The fact that the request came in late on a Thursday afternoon should have aroused my suspicions. ‘Are you available?’ she asked.
This was a BBC producer asking me if I was free to appear on Any Questions the following day. I quickly ran through my commitments: pick up Caroline’s dry-cleaning, fix the lavatory seat in the upstairs loo, take Ludo to the doctor.
‘Of course I’m available,’ I said.
It wasn’t until I was introduced by Jonathan Dimbleby that I realised why they’d called me so late. ‘Toby Young has heroically stepped into the breach after Kelvin Mackenzie dropped out,’ he said.
It didn’t take long to realise why Kelvin had done a reverse ferret. The programme was being broadcast from Caroline Lucas’s constituency in Brighton. The last time I did Any Questions was in Liverpool, the city with the most workless households in the UK (31.9 per cent), and I didn’t think I’d ever face a more hostile audience than that. I was wrong.
The first question was about the eurozone crisis and I gave what I thought was an even-handed reply in which I praised Gordon Brown and Ed Balls for keeping us out of the euro, but also complimented George Osborne for putting in place a fiscal consolidation strategy that, so far, has stopped us being engulfed by the sovereign debt storm. I pointed out that if Labour had been re-elected it’s unlikely Britain would have retained its AAA credit rating and that, in turn, would have pushed up the cost of government borrowing to unmanageable levels.
I might as well have praised Osama bin Laden. Actually, this audience was so anti-establishment that that would have been greeted with polite applause. As it was, I was almost booed off the stage.
Sitting beside me was Andrew Mitchell, the Secretary of State for International Development. I naively thought he might be one of the few Cabinet ministers that Caroline Lucas’s supporters would be sympathetic to — him and Chris Huhne. But no. Almost as soon as he opened his mouth, the audience started barracking him. When he mentioned the economic mess this government inherited from the last government, I thought the roof was going to come off, so loud were the jeers and catcalls.
We struggled on manfully, but it didn’t get any easier. The subject of free schools came up and I did my best to explain that, far from being an ideological experiment that we can ill afford, they represent good value for money. Given that the UK’s population is projected to reach 70 million before long, we desperately need more school places. Under the last government, the average cost of setting up a new secondary was £28 million, whereas the West London Free School will only cost £15 million, thanks in part to the fact that it’s been set up by a group of volunteers donating their labour for free.
They didn’t like that, I can tell you. A man in the front row, puce with rage, shouted out ‘rubbish’. Dimbleby asked for a show of hands: who was in favour of free schools and who was against? The nays outnumbered the yays by ten to one.
By this time Andrew Mitchell had begun to enjoy himself. He leaned over as the Shadow Minister for Care and Older People was talking (‘I just want to utterly refute something Toby said…’) and whispered that he was going to get the audience really riled up. After the thunderous applause for the Labour spokeswoman had died down, it was his turn to speak.
‘This man deserves an enormous amount of credit for having started a free school,’ he said, prompting an eruption of boos and hisses so cacophonous it was impossible to hear another word coming out of his mouth. I began to fear for our safety, imagining that enraged lefties would start hurling themselves at the stage, fists flying. The Secretary of State was completely unfazed and just ploughed on regardless, possibly drawing on his experiences as a UN peacekeeper.
We managed to get through it in one piece and afterwards tried to work out why we’d been given such a hostile reception. Even for environmentalists, they seemed particularly unhinged. It turned out the building we were in was a college of further education and the majority of the audience were either members of the NUT or students they’d managed to brainwash. Not greens then, but militant Trotskyists. Kelvin did well to withdraw. I’m not sure he would have got out of there alive.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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