time she didn’t throw quite so many good parties. (£7 million worth, they say, at Downing Street alone, since the election was won, attended by pop stars and flibberty-gibbets.) If only, ancient mutton dressed as lamb, stepmother didn’t keep claiming to be so cool and young and new; miniskirting those old blue-veined legs.
Everything’s being re-logoed. British Airways loses its flag and crown and becomes a flying gallery for ‘new, young’ artists – those two adjectives apparently being sufficient recommendation for excellence. (I won’t fly BA any more: the tail-fins bring out the critic in me.) The retiring head of the British Council in Madrid – the BC is the cultural arm of the Foreign Office – told me sadly the other day that its logo is to change too: from admittedly mysterious but at least recognisable rows of orange dots to something that demonstrates the Council is ‘all about people’. ‘But it isn’t about people,’ I protested. ‘It’s about civilisation, culture, ideas, the arts.’ Said he, sadly, ‘I wish you’d been at the meeting.’ Claim that anything is ‘about people’, magic words, and all opposition melts away. Diana reigns!
Stepmother doesn’t like other women much. Doesn’t want rivals. She gives them hot potatoes to hold and sniggers when they drop them. Clare Short of International Development, Mo Mowlam of Northern Ireland, and Harriet Harman of Social Security were all too powerful and popular not to be given office when the transition from old to New Labour was made. Clare Short is manoeuvred into taking the rap for Foreign Office bungling over the evacuation of Montserrat when the volcano erupted: Mo Mowlam is held personally responsible for failing to solve a two-hundred-year-old Irish problem within the year: sweet, pretty Harriet Harman, taking the rap for doing no more than mouth Treasury policy, is now universally disliked as cold and cruel. Oh, stepmother’s a smooth operator, all right.
When Diana died, when the black Mercedes crumpled, when the gender switch was finally thrown, when the male-female polarities reversed, when we all took to weeping in the streets and laying flowers, there was, let it be said, an ugly moment or so. That was when Monarchy, male in essence, headed by a head-scarved Queen, refused to show itself as emotionally correct. The Queen wouldn’t lower the royal flag to half-mast: the Prince declined to share his grief with his people. (Nor was that grief allowed to be in the least ambivalent: it was as if the divorce and the infidelities had never happened.) For an hour or so the milling crowd outside Buckingham Palace took on a dangerous mien. The people were angry. For once they wanted not bread, or circuses, not even justice – just an overflowing female response to tragedy. Forget all that dignified ‘private-grief’ stiff upper lip stuff. The crowd got their way. The flag was hauled down. The Prince shared his grief.
Since then the Palace too has shown a female face. Prince Charles is photographed with the Spice Girls, is seen tie-less with his arms around his boys, turns up somewhere in Africa to apologise for Britain’s behaviour in the past and has never been so popular. Even Prince Philip, that dinosaur out of the old patriarchal era, turned up on the occasion of the Royal Golden Wedding Anniversary to apologise to his wife. ‘She’s had a lot to put up with.’ The Queen glittered terrifically in a gorgeous outfit and looked pretty and smiled. Tony Blair escorted her once again as might an affectionate and indulgent daughter.
Women win.
Taking the plough to the Garden. The earth’s so stony: nothing blooms any more without effort. Written for the New Statesman as New Labour prepared its manifesto, preparatory to taking over the reins of government.
– So vast and profound a re-organisation of its manners and customs it’s hardly worth even dreaming of.
– But given the dream; a world in which utopianism ceases to be a dirty word: and a vision arises of a human society which echoes actual human needs; in which it’s recognised that daily nine-to-five work (if you’re lucky) is inappropriate in a prosperous technological society in which machines and computers do the donkey-work, and was never much cop anyway. (People wake and sleep in rhythm – sixteen hours on, eight hours off, roughly – but endeavour tends to come in bursts – weeks on, weeks off: how can nine-to-five be anything but a tedious pain?) In which over-manning is seen as desirable, and inflation is not a devil to be feared and loathed. In which everyone can walk to work. In which every child is a planned and wanted child and parenthood a matter of a joint opting in, not a failure to opt out, and compulsory parental leave (both parents) extends for six years (that would soon cut the birth rate): thirty million is probably a good workable level for the nation. In which school is not compulsory, but in which TV and film fiction is banned by order of the censor general: too much fiction is bad for you. So boredom, not the law, drives the young to school. In which people have enough confidence to see that the cloning of people is a perfectly possible route for humanity’s future. If nature creates the Taleban can human ingenuity do so much worse? Courage, courage!
Okay, I’m joking.
Failing all this, I’d settle for one little simple change in the law. That someone who leaves their employment because they’re expected to do something immoral or disgusting isn’t then declared to be wilfully unemployed and ineligible for unemployment or housing benefit. Employees once had the courage to blow whistles: now it is too difficult. It’s a pity. Societies are self-righting, given just half a chance.
‘Oh well, business as usual,’ was my mother’s sighing response to news of NATO’s bombing of Serbia. ‘How the menfolk love a war.’
Look at the pictures coming out of the Kosovo war. What do you see? Men with blood lust. Men in uniforms, waving guns like phalluses: men in iron tanks, pounding and crushing. The men have got war fever again. Men launching cruise missiles, smart bombs; men having a great time with the toys of death, all the hard metal technology of killing and destruction. Older men back home proving they’re still virile and brave, spouting noble sentiments, sending young men to their deaths. This village must be destroyed to save it! Slobodan Milosevic, the old Stalinist hardman, happy to face death rather than dishonour. Into the bunker like Hitler, while the nation collapses into rubble around him. No-one’s going to give in, no-one’s going to back down, males antlers are locked.
What else do you see in the pictures out of Kosovo? Women and children suffering, of course, the natural female sacrifice to the God of War. What fun the men have, stampeding them from their homes. Not just ethnic cleansing, domestic cleansing, atavistic, of the pitiable and pitiful, the too young or too old to breed.
Couldn’t we perhaps get a gender perspective on what’s going on? This is the War of Lewinsky’s Mouth, of Tony proving his virility. All the electorate-friendly girlie touchy-feeling sentiments gone like a flash: let’s show some muscle here! Let’s forget about the Euro, about the collapsing Peace Accord, about education, education, education, every Scottish school a computer, the composition of the Second House; all that domestic stuff’s so boring, let’s be men, let’s bring Milosevic to heel.
It’s enough to turn you back into a feminist, holding hands around the US cruise missile site
