So yes, as expected, there was complacency, indifference, triumphalism in the faces I examined as they sang ‘King of glory, king of peace, I will love thee’. But they were not a party rotten with the assumptions of power, slow, bored, eager to dispense a little late and guilty generosity. No, because Thatcher is a revolutionary in a democracy; and she is tireless and will not rest until England, Britain even, is made in her image. In that sense she has a totalitarian aspect. I’d often wondered why, after nearly ten years in power, and with negligible opposition and a cooperative media, the Conservatives were still so angry. It was, I could see now, looking at Thatcher, that there was not a scrap of liberalism in her; everything had to be as she wanted it; the job had to be finished.
At last the Mayor of Brighton, Patricia Hawkes, started to speak. There were banalities. Thatcher stared at her, blinking at a tremendous rate, as if Hawkes had started to read from the Kama Sutra. Later I realised Thatcher wasn’t listening at all; this was her serious and concentrating look. But Patricia Hawkes, a Labour mayor, had good courage. It was the sentence ‘power must bring responsibility and compassion’ that first had eyes opening and then widening in the hall of the Worker’s Party. Hawkes hit her stride as the audience listened carefully. ‘Think not just of those with wealth, but those living in bedsitting squalor, those waiting and hoping for a job, and our pensioners living close to the margin.’ Now they knew they’d been slapped in the face, squirted in the eye, in the opening minutes of their rally, their celebration of power. They jeered and brayed, they slow-handclapped and yelled and their anger was genuine. The giggling journalist beside me was ecstatic; he said it would be the only dissent all week, apart from when they’d abuse the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. That did indeed seem likely: Hurd’s combination of brains, breeding and a refusal to vote for the reintroduction of hanging would not stimulate the dull palate of the Worker’s Party.
That evening I went off eagerly to my first fringe meeting, to be addressed by John Biffen. The room, which had a plaque on the wall saying ‘Paganini played here, 9 December 1831’, was full of men in dark woollen suits. Biffen, a mild-looking man, a doctor perhaps, disappointed the audience with his good sense. People attending the conference craved phrases to applaud or jeer; they wanted a Tom Jones concert, not a reading of ‘Dover Beach’. Later in the week I’d come and hear Enoch Powell in this room. Perhaps the temperature would rise then. Perhaps Wolverhampton’s clearest thinker would earn a plaque on the wall, too.
Biffen said that Kinnock reminded him of Gaitskell, heaving the Labour Party towards the centre of British politics. The left of the party would soon be irrelevant. The fact that Benn, Livingstone and Heffer opposed Kinnock was good publicity for him, this is how he would prove himself. What a shame, Biffen added, that the press caricatured the Labour Party, making it difficult for interested people to see it clear. Biffen then warned the audience: ‘We are a party which favours the up and running. But we do not want to be seen as the party which made a country fit for yuppies.’ People started to leave. He went on: ‘We have to be a thinking party. Where are we weak? The NHS is underfunded.’ Finally, after saying the Poll Tax wasn’t worth it in terms of social division, he talked of the Soviet Union, saying that in an altered politics of Europe, Russia would cease to be a global power and become more of a European one.
Next morning I went back to the conference hall. Outside were a middle-aged couple with a banner saying ‘Our children were murdered — bring back capital punishment’. To my pleasure, Cecil Parkinson was speaking. Clearly the Empress of Albion’s favourite son, when he performed the audience was enthusiastic, swooning with forgiveness. As Parkinson spoke I parked myself quickly in a spare seat beneath him and started to read, in this choice position, Sara Keays’s book concerning their … relationship. I almost wrote ‘affair’; but it lasted twelve years, as she repeats and repeats. The Empress had wanted to appoint him Foreign Secretary before the story broke; maybe he would become Chancellor even now.
As — above me — Parkinson announced the privatisation of coal, I was reading of how he and his cronies, in the struggle to survive, had publicly smeared Keays. Jeffrey Archer (who once asked a friend of mine if he thought he, Archer, would win the Nobel Prize for Literature), was then Deputy Chairman of the Party. He said of the anguished book, which Keays published herself: ‘Not one of the twenty-seven major publishing houses in Britain wanted to touch it.’
In 1983 Tebbit accused Keays of reneging on an undertaking that she wouldn’t publicly talk about Parkinson. In 1988 Tebbit and his ghostwriter Michael Trend, busying themselves in the highest form of self-reflection, autobiography, and learning quite quickly, I am sure, that collectively they lacked the essential gift of reflection, repeated this claim (in my uninterfered-with version), about an undertaking which was never made.
I read of how in 1981 Parkinson failed to tell the police where his car was parked when it was broken into outside his lover’s house. He also ensured that Keays, who’d been selected to stand as a candidate in Bermondsey, was stymied by him in her efforts to become an MP. Another time Parkinson rang Keays and accused her of trying to blackmail him into marrying her; he generally abused her. His wife was listening on the other line.
I wondered, as Parkinson pledged his commitment to nuclear energy, if any of this still mattered. Part of the failure of the Labour Party is its inability to mislead, to lie, practise treachery and be generally guileful. For a reason I cannot fathom, it appears to believe in honesty and plain speaking, democracy and fairness. But integral to the Tories’ vision of Britain, articulated by Peregrine Worsthorne later in this revealing week, was that a future ruling élite would dutifully have to be an example to the lower orders. The price of omnipotence would be purity.
It was becoming apparent that the Conservatives resented what they saw as Labour’s exclusive grip on the moral life. It wasn’t enough to have seemed to have generated wealth, the Empress wanted to be seen to be good; she wanted to be liked now, loved even. I could see an ethical edifice being constructed, but it would be difficult for the Empress to pull it off: the only thing I never saw beneath the golden hair, as I sat looking at her blinking away hour after hour, was the slightest hint or possibility of that vagrant quality — love.
After Parkinson I left the hall and walked along the front. I would take in something less taxing this lunchtime, something that might turn out to be a little weird. I chose the Union of Muslim Organisations.
In the meeting room, which was virtually empty, I sat next to an Indian who once owned five restaurants in Brighton, though he only had one now. His complaint was that the immigration laws made it impossible for him to get staff. He wouldn’t recruit British Asians, they were useless, the hours didn’t suit them; grateful, freshly arrived Bangladeshis were just the job. He was very worried for the future of the corner shop, he whispered, as the meeting started.
Douglas Hurd had failed to turn up, but he’d sent two men from the Home Office to represent him. Like many other Tory men they had pink faces, white shirts with pink stripes, and fat bellies. Here amongst mostly Asians, they were on their best behaviour, especially as the Imam of the local mosque, in white cap and beard, started to recite from the Koran. Another Englishman was carrying a piece of quiche on a plate; as the Imam chanted the verses the Englishman stood stock still like a living sculpture in the centre of the room.