Letters from London (14 page)

Did such an addition require planning permission from the local council? “We wrote to them,” Adrian Fisher explains, “and said did we need permission for bricking the courtyard in an unusual manner, and they said don’t even bother to waste our time by applying.” There were some protests from the local civic society, which fell silent when the official opening of the courtyard included the announcement that the maze had won a Heritage in the Making Award from the British Tourist Authority. (The prizes were sponsored by a dairy company, the winners receiving a lump of cheese cast in bronze, with a bronze cheese knife alongside.) But was Fisher himself trepidatious about thrusting his design into an established manor house? He characterizes his attitude to Kentwell as “mildly reverential,” and explains, “To be too timid would be pathetic.” It’s a bit like a mugging, he says: if the potential victim is too acquiescent, he is liable to suffer the more.

This is all very well, but who is the mugger and who the muggee? Some might judge Kentwell Hall victim rather than assailant. For if the pavement maze looks fairly contentious from ground level, it increases in forcefiilness as the eye gets farther off the ground. The
maze is certainly “very observable,” as John Evelyn might have put it. From above, either you see toning brickwork and a harmonious symbolic design that extends the house’s period flavor with a characterful modern flourish, or else you see something that resembles a vast—and vastly cute—target for a parachuting competition. And isn’t there something fundamentally dubious, if very British, about the very concept of Heritage in the Making? It speaks of self-consciousness, of historical preening. Every nation naturally has its bucketload of guilt about the stuff that’s been knocked down over the centuries (and mazes, which are swiftly obliterated by mere neglect, have been lost in large numbers). But do we assuage that guilt by pronouncing some wet-eared artifact an instant classic? Is it good for cultural items to be no sooner created than lacquered and preserved: cheese cast in bronze? Isn’t it impertinent to second-guess history in this way? The courtyard maze at Kentwell Hall has forfeited its right to a real, actual, bruisable existence, a life in the present, because it has already been classified, with nosy authoritarianism, as the future’s past.

September 1991

5
John Major Makes a Joke

A
t the Conservative Party Conference in early October, the Prime Minister made a joke. In truth, he made several, and they were hard to miss, because John Major has not yet mastered one of the refinements of public comedy, which is to smile after you make the hit rather than beforehand. But there was one particular jest that merits recall and annotation. The Labour Party had held its annual conference a week or so previously, and Mr. Major allowed himself the traditional accusation that the Opposition had been purloining some of his Government’s ideas. He continued, “They don’t even hide it when they steal some of my clothes. Did you see how many of them were wearing gray suits last week? Have they no shame?”

The first point to make is that Mr. Major’s idea of a joke—or, more exactly, his speechwriters’ idea of the sort of joke that is appropriate to Mr. Major—is very different from his predecessor’s idea of a joke. Mrs. Thatcher, for most of her sovereignty, showed no public awareness of the existence of humor. A joke for her would be a sign of feebleness, an attempt at consensus politics, something uneconomic and possibly subversive, like a bottle of foreign mineral water on the
table at a Downing Street banquet. Hefty sarcasm was about as far as she went in this field until almost the end of her Premiership, when there was a last-ditch attempt to project a new, caring, human Maggie in place of the Robocop figure previously running the show. So occasionally she relaxed into the sort of wordplay that would stun a rhino: attacking Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, she maintained her furious opposition to federalism, which included “federalism by the back Delors.” Even in the joke she remained aggressive and dismissive. Whereas the quip Mr. Major delivered to the conference was modest, self-deprecating, and voter-friendly.

The second point to consider is the reference to the gray suit. Mr. Major had several problems when he took over in November of 1990, one of them being that hardly anyone knew who he was or what he was like. Down the Thatcher years, there had been a number of young aspirants unofficially tagged as Possible Successor. It was an arduous post, rather like being the court favorite of Catherine the Great, and those whose summer of favor ran out were left occupying a difficult—even risible—position. But Mr. Major had the good fortune to find himself the frolicker standing next to the sole remaining chair when the music happened to stop. As he settled onto the seat cushion molded firmly by the capacious derriere of another and found the arms a little higher than he’d imagined, he had an immediate tactical problem. Mrs. Thatcher had been removed because enough members of her party thought that her domineering dogmatism had become electorally counterproductive. On the other hand, Mr. Major had been the candidate of the outgoing leader and the die-hard Thatcherites. So he had to keep the
BUSINESS AS USUAL
sign up in the window while redecorating the place and updating the stock: instead of barbed wire and rifles, the family store would in future sell chocolate bars and liniment. And in terms of personal image—where, admittedly, there was less room for maneuver—Mr. Major also had a dilemma. If he tried to play the decisive, uncompromising leader, he could only come across as a pale substitute for his predecessor; if he took his time and went back to the antiquarian system of consultation, of being prepared to change his point of view when presented
with a convincing argument, he would be accused of indecision. The new Prime Minister has had an occasional stab at audacious leadership—such as proposing a safe haven for the Kurds while others were still dozing—but the style didn’t really suit. Instead, Mr. Major has broadly followed the honorable political line of not doing anything in particular unless it’s otherwise inevitable, while nevertheless proclaiming that there is Still Much to Do. He is therefore frequently denounced by the Opposition as a ditherer.

He has also been denounced as dull, boring, and uncharismatic. But in certain political times (and in the context of your predecessor) these characteristics are not necessarily negative. Add to this that all sides agreed early on that Mr. Major was a decent, honest chap, the sort of bloke who liked to watch the cricket from a stripy deck chair while a steaming mug of tea warmed his groin. He didn’t have anything threatening about him, like an academic record, a furtive interest in modern sculpture, or a tendency to use long words in his speeches. He was the sort of PM who, it was usefully allowed to leak out, would stop his official car and tuck into a humble meal at a humble motorway restaurant known by the resolutely uncharismatic name of Happy Eater. In other words, the natural process of political presentation and self-presentation was under way: limitations were made into normality, normality into virtue. And so when at his first Tory conference as leader—which could also prove his last, since an election must take place in the first six months of 1992—Mr. Major acknowledged his self-image as a fellow in a gray suit, he was acknowledging what could not be changed and was now declared to be what the country requires. Call me a dull dog if you wish, he seemed to be saying, but that is what I am: self-made, hardworking, unspectacular, trustworthy, the very spirit of middle England. Snobs may find Mr. Major suburban, but then snobs always have fewer votes than suburbanites. The Prime Minister has not yet, so far as is publicly known, visited the Toulouse-Lautrec show at the Hayward Gallery (he has until January 19), but were he to do so he might be pleased by one of the artist’s most elegant and daring lithographs,
The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge
(1892). It shows a correctly dressed middle-aged man
accosting two young women. The background is bright yellow and bright blue; the principal female figure has startlingly red hair and a dress of delicate green. Thrust into this surround of cheery color, the Englishman is depicted in monolithic gray. His suit, hat, tie, gloves, and stick are gray; his hair, mustache, face, and ears are gray. The tone washes ineradicably through him.

And the final point to make about Mr. Major’s joke is that it contains some truth. We have now entered that final, wearisome stage before a general election when the contending parties are keenest to avoid mistakes, when image becomes more important than policy, and when the gap between Labour and Conservative in terms of promised programs tends to narrow. Hence the accusation of clothes stealing. For this year will see the Battle of the Men in Gray Suits. Long gone is the time of nobs in grouse-moor tweeds versus yobs in cloth caps; now everywhere you look is a seal beach of gray. The two parties are shuffling closer to one another, like gawky cadets on parade, each keeping eyes front and pretending that the other one is doing the moving. The rough aim for each of them in the next election is to present itself as an efficient, forward-looking organizer of a market economy who yet displays the correct degree of social concern. The Tories know that their decade-long fling with Thatcherite ideology must come to an end—that it is time to dig out from the attic the old mothbally uniform of pragmatism, and also make sure that not too many hospitals close down in the coming months. The Labour Party, having lost three elections on the trot and having seen the so-called socialist Eastern bloc collapse, has (according to your point of view) either junked most of its long-held principles or finally adjusted to the realities of the world. For instance, just when Gorbachev was making the world safer and serious disarmament was beginning, the British Labour Party reversed its nonnuclear policy and declared that it loved the bomb—or, at any rate, loved it a little bit, though naturally much less than the Tories did, and anyway it was a mistake to go naked into the conference chamber, while Labour would, of course, be more responsible, more caring bomb users than the Conservatives in the unfortunate event… And all because at election after election
it had become painfully clear that the British voter didn’t much care for a stance of principled emasculation. Similarly, the suave and harmonious enthusiasm for Europe currently displayed by the Labour Party contrasts ironically with the huffiness and fretful insularity of earlier years. But then Europe is where self-respecting men in suits congregate nowadays. In Europe, they wear power gray.

Britain has no fixed electoral term—only a five-year limit within which the Government must face the nation. So if you are elected with a small majority you might swiftly dash back to the voters for a more generous and useful endorsement, and if things are going badly you might hang on until the last possible minute. This flexibility gives the Government a tactical advantage; instead of the parties’ gearing their efforts to a known month, there is much posturing on both sides about announcing the date. The spectacle often resembles the start of a playground fight where the two opponents dance around trying to look tough, one of them shouting, “Come on, I’m ready for you, let’s see what you’re made of, scaredy-cat,” while the other strikes a nobler pose, ignoring the taunts and declaring, “I’ll be the one to say when the fight begins.” Such ritualistic behavior is intensified at the time of the party conferences. This autumn, there were authoritative leaks that the Prime Minister would definitely—well, almost definitely—go to the country before the end of the year, yes he would, almost certainly in November—that is, unless he changed his mind.

This will-he/won’t-he atmosphere was heightened by the appearance in late September of the latest TV commercials from the two parties. If Major versus Neil Kinnock is the main scrap in the coming months, we shouldn’t ignore a tasty little scuffle lower down the bill: that between Hugh
(Chariots of Fire)
Hudson, a supplier of Labour’s TV advertising, and John
(Midnight Cowboy)
Schlesinger, brought in to beef up the Conservative effort. Given the near moribundity of the domestic film industry’, which for the past decade has been told by the Government to stand on its own wheelchair, there is a cinematic as well as a political interest for the viewer. If it is not quite a head-to-head battle—Schlesinger has been brought in more as a troubleshooter, a last-minute rejigger, whereas Hudson was committed
from the start—it promises slightly higher production values at least. Not that the first round of commercials exactly stays quivering in the memory. The Schlesinger film had sunrises and sunsets, a newborn baby, and Mozart’s Twenty-first Piano Concerto: Tory Britain, we deduced, was peaceful and pastoral, energetic but also somehow elegiac. Hudson’s Labour riposte was a toiling piece of agitprop, in which a couple of eager parents (Mr. and Mrs. Voter) went to the school for a report on their boy (the Conservative Party) from the headmaster (God, perhaps), only to be told, with plodding predictability, “The Tories have come bottom of the class” and “Quite frankly, I wouldn’t let them run the tuckshop.”