Letters from London (15 page)

In the Conservative commercial, the Prime Minister was seen in a brief sound bite speaking of “a nation at ease with itself.” Such soporific complacency is, of course, traditional Tory policy: in 1957. Prime Minister Macmillan, echoing—or perhaps stealing—the 1952 Democratic Party slogan, assured voters that “most of our people have never had it so good” The Thatcher years were in many respects an aberration, for the idea that the British way of life needs a good kicking around comes hard to a Conservative; the corny image of the nation as a sleeping lion, with the emphasis on the sleeping, is much preferred. Eighteen months (the time from Mrs. Thatcher’s departure to the latest possible election date) was not long for John Major to shake off this new, ahistoric image of the Tories as a radical, reforming party; and shaking off the image was much connected with shaking off Mrs. Thatcher—with persuading her to keep her mouth shut.

But Mrs. Thatcher has never been good at keeping her mouth shut—indeed, bawling out trade unionists, the unemployed, foreigners, and other miscreants has been part of her enduring appeal to the British public. Since her retirement as PM, she has had her memoirs to think about—the selling, that is, not yet the writing. There has also been the setting up of the Thatcher Foundation, a kind of international think tank, whose officially registered objectives are of narcoleptic generality, and were much better summed up by the lady herself: the foundation’s aim, she said, was to “perpetuate all the
kinds of things I believe in.” The project got off to an inauspicious start when the Charity Commissioners refused it tax-relieving status, on the ground that spreading Mrs. Thatcher’s word could not by any stretch of the rules be considered a charitable activity; the foundation is also now registered, unpatriotically, in Switzerland, where it is much harder for journalists to discover which foreign billionaires are putting up the moola. The start-up target was £12 million per annum, and Mrs. Thatcher has spent a good part of the last year on the stump among the very rich: the Sultan of Brunei is said to have promised $5 million the other week. These trips naturally involve pleasant bits of flummery, like the acceptance of honorary degrees. She got one in November from Kuwait University (having been turned down for one a few years ago by Oxford: a unique snub to a Prime Minister). In her acceptance speech she revealed a hitherto unsuspected backer for her worldview. “Leafing through Tennyson’s works, as I sometimes do in the early hours, looking for inspiration,” she had found lines that encapsulated and foreshadowed the Thatcher philosophy:

Tennyson’s poem “The Two Greetings,” a rather maundering celebration of the birth of a child, is in fact entirely devoid of any political subtext; but no doubt we should just be grateful when any verse sets off a ping on a politician’s late-night sonar.

The traditional way of keeping an ex-Prime Minister busy—that’s to say, out of harm’s way—is to shunt him or her off to the House of Lords. It was always an irritation to Mrs. Thatcher’s Parliamentary acolytes that her Tory predecessor, Edward Heath, resisted both the Lords and a tempting ambassadorship, preferring to stay in the Commons as a spikily disapproving remnant of an earlier, more liberal Conservatism. The shunting off of Mrs. Thatcher, if agreed on in theory, is proving no less tricky. The idea of a sweet transition to ermined dotage came unstuck when it emerged that Mrs. Thatcher
did not have in mind what her immediate predecessors understood by retiring to the Lords. Apart from Heath, who stayed in the Commons without even the promotion of a knighthood, recent Premiers-Wilson, Callaghan, Home—have taken life peerages. Mrs. Thatcher let it be known that, far from accepting such a half-baked recognition of her services to the nation as a mere personal ennoblement for the rest of her days, she wanted the full hereditary works,
WAY CLEARED FOR THATCHER TO BECOME COUNTESS OF FINCHLEY
, said a front-page headline in
The Times
of October 3, and the whole potentially embarrassing issue of hereditary peers having a hand in democratic government came to the fore again. It’s true that Harold Macmillan accepted an earldom, but he held out for more than twenty years after leaving the Premiership, and took the honor at the age of ninety only, it is said, out of boredom. Winston Churchill, a regular—indeed, fetishistic—figure of reference in Mrs. Thatcher’s speeches, even turned down a dukedom. In her case, there is an extra element. The prospect of her son proceeding cozily from Mr. Mark to Sir Mark to the Earl of Finchley and thus becoming one of the nation’s legislators is one to appall the meritocrat and delight only the satirist. Thatcher Junior’s heavy-handedness has already put off several likely supporters of the Thatcher Foundation, including Charles Price, the former United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. His delicacy of approach was illustrated on a recent fund-raising tour of the Far East, when he offended one Hong Kong millionaire with the memorable instruction “It’s time to pay up for Mumsie.”

The fact that even the nature of Mrs. Thatcher’s thank-you present from the Conservatives became an issue—one commentator remarked that the title Countess of Finchley was “the heraldic equivalent of a pair of furry dice bouncing around in the back of a state coach”—shows what a contentious figure she remains. Even a year after her departure from office, her capacity for provoking fission in her own party is unmatched. At the Tory conference, for instance, it was judged unsafe to let the lady address the delegates and the nation directly. But since it would have been overbrusque to suddenly declare her a nonperson, she was allowed a brief appearance in the conference
hall—a vision bite, if not a sound bite. The ovation she received for her nonspeaking walk-on part lasted five minutes and was measured at 101.0 decibels. The keynote speech of John Major received applause of four minutes and twenty-eight seconds, reaching the lower decibel level of 97.5. (Lesser ministers garnered one to three minutes, with noise levels in the low 90s.) Interestingly, the only speaker to raise greater hysteria than the silent Mrs. Thatcher was one of the men who brought her down, Michael Heseltine; he got the clapometer up to 102.0.

Mr. Major’s need and desire to show difference from the previous leadership declared themselves in the choreographing of his appearance. Low-key and feel-good in style as he is, he entered the hall from the rear, shaking hands with grassroots Tories on his way to the rostrum. After his speech—or, more exactly, after the subsequent patriotic singing of “Land of Hope and Glory” (and the 100-decibel, five-minute-and-fourteen-second ovation which
that
set off)—he returned to circulate below the salt. As for the speech itself, an indication of its New Tory Tone can be had from Mr. Major’s reference to Churchill. For ten years, Mrs. Thatcher appeared to own the copyright on allusions to Winston, as she familiarly called him: only she could smoke the cigar and doff the gray homburg, because she, too, had fought the foreigners on the beaches, urged blood, sweat, toil, and so on. Mr. Major’s Churchillian moment came when he was discussing government education policy. Churchill’s praise of the RAF Fighter Command’s performance in the Battle of Britain (“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”) was tweaked by Major into a joke about his own thin scholastic record and the curiosity it has provoked among journalists: “Never has so much been written about so little.” It was jauntily downbeat, unrhetorical, human.

But unrhetorical is what Mr. Major is, and what he is best advised to stay. Agreeable drabness of diction will offer fetching contrast not just with Mrs. Thatcher but also with his immediate opponent, Neil Kinnock, who, despite having curbed some of his orotund tendencies, is always likely to lapse back into Welsh windbaggery.
The only moment of near-rhetoric in Mr. Major’s text came when he embarked on that painful but necessary part of a keynote speech, My Vision of the Future (though My Vision of Next Week might have been more characteristic, and perhaps more voter-useful). He was hinting at a possible change in the inheritance tax: “I want,” he declared, “to see wealth cascading down the generations.” This seemed all wrong; in Mr. Major’s world, nothing does or should
cascade
. Waterfalls are much too dramatic: a metaphor from irrigation or, better still, plumbing would have seemed apter. And though Britain under Mrs. Thatcher has been coarsened and desensitized about the notion of great, vulgar gouts of money, the Niagara splash of cascading wealth still has an unmerited—indeed, American—sound to it.

For the rest of his fifty-seven-minute speech, Mr. Major played safe, with bumbling banality and uncontentious hopefulness. “I should like to live in a world where opportunity is for everyone, where peace is truly universal and where freedom is secure,” he declared, thereby distinguishing himself from few other politicians in the Western World except intransigent Brezhnevites and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Major wants a strong Britain, a secure defense, respect for the law, good education, lower inflation, a crackdown on crime, European partnership, a classless society, and a free health service for all. Mr. Major’s “vision” of “freedom and opportunity” sounds—even if it does not quite mean—the same as everybody else’s; it is as flat as a pavement, and this is its appeal. Received wisdom states that those who occupy the middle of the road in politics risk getting run down from both directions. But in Britain today all the political traffic keeps its snout firmly planted on the big white line; few see the appeal of the gutter, and the verges are being returned to cow parsley, the shrew, and the wren.

Mr. Major, both in public and in private life, has no vivid characteristics, no suspected vices, no dangerous passions. He is a satirist’s nemesis. Attempts to call him Major Minor and other variants on Joseph Heller have largely petered out; old Major, the prize Middle White boar in
Animal Farm
, seems no help. One early interviewer,
catching the Prime Minister in a relaxed moment when his pants had ridden down an inch or two, spotted that Mr. Major’s shirt was tucked into his undershorts. Whether this sartorial inelegance is a matter of habit or was the momentary and venial maladroitness of a busy politician remains unverified, but it did give the country’s most pugnacious satirical cartoonist—Steve Bell, of the
Guardian—a
welcome point of entry. He draws Mr. Major in his Lautrecian gray suit but with his undershorts—unstylishly pouchy Y-fronts, of course, not boxers—worn over his pants. Occasionally in the life of Bell’s strip, the PM persuades his other ministers, as a demonstration of loyalty, to wear their undershorts publicly after the same fashion. It is a pleasant thrust, but such is Major’s unconfrontational nature that the caricature no longer seems particularly fierce. This graphic reversal of over- and underwear has come to seem almost cozy: downbeat, unrhetorical, human—yes, all of that again.

It is to Mr. Major’s advantage that very little cosmetic work has had to be done on him. Mrs. Thatcher fixed her voice, her hair, her clothes; George Bush called upon the valuable coaching skills of Roger Ailes. (“There you go again with that fucking hand!” he once berated the President. “You look like a fucking pansy!”) All Mr. Major has to do is remember to tuck his shirt into the correct garment, and there he is—Prime Minister. When you see him in the flesh, what is extraordinary is that he looks exactly as you would imagine, neither taller nor shorter, drabber nor sprucer, jollier nor gloomier. In the short term, this ordinariness—or simplicity—will probably benefit Mr. Major. We seem, domestically, to be living in ordinary times at the moment. Our new Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, is a very ordinary man—one who on attaining office gave his first national press interview not to
The Times
or the
Daily Telegraph
but to
Reader’s Digest.
Mr. Major’s equivalent was to give a quite magnificently platitudinous interview this summer to
Hello!
magazine. This is a publication that specializes in not embarrassing celebrities, unless they have the wit to be embarrassed by glutinous fawning. Princess Di’s brother was caught with his trousers down not long after his marriage, and ended up indecorously trading sexual insults across the press with his ex-girlfriend;
Hello!
was where the Viscount’s rehabilitation could begin.
Hello!
(the exclamation mark in the title aptly reflects the magazine’s tone of excited innocence) likes to look to the future, prefers tragedy to smut, and interviews from the kneeling position. So John and Norma Major, quizzed about the sort of things they liked to do on their holidays in Spain, were able to reply very much in the spirit of the journal. Thus John: “Well, first of all I get a bit more sleep than I’m used to. I’ve even been known to have a Spanish siesta! And a very good invention it is too.” Asked to expatiate on the national characteristics of the locals, Mr. Major responded, “The Spanish are a very warm people. When I became Prime Minister I received a number of charming letters from Candeleda—even a sausage.”
Hello!
avoided the potentially criminal aspect of this sunny avowal—the question of whether the gifted sausage was raw or cooked. If raw, its importation, even by a Prime Minister, would be in breach of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise regulations.

So Mr. Major’s game plan from the Tory conference to the forthcoming election is one for which he seems by nature well suited: that of not doing anything rash. The Labour Party, despite appearing to demand a general election in the autumn, can remain privately content that it has been put off beyond the winter. The longer Mr. Major goes on, the greater the chance of some blissful foul-up. Labour can point to an encouraging tradition of recent British Prime Ministers being brought down by a tough “winter of discontent” (a phrase that has suffered a rare linguistic reversal: a metaphor in Shakespeare’s original use, it has now been turned back into a realistic description). Both Heath and Callaghan fell after hibernal turmoil. On the other hand, the trade unions are now in a much weaker position than they were a decade ago. And the longer Mr. Major continues, the less he will look like a stopgap and the more like a genuine, sausage-eating Prime Minister.