Rebels with a cause: can Dominic Grieve and Anne Milton triumph on Thursday?

The battle for Beaconsfield has now become an air campaign. One of Dominic Grieve’s electors has taken it upon himself to launch a 20-foot blimp into the sky above the constituency. On one side of the blimp is written “Out with Grieve,” on the other simply “Brexit.” Only, recently, following speculation that this high-flown intervention might be violating campaign spending law, its owner has taken to floating and then quickly lowering it at intervals. What an overripe image that is: against a darkening sky, a small sinking parcel of hot air called “Brexit” deflating slowly over the seizing heart of Conservative Britain.

Befitting of times in upheaval, three ex-Conservative ex-ministers—Dominic Grieve, Anne Milton, and David Gauke—have spent the last six weeks attempting to reassert themselves as independents in their long-held constituencies, throwing themselves into the teeth of the Conservative Party machinery that previously guaranteed them their seats. Having swung out of orbit with the party orthodoxy on Brexit, and with election day closing in, might they yet score a vindicating electoral coup?

***

On Marlow High Street, where I met him on Monday, Dominic Grieve presented a familiar, besieged aspect. Phlegmatic, painstaking, lawyerly, he is resolved bitterly, it seems, to picking off his erstwhile 24,000-vote majority one handshake at a time. Marlow is primordial Conservative territory: a town of serif-font tearooms and soft-tops, well-kept graveyards, stooping doorways, and the unmistakable air-borne gift-shop nausea of the home counties. Some of the dogs are more presentable than I am, and they know it; one, that comes trotting up to us in a café, is wearing a tank-top fastened with a broach. And it really does start to feel like Christmas when, later in the evening, almost 400 locals cordially pack the pews for the final hustings at All Saints Church—united, all 400 of them, in their refusal to take the last custard cream, which continues to lie, flat and taboo, on a plate when the last of them leaves.

Grieve’s small-c-conservative suspicion is that he has the fighter in the blue corner “rather rattled.” This, despite the evidence that many constituents appear to be wedded to the local Conservative Association by a bond of blood-loyalty. “I’m an apostate!”, Grieve acknowledges. “This is a tribal matter and the tribe has now decided that you are a non-person, and therefore you should just disappear. ‘How dare you come along and stand as an independent?’ This is a breach of all the rules under which they operate.” Certainly, the British electoral system is not kind to independents—for one thing, all the plausible colours are gone. Anne Milton experimented with purple-on-green, she told me, but abandoned it when it came out too “UKIP-y”; instead she settled for a rose-tinted “pink on pink.” Grieve hands out leaflets in a shade that he declares with authority to be “British racing green.”

Catching campaigners in the act, one is left with the impression that only a morbid psychology would voluntarily submit to the degree of self-exposure required by electoral politics. To leaflet on a street corner with Grieve is to position oneself at the apex of a schizoid carrousel of hatred and hero-worship. It is, of course, the grandmother types—veritable Mrs Clauses—who prove the most enthusiastically abusive. “Go Hang!” one chimes spitefully. Another crosses the road to remind him that he is a once-in-a-generation traitor, then turns, and placidly waits to cross back over again. “Vote Boris!” yelps one driver, in what is plainly intended to be an unanswerable passing joust until the line of traffic suddenly condenses in front of him, and he stops short just parallel with Grieve, who stands there grimacing politely.

Actually, on the whole, Grieve is treated more as a favourite local mascot or parliamentary patron saint than a communal political piñata. One man, wearing a glazed Kathy-Bates-style biggest-fan expression, so overflows with praise he seems about to cry or burst into song. It is though, Grieve claims, his volunteers—clearly, many of them, devoted to him—who have really “made the whole campaign sing.” One, Robert, a “lifelong Labour voter” in deep-cover, has taken what he describes as a “six-week sickie” in order to pledge himself entire to the Beaconsfield race. Six weeks seems to call for something more than sickness, it strikes me; perhaps he ought to have faked his own death? But then it turns out he is a writer—in fact Robert Thorogood, the creator of BBC One’s Death in Paradise. Another canvasser, Nicholas, introduces himself to me as “a speechwriter of Mrs Thatcher’s.” Grieve confesses to feeling “overwhelmed” by the show of loyalty, and indeed the bonhomie persists easily enough through the cold and afternoon when Grieve goes off to address some “younger voters” (who, by the look of things, aren’t allowed within the town perimeter). The others go door-knocking, during which they are instructed to target those houses marked as “threes and fours” on the self-assessed Grieve-loyalty-scale: five means you “love him”, one means you “want to hang him” (hanging seems to be a pretty common method of appraisal round here). “Actually, we do get minus numbers too sometimes,” Robert adds wistfully.

***

What you see when standing as an independent, Milton tells me at a meeting in her Guildford seat, is “political campaigning for what it really is, which is a manipulation of the public.” Her solo pitch is based resolutely in a newly-discovered antipathy for the instruments of party discipline at Westminster, and her through-going localist credentials. Shouldn’t Hugh Grant visit though, just in case, to bumble to the troops into line?

“I don’t know if I’d want Hugh Grant! No, Hugh Grant hasn’t come here. I don’t need Hugh Grant to come here. He’s got much better things to do with his time than come here.” No doubt he has, I agree. “I don’t think the people of Guildford and Cranleigh are those sort of people… to quote Shania Twain: ‘I don’t think they’d be impressed very much’… It doesn’t impress me much.”

If we’re playing this game, I wonder which of the Twain back-catalogue Grieve would select as his campaign anthem (perhaps the slightly unloved 2004 country hit, “I ain’t no Quitter”?) Milton reminds me that she is running a quite different campaign from Grieve and Gauke. She had to win Guildford off the Lib Dems in 2005. Now she’s standing again in the hope that “she can win as an independent.” She has no illusions, however, about her chances on Thursday; foremost in her mind is that her integrity is preserved whatever the final poll. “I will not be a member of parliament at any cost. Because every day I have to look at myself in the mirror.” Walking through Marlow later in the week, Grieve uses an almost identical justificatory image. But how, by implication, do some of his former colleagues plan on confronting themselves in mirrors or elsewhere? “I don’t know” he says briskly.

Milton’s daughter, Nikki Henderson, recently piloted the yacht that carried Greta Thunberg across the Atlantic to Lisbon; the way she talks about them, it is clear that her four children and their good opinion weighed heavily with her over the past few months. Following her support of the Benn Act which sought to avert a no-deal Brexit and Boris Johnson’s September purge of his senior backbench, one of Milton’s children WhatsApped her to commend her for rising out of the “sea of weak-minded tory MPs… They may get re-elected, but the bastard [Johnson] ground them down and they’ll never quite sleep the same as a result…”

***

“I know there are former colleagues who share my view [on Brexit],” Grieve reflects. “I have a very nice former colleague who is going to win his seat, standing elsewhere in the country, who sent me a text yesterday saying ‘probably shouldn’t be saying too much on the phone, but the best of luck.’”

Although compensated for by the emergence of new loyalties that traverse the house, Grieve acknowledges that the 2017 parliament has strained some close political friendships. Steve Baker, a hard-line Brexiteer, is a notable example. “The truth is that we’ve always been good friends, genuinely good friends. There’s the added element that we both share a Christian faith, which he takes very seriously, as I do. And he’s a very decent man. So, of course, that’s painful.”

Both Milton and Grieve would like to see something like the equipoise of 2017 re-established on Thursday. “Very little change wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Milton says—not a slogan one can easily chant to, admittedly—and she freely admits that the public “would be appalled” by such a result. Even granting such an outcome, Grieve says, one irreversible deed is the “purge in the Conservative Party of its moderate wing. They’re never going to come back.”

Milton insists she feels no bitterness over the events of the September coup and Johnson’s ousting of 21 Conservative MPs from the parliamentary party. Somewhat in tension with this, she proceeds to liken the personal fallout to the collapse of a marriage and the feelings you might have “when you discover the person you’ve been living with for 20 years is having an affair: … You suddenly take a second look at everything that has been going on.”

Later on, in a solicitous turn, and a rather inscrutable extension of the metaphor, she urges me to “marry for fame… Or,”—an afterthought—“or for money!” I reassure her that I intend to. She then implores me, only slightly teasing, not to go near politics. “No! Don’t! You’re a young man, you can do much! … It is a bit like a drug: once you’ve had your first hit, you might not give it up. So, wait! Wait, dear man!”

***

“I’d like to complete my Scottish Munros” said Grieve, contemplating life after a potential loss. “…And this would be a golden opportunity to do it… I’ve got about 38 to go! And it would be nice to get them done in the next two years before my legs give out.” I remind him that his wife once suggested he might use his retirement to produce an exhaustive study of the various carpets of British stately homes. He laughs. “My wife is quite right, I also have an interest in carpets. Carpets are a subject that are largely ignored…,” Grieve continues earnestly.

This is what a future after Thursday holds if we are to trust the pollsters’ augury: Grieve buried in carpet-samples, Milton tending to her “amateur” garden, the clamour of crisis continuing to sound somewhere beyond their horizon.

The first-past-the-post system, which has the effect of pixelating the UK into primary colours, will at any rate obscure the widely diffused affection and support for such MPs as Milton and Grieve. This is because it is a system that punishes independence, and by extension the qualities that such independence is summoned by—resolve, integrity, and a sense of duty grounded in something less perishing than tribe loyalty.