Lately, people only have to look at me to splurge their deepest, darkest secret. Last May, they did a terrible thing. They voted Tory. Now they’re contemplating greater deviance: voting to leave the EU — if only, they say, the campaign was fronted by someone they could believe in. And who do they want? The answer surprised me. Theresa is no temptation, as it turns out, nor even Boris. No, it’s Michael Gove they fancy.
Westminster types might read this and splutter, ‘What tosh! If there’s one thing we know about the British public, it’s that they hate him.’ But these are the experts who failed to predict the outcome of the general election. Whereas I was sure the Tories would win, simply from talking to my relatives.
First, my state-school-teacher mother voted Tory in homage to Gove, since his education reforms had restored her faith in teaching. The party may have knifed her hero, but still it was the right thing to do. Then my father went all gooey-eyed and started saying weirdly positive things about ‘Dave’.
Then my brother, who works at the BBC, in the heart of socialist Salford, registered to vote for the first time, at the grand old age of 29, to go blue. My friends began to mutter: ‘Cameron may look like a smarmy git but he’s done a bloody good job.’
Shy Toryism among the lower classes isn’t new. It’s a tendency rife among people who don’t like to have their intelligence insulted (and that’s why they don’t like the ‘in’ campaign one little bit). It has existed, to my certain knowledge, since the 1960s, when my working-class, Irish Catholic great-grandmother was rumoured to have included ‘voting Conservative’ in her deathbed confession. Pollsters also called the election result wrong in 1987 and 1992.
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