It is something of a shock to be back in England, my exile home of many years. The country is as grimly grey as it ever was, even though we are approaching mid-summer.
The ride in from Heathrow airport reveals the same unrelenting rows of semi-detached, mock-Tudor maisonettes that seem to run on forever, gloom and stubborn silence hanging over their grimy, unused chimneys, the potential for many a sullen, suburban murder, à la Agatha Christie and PD James, lurking behind those miles of faceless net curtains.
But there is something new and frisky in the British character, once you are able to leave those ghastly outer suburbs behind. After years of splendid isolation, the Eurotunnel has finally linked the island of shopkeepers to mainland Europe, and a whiff of refreshingly high spirits has come flooding in through the subterranean passage that has been opened up under the English Channel. Even the customs officers smile at you nowadays – a revolution indeed.
Is it really possible for the English to change? I guess the answer would be a typically English ‘Yes and no.’
I mean, who ever thought gloomy Golders Green could be transformed? And yet here, as your taxi finally swings you away from the hideous, lower-middle class suburbs strangling themselves around the North Circular, is an unrecognisable flurry of Parisian-style bistros and sidewalk cafés, their elegant doorways giving a glimpse into fragrant interiors daringly painted in very un-British shades of purple and yellow.
Finchley Road offers more of the same, and by the time you get to West Hampstead and the warren of streets that used to be merely space-fillers around the railway sidings running into Paddington and King’s Cross, you are deep into a carnival wave of Serbian and Kosovan restaurants, inhabited by a cheerfully mongrel, cosmopolitan clientele.
Somalis now outnumber the Irish in their traditional working-class fastness of Kilburn. The Midlands city of Leicester is now 40% Asian (meaning people from the Indian subcontinent) -‘It feels like you’re walking around Bombay or Hyderabad,’ says a painter friend of mine approvingly.
So yes, in many respects the English have come a long way.
On the other hand, there have been the depressingly predictable race riots in Oldham. On this 20th anniversary of the riots that sent Liverpool’s largely black suburb of Toxteth up in flames of anger, another English city reminds the world that fear and loathing are alive and well, and living in the poverty-stricken streets of the ‘working-class’ north.
Meanwhile, in the wealthy south-east, political tradition is and isn’t in the process of being turned on its head.
The Times, ancient mouthpiece of responsible Toryism, now advises its readers to re-elect a Labour government. But is this really a volte face? The party that The Times is endorsing is scarcely recognisable from the days of Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, or even the gamely bumbling Neil Kinnock. New Labour has a breezy, Euro-style soft-right image that the Tories wish they had thought up first.
And so the Tories’ lacklustre leader William Hague, who resembles nothing so much as the Muppet Show‘s Dr Bunsen Honeydew (but without the charisma), is forced to fall on his sword in the wake of a bloodbath at the polls, and disappear back into the primal Tory ooze from whence he came.
The formerly terrifying dragons of the Tory primal ooze are, amazingly, still rearing their heads into the chic politics of the present, but putting on a rather poor show. Norman Tebbitt, now Lord Tebbitt of Essex (or somewhere) barks out a warning to the party faithful against giving backing to supposedly repentant-gay front-runner Michael Portillo, who will probably inherit Hague’s vague and unappealing mantle. Alas, nobody takes poor old Tebbitt too seriously nowadays.
The serious attention is reserved for another former cornerstone of Maggie Thatcher’s sternly Victorian, pro-family-values inner caucus. Jeffrey (now Lord) Archer, millionaire author of sub-Barbara Cartland, sub-Jilly Cooper, sub-Wilbur Smith soft-porn adventure romances, is fighting for his personal and political credibility in the Old Bailey, and faring rather badly.
Way back in 1987, you see, Archer held his head proud as a high court judge declared him innocent of charges laid by a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, that he had not only slept with her, but had persuaded a friend to fob her off with a big bribe, delivered in a brown paper bag, to keep her mouth shut about his tryst with her. The judge ruled against the sordid tabloid daily Star, which had to pay the injured Archer libel damages amounting to 500 000 pounds – a tidy sum by any standards.
The drift of the case in the Old Bailey now seems to suggest that Archer not only did have an adventure with self-confessed prostitute Coghlan (who has since died under mysterious circumstances) but that he was in the midst of several extramarital affairs at the same time, one of which was conducted in Nigeria – although no one is suggesting there was an actual Nigerian lady involved.
So it is, indeed, an exciting time of all-change and no-change in British public life.
There are, thank goodness, various items of trivia that surface in the British press to take our minds off the heavy implications of all these traumatic changes.
The one that caught my eye this week is that our president, Thabo Mbeki, who happened to be on a state visit to the United Kingdom last week, shares a birthday with former Beatle Paul McCartney – same day, same month, same year, which makes them twins.
Is there any significance in the fact that, in Britain in the early 1960s, two men of identical age, who knew nothing about each other, were simultaneously plotting revolutions – one that would change the face of South Africa, the other that would change the face of modern music?
I don’t think so. But it’s a nice bit of trivia anyway.
Viva, trivia, viva.
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