Anglomania (43 page)

The joy of getting on in English society is to feel included, to join the club, to open doors that are closed to others. One afternoon in May Dominic and I decided to watch the cricket at Lord’s. Dominic was a member of the MCC, for which the waiting list is so long that most aspiring members can only hope to be accepted in their dotage. His magic pass allowed him to bring one guest. We went up to the pavilion—members only, of course. At the entrance was a stout man with a bulbous red nose. His manner was officious. His Cerberus role was to keep nonmembers out. He took his time, enjoying his brief moment of authority, turning Dominic’s pass this way and that, asking him questions about precisely who I was. Something about the man, his nose, his puffed-up airs, sent me into a silent rage. After we had finally been let in, my rage became more vocal. Silvery heads in the Long Room swiveled in our direction. And Dominic said to me, with a patience my outburst hardly merited: “But don’t you understand? This is the whole point of being a member. This is what English life is all about.”

He was right, of course. And it was while working with Dominic that I realized my basic error. I had been deceived by appearances. The
world I had entered briefly was not just a theatrical fantasy. Mrs. Thatcher’s poujadisme, the go-for-it spirit were not inimical to
Spectator
Toryism. Moore’s affected squirearchy needed the man with the foreign name and the slicked-back hair to bring in the cash. The resilience of the British class system is due to this marriage of new money and old style. As Tocqueville already observed, the British upper class acts as a sponge for talent and ambition. Snobbery can act as a spur to personal achievement. The
Spectator
is one of those British institutions that lends aristocratic airs to bourgeois striving. And in fact, Mrs. Thatcher’s assault on class privilege was always more apparent than real. She herself affected, in the most theatrical and rarely convincing way, the mannerisms of a class to which she wasn’t born. She was, in a sense, the man with the slicked-back hair. People mocked her affectations, but she provided the money for the go-getting new rich, and the gentlemanly old rich too. And so she enabled the age-old show to go on, and on.

It was a show that I eventually grew tired of. Observed from a distance, the
Spectator
style was quaint and amusing. And there was much that I admired: the debunking of Utopian nonsense, the satirical view of idealism, the intellectual cheekiness. And like Tocqueville I could see merit in snobbery as a tonic for individual enterprise. But perhaps I was too much of an Anglophile to live with the real thing for too long. For under the cheekiness was a complacency, a philistinism that I found irritating. The English social order, celebrated in
The Spectator
, may be more civilized than most political arrangements in the world, but that is not saying much, or at least not enough. In the end I felt ill at ease with young people who had never thought of trying anything else, who had walked only on well-trodden paths, whose main aim was to conserve the system in which they had got on, and who looked at any alternative with amused contempt.

I can remember the moment I realized enough was enough. Rajiv Gandhi had just been killed by a suicide bomber in southern India. We had a meeting in Dominic’s office to discuss the forthcoming issue. Naturally we had to do something on India. I was sitting on a comfortable sofa. Next to me was Simon Heffer, the deputy editor, a pale, carrot-haired young man whose girth showed a fondness for English puddings. To say that he sat would be inaccurate. He was sprawled in a pose of exaggerated ease, with his head denting a thick
cushion, his heavy legs stretched out, and a large pasty stomach straining the buttons of his stripey shirt.

As foreign editor I was asked how to cover the Indian events. I mentioned a few well-known journalists in Delhi who might contribute. I suggested that a piece on the Gandhi dynasty by an Indian writer might not go amiss. Suddenly I felt the figure on my left stir. “Enoch!” he bellowed. “Enoch’s always frightfully good on India!” Now there were no doubt occasions when Enoch Powell’s love of the British Raj could be given an airing, but I did not feel this was one of them. Not that this was a reason to resign. It was of no great consequence. In fact, Enoch never wrote the piece, and I carried on at the
Speccie
for a while longer. But I knew that a change of scene was in order.

“B
LACKPOOL
,”
SAID THE
mayor in full regalia, “is my kind of town.” The large silver chain around his neck glinted in the television lights. There was a pungent smell of sweat in the crowded hall. “I’m sure,” the mayor resumed, after the initial burst of applause had died down, “as loyal Conservatives, it’s your kind of town too.” During the week I attended the Tory Party Conference in the autumn of 1995, I never quite understood what he had meant by that. Blackpool, with its floats of fairy-lit cartoon characters gliding up and down the seafront, with its clubs and Ferris wheels, its leering comedians and amateur striptease nights, its knobbly knees and “naughty” fun, its bed and breakfasts and booming discos, is unashamedly vulgar. The Conservative party tries to disguise any vulgarity under a coat of gentility, or so I thought.

As I listened to speaker after speaker in the main hall, mostly young men in loud suits and crude haircuts, telling us why Britain was great and Europe a tyranny, I thought of other places. I thought of Bavaria, in particular. Of beer halls filled with large people in funny green hats and leather shorts. Bavarians wear these ludicrous costumes, known as
Tracht
, as though their ancestors had always worn them.
Tracht
is a badge of belonging, of identity, like the Highland kilt. And like the kilt, Bavarian dress is largely a nineteenth-century invention, to give Bavarians something native to hang on to while its political institutions were being swallowed up by a greater Germany ruled from Berlin. To wear a funny green hat and leather shorts was a kind of
compensation for the loss of sovereignty. There seems to be a rule of thumb: when political identities weaken, native costumes get louder.

The
Tracht
at the gathering of Tories was stripes and polka dots, on navy blue or gray. Polka-dotted dresses, polka-dotted ties, striped suits, and striped shirts. The Tory rank and file looked like an expanse of Regency wallpaper come alive, with the occasional tuft of bucolic tweed. No doubt these clothes reflected the conventional tastes of middle England. But they were also worn, I think, with a grim determination to show the badge of national identity, as uniforms of Englishness. For more than a hundred years, following the theatrical imagination of Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory party had marketed itself as the national party. This time, the fear of losing the next election, but above all of losing national sovereignty to the “faceless bureaucrats” in Brussels, had made the party faithful testy. There was a defensive air of aggression about.

“S.A.S.,” said the defense minister, Michael Portillo, grinning fiercely as he milked the applause by invoking the reputation of crack British commandos, “three letters that spell fear in our enemies: ‘Don’t mess with Britain!’ ” The enemies, in the defense minister’s speech, were not the Soviets, for they no longer existed, but the faceless foreigners in Brussels, or “Europe.”

At a fringe meeting in the back room of a saloon bar, reeking of stale cigarettes, a member of Parliament named Tony Marlow spoke in a grotesque imitation of Winston Churchill’s dramatic flourishes and pauses about “the Battle against Europe.” Except that he sounded defeatist, and a bit mad. “We’ve lost it!” he shrieked. “We’ve lost control!” I felt embarrassed for him. It was an undignified spectacle: a middle-aged Englishman in a banker’s suit wobbling on the edge of hysteria. He reeled off various political Dunkirks. “Metrification,” he cried, “a mere skirmish in historical terms, but a hilltop to be regained.” But there was still hope, he said, suddenly beaming in the happy anticipation of a well-rehearsed line: “The Euro-skeptic tanks are landing in Europe!”

A young speaker in the main hall, with spiky blond hair and a florid face, was working himself into a lather of rage. He was impatient, he said, with our “European partners.” He spat the last word out with a sneer: “P-a-r-t-n-e-r-s.” He was impatient with them because they “forget the sacrifices we made in the war. I resent it when they say we are
not working for a free and peaceful Europe, forgetting that without us there would be no free and peaceful Europe!” The audience cheered. One gray-haired lady in a blue dress, a dear old thing who probably organized tea parties at her local Conservative Club, was bouncing up and down on her plastic seat in an almost erotic frenzy.

The rhetoric, the people, the noise: it suddenly became too much. I needed a breather and made for the shops outside the main hall. But it was impossible to get away from the action. You were followed around by television monitors, which never let up. From the corner of my eye I saw the next speaker, another pink-faced young man in a loud suit: “Let the British lion awake!” he shouted. I scanned the books on sale. Biographies of General Montgomery, the duke of Edinburgh, Winston Churchill, and Michael Portillo. Novels by Jeffrey Archer. Books about cricket and fishing. And David Attenborough’s
The Private Life of Plants
. For those who prefer videos to books, there was one entitled
No! No! No!
about Mrs. Thatcher’s battle against Europe. There was more shouting in the hall. The speaker was beginning to sound unhinged: “Brussels,” he bellowed, was “taking away our history.”

I tried to make sense of this British “identity” that was under such threat. What exactly was it? What did those pin-striped suits really stand for? Order, I suppose. But also for a particular idea of class. If British socialists often used to be toffs dressed up as proles, the Tory Party Conference was full of ex-proles dressed up as toffs. The most ferocious speeches in defense of “British values” came not in the ripe vowels of Tory grandees but in the glottal stops of southern suburbs. This is what “empowerment” meant under Mrs. Thatcher—and has meant for a century or more. These boys wanted their bit of the cake too. And cake, in Britain, means class, or at least its trappings, even if they come off the peg.

The constant references to World War II were mostly made by young men who were born long after the event. It was as though they felt a lack of heroism in their lives, compared to their fathers’ or grandfathers’, and tried to make up for it by mimicking Churchill. This sense of inadequacy was echoed by a feeling of national impotence in a bewildering world, where old enemies seemed to be dominant. Talking about tanks landing in Europe, and hills to be regained, and battles for Britain was a way of putting the clock back, to more heroic times. What was it Nicholas Ridley had said to Dominic Lawson? That he would almost
prefer to fight Germany from the bomb shelters than to be “simply taken over by … 
economics
.”

But order, heroism, and class aside, it was the word “freedom” that haunted me in Blackpool. The speaker with the spiky blond hair was wrong when he said that “foreigners” had “always admired us for our history, our monarchy, our traditions, our courage, our strength.” Or at least partly wrong. British strength has often inspired hatred too. What Anglophiles admired about Britain, more than its monarchy or its traditions, was its liberty. Underneath all the flummery and Churchilliana of the Tory conference was the message that “Europe” threatened British traditions and thus British freedom, as though the two were always the same. A European federation had to be, by definition, tyrannical. Britain was by its very nature free. It was as if the Tories at Blackpool had pushed an Anglophile caricature to extremes. “Europe” had become a mythical place where Britons go only to wage wars of freedom. And Britain’s current constitutional arrangements, hallowed by tradition and monarchic superstition, were sacred, and to be defended at all costs.

I was haunted by the idea of freedom at Blackpool, because I felt torn by what I saw and heard. I, too, had grown up with the Anglophile myths, and there was enough truth under the layers of anxious nostalgia for it to be disturbing. It was easy to feel superior to the young men in their pin-striped suits, roaring about the awakening British lion, or the mediocre politicians invoking the beaches of Normandy. These were very unpleasant people, with some very unpleasant ideas. But it was as if a much-admired phantom had come to life as a monster. The Englishman fighting for his freedom had turned into a spitting xenophobe. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster may be right, or was at least asking the right questions.

National sovereignty in modern British history has been based on the idea of government by consent. The British electoral system may not be the fairest or most democratic in Europe. Its judicial system may be flawed. The clubbiness of its institutions may be archaic and in urgent need of reform. But people know whom to criticize, and whom to vote for. The British version of capitalism may be harsher than the French or the German, and the gap between rich and poor more pronounced. But if this means less official interference, most people are prepared to put up with it. “Europe” has not been driven so far by ideas
of democracy, individual freedom, or liberalism, but by economic efficiency, old European dreams of Continental unity, and an older generation’s fear of war.

The United Kingdom might well go the way of Bavaria, once a liberal and enlightened monarchy. The slow demise of the nation-state, if it is to happen, would be a melancholy spectacle, especially in Britain, for of all European countries, Britain has most to lose. The idea of Britain, after all, is a political one. The United Kingdom is not defined by a race, a culture, or a religion, but by laws and institutions, which have worked reasonably well to safeguard individual liberties. The idea of the French Republic is political too. But it is a Jacobin idea, stressing the will of the people, expressed by a strong state. Inevitably, as time passes, political institutions are encrusted with popular feeling. Loyalty to the nation is not a wholly rational thing. By any rational yardstick, much is wrong with British institutions, but transferring too much of their political authority to pan-European councils and commissions is to take the politics out of the British identity. And then you are left with nothing but bruised popular feelings. At best, this ends in displays of loud, pin-striped suits or camp,
Speccie
-style nostalgia. At worst it will explode in angry chauvinism. Both were in evidence at Blackpool.