart in the doghouse, She Who Must Be Obeyed, Rolling Pins at Dawn, and so on. Fraudi and the Canadian both seemed to find this talk of feminine domestic terror hilarious.

After this bulletin from the front line of the battle of the sexes, we are all sitting in a bloke-only pub, with a big football game going on in the next room, knocking back pints of ale and practically picking our noses and scratching our crotches. We are all great chums, like members of a Rugby Club drinking teams which evidently played such a part in Fraudi’s student and schoolboy salad days. As part of this mood Fraudi starts telling war stories about the day’s canvassing, and how it is all going.

Fraudi goes to the bar again and the Canadian disappears to toilet leaving Trollope and Urquhart together for a little while. They have done a bit of canvassing now, at a couple of locations in the borough, and the main impression is that people are far less hostile than they had expected. In particular there is hardly any racial reaction on the doorstep towards Trollope or the idea that a black Tory might in any way be odd. The Major and the Colonel were obviously a bit old-fashioned on the subject, and there was the business of Big Frank going on about the 15 arrested “terrorists”. But overall – so far so good – it was all fairly encouraging. Maybe the media and the chattering classes have got it wrong - the general public and the Tories are much less racist than previously thought.

Fraudi returns from the bar and plonks down the lagers, tossed a bag of crisps into the middle of the table and launches straight away into his favourite canvassing war story of the night, all smiles and chuckles.

“I knocked on one door and this old Glaswegian guy came out… verrrr much the died in the wool Old Labour supporter, and he said: ‘I don’t like Blair. But I am not voting for a F****ing Welsh Jewboy like Michael Howard’.”

There is an agonized pause. It wasn’t entirely clear why Fraudi had decided to unburden himself of this story. Probably he told it to try and point out that as a progressive, modern sort of Tory he was not an anti-semite or racist himself.

Trollope, the resident race relations expert, came to the rescue and defused an awkward moment:

“Better put him down as a ‘don’t know’ then”.