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| Back on the Isle of Wight, Tory Britain rehearses its collapse | Back on the Isle of Wight, Tory Britain rehearses its collapse |
| (about 20 hours later) | |
| Going home? Not quite. Although it’s my birthplace, the Isle of Wight is almost terra incognita to me. With 110,000 voters, it’s the biggest constituency in the country, and a high proportion are old and Tory. | Going home? Not quite. Although it’s my birthplace, the Isle of Wight is almost terra incognita to me. With 110,000 voters, it’s the biggest constituency in the country, and a high proportion are old and Tory. |
| Distant childhood memories blur into an idea of a backwater frozen in the 50s – white sliced bread, spam, a doll’s ration book, my father playing cricket on Shorwell village green, walking to the tiny two-class village school, a tiddly winks contest, Virol, Fru-Grains, cod liver oil and blue-top orange juice from the clinic. Why my father brought my mother here in the war, I don’t know, but I was born in the bitter December of 1946, when snow reached the windows until March. The Attlee government struggled with an energy crisis, while my mother struggled with a new baby and a rationed one-bar electric fire. | |
| It’s not rich – with the food bank HQ nearby and Ofsted denouncing island schools as among the nation’s worst | It’s not rich – with the food bank HQ nearby and Ofsted denouncing island schools as among the nation’s worst |
| This time I come away no wiser as to why they came here, but not entirely surprised my mother divorced my father and fled. Escaping is what many of the young do here. The long-serving editor of the island’s County Press says he urged his children to go. But, he says, people get stuck. I met a good few – professionals too – who hadn’t left the island in months. I never came back, except to see Bob Dylan in 1969. How do the young feel? I noted a youth club called Wight Trash. And to London eyes, the place does feel bleached at 98% white, plus 1% Filipino nurses and care home staff. It’s not rich – posh Royal Yacht Squadron Cowes is a fragment of island life, with the food bank HQ nearby and Ofsted denouncing island schools as among the nation’s worst. | This time I come away no wiser as to why they came here, but not entirely surprised my mother divorced my father and fled. Escaping is what many of the young do here. The long-serving editor of the island’s County Press says he urged his children to go. But, he says, people get stuck. I met a good few – professionals too – who hadn’t left the island in months. I never came back, except to see Bob Dylan in 1969. How do the young feel? I noted a youth club called Wight Trash. And to London eyes, the place does feel bleached at 98% white, plus 1% Filipino nurses and care home staff. It’s not rich – posh Royal Yacht Squadron Cowes is a fragment of island life, with the food bank HQ nearby and Ofsted denouncing island schools as among the nation’s worst. |
| My expectation as an outsider – “overner”, as they call us here – was of a sleepy memory lane on solid Tory turf. But no, the island is a hotbed of turmoil. The County Press has bristled with civil war in Toryville – his biggest story, says editor Alan Marriott. Andrew Turner, MP since 2001, was almost ousted in a January coup, surviving deselection by just one vote. The putsch came from some Tory councillors. Why? Certainly not politics: Turner is well tuned to local sentiment – adamantly anti-EU, anti-immigration, anti-wind turbine. When, eventually, I squeezed a cautiously chaperoned interview out of him, he said his politics were “not that different” from the Ukip candidate’s. “I voted no in the 1975 referendum”, and he was a rumoured Ukip-defector. What does he think of Cameron? “I’m reasonably happy with him” is his grudging best. | My expectation as an outsider – “overner”, as they call us here – was of a sleepy memory lane on solid Tory turf. But no, the island is a hotbed of turmoil. The County Press has bristled with civil war in Toryville – his biggest story, says editor Alan Marriott. Andrew Turner, MP since 2001, was almost ousted in a January coup, surviving deselection by just one vote. The putsch came from some Tory councillors. Why? Certainly not politics: Turner is well tuned to local sentiment – adamantly anti-EU, anti-immigration, anti-wind turbine. When, eventually, I squeezed a cautiously chaperoned interview out of him, he said his politics were “not that different” from the Ukip candidate’s. “I voted no in the 1975 referendum”, and he was a rumoured Ukip-defector. What does he think of Cameron? “I’m reasonably happy with him” is his grudging best. |
| The trouble began at a Valentine’s ball, when Turner’s partner of many years had a noisy row with a Tory councillor’s partner and things escalated. Turner’s Tory opponents challenged his expenses: he had flipped a large Georgian pile in Newport with a London flat and claimed £103,000. But they’d left it too late, said the parliamentary standards commissioner, as all the bills had been shredded in 2010. She warned they should not “make use of the work of my office as a way of trying to resolve internal difficulties”. | |
| Turner’s partner was suspected by Tory councillors of defecting to the independents who took control of the council, as she was photographed hob-nobbing with them and their champion Martin Bell. The hostile Tories described her as a Svengali-type who ran everything Turner did. Then the County Press reported that she had run off with Turner’s transport adviser. Turner’s enemies said that after suffering a stroke in 2006 he was no longer fit to be an MP. It got very nasty. Never say island life is dull. | |
| Turner is positively serene compared with his Ukip challenger, Iain Mackie, who brims with aggression, combat-ready after his party won 41% in the EU elections. “I’m passionate!” he kept saying, as he hammered on about Turner’s expenses. But the odds are strongly on a Tory victory. “Anything in a blue rosette wins here,” said one islander waiting at the ferry port. | Turner is positively serene compared with his Ukip challenger, Iain Mackie, who brims with aggression, combat-ready after his party won 41% in the EU elections. “I’m passionate!” he kept saying, as he hammered on about Turner’s expenses. But the odds are strongly on a Tory victory. “Anything in a blue rosette wins here,” said one islander waiting at the ferry port. |
| But that’s not the whole island story. My birth certificate was issued in Ventnor, a gem of a mini-Victorian resort where Labour candidate Stewart Blackmore is a town councillor. Despite 38 years here, he still speaks strong Aberdonian, as he introduces me to some un-Tory Ventor people. The hyperactive 77-year-old town clerk, tall and craggy, spent his pre-island life in Rochdale community work, skilful at raising funds and grants: half Ventor’s four wards are among the UK’s most deprived. One councillor is a former Leeds university politics lecturer and their leader is a live-wire activist. They beam at the Tories calling this “the independent socialist republic of Ventnor”. Cuts have hit hard, as everywhere. “I’ve had people in tears over the bedroom tax,” Blackmore says. If Ukip, the independent council leader and the Tory vote splits three ways, he might break through to second place. | But that’s not the whole island story. My birth certificate was issued in Ventnor, a gem of a mini-Victorian resort where Labour candidate Stewart Blackmore is a town councillor. Despite 38 years here, he still speaks strong Aberdonian, as he introduces me to some un-Tory Ventor people. The hyperactive 77-year-old town clerk, tall and craggy, spent his pre-island life in Rochdale community work, skilful at raising funds and grants: half Ventor’s four wards are among the UK’s most deprived. One councillor is a former Leeds university politics lecturer and their leader is a live-wire activist. They beam at the Tories calling this “the independent socialist republic of Ventnor”. Cuts have hit hard, as everywhere. “I’ve had people in tears over the bedroom tax,” Blackmore says. If Ukip, the independent council leader and the Tory vote splits three ways, he might break through to second place. |
| However cocky the Tory campaign looks, you just need to lift a stone or two in the heartlands to find fissures | However cocky the Tory campaign looks, you just need to lift a stone or two in the heartlands to find fissures |
| Good reasons not to dismiss the Isle of Wight as a forgotten backwater include Vestas, the Danish wind turbine company. It recently reopened to make gigantic offshore sails, a third bigger than the London Eye, each powering 7,500 homes, bringing 200 island jobs. Its enthusiastic manager is island born and bred – and not a Tory, partly because Wight has refused all windmills. Tory Bournemouth even resists one 12 miles offshore, which would use Vestas sails. | Good reasons not to dismiss the Isle of Wight as a forgotten backwater include Vestas, the Danish wind turbine company. It recently reopened to make gigantic offshore sails, a third bigger than the London Eye, each powering 7,500 homes, bringing 200 island jobs. Its enthusiastic manager is island born and bred – and not a Tory, partly because Wight has refused all windmills. Tory Bournemouth even resists one 12 miles offshore, which would use Vestas sails. |
| Another island first: far from Westminster, it has developed its own innovative NHS and social care system. In St Mary’s hospital I saw the integrated care hub that takes both 999 and 111 calls, no outsourcing. The room shares desks for district nurses, social workers, care staff, mental health staff, physios and others fielding the crisis calls. Ambulance time is saved, with hospital admissions cut, a former ambulance driver managing A&E, hospital beds and community, with no silos. But the Lansley Act forcing services out to tender threatens this unity. You don’t find many Tories in these services or in the pooled advice services under one roof – CAB, law centre, Age UK – fielding crises in benefits and debts. | Another island first: far from Westminster, it has developed its own innovative NHS and social care system. In St Mary’s hospital I saw the integrated care hub that takes both 999 and 111 calls, no outsourcing. The room shares desks for district nurses, social workers, care staff, mental health staff, physios and others fielding the crisis calls. Ambulance time is saved, with hospital admissions cut, a former ambulance driver managing A&E, hospital beds and community, with no silos. But the Lansley Act forcing services out to tender threatens this unity. You don’t find many Tories in these services or in the pooled advice services under one roof – CAB, law centre, Age UK – fielding crises in benefits and debts. |
| In the house where I was born, I found a former director of Red Funnel ferries, with a 1941 Tiger Moth in his back garden. He’s a firm Tory but out of kilter with the party, an old world Macmillan type, appalled by rampant executive pay, horrified by property prices beyond young people’s reach, wanting an economic shift away from finance to making and inventing things again. However cocky and seamless the Tory campaign looks from Westminster, you just need to lift a stone or two in the heartlands to find all kinds of fissures just beneath the surface. |