The Prime Minister’s fall from power in 1990 is, in Hensher’s fiction, a wholly random event, as random as the murder of an Italian rent-boy by a powerful House of Commons clerk. In as much as anything is intended in the story, it is impossible to say when it began to be intended. There is an ancient sense of Fortune with a capital F.
The ‘leaderene’ and the cog in the parliamentary machine are well matched. The greatest politician of her age lovingly fingers the silk around her neck (no one has ever better described Mrs Thatcher dressing) in the same way that the subversive clerk, anticipating the fuck that has cost him £50, feels the silk of the hired boy’s skin. The mistress of politics in her prime crushes the world like a dead cigarette with every high-heeled step she takes. But the clerk crushes whichever politician is in power, concentrating most of his mental energy on remembering the name of every Trollope novel.
Venom is as ubiquitous as alcohol. Fierce intelligence is everywhere, too, most of it useless and pointless. Haunting is his theme. His heroine remains for some while as a spiritual presence in Westminster and Whitehall, passing on her power ‘in a command and a request’.
‘You might enjoy it. You should add it to your reading for after The Line of Beauty.’
But her agitation has passed.
‘Are you pleased that you became a journalist?’ She asks this question slowly, as though it is the one she has long most wanted to ask.
No one has asked me that for a very long time. This is an even more desperate question than ‘how did I feel?’ Probably the last person to ask it was the man who wrote the letters in brown ink.
‘Yes, of course, I am pleased that I became a journalist, proud too most of the time.’
‘What about the rest of the time?’
22.8.14
When Miss R came here first she struggled for space. Almost all of my boxes have now gone. But she has added piles of her own, personal letters and Latin plays, even borrowing some of the labels that read DO NOT MOVE TILL LAST DAY.
‘For evidence’, she claims with a smile, she has set aside Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, the copy inscribed to me ‘Chez Woodrow.’
‘For atmosphere’ there is now Kitchen Venom as well as The Line of Beauty.
On top of the pile is Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, its cover a frosty scene of French duellists, name and title in brown, winner of the Booker Prize in 1998. ‘This one is a bit about you’, she says as she sits down on the floor.
I try to look surprised. I am not wholly surprised. It is an identification I have heard before. ‘Some said Peter Stothard, others Alan Rusbridger. But I have no idea …’: that was how the author himself put it, writing in a presentation copy for charity last year, words extracted by the Guardian, edited by Alan Rusbridger.
McEwan was being mischievous maybe but I can hardly blame him for that. Mischief is what writers make. For Miss R, newly interested in my pride or lack of pride, in ‘how did I feel?’ or how did I ever feel, Amsterdam is a reasonable destination.
‘Tell me about it’, she says, by which she means, I think, that she genuinely wants me to tell her, not that her question is of the ‘tell-me-about-it’ teenage kind.
‘McEwan’, I try to summarise quickly, ‘has two rival characters, the duellists of the cover. The musician in the foreground need not concern us, but further back there is a newspaper editor, a man in charge of The Judge, a paper not unlike The Times. Maybe I have the two men the wrong way around. How do I know? I don’t. It does not matter.’
‘The story need not concern us either, only the character of the editor, Vernon Halliday, who responds to a story of political scandal with bouts of confidence and hubris, self-righteousness and self-criticism, shock at the effects of his actions and reasoned doubt about whether he is doing anything at all.’
She opens the book, finds some blue-pencilled quotes and notes the passages, page numbers first. She reads aloud, not in her glass-etcher’s voice but softly and slowly.
‘After talking to forty people in his first two hours of work, offering “opinions that were bound to be interpreted as a command”, Vernon finds himself with thirty rare uninterrupted seconds: “It seemed to him that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him and, when he was alone, he was nothing at all.” He was “finely dissolved throughout the building” and “globally disseminated like dust”.’
‘Did you have hours like that?’
‘Not many but a few, quite enough truth for fiction.’
‘Amsterdam is set in the mid-1990s, more or less on my own editorial watch. Halliday is both a pedant on grammar and a risk-taker in the newsroom. I recognise myself there. He dismisses a story on hepatitis as too dull even for the TLS. He is described as a “hard-working lieutenant for two gifted editors in succession”.’
‘Pedantic about Latin quotes? Happy to take a risk? Liable to invoke the TLS? Yes to all of those.’
‘Both Harold Evans, who opposed Margaret Thatcher, and his successor, Charles Douglas-Home, who cheered the paper through the Falklands War, were “gifted” and, in different ways, seen to be so. I worked hard for them both – and for their successors too, including my friend, Charles Wilson, the Editor so disapproved of by Frank Johnson in the Senecan times.’
‘Halliday is a well-observed character. He is not always sure that he is alive. Few men of power ever admit that in their memoirs. That is why novelists matter. In the brief moments of the day when the Editor of The Judge is alone, a light goes out. “Even the ensuing darkness encompassed or inconvenienced no one in particular. He could not say for certain that the absence was his.” Most Editors would understand this Editor very well.’
25.8.14
When Miss R returns this morning a bookmark shows that she has almost finished Amsterdam. When I say nothing, she simply stands in the corner and reads some more until I continue my story from where it stopped.
‘As the Major government decayed, his predecessor’s ghost came ever more vividly back to life, the fiercest among the flittering flocks who pursued the new Prime Minister. The question was quick in coming. Who should replace this Tory leader who had failed to inspire? Even four years after her fall was there not still the possibility that the replacement might be Margaret Thatcher once again?’
‘There was a Christmas party, held in her museum home of signed Ronald Reagan photographs, frosted MT paperweights and an almost all-black oil painting of the hostess with a shady Tory lady. When we spoke I was wholly unready for the blasts against her successor. Three times she said that she was not looking to come back to power. Each time she looked hard about, daring me, or anyone else, to disagree. The only way to avoid her eye was to catch a peculiarly vile blue view of the Falklands.’
‘What help were her Senecans then?, asks Miss R, holding Amsterdam at her waist.
‘Ronnie became a double man in those days. Fortunately, he was well trained for that. Every time that his heroine heard he had written a speech for Major, she banned him from her presence. Ronnie tried to please both sides. He said he did not approve of her haunting Downing Street as though a part of her had never left. Woodrow claimed that he too was against her afterlife. I doubt whether, when he was with the former Prime Minister, he defended the new Prime Minister very much.’
‘In Ronnie’s mind there was never a doubt that Margaret still mattered. He always believed that if Mrs Thatcher felt well (a state she regularly discussed with him) she really was well. If she was well (a truth he would always readily believe) she would speak well and that if she spoke well (which, under his direction, she usually would) she would act well. He still believed this even though it mattered less now. He wished he had done even more when it had mattered more.’
‘Although Margaret had been out of power for two years, Sir Ronald Millar, in his own mind, was still a national benefactor, keeping the ousted queen alive. This life of hers was not in his playwright’s mind alone. To Woodrow Wyatt and David Hart –
and to many more from the Locarno Room and beyond – Mrs Thatcher might still be needed again.’
‘Ronnie often recalled in The Old Rose how long after Nero had fallen to his dagger, years after his last cry of “O what an artist dies in me”, Seneca’s pupil still had supporters in Greece who were sure he was coming back. No one liked to criticise his repetition. It was something of a comforter for him. Frank saw Margaret in something of the same light, her stalwarts as exiled cohorts landing at Clacton, like William of Orange at Torbay, meeting up with local worthies such as Lord Tebbit, assuring her that Essex was rallying to her side.’
‘Frank mocked but he also yearned. In the traditional ways of the Conservative Party a former leader had to be either loyal or dead. But Mrs Thatcher’s own bitter predecessor, Edward Heath, had rewritten the rules. There was now an ousted dictator role in British politics, just like in Argentina, he would jollily say.’
‘Margaret herself had entered the House of Lords, a desperate fall, thought David, although he would have loved the humiliation for himself. There was still a range of possible uses for the newly ennobled baroness, to push her successor in the right directions, to promote a better successor if one were needed. If the idea of a Thatcher Mark Two, fresh and repolished, were wholly absurd, David might yet make the Lady think that it was not.’
‘For Woodrow she was a ripe fruit that had to be kept from rotting – by flattery, by drink, by calls upon her party loyalty to stop being an angry ghost and to help John Major where she could. She always told the Voice of Reason that she was heeding his advice. She was inconsistent in keeping to that pledge.’
‘Woodrow said that David was a menace, increasingly obsessed by the SAS and the Bravo Two Zero books about its heroes. Margaret was “history”, that most respected state of comfort and condemnation. She must remain as history. John had to remain as Prime Minister. The Labour Party would destroy itself as it so often had before. Most importantly, Woodrow had to remain. Every adviser was fine as long as Woodrow was fine.’
‘And the lessons at The Old Rose?’
‘The spirit of the Latin lessons was now almost gone. We rarely tried to persuade one another. For David, Margaret was a long dying animal, ready soon to be stuffed as an icon for followers of some spiritual successor, hand-picked by himself. For Ronnie she was still the star whom he had helped to mould. For Frank and me she was a subject who, as time moved on, became less of a subject.’
‘Margaret herself was mostly more pragmatic than her ghost, more realistic than the image her admirers made of her. Although she never forgave Ronnie for working for John Major she needed him to write her own speeches and gradually the two were warmer together again. He had always been much more than a speechwriter to her. She saw that more clearly now, he suggested slyly.’
‘Ronnie still had the matinee-idol looks that she liked. She trusted him when he said she could wear expensive pearls without looking like a plutocrat’s wife. He was tall. His hair was dark. His face was still polished enough to be her one remaining mirror when so many others had passed on. His voice was low. He made her calm and kept her calm. In exile she needed calm more than ever.’
‘“We talked about Stoicism”, Ronnie said. I believed him as best I could although others reported a more random pattern to her mind. She somehow felt a greater need for principles when she did not need to apply them, he explained. She felt herself to be a Stoic, he insisted. He made her an honorary member of our extinct club. No one else could ever be her Seneca. It was Ronnie who came closest to the Stoic ideal of a tutor whose pupil was the greatest power in the world.’
‘Sometimes he tried to guide her to lighter reading, less philosophy more Dorothy L. Sayers. She loved the poetry of John Masefield and had more time for that too. His own ideal novels were those of his mentor, C. P. Snow, “Charles”, as he called him with an accentuated long A. The Masters, the story of the battle for succession at a Cambridge College, was his favourite. He had dramatized it for the West End, where it had run for a decade. It was one of the foundations of his fortune, the fuel for his bronze Rolls Royce.’
‘That play was deep within his mind. He had lived the plot, the moderniser vs the traditionalist, the complexities of new against old in a conservative institution. That was why it had worked so well. Plotting and plotting were the same thing, with Charles, with David and Woodrow: and Margaret could enjoy the plot too.’
‘He continued to take her to the theatre. He recalled how in the old days they saw an early performance of Evita: “if a woman like Eva Peron with no ideals can get that far, think how far I can get with all the ideals that I have”, she told him. Ronnie readied her well for the Falklands and in the nineties the Haymarket Theatre remained his home. He had an office there. He could arrange staff members in the audience to clap when she arrived.’
‘Such applause was less easy to arrange when she was Prime Minister. But she did not care so much about the occasional boo or heckle then. In exile she cared more. Her reluctance to be retired was too often all too clear. And in her unaccustomed weakness it was easier for the cautious and cowardly to hurt her.’
‘Just as theatre trips were not as easy as once they had been, nor were lunches at party conferences. The last time I had a lunch with Mrs Thatcher was in 1996, in Bournemouth.’
‘Are you interested in “last times”?’
She waves her Amsterdam in what seems like a ‘yes, possibly’.
‘The sound when we entered the dining room was a hush, not quite a hiss but not what she was hoping for. I joked that a not very supportive Tory MP had just been found drunk in a seaside gutter. “A calamity, dear”, she insisted. That sort of satisfaction was never a cheer to her. She was vigorously insistent that her salmon be “very well cooked”.’
‘Margaret’s successful performances were almost all abroad. In America her status was unshaken by her fall. In Downing Street and in London newspaper offices her faraway speeches were read for signs of treachery to John Major. She always professed loyalty but often did not sound very loyal. Woodrow would sometimes admonish her for making her successor’s life too difficult. Ronnie was milder in the same campaign. Both men were at different levels insincere.’
‘David had no need to express a public position. He used to listen carefully to her distant words, occasionally referring me to a line of language that he claimed was one of his own. His game was the succession, the long game, not to be played for maybe four or five years. He did not have a single candidate. He had different plans for different times.’
‘Every day, it seemed, John Major’s leadership was about to be challenged. Every week a challenge failed to happen. He called his Tory critics “bastards” and worse. Woodrow redoubled his support for the Major government. The worse John’s problems, the more strident the Voice of Reason became on his behalf.’
‘Whatever Woodrow’s sincerity – and David and Ronnie deeply doubted it – he was a noisy friend in hard times. He and I were arguing constantly still about his column. Increasingly he wanted to use it to abuse The Times for our own attacks on John Major, cheerfully misquoting us unless we were alert.’
‘Maybe I should not have been so sensitive. Majorism was maybe infectious to us all. David thought that Major must go – and that one of his own protégés should take over as soon as he could engineer it. Woodrow thought this absurd. He told me that Margaret Thatcher was “100 per cent behind John now”. Ronnie said she was not. I believed Ronnie more.’
‘Woodrow said again that I would lose my own job long before he lost his: I was naive, utopian and would surely soon fall off the ‘slipper wheel’. The sooner the better, he announced at a party to celebrate a book by his fellow Times columnist, Bernard Levin, about utopias, A World Elsewhere.
‘Newspaper editors become accustomed to hearing regularly of their own demise. Woodrow had firm views about how the Editor of The Times should behave. I should be a proponent only of what was practical. All else was indulgence, fine
only for columnists.’
‘John Major was as close to my views and background as anyone available was likely to be. So why did I not help him more, or help him at all? Did I want a Labour government? I said that I might.’
‘John Major’s last years of weakness in power were a spur to every worst conspiratorial urge. Woodrow spun the slippery wheel as loyally as he could. Ronnie sighed and spoke to Margaret whenever he could. David wanted the best future place that he could get. He needed the succession to go to the candidate whom he had personally helped the most, the one who would owe him the most, who would give him an office in Downing Street and the title, the knighthood, or maybe even the peerage that Thatcher had somehow failed to give.’
‘That required a stream of stratagems towards rivals to his own men, most of all against a puritan political thinker, John Redwood, who alone had the will to stand against John Major in a leadership contest in 1995. David’s favourite, Michael Portillo, one of the veterans of the Heartbreak House weekend, was left waiting in the wings, in useless readiness to strike if the Prime Minister emerged as a stricken beast. David installed forty phone lines in a Portillo campaign headquarters. In a last burst of Bravo-Two-Zeroing he told his man to cite the SAS slogan, Who Dares Wins. Neither decision was a good one. John Major was not stricken enough and limped on. Woodrow cheered loudly (and sometimes almost persuasively) at his champion’s courage.’
‘Woodrow and I found it much easier to talk about Beryl Bainbridge’s novels than about Margaret Thatcher’s heir. He harped on about the writer’s betrayal by her publisher, praising her “wonderful books”, complaining that she did not get the recognition she deserved. All publishing was politics. All things were politics. That was what I seemed never to learn.’
‘He had by then come to hate David. In conversation and in his column he professed ever greater support for John Major, warning anyone who would listen of the enemies within the Tory camp. Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, ostensibly a Major loyalist too, was “Hart’s second choice if Portillo fell”. That position, said Woodrow, was a very slippery position to hold, hardly a position at all. His great hope now was that some event would happen. Perhaps the Argentines could oblige for a second time and launch a noisy attack on the Falklands.’
The Senecans Page 21