Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [83]
1 May 1997
Polling Day. Voted, with Harold, at noon up at Fox Primary School. Only one teller, a Tory, a jolly blue-rinser who bemoaned the lack of tellers for the other parties: ‘Once we tellers had such wonderful talks …’ The truth is, we are now a small safe Conservative seat. Later we went up to Melvyn and Cate’s in Hampstead as before, in a hired car. Me to Harold: ‘Would it be the height of radical chic to ask for a driver who is a Labour voter?’ Melvyn beaming and friendly as usual, but that means nothing: he was beaming in 1992. Michael Foot, who was ostensibly co-host (as in 1992) very frail, there with his dog, Dizzy, aged seventeen, also very frail. A touching sight. I sat next to him on the sofa. Michael Foot didn’t quiver when the various TV programmes referred insistently to his ‘disastrous leadership’. Others present included Salman as before and his wife Elizabeth West, expecting a child imminently, looking like a Madonna with her mystically beautiful and tranquil face. Also Kathy Lette jumping up and down like a sexy frog as – at last! – the results came in and this time it really was going to be a victory. No, a landslide.
We decided to indulge ourselves by going to the BBC party. Christopher Bland, Chairman of the BBC, very bonhomous. Enormous security to get in (the IRA does not go away). It was another kind of rout. Such delight as the Tory grandees crumbled on the screen and crumbled in our sight at the party. Allegiances were being hastily shuffled. For example, I like to think that John Birt’s face shaded from blue to pink as in a Disney cartoon, while I was watching. Later we had yet another party at home with the cats, Catalina and Casimir, strong Labour voters both of them, and champagne. By three o’clock in the morning everything was a blair, I mean a blur. Memorable day to be compared with that marvellous summer’s day in 1945 when following the landslide victory of Labour, my father’s friends predicted to this awed, happy schoolgirl that Labour would ‘rule Britain for fifty years’. Of course it was actually six … but this time it was going to be different.
The chart of Harold’s loss of faith in the Labour government began with the situation in former Yugoslavia. Along with many others, including me, he disapproved strongly of NATO’s action against Serbia following the failure of the Rambouillet Agreement starting in March 1999. This NATO campaign had of course the full support of the British government. None of this was easy, starting with the situation in Kosovo. What action, if any, should be taken by outsiders when atrocities were taking place? There were after all atrocities by Albanians as well as Serbs. What was the role, what should be the role of the all-powerful US? Personally I rather agreed with a letter in the Guardian, rather rude, saying that Kosovans didn’t give a toss about US foreign policy: they just wanted to be rescued.
Yet under any circumstances, it was difficult to see that NATO bombs constituted any solution to a place already tormented by so many historical, tribal issues. Bombs, after all, are no respecters of persons.
8 May 1999
We get the news of the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. It is announced ‘with regret’. Just one of those mistakes. Oh, so that’s all right. To say nothing of a cluster bomb in a market, grandmas and grandpas bestrewed about, dead amid their vegetable stalls. This week has naturally been dominated by the war. Harold’s broadcast on Tuesday was icily brilliant, pale (chest infection), all in black (natural plumage) and then he spoke the now famous words: ‘What is moral authority? Where does it come from? Who bestows