Letters From London

by Julian Barnes

  September 1993

  The losses for 1991, announced in May 1994, were twice what Lloyd’s had predicted twelve months earlier: £2.5 billion (or, if you prefer the newly introduced and more agreeable system, which strips out the “double count” when two syndicates reserve for the samt claim, a mere £2.048 billion). Apart from asbestosis and pollution claims, there is now a new long-tail threat: claims against manufacturers of silicone breast implants. Tom Benyon, chairman of the Society of Names, estimated that up to 9,000 Names would be ruined by the 1991 results. In October 1994 there was some apparent good news for the deficit millionaires: a group of 3,096 Names successfully sued the underwriters of the Gooda Walker syndicates for negligence. Solicitors for the plaintiffs estimated that the award would be worth more than £500 million. However, nothing is straightforward at Lloyd’s. Where were the policies covering the Gooda Walker underwriters against “errors and omissions” written? Mostly at Lloyd’s, of course. Even those which were reinsured outside Lloyd’s may well turn out, such is the vortical nature of the business, to end up back in the London market. So Names may find that they have won money from their negligent underwriters, who in turn claim on their professional insurers, who in turn call in the money from the same Names who are owed it elsewhere. Bankrupt already? Now you can make yourself even more bankrupt!

  11

  Mrs. Thatcher Remembers

  A few years ago, an elderly friend of mine was being examined in a British hospital for possible brain damage. A psychiatrist catechized her patronizingly. “Can you tell me what day of the week it in?” “That’s not important to me” came the cagey reply. “Well, can you tell me what season of the year it is?” “Of course I can.” The doctor plodded on to his next tester. “And can you tell me who is the Prime Minister?” “Everyone knows that,” my friend answered, half triumphant, half derisive. “It’s Thatch.”

  Everyone did indeed know, for more than eleven long years, that it was Thatch. No other Prime Minister in my lifetime has been always there to the extent that Margaret Thatcher was, in terms not just of longevity but also of intensity. She trained herself to sleep only four hours a night, and most mornings the nation awoke to a parade-ground snarl, to the news that it was an ’orrible shower, and the instruction to double round the barracks again in full pack or else. Those who met her in private confirmed that she was just as powerful an eyeballer as on the parade ground. The poet Philip Larkin wrote of the moment when “I got the blue flash,” going on to moan appreciatively to another correspondent, “What a blade of steel!” Alan Clark, a minor Tory minister and rakehell nob diarist, treasured a moment when “her blue eyes flashed” and “I got a fall dose of personality compulsion, something of the Führer Kontakt.” (He also noted her “very small feet and attractive—not bony—ankles in the 1940 style”) Even President Mitterrand, whom one might expect to be immune on both national and political grounds, can be heard succumbing to La Thatch in Jacques Attali’s “Verbatim.” “The eyes of Stalin, the voice of Marilyn Monroe,” he muses in tranced paradox.

  When she came to the Tory leadership in 1975, it seemed as if she might be a brief and token phenomenon. She was of the Tory right, and British politics had for years shuffled between governments of the Tory left and the Labour right: little bits of tax lowering and denationalization on the one hand, little bits of tax raising and renationalization on the other. Worse, she was a woman: though both major parties had pachyderm prejudices against the species, it had always been assumed that the officially progressive Labour Party was the more likely party to put a woman at its head. Tory women, it was known, preferred men; and so did Tory men. Finally, there was Mrs. Thatcher’s apparent suburban Englishness: it was confidently asserted that she would get no votes north of the Watford Gap (a motorway service area in the South Midlands). So her first election victory was put down to the temporary weakness of the Labour Party; her second to the knock-on effect of the Falklands War; her third to renewed Opposition fissuring. That she was deprived of the chance of winning a fourth was due not to the Labour Party, still less to the Tory faithful in the country at large, but to a disgruntled Parliamentary Party, which decided (and only by a whisker) that she had passed her vote-by date.

  Those who opposed her, who felt each day of her rule as a sort of political migraine, tended to make two fundamental miscalculations. The first was to treat her as some kind of political weirdo. This was understandable, since she was a Tory ideologue, and when had the Conservatives last been a party of ideology, of inflexible programs, of Holy Grail beliefs? What took years to sink in was the nasty truth that Mrs. Thatcher represented and successfully appealed to a strong and politically disregarded form of Englishness. To the liberal, the snobbish, the metropolitan, the cosmopolitan, she displayed a parochial, small-shopkeeper mentality, puritanical and Poujadiste, self-interested and xenophobic, half sceptered-isle nostalgia and half count-your-change bookkeeping. But to those who supported her she was a plain speaker, a clear and visionary thinker who embodied no-nonsense, stand-on-your-own-two-feet virtue, a patriot who saw that we had been living on borrowed time and borrowed money for far too long. If socialism’s gut appeal lies in the argument from science (which implies inevitability), Thatcherism’s gut appeal lay in the argument from nature (which also implies inevitability). But arguments from nature should always remind us of one of nature’s commoner sights: that of large animals devouring smaller ones.

  The second miscalculation was the assumption, made until quite late in the day, that what she was doing to the country could, and would, eventually be undone. This had always more or less happened in postwar politics: little pendulum swings to the left and then to the right along the years. Now, post-Thatcher, the pendulum continues to swing, but inside a clock that has been rehung on the wall at a completely different angle. Like many, I used to think that the official saturation of the country with market values was a reversible phenomenon; a little skin cancer perhaps, but no irradiation of the soul. I abandoned this belief—or hope—a few Christmases ago, and when I want an image of what Mrs. Thatcher has done to Britain I think of the carol singers. At the time she came to power, they would, as they always had, stand outside your house, sing a carol or two, then ring the bell, and if you answered, sing some more. Halfway through the rule of Thatch, I began noticing that they wouldn’t bother to start singing until they had first rung the bell and checked that you were there to listen and pay up. After she had been in power for about ten years, I opened the door one Christmas and peered out. There were two small boys some distance from the house already, unwilling to waste their time if they got a negative response. “Carols?” one of them asked, spreading his hands in a businesslike gesture, as if he had just acquired a job lot of tunes off the back of a lorry and could perhaps be persuaded to cut me in.

  Mrs. Thatcher’s achievements were, in political terms, remarkable. She showed that you could disregard the old pieties about consensus, whether intraparty or cross-party. You could govern the United Kingdom while effectively shrinking your MP base to a purely English party. You could survive while allowing unemployment to rise to levels previously thought politically untenable. You could politicize hitherto unpolitical public bodies, and force the holy principles of the market into areas of society presumed sacrosanct. You could sharply diminish union power and increase employer power. You could weaken the independence of local government by limiting its ability to raise money, and then, if it still bugged you, you could simply abolish it: London is now the only great city in the world without an elected metropolitan authority. You could make the rich richer and the poor poorer until you had restored the gap that existed at the end of the last century. You could do all this and in the process traumatize the Opposition: the presence since 1979 of a Tory Government that has been frequently unpopular yet ineluctably reelected has driven the Labour Party steadily to the right, until it has abandoned much of what it believed in the seventies and presents itself now as the party of
nice, caring capitalists, as distinct from nasty, uncaring ones. Even the unemployed have been traumatized, to the extent that at the last election (Thatcher-free but still fought around Thatcherism) they actually ended up voting in slightly higher proportion for the Tories than the previous time round.

  From the start, the prime appeal of Margaret Thatcher was her granitic certainty. Her “great virtue,” Philip Larkin told an interviewer in 1979, “is saying that two and two makes four, which is as unpopular nowadays as it always has been.” Later the same year, the poet elaborated: “I adore Mrs. Thatcher. At last politics makes sense to me, which it hasn’t done since Stafford Cripps (I was very fond of him too). Recognizing that if you haven’t got the money for something you can’t have it—this is a concept that’s vanished for many years.” Politics, of course, is a matter of decimals, logarithms, and long division, but Mrs. Thatcher, by making parts of it appear simple, not only infuriated those who knew it to be more complicated but also cemented her support among the two-plus-two brigade. Thus, she loved to explain the nation’s economic policy in terms of the domestic shopping basket. Budgetary squabbles with the EC were a matter of getting “them” to give “us” “our” money back. She loved polarizations into them and us. Also into good and evil: like Superman, the Iron Lady made the world easier to understand. She and Reagan took readings from the same moral graph. One of the few genuinely comic moments in Margaret Thatcher. The Downing Street Years is a color photograph taken during a banquet at No. 10. The Prime Minister is banging out a speech while the President looks up at her with an expression of goofy awe. Underneath this official souvenir he has written, “Dear Margaret—As you can see, I agree with every word you are saying. I always do. Warmest friendship. Sincerely, Ron.” During the Reagan-Thatcher years, local dreamers could imagine a reverse of the Kennedy-Macmillan era. Macmillan liked to portray the Atlantic alliance as the relationship of wise old Greece (Britain, in case you were wondering) to vigorous young Rome. For a while, at least, during Reagan’s sleepy-senior-citizen act, Thatcher could pose as the dynamic ideas merchant.

  “Personally dominant, supremely self-confident, infuriatingly stub born,” Mrs. Thatcher “held a strange mixture of broad views and narrow prejudices.” This is the summing up not of some vexed Labourite but of the normally unctuous Kenneth Baker, one of her Party chairmen. (Baker was once tipped for the succession, and his oiliness provoked the comment “I have seen the future and it smirks.”) She made up her mind, kept to it, spoke it, and repeated it verbatim for as long as necessary. In The Downing Street Years she dismisses the hapless John Nott, Defense Minister during the Falklands War, with the neutering line “His vice was second thoughts.” None of them for Maggie. Larkin was once invited to a dinner party at the house of the historian Hugh Thomas, and recorded her combative and unself-questioning manner: “Watching her was like watching a top class tennis-player; no ‘uh-huh, well, what do other people think about that,’ just bang back over the net.” Since the other guests included Isaiah Berlin. V. S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard, Mario Vargas Llosa, J. H. Plumb, V. S. Pritchett, Anthony Powell, Stephen Spender, Anthony Quinton, and A. Alvarez, this was quite tony company to play tennis in. But then Mrs. Thatcher was no more snob-struck by “vain intellectuals,” as she characterizes the breed in her book, than by Tory toffs. There was an early move in her Premiership to present her as a PM who liked a workout on the ideas mat with a few top brains—the historian Paul Johnson was one such scrimmager—but it does not seem to have lasted long. Certainly none of the above names even makes it into the index of The Dawning Street Years: you can have “Berlin disco bomb” but not “Berlin, Isaiah.”

  Indeed, the subject of the arts occupies a whole two pages here, and one of those is spent describing Mrs. Thatcher’s heroic but thwarted attempt to bring the Thyssen art collection to Britain. (“It was not only a great treasure but a good investment,” she typically notes.) Where other Prime Ministers—however truly or hypocritically—like to maintain that the arts are at least a decoration, if not actually an additive, to life, with Mrs. Thatcher they do not enter the equation: if you have that sort of spare time, you aren’t doing your job as PM. She remembers Macmillan telling a group of young MPs that “prime ministers (not having a department of their own) have plenty of spare time for reading. He recommended Disraeli and Trollope. I have sometimes wondered if he was joking.” He almost certainly wasn’t, and it’s significant that John Major, who has gone back to the Macmillan “easy-listening” style of Premiership, also claims Trollope as his favorite writer—indeed, is a member of the Trollope Society. (The fact that the novelist was scathing about politicians, and especially about Tories, doesn’t seem to bother modern Conservatives.) Mrs. Thatcher, by contrast, cites as her favorite reading “thrillers by Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré.” This is probably just as well. The sight of Mrs. Thatcher pretending to like art would not be for the squeamish.

  Far better is her unfeigned response on the occasion when Kingsley Amis presented her at No. 10 with an autographed copy of his novel Russian Hide-and-Seek. “What’s it about?” she asked him. “Well,” he explained, “in a way it’s about a future Britain under Russian occupation.” “Huh!” she cried. “Can’t you do any better than that? Get yourself another crystal ball!” This put-down (“unfair as well as unanswerable,” Amis noted) failed to decrease the novelist’s devotion to the Prime Minister. In his memoirs he calls her “one of the best-looking women I had ever met” and adds this recherché compliment to her allure: “This quality is so extreme that, allied to her well-known photogenic quality, it can trap me for split seconds into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220.” More routinely, Amis admits that Mrs. Thatcher has replaced the Queen as the woman he dreams about most; once, she even drew him close and murmured lovingly, “You’ve got such an interesting face.” Well, she may make his dreams, but, no, he doesn’t make her index, either. Nor, for that matter, does the name of a British subject sentenced to death by a foreign power during her Premiership. You would think this might have caused some offense to the notions of British sovereignty, honor, and independence that bray out like trumpet cadenzas from these pages. Bad luck, Citizen Rushdie.

  Those high concepts are, by contrast, regularly involved when it comes to one of the central events of Mrs. Thatcher’s Premiership: the Falklands War of 1982. Her account of it has a novel clarity: history with little nuance or complication, whether political or moral. The Argentine invasion of the islands was completely unforeseeable (she set up a royal commission afterward which confirmed it, so that’s that); the British were defending “our honour as a nation;” while our wider duty was to ensure that Aggression did not Succeed, and that international law be not flouted. But the war also sprang from—and celebrated—Mrs. Thatcher’s nature, and her resolution. When the Argentine fleet set off to invade the Falklands, the second-thoughting Defense Minister gave her the feeble official view that, once seized, the islands could not be retaken. “This was terrible, and totally unacceptable. I could not believe it: these were our people, our islands. I said instantly: ‘if they are invaded, we have got to get them back.’” What was the alternative? “That a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was Prime Minister.” She has to kick a few peaceniks into line, including her Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, who shows wobbliness and a disproportionate interest in diplomatic solutions; and she is willing to threaten resignation to get her way with the War Cabinet. Staunch support comes from Caspar Weinberger, Laurens van der Post, and François Mitterrand (who had, of course, his own postcolonial aggravations); but it is, essentially, Maggie versus the Argies. At one point, she is down on her knees at Chequers measuring territorial waters on naval charts with the Attorney General. Eventually, “the freedom, justice and democracy which the Falkland Islanders had e
njoyed for so long” are returned to them. “I do not think I have ever lived so tensely or intensely as during the whole of that time,” she writes.

  Much of this is comic-strip simplification. The Falklands, with its depressed company-store economy, tiny population, and militarily insufficient runway, held no interest for the British except perhaps among philatelists. We had been trying to unload the islands for decades, efforts which culminated in Nicholas Ridley’s “leaseback” proposal of 1980. This was thrown out by the House of Commons; but still, in classic schoolyard fashion, we did not really want, or think about wanting, the islands until someone else did. Hence the war sweetly characterized by Borges—a “vain intellectual” living under a “common or garden dictatorias “two bald men fighting over a comb.” Nor was Mrs. Thatcher at all in the valiant isolation she now chooses to describe. The House of Commons fell immediately and noisily behind the Prime Minister, not least after a key intervention she fails to acknowledge: that of Michael Foot, old-socialist leader of the Labour Party and, in his own words, an “inveterate peacemonger,” who came out for war. So did most of the nation: the British are still a bellicose race, and they rather like fighting, preferably by themselves and in a good-versus-evil struggle as sketched by the Prime Minister. For once, something was happening out there, the TV pictures were good, and xenophobia could be indulged.

  Mrs. Thatcher, with her shopping-basket view of the world, likes to assure us that she does her sums. But it’s odd that she doesn’t mention the basic statistic of the war. One thousand eight hundred islanders were liberated from the Argentines (who brought not torture and death but color TV sets to cheer the crofters’ firesides), at a cost of just over 1,000 deaths, 255 of them British, plus countless modern maimings. Try doing the sum on a different war: imagine that the reinvasion of France in 1944 had cost 23 million lives, 6 million of them Allied. Would we rejoice so much and praise our leaders? Freedom is indivisible, politicians like to say, but of course it isn’t; on the contrary, it falls into strict categories. It was lucky for the islanders that they were white, just as it was lucky for the Kuwaitis that they exported oil rather than Turkish delight. Nor was the aftermath of liberation much like Paris in 1944. The British soldiers who reoccupied the islands were unimpressed by the Falklanders, whom they nicknamed “Bennies,” after a notoriously dim character in a TV soap. An official order had to be put out instructing the troops not to use this insulting term. Shortly afterward, they took to referring to the locals as “Stills.” A mystified officer asked a soldier to explain this new sobriquet. “Because they’re still Bennies, sir,” came the magnificent reply. Today, the Falkland Islanders are no nearer the hearts of the British than before; a political solution has been endlessly deferred; and the enlarged airstrip, which we once couldn’t afford, has now been built, to the ultimate benefit of the Argentines. Were the islands worth a single death, or even the money the expedition cost? Before hostilities began, Macmillan advised Mrs. Thatcher to keep the Treasury out of things (ironic counsel, since it was Macmillan as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of Suez who helped pull the plug on that campaign). So this was to be a No Expense Spared War. And what did it cost? All we find in The Downing Street Years is bland mumblings: “It was a remarkable testament to the soundness of public finances by this stage that we managed to pay for the Falklands War out of the Contingency Reserve without a penny of extra taxation and with barely a tremor in the financial markets.” Another example of good housekeeping, then. In fact, the cost of the campaign, plus that of securing the Falklands to the end of the eighties, was upwards of £2 million per islander. High price for a comb.