It’s the woad to recovery cried Boris, his hands dipped in paint
TOP pun of the campaign came from Boris Johnson, who popped up in south London alongside David Cameron. They were at a nursery school and everyone dipped their palms in a tray of blue paint.
Ancient Brits used to smear their faces in such stuff before taking on the hairy Picts. It was called woad.
London Mayor Boris cried: ‘It’s the Woad to Recovery!’ Tommy Cooper himself would have been proud of that one.
Messrs Johnson and Cameron did a joint turn for the TV cameras (if not for the sketchwriters) because it had become received wisdom among the political elite that Boris had been somehow boycotting the election campaign.
This theory was cobblers. Two weeks ago I wrote a sketch about Boris wowing the locals in New Malden and Sutton. But received unwisdom sometimes has to be corrected. And so Boris and Dave did their turn and Boris was later pushed by Sky News’s mistress of the thumbscrews, Kay Hurley-Burley, to admit that he might one day fancy being Tory leader. Good for him. The party of aspiration will not shrivel from a man for being ambitious.
At the nursery school the PM and Mayor sat at one of those toddlers’ tables – the sort with tiny chairs, dangerous for a man with Boris’s bottom, as you might get stuck. They did a jigsaw puzzle with Joshua, three, Hamish, four, Stephanie, three and fouryear-old Leo. Boris tried to tell the youngsters about Mr Cameron’s l ong- term economic plan.
Polite but blank looks. Tory spin doctor Craig Oliver started to fret that his politicians were taking too long to complete the toddlers’ j i gsaw puzzle. Mr Oliver started to flap, as spin doctors do. Boris cried that they had a ‘jigsaw crisis’. Collapse of one spin doctor.
On doorsteps in Nottingham- shire, where I l ater visited Broxtowe, there was what you could call a woadish worry about Picts or their modern counterparts – the Scot Nats.
I was with Tory candidate Anna Soubry, a fiery old bird who in 2010 took this seat from a ghastly Labour droner called Palmer. He is standing again, even though he pocketed a vast pay-off from the Commons five years ago.
Nearly all the voters I met mentioned SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. They were worried about her. ‘ Seeing Sturgeon cuddling up to Miliband is a worst- case scenario for me,’ said an ex-Royal Navy man in Stapleford’s Brunswick Drive. Stapleford is a DH Lawrence sort of place, working- class, plain-talking, solid England. Great place.
The ex-Navy man had been thinking about voting Ukip because of a pensions problem and immigration. Miss Sturgeon had changed his mind. ‘A government of her and Miliband don’t bear thinking about,’ he said. He was now leaning to the Tories. Defence Minister Soubry, 58, is the ripsnorter (she looks a little like Mrs T but is more liberal) who took a swipe at Alex Salmond on TV a couple of weeks ago.
AFTER the programme, Mr Salmond – himself pugnacious – refused to speak to her, whimpering that she was ‘far too aggressive’. Miss Soubry
recalled that with an almost Sid James laugh. Her campaigning yesterday was local – doorstep chats about health clinics, Nottingham school and most of all, the trams in Beeston.
The town, once solid Labour, has been logjammed for two years by the Labour council’s bungled tram project. Lifelong Labour supporters have vowed never to support the party again, but the area has a lot of Guardian-reading university lecturers and public-sector workers.
It was not all going Miss Soubry’s way. A man in a deli said he hoped she would lose. The owner of an Audi con- vertible in Brampton Drive would not vote Tory because they did not help ‘poor people’ like her.
A man washing his car and smoking a cig at the same time had switched from the Lib Dems to Ukip. He didn’t like blacks. But shopkeepers Cheryl Sims of Beeston Sewing and Nicholas Martin of the Cameron House gift shop were voting Tory because of the trams and the economy.
And a miner’s daughter who had been brought up Labour and voted Lib Dem last time was switching to the Tories. Why? ‘I don’t want Sturgeon in.’