Letters from London (8 page)

For much of last year, there was a tangy smell to British political life, though whether it was just the whiff of well-hung game—a mature government becoming more mature—wasn’t clear. Certainly it was a year of deaths and resignations, though at first many of them had a comic slant. In June, for instance, the Social Democratic Party, after a decade of oscillating fortunes, finally went into liquidation. Founded in 1981 to wide media acclaim, the SDP in its early years looked to
have revived the center of British politics and established a three-party system. But it was undone successively by the Falklands War (which solidified Tory support), by the voting system (proportional representation would have greatly helped the cause), by its own factionalism, and by a revived, middle-ground Labour Party. The SDP laid itself out and tucked the shroud around its own starved frame after a humiliating by-election in the Lancashire town of Bootle. In late 1981 and early 1982, the SDP had actually held an opinion-poll lead over both the Conservatives and Labour. Eight years later, at Bootle, their candidate was not treated seriously by the electorate; worse, he was not even treated as a joke. The representative of Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Cavern Rock Party—which comes into existence only at by-elections, in order to publicize an aging rock star—received 418 votes, out of 35,477. The SDP polled a dismal 155.

Some of the resignations were distinctly comic, too. Take the case of Patrick Nicholls, a forty-one-year-old Junior Environment Minister, solicitor, and keen Thatcherite, whose more or less invisible career ended, after three years, in a moment of spectacular self-combustion. As minister responsible for health and safety at work, Nicholls campaigned against alcohol abuse. In March, he told an Alcohol Concern conference, “Quite simply, alcohol and work do not mix,” pointing to the deleterious effects on health, family well-being, and company profits. In October, Mr. Nicholls was himself at work, and most publicly so, at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth. On Wednesday, October 10, he sat on the platform listening to—or, at least, present at—the Home Secretary’s warnings about drunken driving. That same evening, Mr. Nicholls went out to dinner with friends. Prudently, he had arranged with a local taxi firm for a cab to pick up the revelers at ten-fifteen and take them to Portsmouth. The agreed charge was to be £47.00. Imprudently, Mr. Nicholls and his party lingered at the restaurant until after midnight, at which point, the taxi driver informed them, the cost of transportation had gone up to £62.50. More imprudently, the Minister turned this offer down, thus depriving the cabbie of his hoped-for profit.
Most imprudently of all, he then asked the fellow to drive him as far as a car park, where he collected his own vehicle. Now, Bournemouth during a Conservative Party Conference must be one of the most densely policed areas of the country, and it is believed that the taxi driver, in understandable pique, denounced the Junior Minister to the local constabulary. Mr. Nicholls’s career vanished as a flashing blue light pursued him out of the darkness. It was the update of a cautionary tale by Hilaire Belloc:

The more important resignation was that of the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Mr. Nicholas Ridley. At first, it too seemed largely a comic business, though it was here that one of the year’s most powerful, if latent, political themes began to emerge: Europe. Most Cabinet ministers (and Mrs. Thatcher managed to chomp her way through fifty-six of them, in fifteen major reshuffles) resign or get sacked for disagreeing with the Prime Minister or her advisers. Mr. Ridley managed the rare and ingenious trick of being obliged to resign because he agreed all too thoroughly with the Prime Minister. His only mistake was to express in public opinions that Mrs. Thatcher could permit herself to endorse only in private. Ridley was, however, no damp-eared aspirant trying to fawn upon his leader; he was a trusted friend and political soul mate. Oddly, the old bruiser was valued equally on both sides of the House: Mrs. Thatcher saw in him someone unquestioningly devoted to the ideals of the market, while the Opposition treasured him for being just the sort of Tory they needed—not only a viscount’s second son but one who every so often was given to making huge and exploitable gaffes. His devotion to the power of the market was evidenced during his spell as a minister at the Foreign Office, when he tackled the problems of decolonization in a novel way. He reportedly offered the Prime Minister of the Turks
and Caicos Islands £12 million to go independent (the huffy reply came that they wanted £40 million and would revolt if bought off for less), while in 1980, two years before the Falklands War, he proposed that the continuing problem of these southerly islands be solved by transferring them to Argentina and then leasing them back—a suggestion that caused patriotic uproar in the Commons. Mr. Ridley’s gaffes provoked almost as much of a stir as his politics. As Secretary of State for the Environment, he denounced country dwellers who were in favor of land development as long as it didn’t happen near them—what he called the NIMBY factor. A little bit of journalistic digging later, and it emerged that Mr. Ridley himself had objected when a local farmer tried to build in a field backing onto his eighteenth-century Gloucestershire rectory. Even more embarrassing was his remark a few days after a cross-Channel ferry (named, ironically, the
Herald of Free Enterprise)
sank off Zeebrugge with the loss of 193 lives. Ridley made a joke about a fellow-minister going full steam ahead: “Though he is a pilot of the bill, I hasten to add he has not got his front doors open.” He confessed the comment to be “inappropriate, inopportune, insensitive,” and was permitted to survive. So he was never low-profile, and with a less understanding PM he might well have departed earlier. He entertained the right—for instance, by calling the Greens “pseudo Marxists”—and he infuriated the left with his dismissive, patrician air and his art of taking laissez-faire—as during the Harrods saga—to the point of inertia. Even his chain smoking (a reported four packs of Silk Cut per day) seemed designed to infuriate. When he arrived at the Department of Trade and Industry and said that in the long run his policy was to abolish the place, Labour dubbed him the minister with “no in-tray, no out-tray, only an ashtray.”

But this Grand Guignol figure, officially licensed to scare the lefties, finally overstepped. He gave an interview to the right-wing weekly
The Spectator
(no danger there, surely); the editor asked him a few questions, and Ridley said what he thought. About European monetary union: “This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted.” About the European
Commissioners: “Seventeen unelected reject politicians.” About the French: “Behaving like poodles to the Germans.” About the Germans: “Uppity.” About the Irish: “Ireland gets six per cent of their gross domestic product [from the Community, by way of subsidy]… When’s Ireland going to stand up to the Germans?” On Helmut Kohl: “I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the [air-raid] shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics. He’ll soon be coming here and trying to say this is what we should do on the banking front and this is what our taxes should be. I mean, he’ll soon be trying to take over everything.” On Britain, Germany, the EC, the European Commissioners, and the question of national sovereignty: “I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly”.

Now, it is a well-established convention of British politics that you are allowed to mock the Irish and are positively encouraged to vilify the French (who understand the rules of the game, and react to being called poodles with the most urbane of shrugs), but Germany is another matter. So first there was the official denial, and then the resignation. This being Ridley, however, the “official denial” didn’t relate to the words allegedly spoken but to the level of alcohol in the blood at the time. Count Otto Lambsdorff, the leader of the German Liberal Party, declared that the Trade Secretary “was either drunk … or he could not stomach England’s World Cup defeat at the hands of the Germans.” But Ridley was not known for his interest in soccer, so the initial conclusion, drawn even by some of his Conservative colleagues, was that he must have been plastered. Not so: the editor of
The Spectator assured
the world that during their lunch together Ridley had imbibed only “the smallest glass of wine.” This left unanswered one interesting question: if insulting the Germans while sober is a matter for resignation, is insulting the Germans while drunk a greater or a lesser offense? Would Ridley have survived if it could have been proved that he was sozzled out of his skull? But, no, he was sober, and soon jobless. Tracked down in Budapest on the day
The Spectator
came out, Ridley commented, “This time I’ve really gone and done it.” He
had: two days later, Mrs. Thatcher was tenderly accepting his resignation.

Of course, Mr. Ridley’s words were not just a contextless outburst occasioned by, say, the sight of a dachshund or a corked bottle of German wine from which he had taken only “the smallest glass.” If Mrs. Thatcher officially dissociated herself from his views and his language, her suspicions about economic and monetary union— and her fear that it might lead to a Europe dominated by a powerful, enlarged Germany—were well known. Ridley’s interview, however miscalculated, was part of a long wrangle within the Conservative Party and, more particularly, within the Cabinet. The old argument—which in the sixties and seventies had split both Tories and Labour, leading to bizarre coalitions of Tory right and Labour left—was whether or not to join Europe. The new argument is about what sort of Europeans the British want to be: reluctant, carping, tail-end-Charlie Europeans or bright-eyed, opportunity-grabbing, here-comes-the-sun Europeans. Where do we define ourselves on the spectrum from insularity to federalism, from aloofness to camaraderie? These are not, of course, the sorts of questions that profoundly stir the soul of the average voter; and it was all the stranger to see them dividing the most traditionally united of British political parties, the Conservatives. It was, perhaps, a measure of the extent to which the Party had changed under Mrs. Thatcher from one of pragmatism and fudge to one of ideology and dogma that this should have happened.

It was the question of Europe again, and Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation over it, that brought an astonishingly swift leadership crisis—the first serious one in fifteen years—and the equally swift departure of Mrs. Thatcher. She had, it is true, been unpopular in the opinion polls for some time, and Sir Geoffrey was Deputy Leader of the Party and Leader of the House. But Mrs. Thatcher had toughed her way out of unpopularity before, and Sir Geoffrey’s titles should not be overestimated: Deputy Leader is more akin to Emeritus Professor than to Vice President, while the Leadership of the House is usually given to an amiable but efficient old buffer whose political
time has passed, as it seemingly had for Sir Geoffrey when Mrs. Thatcher humiliatingly sacked him as Foreign Secretary seventeen months previously. He was and is, as they say, “well liked” and “greatly respected,” which means that he is a cautious career politician who has never raised either his voice or the temperature of the room; who in forty years of professional oratory has never threatened the dictionary of quotations; whose honesty has never been questioned and whose loyalty has never been doubted; whose survival has depended on a basic competence, a general inability to give or take offense, and a skill at blending effortlessly with the wallpaper.

If politics were a fairy tale—and sometimes it is—and Mrs. Thatcher were the Wicked Witch, then Sir Geoffrey would be the elderly Bunny Rabbit who every morning loyally fixed her porridge and fetched her shaving water. One day, despite his years of service, the Wicked Witch viciously cut off his ears and whiskers, but still Old Geoff hung about the Gingerbread Cottage, because even though she’d cut off his ears and whiskers, she had given him a nice present of a secondhand waistcoat at the same time, and Geoff thought he looked quite smart in it. Slowly, however, he began to realize that an old waistcoat didn’t quite make up for the loss of his ears and whiskers, and so after sulking for a year and a half he just lolloped off into the forest. Whereupon—and this is the peculiar part of the story—all the other animals, who had admitted that the Witch had a perfect right to cut off his ears and whiskers if she thought it necessary, were up in arms about Old Geoff’s hurt feelings, stormed the Gingerbread Cottage, and flung the Wicked Witch onto the dung heap. Then everybody looked for a moral.

More precisely, what happened was this. In late October, there was a two-day summit in Rome of European Community leaders, at which it was decided that January 1994 would mark the start of the next stage of economic and monetary union; beyond that, a single European currency would be established “in a reasonable time”—which might mean 1998 or 2000, depending on economic performance. Afterward, Mrs. Thatcher in an outburst of acrimony and pique openly dissociated herself from the communiqué: the agree
ment reached was “like cloud-cuckoo land;” sterling was “the most powerful expression of sovereignty you can have;” and “if anyone is suggesting that I would go to Parliament and suggest the abolition of the pound sterling—no!” This was, of course, roughly, if not exactly, what most, if not all, of the others were suggesting. St. Augustine’s cry was “Give me chastity and continency but not yet;” Mrs. Thatcher’s has been “Give me economic and monetary union but not yet.” Some of those close to Mrs. Thatcher put it about that she had been bounced into an agreement by Continental knavery. However, the European leaders had become accustomed to the British Prime Minister’s position as a one-woman awkward squad. As President Mitterrand suavely observed, “It is not for the slowest country to tell the others how quickly they should move to European union.”