Sexual politics in the 90s: Fantasy politics

Our erotic dreams are now peopled by the Labour cabinet, reports Heather Chalmers

Dream, you may remember, were the pop group chosen by New Labour to play at their election-night shindig. And d:reaming about New Labour is exactly what the nation has been up to ever since. The dreams are full of idealism and social hope. They are also charged with the erotic, and women in particular are having them in spades.

"I was running away from the evil army," muses Kirsty, 31, "across a rocky hillside: it comes from Kidnapped, I've had the dream before. It's a Scottish dream, so, it's not surprising I'm rescued by a chap in a kilt. Maybe it is a wee bit surprising, though,that my saviour was Gordon Brown. He looked fab in the kilt, I can tell you. It's like having a secret love- affair. I have a smile to myself when he comes on the TV. I imagine us doing horseplay, him with his camped-up Scottish gruffness: `I am Chan- cell-or of the Ex-chequ -er. It's probably relevant that I'm a Scottish person in London, and I do get homesick a lot. Also, I am pretty worried about my finances right now..."

"Robin Cook," says Maxine excitedly. Maxine, 32, is an artist. She's just been ill with a nasty stomach bug. "I dreamt I was vomiting out these miles of stencils. You know, the bits of paper left after you've cut out the shapes. Then Robin Cook turned up in my studio. The Foreign Office simply had to know about my shapes." Maxine is a friend of mine. I know she finds it difficult to reconcile the austere, public-spirited values of her parents with her own desire to wallow around in art. Austere, public- spirited values? Remind you of any somewhat stern and Scottish Foreign Secretary you know? Onwards into European integration! That, perhaps, is where Maxine should be headed, for the sake of her stomach, her family life and her art.

In 1992, the porno-Freudian novelist D M Thomas published a much-mocked book called Flying Into Love. It was sort of about J F Kennedy, who did indeed fly into Love Airport shortly before his assassination. A lot of it, however, was about the dreams ordinary Americans were having about their dishy President. "Ten thousand dreams a night, a Dallas psychologist told me, are dreamt about the Kennedy assassination. Since dreams begin everywhere, and since fiction is a kind of dream and history is a kind of dream, and this is both..." Thomas burbles. I didn't believe that 10,000- dreams statistic when I first read it. I more than believe it now.

"A month ago, I'd have been embarrassed about my thing with Gordon," says Kirsty. "But now, I've only to mention him, and women say, `Yes, he is quite cute...'" This isn't just the Mellor effect, the old canard about sex and power. It is something closer to what D M Thomas imagined about Kennedy: a nation's libidinal floodgates crashing open after a long and depressing block. "Things can only get better" as D:Ream so rightly sang.