by A. N. Wilson
Tracey Emin was easier for the philistines to guy since she was a woman, she was of foreign extraction (Turkish Cypriot on the father’s side), and she resorted to that device which many women consider necessary as a way of crossing the barricades of male stuffiness–buffoonery. Germaine Greer and Jessica Mitford come to mind. Probably few had heard of Emin until 1997 when she appeared on a Channel 4 television programme, visibly drunk (she afterwards claimed an unwise mixture with painkillers on account of a cut finger). She abused the other panel members in the arty discussion, rose to her unsteady feet and tottered off, claiming she was going home to her mum. Thereafter, she was a famous character. She exuded sexual allure and charm, and, like many artists before her, she made her life her subject matter. She had been born in Croydon but brought up in Margate. At thirteen she was raped, or ‘broken in’ as the local boys called it. Her high intelligence and resourcefulness took her to Medway College of Design, where she met the arresting, overblown figure of Billy Childish and spent five years as his muse and concubine, posing naked for photographs while developing thoughts and artistic ideas which outsoared his by miles. Later she had a relationship with Carl Freedman, and it was during this period that her distinctive styles became marked. She was an extremely skilled draughts-woman, and her drawings would, at any era of art, have been esteemed. She was also interestingly involved with fabric appliqués and other embroidered works. She was witty and quirky–witness her neon signs Is Anal Sex Legal? and its companion piece, Is Legal Sex Anal? Her most famous art work was My Bed, which was acquired by the Tate Gallery and a tent, appliquéd with the names of those who could be included in its title Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. These included her twin brother, her granny and her aborted child, as well as sexual partners. Emin transcended the necessary absurd sounds and furies of the BritArt publicity machine. She seemed, miraculously, to be using all this stuff to do what art had always done–relating personal experience to the general culture. If that culture was in chaos and decline, and if many people felt the sort of confusions (and amusement) displayed by Emin in her work, she was doing the work of a public artist in a very strange era.
The older guard, of course, saw a different Britain, and responded in a different way. David Hockney had spent much of his creative life drinking up the Californian sunshine and splashing it down in unforgettable images of light and water. In the twenty-first century, partly influenced by Chinese art, partly seeming to revisit Van Gogh, but chiefly, surely, by homesickness for Yorkshire, he began to paint big splashy watercolour landscapes. To use a word like elegy for these pictures implies sadness, even soppiness. Hockney was a preternaturally robust personality, and the pictures of this time have full-square confidence. Yet many who saw the fields and skies, the rainy mornings of the valley in Lillington, the red trees of Woldgate in autumn, must have believed that Hockney, after long exile, was painting a Britain which they had almost forgotten existed: the rolled haystacks, the wild flowers, the telegraph wires stretching down country roads. Even the roofscapes, when he comes towards the suburbs, so pure and red against a blustery Yorkshire sky, seem to be Yorkshire unvisited by the mullahs. It is not a ‘modern’ picture of Britain, and many in after years would be surprised to know that the pictures had been executed when Tony Blair was Prime Minister.
Tony Blair wanted to be ‘modern’, and this more or less ruled socialism out. He wanted to appeal to the sort of men–publishers, architects, senior broadcasters–who drank fizzy mineral water, and who sat in expensive restaurants in their Paul Smith shirt sleeves. Not only did he want to appeal to business, the traditional enemy of the Labour Party, but he wanted to continue in the good graces of opinion formers (provided they were young, metropolitan and trendy). The ‘views’ and ‘ideas’ and ‘opinions’ which the left had cherished for so long, and which they loved to debate in impassioned form, were all dumped–the commitment to unilateral disarmament, the belief in nationalised industries. The local branches of the Labour Party, which used to choose the candidates for parliamentary election, were overridden and Blairite lobby fodder was sent down from London, whether the local party liked them or not. The poor old dinosaurs who liked thinking about such matters were never to be allowed to do so again in front of television cameras. The Labour Party Conference, which in the old days was under the impression that it formed party policy, was taken over ruthlessly by the spin doctors. There were, in effect, no more ‘debates’ in which union barons, each commanding block votes of millions, decided the contents of the party manifesto together with the socialist ideologues of the Parliamentary Party. Instead, there were to be ‘focus groups’, which could be conveniently ignored. The shape and pattern of the conferences now began to resemble brainstorming meetings of NatWest Bank executives on a short training course. Policy was now firmly in the hands of Tony Blair and a group of trusted friends. The left of the party hated Blair from the beginning, but they put up almost no fight against him, watching powerlessly as he, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson ‘modernised’ the party. Almost at once, the pure, ‘straight kinda guy’, as Blair had described himself, was mired in sleaze. He took his first family holiday after becoming Prime Minister at the villa of Signor Berlusconi. Bernie Ecclestone gave the Labour Party £1 million from Formula One racing which received large revenues from tobacco advertising. Tony exempted Formula One from the ban on tobacco advertising. He promoted his cronies and flatmates, and he unwisely put no check on his adorer and close adviser Peter Mandelson (Mandy).
Mandy, once in power, proved to be unfortunately accident-prone. Having secured the safe Labour seat of Hartlepool, he was able to find himself in the Cabinet. He wanted, needed perhaps, to live beyond his means. He was much the most social of the New Labourites. He liked dining out, he liked going to parties given by rich, fashionable people, regardless of their political persuasion. He liked Jamie Palumbo, Carla Powell (wife of Thatcher’s Downing Street adviser Sir Charles). He liked escorting royal princesses, and became one in a long line of homosexuals who was pleased to be Princess Margaret’s ‘walker’. Such a life necessitated, in his view, a house where he could entertain, in a suitably fashionable part of London. This meant borrowing money for a house costing £475,000–a sum way beyond his means. When Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, he borrowed £373,000 from a fellow Minister, Geoffrey Robinson. It emerged that Mandy had made a fatal error on his mortgage application form from the Britannia Building Society to supplement the loan from Robinson. Mandy had to go. Blair, however, retained an affection for him and gave him another chance, this time to become the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Mandy did not last much longer in this department, either, since it transpired that in 1998 he had personally intervened with Mike O’Brien, Immigration Minister, over a passport application made by the multi-millionaire businessman Srichand Hinduja. At the time of this conversation, Mandy had been responsible for the Millennium Dome, which contained the numinous area known as the Faith Zone, sponsored by Hinduja and his brother for the sum of £1 million. That quintessentially New Labour thing, the Millennium Dome had actually been the dream child of Michael Heseltine, when, as President of the Board of Trade, he liked to be called ‘the President’. Not that it had originated with Hezza. It was as far back as 28 March 1989 that Bevis Hillier, biographer of John Betjeman, wrote to The Times with the suggestion, that ‘it is not too late to start planning a British exhibition or festival to celebrate the year 2000? Like the Great Exhibition of 1851, it should have a cosmopolitan aspect rather than the insular character of the 1951 Festival of Britain. It should be a celebration of the western world’s achievements. Not just a crowning manifesto of its own.’12 Bevis sowed the seed, and Heseltine watered it. It was a typical Heseltine idea, based on the fallacy that by hiring a sufficiently trendy and expensive modern architect–Richard Rogers–and building an eyesore in a run-down urban area, they would achieve ‘regeneration’. It was all to be paid for out of the National Lottery. At his pre-election con
ference speech Blair had told the bewildered party that they had ‘a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years’.13 a typically New Labour phrase which provided the missing link between the language of the Third Reich and a cheap advertising jingle. When Blair’s first Cabinet discussed the matter in June 1997, the majority, still thinking along Old Labour lines, believed that the Dome project should be shelved forthwith. If it was being paid for out of the Lottery, that was all the more reason to discard it, since the Lottery was a tax which exploited the gullibility of the poor; such money as it raised should be spent, it was argued, on worthy causes rather than on this piece of frivolity. They could not see, these old diehards, that New Labour was by definition frivolous. Seen from afar, the Dome gave the impression that a giant flying saucer might have landed from outer space on a bend in the Thames opposite Greenwich. Seventy-two giant pieces of fibreglass, coated in Teflon, made up the roof, surrounded by a framework of steel masts.14 Bevis had sown. Hezza had watered. New Labour would bring forth the plant to glory. Egged on by Mandy, who saw the Dome as a symbol of the New Dispensation that was being brought into being, the Dome became the special responsibility of a former flatmate of Tony Blair’s, Charlie Falconer, a genial lawyer who for no reason beyond his friendship with Tony found himself elevated to a peerage. The Dome was big. Its bigness made up for its emptiness, and so its bigness was often dwelt upon. Inside you could fit two Wembley Arenas, thirteen Albert Halls or one Eiffel Tower on its side. It was the largest dome in the world, twice the size of the Georgia Dome in the United States. The comparisons had the unfortunate effect of inviting…comparison. The Wembley Arena and the Albert Hall and St Peter’s in Rome and all the other domes and great spaces which were smaller than Lord Falconer’s great space had been built for a discernible purpose. The Crystal Palace of 1851, for example, which housed the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, had attracted visitors from all over the world. Had it failed, the committee of public men who commissioned it had underwritten its costs. Blair’s Dome was not paid for by any of those who sat on committees, and so prodigally ran up expense. One early enthusiast was the journalist Adam Nicolson, for whom ‘the Dome was a catalogue of marvels, a cabinet of rarities, a circus of marvels’… ‘a kaleidoscope of the very best that we could do’.15 Others, as they stared at the finished result, the feebleness of the exhibits, the boringness of the ‘zones’, the tiny queues dwindling to nothingness as the whole project flopped so spectacularly, wondered if Nicolson’s words did not provide an unintentional description of Blair’s Britain. Was this Teflon-coated extravagance really ‘the very best that we could do’? Perhaps it was.
The New Millennium was ushered in at Greenwich in a chaos, as the favoured guests queued for hours at Stratford East station in order to be allowed from the newly built underground station to the Dome. When they finally entered the symbol of Britain’s regeneration, they were greeted by the uninspiring Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, cruelly dubbed ‘Mr Blobby’ by his own clergy, who intoned the Lord’s Prayer. There was then a rendition of the Beatles’ song ‘All You Need Is Love’, followed by a toe-curling jazzed-up version of the National Anthem.16 The floor show, like the New Labour project itself, as it was to unfold in the coming years, was a strange mixture of the boring and the tawdry. As midnight struck Tony and Cherie linked arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On his right, his monarch permitted her fingers to be held, though she did not link, or swing, her arms with her neighbours. While they roared, ‘We’ll tak a cup o kindness yet’, Elizabeth II’s mouth remained rattrap-furious closed.
As in the case of Thatcher, and indeed of almost all Prime Ministers, Blair began by attempting to impose his will on domestic politics. Then, as this became messy and intractable, he turned his attentions to foreign policy and began to see himself, not without some justification, as a figure on the world stage.
The left watched and waited through ten years of Blair’s premiership for any noticeable social engineering, or–to use a phrase popularised by David Shepherd, Bishop of Liverpool–‘bias to the poor’. They could wait in vain. Blair had no more interest in closing the poverty gap than had Thatcher. In the matter of constitutional reform, the radicals were to feel an equal sense of letdown. The historian Ross McKibbin, author of one of the best left-wing analyses of modern Britain, felt that at the end of his time as Prime Minister, ‘Blair has had opportunities unavailable to any other Labour Leader, and has thrown nearly all of them away…the greatest of these opportunities would have been the democratic reform of the constitution.’17
Whether you agreed with McKibbin depended upon your perspective. If you were a Tory (feeling as disenfranchised by the antics of modern Conservative parties as socialists were by New Labour) you might have felt that Blair’s constitutional reforms went too far. Almost as soon as New Labour took power, they announced devolution for Scotland and Wales. Although neither country showed especial enthusiasm for the scheme, and in Wales it was all but necessary to fudge the referendum to make it seem as if a majority wanted a special Welsh Assembly, each country was fitted up with its own expensive legislature, and in the case of Scotland the setting up of the Parliament was but the first clear step on the road to nationalist independence and the breaking up of the United Kingdom. This was quite a radical change to have put into ineluctable effect within a year of taking office. Likewise, the introduction of an elected mayoralty to London was a significant change, even if central government held on to so many of the purse strings that the elected mayor (faced with a truly grotesque choice of candidates, Londoners opted for Ken Livingstone, former leader of the GLC) did not have anything like the spending power, hence administrative capacity, as the mayors of New York or Paris. The machinery was there for other elected mayoralties, if only the sluggish British could become more excited by ‘democracy’ and its processes. The truth is that from the time of the Chartists, only a very small percentage of the British electorate have been democrats, in the sense of wishing to be consulted about every change in or operation of the law. The system of representative government, by which voters send a local member to Parliament, to act and vote on behalf of all his constituents, regardless of political affiliation, had worked quite well until the Blair era, and for many voters it was preferable to the hectic political systems cobbled together in France and Germany after the Second World War. These voting systems, undoubtedly more democratic, were based on a proportional representation idea, rather than a first past the post system. Godfather Woy tried to persuade young Tony to adopt some such European scheme, but he never did so. In the matter of the House of Lords, the radicals were no doubt as disappointed as the Tories were outraged. In May 1997 there were 1,067 peers in the House of Lords. In March 2000 there were 682. In May 1997 there were 633 hereditary peers with voting rights. By March 2000 there were only 92, and these were subsequently abolished. The others were 564 life peers and 26 lords spiritual. Parties of the left–the Liberals under Gladstone, and even more under Lloyd George, and the Labour Party ever since its inception, had been talking about abolishing the system whereby hereditary peers automatically formed part of the legislature. It was Blair who actually did it.
Yet, in a brilliant short book, a young German scholar, Katrin Rohde, sees that Blair was never intent upon a revolution based on Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The pattern to seek in his administration is the essentially conservative one of Edmund Burke who, in opposition to Paine at the time of the French Revolution, saw that in order to be preserved, institutions needed constant minor reform. The plant which had been tweaked and pruned did not need to be uprooted.18
Blair’s Britain was different from Mr Major’s. If it was more modern to be governed by Tony’s appointees, such as ‘Lord’ Falconer and ‘Lord’ Levy and ‘Lord’ Alli, rather than clever hereditary peers such as Max Egremont, Robert Salisbury, Conrad Russell, Garry Runciman or Andrew Devonshire, then British government had certainly become more modern. Hundreds of hours of parliamentary time were spen
t debating the issue of foxhunting. On Sunday 1 March 1998, a mass movement of the ‘countryside’ marched through the streets of London, almost matching the size of the protests against the government’s wish to go to war against Iraq. Blair had no interest in the question of whether people should hunt foxes with hounds. He wanted, as often, two contradictory things–to please the dwindling country-dwellers and to appease those class-envious lefties who saw the hunt as one of the last bastions of old privilege to be swept away, like the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, to the dustbin of history. Blair, as a good Thatcherite, knew that soaring property prices in the 1980s had removed the last squires and parsons from the manor houses and parsonages of England and filled them up with yuppies, replacing the kitchen gardens with swimming pools, and erecting Colefax and Fowler festoons of fabrics in drawing rooms which had never previously known central heating. Meanwhile, in the villages and on the edges of fields, what had been affordable rented agricultural cottages became second homes for the white flight, those not yet fortunate enough to own old rectories and old manors, but who did not want their Boden-clad children to play in inner city recreation grounds, littered with used syringes and condoms. With the virtual extinction of cheap property to rent, and with a diminishing agricultural workforce, it was no surprise that the rate of suicides among the rural working classes soared. Thatcher had espoused Thatcherism knowing it would be hateful to the majority. The knowledge even gave her a certain satisfaction, just as predestinarian sects in the Protestant world enjoyed the warmth of inner assurance that those not elected to glory–a majority of the human race–would probably be damned. Blair, however, whose mind was drawn more instinctively to the doctrines of universal salvation preached by the Catholic Church, and who had the greasepaint in his blood, wanted to woo audiences and to be liked. He was a Thatcherite who lacked the one thing necessary to be a successful Thatcherite, namely the enjoyment of being hated. He wished to be seen as a man who took seriously the complaints of farmers and agricultural workers who had seen their quality of life eroded over twenty years, with more and more legislation coming from Europe; with mechanised conditions reducing those employed in agriculture; with the decline of country buses, schools, shops and post offices. ‘I wouldn’t live in a big city if I could help it,’ he told Country Life. ‘I would live in the country. I was brought up there, really.’19 Really? At no time did Blair live in the country, spending most of his childhood in suburban houses on the outskirts of Durham, or at boarding school in Edinburgh. Yet he saw the foxhunting matter as something which could be offered to the left-wingers on his back benches, who were dismayed by his foreign policy and by the impenitent prudence of the Treasury. When, after spending hundreds of hours of parliamentary time discussing the question, what had been lost was not so much the hunt, as the spirit of live and let live. As it happened, nearly every hunt continued to go out with hounds during the season, some just about keeping within the limits of the law by drag-hunting, or by taking a gun with which to kill the fox when found; but most openly defying the law. But New Labour Westminster had shown that it was a government which wanted to boss, to impose the will of an urban and suburban majority upon the rural minority.