They asked me about Europe, and I said I thought it was a nice place that I was hoping to visit the following summer on a family holiday.
Eventually they returned to their seats – I had turned up at a half-time interval – and I was summoned upstairs. I walked into a room with some 120 people in it, and was clapped in and shown to the lectern.
Having spent years briefing soldiers and statesmen, I was a confident public speaker. But on this occasion I was extremely nervous, because I had no idea what I was doing. My chosen subject in the end was the benefits system; how the bill had gone from £120bn in 1997 to £210bn in 2009, and that it was now at a point of not delivering for the most vulnerable who needed it because too many people were claiming it.
Simple stuff, or so I thought.
It did not go down very well, and there was an awkward moment when I sensed people looking at each other just out of my field of vision as I carried on speaking. No doubt they were asking each other if I had walked into the right bar that evening.
One lady, who must have been at least in her nineties and seemingly without much time for other people’s feelings, said rather loudly to her neighbour, ‘What is he talking about?’
I took this as my cue to change tack. I told my story, briefly and poorly, and spoke about what I thought politics meant to me – improving life for people, our most vulnerable, our veterans; our young people and our mental health communities, both carers and sufferers.
In Cornwall, where the most important issues were farming, Europe and the single market, I had misjudged the mood.
I was pleasantly surprised by the questions at the end. The younger contingent clearly liked me, and I felt much better after fielding some of their questions than after my five-minute rant. Fortunately, the questions had very little to do with my speech.
I was thanked for my time and then I got back in the car and headed home. I knew what was coming when the phone rang that night. I remember the call now – I hadn’t got it.
The thing is, no matter that you never really wanted that seat because you knew nothing about it, no matter how much your partner tells you that it’s ‘not part of the plan’, no matter how badly you know you did, to some degree, the rejection still stings.
That evening I suddenly felt very vulnerable. I had left a stable, good career against almost everyone’s advice; I had two children – one of whom was six months old; Felicity and I were planning on getting married the next summer; I had no family wealth to fall back on. It suddenly seemed like a very bold (stupid) decision to ‘leave the Army to be an MP’.
It’s times like that which define you, I think. I was lucky; I had an immensely supportive partner and to be frank, anything was better than getting ready for another tour of Afghanistan with the Army – I was sick of that.
That evening, Felicity and I stayed up late talking. We resolved to stick to the plan, to hold on for the Plymouth selection and go for that. In the meantime, I would get a job in the local area, and we would seriously cut back the scale of our impending wedding.
In the end, the Plymouth selection came around relatively quickly and I was given a date in the autumn of 2013. Then on the day itself I received a phone-call to say that all of the other candidates had pulled out, and the selection event would not be going ahead. For a moment I wondered, yet again, what the hell I was doing. However, the delay did give me a fantastic opportunity to get to know the association, and I spent some time in the intervening couple of weeks – while a new selection was convened – speaking with the personalities involved. It was a small and modest association, who were very friendly indeed.
The selection evening eventually took place two weeks later. Eleven people were eligible to vote for me on the evening (having been members for more than three months). Based on how seriously the process was taken by the central party, and how little national interest the seat seemed to attract, it was clear that the chances of winning this seat in a general election were not good.
I was, however, up against some very interesting characters. One conversation stood out.
‘I’ve just got back from conference,’ she said.
‘Oh yeah, what’s that?’ I asked.
‘You know, conference. I’m still high from it.’
I thought this was a stitch-up, or a joke. It wasn’t.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Lynton’s given me the secrets of passing these things,’ she said.
‘Who’s that, and what are they?’ I asked, excitedly.
‘I can’t tell you that. I’ll tell you when we’ve finished,’ she replied.
‘Oh, OK.’ I shut up.
This was going to be a very interesting journey. Remarkably I was chosen, and late that October evening in the Futures Inn in Plymouth, I assumed the position of the official candidate for the Conservative Party for Plymouth Moor View at the 2015 General Election.
Even though this was what I wanted, leaving uniform for the last time that December was an odd experience. I had trained hard in that uniform, I knew what I was doing in that uniform and I could put it on and assume the role that I was asked to play. Taking it off for the last time is disarming, making one feel uncertain and nervous about the future, both immediate and longer term. This feeling was particularly strong for me. The Army had become my family – my home and my security after I had left my parents’ house. I could handle the internal thoughts and challenges that were hangovers from my upbringing by simply donning my uniform and being ‘someone else’. But life was very different for me now. I had won my mental battles for now – no doubt they could return. I had a family and home of my own for the first time. I was settled and stable. I was that person I wanted to be, and I told myself I could do it.
37
New Year’s Day 2014 brought the new challenge into focus, and I was looking forward to it already. The year ahead was going to define the next ten years of my life. I needed to find a way of combining a job that I was yet to find, that could support a wife and two young children, with campaigning for a seat as an MP that no one thought was winnable.
From my savings, I paid the bills for the wedding in advance. I came up with a finance plan that would give us £105 per week in cash to get by. Bills and rent would be paid; we would just have to feed and clothe the kids and put a bit of fuel in the Rover 400 we had bought for £400 to replace the knackered Peugeot, which never recovered from its night on the moor.
But the fuel soon became too much of a drain. Felicity and I decided that we would sell the remaining car and instead get a baby trailer that attached to her bike. She would then cycle six miles, twice a day, to get Amalie to and from school. This would save us money and give us some wriggle room if we needed it.
I would remain on my motorbike. The fuel on that worked out a lot cheaper, but riding it everywhere was so bloody cold. My fingers, in particular, felt the cold quickly after getting frost-nip in Norway all those years ago. As well as being painful, the bike looked ridiculous. I had repaired it myself after my encounter with the hedge in the autumn and it reminded me of one of the motorbikes the Taliban used to ride around on in Helmand. This was confirmed on a trip into Plymouth in early January: I was riding past the dockyard in Devonport when I was hailed by two kids at the side of the road.
‘Oi! Oi! Mate!’
I slowed down to speak to them.
‘You’ve got a really shit bike, mate,’ the older one said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
I carried on. Running for parliament as a Conservative in Plymouth was going to be an abusive year. I’d best get used to it.
As winter turned into spring, a friend from the village offered me some work. Phil didn’t think it was good for me to have the male banter from the military disappear all at once, and asked if I would work on his building site with him.
He picked me up outside my house at 7 a.m. each day in his van. We would wind our way across the moor in the morning haze that dominate
s the Tamar Valley in the early part of the year. We mostly worked on one new-build property. However, on the way home we would often pop into someone else’s house to help them out with a piece of DIY, such as sealing a chimney or building a wood store.
It was bloody hard graft. Phil taught me how to lay a wall with breeze blocks. I dug out a garden. He would set me to work and come back three hours later. The manual labour was perfect. We sometimes worked with other unskilled labourers, and the banter was intense. From an army officer to the building site in three months – for some reason they found that hilarious.
But not as hilarious as when I told them I had left the Army to be an MP, and I was standing in May 2015. They truly thought I was joking. They wondered why on earth I would do that. Once they got over their initial shock I was belt-fed politics from their view on a daily basis, and it was intriguing. My knowledge of small business, business rates in general, accounting, employment law, imports and exports, material prices, immigration, the NHS and state welfare was, until this time, very limited. This was the perfect education. It quickly became apparent that all I knew about was defence and foreign affairs. But as one of them said to me – better to know what you don’t know.
Spring turned into summer and Felicity and I got married. It was a very small but very idyllic wedding. Amalie and Joey were our beautiful but disruptive bridesmaids; Felicity designed everything from the table covers to the candle-lit first dance under the stars. There were only eight of us. Karl, the Padre from 29 Commando, married us. My best men were Adam, my boss from the 2010 tour of Afghanistan, and Charlie Fisher, the mad one who had married the maid of honour from his cancelled wedding. That story would never get old.
We got married in Altarnun Church in Cornwall, colloquially known as the Cathedral on the Moor, and had our reception at the Endsleigh Hotel, just the other side of the River Tamar in Devon. It was an extraordinary day. My thoughts were all over the place. When first my children, and then my stunningly beautiful wife-to-be, walked down the aisle to me, I realized I had achieved all I ever wanted in life. I only ever wanted a family of my own – the other stuff was just filling time. Now I had them. And they were perfect.
I also thought a lot of Mark Chandler. I don’t know why, but whenever I had one of those moments when I realized how lucky I was, I thought of Bing. He would have been married by now and had children, I suspect. He would have built a life and a family, just like me, had I not commanded him in Afghanistan of course, so the monkey on my shoulder wanted me to believe.
I went to the hotel toilet and remember glancing at myself in the mirror – dressed up in a suit, still a bit scruffy despite my best efforts. I looked at my face, at the lines around my eyes, the scars, and watched as a tear rolled down my cheek.
I heard Baz saying, ‘Do you ever wonder what’s become of us?’
I wiped the tear away, left and walked back out into a beautiful sunlit garden that sits atop the hill that runs down from the house to the Tamar. I would have to carry these thoughts for many years, but I was happy to.
The honeymoon would have to wait. Throughout this period, I was working out my relationship with the Conservative Party Central Office. During the selection process, I’d made a real effort to engage with the professionals from the party. In their view, the seat of Plymouth Moor View, having been ‘eminently winnable’ before my selection, became a ‘lost cause’ as soon as I was named as the candidate. I tried not to take this personally.
‘Well done, Johnny. We’re really pleased for you,’ the local agent said on my selection evening.
‘Thanks. Shall we get together next week and talk about what we are going to do? I’ve got some ideas,’ I enquired.
I had analysed the past results from the previous two elections. There was clearly a core group who voted for one of the main two parties; the majority did not or were not interested. If I could get just two or three per cent of them interested in me and my campaign, I might get over the line.
The agent and I met the following week for a coffee in the association office.
‘Johnny, we don’t want you to campaign for your seat. You’ve got to understand that our priorities are elsewhere, and you must campaign for one of the other candidates, in a seat with a better chance than you – a 40/40 seat this time round for the General Election. We’ll see how you do, write a report and after that we’ll take it from there.’
The 40/40 Campaign was a strategy used by the Conservative Party to target forty seats to hold and forty seats to win, in order to gain a marginal majority in the House of Commons. The targets for 2015 were mainly based on a Liberal Democrat collapse, and because I’d be standing against a Labour incumbent I was not on this list. I understood the 40/40 strategy of course, but did not understand that it would stretch to other parliamentary candidates abandoning their own associations and constituencies.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I told the agent. ‘I left a good career in the Army, which I loved, to be an MP and sort out veterans’ care. I can’t simply abandon that.’
I also felt bad for my association. They had worked bloody hard at the previous election and almost won. They had been through some very hard times, but a few stoic souls had kept it going, and they were desperate to run their campaign around me.
‘You will campaign in a 40/40 seat, Johnny, or we will have a few problems,’ I was told.
I was deflated. The night before the meeting I had been up late with Felicity working through ideas. We would focus on membership first. We wanted to change it so that joining the Conservative Party in Plymouth meant more than paying a subscription and being given hundreds of leaflets and a map of where they needed to be delivered. We wanted it to be a team, a social group, something people wanted to be part of again.
Immediately after this meeting I went into Plymouth and got another coffee. I was left feeling rather isolated. I had a family to support, very little money, had left the Army to pursue these ambitions against all advice, and now the pillar upon which I was going to so heavily lean – the Conservative Party – was not the support I had hoped for.
I called the agent back.
‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m not just going to give up on this,’ I said to him.
A few weeks later I was asked to come to London and hoped it might be good news. I found Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) in Millbank for the first time, and made my way upstairs. I was greeted in silence and shown through to a boardroom with two members of the candidates board. I greeted them with a smile. It was not returned.
‘Johnny, I hear there is a bit of a problem,’ said one.
‘We need you to give up on your campaign and get on board with supporting Oliver across town,’ said the other.
Oliver Colvile was the MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport. He had been elected in 2010 and was facing a tough fight to keep his seat in 2015, despite all the good work he had done for Plymouth in his tenure.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Of course I’ll help him. But I cannot abandon my campaign. The association would be devastated. But above all I left the Army to be an MP, and I can’t give that up. You did give the impression, deliberately or otherwise, that this 40/40 strategy was malleable, and that I might be successful in attracting attention to my seat.’
I knew I would not be a priority. But to my mind there was some distance between that and abandoning my association and giving up on becoming an MP.
‘Johnny, we will not be allocating any resources to your seat. Now or in the future. I’m sorry you have got that impression but it’s simply not going to happen.’
I was obviously not amused, and the atmosphere got worse.
‘Why do you think you should be supported?’ one of them said. ‘Who do you think you are? What have you done with your life?’
I never for one minute came into this career change expecting anything and I didn’t mind that these guys clearly thought nothing of me; they didn’t know me from Adam. But I did no
t expect the arrogance and the sudden, sharp hostility. This belittling fired something off in me. I thought of Felicity, the girls, everything we had sacrificed to achieve this. I had cycled to the station this morning with a suit bag banging against the spokes of my bike because we did not even have a car to our name. I had heard from other candidates that CCHQ was like this, but I had given them a clean slate with me, hoping it would be different.
‘Let me stop you there,’ I said.
She carried on. ‘Why do you think you should be an MP? You say you want to do it better, for veterans. You need to be really careful. Really careful. You’re implying that it’s not being done well enough now. And who are you to question the standard of MPs?’
‘There are clearly some terrific MPs,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying that at all. I just feel we owe these guys.’
‘What do you think is going to happen to you after 2015?’ the gentleman asked me, with a wry smile.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Well, we assess you.’
‘What on?’ I asked.
‘We assess you,’ he replied, again, nodding his head and smiling at his partner in crime.
‘I’m going to leave now,’ I said, rising to my feet. The lady walked out in front of me without saying goodbye and I was shown out of the building.
The Thames was at low tide as I walked back along the Embankment to Westminster tube station. I felt pretty cut up. Felicity had got up early with me that morning and made me a packed lunch as the food in London was so expensive; she had hoped some good news was coming. It took me a while to tell her how the meeting had gone; I was too embarrassed. Similarly, my chairman was hoping for some good news. I told him we were unlikely to be made a 40/40 seat, but lied and said we could be hopeful for some support. I couldn’t disappoint him.
We Were Warriors Page 26