Breaking the Code

by Gyles Brandreth

  In my vote of thanks at the Marginals Club dinner I avoided convoluted jokes altogether and went straight for lay-it-on-with-a-trowel grovelling. The PM was in cracking form, relaxed, confident and discursive. He didn’t say anything any of us hadn’t heard before, but he said it in a way that made us feel that he’s bigger, stronger, better that most of the press (and some of our colleagues) would have you believe. We presented him with our new club tie, made by the Chester Tie Company and designed by yours truly. (Diagonal stripes: dark blue, pale green, light blue. The dark blue and the light blue represent the major universities when your teacher is a don. The pale green is the colour of fresh basil. Basildon was the marginal constituency where the result last year showed us the way the election would go!) Peter Thurnham,250 a well-meaning woolly sheep of a man, is the club founder and chairman. There are about thirty members, from all corners of the party but united in a common purpose: a determination to be ineligible for club membership after the next election.

  It’s 11.15 p.m. I’m in the Library, waiting for the last vote, which should be any minute now. An early night! At the table where I sit I have my back to a wonderful wall of books – plays, poetry, European literature. I am starting on The Confessions of Felix Krull.

  No word of any PPS-ship at the Treasury. Heigh-ho.

  WEDNESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 1993

  This morning’s tabloids are dominated by lurid tales of the dirty doings of Major Ronald Ferguson. Is this in the public interest? No. Is this even interesting to the public? Well, er, yes, sort of. Vying for front page space is a story about one of my constituents, a British ‘mercenary’ killed in Bosnia. The news of his death was brought to his parents by a local newspaper at 5.40 p.m. last night. They called me this morning. They are distraught and say they have nothing to say to the mass of press who are now besieging them. This is a tricky one. The story may well be in the public interest, but should grieving parents – even parents of a ‘mercenary’ – be obliged to submit to cross-questioning by the media? I have sent a fax to various papers asking them to leave the parents alone, but I don’t expect it to make any difference.

  LATER

  I was invited to a preview of the new sex-and-politics movie Damage (aka ‘Yes, yes, oh yes, yesss, Minister!) but because of the votes on the leasehold reform Bill couldn’t go – which turned out to be fortuitous because, just as I was wandering off from the six o’clock vote, Stephen Dorrell,251 Financial Secretary to the Treasury, tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Have you got time for a drink?’

  We went to the Smoking Room, happily deserted, and sat in one of the deep, uncomfortable leather sofas by the window. ‘How would you feel about being my PPS?’ He has an engaging way with him, shy, unconsciously charming. I said I’d be honoured. He grinned. He must be three or four years younger than me, taller, slimmer, brighter, better-looking. ‘At Oxford,’ he said, disarmingly, ‘I used to sit at your feet at the Union. They told me I could have a PPS last year, but I didn’t like the people they had on offer. I thought I’d wait for you.’

  I don’t really know him at all. He’s been here since ’79, a protégé of Peter Walker’s, pro-European, dripping wet, and consequently not in the fast-track in Mrs T.’s time. He became a whip in ’87, went to Health in 1990 and on to the Treasury after the election. They say he’s a coming man, a certainty for the Cabinet, a possibility as leader. And now I’m his bag-carrier. I couldn’t be more pleased.

  I said, ‘What’s the job involve?’

  ‘Not a lot. Odd meetings, a bit of bench duty, keeping me in touch with what’s going on. Let’s fix a time to talk it through.’

  He is easy-going but I sense fundamentally serious. I heard myself saying, ‘Well, if you’re going to be a dogsbody you want to be one to a decent dog.’ It sounded neither gracious nor right. As we parted (we drained our orange juices swiftly), I compounded the infelicity with my parting shot:

  ‘I’m sure we can have some fun.’

  Stephen raised a dubious eyebrow: ‘I’m not sure that fun is exactly what the Treasury has in mind.’

  THURSDAY 11 FEBRUARY 1993

  An unsatisfactory morning. While Gerald and the gang are winging their way to Washington DC, I’m struggling with the District Line. I make it to the committee room on time, but only just. And I make a couple of desultory contributions to our deliberations. It’s silly point-scoring. Unattractive, unworthy, and I suppose I’m doing it because I haven’t got anything of substance to offer. (‘When in doubt, say nowt’ is Michèle’s rule. Oh my darling girl, why don’t I listen? Why am I such a fool?) I got involved in some quite unnecessary banter with Glenda. She accused me (rightly) of patronising the committee by defining an oxymoron. I said something stupid about ‘humble backbencher’ being an oxymoron like ‘military intelligence’. I should have brought in the one Richard Stilgoe252 came up with last week: ‘royal family’.

  Lunch was more satisfactory. Sandwiches and mineral water with Peter Lilley. He’s gathered a group of a dozen or so admirers. He chats through current social security issues with us, impresses us with his grasp of his brief, and, without coercion, ensures that we turn up when he has questions both to put in helpful ones and to cheer his robust replies. It’s a good wheeze. More of them should try it.

  At Home Office questions, I spoke up for the bingo clubs of Chester (who are not allowed to advertise their prizes) and was effortlessly upstaged by Teresa Gorman, so wonderfully vulgar and cocksure. She knows exactly what should be done with rapists: ‘Cut off their goolies!’

  In Members’ Lobby afterwards several hacks descended on me together. I thought they might have got word of my appointment. No. They wanted to ask me if I knew the origin of the word ‘goolie’. ‘It’s Hindustani for pill,’ I said. I think they believed me.

  MONDAY 15 FEBRUARY 1993

  This morning’s headlines told us: ‘Major faces Maastricht constitutional crisis’.

  I’ve just emerged from the Chamber and Douglas [Hurd] has defused the bomb – with such nonchalance that if you didn’t know you’d never realise it’s been another monstrous fuck-up. It seems the legal advice Tristan [Garel-Jones] shared with the House on 20 January was at fault. Regrettable, of course, but there we are. Fresh legal advice means that we’ll have no problem ratifying the treaty regardless of the fate of the amendment dealing with the social chapter. So the rebels are outmanoeuvred. They can’t defeat the bill by voting with the opposition on Amendment 27. As Tony Durrant said in the Tea Room, spluttering happily, ‘He’s shot their fox. Tee-hee.’

  Good news: tonight we finish at ten and, better still, tomorrow night, when we probably won’t finish till the early hours, I’m being slipped so that I can speak at a dinner at Guildhall with HRH. I’ve just called Michèle and she said, ‘Your whips seem to have a warped sense of priorities. They’ll give you an evening off to have dinner with Prince Philip, but a night off to have dinner with your wife? Forget it.’

  FRIDAY 19 FEBRUARY 1993

  Horrible news. Judith Chaplin has died.

  She went into St Mary’s Paddington for a routine operation and something went wrong, a suspected blood clot. She was fifty-four. I was with David Willetts when the news came through. He had been with Judith at No. 10 and possibly at the Treasury before that. The tears just streamed down his face. ‘It’s so terrible. She was so good, honest, decent. I can’t believe it. It’s so wrong.’

  SATURDAY 20 FEBRUARY 1993

  We went to St Anne’s [College, Oxford] for the opening of the Clare Palley Library and, yet again, I marvelled at how Roy Jenkins253 has got away with it for all these years. He’s won every prize, secured every bauble, but, to me at least, every time I see him, he comes over as a complacent, self-regarding, bumbling toper. He is the Chancellor of the University of Oxford (on top of everything else), but his speech today was sloppy, uninspired, certainly uninspiring, frequently inaudible. I’ve not read his books and I didn’t see him in action in his heyday, so let’s put it down to envy –
or, more precisely, irritation. I find it irritating that a shambling fat old fool should have us all fawning on him. (I love the famous line: ‘The only thing that Roy Jenkins ever fought for was a table for two at the Mirabelle.’)

  MONDAY 22 FEBRUARY 1993

  I was told to present myself at the Chancellor’s room at 10.30 a.m. for Treasury prayers. I arrived in good time, knowing there’d be a mix-up over my pass (there was), and fearing I’d get lost (I didn’t). I climbed the great stone stairs, turned right, and made my way right round the vast rotunda, past the Chief Secretary’s offices, past the Financial Secretary’s office, through five sets of fire doors, past two stairwells. I met not a soul. The building has the air of a deserted Victorian hotel, the corridors clang, here and there the paint is peeling and some of the rooms still seem to have lino on the floor. The taxpayer’s penny has not been wasted on refurbishments here. I reached the Chancellor’s suite and decided that the grand doorway, with impressive oak surround, was not the way in for me. I was right. There’s a humbler door to the right that leads to the Chancellor’s ‘outer office’. I was expected. The private secretary (I assume), shirtsleeves, braces, easy manner, introduced me to ‘the team’ (just two of them: his assistant and a diary secretary) and said ‘They’re just coming, go through.’

  The outer office leads straight into the Chancellor’s room: leather armchairs in a little group at one end, a small desk at the other, a mighty table that can seat twenty or more dominating the room. William Hague arrived.

  ‘Welcome, welcome. That’s your chair.’

  I hesitated.

  He laughed. ‘Quite right. That’s where the Chancellor sits. The ministers have the armchairs, we sit on the uprights.’

  ‘What happens?’

  He laughed again. ‘Not a lot. You’ll see.’

  By 10.30 the team had assembled: Chief Secretary (Portillo), Financial Secretary (Stephen), Paymaster General (John Cope),254 Economic Secretary (Tony Nelson).255 The other PPSs: William (Chancellor), David Amess256 (Portillo’s man), Ian Twinn257 (John Cope’s). The Chancellor came in last. He was beetle-browed, preoccupied. He took his seat, folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. For a moment I thought, ‘Goodness, we are going to say prayers’, but no, Norman was simply collecting his thoughts. And his first thought was a kind one, a word of welcome to me. ‘At least the jokes should improve.’ This pleasantry over, an eerie silence fell. I didn’t say anything. The PPSs contribute when invited, after the ministers have had their say. This morning their ‘say’ didn’t amount to much. Weak tea was brought in (with two sugar lumps in the saucer) and served in order of precedence. By the time I got mine and had burned my lip with the first sip, the meeting was over. Very odd.

  This evening we’re gathering in Stephen Milligan’s room for the first get-together of our little group: the ‘thoughtful’ members of the 1992 intake. It’s going to be fairly sombre, of course, because Judith was one of the lynchpins and we’ve lost her before we’ve even started. We’re now six: me, Stephen, David [Willetts], Michael Trend,258 David Faber,259 Edward Garnier. Stephen wanted to include Iain Duncan Smith (‘He’s completely wrong on Europe, but he’s very bright and he’s going a long way’) but David [Willetts] was wary of having a known rebel in our number.

  THURSDAY 25 FEBRUARY 1993

  A nice note from Gerald [Kaufman], acknowledging my resignation from the National Heritage Select Committee and wishing me well in my new job: ‘I hope it is the first step on a ladder full of possibilities.’ (I want to read his book, How To Be A Minister, but I don’t feel one can be seen borrowing it from the Library.) An uncomfortable meeting with Joy.260 It hasn’t worked out. I’m not quite sure why.

  SATURDAY 27 FEBRUARY 1993

  Last night I spoke for Barry Porter261 in Wirral South. He’s a genial cove, but he’s a drunk – an out-and-out alcoholic. Everyone knows it, no one denies, his Association members seem quite content. Indeed, pissed as a newt, they love the man! How can he get away with it? How has he got away with it? The mind boggles. It is all rather different in Chester where I shall remain resolutely sober through my surgery at 9.30 a.m., the Association quarterly meeting at 11.00 a.m., the lunch at Rowton Hall at 1.00 p.m., the trip to paperworks at 2.30 p.m., the tour of the Dukes Way housing project at 5.00 p.m. and the Dodleston School fund-raising evening at 8.00 p.m. But I have to confess that, come 10.30, when I return to my M&S microwaved curry, I shall be allowing myself a bottle of Oddbins best…

  I’m sitting in bed with tea and Marmite toast feeling surprisingly mellow considering The Times tells me that, according to MORI, eight out of ten people are dissatisfied with the way the government is running the country and half the population believes that, whatever the Chancellor says, the economy is going from bad to worse.

  There’s a lovely piece about Judith [Chaplin] by Simon Heffer in The Spectator. ‘She was not just clever, she was politically clever.’ He takes the view that if Judith rather than Sarah Hogg had been head of the No. 10 policy unit since last April, ‘many of the humiliations of the post-election period might have been avoided.’ He says Judith is a loss we can ill afford and calls the eight new MPs so far chosen as Parliamentary Private Secretaries a bunch of unprepossessing nonentities. ‘There are one and a half exceptions to this list of nonentities. The only full-fledged entity is Mr Gyles Brandreth, MP for Chester. Mr Brandreth is famous for playing Scrabble and appearing on television in fortissimo pullovers. His political abilities are uncertain. However, he is a charming and decent sort who adds colour to this monochrome government, and therefore may be allowed to pass without further stricture. The semi-entity is Mr Stephen Milligan, who was briefly a BBC television news reporter. He has the manner and appearance of the sort that Lord Rees-Mogg might have deemed so alarming that he ought only to be allowed on screen once all the children are in bed.’

  MONDAY 1 MARCH 1993

  The Archbishop of York is blaming us – personally – for the upsurge in youth crime. Hugh Dykes262 is foaming at the mouth, outraged that Portillo and Lilley have been breaking bread with Margaret Thatcher in the company of those twin princes of darkness, Norman Tebbit and Sir Alan Walters.263

  The Tea Room is full of Welsh members self-consciously sporting daffodils in their buttonholes and, over in the Norman Shaw building, a wild-eyed colleague invites me into his office to discuss the Budget. He turns on his computer, the screen flickers, and up comes a rather jerky moving picture of someone having oral sex. I pretend not to notice. He is quite unabashed.

  ‘Isn’t it great?’

  ‘Well, er, I’m not sure…’

  ‘It’s computer-generated. It’s amazing what they can do now.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But…’

  ‘Look, we can get right close up.’ He presses various keys to bring us closer to the action.

  ‘Isn’t she cute?’

  He presses another key to lower the volume of background grunts and sighs, but leaves the pornographic pictures flickering away as he launches into our discussion. I find the image on the screen profoundly distracting. I am convinced someone is about to come in and catch us at it. I suddenly remember that I should have been somewhere else ten minutes ago. I decline the offer of coffee, make my excuses and leave.

  There’s no vote tonight. Michèle and I are off to Turandot at the Royal Opera House. The Arts Council Box. Natch.

  THURSDAY 4 MARCH 1993

  Treasury Questions. For the first time since my first day I sit in the second row, immediately behind the Chancellor and the PM. This time, of course, it’s kosher. And it’s wonderful: a ringside seat without responsibility. The Treasury team don’t do at all badly: under the circumstances, Norman is impressively confident, neither too defensive nor unnecessarily combative. He is determined to survive. The PM gets a much rougher ride. He’s clearly not happy, it doesn’t go well, but he doesn’t lose his grip even for a moment. As the questions are asked he sits on the edge of his seat, fingers inside his loose-
leaf folder. With the planted questions on our side (good old Drinks and Q) he knows what’s coming, so he can just flick the folder open at the appropriate spread and spout the pre-prepared answer. With the questions from the other side, and from the handful of our people who won’t play ball (Marlow,264 Cash and co.), it’s trickier. Hearing the question is the first problem. The roar is tremendous. He is good at disregarding it completely. You can see him straining to hear the one word in the question that’ll give him the clue which page to turn to – Europe, unemployment, the NHS, youth crime. He finds the page, neat paragraphs, in large type, in two columns, five words to a line, steps forward and, whatever the volume of cheering and jeering around him, delivers his answer in a reasoned tone, playing to the microphone rather than the House.

  Today, the moment questions were over, he was up on his feet again, with a statement about the honours system. It’s to be rewards on merit in future, no automatic knighthoods (suppressed cries of ‘Shame!’ from behind me), and the end of the British Empire Medal for ‘other ranks’. It seems sensible and uncontentious. To my surprise, Stephen [Dorrell] was rather sniffy about it. ‘It’s hardly high politics, is it? I can’t help feeling there are rather more pressing issues to which the Prime Minister should be turning his attention.’

  MONDAY 8 MARCH 1993

  There’s been a [No. 10] briefing that there’ll only be a limited reshuffle this year. Lamont will go, to be replaced by either MacGregor265 or Clarke, depending on whether you want a safe pair of hands or a swashbuckler. Next year, mid-term, the PM has major changes in mind. Douglas Hurd wants to step down. Norman Fowler could be Home or Foreign Secretary. Why this briefing now? Is it to distract the world from the calamity that may come our way tonight? The sceptics are holding the government to ransom. David Mellor is quite funny about them: ‘When they started out they weren’t even household names in their own homes.’