The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [174]
There were doubts, though, in some quarters, and Labour was thought to have had a very good campaign. Nick himself found their press advertisements much wittier than the Tories'. "In Britain the poor have got poorer and the rich have got. . . well, they've got the Conservatives" was one that even Gerald had laughed at. In general, Gerald's view was that campaigning was over-rated at the national level, and irksome, even counterproductive, in the constituencies. "You know, the best thing I could have done on May 11, when the election was called, would have been to push off for a month's holiday somewhere," he said to Catherine. "Quite possibly on safari." He got fed up with Catherine saying it was a "TV election." "I don't know why you go on about it, Puss," he said, looking in the hall mirror before a "photo-opportunity" for the local news. "All elections are TV elections. And a bloody good thing too. It means you don't have to go and talk to the voters yourself. In fact if you do try and talk to them they're bored to death because they've heard it all already on TV." ("Mm, that may be why," said Catherine.)
He was surprised that he hadn't been asked to appear in more of the major broadcasts and televised press conferences, where the Lady herself had retained a tireless dominance. His personal highlight had been a Question Time on BBC1, where he stood in for the indisposed Home Secretary at the last moment but very much took his own line. He did a lot of smarmy joshing with Robin Day, whom he knew socially, and this irritated the Labour defence spokesman, who was fighting an uphill battle on nuclear disarmament. Nick and Rachel watched it at home. Caught on the TV screen in his own drawing room Gerald looked distinctly alien, fattened and sharpened by the studio lights. He played sulkily with his fountain pen while the other panellists were speaking. His breast-pocket handkerchief billowed upwards like the flame of a torch. He came out in favour of Europe, having as he said a house in France where he spent the summer. He said he believed there were tens of thousands of jobs available if only people would get out and look for them (cries, which he relished, of "Shame"). Lively rudeness and childish antagonism were the point of the programme, and also its limitation. Rachel laughed in fond disparagement once or twice. Gerald's special mixture of laziness and ambition seemed to crystallize under the camera into brutal bumptiousness. A questioner from the floor, who looked like Cecil, the Barwick welly-whanger, accused him of being too rich to care about ordinary people; and while Gerald boomingly deplored the statement you could see it sinking and settling in his flushed features as a kind of acclaim.
When it came to canvassing in Barwick, Gerald felt there was less need than ever to put oneself out. He pooh-poohed the polls. All the Northamptonshire seats were Tory strongholds, even Corby, with its closed-down steelworks. "Even the unemployed know they're better off with us," Gerald said. "Anyway, they've got a computer in the office up there now, and if