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Confessions of a Tory Girl

Independent on Sunday - 27.06.04

I wasn't what you would call a problem child, or even a troublesome teenager. In fact I was studious, spirited and generally well adjusted. Yet at the same time there was something pretty odd about me - or at least that's how other people often made me feel. I had known for some time that my interests had cast me as an 'early developer' but it wasn't until May 2 1979 that I made explicit reference to them in my secret diary. I was then twelve years old - living in suburban Wimbledon and a pupil at the local private girls' school. I had several passions including dancing, ice cream, Starsky and Hutch, clothes and the movie Grease. Boys were beginning to feature in a small way but it wasn't any of these fairly predictable preoccupations that caused me to take pen to paper in a series of furtive midnight scribblings. Alongside homework problems the main thing on my mind that night was noting the small part I hoped I had played in shifting the course of British history; "Tried to get Wendy's mum to vote for Mrs T", I wrote with astonishing self assurance. And then when the size of her victory became obvious a couple of days later I noted, "I'm sure the country will be better off with the Conservatives".

So at 12 I was already the female equivalent of Harry Enfield's cutting satirical creation, Tory Boy, but it wasn't until I actually joined the Young Conservatives a couple of years later that it gradually began to dawn on me how defiantly 'uncool' this was. At first the trendy-ness or otherwise of my new hobby was hardly a concern because I was a naïve idealist for whom politics had always seemed fascinating and vital. Neither of my parents had been didactic but ours had been a political home, with a small 'p' anyway. My father was a journalist whose work had brought all those big cold war issues home to us everyday and my hard working Mum had explained to me at 8, when the Conservative candidate had stopped us in the street with leaflets, that we were Tories. And I never felt the need to rebel because being interested in politics marked me out as unusual enough without having to bat for the left just for the sake of being different.

At first I quite enjoyed the notoriety of being the one girl in a pony loving school who left early to organise a political meeting or two. Not that Wimbledon Young Conservatives was a hotbed of activity when I first joined (and became branch secretary within a week) but Thatcher's magic was potent. I watched the whole movement grow ever more radical and politicised as a generation of pint sized proselytisers competed to outdo each other in their determination to parade their ever drier, new- right credentials. And with CND, the GLC, General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill as our demons there were reasons enough to inspire the transition from the clapped out marriage bureau to ideological cell. Later, when I was at university in the mid 1980s Tory youth grew so radical that it proved too controversial even for the Party which closed down the Federation of Conservative Students after reports of drunken excess and offers of mutual aid to 'freedom fighter' rebels in Mozambique and Nicaragua. But back in south-west London about as rowdy as we got was disrupting a huge CND demo which besieged Wandsworth Town Hall by erecting a huge CND loves the KGB banner slung right across the one way system between two lamp posts.

At the time that kind of direct action seemed quite cool but the more involved I became with my YC colleagues the more I also secretly sympathised with those friends of mine who thought I had taken a credibility by-pass on joining the YCs. Did it bother me? Yes, I have to admit that it did a bit. I was in every other way a fashion conscious teenage girl - but both in professing this precocious interest in politics and, more importantly, in my choice of team, I had rendered myself beyond the pale of social acceptability. Perhaps the nadir for me was joining the coaches of press ganged party members who had been corralled into a vast public display of camaraderie ahead of the 1983 general election. Fortunately for the Tory Party Labour's Sheffield election rally of 1992 has since passed into the annals as the worst case example of campaigning excess. Were it not for that surely our attempt at rousing the troops in Wembley stadium would win the prize? Kenny Everett suggesting we kick away Michael Foot's stick was tasteless though funny. But Lynsey de Paul singing Tory, Tory, Tory, was just sick making. Labour's Red Wedge was still in its infancy, but they got Billy Bragg, the Specials and Paul Weller (all favourites with my school friends) and we got a clapped out Eurovision contestant and Tim Rice. The celebrity endorsements said it all.

But it wasn't the naffness of our supporters that really fuelled my growing ambivalence. Whilst my membership of the YCs saw me grow ever more confident of the childish wisdom I had noted in my early election diary, my proximity to many of the other members felt increasingly uncomfortable. In 1982, my O level year, I was encouraged to take my political career one step up the ladder of Chairmanship (to which I had effortlessly passed) of Wimbledon YCs to run as representative of the local area group of ten or so branches. The election for this post had become caught up in the hysteria of 'wet versus dry' in-fighting that saw pin striped 'Billy Bunterish' schoolboys and close cropped Essex Libertarians engage in increasingly bitter wars of words with what remained of the tweed jacketed county set and the grammar school moderates. I stood on a dull but worthy platform offering faction-free good organisation.

But as I looked around the vastly male and '16 going on 60 year old' audience I realised I had totally misread the mood. The winner had the right wing slate sown up and in return offered an uncompromising agenda of Unionism (certainly not the Trades' variety), hanging, pro life and anti communism. There in the HQ of Kingston Conservatives, Surrey's county town, communism didn't seem an immediate threat. But I could see that my failure to advance the case for unfettered capitalism had lost me the chance to graduate from regular YC to comrade in arms. We weren't fighting the local Labour Party - that was far too prosaic for these renegade boys, we were engaged in a world wide struggle for life, liberty and the free market.

I arrived at York University in 1985 to study politics a year after its best known alumnus, Harry Enfield had graduated. But Tory Boy's influence proved enduring and even for a true blue like me the posturing machismo of my former YC colleagues had rather put me off joining the Conservative Students. Clearly I was a lightweight in refusing to don the Dole not Coal tee shirts and the Hang Nelson Mandela badges. But I would continue to vote Conservative which mystified and horrified most of my student friends who glibly dubbed me "Too nice to be a Tory". It would take another couple of decades later before the Party would admitted that it had suffered for being seen as nasty. The description wasn't always fair but it was potent and in the perception of many of my contemporaries that nastiness was best personified in my Tory Boy colleagues and their provocative antics.

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