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In the summer of 1992 I was working as a cub reporter at the Evening Argus in Brighton. My days were spent watching recidivist teenagers appear at the local magistrates court, interviewing shopkeepers about the recession and, twice a week, updating the opening hours of the Bluebell Railway for the paper’s listings page. It wasn’t a great time if you were a petty thief, or a shopkeeper, but for me it was a happy period in my life.
John Major had recently been re-elected as prime minister and, flush from victory, he delivered one of his most remembered (and ridiculed) policy initiatives. With presidential seriousness, he announced the creation of a telephone hotline for information about traffic cones – a banal proposal dressed up as if the future of the world depended on it.
In Brighton, however, cones were big news. You couldn’t drive into town without getting stuck in roadworksThe main route from London – the A23 (M) – was a corridor of striped orange cones all the way from Crawley to Preston Park. With its tongue firmly in its cheek, the Argus challenged its readers to guess the number of cones that lined the many miles of the A23 (M). Senior staff congratulated themselves on such a brilliant idea. The village fête-style challenge explained the story while also poking fun at central government: perfect local-paper stuff.
Yet only a few hours after the competition was launched, the first entry was received, and in it the reader had guessed the correct number of cones. I remember the senior editors sitting in dejected silence in the newsroom, as if an important local councillor had just died. They had aimed to parody the prime minister, but it was they who had been made to look like fools.
The editors had assumed that guessing how many cones there were on 20 or so miles of motorway was an impossible task. It self-evidently wasn’t and I think I was the only person in the building who could see why.