Letters from London (35 page)

She can see, for instance, that she was the most feted and fetishized of modern Prime Ministers but not that she was also the most loathed. She was loathed in a personal as well as in a political way, since her perceived character—domineering, mean-spirited, divisive, unheeding—seemed to inform and infect her policies. That character is amply on display here. She is contemptuous of Tory wets and Tory grandees. She is contemptuous of the Tory tradition that she
supplanted, referring at one point to the “thirty-year experiment” of “socialism” in postwar Britain: as far as one can follow her chronology, this clearly includes the Conservative governments of Heath, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, and Eden, and possibly that of Churchill. Special spite is reserved for two of her main adjutants, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, neither of whom could finally stomach her. Howe’s resignation speech prompted a challenge to her leadership, ensuring, to her eyes, that “from this point on [he] would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skillful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own.” As for the real Opposition, try this for superciliousness: “Mr. Kinnock, in all his years as Opposition leader, never let me down. Right to the end, he struck every wrong note.”

Monocularity at home, cecity abroad. Alan Clark reports a comment that Mrs. Thatcher made to the civil servant Frank Cooper two years after she had been made leader of the Opposition. “Must I do all this international stuff?” she asked, and when he replied, “You can’t avoid it,” she pulled a face. Cooper also recalled that “during that period she and [Cooper] had met Reagan and Carter, and she was
astonished
at how stupid they were. ‘Can they really dispose of all that power?’ etc.” She grew to enjoy motorcade acclaim, of course, and the banquets chez Mitterrand, while never seeming to suspect that when you are applauded in Eastern Europe it does not necessarily mean more than a public snub to the local leaders. She is sure that “the beliefs and policies which I… pioneered in Britain” have helped “to remould world affairs.” She cannot conceive that the Falklands expedition might be viewed elsewhere not as an early start on the new world order but as the last twitch of an imperial past. She is much happier with distant sheikhs than with European democrats. She imagines that her obstructive, nagging, bullying attitude to Europe was taken as a sign that Britain was walking tall once more. She thinks that if you insult people you gain their respect.

In a TV series made to coincide with the publication of
The
Downing Street Years
, she came up with the following subtly graded observation: ‘There’s a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people: this is our characteristic. There’s not a great strand of equity or fairness in Europe—they’re out to get as much as they can. That’s one of those enormous differences.” For the bicentennial of the French Revolution-whose “abstract ideas,” she notes, were “formulated by vain intellectuals”—she gave an interview to
Le Monde
from which she proudly quotes: “Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution … [they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity… [we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King… it was not the sort of Revolution that France’s was…. ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’—they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.” How strange that all those poor benighted foreigners still harp on 1789, rather than 1688, as their symbolic date. But how equally strange that the English revolution Mrs. Thatcher chooses to cite is that of 1688 rather than the much more famous one earlier in the century, which also led to Parliament’s exerting its will over the King, though in a somewhat different way—by cutting off his head, just as they were to do in France.
Le Monde
, as if humoring the deranged, headlined its interview “L
ES DROITS DE L’HOMME N’ONT PAS COMMENCE EN FRANCE,” NOUS DÉCLARE MME. THATCHER
.

The Downing Street Years
is not, of course, a “book” in the normal sense of the word. Top politicians generally have an arm’s-length acquaintance with their own language: they only truly mean what other people help them say. A speech needs speechwriters (Mrs. Thatcher used the dramatist Ronald Millar and the novelist Ferdinand Mount, thereby perhaps according “vain intellectuals” their true employment); and a book needs book writers—ghosts, researchers, anecdote trufflers, document sifters, prose scrubbers. This shouldn’t strike us as either shocking or dishonest. Mrs. Thatcher’s book is authentic in its public pomposities, its regurgitated speeches and documents, its bulging acronyms. It is authentic, too, in its coy sartorial annotations—“I had worn a simple cotton dress and flat shoes to visit the refugee
camp”—and glutinous domestic dues paying: “Being prime minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend.”

Finally, it is authentic in being a work of colossal, if unsurprising, vanity. Over the decade or more of her rule, Mrs. Thatcher went from Prime Ministerial to Presidential to regal—a progression that was marked both in her language (growing use of the royal plural) and in her frocks. Her later official garments, for such outings as the Lord Mayor’s banquet, increasingly conjured up references to Queen Elizabeth—the First, that is, the powerful one, not the mere Second. Yet while settling the great affairs of state for us she also had an unsleeping eye for the dandruff on our collar, the soup stain on our tie: “Every time I came back from some spotlessly maintained foreign city my staff and the then Secretary of State for the Environment knew that they could expect a stiff lecture on the litter-strewn streets of parts of London.” Reality does not always break in (otherwise, a connection between the state of the streets and the abolition of the Greater London Council might have occurred), but the performance in the book is of a piece with Mrs. Thatcher’s performance in real life. It is a justification and a continuation of her rule, as well as a means of making various jolly millions. It also has the sort of relentless presence that her Premiership had. Every so often, you have to shake your head and remind yourself that just because a book is heavy this doesn’t make it history. Indeed, even among ardent Thatcherites there are different gospels. When the Prime Minister is taking advice from her colleagues during the leadership election of 1990, the procession of traitors and hypocrites is momentarily enlivened by the arrival of Alan Clark. Mrs. Thatcher records:

Here is Alan Clark’s account of the meeting, from his
Diaries:

I went down the stairs and rejoined the group outside her door. After a bit Peter said, “I can just fit you in now—but only for a split second, mind.”

She looked calm, almost beautiful. “Ah, Alan …”

“You’re in a jam.”

“I know that.”

“They’re all telling you not to stand, aren’t they?”

“I’m going to stand. I have issued a statement.”

“That’s wonderful. That’s heroic. But the Party will let you down.”

“I am a fighter.”

“Fight, then. Fight right to the end, a third ballot if you need to. But you lose.”

There was quite a little pause.

“It’d be so terrible if Michael [Heseltine] won. He would undo everything I have fought for.”

“But what a way to go! Unbeaten in three elections, never rejected by the people. Brought down by nonentities!”

“But Michael… as
Prime Minister.”

“Who the fuck’s Michael? No one. Nothing. He won’t last six months. I doubt if he’d even win the Election. Your place in history is towering…”

Outside, people were doing that maddening trick of opening and shutting the door, at shorter and shorter intervals.

“Alan, it’s been so good of you to come in and see me….”

Mrs. Thatcher creates a comic interlude, ponderously narrated, in which she demonstrates statesmanlike gravitas. Clark sketches a
tragic episode, lightly told, in which he is the passionate truth teller. It’s hard not to prefer Clark’s version, even if it is just as self-serving. (Look, I’m the sort of chap who isn’t afraid to say “fuck” in front of Maggie.) Future historians will not be able to avoid the Thatcher memoirs, any more than those who lived under her for so long could avoid her glowering, lowering presence. Had she been more of a Trollopian, she might have known to give the
The Dawning Street Years
its rightful, inescapable subtitle: “She Knew She Was Right.”

November 1993

12
TDF: The World Chess Championship

I
t is a most curious form of theater: austere, minimalist, post-Beckettian. Two neatly dressed men crouch attentively over a small table against an elegant gray and beige set. One, tall, gangly, pallid, and bespectacled, occupies a high-backed, fat-armed oxblood club chair; the other, shorter, compacter, and browner, has a low-backed black-leather number with chrome base and legs, of a design you might call Moscow Bauhaus. Each is fiercely possessive of his chair. They are happy enough to change costume, and on alternate matinees they swap sides of the table; but they always take their chairs with them.

The only other visible characters are a pair of older gentlemen who sit at the rear right of the stage, observing their juniors like some mirroring subplot. None of the four speaks; nevertheless, the theatergoer’s ears are filled with dialogue. A third pair of actors, unseen, high up in a glazed box at the back of the upper circle, guess at the thoughts of the characters onstage. This earphone-filling game of hazard and prediction provides the main interest, since the visible action is limited and repetitive. Occasionally, the two protagonists will

make slight movements with their hands, then immediately scribble notes to themselves. Otherwise, there are only exits and entrances during these four to six-hour matinees: one character will suddenly stand up as if offended and depart stage left, the gangly one tiptoeing away ganglily, the compact one bustling away compactly. Every so often, in an audacious device, both may be offstage at the same time. But always the disembodied voices continue in the ear, assessing, theorizing, imagining; anxious, confident, exultant, apologetic.

Skeptics maintain that live chess is as much fun as watching paint dry. Ultraskeptics reply: Unfair to paint. Yet for three months the cheapest seats at the Savoy Theatre were, by a long way, the most expensive cheap seats in London. Twenty pounds to watch the Times World Chess Championship from the stalls, £35 from the upper circle, £55 from the dress circle. This wasn’t entirely greed, or desperation on the part of Times Newspapers to recoup some of their estimated £4 to £5 million investment. It was also a genuine anticipation of domestic interest. For the first time in the modern history of the championship—deemed to have started with the 1886 match between Steinitz and Zukertort—a Briton had emerged as title contender. Nigel Short was also the first Westerner to contest the final since Bobby Fischer in 1972. Pre-Fischer, you had to go back to 1937 to find another Westerner, the Dutchman Max Euwe; post-Fischer, the only way to get into any of the next seven World Championship matches was to be a Russian whose name began with
K:
Karpov, Korchnoi, Kasparov. Now, at last, there was a local boy to root for, and a serious underdog as well. Kasparov is constantly described as the strongest player in the history of the game; Short wasn’t in the top ten. The size of his task could be estimated by the fact that even one of Kasparov’s seconds, the Georgian grandmaster Zurab Azmaiparashvali, was ranked above him.