Free Letters from London by Julian Barnes

the right hand, and allowing the left hand to dangle on the thigh, like Lord Carrington, seems indecisive, semiwet. Half-cupping both hands in front of the groin, like James Prior, is frankly inadvisable. Alternatively, as three of the ten newly appointed front-rank ministers do, you can deposit the hands, with fingers spread, firmly upon the thigh just above the knee. This pose looks crisply businesslike: here we are, ready for action,keen to clear up the mess left by the last government. So that is one problem solved. The second problem is what to do with the face: that intended smile of quiet confidence might translate as unctuous self-satisfaction, while the plan to appear weighty yet full of vigor often misfires into an expression of high anxiety. Perhaps the best solution is to be as straightforward as possible, and just look very cheerful.
    One man who has found the correct lines on both face and hands sits two places to Mrs. Thatcher’s left: a bespectacled figure, gray-haired but youthful, beaming but thrustful—in essence, jolly happy. So he should be: he has managed the conversion from liberal Conservatism to Thatcherism without angst, he was a key figure in drafting the election manifesto, and he has just been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. His name is Sir Geoffrey Howe, and for the next eleven years he is to remain the most loyal, the least disliked, and the most uncharismatic of leading Tory ministers. He is to spend four years as Chancellor, six as Foreign Secretary, one and a quarter as Deputy Prime Minister. His loyalty and tenacity can be judged by the fact that when he finally resigned, on November 1, 1990, he was the last but one of the original twenty-five Axminster squatters to depart: only Mrs. Thatcher herself remained of that team. Sir Geoffrey’s longevity might not have surprised observers in 1979. What would have surprised them is that within a month of his departure, and as a direct consequence of it, Mrs. Thatcher herself who had in the meantime won two more general elections and still enjoyed a majority of support within the Parliamentary Party, would be hustled into suburban exile, thus bringing to an end the longest premiership since the second Earl of Liverpool’s unappealing stint of power from 1812 to 1827.
    For much of last year, there was a tangy smell to British political life, though whether it was just the whiff of well-hung game—a mature government becoming more mature—wasn’t clear. Certainly it was a year of deaths and resignations, though at first many of them had a comic slant. In June, for instance, the Social Democratic Party, after a decade of oscillating fortunes, finally went into liquidation. Founded in 1981 to wide media acclaim, the SDP in its early years looked tohave revived the center of British politics and established a three-party system. But it was undone successively by the Falklands War (which solidified Tory support), by the voting system (proportional representation would have greatly helped the cause), by its own factionalism, and by a revived, middle-ground Labour Party. The SDP laid itself out and tucked the shroud around its own starved frame after a humiliating by-election in the Lancashire town of Bootle. In late 1981 and early 1982, the SDP had actually held an opinion-poll lead over both the Conservatives and Labour. Eight years later, at Bootle, their candidate was not treated seriously by the electorate; worse, he was not even treated as a joke. The representative of Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Cavern Rock Party—which comes into existence only at by-elections, in order to publicize an aging rock star—received 418 votes, out of 35,477. The SDP polled a dismal 155.
    Some of the resignations were distinctly comic, too. Take the case of Patrick Nicholls, a forty-one-year-old Junior Environment Minister, solicitor, and keen Thatcherite, whose more or less invisible career ended, after three years, in a moment of