DIARY
PETRONELLA WYATT colleague of mine used to describe a
A
certain type of Tory as HCB-positive. HCB stood for 'Home-counties banter', which included such chirpy banalities as 'No peace for the wicked' and 'The Devil makes work for idle hands to do'. New Labour has filled the verbal vacuum left by the Tories' departure with its own jargon, less home- counties than ham-fisted, Clintonesque Californian. Last week the government made frequent references to 'the spirit of the new age', with the intention of showing that Labour was In keeping' with it. I never quite understand what is meant by `the spirit of the new age'. To which type of spirit does it refer? Gordon's? Smirnoff? Johnny Walker? (Let us hope, for Labour's sake, that it is not Haig.) Either that or it sounds suspiciously like the Holy Spirit, whom surely not even Mr Mandelson can be on speaking terms with.
Informality, it appears, is particularly in keeping with the spirit of the new age. Cab- inet ministers were told to call the Prime Minister 'Tony% Gordon Brown, the new Chancellor, declined to put on white tie or black tie for his Mansion House speech; Mr Blair was photographed in jeans — consti- tuting less of a state of the nation address, than a state of the nation on dress. These directives are somehow touching; they indi- cate that Mr Blair's heart is in the right place even if his tailor isn't. The trouble with such self-conscious stabs at modernity, however, is that they invariably appear hopelessly old-fashioned, especially when practised by men who, in many cases, are only a decade or so short of their pensions. Mr Blair's insistence on Christian names and Mr Brown's distaste for 'monkey suits' are less new than rather fustian relics from Sixties Oxbridge Labour clubs. Actually from its inception Labour has had a prob- lem with its social policy — that is, with regard to its own members. Should they dress to the right or the left? Labour is a party with in-built schizophrenia, a work- ing-class movement which has often found itself led by comparative toffs. This has caused some historic splits, not only in Labour's politics but in its trousers. Fat trade unionists have had to squeeze, uncomfortably, into smart suits. Public schoolboys have courted popularity in more populist garments, a pretentious way of dis- playing a socialist principle. The late Tony Crosland was one of the few to bridge this divide successfully. His solution was to hold all his dinner parties in the kitchen, but at the same time insist that the guests wore black tie, and sometimes white. (My father, then a Labour MP, once protested that he didn't own a white tie. 'In that case,' replied Crosland, 'you had better stay at home.'). In recent years, far from reintroducing social dignity into politics, the Tories have been even more lax than Labour. When Mr Major became prime minister we were informed that the government would adopt a more casual, matier approach. Ministers would roll up their sleeves and slap each other on the back. Unfortunately, as Mr Major was to discover, once you give some- one your back to slap they will sooner or later move on to your face. If Mr Blair wants to be really novel he should instruct his colleagues not only to call him 'Prime Minister' but 'Sir', wear Windsor knots in their ties and put on starched shirts with studs after dark. The latter, incidentally, would be a good way of avoiding sex scan- dals as starched shirts are notoriously diffi- cult to get out of. On the other hand, a few harmless flirtations might relieve this gov- ernment's air of admirable but unexciting Cromwellianism. The New Labour dawn is in danger of becoming the New Labour yawn.
Whenever one asks Tories who they are supporting for the leadership the response is curiously similar to the Major government's derided position on EMU. The contenders may have their points, they say, but it is too early to tell. Mr Hague could meet the criteria, but then again, he might not. If, on the other hand, we are going to go for Mr Clarke, the benefits will first have to be very clear. What this really means, as a former minister put it to me, is, `I shall make up my mind when one of the buggers looks like winning.' This is reminis- cent of the story of Talleyrand chatting to `So what should we call him, Alastair or Darling?' his valet while watching some fighting on the street below: 'I see our side is victori- ous.' Which side is that, sir?' I'll tell you in the morning.' Everyone agrees, however, that the new leader must have 'charisma'. So Mr Hague's camp will say, 'William is looking very charismatic today', or Mr Clarke's, 'Ken has really got his charisma under control', as if he were an opera- singer. Mr Howard received an accidental shot of charisma when Miss Ann Widde- combe, the former Home Office minister, said that there was 'something of the night' about him. Friends of Mr Howard com- plained to me that this was cruel. But I can attest to its fatal allure. Of all my Hungari- an relatives, the most successful with women was Bela Lugosi, Hollywood's most famous Dracula, whose character, on hear- ing the sound of wolves, would proclaim lubriciously, 'Listen. The children of the night, what music they make!' One cannot resist the picture of a black-caped Mr Howard acclaimed by howls from his simi- larly wolverine supporters: 'Listen to them, the children of the Right, what music they make!'
Roy Strong's diaries may be the last kept by such a walking laser beam of Englishness. It is easy to bemoan this as a loss to literature. Politicians' diaries are usually poor substitutes for those of dilet- tante scholars, since they are mostly con- cerned with tedious point-scoring. Even Alan Clark's diaries are, in my view, over- rated. His descriptive elegance scarcely ranks with that of Horace Walpole who, as far as one can remember, never called Pitt the Elder a pudgy puffball (but perhaps that was because he was rather thin). I have often thought, however, that the real signif- icance of diaries is their efficacy as a psy- chological weapon. It is not as important to keep a diary as it is to give the impression of doing so. One has only to announce that one is going home `to work on the journal' for people's behaviour to undergo a salu- tary transformation. A terrified, 'What are you going to say about me?' is followed by a grovelling, 'You know, I do so admire you. I was just saying to so-and-so the other day what a beautiful and talented person you are.' A year or so ago, over lunch with a particularly miserly politician, I steered the conversation around to my 'diaries'. The politician enquired whether I intended to publish the first volume of them now or later. Were I to publish them now, I replied, darkly, it would sink a few mem- bers of the government. The effect of these words was miraculous — the politician offered to pick up the restaurant bill. Anita Loos was wrong: diaries are a girl's best friend.
Previous page
