Letters from London (18 page)

Apart from the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Green Party candidates, voters in Hampstead and Highgate are offered a choice of four fringe candidates. There is nobody, alas, from the Monster Raving Loony Party, whose catchphrase is “Vote Loony”—You Know It Makes Sense,” and whose leader, Screaming Lord Sutch, when asked about royal protocol if invited to form a government, replied, “Kissing hands sounds a bit too formal for the Loonies. I wonder whether Her Majesty would object to a discreet snog?” But there are other off-beam contenders. There is Anna Hall of the Rainbow Ark Voters Association, who proposes self-government for Hampstead, the striking of local currency, holistic medicine on the National Health Service, phasing out petrol-driven cars by the year 2000, the teaching of reincarnation in schools, the composting of human waste, and the increased planting of fruit and nut trees. There is Captain Rizz of the Captain Rizz Rainbow Connection, whose basic policies are “freeing the airwaves and relaxing licensing laws” as routes to “uncontrolled personal freedom.” He should not be confused with Charles “Scallywag” Wilson, of the Scallywag Rainbow Party, whose more radical program includes the disestablishment of the Church of England, privatization of the Royal Family, abolition of “all laws against genuine eroticism,” plus “original spiritual awakening” for Hampstead and Highgate. This last proposal might bleed a few votes from the Natural Law Party, whose candidate, Richard Prosser, makes the following statement of campaign aims: “Only the infinite organizing power of natural law that upholds the evolution of
the universe can bring fulfillment to everyone” The Natural Law Party came into existence only the day after the election was called, and its 312 candidates are funded by the peripatetic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (currently domiciled in the Netherlands). His main achievement in the campaign has been to persuade his old pupil George Harrison to make his first full-length British concert appearance since the Beatles split up in 1970. Harrison—who incidentally is the same age as John Major—declined to be a candidate, because he “wouldn’t really want the karma of being in Parliament for four years.” However, the ex-Beatle, perhaps remembering the days of his own famous fiscal protest song, ‘Taxman,” urged concertgoers “to get rid of those stiffs.”

O
N SUNDAY, APRIL
5, four days before the election, the main quartet of contenders for the constituency of Hampstead and Highgate met for the last of their public debates. The site was the church hall of St. Andrew’s, Frognal, just off the Finchley Road—one of those grim barns with cut-your-throat lighting, canvas stacking chairs, and paintwork of a green long defunct on color charts. Though the contestants had already met a dozen or so times before, the place was packed with more than two hundred voters. To the outsider (and there was a professor from Stanford videotaping proceedings from the front row for his politics class), it might have seemed that British democracy was in a healthy condition, full of a zeal for debate, characterized by sage yet skeptical listening and a mutual respect among the postulants for power. In fact, the evening (and its predecessors) proved only that Hampstead and Highgate is sui generis as a constituency, one of the last remnants of how things used to be. Twenty or thirty years ago a Parliamentary candidate would expect to have a public meeting every night of the campaign, and would thicken his or her skin in the sacred rough-and-tumble of a heckling hall. Nowadays, candidates may get away with only a couple of such meetings, where they preach their wisdom to three dogs and a monomaniac. In the constituency immediately to the south of Hampstead, the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St. Pancras, not a single public meeting
was held throughout the campaign. Television is where debates take place, and local issues are accordingly diminished.

The Green Party candidate, Steven Games, was tweedy, passionate, and global. “We are losing species at the rate of one a minute,” he proclaimed, and was himself treated with the sort of amused interest reserved for an unlikely, endangered animal. When he seriously suggested, “Your vote for the Greens will
frighten
the others into taking action,” there were indulgent chuckles. When he invited those present to “go around your home this evening and you’ll find nothing, or almost nothing, that was made in this country—perhaps clothes-pegs,” a man in the front row heckled with infinite politeness, “This jacket was made in England.” Finally, the Green was the only candidate to use the word
please
. This was a striking novelty. Politicians frequently “urge” us to do things (e.g., vote for them), and sometimes, when in a tight corner, “ask” us to do things (e.g., vote for them). But until this night I’d never heard a politician say “please.” Mr. Games ended his speech,
“Please
, for the first time in your lives you have the chance to vote Green,” and was rewarded with sympathetic applause.

The Liberal Democrat, Dr. Wrede, is a tall, good-looking gynecologist, able to project to the back of the hall without a microphone. You might well trust him with your uterus, but trusting him with your vote was more complicated. His set ten-minute speech was clear, ardent, and transparently well-intentioned. But he made you realize that voting for the Liberal Democrats would be rather like deliberately choosing a night of amateur theatricals when you already had tickets for the West End. What he had going for him was the glow of political innocence, to which voters genuinely respond; though it would be a mistake to think of the Liberals more generally as innocent. Just as a two-party domination of power over many decades can make both parties cynical and manipulative, so a decades-long exclusion from power can equally mildew the soul. A party with a small number of seats (no matter how many supporters) cannot go on indefinitely offering itself up as the last best hope for the country. And so Dr. Wrede zealously put the case for proportional representation, and spoke warmly of STV, which some thought a television
company and others an unwelcome affliction of the nether parts until he explained it as the Single Transferable Vote. Proportional representation is, it seems, the salvation of the country; and the fact that it would also be the salvation of the Liberal Democrats as a party is merely a happy coincidence. The recession is so deep, Dr. Wrede argued, the crisis in government so acute, that it can be solved only by “a stable relationship between two parties,” which in turn depends upon the stronger party’s agreeing to electoral reform. It is, admittedly, a ballsy approach: things are so bad in our country that you should give the balance of power for the foreseeable future to a party that hasn’t held office for more than seventy years, and whose last experience of coalition, the Lib-Lab pact of 1977, resulted in its being outmaneuvered by the larger party and ending up with nothing for something.

At one point, Dr. Wrede, seeking to explain rather ponderously the advantages of PR, pointed out, “There are ten people in the front row of this hall. It’s as if these four could outvote these six, whereas under PR these six or seven could outvote these three or four.” Oliver Letwin could not help observing, “It’s strange how in every one of the meetings we’ve had there are always ten people in the front row.” Letwin was the most professional politician on show in the hall, the one who spoke fluently of macroeconomics and used ugly words like
incentify—
factors that probably worked both for and against him. A dapper, quick-witted, and far from predictable Tory, he was also the only contender on the platform to suffer heckling, much of it vigorous and some of it sequential. Letwin: “Conservatives believe in the transfer of power to the people.” Heckler One: “Which people?” Heckler Two: “The Rothschilds.” His views on housing were interrupted by loud cries of “Cardboard boxes!” But his technique under fire was impressive. There was the direct approach: “In housing, and this is where you’d better not barrack me, because what I’m going to say will probably become Labour Party policy as well…” But there was also the more effective feint-and-hit-back method: “We do bear some of the responsibility for the recession.” Hecklers One to Ten: “All of it, all of it.” Letwin then admits what he reckons the extent of
the responsibility to have been: that of reflating too much in 1987. Labour, he points out, at that time wanted to reflate much more.

While the others speak, Glenda Jackson sits with almost alarming stillness, perhaps a relaxation technique learned in the theater. No anxious shuffling around, no couldn’t-disagree-more scribbling on a pad in front of her. Asked earlier in the campaign by
The Wall Street Journal
why she didn’t wear makeup, she replied, “It would be a great disappointment for people if they could no longer say I looked as if I was dressed by oxfam. I would hate to disappoint people.” But tonight she is not dressed by oxfam, and looks neat and crisp in black jacket, white collar, gray skirt, and black stockings. Her speaking style is equally crisp, and, needless to say, the microphone is unnecessary: “I’m not showing off, but if I can’t be heard, who can?” she is, of course, not heckled: In british politics you rarely heckle women, and stars not at all. She also chooses her own broad-brush terms for debate: “I don’t want to get bogged down in the endless exchange of details and statistics.” She prefers statements like “This election is about the struggle for the nation’s soul” (again, we are at a crucial moment in britain’s history), and “we are eight years from the twenty-first century and sometimes one sees things in this country which make one think we’re living in the eighteenth century.” She is straightforwardly moral in her approach: “What I grew up to regard as vices are now regarded as virtues. Greed is no longer greed, it is self-reliance. Selfishness is no longer selfishness, It is an entrepreneurial spirit.” She is in favor of “decency, a sense of justice, fairness.” Who would not be? Well, the Tories: “What we have seen is indecency, a sense of injustice and unfairness.” Her stance is clear, ethical, patriotic—the political equivalent of good plain home cooking.

But Glenda Jackson is not, as Letwin pointed out, “cuddly;” and if her firmness and moral passion are often applauded, there are also times when she strikes a slight chill. She begins, for instance, by describing how she first put forward her candidacy to the local party and was asked, inevitably, “why anyone should vote for an actress.” Her reply was and remains “Because before I am an actress, I am a woman, and in any twelve months of the year a woman touches
more bases than any male MP. We are doctor, nurse, cook, housekeeper, decorator…. I am extremely proud of being a woman.” Apart from putting off the male-decorator vote, there is something about such unadorned thinking—vote for me if you, too, are proud of being a woman—that verges on the patronizing. When the debate shifts to a matter of serious local interest—how best to govern London, and especially what to do about the traffic jams and exhausted public-transport system—this ought to give her the advantage in debate. The Tories abolished the Greater London Council in 1986, considering it an adventure playground for junior Trotskyites, but most Londoners are in favor of having some electable authority responsible for overall control of the city. Labour’s plan, Glenda explains, is for a new Greater London Authority. They haven’t exactly worked out how to elect it yet; all they know is that it won’t be on a winner-take-all system, and the resulting statutory body will by law consist half of women and half of men. As for solving the traffic chaos, there will be extra funding for public transport, priority “green bus routes,” and a determination to “get us out of our cars and onto the buses.” This does not get a warm response. Labour’s moral passion here shades too quickly into We Know Best. After a decade of Mrs. Thatcher’s bossiness, voters are less keen to welcome any bossiness from the other side. A laid-down 50 percent of female delegates rather than, say, a guaranteed minimum? Getting us out of our cars and onto the buses? For most people, one indicator that they have got ahead in life is the ability to use their own car rather than public transport, and getting stuck in a traffic jam may even, however obscurely, be considered a modern democratic right. Though the rival Tory plan for a Ministry of Transport for London was perceived as an election dodge, Letwin’s personal, nonmanifesto idea for a toll on cars going into London, the proceeds from which would fund the public-transport network, was given interested consideration. What was sniffed out in Glenda’s approach was a certain strand of Labour authoritarianism. It reminded me that my own deeply unrepresentative poll of my cleaning woman had elicited the answer that though she would probably end up voting for Glenda Jackson, she found her “madamy.”

I
N THE WIDER CAMPAIGN
, nothing very dramatic happened in the first ten days, except for the normal rituals of preening, display, and aggression, of interest only to the political anthropologist. Then—as if to confirm that the politicians were incapable of igniting things by themselves—a sudden and spectacular row broke out over a four-minute TV election commercial. It was made for the Labour Party by Mike Newell, director of
Dance with a Stranger
, and was, in his words, “a nice little sentimental weepy.” Its subject was the state of the National Health Service; its message, that under the Tories the system was so underfunded that patients were sometimes forced against their natural inclinations into paying for private treatment. Like the best commercials—and unlike most political broadcasts—it told its story in images, without voice-over. Two small girls, each with the same complaint of “glue ear,” go to the same crowded hospital; both need surgery, and their mothers are told of a nine-month wait for the necessary operation to insert plastic grommets. (You can’t, of course, convey such concepts as “glue ear” and “grommets” in a wordless film; but within twenty-four hours of its showing, most people in the land were speaking familiarly of such matters.) One mother pays to have her daughter treated privately, the other waits for the nine months to elapse; one child quickly recovers, the other continues to endure pain, becoming both withdrawn and aggressive at school. While the second child suffers, the mother of the first is seen contentedly signing a check for two hundred pounds. The story ends with a freeze-frame of the two girls in upper and lower bunk beds; superimposed is the slogan “It’s their future—Don’t let it end in tiers.”