Letters From London Read online

  The second campaign was marked by slightly nervous, negative speculation. Sir Geoffrey Howe (now “the Assassin” to Tory loyalists) endorsed Heseltine, just as Mrs. Thatcher endorsed Major. How welcome was either kiss? Conservative MPs declared themselves “the most sophisticated electorate in the world,” which meant mainly that some of them lied to the press, some to the men in suits, some to the three candidates, and most to their own constituency organizations. At the local level, the removal of Mrs. Thatcher was widely regarded as akin to treason, and a vote for Heseltine as an endorsement of murder. Would a sense of shame at the murky deed lead MPs to favor her nominee, Mr. Major? Was Heseltine too risky? Was Hurd, lauded as the “safe pair of hands,” too fogeyish? Was Major, at forty-seven, too young? And not just young in experience: what if he lasted as long as She had done, and thus clogged up the normal processes of succession?

  The three candidates had a long weekend to make their pitches: nominations had closed at midday on Thursday, the twenty-second, and voting opened on Tuesday, the twenty-seventh. Campaign managers looked under stones for hitherto disregarded MPs and tickled them behind the ears; senior Party figures came out with endorsements; constituency parties were consulted with trepidation. Mr. Heseltine had generously announced that as Prime Minister he would keep his rivals in the Cabinet in their present positions; the two others cannily made no promises to Mr. Heseltine. By the day of voting, it was clear that Mr. Heseltine’s first-round surge was not continuing, that Mr. Hurd’s wise-head, safe-hands appeal was limited, and that the only recognizable progress was being made by the least known, least experienced, least charismatic, and least characterizable figure of John Major. Over the weekend, the polls confirmed what they had said seven days earlier—that Mr. Heseltine would be capable of defeating Labour—but they menacingly added that Mr. Major would too, and by a greater margin. Such brief opinion samplings ought to be easily discountable, but if the earlier poll had given Mr. Heseltine extra credibility, perhaps this would do the same for Mr. Major. Every little helps, particularly in the uncertain, slightly mesmerized condition the Conservative Party found itself in. They had killed the Wicked Witch and flung her onto the dung heap, but they still believed in magic. They were long familiar with the hex of Hez; maybe the featureless fellow they knew little about had some special juju they were ‘ as yet unaware of?

  On the final Tuesday morning, Mr. Major opened a Japanese bank in the City, Mr. Hurd had a photo session with Alexander Dubşek at the Foreign Office, and poor Mr. Heseltine went off to his publishing company. The results came through at about half past six that evening. For once, all 372 Conservative MPs had managed to vote without spoiling even one ballot paper: 185 for Major, 131 for Heseltine, 56 for Hurd. Two kinds of gasp went up: one of surprise at the extent of Major’s progress, and one of seething frustration at what the voting system had once again managed to achieve. If Mrs. Thatcher had been 4 votes short of accepted victory on the first ballot, Major was even closer: 2 short. So what did the rules, those blasted un-Conservative rules so many had fretted against, say now? They ordered a third ballot in two days’ time, with both the trailing candidates instructed to soldier on whether they liked it or not. Whereupon two things happened. First, Heseltine and Hurd effectively conceded defeat by announcing that on the third ballot they would vote for Major; and shortly afterward the Tory back-bench 1922 Committee, which is in charge of running leadership elections, decided that the rule book they had been obliged to work with was a frightful piece of non-Tory hogwash. Transferable votes? Who ever heard of such a thing? There would be no third ballot, and that was that. Who were they to be dictated to by some chappie who in any case had deserted the Party for the pinkos?

  So a second man from the East Anglian county town of Huntingdon had been selected to govern the country—the previous one being Oliver Cromwell. And the country was left puzzling briefly over a small mystery: how Mrs. Thatcher, supported by 204 Conservative MPs, was judged to have lost the Premiership, while Mr. Major, supported by only 185, was judged to have won it. Still, this was a time of freaks and records: the Tories, in deposing the longest-serving Prime Minister this century, had replaced her with the youngest Prime Minister this century. (The previous youngest was Lord Rosebery, who in 1894 had inherited power, as John Major did, from a formidable predecessor: Gladstone. Coincidentally, Rosebery was also a great admirer of Cromwell. Mr. Major would be advised not to hope for closer comparison with Rosebery’s Premiership, which swiftly ran into trouble—Asquith said it was “ploughing the sands.” Rosebery was out within sixteen months, defeated in the Commons on a vote over the supply and reserve of small-arms ammunition. Major himself has no more than eighteen months before he is obliged to call an election.)

  The country also settled back to puzzle over a larger mystery: the nature of John Major, this man thrust so quickly into both the leadership and the Premiership, a man who in four days of campaigning achieved more than Michael Heseltine had done in five years of eating rubber-chicken dinners throughout the length of the country. What do we know about the sudden victor? He is, as his supporters told us perhaps too often during the election, “a man of the people.” His father, who was sixty-six when he begat John, was a music-hall and circus artiste, who with his first wife, Kitty Drum, had an act called Drum & Major; later, he set up in business manufacturing garden ornaments, including gnomes. John’s schooling ended at sixteen; he worked as a navvy, spent nine months on the dole, and then applied to become a bus conductor. “There were three of us,” he recalled when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, “and there was an arithmetic test, then they tried us out with these machines to see how good we were, and I wasn’t the best at that.” (It is interesting to note how irrelevant academic qualifications have become to obtaining the highest office. The current leaders of the two main political parties have, between them, the combined achievement of a single pass degree, received at the second attempt, from the University of Wales. Is this bracingly meritocratic, dismally anti-intellectual, or just hazard?) Mr. Major, who had also dreamed of becoming a professional cricketer, joined an insurance company, then went into the Standard Chartered Bank. Local politics in South London led to national politics, a seat in Parliament in 1979, work in the Whips’ Office, junior postings, an unhappy three months as Foreign Secretary, then a year at the Exchequer. He is said to be on the right of the Party in economics, on the left in social policy, central on Europe, and pretty much God knows where on the world outside. Everyone who has worked with him has described him—so far, at least—as decent, honest, able, and hardworking; the word flair is rarely mentioned. His first move in forming his Cabinet was shrewd enough: he appointed Michael Heseltine his Minister of the Environment, thus making the principal Tory critic of the poll tax responsible for sorting it out and saving the Government’s neck. (Within days of Tarzan’s return, an unemployed Lincolnshire builder became the first person to be jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax; with perfect appropriateness, the case happened in Grantham, a town famous mainly for being the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher.) Major’s second move was less shrewd: having announced a Cabinet “of all the talents,” he forgot to include a single woman.

  Skeptics, of course, suggested that there was one there already: Mrs. Thatcher’s ghost would haunt No. 10, and her disembodied voice speak from the backseat of John Major’s car. Certainly, and inevitably, in the frenzied second half of November 1990, his accession was eclipsed by her departure. How do politicians leave office? Broken in spirit? Sadder but wiser? Quietly proud? Anxious about the Verdict of History? Mrs. Thatcher, who after all had been dismissed from the highest public office by her own closest supporters and in full public view, left not just bullishly but in a mood of rampant self-congratulation. She took History by the lapels and slapped it around the face in case it was planning to give her less than her due. Speaking to Tory Party Central Office workers, she commented on how other European leaders were “quite grief-stricken” at her departure
(which must be one of the drollest misconceptions of the last decade). Standing outside No. 10 Downing Street while the moving van headed for the South London suburb of Dulwich, she bade the public temporary farewell, reverting once more to the royal “we”—an increasing tendency in her latter years. “We are very happy,” she said, “that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here.” It was breathtaking, quasi-regal, and also reminiscent of those discreet plaques in French water closets which beg you to leave the place on departure as clean as you would hope to find it on arrival.

  She left, and all the main players could reflect that they had achieved something. Mr. Howe had gained the removal of Mrs. Thatcher; Mrs. Thatcher the succession she favored; Mr. Major the keys to No. 10; Mr. Heseltine a seat in the Cabinet and his own political rehabilitation. And Mr. Hurd? Even Mr. Hurd could joke that at least he’d got a good plot for a novel out of the previous fortnight’s events. Other commentators reckoned the affair more than just the stuff of fiction. The word tragedy was frequently invoked, especially with reference to Julius Caesar, while the esteemed journalist Peter Jenkins, of The Independent, claimed to have observed a “tragic drama” rooted in Mrs. Thatcher’s “Nietzschean will.” But it’s hardly likely that future tragedians scouring the twentieth century for material will fall delightedly upon the events of November 1990. Of course, they were richly exciting, and it is arguable that Mrs. Thatcher’s inflexible sense of purpose and rightness, so much her strength when she was climbing to power and clamping herself there, became the weakness that helped her lose that power. But there was no great fall, as was demonstrated by the former Prime Ministers appearance in the Commons the very afternoon of her resignation. Here was no riven character; she was infrangible, buoyant, even jolly. And it’s hard to talk of tragedy when the estimated price of the victim’s memoirs is several million pounds and her husband has been rewarded with the hereditary title of baronet. So, at most, we had witnessed an absorbing drama, in which a democratically elected leader of the Conservative Party was democratically rejected by the same party, which decided that although she had won three general elections, her chances of winning a fourth were markedly slimmer than those of someone else.

  And should we even be quite so certain of the pattern of events which apparently led so inescapably to this conclusion? When Mr. Heseltine walked out of the Cabinet in 1986, was it a decision of high principle or merely a resignation waiting to happen? When the Biting Doormat nipped the ankles of the Lady of the House, was it on a new matter of major importance, some unprecedented aspect of Thatcherian behavior, or just a weary sense that even downtrodden bristles can take only so much? And when the Conservative Party finally gave the Prime Minister too exiguous a majority for her own survival, were they censuring her style of leadership (which had brought them so much), or declaring that her stance on Europe was henceforth unacceptable, or worrying about the poll tax? It suits us to identify specific reasons, to play the game of if-only-she-hadn’t-done-this, but perhaps what occurred was less close to Shakespeare and Nietzsche than it was to a marriage that runs out of steam and hits the divorce court. There the couple seek the reasons that explain their legal requests, and these reasons have to be couched in a way that the court understands: look how he knocked me about, see how she neglected the kids. But sometimes there are no reasons except that one partner doesn’t want to live with the other anymore and doesn’t see why he or she should. “Europe” was partly the cause of Mr. Heseltine’s resignation, and of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation, and of Mrs. Thatcher’s unacceptability. But one of the most perceptive, if least dramatic, views of her departure was offered by the Honorable William Waldegrave, whom Mrs. Thatcher had recently appointed Minister of Health. Did she have to go because of Europe? He replied, “Apart from two small groups, one of federalists, and one of anti-Europeans, it’s very difficult to get the Conservative Party to argue over Europe. It was more a feeling that time passes, and eleven and a half years was enough.” The divorce had its acrimonious moments, but the Conservative Party retains some gentlemanly instincts, and the couple will go on seeing quite a lot of each other despite the decree absolute. In fact, you could say they’re getting on rather better now that they’ve divorced than they did in the last few years of their marriage.

  January 1991

  Bexleyheath Conservatives forgave Cyril Townsend, who retained his seat in the 1992 election.

  4

  Year of the Maze

  I was once waiting for a plane at Heathrow, sitting in one of those bland pieces of space designed to turn the anxious into docile, processible units. Opposite me, an equally characterless passenger funnel began to disgorge arrivals from a Swissair flight. Some businessmen, a few tanned sporters of upmarket leisure wear, and then about two dozen inhabitants of the nineteenth century: a squire in noisy tweeds, a bishop in full fig, two lushly draped satiny ladies, a masher with velvet jacket and waxed mustaches, another gentleman of the cloth in black stockings. They moved with the assurance of the previous century, their carry-on luggage of finest Victorian leather. Silver-topped cane or three-decker novel to hand, they ignored both the twentieth-century surroundings and the twentieth-century disbelieving gaze. It felt like a moment of Carrollian hallucination. But reality’s explanation proved both simpler and more interesting: here were members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London returning from an outing to the Reichenbach Falls.

  Nobody pointed, nobody mocked, no bustle was goosed. The British rather enjoy their reputation as a people poised between formality and eccentricity, and this applies not just to players but also to airport spectators: the fact that a whole bunch of these Victorian oddities existed confirmed their legitimacy. When playing the fool, there is safety in numbers. During Evelyn Waugh’s time as an Oxford undergraduate in the twenties, there was a society called the Hysteron-Proteron Club. Its members, he recalled in A Little Learning, “put themselves to great discomfort by living a day in reverse, getting up in evening dress, drinking whisky, smoking cigars and playing cards, then at ten o’clock dining backwards starting with savouries and ending with soup.” Today’s less decadent undergraduates might instead join the Oxford Stunt Factory, whose members jump off suspension bridges while attached to large rubber bands, or roar down the Cresta Run in washing-up bowls while smoking a hookah.

  A nation’s larger character shows in its foreign policy, its formal architecture, its great writers. Curlicues of temperament are apparent farther away from the center. One typical indicator is garden design. In France, the continuing ferocity of bourgeois values can be observed even in up-country villages; nature there is mercilessly subdued, gravel laundered, bulbs regimented, hedges barbered, flowers submitted to rigid class distinction. The British tradition is more easygoing, treating nature more as chum than as victim; individuality and self-indulgence are allowed their say. At the suburban level, this might translate into a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden, a lean-to greenhouse at the back where an attempt is being made to grow the world’s largest gooseberry, plus an ornamental pond in which plaster gnomes silently fish. At the grander level, this shows itself in the long tradition of the architectural folly: not just the sham ruin and shell grotto but the Gothic boathouse and castellated forge, the Moorish pagoda and Egyptian aviary, or the forty-foot-high stone pineapple at Dunmore Castle, in Stirlingshire. Another emanation of this spirit of planned fantasy is the garden maze, that curious form which lies at the conjunction of two English passions: the love of horticulture and the love of crossword puzzles. Rather to the surprise of even the relatively few people who have noticed, 1991 has been officially designated the Year of the Maze. Why 1991? Because this year the British, apart from melodiously huzzahing the bicentenary of Mozart’s death like the rest of the world, have been able to celebrate pianissimo the tercentenary of the planting of the Hampton Court Maze.

  On the ninth of June, 1662, the diarist and gardening expert John Evelyn visited Hampton C
ourt, finding it “as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it.” He praised the “incomparable furniture;” the Mantegnas; the “gallery of horns” (hunting trophies); the Queen’s bed, which had cost eight thousand pounds; and the chapel roof, “excellently fretted and gilt.” When he went outside, Evelyn, the translator of The French Gardener and soon-to-be author of the influential arboricultural treatise Sylva, was at first equally impressed: by the park, “now planted with sweet rows of lime trees,” and by “the canal for water now nearly perfected.” The “cradle-work of horn beam in the garden is, for the perplexed twining of the trees, very observable”—an adjective that, though certainly a term of praise, sounds rather cautious, like the word collectible as used by antique dealers to recommend items they consider vulgar but in which the moneyed amateur ignorantly delights. Evelyn concludes his description with the only moment of courtly doubt to ease from his pen. “All these gardens,” he notes, “might be exceedingly improved, as being too narrow for such a palace.”