Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
I’ve come up with a slogan to revive flagging Conservative canvassers — and an encouraging report from the doorsteps. My man in the housing estates of suburban York, of which I wrote two weeks ago, told me ‘the Labour vote is collapsing’ two days before reporters started using that phrase on Radio 4. He also said he was still meeting large numbers of ‘don’t knows’. So there’s everything to play for. But no one could say the Tory campaign has gone according to plan — and that fact is adding new venom to criticism of George Osborne, who is the campaign’s director as well as would-be chancellor. Wondering how much of the venom emanates from sources close to Lord Mandelson, I have been conducting my own canvass about Osborne in the financial world — and I’m sorry to say I haven’t found a single respondent in the past ten days who wholeheartedly endorses him. Almost all describe him as too inexperienced, too cocky, too eager to grab a headline. One senior City figure emailed, ‘A fast learner so will probably be OK,’ only to ring later with, ‘On second thoughts, he’s got to go.’ The most balanced assessment was, ‘Put a gun to the average trader’s or fund manager’s head and ask who they want as chancellor out of Osborne, Cable the moralising windbag or Darling the ditherer, and I suspect the answer would be Osborne.’
I also asked what they thought of his deputy, Philip Hammond, whom Westminster watchers see as a coming man. ‘Measured, cogent, knows his stuff, but not a leader,’ would be a fair summary, with a significant minority saying, ‘No idea, don’t even know what he looks like.’ As to whom they would really prefer as chancellor, the answer is the same as I suspect it would be from most of those flagging Tory canvassers: either Ken Clarke, if he’d do it, or William Hague. The inescapable conclusion of my survey is that, even if the Tories squeak a win, Cameron’s right-hand man should sooner or later start thinking of a second career in Osborne and Little, his family’s successful wallpaper and furnishing fabrics business. In short — here’s the slogan at last — it’s curtains for George.
The Townshend saga
The deaths of Marquess Townshend, the aristocratic founder-chairman of Anglia Television, and Lord (Alex) Bernstein, second-generation head of Granada, are a reminder of the wide variety of visionary entrepreneurs who created British commercial television in the 1950s and 1960s, and how high their aspirations were. Broadcasting to the farming communities of eastern England, and with two Cambridge colleges among its first investors, Anglia made its name with the natural history series Survival. Granada, originally a cinema chain led by Alex Bernstein’s showman uncle Sidney, had successes with World in Action and University Challenge as well as Coronation Street. The founders were moneymen and dealmakers but they also genuinely wanted to broaden viewers’ horizons, rather than drive public taste relentlessly downwards in pursuit of fading ad revenues like their desperate successors today.
Incidentally, the 93-year-old Townshend was also notable for a deal concocted before he was born: his parents’ marriage contract. In 1905, his eccentric and impecunious father, the sixth marquess, having failed to find himself a rich American wife, agreed to pay £2,000 to a government clerk named Dunne for an introduction to a barrister, Thomas Sutherst, who would pay off the marquess’s debts if the latter would marry his daughter Gladys. A wedding duly took place, but Sutherst — who turned out to be an undischarged bankrupt — immediately tried to have the marquess declared insane. Nevertheless the marriage survived, and it was Gladys who eventually managed the Townshend finances back to health. The tale would make a fine television drama; pity they don’t make many of those any more.
Platform 2 for Paris
The winner of my competition (27 February) for the most provocative high-speed rail route from London to the Midlands might well have been the embattled Transport Secretary Lord Adonis himself, since his route across leafy Buckinghamshire — if the next government doesn’t abandon the project — is a recipe for decades of nimbyist strife. But the minister was too busy masterminding the great air-traffic cock-up to send me a postcard, so a bottle of claret goes instead to none other than I.K. Gricer, Christopher Fildes’s still-sprightly City and Suburban railway correspondent. He writes: ‘The man who got this right was Sir Edward Watkin, the Victorian railway magnate, who controlled the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire, the Metropolitan, and the South Eastern, and built the Great Central to link them all up. So his high-speed line ran from Lancashire and Yorkshire to London and Folkestone. He was also a promoter of the Channel Tunnel Company, which would allow his trains to run through to the Chemin de Fer du Nord. A sign on Woodford Halse station (junction for Banbury) directed passengers to Platform 2 for Paris. Lord Adonis should have followed it.’
All eyes on Helmsley
I had just been discussing with a neighbour the idea that the leaders’ debates would have been better broadcast from a real pub with Brown, Cameron and Clegg hunched round a small table, eyeball to eyeball, clutching pints of beer. That would have removed entirely the glitzy talent-show element that has so distorted this campaign. Then I heard that polling in our Yorkshire constituency of Thirsk and Malton has been deferred to 27 May following the death of the Ukip candidate. The seat — carved by boundary changes out of the old true-blue Ryedale and Vale of York — ought to be a comfortable Conservative win. But if the Lib Dems have a strong run on 6 May, they will surely fancy their chances in a low-turnout one-seat poll three weeks later. And the Tories will be desperate to avoid a final embarrassment. So we can expect a concentrated local re-run of the whole campaign — and since my home town of Helmsley is in the middle of the constituency and one of the most photogenic places in England, let me propose a special Clegg-Cameron debate (by then I doubt it will be worth a train fare for Brown) in the public bar of our excellent Royal Oak; I’m sure they’ll turn off the big sports screen for the occasion. As the town’s only journalist, and after years of presenting Helmsley in this column as a perfect metaphor of British social and economic change in miniature, I’ll even offer to buy the first round.
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