“Some say love it is a river…”

OK we all lost at that one, me and the couple at my table in the pub at Leeds central station. She was a bottle-blonde past her best, with a curtain bob and a red dress beneath the beige jacket. He was a shabby, ordinary little man in a blue suit, aged and jowly, at least wohhhhhhhhhh four or five years older than your correspondent.

There was nowhere else in the pub but the other end of their table to set up the national affairs desk, and besides they only had eyes for each other. As young lovers do — well ageing and decrepit ones — they talked of everything and nothing, of office buying needs and Val’s trip to Mykonos, while the rush hour crowd came and went, a quick Stella, a pack of McCoy’s salt and vinegar, they crunch like seasoned roofing tiles, and out into the suburbs of the city.

A huge fat man tried to engage me in conversation and I was having none of it. A girl came in, ordered two glasses of “rosay”, the other drinker never arrived, and the empty chair stared at her until she downed them both and left. All the while Miss Jean Brodie and Last Chance Harvey fell deeper into each other’s eyes as the piped music played some demented serenade made in heaven or hell or as a co-pro of both.

It began with Kenny Rogers ‘The Night Goes On….’ (You and me walking on the land/But we can lose a stare from time in time/cos we both get lonely/and it makes me more afraid/as the night goes on) and they kissed in the third verse. OK potency of cheap music yadadadah.

Coupla songs later I was still catching up on political blogs, reading Iain Dale’s Dairy, which erotica-wise is like taking your dog to have its teeth cleaned while having a rectal itch, and there was some soaring anthem ‘Right Where I Should Be‘.

Right where I should be. The pub at Leeds Central Station waiting to go to a hustings. In the great nowhere of northern England, the belly of the beast. Right Where I should Beeeeeee…..

She was a flashy gal, in the red dress. He was there to make up the numbers, but she must have been north of fifty-five and pogoed to the Pistols once. Others fell by the wayside, but she never lost the urge, the urge to make the effort.

By the time we got to “let go of your heart, let go of your head” we were a trio, there was no way around it, joined by that block of wood, me trying not to eavesdrop, them not really caring. Ah god, whoever has never known adultery has never known love. There were three of us in this relationship, which, as always, was juuuuuust riiiiiiiiight.

And then ‘The Rose‘ and we all laughed. And later they took off. Together? Don’t be thick. If they were going anywhere together, they would have sat there silently over half-pints, and wondered why Walker’s don’t make that tomato sauce flavoured crisps anymore, and should they take the 117 or the 33 and who’s going to take the dog to get its teeth cleaned yadadada. They were alive for forty-five minutes, like mayflies.

So, OK, I got out of town OK? And it wasn’t easy. I hauled my lazy arse out of Milkbar at about 2 pm, and it was hard yards because the place looked like a Taschen catalogue this morning, and I got on the damn train out of Kings Cross.

Turned out to be kinda interesting. There’s quite a lot of England and I would really advise many of you to see it. Close your eyes as you go through the northern suburbs of London though, cos man they’re depressing. Pretty soon after that it’s rolling fields, and then we’re into the Midlands.

Leeds central something seemed a good place to check out the mood of the UK. A northern seat, but Leeds has become a fairly swishy place what with the university and Chumbawumba having that hit ‘n all, so it’s going in multiple directions. This seat is currently held by a pretty impressive local member, coincidentally named Fabian, though he’s a signatory to the Euston Manifesto, so he’s also a bit of a tool. But it needs a 7.5% swing, which is right on the noggin of a Conservative outright majority. If they want that then they have to take a seat like Leeds North East.

It is, in its way, a very Labour seat. As the taxi took me far away from Leeds central station and love among the crisp packets, the city fell away very quickly, a product of the green wedges driven deep into its flanks by successive administrations, a corrective to the smoking ruin it once was.

You can see plenty of that as the train approaches the station. Hollowed out factories, their red brick walls and smokestacks being readied for heritage shopping malls, the marks of smaller factories and workshops for mile after mile.

The lives that saw nothing but the inside of those factories year on year. The place the city, the North, the UK, the place was, the place it now is, is something the county has not even begun to absorb, psyche-wise. To go from being the workshop of the world to wandering around shopping and screwing is not something you get over easily.

The northern suburbs of Leeds are pleasant in that English no-place sort of way: houses even more conformist than the Oz brick-veneer variety, rows of mock tudor shops, interspersed with bike paths and green spaces. God know whoever did this thought they were doing their best, but it is death, sheer death.

It is the best and worst of New Labour too, because when we reach the school where a Q and A by the local candidates for the untutored is to be held, it’s a New Labour school, built two years ago, in the place where a hulking 20s ruin used to be. Bright, breezy, with its name Allerton High School in bright helvetica, it is the sort of place that simply didn’t exist before New Labour got in, and wouldn’t had the Tories had their way.

The hustings is organised by a local interfaith group, the three candidates — the slick Labour guy, the itchy blond anorexic Tory doofus, sorta bloke who makes John Roskam look like Ving Rhames, an eager but inept Lib Dem — giving their three-minute speech, and then the questions. They were before a panel of divines — a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Sikh community leader — it looked like someone had assembled a really elaborate joke and they then faced a panel of questions.

The Labour guy was good, he was too good, he gave his spiel like he’d done a thousand times before, the Tory kid sounded like he was presenting Q3 figures for the south-east regional health centre, and the Lib Dem, well she tried.

The most amazing thing, though, was that no-one could present a programme, even the sketchiest idea of what they wanted to do for the next five years. There was boilerplate about electoral reform — bad good possible — economics, foreign affairs. Questions veered wildly from Afghanistan to the drains in north east Leeds, and so on.

Afterwards I asked a few people about their affiliations and motives and really got the usual answers, which makes you wonder why you bother. “Well look I’m here because I want my kid to come to this school it’s a great school it was just rebuilt last year,” said one bloke in casual wear and ugly glasses, “but I’m a Tory.”

“But this school wouldn’t be here if it wasnt for Labour,” I said. “They built it. They quite possible spent too much money building them…”

“Well I dunno…I mean the school was very old. It would have got rebuilt.”

By who, by the school fairies? Blowing magic school dust? Arggghhhhhhhhhh. But it’s not his fault. Why can’t Labour sell the genuinely good thing it has done over the last 13 years, that it has rebuilt the social infrastructure, that it drew the UK back from a US style abyss?

Because it lives in fear of going up against Maggie, even though David Cameron, campaigning in Yorkshire today, basically repudiated Maggie and all her works.

Even the Tories are damning her. And Labour can’t bring itself to do so for the simple reason that Maggie completed the social revoution that Labour never could.

Narrggghhhhhhhh. The phone beeped. It was the Diarist, cancelling a date at the races with the Abu Dhabi royal family. Her family is having an RD Laing moment. The Actress will need to be returned to first reserve, presuming she can fit it in between the yoga, and doesn’t read Crikey regularly.

God, what the British Labour Party needed was a Keating, and it never got it. When I think of what Keating would have done with David Cameron, I just sit back and smile. Politics? It would have been origami. Or Iron Chef.

Later, after checking into the Novotel, I went to the last pub in central Leeds that hadn’t been swallowed up by Labour’s epic regeneration plans to make this place as soulless and nowhere as Thousand Oaks California, or the inside of Tony Blair, and talked to the stoned kitchen staff who told me they would never in a thousand years vote Tory, which filled me with hope but they couldn’t vouch for their mates without jobs. Arggghhhhhhhhhh.

Where’s the love, that’s what I want to know? Where’s the love? Politics is love, even of your enemies, whom you must destroy. This hustings, in its impeccable, municipal, hooperish way, was a measure of politics of the super ego, of nothing from the id, the guts. Where was the love? Where the roaring passion?

It was, as you know, in the bar at Leeds central station, where two old punks, disguised as adults, pledged their undying love, and went home to their spouses. There was love in the US election 08. There was hate too, but hate is just love seen from behind, moving at speed. “She such a very ordinary little woman/he such a thumping crook/ but both of them little beneath the angels/in the teashop’s inglenook”.*

So, I ask you, amid the municipality, the hung parliaments, the fiscal restraint, where is the love?

Oh and the song that came on after that couple left? ‘So You’re Looking For a Miracle‘.

And In the Spring becomes the Rose.**

* Betjeman, from memory. I was listening to Concrete Blonde at the time.

** The symbol for Labour.