Breaking the Code

by Gyles Brandreth

  This is incompetent government.

  LATER

  More news of mad cows … Neil and Christine [Hamilton] invited their friend Dame Barbara Cartland555 to dinner and asked Michèle and me to join the party. Ten of us, Members’ Dining Room, her son at one end of the table, Dame Barbara at the other. I sat on her left. She was as ridiculous and glorious as ever: the white-powdered face, the giraffe’s eyelashes, the eight remaining strands of hair spun into an extraordinary candy-floss confection, flowing pink tulle everywhere, she seemed to have come dressed as the fairy queen in a Victorian pantomime. She didn’t draw breath. Out the stories tumbled: Noel Coward, Beaverbrook, Churchill, ‘darling Dickie’. ‘No one knew him as I did, he was quite extraordinary. He was the most fascinating man in the world, so ahead of his time.’

  According to Dame Barbara, Mountbatten pioneered the zip fastener instead of fly buttons – and persuaded the then Prince of Wales to follow suit. ‘But it all went terribly wrong one evening at a very smart supper in Biarritz. The Prince went to the cloakroom, but, poor lamb, didn’t dare emerge because the zip got stuck! He had to slip out by the back door. He was furious, had all the zips taken out of his trousers.’ She was full of concern for the plight of the present Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘It’s so sad for them both. It’s heart-breaking. Of course, you know where it all went wrong? She wouldn’t do oral sex, she just wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that. Of course it all went wrong.’

  SATURDAY 30 MARCH 1996

  I flew up to Chester yesterday morning and had a really good session with the farmers on BSE. They are profoundly worried, but remarkably calm. I’ve scored with them not because I have any of the answers but because almost every day since this broke I have sent them the relevant pages from Hansard. They think I’m listening and that I care – and I am and I do. While they offered their solutions, I scribbled away furiously. I didn’t say much, other than voice sympathy. I pulled appropriate faces, but I was careful not to say anything overtly critical of Hogg in case one of them might repeat it to the press. Then I did our local election press conference and photo call. Then I spent four hours on a variety of dismal trains getting from Chester to Harrogate via Leeds arriving in the nick of time for the Central Council conference dinner at which I was the after-dinner turn. I sat with Brian Mawhinney [party chairman] who seems permanently grumpy. I am clearly not his cup of tea. I imagine he finds me bumptious, egregious, too fruity by half. I’m not sure what to make of him. He’s not an easy ride. He’s frustrated that the PM can’t/won’t announce a referendum on the Euro this weekend. He can’t understand why Ken won’t concede when there’s really nothing to be lost and everything to be gained. (Ken, of course, believes these things should be settled by Parliament. That’s what parliamentary democracy is all about. He’s worried too that a simplistic, jingoistic referendum campaign would a) split the party and b) bring about the wrong result.)

  In my speech I lavished mountains of praise on Stephen, only because he was sitting there with Annette and I thought it would please/amuse her. I think it did. Afterwards, we went up to their bedroom and Danny [Finkelstein] joined us and Stephen kindly ordered a bottle of wine and I drank most of it. He clearly believes the last ten days have been to his advantage. I said, ‘They’ve raised your profile, that’s for sure.’

  WEDNESDAY 3 APRIL 1996

  A jolly whips’ meeting. I do my best to keep in with the Chief by at all times ensuring he is within reach of the cheese straws. He is in mellow mood today – except, it seems, when Roger is speaking. Roger appears to irritate him. I have a feeling that when he presents his weekly report on the Lloyds’ Names he intends to irritate him! (Roger is guardian of the list of colleagues who are Names and is supposed to update us on the state of their fortune – or misfortune as the case may be. Roger is a Name who has lost a great deal. The Chief is a Name who may have lost rather less. Roger talks knowledgeably about the vagaries of the various syndicates, but what Roger knows doesn’t always tally with what the Chief believes. Roger speaks, the Chief twitches. Roger continues, the Chief snaps a cheese straw. Roger won’t stop; the Chief leaves the room to make an urgent phone call. I don’t understand the ins and outs of any of it, but it’s quite funny to watch.)

  I can’t work out if Roger in his account of life at the Min. of Ag. is intending to alarm us or amuse us – or simply inform us. Probably the latter, because he seems a totally straightforward guy. (I like him a lot, but I don’t really know him. I don’t think I had spoken to him more than once before I joined the office). Hogg is ready to resign. My feeling is he should. That’s not what I say. What I say is, ‘If he stays, that hat must go.’ We all agree: the wide-rimmed fedora is ludicrous. If he gets rid of the hat, he may be perceived as less of a joke. We charge Roger with stealing and shredding the hat.

  The Chancellor is not resigning either. I don’t believe he ever was. He is ‘reluctantly’ accepting the proposed referendum ‘for the sake of the party’.

  THURSDAY 4 APRIL 1996

  We’re having Easter at home, the Hanleys for lunch on Saturday, Benet’s organising a boat race party, and then we’re off to Venice for five nights. I am taking Elizabeth Taylor. She is now my favourite author.

  Is Ann Widdecombe now my favourite female politician? Possibly. She came up to Chester with me this morning. We travelled together on the train, second class (Ann insisted). The hair, the teeth, the vast low-slung lopsided bosom, she’s certainly an oddity, but the integrity, the commitment, the ambition make her quite special. She’s like Ken: she can never really go wrong because she only says what she believes. You can’t fault her. I asked her why she always sits on her own in the Aye lobby on days when she’s got Questions. ‘I’m there for forty-five minutes in case colleagues have any queries. All ministers are supposed to do it.’ She is the only one who does.

  She came to address the President’s Club. Of course, they were disappointed not to have a Cabinet minister. When I told Stuart [the association chairman] who I’d secured his face fell. I said, ‘We’ve already had the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Home Secretary, Portillo, Virginia…’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know it isn’t easy,’ (meaning, of course, you haven’t got the clout to get us anyone decent) ‘but she’s not much of an attraction.’

  I said rather petulantly, ‘She could very well end up leading the party one day.’

  In the event there was a reasonable crowd and they were impressed. She was good on the collapse of the ‘moral consensus’. In the ’50s there was an agreed standard – everyone – politicians, teachers, church leaders, judges, newspaper editors, everyone – subscribed to the same standard. Of course, people fell below it, but they knew what it was, they accepted it and life was easier. Now there are no agreed standards and life is a lot more troublesome. She told us about her first election campaign, in the run-up to which she had published a pamphlet called Christian Principles. She was going to do an open-air meeting. She’d set up her soapbox in the market square and then suddenly remembered she had left her pamphlets in the boot of her agent’s car. She was to be seen running down Maidstone High Street shouting, ‘Stop, stop! I’ve lost my Christian Principles!’

  TUESDAY 16 APRIL 1996

  Our majority of one556 is now threatened by Sir George Gardiner. Well-intentioned loyalists in Reigate want to deselect him, but Sir George says if he isn’t readopted he’ll resign and force a by-election. The view in the office is that this is ‘probably but not certainly’ an idle threat. We look to Liam to explain how it is that Sir George is still alive when we understood he should have died months ago. Liam cannot help us. We look to the chairman of his association (a retired Major-General and by all accounts ‘thoroughly sound’) to keep Sir George on board at least until we’re within shouting distance of the election – and then dump him.

  Lord Archer is wandering the corridors of Westminster urging us to take Sir James Goldsmith and his ludicrous Referendum Party seriously. S
ir James (bronzed, rich, mad) is putting £20 million into his campaign and threatening a candidate in every seat where the Conservative is not committed to a referendum – not our referendum on the Euro, his referendum on the whole future of our relationship with the Union. Jeffrey has produced a list of the seats most vulnerable to Goldsmith interference. Chester, naturally, is high on it. Jeffrey has lost about a stone and, in his breast pocket, alongside his Goldsmith list he has a card with the details of his diet. He has promised to send me a copy. (I could do with losing two stone. In photographs, face forward, if I push my head towards the camera the chins disappear and I don’t look too bad – but caught at the wrong angle and I recognise the awful truth.)

  The good news is that Alastair Campbell557 and co. are going into overdrive in their desperation to gag Clare Short. She said on the box on Sunday that she favoured a fair tax system where ‘people like me would pay a little bit more’. She’s been yanked off the airwaves by the spin doctors and locked in a darkened, airless room. With luck, the way she’s been gagged will provoke further outbursts. We want her making mischief, but we don’t want her sacked. (The truth is we should be as ruthless and determined to succeed as they are. But we aren’t. We’re flabby and weary and only seem to have energy sufficient to pull ourselves apart. I said to Jack Straw in the Tea Room, ‘Why are you looking so cheerful?’ ‘Because I’ve been here for seventeen years. It’s a long time. We’ve been in opposition for all the time I’ve been here. And soon we’re going to be in government.’)

  SUNDAY 21 APRIL 1996

  I’m just in and pleasantly squiffy. M’s asleep. Felix558 is climbing all over the desk, bumping his head up against mine. We’ve just had the whips’ dinner with the PM, preceded by our annual ‘assessment’ of the government. This is an interesting ritual. We all turned up at No. 12 at 2.30 p.m. Dress was casual. I wore a suit without a tie, but the others came kitted out in the assorted versions of what a Tory MP wears on a Sunday afternoon, ranging from cravat, blazer and slacks to cavalry twills, hacking jacket and knitted yellow tie. I admired Roger Knapman’s highly polished brown shoes. I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got any brown shoes.’

  Roger looked bemused. ‘What do you wear on Sundays?’

  I looked down at my ordinary, everyday, workaday footwear. Roger said smoothly, ‘The rule is “brown shoes on Sunday” because it’s the servants’ day off.’

  I tried to rally, ‘But does a gentleman wear brown shoes in London?’

  ‘As a rule,’ said Roger, ‘a gentleman is not seen in London on a Sunday.’

  Banter behind us, we took our places. Shana had prepared a dossier for each of us, like an exam script, a page for each department of state, arranged alphabetically, from Agriculture through to Wales, with each of the departmental Ministers and PPSs listed according to rank, with a space below their names for comments. The idea, the Deputy explained, was for the whip for the relevant department to give his assessment of the performance of his Ministers, concentrating not so much on the Cabinet members – as the PM gets to see them in action anyway – as on the rest. Who merits promotion? Who needs a rest?

  The exercise took three solid hours. There was joshing now and again (‘If you could put Ann Widdecombe’s brain inside Virginia Bottomley’s body – think of it!’ ‘Yes, but what if it all went wrong and you got Virginia’s brain inside Ann’s body …’), but on the whole the assessments seemed to me to be carefully made and well-judged. There were no revelations and no excoriations. We seemed to bend over backwards to be fair (Roger was unduly circumspect re Hogg) and it was evident that former members of the office are reviewed with a specially light touch – e.g. we all know that David Davis559 is unhappy, already difficult, potentially more troublesome, feeling overworked and undervalued, and believes he should be in the Cabinet now, now, now – but that’s not quite how it came across. And perhaps it didn’t need to because we know it – just as we know that Arbuthnot560 is rising effortlessly (the Ian Lang of his generation?), that Andrew Mitchell is almost crazy with ambition, that we will continue to keep faith with John Taylor for all his endearing frailty because he is ‘one of us’. The only exception to this rule that I noticed was in the case of Willetts. It’s not just envy of his intelligence: I think they feel when he was in the office he didn’t quite ‘fit in’. The truth is he couldn’t wait to get out.

  As usual, the Chief said nothing but his grunts said it all. When I was talking up Douglas French,561 impatient clearing of the throat on my right made it evident I should move on and that poor Douglas’s prospects are poor. When I was talking up Seb, there was a gentle, encouraging gobbling noise from the Chief’s end of the table. Clearly Piers Merchant562 has done something to upset somebody. His name produced splenetic spluttering all round. Overall my interpretation of the Chief’s guttural emanations of the afternoon leads me to believe that David Curry and Michael Ancram are both comfortably ahead of David Davis in the Cabinet queue.

  We broke to change for dinner. I went with Richard Ottaway to his house in Victoria, put on my tie, read the papers, returned for 7.30 p.m. The Chief served his lethal Martinis, the PM was himself – friendly, decent, unstuffy, collegiate. He is encouraged by the Clare Short row (‘If we give them enough time, they’ll begin to unravel…’), depressed by the latest from Norman Lamont (‘How and why he thinks Goldsmith can do us anything but harm, I just don’t know…’) I was alarmed to find myself sitting next to him for dinner (junior’s perk), but it wasn’t a problem: he talked to the table as a whole. The only ghastly moment came after we’d raised an informal glass to Her Majesty on her seventieth birthday and I embarked on my story about the Queen and the recession and her nine Prime Ministers not having a clue – and, suddenly, in full flight realised that the story as told by me on automatic pilot is both lèse-majesté and patronising to the PM. In desperation and through an alcoholic haze I tried to edit/adapt/improve the tale as I told it and ended up rambling hopelessly. Sniggering giggles from Liam: ‘Aren’t funny stories supposed to have a punchline, Gyles? Oo, that was it, was it?’ Fortunately my blushes were quickly obliterated by an extraordinary, lengthy, impassioned outburst from Simon Burns at the end of the table – ten minutes of inane burbling on behalf of the Chelmsford fire brigade! As ever, the wise ones kept their mouths shut. The idiots were on song.

  MONDAY 22 APRIL 1996

  For the second or third time, I cancelled my lunch with Robin Oakley563 at Simply Nico. We’d said we ought to have lunch after the Queen’s Speech when I’d made my joke about being mistaken for him by one of Blair’s spin doctors. But the truth is I’m not comfortable with journalists. Because I’m watching what I say, I can’t relax. Because I’m not giving them what they want, I feel I’m lunching under false pretences. So here I am, alone in the Library. It’s 1.15 p.m. I’ve had my smoked mackerel, tomato salad and shredded carrot and I shall return to the Tea Room for a coffee at 2.00. This afternoon’s excitements include the whips’ meeting at 2.30 p.m., William Hague’s Rotary Club tea at 4.00 p.m. and a curious encounter with the Deputy in his den at 4.30 p.m. When he said ‘Can I have a word?’ and pulled me out into the corridor my heart began to pound. I thought, ‘What have I done now?’ It turned out that he wanted to suggest we put our heads together to see if we can’t come up with an idea for a television sitcom!!

  5.30 p.m.: Jenny/Di. I never go over to 7 Millbank now. I get them to come over here and we sit at the table off the Cromwell lobby, at the foot of the stairs with the Spencer Perceval bust.564 6.30 p.m. Raymond Robertson – to work on his speech for the Scottish Conference. 7.30 p.m. Letter-signing in here. 8.00 p.m. Dinner. 9.00 p.m. Bench duty. The Northern Ireland (Entry to Negotiations etc.) Bill may well be keeping us here late into the night. (It transpires that Mo Mowlam has a research assistant paid for by Mirror Group Newspapers – a fact that doesn’t feature in the Register of Members’ Interests. We’re hoping to have some fun with that…)

  Christopher Milne has died. He was a good man,
gentle and amusing.565 The obituaries all play up his resentment of his parents and Pooh and the whole Christopher Robin phenomenon, quoting his line that he believed ‘my father had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’ But that was how he felt in the ’40s. In the end he felt quite differently. His marriage, the bookshop in Dartmouth, his own success as a writer, changed all that. He wasn’t reconciled to his parents, but he came to terms with who he was. I liked him. It was a privilege to know him. I shook the hand that held the paw of Winnie-the-Pooh.

  TUESDAY 30 APRIL 1996

  The Housing Bill is behind us! We concluded the Third Reading fifteen minutes ago. During the course of the day we had five divisions and I am proud to report that we managed each one of these within two to three minutes of the times I predicted. As far as the office is concerned, that’s all that counts. They don’t give a toss about the quality of the legislation or the content of the debate. I was determined to deliver it all on schedule and that I did is thanks entirely to Gummer, Curry and Clappison566 who all played ball. They rattled through it. When I said ‘You’ve only got two minutes on this clause’ that’s all they took – and when they strayed I yanked the back of their jackets and down they came. It’s a complete game – but today it was a fun one.

  We survived the vote on the extension of leaseholders’ rights with a majority of two. And, yes, we even kept David Ashby on side! Gumdrops had been reluctant to move on the equal rights for homosexual couples (‘Gyles, you and I move in sophisticated circles, some of our best friends really are gay, but to validate homosexual partnerships in legislation will send out the wrong signal to the majority of our electors who do not move in the sort of theatrical millieu to which we are accustomed’ – he has a way with words) but he accepted that if it came to a vote we’d lose so he agreed to a compromise: a beefed-up guidance note putting the principle of equal rights on paper but not on the statute book.