PETER HITCHENS: How I long for the rowdy mobs, lobbed tomatoes and crackling loud speaker vans from election campaigns of yesteryear By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday Published: 17:00, 29 June 2024 | Updated: 17:00, 29 June 2024 e-mail View comments Oh, how I long for some decent heckling and for huge public meetings that go a bit wrong, perhaps even for the occasional well-aimed ripe tomato – though these days the law frowns severely on the throwing even of soft things, so I had better be careful what I say, in case I am arrested for incitement by the Milkshake Squad or the Sense of Humour Squad. I have never yet seen an election so drained of true excitement, so lifeless, colourless, sapless and noiseless. There are hardly any posters.
I have yet to hear the crackling, braying sound of a loud-speaker van. It was not always so. Back in 1964, would-be prime ministers had to endure the ritual ordeal of the Birmingham Rag Market a few days before the poll.
On Tuesday, October 6, that year it was the turn of the aristocratic, cadaverous Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Tougher than he looked, he had sworn he would not be drowned out by the market’s nationally notorious hecklers. ‘Don’t try and shout me down,’ he warned the 6,000-strong crowd.
‘It won’t work.’ Harold Wilson, the former Oxford academic posing as a man of the people, faces a crowd in Manchester in 1966 But as the Daily Mail’s Eric Sewell reported: ‘For the first time in his election to.
