Letters From London

  All this, though, is politically irrelevant. However impressive the feat of arms, its true and lasting significance for the British was as a domestic metaphor. Politics has a presiding rhetoric of “fighting and winning,” which we citizens are rarely able to compute when it comes to matters of trade balance and interest rates. And when we can compute it—as with “the battle against unemployment” or “the fight against crime”—we always seem to be losing. So a clear and televised success in war (especially when for years your soldiers have not been getting a result in Northern Ireland) encourages the belief that other problems are equally soluble, other victories assured, and that Mrs. Thatcher is “a winner.” Hence subsequent chapters of The Downing Street Years are called “Disarming the Left” and “Mr Scargil’s Insurrection.” (Mr. Scargill was not a guerrilla leader in the Yorkshire Dales but a trade-union leader.) And hence the explicit linkage Mrs. Thatcher made immediately after the war in a speech in Cheltenham: “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8000 miles away.” In her view, “without any prompting from us, people saw the connection between the resolution we had shown in economic policy and that demonstrated in the handling of the Falklands crisis.” “People,” here, as elsewhere in the book, is not a generic term referring to the British but a specific term denoting those who supported Mrs. Thatcher. Her vision is ruthlessly monocular.

  She can see, for instance, that she was the most feted and fetishized of modern Prime Ministers but not that she was also the most loathed. She was loathed in a personal as well as in a political way, since her perceived character—domineering, mean-spirited, divisive, unheeding—seemed to inform and infect her policies. That character is amply on display here. She is contemptuous of Tory wets and Tory grandees. She is contemptuous of the Tory tradition that she supplanted, referring at one point to the “thirty-year experiment” of “socialism” in postwar Britain: as far as one can follow her chronology, this clearly includes the Conservative governments of Heath, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, and Eden, and possibly that of Churchill. Special spite is reserved for two of her main adjutants, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, neither of whom could finally stomach her. Howe’s resignation speech prompted a challenge to her leadership, ensuring, to her eyes, that “from this point on [he] would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skillful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own.” As for the real Opposition, try this for superciliousness: “Mr. Kinnock, in all his years as Opposition leader, never let me down. Right to the end, he struck every wrong note.”

  Monocularity at home, cecity abroad. Alan Clark reports a comment that Mrs. Thatcher made to the civil servant Frank Cooper two years after she had been made leader of the Opposition. “Must I do all this international stuff?” she asked, and when he replied, “You can’t avoid it,” she pulled a face. Cooper also recalled that “during that period she and [Cooper] had met Reagan and Carter, and she was astonished at how stupid they were. ‘Can they really dispose of all that power?’ etc.” She grew to enjoy motorcade acclaim, of course, and the banquets chez Mitterrand, while never seeming to suspect that when you are applauded in Eastern Europe it does not necessarily mean more than a public snub to the local leaders. She is sure that “the beliefs and policies which I… pioneered in Britain” have helped “to remould world affairs.” She cannot conceive that the Falklands expedition might be viewed elsewhere not as an early start on the new world order but as the last twitch of an imperial past. She is much happier with distant sheikhs than with European democrats. She imagines that her obstructive, nagging, bullying attitude to Europe was taken as a sign that Britain was walking tall once more. She thinks that if you insult people you gain their respect.

  In a TV series made to coincide with the publication of The Downing Street Years, she came up with the following subtly graded observation: ‘There’s a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people: this is our characteristic. There’s not a great strand of equity or fairness in Europe—they’re out to get as much as they can. That’s one of those enormous differences.” For the bicentennial of the French Revolution-whose “abstract ideas,” she notes, were “formulated by vain intellectuals”—she gave an interview to Le Monde from which she proudly quotes: “Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution … [they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity… [we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King… it was not the sort of Revolution that France’s was…. ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’—they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.” How strange that all those poor benighted foreigners still harp on 1789, rather than 1688, as their symbolic date. But how equally strange that the English revolution Mrs. Thatcher chooses to cite is that of 1688 rather than the much more famous one earlier in the century, which also led to Parliament’s exerting its will over the King, though in a somewhat different way—by cutting off his head, just as they were to do in France. Le Monde, as if humoring the deranged, headlined its interview “LES DROITS DE L’HOMME N’ONT PAS COMMENCE EN FRANCE,” NOUS DÉCLARE MME. THATCHER.

  The Downing Street Years is not, of course, a “book” in the normal sense of the word. Top politicians generally have an arm’s-length acquaintance with their own language: they only truly mean what other people help them say. A speech needs speechwriters (Mrs. Thatcher used the dramatist Ronald Millar and the novelist Ferdinand Mount, thereby perhaps according “vain intellectuals” their true employment); and a book needs book writers—ghosts, researchers, anecdote trufflers, document sifters, prose scrubbers. This shouldn’t strike us as either shocking or dishonest. Mrs. Thatcher’s book is authentic in its public pomposities, its regurgitated speeches and documents, its bulging acronyms. It is authentic, too, in its coy sartorial annotations—“I had worn a simple cotton dress and flat shoes to visit the refugee camp”—and glutinous domestic dues paying: “Being prime minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend.”

  Finally, it is authentic in being a work of colossal, if unsurprising, vanity. Over the decade or more of her rule, Mrs. Thatcher went from Prime Ministerial to Presidential to regal—a progression that was marked both in her language (growing use of the royal plural) and in her frocks. Her later official garments, for such outings as the Lord Mayor’s banquet, increasingly conjured up references to Queen Elizabeth—the First, that is, the powerful one, not the mere Second. Yet while settling the great affairs of state for us she also had an unsleeping eye for the dandruff on our collar, the soup stain on our tie: “Every time I came back from some spotlessly maintained foreign city my staff and the then Secretary of State for the Environment knew that they could expect a stiff lecture on the litter-strewn streets of parts of London.” Reality does not always break in (otherwise, a connection between the state of the streets and the abolition of the Greater London Council might have occurred), but the performance in the book is of a piece with Mrs. Thatcher’s performance in real life. It is a justification and a continuation of her rule, as well as a means of making various jolly millions. It also has the sort of relentless presence that her Premiership had. Every so often, you have to shake your head and remind yourself that just because a book is heavy this doesn’t make it history. Indeed, even among ardent Thatcherites there are different gospels. When the Prime Minister is taking advice from her colleagues during the leadership election of 1990, the procession of traitors and hypocrites is momentarily enlivened by the arrival of Alan Clark. Mrs. Thatcher records:

  Even melodramas have intervals, even Macbeth has the porter’s scene. I now had a short talk with Alan Cl
ark, Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, and a gallant friend, who came round to lift my spirits with the encouraging advice that I should fight on at all costs. Unfortunately he went on to argue that I should fight on even though I was bound to lose because it was better to go out in a blaze of glorious defeat than to go gentle into that good night. Since I had no particular fondness for Wagnerian endings, this lifted my spirits only briefly. But I was glad to have someone unambiguously on my side even in defeat.

  Here is Alan Clark’s account of the meeting, from his Diaries:

  I went down the stairs and rejoined the group outside her door. After a bit Peter said, “I can just fit you in now—but only for a split second, mind.”

  She looked calm, almost beautiful. “Ah, Alan …”

  “You’re in a jam.”

  “I know that.”

  “They’re all telling you not to stand, aren’t they?”

  “I’m going to stand. I have issued a statement.”

  “That’s wonderful. That’s heroic. But the Party will let you down.”

  “I am a fighter.”

  “Fight, then. Fight right to the end, a third ballot if you need to. But you lose.”

  There was quite a little pause.

  “It’d be so terrible if Michael [Heseltine] won. He would undo everything I have fought for.”

  “But what a way to go! Unbeaten in three elections, never rejected by the people. Brought down by nonentities!”

  “But Michael… as Prime Minister.”

  “Who the fuck’s Michael? No one. Nothing. He won’t last six months. I doubt if he’d even win the Election. Your place in history is towering…”

  Outside, people were doing that maddening trick of opening and shutting the door, at shorter and shorter intervals.

  “Alan, it’s been so good of you to come in and see me….”

  Mrs. Thatcher creates a comic interlude, ponderously narrated, in which she demonstrates statesmanlike gravitas. Clark sketches a tragic episode, lightly told, in which he is the passionate truth teller. It’s hard not to prefer Clark’s version, even if it is just as self-serving. (Look, I’m the sort of chap who isn’t afraid to say “fuck” in front of Maggie.) Future historians will not be able to avoid the Thatcher memoirs, any more than those who lived under her for so long could avoid her glowering, lowering presence. Had she been more of a Trollopian, she might have known to give the The Dawning Street Years its rightful, inescapable subtitle: “She Knew She Was Right.”

  November 1993

  12

  TDF: The World Chess Championship

  It is a most curious form of theater: austere, minimalist, post-Beckettian. Two neatly dressed men crouch attentively over a small table against an elegant gray and beige set. One, tall, gangly, pallid, and bespectacled, occupies a high-backed, fat-armed oxblood club chair; the other, shorter, compacter, and browner, has a low-backed black-leather number with chrome base and legs, of a design you might call Moscow Bauhaus. Each is fiercely possessive of his chair. They are happy enough to change costume, and on alternate matinees they swap sides of the table; but they always take their chairs with them.

  The only other visible characters are a pair of older gentlemen who sit at the rear right of the stage, observing their juniors like some mirroring subplot. None of the four speaks; nevertheless, the theatergoer’s ears are filled with dialogue. A third pair of actors, unseen, high up in a glazed box at the back of the upper circle, guess at the thoughts of the characters onstage. This earphone-filling game of hazard and prediction provides the main interest, since the visible action is limited and repetitive. Occasionally, the two protagonists will

  make slight movements with their hands, then immediately scribble notes to themselves. Otherwise, there are only exits and entrances during these four to six-hour matinees: one character will suddenly stand up as if offended and depart stage left, the gangly one tiptoeing away ganglily, the compact one bustling away compactly. Every so often, in an audacious device, both may be offstage at the same time. But always the disembodied voices continue in the ear, assessing, theorizing, imagining; anxious, confident, exultant, apologetic.

  Skeptics maintain that live chess is as much fun as watching paint dry. Ultraskeptics reply: Unfair to paint. Yet for three months the cheapest seats at the Savoy Theatre were, by a long way, the most expensive cheap seats in London. Twenty pounds to watch the Times World Chess Championship from the stalls, £35 from the upper circle, £55 from the dress circle. This wasn’t entirely greed, or desperation on the part of Times Newspapers to recoup some of their estimated £4 to £5 million investment. It was also a genuine anticipation of domestic interest. For the first time in the modern history of the championship—deemed to have started with the 1886 match between Steinitz and Zukertort—a Briton had emerged as title contender. Nigel Short was also the first Westerner to contest the final since Bobby Fischer in 1972. Pre-Fischer, you had to go back to 1937 to find another Westerner, the Dutchman Max Euwe; post-Fischer, the only way to get into any of the next seven World Championship matches was to be a Russian whose name began with K: Karpov, Korchnoi, Kasparov. Now, at last, there was a local boy to root for, and a serious underdog as well. Kasparov is constantly described as the strongest player in the history of the game; Short wasn’t in the top ten. The size of his task could be estimated by the fact that even one of Kasparov’s seconds, the Georgian grandmaster Zurab Azmaiparashvali, was ranked above him.

  Gary Kasparov was, or was thought to be, a known quantity. He was the dynamic, aggressive, and moody champion, much photographed lifting weights, thumping a punch bag, playing football, and swimming on his “Croatian island retreat.” He was the new-style Russian, from “war-torn Baku,” the chum of Gorbachev, then of Yeltsin; easily packageable, and with the zippy if secondhand nickname of Gazza. Nigel Short was the harder case for packaging, since, like many chess players, what he had mostly done in his twenty-eight years was play chess. Only two things seemed generally known about him: that he had once played in a teenage rock band called the Urge (originally titled Pelvic Thrust), and that he was now married to a Greek drama therapist seven years his senior. But then the phrase chess biography is—as Truffaut once cattily remarked of the expression British film—a contradiction in terms. Chess is, famously, an activity entirely unrelated to the rest of life: from this springs its fragile profundity. Biography theoretically links the private to the public in such a way that the former illuminates the latter. But in chess no such connection, or reductiveness, applies. Does grandmaster X prefer the French defense because his mother forsook his father when he was as yet a small child? Does bed-wetting lead to the Grunfeld? And so on. Freudians may see chess as Oedipal: an activity whose ultimate aim is to kill the king, and in which the sexy queen is dominant. But attempted matchups between on-board and off-board character produce as many counterindicators as corroborations.

  Ruthless gutting of Cathy Forbes’s Nigel Short: Quest for the Crown therefore added only a few embellishments of dubious pertinence. Nigel had fallen into an Amsterdam canal as a child; Nigel had been mugged in his home city of Manchester at the age of twenty; Nigel’s parents had separated when he was thirteen; Nigel’s frequently stated ambition was to become a Tory MP. As an indicator of how scarily scant the record is, Ms. Forbes is driven at one point to record that, as a teenager, Nigel “alarmed acquaintances by threatening to dye his hair blue.” An unfulfilled threat, as it turned out, though perhaps helpful to the imaginative psychobiographer, given that blue is the emblematic color of the Conservative Party.

  These exiguous and banal details were widely reproduced. Since chess players are on the whole neither charismatic nor polymorphous, it was comic to see the varying journalistic templates into which Short was excitedly fitted. For Hello! magazine, that tinned rice pudding of the newstand, it was Nigel the family man posing happily in his Greek retreat with wife Rea and little daughter Kyveli. For The Sun, it was Nigel as modern British hero, who ??
?loves rock music and a pint with his mates…. He stormed up the ranks but he didn’t ignore his other passions—women and music.” Short dutifully posed for a laddish photo, hoof to plume in black leather, strutting his stuff among knee-high chess pieces while toting an electric guitar. Headline? IT’S ONLY ROOK AND ROLL BUT I LIKE IT. Harmless fun and all that, but at the same time, seriously unconvincing. Nigel has a nickname too, by the way. If Gary is Gazza, Nigel is Nosher. Etymology? “Nigel Short” anagrams out schoolboyishly into Nosher L. Git.