Letters From London

  ON 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 s
omething 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.”

  IN 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.”

  The film was an excellent piece of agitprop, making its point economically while shamelessly playing on our emotions. Conservatives had known before the election that they were vulnerable on health; William Waldegrave, the Health Secretary, had written to national newspaper editors pointing out that “the exploitation of individual cases where the NHS is alleged to have failed a patient is the preferred method of campaigning by Labour.” He further expressed the hope that the press would not “allow this new and ruthless form of health campaigning to pass unchallenged,” adding, “It would be another ratchet down in electoral standards if it did.” Such heavy-handed advice betokened high anxiety. Newspapers like to be ethically outraged on their own behalf, without ministerial prompting; and in the event, their interpretations of the need to “challenge” the Labour broadcast varied. How, indeed, might you “challenge” it if you wished to do so? You might, for instance, condemn the exploitative use of children, even if only child actors, in political commercials—the Conservative Party chairman, Chris Patten, for instance, called the film “tacky” (he hadn’t seen it at the time, but that was neither here nor there). Or you might assess the narrative plausibility of the commercial—investigate the frequency of glue ear, the average waiting time for an operation, the effects of such a wait on the child’s psychological condition, the cost of private treatment—and then decide whether or not to challenge the broadcast. This is, of course, fairly pedantic, though some newspapers followed such a line, and seemed to establish the general truth of the film, except that the cost of the operation was more likely to be between £500 and £750 (the £200 check probably being just for the surgeon’s fee), thus making Labour’s point even better. But newspapers do not, on the whole, operate in this fashion. The question they asked in response to a political row about a fictionalized infant was depressingly basic: Who is she? And “she” turned out (very quickly, with the help of a leak) to be five-year-old Jennifer Bennett of Faversham in Kent, whose father had written to the Shadow Minister for Health, Robin Cook, to complain about his daughter’s laggardly treatment. But the newspapers also discovered that reality is messier than a TV commercial. For if Jennifer’s father was a disgruntled floating voter, his wife was a Conservative, and her father turned out to be a former Tory mayor of Faversham and friend of the sitting MP. Worse, he had faxed the Conservative Central Office more than a week before the broadcast warning them of Labour’s plans and disagreeing with his son-in-law’s interpretation of events.

  The War of Jennifer’s Ear, as it swiftly became known, dominated the election coverage for several days. Jennifer Bennett was on the front page of every paper, even The Times; the family was endlessly doorstepped; the grandfather, in a moment of pure soap, even burst in on a TV interview with his son-in-law. “Is it true?” had quickly lost out to “Who is she?” which in turn gave way to “Who leaked what?” Did Kinnock’s press secretary divulge the girl’s name? Did Waldegrave’s office put the surgeon who conducted the operation in touch with the Daily Express? And was Jennifer’s case just a simple administrative error, as was now claimed, rather than a direct result of under-funding? And so on. Waldegrave stupidly compared Newell’s film to a piece of prewar Nazi propaganda. Patten claimed the film showed a “colossal error of judgment” on Kinnock’s part and questioned Kinnock’s “fitness to hold any public office.” Cook naturally called for Waldegrave’s resignation on the ground that the Tories had led the press to “the door of the Bennett family and caused them that distress.”

  The Liberal Democrats watched the scuffle from a high moral stool. Labour cursed itself for not having researched the Bennett family more carefully in the first place. The Tories screamed and shouted and threw bagfuls of dust in an attempt to obscure the film’s original campaigning point. But their pained yelps indicated how vulnerable they felt. The British are proud of their National Health Service and react proprietorially if they think it is being messed around with. No one would claim that under Labour waiting lists would be abolished or politically embarrassing cases would never arise. But Newell’s film and the subsequent War of Jennifer’s Ear did successfully illuminate one fundamental question. Given that two patients suffering from the same condition may within the existing health system be treated at different speeds, and that the determining factor in that speed is the patient’s bank account, does this differentiation indicate, as the Tories would maintain, that the citizen has a phi
losophically desirable freedom of choice in medical treatment as in so many other spheres of life under the liberty-loving Conservatives, or is it, as the Labour Party claims, straightforward proof of a two-tier system in which priority of treatment is based not on medical but on financial factors? And which party is more content that this should be so? The British do not, on the whole, like the intrusion of morality into politics, but when Labour’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, declared the whole case a “moral” one, and when Neil Kinnock cried, “A sin, a sin,” they were on the safest political ground.

  A WEEK BEFORE ELECTION DAY, I went canvassing with my friend and neighbor Lisanne, a political scientist and resolute Labour supporter. Badged with our red-and-yellow Glenda Jackson lapel stickers, we addressed ourselves to nearby Chetwynd Road, NW5, a narrow, hilly street from whose highest point you look across to Hampstead Heath (or at least to the big NHS hospital beside it). Originally, Chetwynd Road must have had a certain terraced elegance, but since its discovery by motorists as one of the few east-west cross routes in this part of town, it has become a clogged rat run. Traffic used to barrel along here as fast as it could go, until a couple of years ago Camden Council decided to put speed bumps in the road. This measure is known in planning jargon as “traffic-calming,” but it is, of course, also tremendously traffic-irritating, as drivers roar between the bumps, then stamp on the brakes so as not to lose the underside of their chassis.