CITY AND SUBURBAN
First the good news, then the bad news for Nigel and Tigger
CHRISTOPHER FILD ES Imagine magine Downing Street in the hour of triumph. The Prime Minister thumps on the partition wall, for a word with her next-door neighbour. 'Nigel? Nigel, will you come round for a moment . . . . Now then, sit down: will you have the good news, or the bad news? No, not Wales . . . . The good news is — and the party and I will never forget it — that you've won us the election. The bad news is that you've got to win the next one.' He goes off to Number 11, restraining a kick at his King Charles spaniel, Tigger. He can well say— as he said to me, half-way through the campaign, in the gusty precinct at Blaby - that the economy was the reason why his party started the election ahead in the polls and stayed there, that it pervaded the campaign and set the mood. As much was finally accepted, by his party managers with a belated switch of emphasis, and on election night, by his opponents: 'We lost' (said the Labour Party's general secretary) because the Tories convinced the voters that the economy was going right.' Not merely southern voters, either. Instant analysis of a rich South and poor North came from Metropolitan romantics whose most shocking experience of the North is a London NW postal district with two digits. They need to explain how the Government held marginal seats at Batley, or Accring- ton, or Barrow-in-Furness — all easily distinguishable from Surrey — and scored a net gain in the Black Country. There, the big traditional employers like Guest Keen or Tubes have halved their work-forces in the years of Conservative rule. Evidently there is life after metal-bashing. We shall now see how much of it is self-sustaining, and how much has depended on a plentiful supply of money — the easy money that has chased house prices up and produced a billion pounds to run after the stock market's most overblown new issue, a fun stock taken seriously, Tie Rack. The elec- tion over, can he deflate the boom in money and credit without deflating the w prosperity? Jock Bruce-Gardyne this week examines his chances. In Tigger's place, I would just guard my rear.
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