Letters from London (17 page)

One effect of the Tory campaign’s uncertain focus and general negativity was automatically to dress Labour in a little brief authority. Not that Labour weren’t so dressing themselves, even in the most literal way. For some time, Barbara Follett, wife of the novelist Ken, had been advising Labour MPs and Shadow Ministers on how to look their likeliest. The process had a certain comic aspect for longtime Labour watchers. In the old days, a Labour MP would be comfortingly shabby; the clothes would proclaim that the mind was on higher, more idealistic things. A baggy trouser out at the knee was proof of working-class solidarity, a leather elbow patch on a tweed jacket a badge of thrift and virtue. On special occasions, the MP would put on his least tattered suit and sport a red tie. The
point culminant
of Labour’s sartorial dereliction came a few years ago when
Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock’s predecessor, turned up for the Armistice Day wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph wearing what was generally denounced as a duffel coat (though his description of the garment differed). From that moment, Labour politicians—except for rank ideologues—became smarter dressers, until the top brass now present themselves like cautious stockbrokers. The arrival of MPTV helped speed the makeover. Those midgray off-the-peg High Street suits, worn with crepe-soled brown suede shoes, have been replaced by well-tailored numbers of somber hue; ties have become much more bankerish, even unto those dark blue ones with little white spots; while the special-occasion red tie has been transformed, as in some minor Greek myth, into a red rose worn in the buttonhole. As a result, Labour came into the election looking as if they already were the Government. That they were also allowed to behave as such was another mistake on the Tories’ part. The natural way for a sitting government to play the game is to act as if your side are statesmen (the masculine noun is appropriate, since there were no women in Mr. Major’s Cabinet), while the opposition are mere politicians. The Tories incompetently managed to reverse these standings, and on TV commercials Mr. Kinnock referred relaxedly to “my Chancellor of the Exchequer” and “my Health Secretary,” as if his team were merely waiting out the few necessary days before acquiring office.

Although a dirty campaign was widely predicted, for the most part the politicians contented themselves with insults and lies. Such restraint was wise, since each party was believed to have sexual dossiers on leading members of the other side, but the absence of erotic slurs might also have been caused by the surprise failure of an earlier mud strike. Three months before the election, when it already looked as if the Liberal Democrats might be a significant factor in the outcome, there was a break-in at the offices of Paddy Ashdown’s solicitor. The safe there happened to contain the lawyer’s working notes of a meeting with Mr. Ashdown in which the leader admitted an affair five years previously with his secretary. Details of the stolen notes naturally found their way to several London newspapers, and during a bit of will-they-won’t-they and aren’t-we-being-responsible,
Mr. Ashdown, perhaps unwisely, injuncted most of Fleet Street. Since these injunctions petered out at Hadrian’s Wall,
The Scotsman
promptly published the story, whereupon the whole of Fleet Street gleefully piled in.
The Sun
, a right-wing tabloid that spends much time honing its headlines because there is little room for anything else on the front page, led with this well-pondered screamer:
IT’S PADDY PANTSDOWN!

What happened next was instructive, and allowed British connoisseurs of sex scandals to feel briefly superior to their American counterparts. Mr. Ashdown admitted that the affair had taken place; the secretary was discreet; Mrs. Ashdown, doorstepped by a TV team announcing that her husband had publicly admitted his infidelity, gave an impassive nod and replied, “Well, well, well,” before disappearing into her house without further comment. Whereupon the most surprising thing in the history of British political sex scandals occurred: the next opinion poll to be taken recorded that Mr. Ashdown’s personal rating had improved thirteen points. This effectively killed off the story and must have left other party leaders wondering if a little indiscreet dalliance mightn’t be necessary for the good of the cause.

Of course, it didn’t all end quite as neatly as this. There was an embarrassing coda when the April issue of
Good Housekeeping
carried interviews with the wives of the three main party leaders. Given the magazine’s lead time, these had to have been conducted before the Ashdown story broke. Jane Ashdown here referred to herself self-deprecatingly as “a scruffy cow” and as “just an also-ran, a wife.” What provoked a greater wince, though, was her guileless loyalty to Paddy: “People have accused him of having affairs and he was outraged, terribly hurt. He doesn’t flirt but he likes the company of women. He is totally unaware when they are flirting with him.”

Furthermore, the nation quickly discovered that the No Damage (or even Enhanced Rating) rule suggested by the Ashdown saga has very limited application. The infidelity must be old and terminated, all parties must behave well, and the central figure must be a man. (If the party leader in question had been a woman, imagine the hypocrisy
and aggression of newspaper response.) And it goes without saying that the man must be heterosexual. As if to sternly point the limits on an MP’s permitted behavior, a new case broke in March, just before the election was called. The Conservative MP for Hexham in Northumberland, a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor (right-wing, anti-abortion, antismoking, teetotaler), was arrested with another man near Hampstead Heath; they were in a car parked in a street known to the gay community, who frequent a certain area of the Heath, as Gobblers’ Gulch. The MP was cautioned, as is normal with first offenders, but not charged; and though police cautions are not a matter of public record, this one unsurprisingly leaked out.
M.P.’S GAY SEX SHAME
,
The Sun
compassionately headlined it; and within forty-eight hours Hexham Tories were looking for a new candidate. Fleet Street, having sniffed further around Hexham, then put pressure on the young Liberal Democrat contender to admit
his
homosexuality. He obligingly did so, while declaring, “I just want to win on the issues.” He lost, of course, either on the issues or not, polling four thousand fewer votes than the Liberal had done in 1987, while the (presumably nonhomosexual) Conservative rompingly increased the Tory majority in the seat by more than five thousand.

N
O
SUCH MATTERS
disturbed the campaign in the constituency of Hampstead and Highgate. Despite the occasional healthy insult-like a rousing cry of “Neanderthal”—the fight was clean. At first glance, the seat must have looked a pushover for Labour. They had a celebrity candidate; the Tory majority at the last election had been a mere 2,221, making it number twenty-four in the list of key marginals Labour needed to win; national polls were showing a healthy swing to Labour; the sitting Tory MP was retiring, so no personal vote was involved; and Glenda Jackson’s young opponent was one of those responsible for inventing the community charge or poll tax, the most reviled tax imposed on the country in decades, if not centuries. What could possibly go wrong for Labour?

Several things. For a start, despite its reputation as a hatchery of pinko intellectuals, the constituency has only once, in its eighty-plus
years, returned a Labour candidate, and that only for a period of four years after kicking out a spectacular dud of a Tory minister. In addition, it normally swings no more than about half the national average: Conservatives and Labour have solidly entrenched pockets of support. And there were two more recent factors that might also weigh against Labour. The first is that Hampstead and Highgate lies within the London Borough of Camden, which twenty or so years ago was held up as a model of committed and sympathetic municipal socialism but is now widely denounced as inept, spendthrift, bankrupt, idle, corrupt, and deaf Camden did the Labour Party candidate no good by putting up council-housing rents an average of eleven pounds per week shortly before the election, and its very existence and reputation gave the Conservative Oliver Letwin an easy line of attack in his election pamphlet: “Look at our own government in miniature, Camden Council. The Labour Party has been in control of Camden for years. No doubt, when the Labour leaders set out to run and plan our lives they genuinely thought that they would improve matters. The result, as you will know only too well, is dismal and dingy…. The same thing happened when British governments tried to apply the Camden treatment on a national scale. Under the postwar ‘moderate’ Labour Party, plans and bureaucracies flourished. But the results were little short of catastrophic. Britain became known as the sick man of Europe.” Note, incidentally, the sleight of hand in the allegation that Labour governments followed “the Camden treatment,” as if the borough had been an antique nest of William Morris spinners and dyers who inspired the whole Party, the source of original collectivist sin; whereas in fact Camden was merely effecting, with embellishments, central Labour policy.

The second extra factor was one little mentioned locally. Even party workers weren’t very interested in discussing it, as they fought for a vital vote here, a tactical switch in the next street, and so on, doughtily adding up a hundred or so shifts or stabilities in each ward, leading to a successful assault on, or defense of, that alluring figure of 2,221. But if you examined the electoral register you discovered a figure that could prove more significant than the result of all the loyal
efforts of any number of diligent party workers. In 1987, at the time of the previous general election, there were 63,301 people registered to vote in the constituency; in 1992, the figure was down to 58,203. Camden has always had a transient population, but here was a demographic decline of 8 percent in five years. What could account for it? People moving out of the borough to avoid being ruled by Camden Council? General apathy about the political process? Perhaps. But the most plausible explanation was that quite a large number of people had declined to put themselves on the electoral register for a simple reason: fear, or disapproval, or hatred, of the poll tax. Technically, the electoral register has no connection with the list used to collect the poll tax, but few believe this. If you aren’t registered to vote, then they can’t pursue you for the poll tax—that is the received wisdom. Which left us with the possibility of one of the ripest political ironies: that of Mr. Letwin retaining Hampstead and Highgate for the Conservatives thanks to the absence of a key number of Labour sympathizers who had deprived themselves of the vote in order to avoid paying the tax which he helped devise.

Letwin is thirty-five, went to Eton and Cambridge, worked in the Downing Street Policy Unit under Mrs. Thatcher, and now heads the privatization-and-utilities team at Rothschild; Glenda Jackson is fifty-five, worked as a shop assistant in Boots the Chemist for two years, went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, won two Oscars, and was awarded the CBE in 1978. Letwin puts on a brave face at having drawn such a celebrated opponent: “They are very sophisticated voters here,” he replies as often as the question is put, “and they will not be sidetracked by glamour—either Glenda’s or mine.” Labour naturally makes the most of the frenzied press interest, and the results of photo opportunities stud the national dailies: Glenda serving tea at a community center, Glenda with her best foot forward at a ten-pin bowling alley with the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, silliest of all, Glenda and Glenys Kinnock pretending to build a wall together at the Blackburn Road Builders Training Centre. Photos show the two women crouched behind a palisade of brick and wet mortar, Glenda wielding trowel and spirit level, Glenys brandishing a supportive
trowel of her own. “My father was a bricklayer,” Glenda reminds the assembled media folk. “We have to build for the future,” she adds, helping the tabloids toward symbolic interpretation of the event. Subsequent cross-examination of those at the training center revealed that the two Gs had laid only one brick between them, and that the wall itself, after the witnesses had gone, was to be demolished and reconstructed in a different shape.

Oliver Letwin’s photo opportunities are more meager. When the real-life Chancellor of the Exchequer comes to support him, the resulting image hits only page 21 of the
Hampstead & Highgate Express
. Mrs. Thatcher’s visit at least got him onto the front page—in color, moreover—and the newspaper dutifully reported the former Prime Minister’s remark that Letwin had the credentials to be PM himself one day; but it still chose to headline the story
GLENDA FLAYS MAGGIE.
Asked about the Glenda factor over tea in a Conservative Party worker’s home just south of Swiss Cottage, Letwin pronounces himself comparatively unconcerned: “I suspect Glenda is very popular with Labour voters. With Conservatives she’s very unpopular. There are quite a lot of Liberals who are going to vote for us.” Overall, he reckons that her presence will have “a slight negative effect” for Labour. “If she were a little more cuddly, she would convert more Tories.” (I ask him about the public platforms they have so far shared: “Well, she makes up facts occasionally, but that’s only in the flow of rhetoric”) More to the point is his view—and it is a refreshingly candid one to hear from a Parliamentary candidate—that “most people neither know nor care who their MP is.” Letwin notes that his predecessor, Sir Geoffrey Finsberg, held the constituency for twenty-two years, and by the end of this time only 12 percent of voters proved able to name him. There are, of course, alternative explanations for such ignorance.

Letwin himself is a good choice for Hampstead and Highgate, being one of the Tory Party’s prospective highfliers, able to play the Hampstead Jewish-intellectual card and also to exploit the Thatcher connection (by no means a negative factor in getting out the Tory vote); he describes himself as laissez-faire in economic matters, liberal
in social policy. He is the author of
Privatising the World
(1988) and
Ethics, Emotion and the Unity of the Self (1987)
. Asked for his realistic assessment of the result, he says that he expects a local swing of half the national average. Glenda needs 2.5 percent to gain the seat; the opinion polls suggest a national movement of 5.0 percent toward Labour. It is not going to take much to deflate those blue balloons at the local Conservative headquarters which ho-hoingly proclaim “Let’s Win with Letwin.” I ask him what fears assail him during those nocturnal moments of self-doubt. “I sleep soundly,” he replies professionally.