A ROASTING FOR LABOUR
Stephen Fry tells Jasper Gerard why he's upset by Labour's illiberal family values
A MASTER actor, terribly famous and utterly charming. Oh, and a bit of a toff. No figure could be more New Labour than Stephen Fry. Yet the man who conducted Labour's centenary celebrations — who has air-kissed Tony and Cherie more often than pensioners have cursed Gordon Brown is having strong doubts about Blair. One of the themes of Fry's new novel, The Stars, Tennis Balls, is the hypocrisy of politics, particularly of the moral majority. The theme of our talk in the Groucho is his anger with Blair for joining that brigade.
Is he sceptical of New Labour? 'Abso- lutely. Thatcher, whatever one thinks, never intruded into the bedroom. She was pure monetarist,' he says, forgetting the 'family values' froth. He was horrified by 'naming and shaming' and felt ministers should have condemned it. `So much wickedness is done in the name of the family (incest, necessari- ly so). If people want toughness they should live in Iraq. Under communism the state was worshipped. Now it is family. Anything anti is cast into outer darkness. I love my family but they are not The Family. It has become an icon before which we bow. The shorthand is Daily Mail. A fear of modern art, alternative sexuality or foreigners. Good families welcome people.'
And then the sting: 'It's a great shame that Tony Blair, who loves his family, has allowed himself to be pulled into that. I don't think it suits Labour.' Labour certainly isn't liberal, I remark. 'It doesn't seem to be, no,' he concedes. 'That is something I am uncomfortable with. Legislation must be combed to check it is pro-family. Maybe the breakdown of the family is the root of all evil, but don't forget the evil that was caused because abortion was illegal and divorce was difficult. It created a seedy world when peo- ple went to hotels to be photographed to prove adultery. Guilty, perplexed people grew from that who became sad little per- verts hanging around libraries.'
Some of his own youth was spent hang- ing around such amenities. He recounts a dinner held by Tristan Garel-Jones when Edwina Currie was trying to reduce the age of gay consent, and a row he had with Mrs Kenneth Clarke, 'bless her'. 'Ken was perfectly all right, but she was saying, "Oh, it will be a charter for perverts", but it isn't: the word is consent. The law allowing heterosexual sex at 16 is not a charter for old men to hang around netball courts.'
Endearingly, a hint of crusty colonel is creeping into Fry (Bill Gates is `scum'). 'I can't watch Question Time, I am filled with rage, I come over all Basil Fawlty.' How close is he to Labour? 'I don't feel particu- larly attached. I grew up in a Conservative family, my father was chairman of the local party, Ian Gilmour was our MP and he would come to dinner, my mother ran fetes. I always considered myself a Tory. I thought those who voted Labour had a genetic defect — it seemed such a gross and bizarre thing to do. Every time I saw a Labour politician, I thought their vowels were horrible.' I wait for a repudiation of youthful snobbery. 'I haven't changed at all. Those reactions to vulgarity, puritanism and nastiness I had against Labour in the Seventies were the same I had to barrow- boy Toryism in the Eighties.'
Surely Blair has not been all bad? He agrees, just. 'I never had the high hopes that everyone else had. I am not claiming to be a prophet, but I remember saying to Mr Blair before the election at some din- ner that there would be the flodhip crisis. He said, "What on earth do you mean?" I said, "You will sign some paper in some red box and people will resign and the papers will say, ah, the tide is turning." I never thought paradise would be created in four years. It was absurd, this idea that they would make England different. Eng- land is us. There was that pathetic faith in `Not outside gay marriage, I hope.' politicians that they could — that awful word — deliver a Britain that was better.'
There is an MI5 officer in Fry's novel, to be published on 5 October, whose com- plaint is not that politicians are too arro- gant, but too malleable. 'They are nobodies trying to flatter some bod from Nissan to build a factory,' he says. Might he welcome a benign international dictator? 'Absolute- ly, that's the EEC.' Will this not dilute his beloved Britishness? 'No one believes more than me in the United Kingdom. I blub like a child at the state opening of Parliament. The mere mention of the Queen Mother and I am a gibbering wreck; the sight of the Queen's head on postage stamps is sheer delight, but I have yet to see evidence that euro-zone countries have become less themselves; to make an Italian non-Italian — well, it would be easier to turn lead into gold. There is this view [cue: Chingfordian vowels] "Once you get sucked in you've lost the nation." But you can decide not to. There is political will. The French have it; look how they plant bombs in McDonald's.'
Unlike Labour, he is sentimental about rusticity, talking with near glee about rab- bits he has killed, and mocks naive urban- ites. He recounts hiring a rat-catcher. When his terriers emerged salivating with blood, the catcher said, 'I've controlled the problem.' Fry: 'I don't want you to control them, I want you to kill them.' Catcher: `When you say "kill" customers get upset.'
Similarly, Fry says, the RSPCA received a call from a woman who complained that a farmer had left his cows out in the rain. He is sounding more Countryside Alliance than eco-warrior. 'I get annoyed by Western guilt and anti-science. People talk of modern diet as if it's poison, but we have never eaten more healthily. Those of us born after the war are an experimental people; death is such a stranger. All of us have more power than Louis XIV: look in our cupboards.'
He seems to have grown more serious, though he insists his next novel 'might be lighter than a soufflé'. Quickly he is back attacking politics. Admitting that he once considered Parliament, he says the slavish bowing to public whim repelled him. `Mo Mowlam's transgressions are so minor compared with those I would want to con- fess to. I was at Cambridge with Charles Moore; he chose journalism, yet 30 years earlier he would have chosen politics.'
We, not they, are to blame. 'MPs are people. They are not a gene pool of hypocrisy and spin.' If New Labour impresses Fry, it is in its timid reform of the Lords. 'Britain has worked best in the Walter Bagehot way,' he says, and I momentarily think I am in the Carlton with Lord Blake. 'I'm old-fashioned like that. I'm glad we didn't have a French Revolu- tion. Cutting off aristocrats' heads is no guarantee of a just society.' Lord Fry of Smith Square? I wonder.
Jasper Gerard is an associate editor of The Spectator.
Previous page
