Letters From London

by Julian Barnes

  What has changed? The Labour Party is like a lover who, rejected for being scruffy and high-minded by the girl he seeks, goes out, gets a haircut, a new suit, a proper job, a mortgage, and a portable phone, and then comes back only to be rejected again, in favor of some other man with a haircut, suit, job, mortgage, and portable phone. Better the devil—or the man in the suit—that you know. Casting around for explanations, Mr. Kinnock complained about the tabloid-press denunciations of Labour. But the tabloid press always denounces Labour. Others pointed to “the Kinnock factor”—a suspicion of his malleable principles, combined with a prejudice against him as a Welshman. But the British do not hold an ability to change one’s mind, one’s principles, even one’s political party, against somebody who really wants power. And, while there is a certain low-level anti-Welsh prejudice among the English, and there could not have been a greater contrast than that between the hey-boyo Kinnock and the permafrost upper lip of the Prime Minister, this explanation is strictly one of last resort.

  A more likely solution is that the British themselves—or an electorally significant percentage of them—have changed. Surveys of social attitudes tend to show that the Thatcher years have not much altered what people claim they want and expect from society. But people’s behavior has changed. For a start, they have clearly started lying to opinion pollsters, which is probably a sign of a new political maturity on their part, and might even lead to the healthy disgrace and eventual abandonment of polling. (Of course, if they lie to political pollsters they might equally lie to social-attitude pollsters.) And in other respects a significant portion of the voting public has been altered by Thatcherism. As I waited for Glenda’s result in the defiantly unstimulating atmosphere of the Camden Council Chamber—no alcohol allowed, smoking forbidden, the coffee machine run dry—and as John Major’s prospects rose by the minute, a TV technician said to me, a little apprehensively, “I instructed my bank manager to buy me nine hundred pounds’ worth of BT shares if the Tories won.” He was worrying about the fact that on the eve of Election Day the City had scented a possible last-minute Tory rally and share prices had taken off; even so, he reckoned that his shares in British Telecom, the privatized successor to a section of the state-run Post Office, were a good buy. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the idea of a BBC technician instructing his bank manager to up his holding in BT would have seemed a strange dystopian fantasy. Now it is unavoidable here. Oliver Letwin wrote a book called Privatising the World; Mrs. Thatcher famously remarked, “There is no such thing as society” (there being only individuals and families in her view). The change in British political reality is not as complete as these two phrases imply, but a shift has certainly taken place—one that will have led, by the end of Mr. Major’s immediate term of office, to seventeen or eighteen years of nonstop Conservative rule. This long period of single-party power makes Britain, depending on your view, either a stable and economically realistic nation of enterprise and individualism, or else “Japan without the prosperity.”

  On the Monday following his defeat, Neil Kinnock resigned as Labour leader. Eight days earlier, his last major London rally before the election was a gathering of the fairly high-profile faithful-self-satirizingly dubbed “Luvvies for Labour” by the comedian Ben Elton. Kinnock preceded his speech by pulling from his pocket Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, which, he said, he habitually carried around with him. It was an odd and proleptic choice:

  When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

  And look upon myself and curse my fate…

  The poet, in despair, reflects upon the one he loves, just as Mr. Kinnock, in a dignified farewell, was to pay warm tribute to his wife, Glenys: he was not to be pitied, for he had much richness in his personal life; it was the country that was to be pitied. The sonnet ends:

  For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,

  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

  —which was, more or less, exactly what he’d been trying to do for the last eight years as Labour leader.

  Asked what went wrong for him in Hampstead and Highgate, Oliver Letwin replied, “Very simple. The Liberals collapsed and the bulk of them went to Labour.” Why? “I don’t know.” The Glenda Jackson personal vote he still rated an insignificant item; he thinks there might have been “a marginal anti-me factor,” because of his association with the poll tax, but the result was all “more to do with the big national questions.” Liberal Democrats voted tactically “to get out the Government,” and while his own vote held up well, the Lib Dem switch finished his chances. Unlike those of us who waited until 3:15 A.M., Letwin knew “as soon as the ballot boxes were opened” that he had lost: not from counting his own votes or Glenda Jackson’s but from the rarity of crosses beside Dr. Wrede’s name. If it’s any comfort to Labour, Letwin judged it “absurd” to talk about the Party’s long-term unelectability—politics being simply too fluid and hazardous a business. Asked finally about the victor, he agreed that she will probably make a good constituency MP. “The danger is she might get bored. She’s been on a big stage, and she might find Parliament boring and trivial.”

  Her stage has indeed been big. Apart from anything else, there can be no other member of either House of Parliament who has inspired a piece of South American fiction. Julio Cortázar, in his story “We Love Glenda So Much,” describes a group of film fans who so adore the actress that they are unable to bear the fact that some of her films are less than perfect. These club members therefore buy up copies of her unworthy movies and, with a cut here and a sly addition there, give them a perfection that their incompetent directors had initially been unable to provide. When Glenda announces her retirement, their happiness is complete: her oeuvre is perfect and their love impeccable. Except that one day, a year later, the actress announces her return to the screen. The fans are shattered. They cannot start their work all over again, and so they decide on the ultimate solution: in order to defend both Glenda’s oeuvre and their love for her they must ensure that she doesn’t live to make another film—

  If such a group of fans exists, they will surely be pleased with the result on April 9 in Hampstead and Highgate. The work of the death squad in closing off the film career of Glenda Jackson has been done instead by 19, 193 North London voters.

  May1992

  The Boundary Commission changes proved less damaging to Labours prospects than had been predicted. Mike Newell went on to direct Four Weddings and a Funeral.

  7

  Traffic Jam at Buckingham Palace

  A couple of years ago, I was driving west out of London, sauntering down the middle lane of the M4 at no more than ten miles an hour over the speed limit, when two search lights lit up my offside wing mirror. They turned, all too rapidly, into police motorcyclists. I was beginning to console myself on the unfairness of my random arrest when they growled past unheeding. They were far too busy sweeping the fast lane for the car they were escorting. It duly appeared in its swift bulk, pounding along at between ninety and a hundred miles an hour: a large black saloon flying a royal pennant on its bonnet. When the rearguard had passed, my companion and I speculated on the limo’s occupant and the reason for such ostentatious speeding. The Queen late for a state lunch? Princess Anne late to feed her horses? The Queen Mum late for a gin and tonic? And so on. But the encounter also made me recall one of Prince Philip’s obiter dicta: he once remarked to an interviewer that the Royal Family would “lose its dignity” if its members were caught in traffic jams like ordinary citizens.

  Over the last few years, the Royal Family has shed quite a bit of its dignity, and the fault has not been that of its motorcycle outriders. The latest revelations, or allegations, or filthy gossip, about the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales may have induced disbelief, rage, pity, and schadenfreude, but they did not come out of a clear blue sky. Most of the recent domestic bulle
tins about the House of Windsor have been of matrimonial misfortune. There is a probably apocryphal story of a British matron watching Sarah Bernhardt play Cleopatra and commenting, “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.” Until not long ago, the remark could be, and was, still applied waggishly to the stodgy, dull, decent, seemingly chaste House of Windsor. Not anymore. For a mother of four children to see one of their marriages break up is probably a statistical normality in present-day Britain; two looks like positive misfortune; three begins to argue that there is something seriously wrong with the family itself. When that woman is the Queen of England, the follow-up questions have a wider resonance.

  The fact that Prince Charles himself has been afflicted with marital blight is particularly ironic. The British monarchy, which over the centuries has put its fair share of blackguards, adulterers, and madmen on the throne, and has endured mockery and criticism up to the severest censure of regicide in 1649, has been enjoying for the last half century a remarkably placid and uncontested phase of its existence. One factor in this, even committed monarchists agree, has been genetic good fortune. The line of thinking goes as follows. Jolly lucky we got rid of that unstable and potentially ruinous Edward VIII, plus his foreign, fortune-seeking Mrs. Simpson, and traded him in for the solid stamp-collecting George VI. Jolly lucky that his eldest daughter was the dutiful Elizabeth, and that we got her as Queen rather than the flighty Margaret, who fell in love with a divorced man, liked smoking cigarettes, and hung around with arty types. Jolly lucky, finally, that Charles, an earnest worrier with a proper sense of his ancestry, is going to inherit, rather than the headstrong Anne, the larky Andrew, or the seemingly unmarriageable Edward. And, besides, we don’t just get Charles, we also get Princess Di, the most popular woman in the country. How can the show not run and run?

  The main allegations in Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton, formerly a Daily Star journalist and now a rich man, are: that the marriage of Charles and Di collapsed early and is currently a sham; that Di became acutely depressed and made five “suicide bids” (or, at least, pathetically frenzied cries for help, such as throwing herself against a glass display cabinet and cutting herself with the serrated edge of a lemon slicer), which Charles declined to take seriously; that she suffered from bulimia nervosa for many years of her marriage and was treated by a consultant psychiatrist; that she does not believe she will ever become Queen, an apprehension confirmed by the astrologers she has consulted; that Charles is a cold and unsupportive husband, who throughout his marriage has continued his long-standing “friendship” with Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles despite his wife’s protests and jealousy; and that when, after years of painful matrimony, the Princess asked her husband, “But did you ever love me?” he is said to have replied, “No.”

  If these disclosures were merely the backstairs chatter of a disgruntled parlor maid, as used to be the case with “royal revelations,” they might have made no more than a deniable early-summer scandal. But Morton was allowed to tape interviews with one of Diana’s sisters and her younger brother; he talked to her former flatmates and Chelsea friends; the publisher of the book was sold eighty previously unseen photos by her father, Earl Spencer; and a slice of profits from the venture will go to a drug-abuse charity of which Diana is patron. In other words, this is as close to Diana: My Story as we are likely to get; and if the Princess now finds her life sensationalized and its emphases skewed, then that is the price celebrities often pay for not writing their own stuff.

  Morton’s book, as serialized in the Sunday Times before publication, was received with fascination, wrath, and a large amount of cant, not least from fellow journalists. The day after the first episode appeared, Donald Trelford, editor of the rival Sunday Observer, was quoted as saying of Morton’s book, “It looks like trash to me. I can’t stand stories about Royals who can’t answer back. I don’t know if it’s true or false.” But such sentiments, however worthy, had bowed to the exigencies of journalism the previous day. The Sunday Time’s front page had been dominated by a color photo of a rather melancholy Diana in her finery, beneath the headline DIANA DRIVEN TO FIVE SUICIDE BIDS BY “UNCARING” CHARLES. The Observer’s was dominated by an even larger color photo, of a grim-looking Princess at the wheel of her car, beneath the headline DEPRESSION “DROVE DIANA TO FIVE SUICIDE BIDS.” Devotees of the codes and conventions of British headline writing might have noticed the position of the quotation marks, which separate those parts of the story which are only alleged to be true from those which the newspaper itself endorses: so the Observer was confirming the depression but hedging its bets on the suicide bids; whereas the Sunday Times was confirming the suicide bids but hedging its bets on whether or not Charles was a heartless husband. The average reader, of course, would come away from each front page with exactly the same impression of what had happened, and probably the same percentage of conviction as to the truth of the story.

  But whether the other papers were sniffy-nosed, emulative, or spoiling, none managed, or perhaps tried very hard, to discredit the story in the first few weeks; they were too busy selling newspapers. Nor were there any denials from the Palace. So with the question “Is It True?” on hold, attention turned to “What Does It Portend if True?” and “Should the Bastards Have Been Allowed to Do It?” In constitutional terms, the story portends very little. The couple could separate, they could divorce, Prince Charles could even marry again, and there would be no constitutional crisis. If Henry VIII is anything to go by, he could marry again to his heart’s content; the only disadvantage would be that he couldn’t remarry in church, and therefore couldn’t act as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. So the portents were all more local: to do with the future stability and popularity of the monarchy if its current juve lead withdrew from the production.

  This left the question “Should the Bastards Have Been Allowed to Do It?” Though a regulation amount of smarmy humbug oozed from the Sunday Times, it was exceeded by the hypocrisy in some of the responses. If the message is bad, shoot the messenger. There were widespread denunciations of gutter-press intrusiveness, although the story first appeared as a book, from which a broadsheet serialization was made. There were renewed calls for a law of privacy, a subject which thereby climbed higher up the reformists’ agenda than more fundamental matters of government secrecy and freedom of information. There was the reminder that the Royals could sue for libel. (Minor ones, like Lord Linley, Princess Margaret’s son, have already done so.) The Archbishop of Canterbury burbled away in disapproval. So did the Press Complaints Commission, a rather ludicrous body set up by the industry out of the fear that if it didn’t regulate itself the government would come in and do the job less indulgently. The commission condemned what it called “an odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls in a manner which adds nothing to legitimate public interest in the situation of the heir to the throne.” This stricture was not treated everywhere with proper gravitas, given that two of the commission’s members are the editor of the News of the World, historically the market leader in Sunday salacity, and the editor of the Daily Star, whose front page that very day had finger-dabbled, with the headline CAMILLA’S ROYAL OK, claiming that “Di’s love rival,” Mrs. Parker-Bowles, had won a “big smile” from the Queen at a polo match.

  There was even a droll side tiff between Mr. Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, who had fronted the story much more than Mr. Morton himself, and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph. The two had previously confronted each other in the libel court, when the self-consciously old-style Worsthorne had been obliged to pay the self-consciously new-style Neil a thousand pounds for implying that when Mr. Neil had squired a certain Pamella Bordes around town he knew that she was not just a glamorous model and an ex-House of Commons researcher but also a high-class tart. Sir Peregrine, who despite his parodically English name is of Belgian extraction, and who despite his chivalrous defense of
the decencies of life was one of the first people to use the F word on television, returned to the subject of Andrew Neil with gleeful disgust. “Twice last week,” he wrote in his Sunday Telegraph column, “have I had to see Mr. Neil on television. It is not quite a case of ‘see Mr. Neil and die’ but see Mr. Neil and throw up. Has there ever been a more confusing face? With an expression half-bovine and half sheeplike he stares out of the screen in such a way as to leave us all uncertain whether he wants to cut our throats or lick our boots.” It is true that Mr. Neil is not exactly a looker, but connoisseurs of comic physiognomy would do well not to bypass the flamboyant Sir Peregrine: in any Daumier series, he could safely model for the Languid Epicure. As for Miss Pamella Bordes, she is a good example of how the lives of celebrities intertwine. I was in Delhi this February, and seeking conversation with a taxi driver, I remarked that Princess Di happened to be in town, too. (She had visited the Taj Mahal and pronounced it “a very healing experience”—a remark that made no sense at the time but a little more in retrospect.) The driver was indifferent to the Princess’s visit and proclaimed himself much keener on Pamella Bordes, the famous model, who was also visiting Delhi. Our conversation took off when I shyly confessed that I had myself met Miss Bordes, and even shaken her hand. I did not mention that at the time she was in the company—how the names come around again—of Mr. Donald Trelford.

  A further question that the moralistic harrumphers chose not to answer was this: what if the “dabbling in other people’s souls” is actually connived in by the so-called victims? It may be a well-known fact that the Royal Family, as Mr. Trelford reminded us, “can’t answer back;” but like most well-known facts, this one is partly untrue. For a start, Buckingham Palace and its coroneted outposts have a very large slice of Fleet Street—including Sir Peregrine Worsthorne—already in the position of thrilled obeisance. The Royal Family may not come to the front door and give interviews, but it carefully chooses what to throw in its dustbins, confident that they will be rootled through before dawn. Princess Di seems to have given the Morton story tacit approval before publication; subsequently, she gave it active encouragement. For instance, on the Wednesday after the news broke she telephoned her old friend Carolyn Bartholomew (one of Morton’s sources) and invited herself round that evening. Shortly afterward five newspaper picture desks and one royal photographer were alerted and told to be outside the Bartholomews’ house at eight-fifteen. The Princess arrived, spent forty-five minutes with her friend, and then lingered on the doorstep long enough for every snapper to get his picture. The next morning the Bartholomews spoke openly to journalists about the visit. Now, this may not technically be a press conference, but it goes as near as royal protocol allows, and probably nearer. To take another example: last summer the tabloids discovered that the Princess was spending her thirtieth birthday in a surprisingly subdued and Charles-less manner. “Friends of Prince Charles” had told gossip columnists that the Prince had offered her a birthday party but she had refused; at about the same time, news began to leak of the Princess’s friendship with a certain major. One theory is that Diana used the Morton conduit as a way of replying to “Friends of Prince Charles.” More generally, she might be seen as appealing over the heads of Palace apparatchiks to her loyal British public, making a cry for help on a national scale.