5. The Top Secret Tory Training Camp

What Ho Proles!

The following weekend, My Man smoked the Bentley up to Market Snodsbury, a small village to the North of Chipple Heath, where Lord Finley was hosting the top secret Tory training camp for new parliamentary candidates.

The Conservative Party holds these weekends across the country for anybody new to the blue rosette and who have yet to learn the dark arts of political campaigning. They spend two days attending seminars with titles like ‘The Z to A of Question Avoidance’, ‘Bunting Stringing Secrets’, and ‘How to Smile Like a Human’. They even teach you how to outwit any interviewer (but for the dreaded Paxman who we are advised to avoid), harangue your opponents without raising your voice, and keep the nausea to a minimum when kissing ugly babies. If you ask me, the Labour Party goes about this sort of thing in a much more civilised way. They even have specially trained infants, psychological inured against the likes of John Prescott throwing his greasy lips their way.

Still, as an old Etonian, I’m always up for a free weekend of structured education and despite concerns about Flora Shaw’s mission, my excitement was rising as My Man turned the Bentley off the motorway and we entered the winding turns of a typical village in Southern Albion.

After passing a neatly trimmed cricket field ready for the new season, through a small village with a quaint duck-pond and overfed ducks, and down a sequence of tight turns, we eventually came to the entrance to the Finley estate. Hung on a large gate which spanned the road was a sign that read ‘Private Estate: Guard Dogs Shotguns’, which only got me more excited. Guard dogs with shotguns! That sounded much more promising than the Dobermans with rubber bands that patrol the grounds of Murgatroid Hall at night.

I was going to tell My Man to make a note of this splendid innovation when I noticed a boy of about fourteen years sitting on the fence at the side of the gate and heartily preoccupied with the business of eating an apple. The boy was remarkable since he was dressed in a full school uniform, which is a rarity in these days of branded T-shirts and not much else, and he had adopted the age old custom of reversing his cap before pressing it onto the rather large dome of his head. It made him look almost Papal in his beneficence when he dutifully paused in the tireless work of directing his teeth around the dwindled core and looked up as I rolled my window down.

‘This the road to Finley Hall?’ I asked.

‘Might be,’ said he, setting a nail to dislodging peel from between his teeth. ‘Depends what you’re looking for.’

‘I’m looking for the top secret Tory training camp,’ I said and, aware that the might be a Tory worker in disguise, gave him the secret Party wink.

‘Oh, you’re one of them?’ he said. ‘Then you’re on the wrong road. You need to back up and go down that path there.’ His finger pointed to a muddy track that headed off into woodland.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that’s where you’ll find all your lot,’ he assured me.

Well, I should have known something was amiss. We Tories are not known for venturing into bushes unless we intend to chase out a fox that’s gone to ground. Anything else is Liberal Democrat business and, to be quite honest with you, I want nothing to do with that sort of thing. I was about to make this point to his Holiness but he had returned to his apple and it was clear that my audience had come to an end.

Now, as you may know, the Bentley T1 is really a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom but with a different radiator. It’s dandy for the city and does an adequate job in the English shires where its weight comes in handy pushing ramblers and cyclists into the hedgerows. Where is does have a weakness is with farmyards and muddy tracks leading to farmyards; a fact which became only too apparent after we’d travelled perhaps a quarter of a mile down the track and entered a thick copse of trees. That was when My Man uttered a loud expletive and the car shuddered to a halt. At first I thought we’d hit one of those Lib Dems I was taking about a moment or two ago, but the reality was far less exciting.

I should also say that I take full responsibility for what happened next. Call it a lesson learned, but I should really have sat back in my seat, picked up a paper, and left My Man to sort out the problems with transport. But I'm a doer, you see, and I had an urge to get to the conference.That’s why, without a thought about what I was doing, I climbed out of the car. I was so intent on surveying the damage that I barely noticed myself sinking into a brown ooze of slurry and muddied earth. Though My Man is a trained driver on account of his many years in the army, even a career handling tanks couldn’t have prepared him for terrain that could eat a Bentley as it was slowly eating me.

Half an hour later, I led a line of muddy footsteps up to the front door of Finley Hall. My Man trudged half-a-mile back dragging the luggage but I was in no mood to complain about his slacking. Standing at the door to the Hall was a figure I immediately recognised as Bernard Jenkins, one of the new brooms in the Tory hierarchy, and most certainly a man a new candidate would do well to impress. With slurried pleats to one’s trousers, I knew I was never going to impress. Then again, though I say it was Bernard Jenkins, I might well have been mistaken. I was too busy looking at other delegates who were arriving, climbing from a line of clean Beemers, Jags, and Porsches that had come gliding up the drive leading up from the gate. And need I add that was neither an apple eating Pontiff nor shotgun wielding Alsatians to be seen for miles?

A mixture of anger and humiliation carried me up the steps, where the man I assume was Jenkins came forward and greeted me. I simply mumbled some oaths about poor directions and the papal aspirations of apple eating proles and I suppose he thought it the typical rhetoric of a would-be Tory. He clapped me about my shoulder and said something like: ‘That’s the spirit! Hammer those proles! We want to hear more of that over the next couple of days! Splendid show! Splendid!’

It was only later that evening, when I went down to dinner, that I discovered that the boy responsible for my muddy adventure and a not-inconsiderable bill for getting the Bentley out of a quagmire, was, in fact, the son of Lord Finley, known in the lout business as the Honourable Frederick Finley. I also discovered that Bernard Jenkins was not actually Bernard Jenkins but the lout’s father, Lord Finley himself.

The only thing I could not have known was the prominent places that father and son were to take in the events of the subsequent two days. If I had, I might well have packed my bags immediately.