Letters From London

by Julian Barnes

  As Lisanne and I plunged hip-deep into the carbon monoxide, I remembered Oliver Letwin’s observation about canvassing. From the moment he approaches a house, he says, he can usually judge whether its inhabitants vote Tory or Labour. “You can tell the Tories from the neatly clipped hedge, the little pots of geraniums, from the fact that the front porch is tidily swept” It has nothing to do with grandeur—indeed, if a large house isn’t neat on the outside, its inhabitants will never be Tories—or with the beauty or value of the property. It has purely to do with tidiness. (The Letwin front-garden principle, by the way, applies only in the South of England, he says. In the North, they’re all tidier, regardless of politics.)

  There are about 120 houses in Chetwynd Road, some owner-occupied, many divided into flats. The object of canvassing is not (as I had imagined when I stood on my front step with Glenda) to convert people, or to indulge in far-ranging discussions of foreign policy, but simply to identify your own supporters. A printout of the electoral roll gives you a list of all registered voters. This, you quickly realize, does not tally with the people who actually live in the street.

  “I’m just over from Hong Kong,” replies the first man whose electoral intentions we inquire about, “and I can’t wait to get back there.” An elderly woman opens the door, peers at our red-and-yellow lapel stickers, and wordlessly closes the door again. “Not one of us,” hazards Lisanne, annotating her printout accordingly: T for Tory, S for Liberal Democrat, L for Labour, P for Possible Labour, M for Moved Away or Dead. We are in a demographically Macedonic area: there are Greek and Irish names, Italians and Indians, a girl whose unfamiliar Christian name turns out to be Maori. The Letwin front-garden test seems generally to hold up well: extreme tidiness in the face of this traffic-wrecked, fume-ridden street where cars are parked all over the pavement is often topped off by a neat Letwin advertisement. But mainly the posters are red-and-yellow ones; we mark L on the printout and move on to the next house without knocking. A fair number of voters are wary of opening their doors as the light fades on an April evening; some lie doggo, others throw up top-floor windows. Nowadays, holding a conversation through the entry phone is a key political street skill. “I’m a Liberal Democrat,” squawks one metal box in reply to our ring.

  “Well, let me tell you,” Lisanne bellows back, “that we have very good friends in Richmond who are Labour and who will be gritting their tiny teeth and voting Liberal Democrat to get the Tory out, so why don’t you return the favor?”

  “I’ll think about it,” squawks the box.

  “We don’t want Mr. Letwin, do we? Not the man who invented the poll tax?” Lizzie eyes the box fiercely.

  “You may have a point,” it answers, rather cravenly. Is this a P or just an S being polite? It’s hard to tell. One house worryingly displays both Labour and Tory posters side by side; only when we get close do we see that Oliver Letwin’s youthful features have been disimproved with a burlesque Biro mustache, while a large arrow penetrates his skull; we mark L and move on. An Indian paterfamilias with sticker-free windows mutters, “Yes, Labour, all four of us,” and Lizzie triumphantly marks four Ls. I am less sure; he replied with dubious speed, and his front garden is suspiciously tidy.

  We start down the other side of the street. “I’m still making up my mind,” answers a gentleman in slippers, dressing gown, and pince-nez. “But not for us, I think,” Lisanne adds quietly after the door is closed. Then we meet “I’m deciding on polling day,” and “I’m a Liberal Democrat, but I’ll be voting for Glenda Jackson unless it looks as if she’s going to win easily, in which case I’ll vote Liberal Democrat,” and again, “I’m making up my mind on polling day.” (What is it with these people? Thirteen years of Tory rule and they still haven’t decided whether more of it is a good or a bad idea?) According to the electoral register, several voters live over the launderette, but, if so, they must come and go by rope ladder. A large West Indian at a top-floor window gives us a thumbs-up sign, then yells, “But I haven’t paid my poll tax.” “Doesn’t matter!” we yell back. “It’s not connected!” Most of the exchanges are perfectly friendly. “I’m not going to vote for you,” says a young man, “but anyway I vote in Islington.” “Good,” mutters Lizzie as we walk off “That won’t make any difference either way.” We get a friendly hello from a pair of blue-rosetted Tory canvassers, and are briefly abused with shouts of “Tory, Tory, Tory, we’re gonna win” from three teenage girls, fortunately below the age of electoral consent.

  At almost the last house in the street, we come across the first positive evidence of a changed electoral intention. “I always vote Tory, but I’m probably going to vote Labour this time,” a young woman says. “What’s your party’s position on blood sports?”

  Lisanne rises splendidly to this request. “As part of our program to outlaw cruelty to wild mammals,” she recites, straight from the manifesto, “there will be a free vote in the House of Commons on a proposal to ban the hunting of live quarry with hounds.”

  “But what does your candidate think? How is she going to vote?”

  “I think you’ll find Glenda very sound on blood sports,” answers Lisanne, crisply guessing.

  Overall, she is cheered by the canvass: one almost certain switch to Labour, one probable, plus the guy at the end of the entry phone who might do a tit-for-tat tactical vote with someone in Richmond he hasn’t met. Not a bad evening’s work. Yet what made the strongest impression on me was the number of people living in Chetwynd Road who weren’t on the electoral roll. One house was almost certainly empty, but several more, all in multiple occupation, contained not a single resident authorized to vote. Here were members of that missing five thousand. Some were no doubt just passing through the borough, or were, in any case, apolitical, but what if, say, a quarter of them were natural low-income Labour supporters who failed to register because of a desire to avoid the poll tax? Would their significant silence thwart Glenda and ease Letwin home?

  IN THE LAST WEEK of the national campaign, to everyone’s surprise, a genuine issue emerged, one on which all three main parties had differing opinions: electoral reform, and, specifically, the issue of proportional representation. When Paddy Ashdown first tried to get the question of PR rolling in the campaign, John Major had mockingly dismissed the initials as standing for “Paddy’s Roundabout.” But with some help from the pressure group Charter 88, and more from opinion polls that still pointed firmly to a hung Parliament, Ashdown managed to get PR discussed. What, he demanded twice daily, did the other main parties intend to do when Parliament was deadlocked after April 9? And on every occasion he repeated the Lib Dem message: stability for a full term, a five-year partnership, with PR the price of the deal.

  Despite the questionable logic (is there anything inherently stable about coalition government?), Mr. Ashdown’s cheek and verve in making strong demands from a weak position drew other parties into the argument. The Conservative position was explained by the Prime Minister without ambiguity: we do not believe in PR, there will be no PR under the Tories, the present system works perfectly well, thank you very much and good night. Ergo, the voter deduced, there could be no Tory pact with the Liberals unless Ashdown retreated utterly. So what about the Labour Party, still tipped to be the largest grouping in the new Parliament, if without an overall majority? Labour was, in any case, a more natural ally for the Lib Dems. The official Labour answer, as given in St. Andrew’s, Frognal, by Glenda Jackson, was “Well, there won’t be a hung Parliament.” Labour’s fallback position was that no one could say what the Party’s position on PR was because it hadn’t yet been decided. The leadership had commissioned a report on the matter two and a half years previously, and was still waiting for the outcome. Some Labour candidates, like Glenda Jackson, were in favor of PR; some were against it; Neil Kinnock, when quizzed, said it wasn’t very easy to say where in particular he stood, while emphasizing that his was of course the party that was always open to discussing new ideas. The cynical or politica
lly realistic interpretation of all this was that the Tories were against PR because it would mean an end to their ability to form a majority government on a minority of the votes, and that Labour, while also hoping to pull the same trick this time round, was keeping open the option of being principled in case of failure. The issue of Paddy’s Roundabout made the Tories seem hostile to new constitutional thinking, Labour fuzzy-minded if not actively shifty on it, and the Liberal Democrats clearsighted, pragmatic, and committed to electoral justice. They were also, no less than the other parties, committed to their own self-interest—a permanently hung Parliament, permanent third-party influence, and a permanent job for the increasingly statesmanlike Paddy Ashdown.

  The last-minute omens looked good for Labour. The Financial Times came out in their favor; the afternoon before Election Day a horse called Mister Major was withdrawn from the three-forty at Ascot because it was discovered to be “unsound;” and the morning of Thursday, April 9, dawned bright and sunny over most of the kingdom. The blue of the sky seemed bad news for the Tories, who are normally held to gain an advantage of up to 1 percent at the ballot box if it rains; Tories drive to the polls, Labour supporters walk, according to the received wisdom. On the other hand, there were keep-your-spirits-up murmurings about a “late Tory surge.” Conservatives reminded one another, as they had done at disheartening moments during the previous four weeks, that John Major (unlike his equine namesake) was “a late finisher” Look how late he had finished in the leadership election, and look how late he had snatched victory at the Maastricht summit. Whether these signs were truly comforting was another matter: in the leadership contest he failed to get an overall majority, and at Maastricht he merely established the right of his country to be, on some matters, in a minority of one.

  The Guardian, reckoning that if voters hadn’t made up their minds by now on the weightier isues, they might as well be given some frivolous reasons for doing so, canvassed candidates in marginal constituencies as to their favorite books, films, and music. Glenda Jackson proposed Persuasion, Les Enfants du Paradis, and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms; her Conservative opponent chose War and Peace, Dr. Zhivago, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; the Liberal Democrat listed Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak, the film Stalker, and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Light relief from The Times came in a different form—that of a special Election Day poem by the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. It is, of course, by now traditional for any Laureate’s official offerings to be bewilderingly bad, and Hughes certainly obliged with a jocose number about the effect of toxic chemicals on the sperm count of Western males. Specimens going off to vote might have been downcast to learn from the Laureate that their “virility packet” was only half as spunky as it had once been, yet more than a touch skeptical about the likely efficacy of Hughes’s gonadic appeal to the incoming Prime Minister.

  You wouldn’t have thought there was much wrong with the sperm count of British males to judge by the end of the campaign. The three party leaders raced about in a fizz of testosterone, leaping into helicopters, bouncing out of cars, promising firmness, forcefulness, resolution, courage. But all the opinion polls pointed to neutered deadlock; so did the Poll of Polls, that source of wisdom as sure as the King of Kings; so, too, did the exit polls. But when the first actual results came in, around 11:00 P.M. on Thursday, April 9, computer predictions began to suggest—contrary to all previous commentatorial wisdom and psephological savvy—that the Tories might actually form the largest party in the new Parliament. The media pack ensconced on the press balcony at the Camden Centre to await Glenda’s declaration shuttled incessantly to the wonky TV set in the Council Chamber for an update on the baffling results. As we watched, strange things continued to happen. For a start, swings varied enormously—one moment 7 or 8 percent to Labour, then suddenly 1 or 2 percent to the Conservatives. What was this about? Was it the result of tactical voting? The computer which claimed to make sense of everything was now suggesting that the Tories might even end up with an overall majority of one seat. The Liberals picked off a couple of Tory bastions in the West Country, then started shedding constituencies of their own that they’d gained in recent by-elections. The Tories seemed to be doing much better than expected in Scotland; female Labour candidates were showing well, black Tory males were going down. The Tory Party chairman, Chris Patten, lost his marginal seat in Bath; senior Conservatives mourned him in the language of classical tragedy.

  Throughout it all, Glenda’s result (as we had come to think of it) kept being delayed, from 1:30 A.M. to 1:50, to 2:20, to 2:50, and the caffeine-fueled remnants of the press began to fret about deadlines. Meanwhile, the calculated size of the Tory majority continued to rise: one, two, nine—until, by three o’clock, it had reached double figures. Hampstead and Highgate, twenty-fourth on the list of Labour’s key marginals, was by now only of local interest; it couldn’t arrest the remorseless Tory advance. So it was in an atmosphere of slightly reduced excitement that the Returning Officer at 3:15 A.M. finally led the eight candidates up onto the stage for the announcement of the result. They stood in a line with a large black curtain behind them, the only decoration a vast funeral-parlor vase of white flowers: lilies, carnations, and daisy chrysanthemums. Glenda Jackson wore the same outfit as she had at St. Andrew’s, Frognal, with the addition of a spray of red roses on her left lapel. Captain Rizz looked dashing in red-and-yellow top hat, red frogged jacket with tails, and dark glasses. In alphabetical order of the candidates’ names, the Returning Officer read out the number of votes cast. The Green Party got 594 and the Rainbow Ark Voters Association 44, putting a damper on the plan for Hampstead to have its own currency. Glenda May Jackson received “nineteen thousand, one hundred and ninety-three votes,” Oliver Letwin “seventeen thousand…” The extra numbers (753, to be exact) were lost in a great roar, while Glenda stepped forward and gave a curious gesture: she raised her arm, though not with masculine aggression, and closed her fingers on her palm, but without making a tough fist. A sort of soft-left victory salute, presumably.

  The other figures were then announced. The Liberal Democrat got 4, 765, a fall of nearly 50 percent, and an indication that tactical voting had reduced his pile. Captain Rizz got a mere 33 votes, and Charles “Scallywag” Wilson, whose name was greeted with an enthusiastic cry of “Yeah, Scallywag” from the hall, received only 44. This serious three-way split in the Rainbow vote (which in 1987 had tallied 137) eased the Natural Law Party representative, a man in a deeply nonpolitical white suit, into fifth position, with 86 votes. The candidates made brief speeches. Glenda Jackson said, “Never before has the Labour Party been needed as it is now.” Oliver Letwin consoled his supporters with the traditional remark that “this seat is on loan to the Labour Party for perhaps a few years;” but the figures were not prima facie encouraging. If Hampstead and Highgate traditionally swings at half the national average, Glenda Jackson had done four times as well as had been expected. The Green candidate, after making his speech, gave the new MP a bottle of champagne, on the ground that she must be a champagne socialist; though he missed a trick by not asking her to recycle the bottle. Then the candidates were led off, and in a moment of tiny metaphor Glenda Jackson was seen beginning her political life by leaving a theatrical stage.

  BY LUNCHTIME ON FRIDAY, with only a few Ulster results left to be declared, John Major’s majority had grown to the comparatively decent—and, in terms of all predictions, incredibly enormous—size of twenty-one. It is effectively larger, given the inert status of Ulster Unionists in mainland politics, so Mr. Major will not have to worry overmuch when a backbench MP gets stuck in a traffic jam on the way to vote or starts complaining of chest pains. The Prime Minister will be able to ride out a few by-election losses and govern without much Parliamentary threat for up to five years. Not even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s threat to leave the country in the event of a Labour victory had persuaded enough people to vote for Neil Kinnock.

  Labour optimists pointed out that they had needed
a swing of 1945 proportions to oust the Tories, and that the reduction of the Conservative majority from 101 to 21 was a fine achievement. Labour had nearly climbed the mountain; one more push next time and they would surely make it. But this line of consolation fails to convince. Apart from anything else, next time the mountain will have grown even higher. The recommendations of the Boundary Commission will have been implemented by the next general election, adjusting the size and shape of many constituencies. The effect of these changes, it is generally assumed, will be to hand the Tories from fifteen to twenty extra seats without any more work.

  The situation facing Labour is therefore brutal. If the Party spends eight years reorganizing itself under Neil Kinnock, outlawing the word socialism, expelling left-wing extremists, accepting the free market and the principles of nuclear deterrence, weakening the obvious links with trade unions; if the party leadership does everything to cuddle up to prospective voters made apprehensive by previous Labour attitudes; if, banker-suited and pro-Europe, they pitch themselves as a nicer, more compassionate version of the Tories; if they fight an excellent campaign, well-organized and well-publicized; if the election comes at the right time for them, in the depths of a recession, with a lot of old-lag Tories seemingly attached to power only by their fingertips; if all the polls and all the analysts agree that Labour will at least end up with a share of power; and if, when the results come in, despite an increase in seats, Labour has captured only 35 percent of the vote, and the Conservatives are just as solid on 43 percent as they were five years earlier—then the question arises as to whether Labour has become unelectable. Or at least unelectable under the present system. Perhaps jumping on Paddy’s Roundabout is the necessary solution? Whereupon a second brutal truth asserts itself: in order to change the electoral system to a new one which favors you better, you first have to win power under the old system. Which is what Labour seems incapable of doing.