SO FAR in this election campaign, Oliver Letwin has worn out two pairs of shoes.
It’s amazing he hasn’t also worn out his tongue.
After talking for an hour and a quarter in Loders Village Hall near Bridport - and no answer he gave was ever less than five minutes long, and several were nearly ten - he said he’d been walking and talking his way around West Dorset’s towns and villages, eight hours a day for the last four weeks.
The Conservatives – in short – are taking no chances against the Liberal Democrats’ candidate Dr Sue Farrant.
“Imagine it could just be down to one vote,” said one canvasser. “If that one vote is in Highacres [part of Loders], we want to get it.”
So the Tories motored down through one of the old drovers’ tracks into Loders just as children were coming out of the village school, and they left more than five hours later.
Take money off poor people
One highlight:
6-year-old to canvasser – “When I couldn’t get to sleep one night I came downstairs and I watched one of those things on telly and I saw David Cameron saying he was going to take money off poor people and give it to the rich.”
Canvasser: “I don’t remember him saying quite that. I think you’ll find he has the right economic policies…”
6-year-old: “I think people should vote for Nick Clegg, although I’m only six so I’m not old enough to vote…”
At which point I fancied I could see the canvasser thinking, “good thing too”.
Oliver Letwin himself addressed an audience of 40 people, only one of them aged under 40. All but 4 of the men there were bald or balding; a lot of what hair there was, was grey or greying.
The King
Dr Letwin was sporting the beginnings of what could be a very fine quiff. Put him in a jump-suit, dye his hair black, teach him Blue Suede Shoes and you could call him The King – at least, The Philosopher King – or so I fancied during an extraordinarily long and detailed question about litter on the A-Roads and Motorways of the South of the United Kingdom, with particular reference to the area surrounding Bath…
Sadly Dr Letwin didn’t sing, but he did speak with tremendous fluency and seriousness, interspersed with fits of boyish enthusiasm for the resurrection of engineering, and for using the findings of American academics for nudging social changes, for example by using different rates of tax to encourage a fashion – if fashion there must be – for drinking alcohol that is less than super-strength. You see his manner of speaking is, in itself, contagious.
Anyway, last month, when Dr Letwin’s idea of “The Big Society” was being derided on the front page of one national newspaper as “bollocks”, I had this exchange on Twitter with greendrawers.
On personal level @greendrawers I feel sorry for Oliver Letwin seeing his ideas trashed as “b*ll*cks” – cos they derive from West Dorset 2:23 PM Apr 21st via web
Letwin’s never put it like this @greendrawers but the Big Society stuff has been hidden theme of his Western Gazette columns for years 2:25 PM Apr 21st via web
Question @greendrawers is whether Letwin persuaded himself his ideas would work elsewhere – or do they only suit places like W Dorset? 2:29 PM Apr 21st via web
If indeed @greendrawers Letwin ever even right in 1st place abt W Dorset? But fascinating, even noble, attempt to make rest UK like here 2:32 PM Apr 21st via web
Well yes @greendrawers Twitter imperfect for conducting philosophical debates. Perhaps aim was to make UK more like here, not exactly same 2:53 PM Apr 21st via web
As it happened, this subject came up. Dr Letwin spoke of “the fantastic tapestry” of West Dorset life, its clubs, its societies, its volunteer litter-pickers in Chickerell, its community pubs, its community shops, its community First Responders in Thorncombe, and so on.
“People get together and they do things for themselves. This is a natural thing in West Dorset.”
And then he added: “What we have in West Dorset is not a universal phenomenon in the UK. We want to make it a universal phenomenon.”
The essence of the idea of the Big Society was, he said, that people were not just like atoms, they could bond together to make things better.
He recalled how he’d been mocked as crazy for once making a speech about beauty, but he insisted that the look and feel of things was important, and people should be given a greater say in, through, for example, changes to the planning system, from the top down, starting with the abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies, currently, in his view, menacing Sherborne with absorption into a Greater Yeovil.
“Together,” he said, “we forge the kind of place we’re in.”
Editor’s Note: Candidates standing for West Dorset in the 2010 General Election campaign are Dr Oliver Letwin (Conservative), Dr Sue Farrant (Liberal Democrat), Dr Steve Bick (Labour), Oliver Chisholm (UKIP) and Susan Greene (Green).
Mr Letwin will NEVER get my vote
So, as @greendrawers, I would like to say the following:
Mr Letwin is indeed an intelligent man, with many ideas of merit forging his idea of the ‘Big Society’. As a local MP he has personally helped me, and my husband, at a time of great hardship and need.
However, as a member of the Conservative Party, he also stands for many things that make for a society I do not want to be part of; many in his party would see us out of Europe, they would never have allowed equal rights to gay men and women, they would axe thousands of public sector jobs – ones that have managed to keep this county mostly insulated from the ravages of recession. Tory representatives in Europe have cosied up to some of the most right-wing, bigoted bunch imaginable who would see many of the rights that those previously considered ‘minorities’ taken away and replaced with draconian levels of what is and isn’t acceptable.
I cannot condone that in any way shape or form and therefore Mr Letwin will NEVER get my vote, regardless of his personal compassion and tireless work for this part of England’s green and pleasant land.
He is right in that ‘together we forge the kind of place we’re in’ – it’s just that some of us don’t want the kind of place where difference is marginalised, and where the bottom line is king.
If you follow me on Twitter, I re-tweeted a post from @StephenFry – a piece from The Independent about what has happened to my old borough of Hammersmith and Fulham since the Tories took over in 2006 – cut and paste this link to read http://tinyurl.com/2vkhwaw For me, it says everything that Mr Letwin doesn’t about his ‘Big Society’.