Letters From London

by Julian Barnes

  This is all very well, but who is the mugger and who the muggee? Some might judge Kentwell Hall victim rather than assailant. For if the pavement maze looks fairly contentious from ground level, it increases in forcefiilness as the eye gets farther off the ground. The maze is certainly “very observable,” as John Evelyn might have put it. From above, either you see toning brickwork and a harmonious symbolic design that extends the house’s period flavor with a characterful modern flourish, or else you see something that resembles a vast—and vastly cute—target for a parachuting competition. And isn’t there something fundamentally dubious, if very British, about the very concept of Heritage in the Making? It speaks of self-consciousness, of historical preening. Every nation naturally has its bucketload of guilt about the stuff that’s been knocked down over the centuries (and mazes, which are swiftly obliterated by mere neglect, have been lost in large numbers). But do we assuage that guilt by pronouncing some wet-eared artifact an instant classic? Is it good for cultural items to be no sooner created than lacquered and preserved: cheese cast in bronze? Isn’t it impertinent to second-guess history in this way? The courtyard maze at Kentwell Hall has forfeited its right to a real, actual, bruisable existence, a life in the present, because it has already been classified, with nosy authoritarianism, as the future’s past.

  September 1991

  5

  John Major Makes a Joke

  At the Conservative Party Conference in early October, the Prime Minister made a joke. In truth, he made several, and they were hard to miss, because John Major has not yet mastered one of the refinements of public comedy, which is to smile after you make the hit rather than beforehand. But there was one particular jest that merits recall and annotation. The Labour Party had held its annual conference a week or so previously, and Mr. Major allowed himself the traditional accusation that the Opposition had been purloining some of his Government’s ideas. He continued, “They don’t even hide it when they steal some of my clothes. Did you see how many of them were wearing gray suits last week? Have they no shame?”

  The first point to make is that Mr. Major’s idea of a joke—or, more exactly, his speechwriters’ idea of the sort of joke that is appropriate to Mr. Major—is very different from his predecessor’s idea of a joke. Mrs. Thatcher, for most of her sovereignty, showed no public awareness of the existence of humor. A joke for her would be a sign of feebleness, an attempt at consensus politics, something uneconomic and possibly subversive, like a bottle of foreign mineral water on the table at a Downing Street banquet. Hefty sarcasm was about as far as she went in this field until almost the end of her Premiership, when there was a last-ditch attempt to project a new, caring, human Maggie in place of the Robocop figure previously running the show. So occasionally she relaxed into the sort of wordplay that would stun a rhino: attacking Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, she maintained her furious opposition to federalism, which included “federalism by the back Delors.” Even in the joke she remained aggressive and dismissive. Whereas the quip Mr. Major delivered to the conference was modest, self-deprecating, and voter-friendly.

  The second point to consider is the reference to the gray suit. Mr. Major had several problems when he took over in November of 1990, one of them being that hardly anyone knew who he was or what he was like. Down the Thatcher years, there had been a number of young aspirants unofficially tagged as Possible Successor. It was an arduous post, rather like being the court favorite of Catherine the Great, and those whose summer of favor ran out were left occupying a difficult—even risible—position. But Mr. Major had the good fortune to find himself the frolicker standing next to the sole remaining chair when the music happened to stop. As he settled onto the seat cushion molded firmly by the capacious derriere of another and found the arms a little higher than he’d imagined, he had an immediate tactical problem. Mrs. Thatcher had been removed because enough members of her party thought that her domineering dogmatism had become electorally counterproductive. On the other hand, Mr. Major had been the candidate of the outgoing leader and the die-hard Thatcherites. So he had to keep the BUSINESS AS USUAL sign up in the window while redecorating the place and updating the stock: instead of barbed wire and rifles, the family store would in future sell chocolate bars and liniment. And in terms of personal image—where, admittedly, there was less room for maneuver—Mr. Major also had a dilemma. If he tried to play the decisive, uncompromising leader, he could only come across as a pale substitute for his predecessor; if he took his time and went back to the antiquarian system of consultation, of being prepared to change his point of view when presented with a convincing argument, he would be accused of indecision. The new Prime Minister has had an occasional stab at audacious leadership—such as proposing a safe haven for the Kurds while others were still dozing—but the style didn’t really suit. Instead, Mr. Major has broadly followed the honorable political line of not doing anything in particular unless it’s otherwise inevitable, while nevertheless proclaiming that there is Still Much to Do. He is therefore frequently denounced by the Opposition as a ditherer.

  He has also been denounced as dull, boring, and uncharismatic. But in certain political times (and in the context of your predecessor) these characteristics are not necessarily negative. Add to this that all sides agreed early on that Mr. Major was a decent, honest chap, the sort of bloke who liked to watch the cricket from a stripy deck chair while a steaming mug of tea warmed his groin. He didn’t have anything threatening about him, like an academic record, a furtive interest in modern sculpture, or a tendency to use long words in his speeches. He was the sort of PM who, it was usefully allowed to leak out, would stop his official car and tuck into a humble meal at a humble motorway restaurant known by the resolutely uncharismatic name of Happy Eater. In other words, the natural process of political presentation and self-presentation was under way: limitations were made into normality, normality into virtue. And so when at his first Tory conference as leader—which could also prove his last, since an election must take place in the first six months of 1992—Mr. Major acknowledged his self-image as a fellow in a gray suit, he was acknowledging what could not be changed and was now declared to be what the country requires. Call me a dull dog if you wish, he seemed to be saying, but that is what I am: self-made, hardworking, unspectacular, trustworthy, the very spirit of middle England. Snobs may find Mr. Major suburban, but then snobs always have fewer votes than suburbanites. The Prime Minister has not yet, so far as is publicly known, visited the Toulouse-Lautrec show at the Hayward Gallery (he has until January 19), but were he to do so he might be pleased by one of the artist’s most elegant and daring lithographs, The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge (1892). It shows a correctly dressed middle-aged man accosting two young women. The background is bright yellow and bright blue; the principal female figure has startlingly red hair and a dress of delicate green. Thrust into this surround of cheery color, the Englishman is depicted in monolithic gray. His suit, hat, tie, gloves, and stick are gray; his hair, mustache, face, and ears are gray. The tone washes ineradicably through him.

  And the final point to make about Mr. Major’s joke is that it contains some truth. We have now entered that final, wearisome stage before a general election when the contending parties are keenest to avoid mistakes, when image becomes more important than policy, and when the gap between Labour and Conservative in terms of promised programs tends to narrow. Hence the accusation of clothes stealing. For this year will see the Battle of the Men in Gray Suits. Long gone is the time of nobs in grouse-moor tweeds versus yobs in cloth caps; now everywhere you look is a seal beach of gray. The two parties are shuffling closer to one another, like gawky cadets on parade, each keeping eyes front and pretending that the other one is doing the moving. The rough aim for each of them in the next election is to present itself as an efficient, forward-looking organizer of a market economy who yet displays the correct degree of social concern. The Tories know that their decade-long fling with Thatcher
ite ideology must come to an end—that it is time to dig out from the attic the old mothbally uniform of pragmatism, and also make sure that not too many hospitals close down in the coming months. The Labour Party, having lost three elections on the trot and having seen the so-called socialist Eastern bloc collapse, has (according to your point of view) either junked most of its long-held principles or finally adjusted to the realities of the world. For instance, just when Gorbachev was making the world safer and serious disarmament was beginning, the British Labour Party reversed its nonnuclear policy and declared that it loved the bomb—or, at any rate, loved it a little bit, though naturally much less than the Tories did, and anyway it was a mistake to go naked into the conference chamber, while Labour would, of course, be more responsible, more caring bomb users than the Conservatives in the unfortunate event… And all because at election after election it had become painfully clear that the British voter didn’t much care for a stance of principled emasculation. Similarly, the suave and harmonious enthusiasm for Europe currently displayed by the Labour Party contrasts ironically with the huffiness and fretful insularity of earlier years. But then Europe is where self-respecting men in suits congregate nowadays. In Europe, they wear power gray.

  Britain has no fixed electoral term—only a five-year limit within which the Government must face the nation. So if you are elected with a small majority you might swiftly dash back to the voters for a more generous and useful endorsement, and if things are going badly you might hang on until the last possible minute. This flexibility gives the Government a tactical advantage; instead of the parties’ gearing their efforts to a known month, there is much posturing on both sides about announcing the date. The spectacle often resembles the start of a playground fight where the two opponents dance around trying to look tough, one of them shouting, “Come on, I’m ready for you, let’s see what you’re made of, scaredy-cat,” while the other strikes a nobler pose, ignoring the taunts and declaring, “I’ll be the one to say when the fight begins.” Such ritualistic behavior is intensified at the time of the party conferences. This autumn, there were authoritative leaks that the Prime Minister would definitely—well, almost definitely—go to the country before the end of the year, yes he would, almost certainly in November—that is, unless he changed his mind.

  This will-he/won’t-he atmosphere was heightened by the appearance in late September of the latest TV commercials from the two parties. If Major versus Neil Kinnock is the main scrap in the coming months, we shouldn’t ignore a tasty little scuffle lower down the bill: that between Hugh (Chariots of Fire) Hudson, a supplier of Labour’s TV advertising, and John (Midnight Cowboy) Schlesinger, brought in to beef up the Conservative effort. Given the near moribundity of the domestic film industry’, which for the past decade has been told by the Government to stand on its own wheelchair, there is a cinematic as well as a political interest for the viewer. If it is not quite a head-to-head battle—Schlesinger has been brought in more as a troubleshooter, a last-minute rejigger, whereas Hudson was committed from the start—it promises slightly higher production values at least. Not that the first round of commercials exactly stays quivering in the memory. The Schlesinger film had sunrises and sunsets, a newborn baby, and Mozart’s Twenty-first Piano Concerto: Tory Britain, we deduced, was peaceful and pastoral, energetic but also somehow elegiac. Hudson’s Labour riposte was a toiling piece of agitprop, in which a couple of eager parents (Mr. and Mrs. Voter) went to the school for a report on their boy (the Conservative Party) from the headmaster (God, perhaps), only to be told, with plodding predictability, “The Tories have come bottom of the class” and “Quite frankly, I wouldn’t let them run the tuckshop.”

  In the Conservative commercial, the Prime Minister was seen in a brief sound bite speaking of “a nation at ease with itself.” Such soporific complacency is, of course, traditional Tory policy: in 1957. Prime Minister Macmillan, echoing—or perhaps stealing—the 1952 Democratic Party slogan, assured voters that “most of our people have never had it so good” The Thatcher years were in many respects an aberration, for the idea that the British way of life needs a good kicking around comes hard to a Conservative; the corny image of the nation as a sleeping lion, with the emphasis on the sleeping, is much preferred. Eighteen months (the time from Mrs. Thatcher’s departure to the latest possible election date) was not long for John Major to shake off this new, ahistoric image of the Tories as a radical, reforming party; and shaking off the image was much connected with shaking off Mrs. Thatcher—with persuading her to keep her mouth shut.

  But Mrs. Thatcher has never been good at keeping her mouth shut—indeed, bawling out trade unionists, the unemployed, foreigners, and other miscreants has been part of her enduring appeal to the British public. Since her retirement as PM, she has had her memoirs to think about—the selling, that is, not yet the writing. There has also been the setting up of the Thatcher Foundation, a kind of international think tank, whose officially registered objectives are of narcoleptic generality, and were much better summed up by the lady herself: the foundation’s aim, she said, was to “perpetuate all the kinds of things I believe in.” The project got off to an inauspicious start when the Charity Commissioners refused it tax-relieving status, on the ground that spreading Mrs. Thatcher’s word could not by any stretch of the rules be considered a charitable activity; the foundation is also now registered, unpatriotically, in Switzerland, where it is much harder for journalists to discover which foreign billionaires are putting up the moola. The start-up target was £12 million per annum, and Mrs. Thatcher has spent a good part of the last year on the stump among the very rich: the Sultan of Brunei is said to have promised $5 million the other week. These trips naturally involve pleasant bits of flummery, like the acceptance of honorary degrees. She got one in November from Kuwait University (having been turned down for one a few years ago by Oxford: a unique snub to a Prime Minister). In her acceptance speech she revealed a hitherto unsuspected backer for her worldview. “Leafing through Tennyson’s works, as I sometimes do in the early hours, looking for inspiration,” she had found lines that encapsulated and foreshadowed the Thatcher philosophy:

  This main miracle, that thou art thou

  With power on thine own act, and on the world.

  Tennyson’s poem “The Two Greetings,” a rather maundering celebration of the birth of a child, is in fact entirely devoid of any political subtext; but no doubt we should just be grateful when any verse sets off a ping on a politician’s late-night sonar.

  The traditional way of keeping an ex-Prime Minister busy—that’s to say, out of harm’s way—is to shunt him or her off to the House of Lords. It was always an irritation to Mrs. Thatcher’s Parliamentary acolytes that her Tory predecessor, Edward Heath, resisted both the Lords and a tempting ambassadorship, preferring to stay in the Commons as a spikily disapproving remnant of an earlier, more liberal Conservatism. The shunting off of Mrs. Thatcher, if agreed on in theory, is proving no less tricky. The idea of a sweet transition to ermined dotage came unstuck when it emerged that Mrs. Thatcher did not have in mind what her immediate predecessors understood by retiring to the Lords. Apart from Heath, who stayed in the Commons without even the promotion of a knighthood, recent Premiers-Wilson, Callaghan, Home—have taken life peerages. Mrs. Thatcher let it be known that, far from accepting such a half-baked recognition of her services to the nation as a mere personal ennoblement for the rest of her days, she wanted the full hereditary works, WAY CLEARED FOR THATCHER TO BECOME COUNTESS OF FINCHLEY, said a front-page headline in The Times of October 3, and the whole potentially embarrassing issue of hereditary peers having a hand in democratic government came to the fore again. It’s true that Harold Macmillan accepted an earldom, but he held out for more than twenty years after leaving the Premiership, and took the honor at the age of ninety only, it is said, out of boredom. Winston Churchill, a regular—indeed, fetishistic—figure of reference in Mrs. Thatcher’s speeches, even turned down a dukedom. In her case, t
here is an extra element. The prospect of her son proceeding cozily from Mr. Mark to Sir Mark to the Earl of Finchley and thus becoming one of the nation’s legislators is one to appall the meritocrat and delight only the satirist. Thatcher Junior’s heavy-handedness has already put off several likely supporters of the Thatcher Foundation, including Charles Price, the former United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. His delicacy of approach was illustrated on a recent fund-raising tour of the Far East, when he offended one Hong Kong millionaire with the memorable instruction “It’s time to pay up for Mumsie.”

  The fact that even the nature of Mrs. Thatcher’s thank-you present from the Conservatives became an issue—one commentator remarked that the title Countess of Finchley was “the heraldic equivalent of a pair of furry dice bouncing around in the back of a state coach”—shows what a contentious figure she remains. Even a year after her departure from office, her capacity for provoking fission in her own party is unmatched. At the Tory conference, for instance, it was judged unsafe to let the lady address the delegates and the nation directly. But since it would have been overbrusque to suddenly declare her a nonperson, she was allowed a brief appearance in the conference hall—a vision bite, if not a sound bite. The ovation she received for her nonspeaking walk-on part lasted five minutes and was measured at 101.0 decibels. The keynote speech of John Major received applause of four minutes and twenty-eight seconds, reaching the lower decibel level of 97.5. (Lesser ministers garnered one to three minutes, with noise levels in the low 90s.) Interestingly, the only speaker to raise greater hysteria than the silent Mrs. Thatcher was one of the men who brought her down, Michael Heseltine; he got the clapometer up to 102.0.