The most politically wounding part of the story ought to have been the details of Mr. Lamont’s Access account. If you want to connect private and public spheres of activity, and allege that behavior in one affects behavior in the other, then here was a vast opportunity. A private individual who heedlessly runs up debt, and by not paying off that debt incurs a punitively hefty rate of interest, who has to be booted into line by the credit authorities, and blames the builders for his failure to respond to his latest bill? Could there be any connection with a chancellor who presided over a whacking hike in public-sector borrowing, who kept the pound at an indefensibly high level, who maintained that Britain would never leave the exchange-rate mechanism until the day Britain left the exchange-rate mechanism, and who likes to blame everything on the Germans and the Bundesbank? Does this or does this not sound like the same man?
Mr. Lamont has not been one of the more impressive Chancellors of recent decades. He is said to be “overpromoted.” Apart from anything else, he never seems to exude much confidence that he is the Chancellor. I once saw a game show on television in which the same piece of music was played three times by a studio band, with a different conductor each time. The contestants had to guess which of the baton waggers was a real musical conductor, the other two being by occupation bus conductors. Mr. Lamont has always seemed the bus-conductor type of Chancellor: one who scoops his hands up and down while music is played but has no special idea what tune is coming out, or how the musicians manage their instruments. Most people admit to little understanding of economics, while worrying a fair deal about it; so public confidence in the Chancellor depends on more than just his choice of policy. An important part of his function is to look as if he knows what he is doing while blaming others—France, Germany, the world—for the economic ills of the nation; to maintain grandly that “we shall not be blown off course,” whatever the barometer indicates; and to reassure the public with an air of weighty savvy. But what if the nation knows that it is suffering the worst recession in sixty years, that bankruptcies and mass redundancies continue unabated, and that the man in supposed charge of it all, who claimed to spot “green shoots” in the economy when others saw only a trampled mud field, doesn’t appear able to keep a grip on his own small private finances? In such a case, statesmanlike posing from the Chancellor is likely to carry less conviction.
But this is, of course, a position, an editorial statement, rather than a running story. Downing Street did not attempt to rebut the disclosures about Mr. Lamont’s lamentable credit record, because they were irrebuttable; the battle was fought over Mr. Lamont’s moral rather than financial creditworthiness, and took place amid the stacked pre-Christmas shelves of West London “off-licenses.” The full power of the British Treasury was now ranged against Mr. Onanuga. Officials telephoned newspapers with the Downing Street version of events: Mr. Lamont had never set foot in the Praed Street Thresher’s but had called in at another branch the previous day on his way back from his official Buckinghamshire residence; nor, of course, had he bought chilled champagne and a pack of Raffles—just three bottles of wine. Needless to say, this primary denial was little believed: would you take the word of an unnamed Treasury spokesman against that of an assistant in your local “offie”? Almost certainly not. Besides, Mr. Onanuga had apparently told his store manager and his girlfriend that he had served Mr. Lamont days before The Sun broke its story.
Thresher’s is a subsidiary of Whitbread, a large brewing company that is also—as conspiracy theorists were quick to point out—a major donor to the Conservative Party. (This last detail is probably not as significant as it seems: you would be hard put to find a company as large as Whitbread giving money to any party other than the Conservatives.) Thresher’s held an emergency board meeting at its Welwyn Garden City headquarters; thousands of credit-card vouchers were examined by staff; and at the end of it the company confirmed the Treasury’s version of events, while continuing not to specify the branch where Mr. Lamont had shopped, and denouncing its own employee’s story as “wholly inaccurate and without foundation.”
On the night of Sunday, November 29, in a final attempt to put the cork in the bottle, the Treasury released a copy of a Thresher’s register receipt bearing the Chancellor’s signature. This showed the date as November 15 (the Sunday), the time as 7:19 P.M., and the amount paid as £17.47; it itemized two bottles of J. P. Bartier claret at £3.99, plus one bottle of 1990 Margaux from Sichel at £9.49. Mr. Lamont then released his own copy of the receipt, which added a final detail: the identity of the Thresher’s branch in question, one in Connaught Street, a few blocks away from Praed Street. Finally, a Thresher’s spokeswoman announced that Mr. Onanuga and his store manager had admitted that their story was “totally fabricated” but said that they “did not mean to cause Mr. Lamont any trouble.” So why might they have done it? Were they part, wittingly or unwittingly, of some wider conspiracy to undermine the Chancellor? Did they simply wish to wind up the press and set it running in best headless-chicken mode? Either way, the men were not produced for journalistic cross-examination and were suspended “in line with normal disciplinary procedures”—as if there had been anything normal about the preceding tale. Only a couple of minor points remained. When journalists tried to obtain from Thresher’s the two wines Mr. Lamont had bought only a fortnight earlier, they discovered that both had been taken off the shelves for what was described as “precautionary quality control.” And, lastly, it seemed strange that, given all the publicity, given knowledge of the exact date, time, and location of Mr. Lamont’s purchase, no one had come forward from the Connaught Street shop with any memory of having served the rather recognizable Chancellor.
So, after a week of vintage quibbling, the story petered out, with an appropriate tasting note from the wine writer Jancis Robinson. Asked if she had come across Mr. Lamont’s cellar selections, she consulted her records and found that she had dismissed the J. P. Bartier claret in a single word: “dirty.” The story was now also dismissed, though only in the sense that a small cloud can be swallowed up by a larger one. For it was at precisely the moment of the Praed Street affair that an earlier embarrassment in Mr. Lamont’s tenure as Chancellor bobbed up again, like a dead dog in a dirty river. This one involved, well, yes, sex, though even the most prurient mind did not finger Mr. Lamont himself in this context. It began when he was appointed Chancellor in November of 1990; the job brought with it a salary of £63, 047, a government car, and the use of two houses: 11 Downing Street for work, and a forty-five-room Buckinghamshire mansion for weekends and holidays. This superabundance of housing meant that Mr. Lamont was able to rent out his own dwelling in Notting Hill. The following April it turned out that the tenant in his basement, one Sara Dale, who had described herself in her rental agreement as a “therapist dealing with stress and nutritional management,” was, in the language of the News of the World, a “busty hooker,” and that her therapy involved punishment and payment (ninety pounds per hour) of an all too predictable nature. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Lamont had met this professional lady; she had been found, it seems, by reputable agents who had taken personal references from “solicitors, a bank, and a building society.” When he heard that the story was about to break, Mr. Lamont not unnaturally went to see a solicitor. What was surprising was his choice of Peter Carter-Ruck & Partners, one of Britain’s best-known and supposedly most expensive libel firms. Their job was (1) to evict the embarrassing woman (not their normal line of business); (2) to handle press inquiries (though there was also the Treasury press office, which would not have charged for this service); and (3) perhaps most important, to warn newspapers to be careful what they wrote. As a further incentive to speed Miss Dale, Carter-Ruck took out a quite extraordinary writ for defamation against the therapist, alleging damage to the reputation of Mr. Lamont’s property caused by her presence in it. It seems that in British law you can libel a building. Whether prospective buyers or tenants might have thought that the property’s reputati
on had already been sufficiently diminished by having a politician living in it was not, alas, tested in court.
The solicitors’ bill for this work—an unopposed eviction case, some phone answering, plus a bit of watch-your-step to Fleet Street—came to a staggering £23,114.64, the equivalent of 257 hours of “stress therapy” from Miss Dale, or approximately 5,800 bottles of J. P. Bartier claret. Not a penny of this was coughed up by Mr. Lamont himself Most of the bill was paid by a generous but unnamed Conservative Party supporter, while £4,700 came from Treasury funds. The justification for this latter contribution, which for a year and a half was successfully concealed from the public, ran as follows: if ministers are involved in legal actions relating to official duties, they may, under a Cabinet Office code of guidance, be indemnified with taxpayers’ money. Apparently, the then Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Peter Middleton, told Mr. Lamont that it was “reasonable and proper” for the Treasury to meet a portion of the bill: the £4,700 thus paid was for Mr. Carter-Ruck’s firm to issue a statement about potential libel and handle subsequent press inquiries (at £200 per hour, in case you are planning to use them). There seem to be three problem areas in all this. First, whether “legal action” can be stretched to include “preemptive legal strikes against possible libels;” second, whether Mr. Lamont should have chosen a famously expensive firm when some of his bill was being footed by the public; and, third, whether his case fell remotely within the Cabinet Office guidelines. It’s true that if he had not been appointed Chancellor he wouldn’t have been able to rent out his own house and therefore wouldn’t have been obliged to evict the stress therapist, but it’s hard to see how this domestic irritation could be said to have anything in the world to do with his official duties.
Mr. Lamont is currently being described as “accident-prone”—political shorthand for “incompetent beyond the dreams of the Opposition”—and is sternly announcing that he will not resign (often a prelude to resignation). But his predicament is far from unique. Consider its elements: unfortunate image, doubtful competence, public unpopularity, plus a willingness to let others pay your bills. Who else fits this profile perfectly? The British Royal Family, of course. And in the very week that Mr. Lamont was desperately defending his reputation and his job, the Queen was defending hers, too. In a speech at the Guildhall to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, she made a rare public appeal for sympathy, and even acknowledged that there was room for debate over the nature of the organization she heads. “There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life,” she said. “No institution—City, monarchy, whatever—should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t. But we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humor and understanding.” This may seem bland and banal to a reader living in a republic, but in a British context it was positively self-lacerating.
Her Majesty admitted that 1992 had been for her an “annus horribilis. The sexual and marital tomfoolery among her whelps was indeed terrible PR for Windsor Inc. And the year closed with bad news feeding off bad, so that even a potentially blithe event was thrown out of kilter by the murk surrounding it. This was the case with Princess Anne’s remarriage on a raw and snow—threatening Scottish afternoon. It could have been a mildly upbeat affair, contributing a speck of much-needed image modernization to the family: here, after all, was a divorced woman in her forties marrying a chap five years her junior, and also introducing a few welcome (if dilute) Jewish molecules into the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha blood royal. Instead, the union was swamped by the backwash from Charles and Diana’s separation, and the fact that the event took place in Scotland merely pointed up the current impossibility of royal remarriage within the Church of England. What was billed necessarily as a “quiet family affair” smacked instead of a dynasty hunkering and bunkering down against misfortune. The rare dispatch with which Anne married Comdr. Tim Laurence even depressed the normally buoyant memorabilia market. Previous royal hitchings produced hundreds of commercial supplicants to Buckingham Palace, asking permission to vend jaunty mugs and smile-filled T-shirts. By the time Anne and Tim had signed the register, however, only a single such request had filtered in to the Palace. One manufacturer from Stoke-on-Trent commented glumly, “We didn’t think anyone would want to buy Anne and Tim tea towels.”
Whether there will be Royal Worcester oil-and-vinegar cruets to mark Charles and Di’s official separation remains to be seen. This public acknowledgment of a widely reported reality was no doubt designed as some kind of solution; but at best it is a holding operation, and one which opens up more possibilities than it closes down. (Separate lives, separate courts, separate lovers? A tabloid editor’s dream.) Worse, it refocused the same problems as in the Lamont case: the tie-in between the private and the public life. If you don’t view the Royal Family as the privileged descendants of a bunch of brigands and main chancers airbrushed into respectability by high-quality PR (with even Shakespeare & Co. engaged on the account), then you tend to invoke symbolic identity, public service, duty, and so forth. During various official junkets (the Coronation, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales), various Royals pronounce various vows whose texts are rarely scoured. But roughly they say: we promise to do our duty as symbolic top people, figure heads of the nation, defenders of the established church, and in return you give us your fealty, some of your money, and applause ad libitum. This larger pledge for the most part wafts mistily in the air, while groundlings pay closer attention to the lesser pledges: for instance, the marriage vows, promises to forsake all others and so on, made before a television audience and a priest of the said established church. So what happens when the marital log of Elizabeth H’s children shows a 100 percent failure rate? Do we merely blame the press? Do we look with a darker, different eye upon the parents? Or do we say that this is the royal equivalent of Mr. Lamont’s infraction, and that the family is recklessly running over the credit limit of its moral Access card?
And the fact that “we” are talking about it in this newly authoritative way indicates that another shift has taken place. As at the time of the 1936 Abdication, there is now talk of a constitutional crisis. There isn’t one, inasmuch as there is very little constitution to refer to; rather, there are the adipose opinions of a group of political and spiritual power brokers who take it upon themselves to be moral arbiters. When Edward VIII—like Charles, a late marrier—was forced out, the viziers involved were the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the editor of Vie Times. The historian A. J. P. Taylor described these three “directors of public life” as talking subsequently “as though they had triumphed over the laxity inherited from the nineteen-twenties.”
Currently, the main pseudoconstitutional questions being asked are: Can Diana be crowned Queen if she and Charles are living apart; and shouldn’t Charles give up the throne in favor of his elder son, William? The directors of public life have in the meantime changed. Rupert Murdoch’s Times is much less influential, the Prime Minister is an easygoing loyalist, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is a member of the happy-clappy persuasion. With the Palace having lost the knack of setting the agenda itself, a loose crew of tabloid editors, opinion pollsters, and royal experts has taken over. So Charles is being and will continue to be tried in some informal court of morals and popularity. No matter that he is the legitimate heir to the throne, that he is still of sound mind, and that he has been trained all his life to assume the function of monarch. How will this stack up against the fact that he two-timed the most popular woman in Britain?
And then, on top of all this domestic drama, there is the question of money. This arose with a vengeful suddenness in the wake of the Windsor Castle fire. Normally, a good blaze plays in a predictable fashion, producing a sort of subdued Rei
chstag effect. (One could even imagine a junior Royal torching the castle to reattract public sympathy.) But this time the opposite occurred. Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for National Heritage, no doubt imagined he was being a loyal minister and an uncontroversial citizen when he announced the next day in the House of Commons that the state would pick up the estimated £60 million tab for restoring “this most precious and well-loved part of our national heritage.” Buckingham Palace confirmed that the Queen herself would pay only for the repair of damaged artifacts from her private collection—which seemed to come in at a few carpets and chandeliers, plus various items dented by the firemen. Both sides agreed that the financial position was clear. Windsor Castle belonged not to the Queen as a private individual but to the Crown; therefore, the Crown, meaning the state, meaning the taxpayer, would have to fork out.
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