Letters from London (45 page)

There is not much chance of getting a cheap haircut out of Eurotunnel. Indeed, from now on your passage from England to France will be sweetly unpunctuated unless, say, you are a Rastafarian smoking a joint the size of a baguette and driving a car with Colombian number plates. Otherwise, your journey will go like this: you turn up at the Cheriton terminal whenever you like, buy a ticket at the toll booth, pass through British and French customs with a couple of flaps of your passport, and drive onto one of the double-decker shuttle carriages. Your thirty-five-minute translation to France will be an austere experience: no smoking, no bar, no shops, no duty-free, though you will be allowed to leave your car and visit one of the lavatories, which are placed in every third carriage. It will also be an austere experience spiritually: first reports indicate that your ears may not even pop to remind you of where you are. You will not see the White Cliffs of Dover as you leave or the Bassin du Paradis in Calais Harbor as you arrive; indeed, you will not spot water at any time. Then you will emerge into a French marshaling yard and roar off, unhindered by any authority, toward the
autoroute
and that rented holiday cottage.

In 1981, when the Humber Bridge was opened, a cantata was performed with words by the poet Philip Larkin. In his closing stanza he described the bridge as

This is what most people feel, or would like to feel. A
grand projet
should inspire, should stun us into reassessing our place and purpose in the world. But perhaps the Channel Tunnel has come too late to do this. Imagine if it had been built a century or more ago, before
Blériot flew the Channel, before radio and television. Then it would have been a marvel: it might even have changed history, instead of merely adjusting it. What we have now, though, is the ultimate nineteenth-century project completed just before we enter the twenty-first century. So it is a convenience, something to be thankful for, as impressive as a fine new sweep of motorway. And it will still be there on that distant, perhaps apocryphal, day when the British finally get over their complicated and self-destructive feelings about the French, when they decide that difference does not logically entail inferiority, and when Little Englanders, tabloid journalists, and John-of-Gaunters line up at Folkestone with a
chanson
in their hearts to bellow invitingly down the Tunnel’s mouth, “Froggy! Froggy! Froggy! In! In! In!”

June 1994

15
Left, Right, Left, Right: The Arrival of Tony Blair

O
n July 14, the country’s public elite gathered at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service of the Labour leader John Smith. Foreign ambassadors, church leaders, an ex-Prime Minister or two, and the nomenklatura of all major parties: an IRA wet dream. It was a sweltering day: paramedics and the British Red Cross were deployed in force, on red alert for the toppling of elderly pols. But the Abbey was cool inside, and made somehow cooler by the playing of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. There is something about an English brass band, when not in jolly-oompah mode, that induces a powerful and rather stately melancholy. It is the sonic equivalent of damp hillsides, mill chimneys, and the smell of soot. As Mrs. Smith and her three daughters were led beneath the crossing to their seats, the band was playing “Nimrod” from Elgar’s
Enigma Variations
. There was an added political poignancy about the music: the Conservatives, during their pit-closure program, finished off the Grimethorpe Colliery, and all that remains of it now is the after-echo of its band.

Smith’s death, at fifty-five, had been signaled by a heart attack five years earlier, but even so it took people by surprise. Party leaders,
like orchestra conductors, tend to live a long time, the proximity to power seeming to act like royal jelly. When Smith died last May, no fewer than four previous Labour leaders, including two Prime Ministers from the Jurassic sixties and seventies, were still alive. The active mourning even extended to the Tory press, whose praise for a man it had greedily reviled at the last election was quite extravagant. This wasn’t just hypocrisy, or good manners, or political canniness (raise up your dead opponent the better to diminish your living ones). The death of a politician before he can come into his expected power has a particular emotional effect. The leader-in-waiting who never becomes leader is the man who never disabuses us of our expectations, as all the others did; his death gives us a permit for idealism, which we transfer back onto him.

The tributes hailed Smith as a warm and passionate man of blazing wit, a fellow of infinite jest who was always first to the bar on the train back to Scotland after a hard Parliamentary week. This was a deep surprise to most of the nation, since he had always come across as an owlish, lawyerly figure whose main strategy seemed to be to keep the Labour Party from squabbling and wait for the Tories to disembowel themselves. He seemed cleverer than John Major but not fundamentally more thrilling: you might not be surprised to find Mr. Major behind the grille at your suburban bank dishing out the tenners, and Mr. Smith in the paneled back office frowning about your overdraft. This public dourness was apparently deliberate. A Labour MP’s wife, known for her reluctance to humor bores, assured me, “John was very,
very
funny. If you went to dinner, you knew you were going to have a good time.” So why, I asked her, when most politicians try to make themselves seem more exciting than they are, rather than the reverse, had Smith gone in for this peculiar and chameleonic behavior? “He decided not to be witty in public,” she replied, “because of Kinnock and seeming frivolous.” There was probably some sense in this: wit and spontaneity are tolerated here among effete backbenchers whose chance of real power has gone, but among the higher echelons everything must sound as if it had been triple-drafted by civil servants, spin doctors, and ideological minders. Neil Kinnock,
John Smith’s predecessor as leader, once ran into trouble over the Falklands War. He was appearing as a TV panelist, and a member of the audience put it to him that Mrs. Thatcher had displayed “guts” as a politician. He responded, “It is a pity that other people have to leave theirs on the ground in Goose Green in order to prove it.” In the circumstances, this was an excellent reply—sharp, angry, and appropriate—yet Mr. Kinnock discovered that it was not deemed politically acceptable, and shortly thereafter was dispatching letters of explanation and regret to Falklands widows. John Smith was unlikely to make mistakes of this order: a Scottish Presbyterian lawyer who scared neither middle England nor the City, he was par excellence a safe pair of hands.

The catcher’s mitt has now passed to the youngest-ever leader of the Labour Party. Tony Blair is forty-one, has been a Member of Parliament only since 1983, and is still young enough (or well enough briefed) to be able, when interviewed by a Radio 1 disc jockey, to cite numerous different rock groups whose music he fancies. He grew up in Durham, went to Fettes public school in Edinburgh, and then to St. John’s College, Oxford. Here he sang and played guitar in a band called Ugly Rumours; more significantly, he converted to both Christianity and socialism. In London, he joined the Labour Party and became a barrister; he met his barrister wife in the same set of chambers. In 1982, he fought the parodically unwinnable Tory seat of Beaconsfield in a by-election; then, thanks to a mixture of good fortune and personal persuasiveness, landed the safe Labour constituency of Sedgefield, in County Durham. His career so far has featured luck and timing as well as good judgment. But he was also singled out early as a rising talent by the Labour hierarchs, and as a rising danger by the Conservatives. Most people I spoke to about Tony Blair—even a sleepy House of Commons porter—assured me that they had picked him as a future leader from the beginning.

It was frequently asserted during the leadership election (in which Mr. Blair defeated two rivals with just about the right degree of emphasis—handsome but not humiliating) that one of his key political virtues is his appeal to the Southeast. By “the Southeast” we are to
understand those key voters, from the skilled working class and middle management, who defected to Mrs. Thatcher and stayed with Mr. Major. This assessment is probably correct, though the new leader is hardly repugnant to the North: a Durham childhood, a Scottish schooling, a Durham constituency, and, as a clincher, the fact that his wife was the stepdaughter of the actress Pat Phoenix, who for many years played the regal role of Elsie Tanner in
Coronation Street
, the long-running TV soap about Northern working-class life. This is indirect yet unarguable pedigree, rather like the Royal Family being related to Barbara Cartland.

Another part of his pedigree is equally interesting, and had been unknown even to Mr. Blair himself until the journos started trampling over his life.
The Daily Mail
acting no doubt in the public interest, and surely without any hope that it might turn up an embarrassing secret, commissioned genealogical research into the Blair family. It had frequently been reported that the new leader’s paternal grandfather was a rigger in the Govan shipyard by the name of William Blair. This added useful proletarian authenticity, given that Tony’s father, Leo, was not only an academic but a lifelong Conservative and convinced Thatcherite. The investigation discovered, however, that Leo’s true parents were not the Blairs but a pair of music-hall performers named Charles Parsons and Cecilia Ridgeway; they had been on a Northern tour at the time of Leo’s birth, and put him out to board with a Mr. and Mrs. Blair. The distant tang of illegitimacy is scarcely scandalous; more to the point is the extraordinary coincidence that both the present Prime Minister (son of the artiste Tom Ball) and the present Leader of the Opposition have music-hall blood in their veins. That they should end up heading their parties in the House of Commons seems Lamarckian: positive proof of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Most echelons of the press also went on the trawl for the personal stuff In this they have so far been disappointed: Ugly Rumours has proved no more than the name of a band. For instance, Mr. Blair must be the only student rocker in the entire 1970s who never took drugs. What’s wrong with the University of Oxford? President Clin
ton went there and failed to inhale; Tony Blair didn’t even touch his fingers to the smoldering sin. As one of his Oxford contemporaries put it, “Listen, I would know, and the answer is definitely no. Unlike most of us, the guy hardly ever drank.” W
haaat?
And then there is the other thing, the thing that people, especially young people, tend to do when left alone in pairs; but even here it seems that the state troopers will not be called in evidence. At Oxford, according to
The Independent on Sunday
, the consensus was that Tony did not “get laid.” Unbelievable: you’d think the fellow was running for the See of Canterbury. On the other hand, this is probably just as well, since the insertion of overt ethical content into British politics—such as Mr. Blair has done in recent weeks—normally leads to self-slaughter. No sooner had the Tories launched their “Back to Basics” campaign last year than it emerged that numerous Tory MPs had been getting back, or up, to some pretty basic things themselves. Does Mr. Blair have any sinister, or even ordinary, peculiarities? Well, I can add one speck to the dunghill of data currently accumulating, which may or may not be indicative. Anthony Howard, the seasoned political observer and former editor of
The New Statesman
, reported to me in awed tones this action-man detail: “He is the fastest eater I’ve ever come across. I mean, I’m a quick eater, but I was only halfway through my liver and he’d cleaned his plate!”

Mr. Blair’s victory was a success for those in the Labour Party currently called “modernizers.” Political struggles are in part struggles of nomenclature: pin the best label on your own chest, and slap the worst on your opponent’s back, preferably at a place where the knife goes in the most easily. In the Tory Party there was the enduring scuffle between “wets” and “dries” (which has elided into one between “consolidators” and “radicals”). In the Labour Party for a long time it was “moderates” versus “militants” (which some arrant compromisers tried to solve linguistically, by calling themselves “militant moderates”). More recently, it has been “modernizers” versus “traditionalists.” The modernizers sought, apart from anything else, to make Labour electable again: this involved smartening the Party up, democratizing its electoral systems, reducing the influence of the trade
unions, and accepting a certain amount of market reality. Such activities are regarded by some as classic right-wing middle-class treachery. During the leadership election the far left in the constituencies wittily dubbed Blair “the liquidationist candidate,” and the depths of suspicion with which the modernizers are viewed can be judged by this recent remark from the veteran
gauchiste
Tony Benn: “If you look at apartheid in South Africa, it didn’t end because Nelson Mandela had a pink rose, a new suit, a policy review, and Saatchi & Saatchi.” However, the modernizers have not only the ascendancy but also the better label. “The traditionalists
hate
being called traditionalists,” I was told by one Westminster correspondent. And they won’t even be allowed to call themselves left-wing for much longer if the nameplate stealing continues. Here is Tony Blair during the run-up to the election: “Many of those that call themselves left aren’t on the left at all if left means radical. They simply represent a kind of conservatism.”