Holly Lester by Andrew Rosenheim Page B

with a desperation fortified by their disastrous standing in the opinion polls. They did not have to call a General Election for another twelve months, but as the countdown began, time no longer seemed an ally; short of a war nothing could happen to improve the Conservative position in the polls. The economy was booming, crime was down; ‘feel good’ factors multiplied apace. Yet from those accorded the attention of pollsters, nothing indicated anything but a stubborn determination to have a change.
    Labour was almost nauseatingly buoyant, and like so many of his fellow citizens, even the instinctively Tory Billings could not feel greatly alarmed by their imminent rise to power. Like others, he felt wrapped in a warm cocoon of prosperity; any efforts to push the usual scare buttons of revived union power or runaway inflation seemed historical, almost quaint. In his memo, Trachtenberg had written perceptively about the longevity of a political party’s notoriety, but he was also right to see that in Labour’s case this had expired.
    To Billings, the Prime Minister seemed a decent man – appearing so fatally ineffectual only because he was charged with the impossible task of leading a party fatally tired of power. And presiding over a party so split that the resolution of its philosophical divide could only take place in Opposition.
    But then, who had ever excited Billings? He cast his mind back to no avail. Not Heath; there was something repulsive there, a little boy posturing in a sailor suit was the image that came to mind. Not Douglas Home – too much the grandee. Not Macmillan – too much the grandee
manqué
, an improbable grandson of a crofter. Billings remembered his own grandfather more fondly, a clerk on the Great Western Railway who liked to joke that he was close to Lord Berners because both of them lived in Farringdon.
    But he was evading the necessary focus for any retrospective view of recent leaders. Early in his affair with Holly, he had protested, ‘I’m not a Thatcherite.’
    She had said, ‘of course not. That’s part of the problem,’ which confirmed the troubling suggestion of Trachtenberg’s memo that to New Labour, Lady T. was a good thing.
    He could see the putative benefits of her rule, recognize the positive changes which had taken place in his absence. He knew the arguments. Who could seriously pine for the old-fashioned unions? Who could decry the prosperity that made Billings, once so conscious of his country’s poor cousin status vis-à-vis the States, now see the same kind of spending power here in England? Who could fault that?
    Actually, Billings could and did. Accustomed to a rich man’s world in his daily business, he could see the futility of using mercantile measurements for everything. Was he supposed to be overjoyed that everybody now seemed to own a motor car? And a video? And a camcorder? And an intrusive mobile phone? Was it comforting to see the nicer parts of London now utterly devoid of normal English middle class inhabitants? (Recently he had walked through South Kensington, where a million pounds now bought a small mews house. He’d realized that, despite its financial selectness, the area, with its barred windows, parking restrictions, and High Street Ken as an avenue of t-shirt shops and shoe shops, was an infinitely less pleasant place to live than thirty years before.) So what if the young wore black and listened to pirate radio stations, or watched one of a dozen cable or satellite television channels – was this a revolution?
    He supposed it was, and in his wet, gentle Tory way regretted it. His league table of leaders seemed hopelessly historical when seen through post-Thatcher lenses, and of no relevance in any effort to situate Harry Lester and New Labour. Nor could Lester be placed among his own faraway Labour predecessors, that clique of New College dons pretending economics was a science, forming