Leaving the Speccie

When I arrived in London in 1990 the bubble was about to burst. House prices were starting to crumble. The Thatcher era would soon end in her own public tears. After a decade of economic boosterism, during which men and women with more ambition than finesse had been encouraged to roll the dice and go for it, London felt harsher than before. I had been living in Hong Kong - not a sentimental place. But even there I had never seen quite the same look of contempt that disfigured the coarsely handsome features of a young man in a double-breasted suit as he tossed a few coins down the dark stairwell of a tube station in the rough direction of another young man, huddled in a blanket and holding a sign saying he was hungry. This was not necessarily a sign of class hatred. The two men could well have come from the same neighbourhood. But one had gone for it, and the other, for whatever reason, had not.

I came to London to write about foreign affairs for the Spectator, a publication so self-consciously English that it could have been edited by Anglophiles rather than Englishmen. The Speccie and its editor at the time, Charles Moore, always bordered on self-parody. The office, a fine Georgian house in Bloomsbury, was emblematic of civilised, upper-bourgeois ease. The receptionists, with old or at least long family names, spoke in the trilling accents some Americans still find charming. The interior decoration had the feel of a well-worn but superbly cut suit: frayed Persian carpets; Victorian desks; a black trunk which had once belonged to Lord Salisbury; lampshades at rakish angles like Winston Churchill's bow ties.

I first met Charles Moore when he visited Hong Kong, in whose fate he took a patriotic interest: Britain had to do the right thing by its colonial subjects. I waited for him at his hotel. Just as he descended from the lift, dressed in a dove-grey tropical suit, a Jermyn Street shirt and a discreetly dotted tie, a band of Scottish bagpipers started up a pibroch in the lobby. This was, in fact, a daily event at the Hong Kong Hilton. Charles had had no hand in it. But it seemed, somehow, as if he had.

Charles was only in his twenties then, fresh out of Eton and Cambridge. Yet he looked and spoke like a man from an almost vanished world. His England, and that of the Spectator, seemed to me like PG Wodehouse's England, that is to say, an amusing invention, which could still be marketed with some success. The ads in the magazine, for "silk racing umbrellas" or 18th century furniture or handmade shoes from Lobb's, could have been enjoyed only vicariously by most people, even Spectator readers. There are people, of course, who shoot and have their shoes made at Lobb's and dream about a country still governed by landed gentlemen. You see them in the party pictures of the Tatler, lifting squealing debutantes above their shoulders at country-house balls. They exist, but, like Charles himself, they look a bit like characters in an old play which has gone through too many revivals.

There was an advertisement in the Spectator for a clothes shop named Hackett, after its owner, a clever young entrepreneur. In the beginning, still in the Thatcher years, Hackett sold only second-hand clothes-old tweed suits, dinner jackets, waistcoats and the like-family hand-me-downs for those whose fathers had never worn a dinner jacket. It was more a costumier than a men's shop. Then Hackett thought of something better: he would have those costumes made from scratch, complete with instructions on the proper way to wear them. Thus the style of an old upper class was reinvented for Thatcher's children.

Charles was perhaps not exactly a poseur. But I could never gauge the degree of self-consciousness with which he played his role as the young squire, the twenty-something High Tory, the Old Etonian about the Beefsteak Club. To what extent was his class act conscious? Perhaps it wasn't. Perhaps it was just me, coming in from the outside, who felt as though I had stumbled into a bizarre play without knowing all my lines or even quite what role to adopt.

The other thing which puzzled me at first was how Moore's squirearchy fitted in with Margaret Thatcher's vulgar poujadisme, her strident go-for-it ethos, her provincial disdain for old institutions of privilege such as the Bar or Oxford and Cambridge. Charles and most of his writers were keen supporters of Thatcher. The sentimental views of patrician High Tory "wets," who believed that gentlemen owed patronage to the working classes, that money was not something you discussed in public and that ambition was for foreigners and cads, were treated with dry disdain. Hayek was the high priest of Moore's Spectator. Going for it was good. And yet the fogeyish world of the Speccie was, at least on a fantastical level, all about privilege, old money, old schools, old families, old silver and old gentlemanly wit.

I was flattered to be in this old Anglophile world, with its weekly lunches and its summer parties, where you found yourself in a suffocating crush of braying people, trying not to spill your drink over someone else's linen suit. Even eating barely edible meals-washed down with superb wines - at gentlemen's clubs - making small talk with retired Tory cabinet ministers, gave me a certain thrill. Yet I soon realised that although I might be in this world I would never be of it. I could never quite shake my fear of striking a false note. There was, for example, the day I turned up for a Spectator lunch in a thick tweed jacket, suitable for a shooting weekend in Scotland perhaps, but decidedly not for a Spectator lunch. I thought it looked suitably English.

It was a sunny November morning, unseasonably warm. The fire in the editor's office, on the first floor, was blazing. Within seconds of walking into the room in my tweed jacket, I knew disaster would strike. Slim, elegant, pale-skinned people in understated suits were standing around sipping sherry. The most remarkable thing about them was not the clothes they wore or the sound of their voices, chiming with the crystal glass. No, it was the fact that they looked so cool; these people were bone-dry, with not a pearl of perspiration in sight. While talking to an Amanda (just flown in from Cape Town) and a Simon (something in the City; went to school with Charles), I felt it coming, like tropical rain. Rivulets trickling from my temples became rivers by the time they hit my collar. My light-blue shirt went navy, my hair was plastered to my forehead. I retired to the lavatory to mop myself with toilet paper, with the result (I discovered later, with a horrified glance in the gilt-framed hall mirror) that I returned to the editor's drawing room with bits of paper stuck to my face, as though I had been wounded or treated for some dreadful skin disease. The other guests politely declined to notice.

Lunch began. The roast was served, the talk flowed, the port went round the rosewood table. I was sitting opposite the writer Frederic Raphael, who was telling Kingsley Amis, in his most affected, Disraelian drawl, that he, Freddie (Charterhouse and Cambridge) Raphael, would "never understand you English. You English are really too, too extraooordinary." I could see a twitch of intense irritation pass across Amis's face. It was no more than a flicker of the eyelashes, but it was enough to tell me that ancient prejudices had been severely tested.

Another guest - I cannot remember who - was quoting General de Gaulle. The question was: why didn't de Gaulle want Britain to join the Common Market? Well, said de Gaulle, because he realised that England was not part of Europe. If England joined the Common Market, said de Gaulle, then England would be lost. And Europe would be the poorer for it. There was a brief lull in the conversation. There was nothing left to say. Everyone agreed. Then, suddenly, apropos of nothing, really, Charles said something that put him for ever on the other side of an invisible wall. He asked, with absolute seriousness: "Ian, tell me, which bible do you use?" The word "use" was especially fine. I understood what the poet James Fenton had meant when he called the Spectator "camp."

Charles was succeeded as editor by Dominic Lawson. The camp Tory style of the magazine remained, but there was a definite shift in mood. A new publisher had been hired. His Spanish name and American accent were much mocked behind closed doors, and his slicked-backed raven hair, radiant smile, eternal tan and the too perfect cut of his Prince-of-Wales suit gave him away as an exotic. But he was skilled at bringing in expensive ads for champagnes and diamond necklaces. The go-for-it spirit was more visible under Dominic's editorship: ambition, youth and the importance of money were more openly acknowledged. Fashion became a factor.

Dominic's background was in some ways grander than Charles's. His father had been one of Thatcher's senior cabinet ministers, one of those to whom Harold Macmillan referred when he said Thatcher's government contained more Old Estonians than Old Etonians. But Dominic was less romantic about England than Charles, perhaps because he saw it more clearly. Dominic came from a family of successful immigrants. Although he was as British as Charles, others might not always see it that way, which added a keen edge to his will to succeed in society. It also gave him a subversive streak, an instinct for outrage. I was still at the magazine when Dominic's interview with Nicholas Ridley caused a stir. Ridley was Thatcher's minister for trade and industry. With some journalistic skill, Dominic got the old aristocrat to vent his heartfelt but highly undiplomatic prejudices about the Germans. Ridley had to resign. Dominic was proud of his feat, yet professed to regret its consequences. Perhaps he did.

The joy of getting on in English society is to feel included, to join the club which is closed to others. One afternoon in May, Dominic and I decided to watch the cricket at Lord's. Dominic was a member of the MCC, for which the waiting list is so long that most aspiring members can only hope to be accepted in their dotage. His magic pass allowed him to bring one guest. We went up to the pavilion - members only, of course. At the entrance was a stout man with a bulbous red nose. His manner was officious. His Cerberus role was to keep non-members out. He took his time, enjoying his brief moment of authority, turning Dominic's pass this way and that, asking him questions about precisely who I was. Something about the man, his nose, his puffed-up airs, sent me into a silent rage. After we had finally been let in, my rage became more vocal. Silvery heads in the Long Room swivelled in our direction. And Dominic said to me, with a patience my outburst hardly merited, "Don't you understand? This is the point of being a member. This is what English life is all about."

He was right, of course. And it was while working with Dominic that I realised my basic error. I had been deceived by appearances. The world I had entered briefly was not just a theatrical fantasy. Thatcher's poujadisme, the go-for-it spirit, were not inimical to Spectator Toryism. Moore's affected squirearchy needed the man with the foreign name and the slicked-back hair to bring in the cash. The resilience of the British class system is due to this marriage of new money and old style. As de Tocqueville observed, the British upper class acts as a sponge for talent and ambition. Snobbery can act as a spur to personal achievement. The Spectator is one of the British institutions that lend aristocratic airs to middle-class striving. And in fact Thatcher's assault on class privilege was always more apparent than real. She herself affected, in the most theatrical and rarely convincing way, the mannerisms of a class to which she wasn't born. She was, in a sense, the man with the slicked-back hair. People mocked her affectations, but she provided the money for the go-getting rich, and the gentlemanly old rich too. And so she enabled the age-old show to go on and on.

It was a show of which I eventually grew tired. Observed from a distance, the Spectator style was quaint and amusing. And there was much that I admired: the debunking of Utopian nonsense; the satirical view of idealism; the intellectual cheekiness. And like de Tocqueville, I could see merit in snobbery as a tonic for individual enterprise. But perhaps I was too much of an Anglophile to live with the real thing for too long. For under the cheekiness was a complacency, a philistinism which I found irritating. The English social order celebrated in the Spectator may be more civilised than most political arrangements in the world, but that is not saying much, or at least not enough. In the end I felt ill at ease with young people who had never thought of trying anything else, who had walked only on well-trodden paths, whose main aim was to conserve the system in which they had got on, and who looked at any alternative with amused contempt.

I can remember the moment when I realised that enough was enough. Rajiv Gandhi had just been killed by a suicide bomber in southern India. We had a meeting in Dominic's office to discuss the next issue. Naturally we had to do something on India. I was sitting on a comfortable sofa. Next to me was the deputy editor, a pale, carrot-haired young man whose girth showed a fondness for English puddings. To say that he sat would be inaccurate. He sprawled in a pose of exaggerated ease, with his head denting a thick cushion, his heavy legs stretched out, and a large stomach straining the buttons of his striped shirt.

As foreign editor I was asked for ideas on how to cover the Indian events. I mentioned a few well-known journalists in Delhi who might contribute. I suggested that a piece on the Gandhi dynasty by an Indian writer might not go amiss. Suddenly I felt the figure on my left stir: "Enoch!" he bellowed, "Enoch's always frightfully good on India!" Now there were, no doubt, occasions when Enoch Powell's love of the British Raj could be given an airing, but I did not feel that this was one of them. Not that this was a reason to resign. It was of no great consequence. In fact, Enoch never wrote the piece, and I carried on at the Speccie for a while longer. But I knew that a change of scene was in order.