humour, but they had been given the job of enforcing the price-maximum in grain. Peasants, to avoid selling the grain, had fed it to their animals, which at least they could consume, and a trick was to detect the grain husks in the animals’ excrement, a task for which actors were especially selected by the reigning revolutionaries.
In the later forties in Hollywood, the McCarthy scare fell darkly upon the land, and there were victims, none of whom lost his life, though some, in employment, were for a time under an eclipse. It was certainly true that, as Vladimir Bukovsky says, if you looked at the twentieth century through Hollywood, you would have no idea what it was about. Its wallet, as was said about the Third Republic, was on the Right, but its heart was on the Left, and it felt guilty if in, say, The Killing Fields or Dr Zhivago Communists were mentioned in a bad light, or even at all. In that period Reagan seems to have guessed that these actors were being manipulated, and he became spokesman for the Republican cause: he was even divorced for ‘extreme mental cruelty’, his then wife tending to go along with the martyr-histrions. He had many gifts, especially as a talker. Provincial American politicians tended to be lecturing and charmless. Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, talked as if she had a carriage-shift bell in her larynx and qualified for the French phrase, ‘She listens to herself talking.’ Reagan was not like that: he told funny stories, and even, against his opponents, acted them out. There was a revealing scene when Berkeley students protested against his proposals to make them pay money for their education: past screeching demonstrators, Reagan adopted a creeping pose, and said, ‘Shsh,’ That disarmed even the screeching protestors, and worked very well on television, which, of course, Reagan had had in mind. As Governor of California, he had known how to goad his enemies into making allies for him. When the time came, in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of Carter’s America, he quite easily defeated any north-eastern and moderate Republican candidate, and was adopted. In his way, Reagan was a Nixon with charm, for he did not lock himself away, like Nixon, and there was an element of steel as well, in the sense that he knew that the United States represented something. He had charisma, such that people around him delivered, without quite knowing why. He was also quite indolent, and would semi-doze through Cabinet meetings, eating endless jujubes, a habit he had taken up in order to stop the cigarettes that everyone had smoked in earlier decades. Not for him the Carter regimen of rising at six and ploughing through endless paper, before jogging scrawnily in shorts, holding his wife’s claw-like hand, around the grounds. Nancy Reagan was no doubt a facelift too far, but she had seen him through crises, and knew how to deal with the Californian tuxedos whose activities had not made good publicity for Nixon. The White House machine, by now very large, worked messily, and there was a constant changeover. There were complaints. Apparently more efficient machines, both his predecessor’s and his successor’s, consisted of clockwork but worked to little effect. Ronald Reagan managed to get the big things right, sometimes despite crushing bombardments from people who ostensibly knew them much better than he did. In 1987, for instance, the most respected financial expert on Wall Street, Felix Rohatyn, wrote a vast article in the New York Review of Books to explain that the debt and the deficit would wreck the country. Reagan sailed on regardless, and was proved to be quite right. East-coast America was nonplussed, and was vengeful enough to have Reagan missed off the guest list for the Harvard Tercentennial celebration in 1993, whereas a parade of mediocrities such as Ford and Carter was welcomed. In fact, Carter was so full of sour grapes that he did not even give Reagan more than an hour or so of preparatory talk when the changeover occurred, and was appalled that Reagan did not take notes. Reagan had his revenge. Carter had asked him to send a telegram to the South Korean president, asking for an opposition leader’s life to be spared. Reagan sent it, but added that he so wished that he, too, could deal with university mayhem by conscripting students. Americans were good at everything, except losing. They were about to win an enormous victory, and the most interesting question about 1981 is why it did not foresee 1989.
The same question occurs about Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher in 1979 had a very difficult hand to play, and though she was a very different figure from Reagan, she ran into similar opposition: famously, almost all of the grand names in British economics denounced her to The Times in 1981, just as England was becoming, once again, an interesting country. But it was not just the economists. No Prime Minister can have met such sheer hatred since David Lloyd George, whom the Right had loathed because he had fought, in his way, for the class-eroding England that had ended up under trade union rule in the 1970s. Writers, actors, philosophers: off they rode, and a meeting of the PEN club in Lisbon, where various well-known writers of the world were expecting to protest about the fate, generally under Communism, of their peers, had to listen, in utter bewilderment, as the English contingent went on, and on, and on about Margaret Thatcher, whom most continental Europeans vaguely respected, as a woman fighting her corner in a man’s world. A high point of such criticism occurred when Dame Mary Warnock, a porphyrogenita of the long-bottomed-knicker progressive Edwardian world, mother of five, philosopher called to any committee requiring pronouncements as to public morality, headmistress of a famous school but also wife of the Oxford Vice-Chancellor, was interviewed about Mrs Thatcher. She did not have much to contribute as to privatization or the money supply, and the high point came with a strangled ‘that voice… those hats.’ In such circles Mrs Thatcher was regarded as utterly without culture, but there again was a mistake. She had grown up in a provincial world where application to schoolwork was very important, where you read the national classics. There was a revealing occasion in 1989 when Francois Mitterrand staged the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He had made quite an effort, and had a shiny Paris on show. Mrs Thatcher arrived by the new Channel Tunnel and gave an interview to Le Monde as to what she thought of 1789; and her remarks were in favour of the English way of doing things, what with individual rights rather than Rights of Man. Her reward was to be placed in an obscure place in the official photographs. She had her revenge. The official party was taken to a performance of a revolution opera, Andre Chenier. It was a hot night, and the opera lasted for four hours. The party was then taken to the new Impressionist museum, a brilliantly converted railway station at the Quai d’Orsay. Protocol had forgotten an essential: that after four hours’ exposure to second-rate opera, the guests might need to visit the lavatory. Upon arrival at the museum, they found only one, down a flight of steps, which Margaret Thatcher naturally had the right to use first. She took her time, emerging from the steps to find a small platoon of African heads of state, in their tribal finery, squirming. She was then taken, alone, round the museum by its director, Francoise Cachin (granddaughter, as it happens, of a Comintern stalwart), who later said that, of all the politicians she had taken round, Margaret Thatcher was the one who showed the greatest interest and asked the best questions.
Oxford, also famously, rejected her candidacy for an honorary degree in 1985. That was unworthy behaviour because she was, after all, an Oxford graduate, and had become the first woman Prime Minister, a considerable achievement in itself (and when she finally fell, in 1991, she was given an extraordinarily respectful and indeed moving send-off by the high druidess of feminism, Germaine Greer, at a time when her friends were all shouting for glee). Once upon a time, these honorary degrees had meant something: in giving them to Tchaikovsky and Verlaine in the days when Oscar Wilde had been given two years’ hard labour for homosexuality (Verlaine had served two years in Mons, in Belgium, but for shooting Rimbaud in the thumb, having missed) Oxford had shown decency. Then the things became an excuse for a party, as humble academics could for a moment shine in the spotlight turned on someone else, and picturesquely garbed worthies, having been told in a solemn address that the truth was in the middle, could process through the Cornmarket, past Burger King, W. H. Smith’s, three clothing chain-stores proclaiming sales and the overweight Liverpudlian seller of the Big Issue.
Besides, she was engaged upon a course of action for universities which, however misguided in tactics, was sensible enough in strategy. Inflation was the worst enemy of educational institutions, wrecking scholarship funds, libraries, laboratories. It meant leaking roofs, moonlighting academics and generally the end of serious universities. If Oxford existed at all, it was to give out scholarships to young men and women who could not otherwise have been there — Margaret Thatcher’s case. These scholarships had become small change, the university sent round its ablative absolutes in used envelopes, and then launched an appeal for funds that put the needs of the Bodleian Library — the only major university library in the world where you could not go round the stacks — sixteenth equal with creches for laboratory assistants. Mrs Thatcher did at least have a programme to deal with this. Both she and Ronald Reagan had in the first instance to deal with this financial operation which, underneath, was a political contest. It amounted to a June Days, of a sort, and England — though not America — did produce, in one Arthur Scargill, a barricade artist whom a great many people would have liked to shoot down, Miserables-fashion, with respect. The crucial date was 6 October 1979, when an American measure was decisive in much the same way as 15 August 1971 had been. The Federal Reserve put up interest rates to almost 20 per cent, at which level credit would become very expensive, and businesses would crash. At the same time, exchange control was abolished in London. Pounds went abroad, especially to the United States, and business also crashed in Great Britain. This, after a very difficult period, worked. No two decades could
