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Were You Still Up for Portillo
- GenresPolitics
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 2, 1997
9 people want to read
About the author
Brian Cathcart
13 books13 followersBrian Cathcart is a journalist by background, having worked for Reuters, the London Independent papers and the New Statesman, and he is now professor of journalism at Kingston University London. Some of his books (including The Case of Stephen Lawrence, which won the Orwell Prize and a CWA Gold Dagger) have grown out of news and journalism; others (such as The Fly in the Cathedral) reflect his love of history. His latest, The News From Waterloo, combines the two. Cathcart is also a campaigner, having co-founded Hacked Off in 2011 to make the case for a free and accountable press. He is married with grown-up sons and lives in London, where he feeds the birds in the garden and from which he escapes occasionally to walk the Pennine Way.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 1, 2024
If you've seen the TV coverage multiple times already like I have then you probably won't learn a lot from this book, but it's an entertaining observation of election night 1997. Not a bad charity shop pickup!
August 19, 2023
Want to revisit the glory days of the biggest defeat of the Tories since... well, ever? This is your read, and Brian Cathcart, telling it in straightforward journalistic prose, is your man.
The strapline 're-live the drama of election night hour by hour' describes exactly what this short (188 pages), information-dense volume will do for you. I read it, literally, in one night, starting at about 10 and finishing before 2 - in other words almost in phase with the night itself. And honestly it took me right back there because, on the night in question (1st-2nd May 1997) I was, like the title, "up for Portillo" and his magnificent defeat by the young, as-yet-unknown Mr Twigg and his mischievous grin (there are pictures).
Each chapter covers one hour, starting from the commentariat's no-man's-land of close of polls at 10 pm, when no results can possibly yet be in but pundits and psephologists are asked, relentlessly, to offer opinions on how the night will unfold. The studio set-up, both BBC and ITV, and the awkwardness, are captured in loving detail. Stung by their 1992 defeat after the polls had promised victory, Labour spokespeople forced themselves to remain reserved, while pollsters of other persuasions and none were little better off.
The 'race to be first to declare' had, by 1997, become a thing, and Sunderland South's military-style operation is described in detail - they declared within 46 minutes, setting a record. This may have been the election where Chris Mullin, ther resulting first-elected MP (and author of a novel called 'A Very British Coup', which by the way I highly recommend) pointed out that he could now enact some 'intersting' legislation by voting it through a House in which he was the only sitting MP.
Hour by hour we are then taken through the night's extraordinary events as MPs, including no fewer than seven Cabinet ministers, lose their seats to young, diverse, and often surprised, Labour and LibDem adversaries. Want to refresh your memory about Jonathan Aitken's 'sword of truth and trusty shield of fair play', Martin Bell 'The Man in White' (and the record he set), or Chris Hamilton and his alleged Brown Envelopes? It's all here, in precise but passionate detail, along with the unfolding tally of newly-minted Labour and LibDem seats, each accompanied by its 'target number' - for example '1' being the seat with the slimmest Tory majority over Labour, and therefore the easiest for them to claim. Target numbers up to the 190s get a mention.
The two almost throwaway quotes I personally recall from the night both get a mention. "Hove? Hang on - something seismic must be going on if they've lost Hove..." (I used to live there), and "Well", (addressed to Cecil Parkinson, Conservative party chair), "You're head of a fertiliser company: How deep in it do you think you are now?"
In the end, this is the story of a dawn that came after a long night. Eighteen years of Tory government had made the economy's headline numbers look good, but at a terrible cost. Individual failings of ministers and MPs - adultery (after the obligatory 'family values' speech), bullying, and financial shenanigans, added to the country's woes of widening inequality. The Great British Public had simply had enough. The exact reasons for the dramatic scale of the defeat are not probed in detail, bar a few quotes from MPs. However I like to think that our human sense of fair play remains - that in these times of even further widening of inequality, to the extent that life is beginning to be made impossible for some, the British public will shortly send our current crop of Tory MPs, whose dirty dealings make the class of '97 look like rank amateurs, away from anywhere near the levers of power.
The strapline 're-live the drama of election night hour by hour' describes exactly what this short (188 pages), information-dense volume will do for you. I read it, literally, in one night, starting at about 10 and finishing before 2 - in other words almost in phase with the night itself. And honestly it took me right back there because, on the night in question (1st-2nd May 1997) I was, like the title, "up for Portillo" and his magnificent defeat by the young, as-yet-unknown Mr Twigg and his mischievous grin (there are pictures).
Each chapter covers one hour, starting from the commentariat's no-man's-land of close of polls at 10 pm, when no results can possibly yet be in but pundits and psephologists are asked, relentlessly, to offer opinions on how the night will unfold. The studio set-up, both BBC and ITV, and the awkwardness, are captured in loving detail. Stung by their 1992 defeat after the polls had promised victory, Labour spokespeople forced themselves to remain reserved, while pollsters of other persuasions and none were little better off.
The 'race to be first to declare' had, by 1997, become a thing, and Sunderland South's military-style operation is described in detail - they declared within 46 minutes, setting a record. This may have been the election where Chris Mullin, ther resulting first-elected MP (and author of a novel called 'A Very British Coup', which by the way I highly recommend) pointed out that he could now enact some 'intersting' legislation by voting it through a House in which he was the only sitting MP.
Hour by hour we are then taken through the night's extraordinary events as MPs, including no fewer than seven Cabinet ministers, lose their seats to young, diverse, and often surprised, Labour and LibDem adversaries. Want to refresh your memory about Jonathan Aitken's 'sword of truth and trusty shield of fair play', Martin Bell 'The Man in White' (and the record he set), or Chris Hamilton and his alleged Brown Envelopes? It's all here, in precise but passionate detail, along with the unfolding tally of newly-minted Labour and LibDem seats, each accompanied by its 'target number' - for example '1' being the seat with the slimmest Tory majority over Labour, and therefore the easiest for them to claim. Target numbers up to the 190s get a mention.
The two almost throwaway quotes I personally recall from the night both get a mention. "Hove? Hang on - something seismic must be going on if they've lost Hove..." (I used to live there), and "Well", (addressed to Cecil Parkinson, Conservative party chair), "You're head of a fertiliser company: How deep in it do you think you are now?"
In the end, this is the story of a dawn that came after a long night. Eighteen years of Tory government had made the economy's headline numbers look good, but at a terrible cost. Individual failings of ministers and MPs - adultery (after the obligatory 'family values' speech), bullying, and financial shenanigans, added to the country's woes of widening inequality. The Great British Public had simply had enough. The exact reasons for the dramatic scale of the defeat are not probed in detail, bar a few quotes from MPs. However I like to think that our human sense of fair play remains - that in these times of even further widening of inequality, to the extent that life is beginning to be made impossible for some, the British public will shortly send our current crop of Tory MPs, whose dirty dealings make the class of '97 look like rank amateurs, away from anywhere near the levers of power.
March 30, 2010
An amusing recap of the BBC and ITV coverage of Election Night 1997. A rather wild scene in Putney!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews