Family Politics John O’Farrell
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For Karey Kirkpatrick
Never share your home with an adult you once gave birth to. You’ve already pushed them out once, I can tell you it’s much more painful second time around. As their mother, you have no right to comment on anything they ever say or do; you cannot ask questions or interact with them on any level without poking a hornet’s nest of outraged indignation. No one was ever as wrong as the parent of a young adult. I expect it’s always been like this. Prince Hamlet moved back home after university and look how that turned out.
It transpired that I was utterly wrong about everything; the words I used were wrong, what I was trying to say with them was wrong. I just shouldn’t be me. It was a very offensive and politically unacceptable position for me to have adopted. Which was all very perplexing, because up until my son moved back home, I had believed I was one of the good people. After nearly five decades on this earth, I had become fairly clear about what was right and what was wrong, what was acceptable and what was not. All my experience of being
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an adult counted for nothing against the knee-jerk analysis of the new grown-up in our home. In most cultures the young venerate their elders. In ours they just blame them for property prices.
I had been on something of a high on that first day when he returned. The night before had been exhilarating, alarming, chaotic, and ultimately hugely satisfying. I had walked into the pub and a huge cheer had gone up for me. ‘One Emma Hughes! There’s only one Emma Hughes!’ sang all my friends and colleagues, which was ridiculous because it’s not even true: there’s the Emma Hughes who does the traffic report on BBC Radio Sussex and at least another three Emma Hugheses in our town alone. But I won’t pretend it wasn’t nice to be acknowledged after the work I had put in.
‘It was all of us !’ I shouted back. ‘We all did it!’ Because you have to say that, even if it wasn’t true and in fact that evening’s protest had taken me many lonely hours of planning and organization.
Our raucous direct-action had been organized in response to the Conservative council’s decision to evict our beloved City Farm. Everyone goes into politics for different reasons; clearly the Tories’ idealistic dream was to close down an animal charity so they could sell off the site for luxury flats. Our campaign against this barbaric plan had tried highlighting the immeasurable social value of this community resource; we had tried citing local planning regulations, until we realized that the correct way to win this complex political and economic argument was to show a picture of a little lamb looking mournfully to camera. If the council had been evicting ugly animals, if there was such a thing as a Stag Beetle
Reserve or a Hairless Rat Sanctuary, our campaign would have been sunk from the outset.
For once, this wasn’t just about fighting the local Tories: this project really mattered to me personally. When I had first got involved in the City Farm, there was a beautiful goat that had recently given birth to two kids. She was a particularly anxious creature, and when the time came for all the staff and volunteers to go home for the night, I could sense she was becoming increasingly distressed. There was a thunderstorm brewing and she began to bleat and push away her feeding offspring, so I said to the others I would stay with her for an hour or two until the weather calmed down. But the storm took all night, and right through the small hours I stayed there with her, sitting on a bale of straw in the dimly lit stall, stroking her neck and telling her it was going to be all right. At each clap of thunder, she would tremble and bleat again, but then I could feel her tension diminish as I talked to her in my calmest voice and she let her young suckle once more. She looked right into me, with those diamondshaped pupils, as I told her only half ironically about the challenges of being a mother and how tough it is when they grow up and no longer need you. People thought I had made an enormous sacrifice spending the whole night with her – my husband Eddie kept texting, offering to come and pick me up – but it was so earthy and snug in there, with the smell of the straw and the rain on the metal roof, I think I can honestly say it was one of the best nights of my life.
Perhaps that was why I was so emotionally invested in the fight against the heartless plan to evict this goat and all her friends and relations. I knew that the City Farm was a vital resource for deprived children in our little town, and many
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of those kids had deep-rooted behavioural issues. Caring for the animals had helped in the rehabilitation of troubled young people from our local community, some of them with criminal records. So I admit it may have been a mistake on my part to entrust those particular children with the care of over-excited farm animals in the formal setting of our historic council chamber.
Originally the plan had been to bring the animals to a temporary pen we had erected outside the town hall, so that the councillors would have to pass the mass picket of sad farm animals as they arrived to vote on their budget cuts. But after the Tories strode past us with barely a glance in our direction, I felt frustrated and impotent, and I decided there and then that we had to do more. Since Eddie was one of the Labour councillors taking part in the debate inside, I was able to send him messages asking him to let me know exactly when the agenda reached the City Farm closure. I slipped into the council building and opened the fire exit from the public gallery, then quickly ushered in the children who were part of our protest, instructing each one to bring an animal with them. They were thrilled by the illegality of this, but I don’t think any of us expected things to escalate quite as quickly as they did.
At first, nobody in the council chamber took any notice of the extra observers up in the public gallery, despite a muffled bleat from one of them. But then, as the Tory leader of the council proposed this callous budget, I unfurled our homemade banner and shouted, ‘Save our farm!’ while fellow campaigners took photos for our social media campaign (#SaveHastingsCityFarm). The children held their chickens and ducks aloft and chanted along with our protest, and that
might have been it. Except the Conservative leader looked at me with such arrogant contempt as he demanded that we get those animals out of the public gallery immediately that I found myself saying, ‘All right then, I will,’ and released a flapping duck in his direction. And then all of the children dutifully followed suit. It was such a liberating feeling, no longer caring what anyone thought, just deciding that I wasn’t taking this shit any more.
Anyway, council meetings are always so dull and formal. People are always saying we should make local politics more interesting to the general public. Admittedly, having a load of noisy, flapping ducks crash-landing and quacking in the middle of the debating chamber might be pushing things too far in the other direction. But the Conservative councillors completely overreacted. Margot Stockdale (Environment and Safety Committee) stood on her chair screaming, ‘Get them out of here! Get them out of here!’ while an Indian Runner duck settled on her desk, fixed her firmly in its gaze and did an enormous crap right on her nameplate.
The children were so excited by the commotion and noise that they made the spontaneous decision to release the larger animals we had sneaked in. Now the liberated goats and micro-pigs stampeded down the carpeted steps, determined to join the ducks and chickens on the floor of the chamber. The clerk of the council was out of his chair trying to grab any animal he could get near, which turned out to be none of them. Meanwhile the Indian Runner ducks had gathered in a corner, glancing nervously around as if they had formed their own political caucus, which now outnumbered the Liberal Democrats and would probably have made a more meaningful contribution to the debates.
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Dwarf Angoras are not an aggressive breed, but may respond to hostility if they feel threatened, which was probably why the Conservative leader of the council ended up being repeatedly butted by a miniature goat. Councillor Davies had stood up with his fists raised as if he was going to have a boxing match with the poor thing, and the goat responded in kind, banging her bony forehead against his knees, while her sister looked on, casually eating that evening’s council agenda.
Pretty soon the police arrived, but when they saw that the children were recording the whole thing on their phones (#SaveHastingsCityFarm), they appeared nervous about manhandling miniature goats and pigs. I think at some subconscious level they foresaw petting zoos around the world rising up on social media in protest against police brutality. Finally, Councillor Davies shouted, ‘Get this creature out of here before I go home for my shotgun and deal with it myself.’ And there was our headline! The Tory who’d wanted these cute animals evicted was now offering to execute them.
‘The thing about you, Emma . . .’ said my friend Hannah in the pub afterwards, ‘is that you act first and think later. I mean, credit where it’s due, that was the best night’s entertainment I’ve had in ages. But we both did that official training course on how to campaign against Tories, and at no point did they say, “Try throwing a duck at them.” ’
‘Oh, I couldn’t help myself. It was just the expression on those smug Tory faces. I mean, how is it possible for them to look up at us, and still look down at us? So I just thought, Fuck it – let’s shake things up a bit!’
I had worried my husband might be irritated that I had
upstaged his big speech from the floor of the chamber, but I think Eddie was quite proud of me. He said revolutions often needed a crazy spark to grab popular attention – tipping the tea into Boston Harbor or releasing micro-pigs into a Sussex council meeting.
On the other side of the pub, I cornered the young journalist who was getting some interviews and made sure he had a good selection of photos from my phone, including pictures taken last summer of the goats being stroked by local children. I gave the file the snappy title ‘Beyoncé, the goat the Tory wanted to shoot dead’.
‘She’s called Beyoncé, is she?’ interjected the journalist, as the AirDrop notification pinged on his phone. ‘The goat that went for the council leader is called Beyoncé?’
‘Yes. We smuggled all the goats from the City Farm into the public gallery. Beyoncé, Ariana, Rihanna and Mrs Edna Murphy. You see, the animals will be homeless if the council evicts the farm . . .’
‘There’s a goat called Mrs Edna Murphy?’
‘What? Oh yes, when Edna died, her family said they wanted to make a donation, but could we name a goat after their mother? I would have gone with Edna, but they presented this nameplate for the stall and now the volunteers always use the full name.’
The journalist still looked confused, so I brought the subject back to the politics. ‘Councillor Davies accused us of deliberately instigating political violence! He said, “Look! I’m being attacked by a sheep!” ’
‘And then I stood up,’ explained Eddie, ‘and said, “Point of order, Madam Mayor. It’s not a sheep, it’s a goat.” ’
The reporter kept turning his head from me to my
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husband as he struggled to make sense of it all. ‘Maybe it’s a goat that identifies as a sheep,’ he quipped, but I didn’t respond because it sounded suspiciously like a joke about something you’re not supposed to laugh at. Now the journalist changed tack as he turned to my husband for the obligatory ‘difficult question’.
‘Am I right in thinking that the Conservatives are only running the council because they managed to do a deal with the other parties, which Labour refused to consider?’
‘Well, the Independents are just Tory-lite. We could never do a deal with them . . .’ explained Eddie. ‘And with this farm closure, the voters are seeing yet another example of what a Tory-led coalition looks like, which is why I am confident at the next council elections they will elect a radical Labour council with a genuine socialist agenda.’
The young journalist didn’t write that down, but checked a few extra details and I repeated my name for him.
‘It’s Emma Hughes, chair of the trustees at Hastings City Farm.’
‘And I’m Eddie Hughes – leader of the Labour Group on the council. Round here they call me Red Ted.’ He looked a little disappointed that that wasn’t written down either.
This was a big year for my husband, who had his sights set on winning the nomination to become the parliamentary candidate in this constituency, and we all thought there was a good chance we could win back the seat.
‘Talking to all your fellow campaigners in this pub, I get the impression that Eddie and Emma Hughes are the Labour Party in this town.’ Eddie beamed with pride at this, and I can’t deny it was nice that all our hard work in our community did not go unnoticed.
‘Well, it’s not just the Labour Party—’ I began, before Eddie took over.
‘Yes, we’re involved in many different campaigns and projects round here. Apart from all the work I do on the council, there’s the local food bank, Hastings Welcomes Refugees, my union work, and also I’m a Friend of the Earth.’
‘Well, he’s more a friend of a friend really,’ I joked, but the journalist just looked confused, so I thought I’d better bring things back to the matter at hand. ‘Not to mention the City Farm, of course, where I still volunteer when I can.’
‘So you brought some of the children who use the farm along to the council meeting,’ he said.
‘Deprived children, yes. But I organized chaperones and everything – all with DBS checks obviously. Many of those kids don’t have gardens at home. The farm is a lifeline for them.’
‘Somebody said the children were chanting, “We hate the Tories!” ’
‘Oh, they just followed my lead!’ blurted Eddie, but I sensed that the journalist wasn’t bringing this up because he was impressed by it.
‘Although, I mean, there were lots of people shouting all sorts of things,’ I interjected. ‘It was a bit mad, to be honest, but at the end of the day we just wanted the councillors to see the kids with the animals to show how much they mean to them.’
‘Do you think it’s a good thing to have young children shouting about hating Tories or anyone else at a time when our country is so divided and angry?’
‘What? Oh, well, that’s the Tories’ fault,’ said Eddie. ‘They’re the ones spreading the hatred. That’s why we hate them.’
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‘Hmm . . .’ said the reporter, almost to himself. ‘Jesus says love your enemies.’
‘Yeah, well, he wasn’t on Twitter,’ I said. ‘Remember, Councillor Davies wanted to shoot a sheep!’ ‘Goat.’
‘Sorry, yes, goat.’
When the article went online, I was mildly relieved that the reporter hadn’t focused on children being encouraged to chant about who they hated. In fact, the media coverage could not have been better: some of the footage made the regional news, and the fact that some English local politician had threatened to shoot Beyoncé was mentioned on international fan forums, before they realized it was not the same one. Following the media furore, the council postponed the closure of the City Farm, which received hundreds of pounds in donations from Beyoncé fans around the world. The truth is that the over-aggressive goat had actually been Mrs Edna Murphy, but I’ve done enough press releases to know when it’s worth adjusting a few minor details.
Eddie didn’t want to stay in the pub for too long once he had been round and thanked everyone. He was on a new mission to appear sober and responsible: when party members are trying to picture their next Labour Member of Parliament, it’s always better if they haven’t seen you getting pissed and noisily slagging off the leader of the Labour Party. I had made a few calls to ensure that the volunteers had got the animals back to the farm, and replied to all the excited messages from people who’d seen the protest on social media. I had wanted to ring my son to tell him about it, but it was late, and in any case, he was coming home from
university the very next day. I could tell him then. Tonight, I would just enjoy the attention I was getting in the pub. It’s hard for a politician’s wife to take centre stage. Unless you’re married to a Tory minister, I suppose, then you get to pose for the paparazzi at the garden gate, announcing that you’ll be standing by your husband, despite the public scandal of his affair with the Spectator ’s young party planner.
My husband and I had decisively chosen the place where we lived by being born there. We grew up disappointingly far from the socialist struggles of the north in a seaside town in East Sussex, more famous for a much older conflict that hadn’t actually happened here in the first place. Mention Hastings to anyone and they’d automatically retort, ‘Oh, as in the Battle of Hastings?’ like we were ever going to say, ‘Oh, I never heard about that, tell me what that was.’
Eddie would always inform them that the classic socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was written in our town, and they would nod and say, ‘Yes, that’s where King Harold got an arrow in his eye, isn’t it?’ and my husband would take far too long explaining that the historical evidence was actually inconclusive on this fact, and that the actual battle happened at a place called Battle, but you couldn’t call it the Battle of Battle, that would just sound stupid.
The Conservative MP for our town was the very elderly Gerald Duff, who had been in the House of Commons since the Great Reform Act of 1832. ‘Old Duffer’, as he was known locally, was so ancient and right-wing he probably believed that Britain should repatriate the Huguenots. They had tried to get rid of him by abolishing his old constituency, but
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somehow he managed to get the seat next to his old one, probably by rolling onto it in his sleep. At every election in living memory, there had been the expectation that he would announce his retirement, but the local Conservatives were too polite to say this to his face. Even when they presented him with the gift of a carriage clock, he didn’t take the hint.
But now ill health had got the better of him, and several months ago, our eighty-four-year-old MP had fallen into a coma. I can report that this did not adversely affect the amount of work he did for the local area. But until he actually died, Gerald Duff legally remained the Member of Parliament for the marginal seat of Hastings and Rye. The rumour was that Conservative Party Head Office had pressurized Mrs Duff into keeping his life-support machine ticking over until the polls improved and the Tories stood a better chance of holding the seat.
Whenever that by-election came, it was my husband’s single-minded mission to become the Labour candidate and then the Member of Parliament for our little town. Were he to be successful, this would, of course, mean a massive change for us both after two and a half decades of humdrum married life. Eddie would be up in London for most of the week and I, his dutiful wife, would be required to live alone until her high-status husband returned to his fiefdom at weekends. And when I thought about this, the prospect of being left all on my own for most of the week, I have to be honest, it sounded fucking brilliant.
Obviously, I could never tell Eddie how excited I was at the prospect of having our house all to myself. I never told anyone this guilty secret. I thanked my friends for their expressions of sympathy when they pointed out how
difficult this would be for me. I said I’d manage, that we all had to make sacrifices for the cause. But the truth was I couldn’t bloody wait. Eddie and I had been together for a quarter of a century, and that is a long time to listen to anyone’s views on proportional representation. Of course I loved him in that perfunctory, married-for-ever kind of way. I didn’t want a divorce or an affair, I just secretly yearned to eat a meal without having to listen to my husband grunt his approval of every mouthful.
This would be another massive change for me, but I was used to that. Women roll with the changes throughout their lives. You often hear about the Seven Ages of Man, but as far as I could work out, men don’t really change at all throughout their charmed and uncomplicated lives. In the First Age of Man, he does exactly what he wants. Then in the Second Age of Man, he does exactly what he wants. And then he just carries on doing the same thing he has always done, right up until the Seventh Age of Man, when he dies, leaving his wife with all the admin. Whereas women constantly adapt, morphing from desirable single ladies to accommodating wives, our roles and our bodies change through pregnancy, motherhood, middle age and menopause, but we carry on, never wanting to make too much fuss about any of this outside the private confessional that is Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. But nothing in my husband’s life seemed to alter from one decade to the next: Eddie still had the same opinions, the same routines, wore the same sort of clothes and listened to the same music as he had when I had first married him. In our hallway, we had the iconic poster of Obama that said, ‘Change.’ I put it to him that we stick something else up there now, but he was adamant that we weren’t changing it.
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I think that evening might have been the very first time that Eddie had ever considered this latest major life shift for me. But now, flush with the success of our protest, he paused Newsnight to have a serious talk with me about what it would mean for our marriage should he be elected to Westminster. The television was frozen on an iconic image of Parliament, like the legendary castle at the end of his great quest.
‘Emma, you know how long I’ve dreamt of getting in there and making a difference. But, as a feminist, I do realize that would involve a huge sacrifice for my wife, were it to happen.’
I hated it when he said ‘as a feminist’, as if saying it repeatedly made him one. He’d said it three times during his long speech at the council’s Equality and Diversity Forum when half a dozen women were waiting to ask a question.
‘It’ll be hard, I’m sure,’ I admitted, staring sadly at the floor, ‘but I have to look at the bigger picture. Somehow, I’ll find a way to manage without you here all week.’
Once I had foreseen a future for myself in which I lived alone for the best part of the week, I couldn’t help but start planning all the things I was going to do on my own. And maybe if I was bored mid-week, I could get the train up to London and we could have a glamorous dinner together in the House of Commons. It would be like a proper date and we would actually have news to tell each other. In any case, tomorrow our only child was moving back home, so perhaps my secret fantasy of time to myself would have to wait.
I had received a curious text from Dylan earlier in the evening, which I hadn’t yet shared with his father. He had in fact sent the message to both of us on WhatsApp, but Eddie was boycotting Facebook and all its platforms, for reasons I probably agreed with but didn’t act upon myself, because I
believed that the political purity of a private boycott can leave a political campaigner isolated and ultimately less effective, and mostly because I liked seeing all the stupid shit on Instagram.
The mock-casual lower case didn’t disguise the ominous overtones of our son’s message: need to have a dmc with you tomorrow hope you’re cool with it. Remembering this message gave me a good excuse to distract Eddie from this awkward conversation about our apparently tragic future apart, so I passed my phone to my husband.
‘What’s a “dmc”?’ Eddie asked.
‘A deep meaningful chat,’ I said, as if everyone knew that, and not letting on that I’d had to google it earlier.
‘Oh my God – maybe our son is gay!’ exclaimed Eddie.
‘What?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? need to have a deep meaningful chat . . . He’s coming out! Didn’t you ever wonder why he never brought a girlfriend home?’
‘But he knows how open-minded we are. If he was gay, why wouldn’t he have just told us years ago? I thought maybe he’s got a girl pregnant or something.’
‘He won’t have got a girl pregnant if he’s gay, will he? He was always a very private boy, and who wants to talk about their sexuality with their parents? But he must have decided that now he’s going to be living here, he needs to tell us.’
‘He might not be gay. He might be non-binary – that’s more fashionable these days, isn’t it?’
‘What are you talking about? It’s not fashionable to be nonbinary, it’s just being discussed in the open at long last. Whatever it is he wants to tell us, we’ll accept him for who he is and show him love and understanding every step of
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the way,’ said my husband, pressing play on the remote control. Then he paused it again as soon as he had another thought. ‘Maybe he could get involved with the LGBT community in the town. Wasn’t there a Pride stall at the country show last year?’
‘Why don’t we let him talk to us first?’
‘Well, he’s really lucky that everyone we know is so tolerant. Imagine if his parents were fundamentalist Christians, or if we lived in Iran or something. Our son can just come down the Labour Club with us any weekend, and everyone there will be completely relaxed about him being gay – and if he wants to bring his boyfriend, that’s fine too, nobody would bat an eyelid.’
‘You actually want him to be gay, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Like it’s more right-on to have a gay son than a straight one.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I just want him to be happy and I’ll always be proud of him whatever his persuasion. Is it OK to say “persuasion”? That’s probably wrong, isn’t it? Like someone talked him into being gay. He’ll have to help us with all the correct terms.’
That night, I found it impossible to sleep. Call it a mother’s intuition, but I sensed something else was on our son’s mind. Eventually I got up and tiptoed across the landing to take one last look at Dylan’s bedroom before it was re-purposed for the man he had become. With the familiar shapes half lit by the streetlamps outside, I stood alone in this museum of his childhood. There was a time when that bed had seemed so huge for my little boy, and I could picture a montage of duvet covers, evolving through dinosaurs and Buzz Lightyear, then giant football badges and motorbikes, right up to
the bog-standard Ikea patterns he’d imagined were so sophisticated and grown-up.
It was exciting to have him moving back in with us after all this time. During his university years he’d barely been home: he’d spent the holidays travelling and working, and I’d been jealous of my friends, who complained about their student offspring lounging around the house all summer. Dylan had always been one to make his own way rather than depend on us, travelling to surprising places with university friends or getting work placements in Oxford during the holidays. But now he had finished his degree and some promised houseshare in London had fallen through. I’d had to stifle my excitement when he had relayed this terrible news, which meant he needed to move back in with Eddie and me for a few months.
I had filled the fridge with all his favourite food. I bought fruit he wouldn’t eat and crisps I knew he would, and the following evening my heart did a giddy skip as I finally saw his silhouette through the patterned glass of the front door. I must have looked away for five minutes when my boy grew into this giant of a man, with a gruff voice and a stubbly chin. He was so gangly and handsome, with his freckles and blond hair, he made me feel like a little old lady as he bent over and kissed the top of my head.
‘Here, darling, let me take that,’ I said, moving to pick up his suitcase, which I couldn’t even lift off the ground.
Over dinner, we didn’t mention his enigmatic message. In any case he ate so fast and without pause that it would have been hard for him to talk. But he had the good grace to laugh as we described the scene in the town hall the night before.
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He was even impressed that my picture of the Vietnamese pot-bellied pig crapping in front of the mayor had been retweeted by a couple of celebrities.
Then he made us smile with his bewildering account of an obstacle fitness course he had just done with some of his Oxford friends, in which they had knocked each other into filthy water and got covered from head to toe in mud. ‘It’s like Tough Mudder – you know Tough Mudder?’
‘No?’
‘Oh. Well, it’s like that. Only the Funky Monkey is, like, even more extreme because the bars are smeared with grease and shit but you can knock each other off with pugil sticks!’ I forced a smile, pretending I understood a word of what he was saying. ‘And Jonty ripped my rugger shirt, so we said he had to drink a pint out of his shoe in under ten seconds – he’s a total legend!’
‘Rugby shirt?’ I said, perhaps focusing on the wrong part of the anecdote. ‘I didn’t know you played rugby?’
‘I don’t. I just like the shirts.’
‘Oh.’
Then, with the empty plates pushed to the middle of the table and the wine glasses running low, Dylan finally said that since he was going to be living at home for the foreseeable future, ‘for which, of course, I’m very grateful, obvs,’ there was something he might as well get out in the open, ‘so we all, like, know where we stand’.
I was impressed at the way he prepared us for his announcement and noticed he blushed slightly before he began to talk while struggling to make eye contact with either of us. He didn’t know I had already put a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge so we could toast his big announcement.
‘So, the thing is – I know that all your left-wing campaigns and protests are very important to you, and I think I learnt an awful lot from growing up in such a political household. But with the benefit of a few years away, hearing some other people’s opinions and shit, and having some time to think about things for myself and look at the world as I see it, well, I just wanted to say that you shouldn’t be too upset if I’ve come to some different conclusions from you.’
In that split second, I breathed a private sigh of relief. Oh, he was just talking about his political views! Don’t all students come back from university certain that they are much more radical and left-wing than their boring old parents? If Dylan had joined Extinction Rebellion or the Socialist Workers, well, then, he would be exactly like his father and I had been at his age, and now I could look forward to interesting debates about revolution versus reform and being denounced as a Fascist because I’d neglected to recycle the Waitrose magazine.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ I heard myself say. ‘Your father and I thought we were revolutionary Communists when we were your age, didn’t we, Eddie?’
‘What? No, Mum, you’re not listening,’ he said. ‘I’m saying my politics are the opposite of yours. I’ve come to realize that I’m . . . well, I’m, like, a Conservative.’
I put my water glass down much too hard – it sounded like it nearly smashed.
‘There, boom! I’ve said it,’ he continued, into the stunned silence. ‘I’m sort of in favour of capitalism, actually, and, like, less government and I’m into, like, personal freedom for me and my mates, and, like, being free to make money and, like, wealth creation and shit, and, yeah, like buying cool stuff
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and just letting people get on with it – so, like, the opposite of the government taking half your money and telling you what you can and cannot do. Which, I guess, means I’m a Tory.’
My first reaction was that he was joking. I attempted to laugh but it came out as more of a strangled choke.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said his father. ‘You can’t be a Tory.’
‘Why not? Didn’t you always tell me to think for myself? To question everything and not believe what they wanted you to believe?’
‘Yes, but not like that! To think for yourself about . . . about the best way of fighting the Tories, not pretend to be one! You’re not a Tory, Dylan, you’re our son. You’re Eddie and Emma Hughes’s son. We’re a Labour family, everyone knows that. In fact, we are the Labour Party in this town. That’s what the journalist in the pub said. You can’t be a Conservative – you’re just experimenting with something in order to get at your parents.’
‘This isn’t about you, Dad, it’s about me, about what I believe. I’ve spent three years away at university. I’ve had a lot of time to think about who I am, and I just wanted to be completely up front with you both, now that I’m going to be back at home.’
I was so shell-shocked that I clutched at the only straw I could think of. ‘Dylan, are you really trying to tell us you’re gay?’
‘What? What’s that supposed to mean?’
I could hear how insane my words sounded as they left my mouth, but there was still no stopping them. ‘Is it that you want to tell us you’re gay, but you don’t want to upset us, so you’re pretending you’re a Tory and then you’re going to say, “Not really, I’m gay!” so that then we’ll be relieved. Is that it?’
‘No, that’s ridiculous. Why would I do that?’
‘We just thought when you texted that you had something personal you wanted to talk about . . .’
Dylan burst out laughing, but it didn’t lighten the atmosphere. ‘Oh, you’d bloody love it if I was gay, wouldn’t you? To go down the Labour Club and tell them all how tolerant and understanding you were being and then it would be bonus points for Red Ted, another cause to march for, another badge on the old donkey jacket.’
I noticed his accent was posher than it used to be.
‘Dylan, I don’t know why you’d want to do something like this to your mother and me,’ said his father, standing up. ‘We’ve given you love and support and always brought you up to know right from wrong. And then you want to come back here and throw it all right back in our faces. Well, I’m not having it! You’re not a Tory, and that’s the end of it.’
Dylan got up and went to his room without thanking me for dinner or helping with the clearing up.
Blimey, that’s a very Tory way to behave, I thought, as I took the sparkling wine out of the fridge and put it back in the cupboard.
Dylan would have been about nine years old when he first started helping at election time. I remember how proud of himself he was, wearing a big red Labour rosette and running back and forth to the polling station at the end of our road, collecting the sheets of voter numbers from the Labour volunteer sitting outside. It was his first general election, and he fully understood what a big deal this was. He loved being useful in the grown-up world of politics, playing his own part in the shared national experience. While others were flagging or negative, feeling despondent, he brimmed with enthusiasm and energy.
Later he was entrusted with carrying a cup of tea down to the polling station for the Labour volunteer sitting there. It took him about ten minutes to walk a hundred yards without spilling it. He met the Labour candidate, who gave him a high-five, and he excitedly updated me on the latest from the front line: ‘Mum, Mum! Three more voters went in, and they
