Volume 44, Number 11 · June 26, 1997
Conservatives, Nice and Nasty
By Alan Ryan
Growing Up Republican: Christie Whitman: The Politics of Character
by Patricia Beard
HarperCollins, 262 pp., $25.00
Christine Todd Whitman: The Making of a National Political Player
by Art Weissman
Birch Lane/Carol, 290 pp., $22.95
At two o'clock on the morning of May 2, an elderly British Conservative looked blearily into the television cameras. Sir Marcus Fox had until a few minutes earlier represented one of the safest Conservative constituencies in Britain. He had been the chairman of the 1922 Committee, which is to say the leader and spokesman of the Tory rank and file in Parliament. And he had just lost his seat to a twenty-four-year-old Labour Party researcher whose name nobody—nobody in the Labour Party even—could remember. Sir Marcus knew that the world had turned upside down, that Tony Blair was on his way to 10 Downing Street, and he to retirement. But he smiled good-naturedly. It would, he remarked, have been pretty bad to have lost to the old Labour Party, but it was not so bad tonight. The Conservative Party of John Major had lost, but it had been replaced by the conservative party of Tony Blair; the country was in safe hands. He was sorry to lose, but hardly agitated.
Review, 6156 words
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