But I didn’t locate them. As soon as I arrived a young Tory, looking like an estate agent, hurried over to me, adrenalin high, and said: ‘You don’t look like a typical mindless right-wing idiot. What are you doing here?’
‘Snooping around.’
‘What for?’
I searched for a reply.
I said: ‘I want to know what is going to energise this party. What it is they’re going to offer the electorate at the next couple of elections.’
‘Oh that’s easy. We’re going to privatise everything. That’s obvious. The Health Service will go eventually. That’ll take a long time.’
‘What else?’
‘There’s the environment. But Tories don’t really give a shit about that. The important thing is the moral mission. Authority, deference, respect, that’s what we want.’
What I saw in his face, and in the faces of his young friends who had also gathered around me to help explain the future, was power, arrogance, supreme confidence. None of them doubted for a moment that their party would win the next election. They could do whatever they wanted, and with the compliant media they now had, nothing could frustrate them. Why should the slightest scepticism, doubt, or lack of nerve affect them? Labour might huff and puff over the intricacies of its defence policy but it was all irrelevant; the Left handed Britain over to Thatcher long ago and, that night, it seemed unlikely they would win it back for a long time.
I left the drinks party thinking I’d never see that particular Tory ever again. But the next day, before I was to go and hear Peregrine Worsthorne perform at a fringe meeting and talk about authority, discipline and its relation to the servant problem, I did see the Tory again, much to my surprise.
There was a demonstration across the road from the conference centre, a place now referred to as the Island, or the Island of the Mighty. About a thousand people, most of them young, had gathered; in their tight jeans and knitted sweaters and DMs, most of them, boys and girls alike, with long hair, they chanted and waved a variety of banners for ‘Troops Out’ and ‘Stop Animal Experiments’. In the crowd I noticed an older man with a handpainted sign, carefully done: on it he’d painted two words, one beneath the other: She Lies. As I was looking at the demonstration I glanced across the road and there he was, the Tory with the soul and suit of an estate agent.
He was leaning as far as he could over the crash barrier outside the hall, looking towards the demonstration. And he had extracted his wallet from his inside pocket; he was waving it at the kids, who were virtually his contemporaries, waving and screaming. Around him, other Tories, bored with the conference, too, or emerging from a debate, quickly returned to the hall to collect Union Jacks which, in a mass, they fluttered and poked at the kids.
As the demonstration dispersed, I noticed an old couple with a banner saying ‘Justice for Pensioners’. As a group of Tories walked past them, one of the group, no spring chicken himself, chucked a handful of change at the pensioner’s feet.
For Worsthorne the hall was full. Tonight it was an upmarket crowd, with Lord Weidenfeld, Paul Johnson and the editor of the Spectator in the audience. The tone of the evening was exultancy in the fact that Worsthorne, unlike most of the cabinet, had the guts to articulate those things which others would only admit in whispers. Earlier there had been, for example, Lawson’s ‘I am in favour of wealth being passed from generation to generation,’ and Baker’s talk of the ‘civilising mission’ and ‘discipline’. But nothing like this, nothing so plain, so gloriously reactionary.
Worsthorne’s argument was that England’s egalitarian age had now, thank God, finally passed. The moment of its passing was the crushing of the miners’ strike — a historic victory for the Tories. Britain would be, once more, a country in which wealth — property — would be inherited. This passing of new wealth to children would no longer be a privilege entirely of the very rich. Many of those who passed on this wealth would be yuppies; they would be vulgar, which was not surprising in the age of the common man where there were no established criteria for behaviour. In a few generations these people would gain noble values. But with the restoration of strict hierarchy the ruling class would once more exercise a civilising influence on the lower orders. Others would want to imitate them in manners, speech, education. The freshly re-established and confident ruling class would be the custodians of values and institutions.
The woman in front of me was trembling with excitement at this. ‘He’s right, he’s right!’ she repeated. ‘Bring back snobbery!’
After he finished his lecture and responded to questions, Worsthorne talked of the importance of the middle class having servants. Not ‘helps’ which were usually other middle-class people — the middle class merely educating each other — but lower-class people who would be cooks, gardeners, butlers, and would find working in great houses a civilising influence.
That night, as I strolled through Brighton and saw the kids skateboarding in the deserted shopping centre — most of Brighton seemed deserted for the conference, as people had gone away to avoid it — I thought of them polishing pepperpots in the houses of the cabinet, some of whose children were heroin addicts. But I didn’t want to think about any of this. Drinking now, I collapsed in one of the older hotels and watched Tories meeting in the bar before they went off to Thatcher’s birthday party.
One woman wore a light blue sparkling mohair jumper; a man in evening dress wore trousers far too short and scruffy day shoes; another woman wore a turquoise sequined dress with a great Marks and Spencer overcoat on top. The young people wore cheap clothes and had cheap haircuts; they were brittle and gauche. I could see that for people like Worsthorne a Tory meritocracy wasn’t enough. You didn’t want the overthrow of egalitarianism, a new economic dynamic, the primacy of the market, the entire Thatcher miracle itself merely giving birth to a reinvigorated ruling class composed of Norman Tebbits, the kind of people who took out their wallets in public and thought Burke was a term of abuse. No; the Tory Party had barely started on its road to reestablishing former inequalities. Money wasn’t enough; next would come a confident, rich establishment with power and influence and even better — authority, served by a respectful working class. At least in the hysterical, forced, undiluted atmosphere at the party conference that was the idea.
Tonight, how would I celebrate Thatcher’s birthday? I hadn’t been invited to the ball; I’d go to the Zap Club instead, which promised Frenzee and pure wild Acid House.
I walked past the crowds of police towards the beach. At random, cars were being stopped and searched. Brighton’s Zap Club was apparently well known in London. The kids would go to Brighton on the last train and return home early in the morning on the milk train. The club was on the edge of the beach, in two tunnels bored under the road, neither of them much bigger than railway carriages. In the entrance was a small shop selling badges, T-shirts, paper fans. Further in, under fluorescent lighting, the people dancing wore white, some of the men with red scarves over their heads. Other men had long curly hair, which looked permed, and they wore vividly patterned shorts like American tourists. (In fact the whole style originated in Ibiza and other Spanish holiday resorts where you dress lightly and brightly.)
The long passages inside the tunnels were painted like terracotta Egyptian friezes, on the floor were stencilled emblems from the 1960s — the word ‘love’ was prominent.