by A. N. Wilson
If the argument were being conducted on a purely intellectually level, it would have to be conceded that the existence of both sides was itself self-explanatory. There are indeed two sides to the question–is membership of the EU to Britain’s advantage? For certain manufacturers, and certain financiers, the answer is very much yes; for others, who trade in other parts of the world or deal in non-European currencies, the economic consequences of membership are indifferent, and the political restraints could well seem tiresome. For the farmers and the fishermen, as General de Gaulle had long before warned, the Common Agricultural Policy favoured the French against the British farmer, the European against the British fishermen in countless ways.
Hence the divide. But the Conservative Party was suffering a collective identity crisis or nervous breakdown. Like a seventeenth-century Protestant sect breaking up into ever more fissiparous and esoteric groups, here Brownists, there Muggletonians, there Shakers, here Anabaptists, the parliamentary party splintered into ever more rancorous groupings: Tory Reform, Lollards, No Turning Backers, Bruge Groupists, Conservative Way Forwarders, 92 Groupers, Fresh Starters and European Foundationists.12 Sensing that they wanted his blood, Major called the Eurosceptic rebels the Bastards. The most personable of the bastards, Michael Portillo, a blubber-lipped bisexual with rigorously combed-back hair, hid his intelligence in order to rouse the rabble, a low point being reached when he told the European Union, ‘Don’t mess with Britain’, and claimed–his father had been a professor at the University of Salamanca–that European examination boards were less reliable than the good old British GCSE. But Portillo was too much of a coward to stand openly against his leader. Major smoked out the bastards in June 1995 by standing down as leader and inviting one of them to challenge him for the leadership. The gauntlet was picked up by John Redwood, christened by the press Vulcan because of a perceived resemblance to Star Trek’s Mr Spock. Major naturally won the contest. It was the most extreme case of ‘No one will kill me, Jamie, to make you King.’13 There was not much doubt, however, about the likely outcome of the next General Election. By the time that happened, Major was well into his eighth year as Prime Minister, a much longer run than many of his predecessors. The country was ready for a change. The nice decent man who negotiated Maastricht had evolved into a largely ineffectual Prime Minister who was blamed for Black Wednesday. He made catastrophic mistakes, such as allowing Michael Heseltine–whom he had appointed as President of the Board of Trade–to close thirty-one coal mines in one fell swoop with a loss of 30,000 jobs. (‘A monumental cock-up’–said the Confederation of British Industry.14) The effects of the recession led to many natural Conservative supporters losing their houses through repossession. Even those who survived felt bruised by the experience. The newspapers, bored by more than eighteen years of government by the same party, began to play up the more absurd antics of Cabinet members, such as David Mellor, who had a three-month affair with a thirty-year-old actress, Antonia de Sancha (in a bugged telephone call he admitted to being ‘seriously knackered’ after a night with hers15). The sleaze was not a journalistic invention. The career of Jeffrey Archer, liar, paymaster of a prostitute and convicted perjurer, should make that clear enough.
Jeffrey Archer was born in 1940, his mother a journalist, the first woman ever to work on the Weston Mercury. His father, whom Archer gave out was a First World War hero, decorated for valour, had in fact been a convicted fraudster and bigamist, who had travelled to New York at the beginning of the First War on his dead employer’s passport and duped ‘many well-known New York people’. The son would be a chip off the old block. His Who’s Who entry was a better work of fiction than any of his novels which he so successfully persuaded the public to buy. He was down as educated at Wellington College–a Berkshire public school–whereas in fact he had merely been to school in the village of Wellington, Somerset. He studied as a gym teacher at the Department of Education in Oxford, but Who’s Who readers were led to believe that Brasenose College was his alma mater. In 1966 he had married Mary Weeden, an ice-cold scientist. This was one of the best bits of luck he ever pulled off, for, as his career came unstuck, he discovered that this beautiful, mysterious person was far more prepared to share the financial rewards than she was to discard the moral disgrace of being Mrs, then Lady Archer. At twenty-nine, he became MP for Loughborough–Britain’s fourth youngest MP. (He of course claimed to be the youngest.) Five years later, he came close to bankruptcy, having invested in a fraudulent Canadian cleaning firm called Aquablast. He decided, like Sir Walter Scott in comparable circumstances, to write his way out of penury. He had a genius, not for writing, but for self-promotion. Initially, the sales of the books were sluggish, but they were always written up and presented as if they were bestsellers on a level with Gone With the Wind. Little by little, people believed this, and the books sold. He re-entered public life, and Conservative political life, as a rich, popular author, much in demand on the circuit of speakers to Conservative luncheons, fetes and fund-raising evenings. By 1985, he had risen to become the deputy chairman of the party, even though Willie Whitelaw warned the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, that Archer was ‘an accident waiting to happen’.
In October 1986, sure enough, Archer resigned. ‘I have been silly, very foolish. What else can I say?’ He admitted arranging for a friend to pay Miss Monica Coughlan £2,000 in £50 notes, at a rendezvous arranged on Platform 3 of Victoria Station. The News of the World printed the story. The Star, however, had the temerity to suggest that Archer was not merely paying Miss Coughlan money out of the kindness of his heart but because he had had sex with her, and wished to offer hush money. He sued, and in July 1987 he was awarded £500,000 in damages. The judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, was so overwhelmed by the ‘fragrant’ beauty of Mary Archer that he could not conceive of a man married to her being tempted by ‘kinky’ sex, as had been alleged, with Miss Coughlan. The evidence given by Miss Coughlan, which included vivid descriptions of the spots on Archer’s naked back, seemed convincing enough to many, but Caulfield effectively ordered the jury to find Archer not guilty. Mary Archer was worth more than her weight in gold. By January 1994, she was a member of the board of Anglia TV. Mysteriously Jeffrey Archer, who, it was claimed, knew nothing of an impending takeover of the company, cleared up a tidy £78,000 profit on buying and selling Anglia shares in a hurry–acting, naturally, on behalf of a friend. By 1997, Archer was speaking of himself as a plausible Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, but in November 1999, the News of the World was able to establish that Archer, in the libel trial of 1987, had persuaded a friend, Ted Francis, to lie about his whereabouts on the night in question. In some ways the interesting thing about the ensuing trial for perjury, in September 2000, was not the demeanour of the defendant, but that of the defendant’s wife, who seemed to be on the edge of losing her cool, and who once actually called out and corrected evidence being given by another witness. Some of the evidence for Archer’s defence consisted of a comparison between two desk diaries. One was a scuffed, well-used diary which appeared to have been the one in actual use in 1986. Another, much newer-looking diary for the same year, with only a few entries was, in Mary Archer’s clear recollection, the one which had in fact been in constant use in the Archers’ London flat. When her accountant came to be examined, he had difficulty in accounting for the half a million pounds in damages, which Mary Archer had said to a local newspaper had been donated to charity. Yet, it was not Mary Archer who was on trial, but Jeffrey, who, while the trial was in progress, had opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, with a play called The Accused. It transferred to the Haymarket in the latter days of Archer’s own trial. He took the part of the Accused, his wooden acting in the theatre being neither more nor less convincing than his behaviour on political platforms over the previous twenty years. He liked to suggest that the play had transferred to the enormous West End theatre because of popular demand. The Haymarket was pathetically empty, whereas the court room at the Old Bai
ley full, to see him be sent down for four years on two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice.16 The question was not why he had been condemned, but why–given his obviously fraudulent character–he had been promoted within the political party by Margaret Thatcher, and, much more disgracefully, ennobled by the Queen at the recommendation of John Major. Poor Miss Coughlan’s wad of money was very different from Miss Prism’s handbag, in that other mishap on Victoria Station described by Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, the words of Lady Bracknell hovered in the air as Major’s government came unstuck. Losing one Minister through scandal was a misfortune, but having a whole pack of crooks as his colleagues and supporters began to look like carelessness.
When John Major became Prime Minister, Britain was involved in the Gulf War, but this was not a conflict of Major’s making. Compared with his predecessors and his immediate successor, he was responsible for remarkably few deaths. His economic policy, following the debacle when Britain tumbled out of the ERM, was unexciting, which meant there were smaller dole queues, fewer strikes, and a higher level of personal prosperity than at any time in the nation’s history. He came very close to helping the warring factions in Ireland find a peaceful way out of their ancient feud, and, indeed, handed an Irish situation on to his successor which was bound to end in peaceful negotiations. All in all, then, a successful term in office, and a good number of years at it, too–nearly eight. But by the end of the Major years, most journalists were writing John Major off as an embarrassing failure.
John Major was an apt Prime Minister for the times. In spite of the snobbish jibes directed at him by privately educated journalists, jibes which he understandably found vexing, he was more or less classless and, apart from a reassuring amiability when appearing on television, he was, in a good sense, characterless. The British had surely had enough of the cult of personality?
The country was no longer a great world power, but it had a sort of ex-great power status which meant it was necessary to have a Prime Minister who was courteous and good-humoured when meeting other world leaders. Major fulfilled this role admirably, as Thatcher most definitely had not. He was a patient negotiator–witness his winning the opt-out at Maastricht. But he was not pushing or needlessly aggressive. He seemed to be the perfect Prime Minister to express Britain’s new status in the world–that of a prosperous ex–world power with an ambivalent attitude to the European Union of which it was a semi-detached member; a country with many of its old problems–corporatism, public inefficiency, too high taxes–but which was coming to terms with radical changes in its economic life and in its ethnic, social and demographic composition with resilience and inventiveness. Major presided rather appropriately over a period when the country wanted to cast aside the old divisive politics of unions versus new money. Something potentially rather interesting was happening to Britain, particularly to London. It was changing–into what, it was not quite clear. It had for a long time been clear that it would never revert to being a North European socialist state such as had been envisaged in 1945. It was therefore for the Labour Party to devise an alternative to state socialism. The trouble with being a Conservative at this date was that, intellectually, Conservatism had won, if not all, then a substantial number of the arguments. The former Eastern European communist states all yearned to become bourgeois liberal democracies such as Mrs Thatcher had championed. Britain, which combined a generous welfare system with burgeoning financial and services industries, was an attractive place not only to the majority of its own citizens but to many throughout the globe who wanted to come and work or live there. Yet, although Britain was more peaceful, more prosperous than it had ever been, there was a sense in many quarters that all was not well.
Major’s government fell because it was inefficient, and because the Labour Party had eventually chosen a leader who did not frighten the electorate. But for those who had a responsibility to produce newspapers each morning, and for those who had an appetite to read them, the dullness of the Major years provided a challenge. Major’s virtues, namely his unflappability and his understatedness, made him insufferably dull, especially to the cartoonists. Steve Bell of the Guardian envisaged him as always wearing Y-front underpants outside his trousers, while Patrick Wright and Peter Richardson devised 101 Uses for a John Major. Major’s expressionless face and his grey off-the-peg suits adorn each cruelly accurate drawing of their little book. The best of them show him standing dispassionately and dutifully being used as: an ironing board–Mr Major bends down while a woman places the board on his back; a toast rack–he kneels at a table, with the pieces of toast balanced on his fingers while a peppery old Tory rustles a copy of that morning’s Times; a draught excluder–a trussed Major is wedged against the bottom of a door, and a lavatory paper holder–a polite, patient Major stands by holding the roll while another peppery Tory-looking character sits enthroned on the lo.17 Something was necessary to fill the mythological gap after the demise of Mrs Thatcher. She had appropriated to herself the roles traditionally played not by ministers but by monarchs. And in Mr Major’s gentle occupancy of Number 10 Downing Street it was inevitable that those who saw the world through the lenses of the newspapers and the television should have turned away from the dullness of politicians to the traditional stuff of story books and mythologies, princes and princesses. The newspaper proprietors and their readership were lucky, for this phase of political doldrums coincided with a period when, although the monarch was, as ever, leading a tastefully discreet existence, signing her state papers, exercising her corgis, following the horses and enjoying the companionship of a few carefully chosen, chiefly aristocratic ladies-in-waiting and courtiers, her heir was champing to be taken seriously, and to command the public stage.
21 January 1993
For the past 15 years I have been entirely motivated by a desperate desire to put the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain. Everything I have tried to do–all the projects, speeches, schemes etc.–have been with this end in mind. And none of this has worked, as you can see too obviously!18
22
Prince Charles and Lady Di
In Heir of Sorrows, a running serial in Private Eye, the Prince of Wales was regularly lampooned. In this parody of romantic fiction, Charles’s admiration for Sir Laurens van der Post, his love of health foods, his watercolours and his care for the environment, his passion for the cityscapes of England and for the preservation of old architecture, far from seen as admirable, were held up for ridicule, and were seen as contributory factors to his ever deeper estrangement from his wife. In one of the scenes, the Prince was summoned to the study of his terrifying father, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was sitting in front of ‘a garish spread of the morning’s newspapers’…‘This has gone far enough!’ he bellowed, as if tearing a strip off some naval rating who had been caught asleep on the Watch.
Charles felt helpless, as he always did. He hated these moments of confrontation. Desperately he groped in his mind for the advice of SirLaurens.
‘In moments of stress be still and build a bridge over troubled waters,’ he had said, but it seemed of little avail as the Duke continued on his tirade.
‘Your mother is very upset. And as for granny–well, she’s hardly getting any younger, is she? We’ve worked bloody hard to keep this show on the road and now you’re letting us all down, d’you hear?’
The words stung Charles like the lash of a whip. ‘I…er…terribly…’ He began. But the Duke was in no mood to listen.
It’s up to you, boy, to bring her to heel before we end up as the laughing stock of Europe.’1
Were we to write down the virtues of Prince Charles, and his achievements, he would undoubtedly emerge as a, if not the, hero of this book. Unlike nearly all the career politicians who have dominated our story so far, this future Head of State took a wide, generous view, and had a much deeper knowledge, of the condition of Britain. The Prince’s Trust, set up in 1976, was a practical response to the rise of crime and the growth of aliena
tion among Britain’s youth. ‘Self-help schemes’ were devised to rescue those young people who ‘were destined for the scrap-heap before reaching adulthood’.2 Within a decade of its inception, it grew to a national organisation involving more than fifty regional committees, with over 1,000 volunteers. It dispersed more than £300,000 per annum, and, unlike the government, it was able to dispense grants quickly and without red tape to causes which were genuinely useful socially, helping unemployed youth get training, encouraging young people to set up businesses. More than 25,000 young people a year were helped by the Trust, and it was recognised as a role model for state-funded organisations to help the nation’s youth.
The Prince’s Trust would have been a considerable achievement were it the only thing which Charles had initiated. But he was also a responsible and intelligent opinion-former–as befitted a future Head of State–about some of the issues of the day which could be seen as the most vital. Long before politicians leapt on to the bandwagon, he was urging people to wake up to environmental problems. He was a keen advocate of organic farming years before it became fashionable. At Highgrove, his Gloucestershire estate, he set up a food business which was a model of its kind, selling excellent hams, bacon, biscuits and jams, full of good flavour and hugely successful. Many other food suppliers imitated him. He was often intelligent and interesting on the subject of food. During a period when supermarkets and factory farms were homogenising and Americanising the food supply, his was an early and clear-throated call for more local produce, more seasonable fruits and vegetables, more celebration of the local and the near and the traditional. Nor did he, in this respect, limit himself to home. While being a keen European, he spoke out against the absurd EU regulations which threatened the very future of French cheese by their insistence upon pasteurisation.