Free Letters from London by Julian Barnes Page A

spectacular self-combustion. As minister responsible for health and safety at work, Nicholls campaigned against alcohol abuse. In March, he told an Alcohol Concern conference, “Quite simply, alcohol and work do not mix,” pointing to the deleterious effects on health, family well-being, and company profits. In October, Mr. Nicholls was himself at work, and most publicly so, at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth. On Wednesday, October 10, he sat on the platform listening to—or, at least, present at—the Home Secretary’s warnings about drunken driving. That same evening, Mr. Nicholls went out to dinner with friends. Prudently, he had arranged with a local taxi firm for a cab to pick up the revelers at ten-fifteen and take them to Portsmouth. The agreed charge was to be £47.00. Imprudently, Mr. Nicholls and his party lingered at the restaurant until after midnight, at which point, the taxi driver informed them, the cost of transportation had gone up to £62.50. More imprudently, the Minister turned this offer down, thus depriving the cabbie of his hoped-for profit.Most imprudently of all, he then asked the fellow to drive him as far as a car park, where he collected his own vehicle. Now, Bournemouth during a Conservative Party Conference must be one of the most densely policed areas of the country, and it is believed that the taxi driver, in understandable pique, denounced the Junior Minister to the local constabulary. Mr. Nicholls’s career vanished as a flashing blue light pursued him out of the darkness. It was the update of a cautionary tale by Hilaire Belloc:
    Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
    The more important resignation was that of the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Mr. Nicholas Ridley. At first, it too seemed largely a comic business, though it was here that one of the year’s most powerful, if latent, political themes began to emerge: Europe. Most Cabinet ministers (and Mrs. Thatcher managed to chomp her way through fifty-six of them, in fifteen major reshuffles) resign or get sacked for disagreeing with the Prime Minister or her advisers. Mr. Ridley managed the rare and ingenious trick of being obliged to resign because he agreed all too thoroughly with the Prime Minister. His only mistake was to express in public opinions that Mrs. Thatcher could permit herself to endorse only in private. Ridley was, however, no damp-eared aspirant trying to fawn upon his leader; he was a trusted friend and political soul mate. Oddly, the old bruiser was valued equally on both sides of the House: Mrs. Thatcher saw in him someone unquestioningly devoted to the ideals of the market, while the Opposition treasured him for being just the sort of Tory they needed—not only a viscount’s second son but one who every so often was given to making huge and exploitable gaffes. His devotion to the power of the market was evidenced during his spell as a minister at the Foreign Office, when he tackled the problems of decolonization in a novel way. He reportedly offered the Prime Minister of the Turksand Caicos Islands £12 million to go independent (the huffy reply came that they wanted £40 million and would revolt if bought off for less), while in 1980, two years before the Falklands War, he proposed that the continuing problem of these southerly islands be solved by transferring them to Argentina and then leasing them back—a suggestion that caused patriotic uproar in the Commons. Mr. Ridley’s gaffes provoked almost as much of a stir as his politics. As Secretary of State for the Environment, he denounced country dwellers who were in favor of land development as long as it didn’t happen near them—what he called the NIMBY factor. A little bit of journalistic digging later, and it emerged that Mr. Ridley himself had objected when a local farmer tried to build in a