Has there been a stranger or more vivid year in our lifetime than 1997? Two separate weeks are unforgettable: the first week in May and the first week in September. Most of us remember David Mellor and Michael Portillo losing their seats in the small hours of 2nd May, during that astonishing Labour landslide. Everyone remembers the death of Diana: the Sunday itself and the extraordinary mood in London that week, culminating in the bizarre funeral service in Westminster Abbey on 6th September, with Earl Spencer's ferocious (and, as it turned out, hubristic) harangue.
The past year has been called epochal. In his new book This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution, Anthony Barnett argues that: "The year 1997 has altered Britain for good: politically, institutionally and emotionally." And apart from the familiar call for modernisation, decentralisation and a written constitution, Barnett directly links the Labour landslide and the public response to Diana's death. Likewise, the playwright David Edgar thinks that "the reason why so many people found that 6th September echoed 1st May was not just the roses and the sunshine (and David Dimbleby); it was an echo of the demand of the British people at the general election that the brute, metallic logic of the market be constrained by a sense of moral responsibility. This time there wasn't a ballot box in which to put that message, but it was posted none the less."
Even if you think (as I do) that this is tosh, it is significant tosh. Even if you thought that "Diana Week" was an unattractive and rather frightening display of mass hysteria and false emotion, it was without doubt an amazing phenomenon. Even if you smile at the steady disillusionment which has followed the exalted post-election mood, something about 1997 needs explaining.
The story of our time, it has been said, is that the right has won politically, but the left has won culturally. This profound truth reached its consummation in Britain in 1997-and it linked those two weeks.
Over the past decade we have seen the collapse of communism in Russia and eastern Europe; and a series of other defeats for the left. As Isaiah Berlin observed not long before his death, Europe is living through the first period since 1789 when there is no large project of the left. But he should have said: no political project. Engels's "kingdom of freedom" is a vanished dream, and so are far less drastic versions of egalitarianism. The Labour party's socialist-redistributive Clause IV has been replaced with a touchy-feely, almost meaningless list of "Aims and Values" which read like the mission statement of a multi-national corporation keen to impress with its tender-hearted social awareness. Eighty years ago, when Sidney Webb helped to draft Labour's first properly socialist constitution, the left thought. Now it feels.
A Labour victory on 1st May was easily predicted, but no one-certainly not Tony Blair-foresaw its scale. Of course no one foresaw Diana Week either, because nobody had thought of her dying, let alone in the luridly baroque circumstances of that early morning in Paris. It was the shock which took away our breath-and our judgement.
After Diana's death, a great deal of what already seems breathtaking nonsense was written. For David Edgar, Diana Week was "open, soft, organic and-as the candles lit up London in the small hours of Saturday-turned night into day. It was also, essentially, collective... The people who made what Martin Jacques has dubbed the 'floral revolution' were engaged in a political act." Edgar and Jacques would both call themselves men of the left. They do not realise how sharply their women's-mag drooling makes the point about cultural victory compensating for political defeat.
Look back at the May election with brute, metallic logic. There were many good reasons for voting Labour, but most of them were negative. The simplest was that, as Ian Buruma put it in Prospect, we did not want to become a one-party democracy like Japan under the Liberal Democrats. "Time for a change" was a perfectly sensible instinct. One party had been in office for 18 years, quite long enough. The historic mission of Thatcherism had long since been fulfilled. The Tories were worn-out and shabby, the country was fed up with them, and they were fed up with themselves, almost longing to be thrown out. Thrown out they duly were.
But look closer. There is an element of fantasy about the claims made for 1st May. Labour's huge majority was a result of technical causes: the Tory vote collapsed from just over 14m to just under 10m. The British had at last learned the art of tactical voting, and the first-past-the-post system produced its grossly exaggerated effect. Many prime ministers in countries with proportional representation, from Italy to Israel, wish they could achieve a clear parliamentary majority, let alone the 63 per cent of seats Labour won, with 43 per cent of the votes.
Look closer still. That 43 per cent is no larger than the proportion of the popular vote which the Tories won in 1992. At 13.6m, Labour's actual tally of votes was smaller than the Tories' at three out of the four preceding elections. More remarkably, it was smaller than the number of people who voted Labour as far back as 1951.
Perhaps the most telling-and ominous-fact about the election of 1997 was that it saw the lowest turnout since 1935: less than 72 per cent. This is 12 percentage points below the 84 per cent turnout in 1951; and it is a sombre reflection on what has happened to our democracy over half a century. It means that many people are disenchanted with politicians and bored by politics; and it means that fewer than one citizen in three voted Labour.
Two weeks before the election, even a commentator as perceptive as Robert Harris could write that "these are revolutionary times," thus deftly identifying just what the times were not. The voters were so nervous about Labour that in 1992 they returned the Tories led by John Major during a severe economic slump-circumstances in which it was quite a feat for Labour to lose. People waited, in fact, until they could safely vote Labour without the least chance of any revolutionary effect at all.
Why were the British people voting to constrain the brute logic of the market, when they had conspicuously not done so at the previous four elections? Surely it was because Blair offered them market economics powdered with caring rhetoric; Thatcherism with a human face; a kinder, gentler version of the previous government (not hard to achieve), whose policies would be pursued by a more plausible and agreeable bunch of ministers (not hard either). When they collaborated in a landslide comparable with the Liberal one of nine decades earlier, the voters may have unconsciously guessed that 1997 would indeed echo 1906, when:
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)
Broke-and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).
Wipe that smile off your face, brother. The 1997 election was historic, all right: a great historic defeat for socialism. Victory was achieved by the first Labour leader in 80 years who does not even pretend to be a socialist, who can scarcely conceal his loathing of most of his party's emotional roots, from the unions to the Celtic fringe to the left, and who does not bother to call himself a man of the left. (He is a "radical centrist," whatever that may be.) Blair is indeed further to the right not only than any previous Labour leader, but arguably further than some postwar Tory leaders such as Harold Macmillan. He has rejected the core beliefs which have distinguished left-of-centre politics throughout this century and throughout the world: economic planning and redistributive taxation.
But if the new government existentially illustrates the victory of the right, it also expresses the cultural victory of the left. The cabinet which is unpicking the welfare state contains several women and one gay man, several of them, on the evidence so far, chosen for symbolic rather than practical value. Chris Smith is a true cultural leftist, with his warblings about a people's Wimbledon, a people's lottery and a people's opera. And Blair, who talks of himself, not very convincingly, as a man of the rock generation, forced the unfortunate Lionel Jospin to have lunch in a room decked out by Terence Conran in the horrible Canary Wharf, and uses the culturally catchy but politically empty rhetoric of "modernisation" and a "young country."
This political-cultural dichotomy also underlaid the extraordinary events of Diana Week. I was one of those who felt utterly excluded that week, and I was grateful that writers as diverse as Richard Littlejohn and Joan Smith also said that they felt they had been living in a foreign country or on a distant planet. We outsiders were bemused, unable to participate in the tidal wave of emotion, unable to feel grief.
Shock, yes; sorrow and regret, even a pang of guilt at my unsympathetic response to Diana during her life, at things I had said, thought and written about her. But I could not feel grief, not in the sense that I felt when my mother died, or a few close friends. This disturbed me-until a man from Leeds revealed on a radio phone-in: "My wife died in April... and I've shed more tears for Diana than I did for my wife." Another man said that he felt more grief for Diana than he had at his father's death. My own coolness then seemed to me better than those radio callers' emotional derangement; but I also began to grasp what was going on. I skittishly told a friend that there would be visions of Diana before the week was out-and so there were.
Painful as all this is to anyone who claims the inheritance of the Enlightenment, it fits the theme of the cultural against the political. And it helps explain the most preposterous thing of all about Diana: how she became a heroine of the left in general (or what passes for it in this country) and of feminism in particular.
After Diana's Oscar-deserving performance on Panorama in 1995, I remarked to a colleague how gruesome it had been. She agreed, but added: "Suzanne Moore will be all over her." Sure enough, two days later the sparky columnist filled a spread in the Guardian with an adulatory tribute. Her theme was taken up by Julie Burchill, who claimed that Diana was an advocate for republicanism and for woman power.
Wipe that smile of your face, sister. The canonisation of St Diana painfully illustrates the decline of feminism-of rational political feminism, that is. Did Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Pankhurst live for this: the adulation of a hysterical and self-pitying pin-up, as intellectually dense as she was emotionally manipulative?
Feminism once meant the vindication of the rights of women: political feminism demanded that women should enjoy full legal and political rights, should be free to compete with men on equal terms, should be free to take control of their lives. It meant that women were no longer obliged only to be, but could do as well.
Not any more, if Moore and Burchill are correct. The rights of women they vindicate are the rights to suffer, to feel bitter, and to make trouble. Diana was a perfect example of a woman who never did anything -were any of her speeches composed by herself unaided, and would anyone have listened to them if she had married another man?-but simply was. Above all, she was a victim, for which she is canonised.
Absurd as all this may seem, it doubtless touches on a psychological truth. Like all formal political progressivism, political feminism could be emotionally obtuse. It forgot "How small, of all that human hearts endure/That part that laws or kings can cause or cure," which is at least as true of female as of male hearts. Women could be enfranchised, could become QCs, professors of Latin, racehorse trainers or prime ministers. But they would still want to consummate physical passion. They would still want to bear and love babies. They would still know that life is a tragic and arduous struggle. And they would still find that men can be rats.
This was Diana's importance. Even if to us literal-minded, old-fashioned feminists she seemed a ludicrous role model for her sex, she spoke, as Simon Jenkins wrote, to and for many women for whom political emancipation had proved almost irrelevant. "She was spokeswoman for those with impossible husbands, worried about their appearance, wrestling with divorce, career, children, trying to match impossible expectations. And all the while she was searching for love and security." She spoke, that is, for a cultural but depoliticised "women's movement" of the heart, not of the head; of feeling, not of thinking.
Again and again throughout Diana Week I thought of "Herod's Prophecy," WH Auden's haunting vision of the coming age in which
Reason will be replaced by revelation... Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions-feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fever or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces...
Idealism will be replaced by materialism... Diverted from its normal outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsociable channels where no education can reach it. Divine honours will be paid to shallow depressions in the earth, domestic pets, ruined windmills, or malignant tumours...
Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue... The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The rough diamond, the consumptive whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy, when the general, the statesman and the philosopher will have become the butt of every farce and satire.
That soliloquy was quoted by Robert Hughes in The Culture of Complaint, his pasquinade against political correctness. Whether or not he rings true in 1990s America, Auden exactly describes London in the first week of September 1997. If not quite a consumptive whore, Diana was a bimbette who loved hugging Aids victims; she had enjoyed visions of a sort induced by eating disorders; she was the idol of the unsociable and uneducable masses; she was the heroine of the New Tragedy.
Seen in this light, the appropriation of Diana reveals the distinction between a political left-which once believed in justice, and for whom Diana could only have been an object of derision-and a cultural left which thinks that pity is the primary value, and which esteems Diana accordingly.
If the election of 1997 was a historic defeat for British socialism, the elevation of Diana as populist heroine illustrates more broadly and even more starkly the bankruptcy of the political left. Tony Blair's "people's princess" was not merely fatuous. To anyone of the traditional left it would have seemed as offensively oxymoronic as the claim (made in a television interview) by Ian Corfield of the Fabian Society that Diana was loved because she represented a "genuine feeling of meritocracy." She did what? The daughter of a rich dipsomaniac earl, whose highest academic achievement was a school prize for best-kept hamster, who married a prince, and who died during (and in a sense because of) a liaison with a coke-snorting, starlet-bonking playboy?
To make the point clearer still, as 1997 neared its end there was another episode which highlighted the dichotomy between the political and the cultural: the huge Commons majority for a Bill to outlaw fox-hunting. No one noticed how remote this is from the conflict of left and right in a traditional political sense. The most eminent "anti" of the century, after all, was Adolf Hitler, a vegetarian whose Reich banned the hunting he abhorred, and one of the best known opponents of hunting today is Alan Clark MP, who has a Rottweiler called Eva Braun-no doubt forbidden to chase bunnies. Equally, better educated fox-hunting men know that Engels hunted with the Cheshire. And more than 50 years ago, George Orwell contrasted the British progressive attitude "towards hunting, shooting and the like" with the fact that "Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were all of them keen sportsmen" who loved nothing more than to bag a few bears or deer.
But then, compare two Labour governments and two parliaments: those of 1945 and 1997. Under Attlee, Labour believed in socialism and taxed the rich heavily to pay for the welfare state, but it let them enjoy their sports. Under Blair, a government which-as every Labour MP knows-is not remotely socialist has sworn not to raise income taxes, come what may of the welfare state. By way of compensation, MPs can indulge in a little pointless cultural leftism by outlawing a sport still associated with a gentry which barely exists.
A century ago, Sir William Harcourt said: "We are all socialists now." We are none of us socialists any more, it seems, least of all in Tony Blair's cabinet. But we can cuddle toy foxes like Mike Foster, we can mope over Diana, we can simper about flower power. It's a strange end to an old song. Not all of us will mourn the death of socialism; the death of the Enlightenment would be another matter.
