Finishing the Job
It was time for an adventure; I’d been stifling indoors for three months, just writing, which can make you forget the world. I’d escape, go to Brighton where our governing party were having their annual conference. I wanted to see their faces. I’d get in amongst them. In four days perhaps a look, a word, anything, might help me steal a clue to what our leaders and their supporters were like. To learn that, I’d have to look them in the eye, smell them, be there. Anyhow, I was sick of seeing history on television. The camera was always aimed at the prepared centre of things: I inclined towards the edges, details, irrelevancies.
Friends said there should be a decompression chamber; the shock of arriving directly amongst them would jar. This seemed good advice. The decompressant would be the south London suburb of Bromley, where I was born and brought up. Bromley (once Macmillan’s constituency) was quintessential Thatcherland. Perched between London and Kent it was affluent, white, Jew-free, lower-middle-class England. If Margaret Thatcher had supporters this was where they lived and shopped.
Bromley had changed in the ten years since I’d fled to London. It was now a minor business centre: glass blocks, reflecting other glass blocks into oblivion, had been built around the High Street.
Walking past the houses of my childhood I noticed how, in an orgy of alteration they had been ‘done up’. One house had a new porch; another double-glazing, ‘Georgian’ windows or a new door with brass fittings. Kitchens had been extended, lofts converted, walls excised, garages inserted.
This ersatz creativity is truly the English passion. Look into the centre of the suburban soul and you see double-glazing. It was DIY they loved in Thatcherland, not self-improvement or culture or food, but property, bigger and better homes complete with every mod-con — the concrete display of hard-earned cash. Display was the game.
On the day I went back, a Saturday, there were manic shoppers in Bromley High Street. It was like edging through the centre of a carnival; it was like Christmas with the same desperation, as the shops were raped. But I was struck by something. These frantic crowds on heat for ‘nests’ of tables, these consumers who camped for two days outside Debenhams before the Christmas sales — they hadn’t voted for acid rain; they hadn’t voted for the police to punish the miners, or for unemployment, or for the SAS, or for the police to enter the BBC and confiscate programmes; they hadn’t voted for the closing down of hospitals. It was simpler than that. Thatcher, rising out of the ashes of the late 1970s unemployment and insecurity, had done this for the suburbs: she’d given them money and she’d freed them from the nightmare of a collective life they’d never wanted. She’d freed them for Do It Yourself.
In Brighton, up around the railway station where the Regency façade doesn’t extend, there were pubs barely altered since the 1930s. There were Christmas lights around the windows and kids with pink hair, sleeveless leather jackets and grown-out mohicans lying in fat ripped armchairs. In the afternoons the pubs, full of the unemployed, were like leisure centres.
Further down, as I walked towards the front, my first sight was of a police helicopter hovering over the beach, lifting what looked like a tin workman’s hut on to the concrete bunker of the conference centre itself. Nearby, an old man with horn-rimmed glasses was holding up a cardboard sign advertising Esperanto. Looking closer at this odd figure I realised he had been my maths teacher in Bromley. He gave me a leaflet which included a number of exercises to translate into Esperanto. (‘Use ballpen, write clearly,’ it instructed. Translate ‘the men sold cakes’ and ‘the teacher sees a boy’ and then ‘send this completed sheet with SAE for free correction’.)
There were police every ten yards and everyone staying in a hotel was interviewed by the police. Even the pier was patrolled; speed boats roared through the water; out to sea a Royal Navy minesweeper circled. Obviously the Tories didn’t want a bunch of Irishmen blowing them out of their beds again; but there was also a strong element of militaristic exhibitionism in all the security. Nevertheless the pier was flourishing. There were two Victorian-style restaurants with furniture in pastel shades and waitresses in Victorian costume. (As it happens, the pier is owned by the Labour council; the other pier, privately owned, is disintegrating in the sea like a drowning chandelier.)
On Tuesday morning I entered the conference hall. It smelled of woodshaving and paint. The organist was playing ‘An English Country Garden’. At the rear of the platform was a light blue wall which resembled an early 1960s BBC test card, consisting of three panels with three eyes in them: the centre eye had embossed on it ‘Leading Britain into the 1990s’. Squarely in the centre of the other two eyes were video screens on which were projected the speakers’ faces and ‘visual aids’: if there was talk of a butter mountain then we would see a cartoon of a mountain made out of butter. At the end of the platform was a Union Jack.
The press sat at six long tables below the edge of the platform along which were yards of fresh flowers. The photographers clustered around the journalists, their cameras on adjustable poles, with lenses as long and thick as marrows.
When I looked up I suddenly saw Thatcher in the flesh for the first time. She was ten yards away in a black two-piece with a wide white collar and white earrings. She looked softer than in her photographs. I could see that her throat and neck had gone; below the golden swept-back hair and mask of make-up she was loose, baggy and wrinkled.
I had spoken to Neil Kinnock on a few occasions and he said to me once that seeing Thatcher at the opening of Parliament last year she’d seemed worn out, withered, a shell. But today neither she nor her government seemed desiccated. Recently I’d been to a party attended by many of the Kinnock camp. They were not happy. It was Kinnock who had not grown in stature with the job; he was too strong to resign, too weak to win, they said; he also knew this. And there was a depressing thing I heard them say again and again about him: he couldn’t cope on television. They would be glad when he resigned after losing the next election. So there was no talk of policy now, just of television; and Thatcher appeared odious on television. Later, I spoke to one of Thatcher’s speechwriters, who said she was not exhausted in the least. Most leaders, he said, took power when they were old and tired. But Thatcher was only fifty-four when she took power in 1979.
There were hymns. The journalists, who had already attended three party conferences this year, were like irritable teenagers, and gazed boredly out at the sanitary, dead hall, only half-full. There were few old women in hats; there were many young people — some young men were without ties, in white T-shirts. The Tories were definitely becoming less patrician, more a mass party of the working class. The journalist next to me was reading a paperback which had a blurb saying: ‘David Profit is a coke dealer with a dream.’ Another young journalist in a smart suit and yellow socks giggled to himself as he scribbled. I went through the conference motions printed in the handbook. Most of them began with: ‘This conference congratulates the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ One motion, from Liverpool, stated that ‘The BBC does not always give fair and balanced views when reporting on Israel and South African affairs.’
Staring at Thatcher and considering her unexhausted and un-English sense of mission, I began to think of something which couldn’t possibly be said of any other successful British politician. It was that in some aspects of herself Thatcher embodied some of Nietzsche’s ideas. I mean the scorn for weakness, the basic belief in inequality and the passion for overcoming. Nietzsche, who hated free thinkers, humanitarians and socialism (which he saw as an ill-applied Christian ideal), also dismissed compassion: it sapped vitality and led to feebleness, dependency and decadence. Compassionate ones opposed the natural and impetuous urges of those sovereign ones, those ‘supermen’ who lived great lives beyond the begging fingers of mediocrities and failures.