FUNNY MONEY

Letter from London

Mrs. Thatcher's Britain is like a Dickens novel, peopled by the greedy, the needy, and the seedy

IAN JACK

Recently I had the bad luck to eat late in a fashionable London restaurant. By midnight most of the foreign moneymen and their Cockney doxies had left for the casinos and the well-sprung beds of their suites around Park Lane.

"We go now, ladies? We return to 'otel and 'ave nice time?"

"Ooh, Aziz, ain't you the cheeky one!"

Eventually only the native English remained. There was a group of them at an adjacent table—all English, all young, all male. They'd come straight from a hard day in front of the money screens, communicating with Wall Street and Tokyo, and now they were placing bets and hiccuping. Several bottles of champagne stood on the table.

"A hundred if you can do it, Henry."

"Make that two hundred."

"O.K., you're on."

The idea was to throw a lit cigarette into the air and then catch it, preferably by the unlit end, between the lips. The winner would take £200, but nobody was sober or seal-like enough to manage it. Cigarettes and ashes arched onto the white tablecloth and sometimes into a drink. The Italian waiters stood back, impassive; British explorers must have looked like this as guests of honor at tribal feast days in central Africa.

"Watch your seat for Christ's sake, Henry."

"Whoops... Christ..."

Crash.

Odd, I thought, that the British were 11 once thought of as a buttoned-up race, W whose restaurant voices rarely rose above a murmur, who were easily scared by headwaiters. "Vulgar" and "loudmouthed" used to be our favorite adjectives for Americans as we sat in a comer cowering over our soup. But it was also true, I thought, that we could have witnessed the same scenes fifty or a hundred years ago. Young English bloods have numbered vomiting and bread-roll throwing among their favorite pastimes for centuries. What is new today is the scale of young-bloodism. It is no longer confined to the traditional boneheaded rich. It has broken out from behind the gray walls of expensive boarding schools and ancient universities and now runs up and down the prosperous high streets of South East England: "Thatcher's Britain." It has spread to city girls with executive briefcases and young men in sharp suits from the humbler suburbs.

Champagne, once a raffish drink suitable for toffs and weddings, has become demotic. The young bloods call it "shampoo," or sometimes, if too many glasses have put double syllables out of reach, just "poo." Champagne bars in the new London are what coffeehouses were in Dr. Johnson's day, though the talk in them rarely rises to Dr. Johnson's level. Money is the topic. How much Hugh has made in copper futures. How much Chase Manhattan will pay Hemy. What Fiona coughed up for a new apartment. What Simon wants for last year's Porsche. A few years ago, before the deregulation of London's financial markets ("the Big Bang"), the fashionable young inhabited a gentler culture, marked chiefly by Filofaxes and Perrier water. At that time the word "yuppie" seemed no more significant than any other of those social categories invented for the amusement of magazine readers, such as "Sloane Rangers" and "Mayfair Mercs." A journalistic confection: you could read about them safe in the knowledge that you might never meet one. But this proved an illusion. The cash-rich young have become the dominant note of London life. Unlike other disturbers of the status quo—the blacks, say, or (once) the gays—they can be abused without moral reproof.

Leftist politicians talk about yuppies and "yuppie settlements" as though they were an invasion of the Goths and Huns. In the narrow streets of East London, where warehouses which once held spices from the East Indies now contain Simon and Fiona, the crime of mugging is known as "yuppie taxing." There is even a group called Class War—a motley collection of impoverished anarchopunks—which sometimes takes to the streets with banners: YUPPIE SCUM OUT

and RICH TOFFS GO HOME.

They won't, of course. London's yuppiedom is underpinned by the one successful, internationally competitive section of the British economy—financial trading. Social change in other parts of Britain is these days almost synonymous with decay; the great provincial cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow are now at best no more than museums to an industrial past. But in London and its hinterlands the change is dynamic; the city has shed its manufacturing and commercial roles and is determined to outpace Tokyo and New York to emerge as the leading financial center in the world. Money is no longer one of London's several specialties. It is the specialty, and it speaks to the citizens directly as hard cash should, uncluttered by the language of the old-school tie, the rolled umbrella, and the bowler hat, which every school geography book taught us were the badges of the gentleman stockbroker, and which rendered city gents as a tourist attraction, like Beefeaters. (These schoolbooks always ran the same picture, a sea of bowler hats crossing London Bridge in the morning rush hour. Recently a German magazine, trying to put together a piece on "traditional" London life, was hard put to find a hatter who still makes them.)

A play has been written about this sea change. Serious Money opened at the Royal Court in Sloane Square earlier this year, has since transferred to the West End, and is billed to open at the Public Theater in New York in December. Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina (Joe Orton and his friend Halliwell in Prick Up Your Ears) had leading parts, and the play attracted warm reviews. It is, according to the critics, a crackling assault on the greed and lack of scruples which currently fuel the markets in London and on Wall Street. Well, that may be its intention. Its author, Caryl Churchill, is certainly committed to the liberal Left, as is the Royal Court Theatre. But both dramatist and theater seem to have overlooked a crucial factor—the audience.

In the narrow streets of East London, the crime of mugging is now known as "yuppie taxing."

On the night I went to see Serious Money the theater was stuffed with the same kind of people who were being sent up onstage. In the old days at the Royal Court you could assume that the bulk of the audience would comprise soft-centered moralists—journalists, publishers, academics, and the like—who, had they been watching Serious Money, would have tut-tutted at the amorality of insider trading revealed onstage, even if (like me) they could not quite work out what was going on. But this audience was guys and gals whose daily lives revolve around exchange rates. It was like intruding into a school play or a production of The Merchant of Venice performed before the Rialto Traders (1596) Inc. They were amused and intrigued rather than disturbed by the onstage villainy, and applauded cheerfully, and quite unironically, when the cast sang "Five More Glorious Years [for Mrs. Thatcher]" at the end.

Any moral condemnation was completely defused, and my group, all in our forties, left the theater feeling we belonged to another time and place. But in this we were humbugs, since we all went home to ordinary Victorian houses which are now worth about four times their "alue when Mrs. Thatcher came to power. The price of one of them would buy an estate in Ireland, a castle in Scotland, or six equivalent houses in the blighted North. Accidents of history and geography have made us rich, and nobody I know, not even my friends with lingering Marxist beliefs, is going to sell up for anything less than he can get.

The social dangers here are obvious enough, and diagnosed so frequently that "divided Britain" has become a cliche. But however you describe the division— private affluence versus public squalor, North versus South— the fact is that most people have become reconciled to the idea of living in a country which has, like Dickensian London, a substantial underclass who are poor, badly housed, barely educated, and increasingly criminal. Nothing here would shock a New Yorker, but in Europe you would have to travel as far south as Naples to meet a squalor equal to that of parts of inner London or the decayed cities of the North. In a way, it is rather like living inside a Dickens novel. Decency has become a domestic rather than a civic virtue. Warm hearts and high intentions gather at home beside a blazing hearth, while outside ragged mobs crowd the broken pavements, and the great engines of financial capitalism chum on through their booms and busts.

Peregrine Worsthome, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, put the matter in a different way. He wrote last summer: "Modem [i.e., affluent] Britain does not feel guilty. Its affluence is too recent for that. It feels insecure, frightened that its affluence could so easily disappear in a puff of inflation." Worsthome is a maverick Tory and one of the most original and unpredictable political commentators now writing in Fleet Street (perhaps because he is of European immigrant stock, despite his yeoman English name). Shortly before this year's election he warned Mrs. Thatcher of something he called "bourgeois triumphalism." It was, he said, "a difficult phenomenon to pin down. But anyone who has heard yuppies at play or at table—and who can have failed to have done so, given the trumpet volume of their braying voices?—will know what is meant." Yuppies felt confident enough "to shed all inhibitions about enjoying the spoils of the class war which they think Mrs Thatcher has won on their behalf." They flaunted their wealth "with a degree of brazen insensitivity the like of which has not been seen since the days of the Edwardian nouveau riche." Their values, or rather lack of them, threatened the country's "long record of civilised governance." They had no loyalty to Britain, and if Mrs. Thatcher were defeated, "off they would go to New York without any regret."

Of course, Mrs. Thatcher was not defeated and, lo, the Filofaxes did not flee unto Egypt. Instead she looks set to become the longest-serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool (1812-27), though unlike Lord Liverpool she will be remembered. She has given her name to an epoch, a distinction usually reserved for monarchs, and created an ism, which few Britons of any rank have ever achieved (unless you count Marx as an honorary Londoner and Marxism as a product of the British Museum's reading room). We live like tenants in "Mrs. Thatcher's Britain" and experience "Thatcherism"—a phenomenon as difficult to analyze as Worsthorne's bourgeois triumphalism. Sometimes it seems like a philosophy, sometimes like an instinct, and sometimes no more than the prime minister's strident and assertive personality.

She was amused by the Worsthome term. "Boo-jhwha?" she told a later interviewer in a mock French accent. "Boo-jhwha?" she repeated, as only Mrs. Thatcher can; the voice that always seems to contain a reprimand, the product of so many years as headmistress in the great classroom of life. "Why can't he find a plain English word for the plain people of England, Scotland, and Wales? The boo-jhwha live in France."

She preferred to call us "the middleclass" and said that she feared "all this talk about bourgeois triumphalism" would be used to discredit the strivers among us who for too long had been made to feel guilty. "How are we to explain this British guilt-complex?" she wondered, pausing, chalk in hand beside her metaphorical blackboard. ''Perhaps it is a misplaced non-conformist [Protestant] conscience—a misunderstanding of people like John Wesley."

Mrs. Thatcher herself was reared as a Wesleyan Methodist above her father's grocery shop. A strict upbringing under the tutelage of a parsimonious but ambitious father and, to judge from her invisibility in the Thatcher iconography, a hard-worn mother. Love and joy, as they are now understood, do not seem to have had much of a look-in; it is interesting that Mrs. Thatcher always talks of families as runways to success rather than as centers of happiness in themselves.

Nonconformism to her means hard work, thrift, patriotism, and a desire to do well by one's children. Her repeated homilies on these subjects have found a genuine echo among millions of aspiring families, and nobody should doubt her achievement in restoring the English (less so the Scottish or the Welsh) middle class to the central position in national life. As a friend says, she is "good on Jews and not in love with dukes." (There have been five Jews in her Cabinets, including her chief political guru, Sir Keith Joseph.)

And yet, for all her energy and resolve she seems blind to the great paradox of her regime. The middle classes in Britain do not owe their present prosperity to honest toil and saving sixpence every week. This is the stuff of Victorian lantern shows. They, or rather we, owe our lifestyle to the diminishing resource of North Sea oil, tax cuts, cheap consumer imports, easy credit, and share trading in newly privatized public monopolies—with public disorder kept at bay through massive welfare handouts. Mrs. Thatcher calls this "the people's capitalism" and "the enterprise culture." To others of us it looks like short-termism driven by greed.

How long can it last? Nobody knows. The coming of a riotous apocalypse is frequently invoked, though personally I think the seedy vision of the novelist Angela Carter is more likely: "It will be like living in a blurred carbon-copy of the United States—all of the disadvantages and none of the advantages. The hamburgers will be lousy and the slot machines won't work."

Meanwhile, order up another of the Dom Perignon, Henry.

"Whoops!"

"Christ!"

Crash.