Letters from London (20 page)

The last-minute omens looked good for Labour. The
Financial Times
came out in their favor; the afternoon before Election Day a horse called Mister Major was withdrawn from the three-forty at Ascot because it was discovered to be “unsound;” and the morning of Thursday, April 9, dawned bright and sunny over most of the kingdom. The blue of the sky seemed bad news for the Tories, who are normally held to gain an advantage of up to 1 percent at the ballot box if it rains; Tories drive to the polls, Labour supporters walk, according to the received wisdom. On the other hand, there were keep-your-spirits-up murmurings about a “late Tory surge.” Conservatives reminded one another, as they had done at disheartening moments during the previous four weeks, that John Major (unlike his equine
namesake) was “a late finisher” Look how late he had finished in the leadership election, and look how late he had snatched victory at the Maastricht summit. Whether these signs were truly comforting was another matter: in the leadership contest he failed to get an overall majority, and at Maastricht he merely established the right of his country to be, on some matters, in a minority of one.

The Guardian
, reckoning that if voters hadn’t made up their minds by now on the weightier isues, they might as well be given some frivolous reasons for doing so, canvassed candidates in marginal constituencies as to their favorite books, films, and music. Glenda Jackson proposed
Persuasion, Les Enfants du Paradis
, and Stravinsky’s
Symphony of Psalms;
her Conservative opponent chose
War and Peace, Dr. Zhivago
, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; the Liberal Democrat listed Bellow’s
More Die of Heartbreak
, the film
Stalker
, and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Light relief from
The Times
came in a different form—that of a special Election Day poem by the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. It is, of course, by now traditional for any Laureate’s official offerings to be bewilderingly bad, and Hughes certainly obliged with a jocose number about the effect of toxic chemicals on the sperm count of Western males. Specimens going off to vote might have been downcast to learn from the Laureate that their “virility packet” was only half as spunky as it had once been, yet more than a touch skeptical about the likely efficacy of Hughes’s gonadic appeal to the incoming Prime Minister.

You wouldn’t have thought there was much wrong with the sperm count of British males to judge by the end of the campaign. The three party leaders raced about in a fizz of testosterone, leaping into helicopters, bouncing out of cars, promising firmness, forcefulness, resolution, courage. But all the opinion polls pointed to neutered deadlock; so did the Poll of Polls, that source of wisdom as sure as the King of Kings; so, too, did the exit polls. But when the first actual results came in, around 11:00
P.M
. on Thursday, April 9, computer predictions began to suggest—contrary to all previous commentatorial wisdom and psephological savvy—that the Tories might actually form the largest party in the new Parliament. The media pack ensconced
on the press balcony at the Camden Centre to await Glenda’s declaration shuttled incessantly to the wonky TV set in the Council Chamber for an update on the baffling results. As we watched, strange things continued to happen. For a start, swings varied enormously—one moment 7 or 8 percent to Labour, then suddenly 1 or 2 percent to the Conservatives. What was this about? Was it the result of tactical voting? The computer which claimed to make sense of everything was now suggesting that the Tories might even end up with an overall majority of one seat. The Liberals picked off a couple of Tory bastions in the West Country, then started shedding constituencies of their own that they’d gained in recent by-elections. The Tories seemed to be doing much better than expected in Scotland; female Labour candidates were showing well, black Tory males were going down. The Tory Party chairman, Chris Patten, lost his marginal seat in Bath; senior Conservatives mourned him in the language of classical tragedy.

Throughout it all, Glenda’s result (as we had come to think of it) kept being delayed, from 1:30
A.M
. to 1:50, to 2:20, to 2:50, and the caffeine-fueled remnants of the press began to fret about deadlines. Meanwhile, the calculated size of the Tory majority continued to rise: one, two, nine—until, by three o’clock, it had reached double figures. Hampstead and Highgate, twenty-fourth on the list of Labour’s key marginals, was by now only of local interest; it couldn’t arrest the remorseless Tory advance. So it was in an atmosphere of slightly reduced excitement that the Returning Officer at 3:15
A.M
. finally led the eight candidates up onto the stage for the announcement of the result. They stood in a line with a large black curtain behind them, the only decoration a vast funeral-parlor vase of white flowers: lilies, carnations, and daisy chrysanthemums. Glenda Jackson wore the same outfit as she had at St. Andrew’s, Frognal, with the addition of a spray of red roses on her left lapel. Captain Rizz looked dashing in red-and-yellow top hat, red frogged jacket with tails, and dark glasses. In alphabetical order of the candidates’ names, the Returning Officer read out the number of votes cast. The Green Party got 594 and the Rainbow Ark Voters Association 44, putting a damper on the plan for
Hampstead to have its own currency. Glenda May Jackson received “nineteen thousand, one hundred and ninety-three votes,” Oliver Letwin “seventeen thousand…” The extra numbers (753, to be exact) were lost in a great roar, while Glenda stepped forward and gave a curious gesture: she raised her arm, though not with masculine aggression, and closed her fingers on her palm, but without making a tough fist. A sort of soft-left victory salute, presumably.

The other figures were then announced. The Liberal Democrat got 4, 765, a fall of nearly 50 percent, and an indication that tactical voting had reduced his pile. Captain Rizz got a mere 33 votes, and Charles “Scallywag” Wilson, whose name was greeted with an enthusiastic cry of “Yeah, Scallywag” from the hall, received only 44. This serious three-way split in the Rainbow vote (which in 1987 had tallied 137) eased the Natural Law Party representative, a man in a deeply nonpolitical white suit, into fifth position, with 86 votes. The candidates made brief speeches. Glenda Jackson said, “Never before has the Labour Party been needed as it is now.” Oliver Letwin consoled his supporters with the traditional remark that “this seat is on loan to the Labour Party for perhaps a few years;” but the figures were not prima facie encouraging. If Hampstead and Highgate traditionally swings at half the national average, Glenda Jackson had done four times as well as had been expected. The Green candidate, after making his speech, gave the new MP a bottle of champagne, on the ground that she must be a champagne socialist; though he missed a trick by not asking her to recycle the bottle. Then the candidates were led off, and in a moment of tiny metaphor Glenda Jackson was seen beginning her political life by leaving a theatrical stage.

BY LUNCHTIME ON FRIDAY
, with only a few Ulster results left to be declared, John Major’s majority had grown to the comparatively decent—and, in terms of all predictions, incredibly enormous—size of twenty-one. It is effectively larger, given the inert status of Ulster Unionists in mainland politics, so Mr. Major will not have to worry overmuch when a backbench MP gets stuck in a traffic jam on the way to vote or starts complaining of chest pains. The Prime Minister will be able to ride out a few by-election losses and govern without
much Parliamentary threat for up to five years. Not even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s threat to leave the country in the event of a Labour victory had persuaded enough people to vote for Neil Kinnock.

Labour optimists pointed out that they had needed a swing of 1945 proportions to oust the Tories, and that the reduction of the Conservative majority from 101 to 21 was a fine achievement. Labour had nearly climbed the mountain; one more push next time and they would surely make it. But this line of consolation fails to convince. Apart from anything else, next time the mountain will have grown even higher. The recommendations of the Boundary Commission will have been implemented by the next general election, adjusting the size and shape of many constituencies. The effect of these changes, it is generally assumed, will be to hand the Tories from fifteen to twenty extra seats without any more work.

The situation facing Labour is therefore brutal. If the Party spends eight years reorganizing itself under Neil Kinnock, outlawing the word
socialism
, expelling left-wing extremists, accepting the free market and the principles of nuclear deterrence, weakening the obvious links with trade unions; if the party leadership does everything to cuddle up to prospective voters made apprehensive by previous Labour attitudes; if, banker-suited and pro-Europe, they pitch themselves as a nicer, more compassionate version of the Tories; if they fight an excellent campaign, well-organized and well-publicized; if the election comes at the right time for them, in the depths of a recession, with a lot of old-lag Tories seemingly attached to power only by their fingertips; if all the polls and all the analysts agree that Labour will at least end up with a share of power; and if, when the results come in, despite an increase in seats, Labour has captured only 35 percent of the vote, and the Conservatives are just as solid on 43 percent as they were five years earlier—then the question arises as to whether Labour has become unelectable. Or at least unelectable under the present system. Perhaps jumping on Paddy’s Roundabout is the necessary solution? Whereupon a second brutal truth asserts itself: in order to change the electoral system to a new one which favors you better, you first have to win power under the old system. Which is what Labour seems incapable of doing.

What has changed? The Labour Party is like a lover who, rejected for being scruffy and high-minded by the girl he seeks, goes out, gets a haircut, a new suit, a proper job, a mortgage, and a portable phone, and then comes back only to be rejected again, in favor of some other man with a haircut, suit, job, mortgage, and portable phone. Better the devil—or the man in the suit—that you know. Casting around for explanations, Mr. Kinnock complained about the tabloid-press denunciations of Labour. But the tabloid press always denounces Labour. Others pointed to “the Kinnock factor”—a suspicion of his malleable principles, combined with a prejudice against him as a Welshman. But the British do not hold an ability to change one’s mind, one’s principles, even one’s political party, against somebody who really wants power. And, while there is a certain low-level anti-Welsh prejudice among the English, and there could not have been a greater contrast than that between the hey-boyo Kinnock and the permafrost upper lip of the Prime Minister, this explanation is strictly one of last resort.

A more likely solution is that the British themselves—or an electorally significant percentage of them—have changed. Surveys of social attitudes tend to show that the Thatcher years have not much altered what people claim they want and expect from society. But people’s behavior has changed. For a start, they have clearly started lying to opinion pollsters, which is probably a sign of a new political maturity on their part, and might even lead to the healthy disgrace and eventual abandonment of polling. (Of course, if they lie to political pollsters they might equally lie to social-attitude pollsters.) And in other respects a significant portion of the voting public has been altered by Thatcherism. As I waited for Glenda’s result in the defiantly unstimulating atmosphere of the Camden Council Chamber—no alcohol allowed, smoking forbidden, the coffee machine run dry—and as John Major’s prospects rose by the minute, a TV technician said to me, a little apprehensively, “I instructed my bank manager to buy me nine hundred pounds’ worth of BT shares if the Tories won.” He was worrying about the fact that on the eve of Election Day the City had scented a possible last-minute Tory rally and share prices had taken
off; even so, he reckoned that his shares in British Telecom, the privatized successor to a section of the state-run Post Office, were a good buy. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the idea of a BBC technician instructing his bank manager to up his holding in BT would have seemed a strange dystopian fantasy. Now it is unavoidable here. Oliver Letwin wrote a book called
Privatising the World;
Mrs. Thatcher famously remarked, “There is no such thing as society” (there being only individuals and families in her view). The change in British political reality is not as complete as these two phrases imply, but a shift has certainly taken place—one that will have led, by the end of Mr. Major’s immediate term of office, to seventeen or eighteen years of nonstop Conservative rule. This long period of single-party power makes Britain, depending on your view, either a stable and economically realistic nation of enterprise and individualism, or else “Japan without the prosperity.”

On the Monday following his defeat, Neil Kinnock resigned as Labour leader. Eight days earlier, his last major London rally before the election was a gathering of the fairly high-profile faithful-self-satirizingly dubbed “Luvvies for Labour” by the comedian Ben Elton. Kinnock preceded his speech by pulling from his pocket Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, which, he said, he habitually carried around with him. It was an odd and proleptic choice:

The poet, in despair, reflects upon the one he loves, just as Mr. Kinnock, in a dignified farewell, was to pay warm tribute to his wife, Glenys: he was not to be pitied, for he had much richness in his personal life; it was the country that was to be pitied. The sonnet ends:

—which was, more or less, exactly what he’d been trying to do for the last eight years as Labour leader.

Asked what went wrong for him in Hampstead and Highgate, Oliver Letwin replied, “Very simple. The Liberals collapsed and the bulk of them went to Labour.” Why? “I don’t know.” The Glenda Jackson personal vote he still rated an insignificant item; he thinks there might have been “a marginal anti-me factor,” because of his association with the poll tax, but the result was all “more to do with the big national questions.” Liberal Democrats voted tactically “to get out the Government,” and while his own vote held up well, the Lib Dem switch finished his chances. Unlike those of us who waited until 3:15
A.M.
, Letwin knew “as soon as the ballot boxes were opened” that he had lost: not from counting his own votes or Glenda Jackson’s but from the rarity of crosses beside Dr. Wrede’s name. If it’s any comfort to Labour, Letwin judged it “absurd” to talk about the Party’s long-term unelectability—politics being simply too fluid and hazardous a business. Asked finally about the victor, he agreed that she will probably make a good constituency MP. “The danger is she might get bored. She’s been on a big stage, and she might find Parliament boring and trivial.”