Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

by Jilly Cooper

  Neil Kinnock is shrewd enough to realise this may be the last chance for the Labour Party, that unless they clean up their act and present some appearance of unity, they’ll never win another election.

  How would he tackle the problem?

  ‘Left, right and centre of the party have only to observe one discipline, the self-discipline of the will to win. To those who won’t realise this, who insist on short-term squabbles, who’d rather fight ally than enemy, I’ll give no quarter. I’m not asking them to make terrific sacrifices, just to think before they open their mouths. Bloody blinds,’ he leapt restlessly to his feet to adjust them.

  Evidently at the TUC conference, he’d commuted between Unions, urging them to boot out their militants. Wouldn’t there be a backlash?

  ‘People overemphasise the militant danger,’ said Mr Kinnock. ‘They’re terrified of Meacher, they regard him as Benn’s vicar on earth, and use his name to frighten their children. In reality, he’s kind, scholarly, innocuous – and as weak as hell.’

  Obviously thinking Hattersley would be elected to the deputy leadership, Mr Kinnock described him as ‘a nice man’.

  ‘Nice,’ I said incredulously.

  ‘I can work with him,’ said Mr Kinnock firmly, which means the same thing.

  Tony Benn however was dismissed as a spent force. ‘Couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding.’

  Was it true he had once described Benn as a blind worm trying to be an adder? For a second Mr Kinnock flickered between discretion and the desire to be credited with a bon mot. He opted for the former, saying: ‘Attribute that to me, and I’ll kill you.’

  He has a good face, and, as with most people with charm, it gets more attractive the longer you look at it. Despite reports to the contrary he still has lots of hair, but as he is small – five foot five at the most – people tend to look down on the bald patch. Then there’s the voice, husky and distractingly seductive, which makes everything he says sound wonderfully significant, until you analyse it afterwards.

  People accuse Kinnock of laziness. He is assiduous at promoting his own image, making speeches round the country, but less anxious about buckling down to the donkey work of dissecting white papers. It is also said he is not very bright. He failed his degree the first time at Cardiff – not a very academic university. But then being an intellectual didn’t get Mr Foot very far. According to Saatchi and Saatchi, even before the election Kinnock was the man the Tories feared most because he offered a street brightness which appealed to the voter.

  What did he feel about the beauty contest set up between David Owen, David Steel and himself, all youngish, attractive and wooing the middle classes?

  Mr Kinnock laughed. ‘I’m bound to lose on the beauty stakes, but I’m not after the female vote, I’m after everyone.’

  He agreed that the word ‘middle class’ had somehow shifted to embrace everyone in work. ‘It’s given them a terrible self-righteousness. Mrs Thatcher has made them look down on people who haven’t got jobs. But forget the glamour,’ he went on, becoming positively Churchillian, ‘we’ve got a product to sell, we’re not a record sleeve party like the SDP.’

  He doesn’t like David Owen much either.

  ‘He’s intelligent, anyone can be intelligent. What we need in politics is common sense. And the man’s arrogant, orthopaedically arrogant in every pore,’ which once again sounds splendid when delivered with the Welsh ring of confidence, until you get home and look up ‘orthopaedic’, to discover it means curing deformities of the bone, and realise the phrase is meaningless.

  Nor did he like the media’s latest interpretation of him as the thinking man’s Harold Wilson.

  ‘Harold Wilson’s a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit, even if they make him a viscount,’ he snapped. For someone who intends to scourge the party of sniping, Mr Kinnock’s pretty high in the vitriol stakes himself.

  Kinnock was born in March 1942, and came from a happy, united family. His father was a miner, later a steel worker, his mother a district nurse. Although both parents worked, and money can’t have been short, they made a decision to have only one child, so all their resources and time could be devoted to Neil. Both sadly died when he was twenty-nine.

  Wasn’t he heartbroken that they weren’t alive to witness his success?

  ‘I am,’ said Mr Kinnock wistfully, then once again remembering his image as the caring parent, hastily added, ‘But it hurts far more that they never knew the kids.’

  Kinnock first met his wife Glenys, who teaches backward children, when they were both at Cardiff University.

  ‘Was it love at first sight?’

  ‘Not quite so elevated as that.’

  ‘Lust then?’

  Mr Kinnock shot me a calculating look, as though trying to assess my age.

  ‘Even when one’s young,’ he said winningly, ‘one only lusts after women in their forties, or perhaps thirties,’ he went on quickly, thinking he might have overshot the mark.

  People who know the Kinnocks well say the dashing and rather beautiful Mrs Kinnock is the power behind the throne. She believes in the Welsh tradition of women living through their men and driving them on.

  ‘Would the real cabinet decisions be taken at home?’ I asked.

  Mr Kinnock denied this with rather too much conviction.

  ‘No, no, but I value the woman’s opinions, she’s so bright, and she has a quite uncanny, basic sense of justice, she knows what’s right. She always counsels caution. If you do that, she tells me, you’ll only get into trouble. I try to heed her, it doesn’t always work. She buys all my clothes, even my suits. I don’t know how she copes with me and the children and her job, but she’s like the great footballers, she’s always got time.’

  Mrs Kinnock won’t give interviews, because it takes the limelight off her husband, and also, allegedly, because she’s terrified of putting her foot in it. At the time of the Royal Wedding, however, she talked to a newspaper, saying: ‘We were asked to the wedding, but we weren’t in the least interested, and of course we didn’t go.’

  According to Kinnock, his wife was misquoted. She wanted to talk about education and politics, and the interviewer kept rabbiting on about the wedding until Mrs Kinnock was goaded into saying they weren’t interested.

  ‘Weren’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Kinnock.

  ‘Didn’t you watch on telly?’

  ‘No,’ the green eyes flicker, then go opaque when he doesn’t like a subject.

  ‘None of you?’

  ‘No – well, Glenys and Rachel watched some of it,’ he admitted. ‘But then Rachel’s very into being a bridesmaid,’ as though that justified such a monarchist lapse.

  Actually, went on Mr Kinnock, trimming, he liked the Queen, and Charles was a nice old bumbler.

  ‘When I was in Strasbourg,’ he added, trimming further, ‘and that Greek idiot was sounding off about the Russians shooting down that plane, I thought thank God we’ve got a queen with dignity, who keeps her nose out of politics.’

  Mr Kinnock is spoken of as the Messiah who will lead the Labour Party into the promised land. Whether the land will be as promised is debatable. He’s already fudging on the Common Market and Polaris. But at least there will be no U-turn over the abolition of the private schools. Mr Kinnock is out for their blood. The first year in power, he will make parents pay VAT on school fees. The next, fee-paying will be made illegal.

  ‘I believe in nurturing parents,’ said Mr Kinnock sanctimoniously. ‘But if I give my kids as much help as I can, it doesn’t affect the other children. But because of the status attached to the independent schools, it makes the maintained sector feel inferior – and they attach far too much importance to academic achievement. What we need,’ he went on, warming to his subject, ‘is intelligence,’ then, remembering he’d attacked Dr Owen for the same quality, ‘or rather common sense.’

  Wasn’t it totalitarianism to forbid parents to educate their children as t
hey wished? Britain would be the only country in the free world to do so.

  ‘Britain’, replied Mr Kinnock heavily, ‘is the only country so divided by class.’

  ‘It’ll cause a frightful row.’

  ‘I like rows,’ said Mr Kinnock, radiating egalitarian spite.

  Things were getting a bit frosty, so I asked Mr Kinnock how he unwound.

  ‘By being with the children. I came back knackered from Strasbourg, and helped Rachel with her fractions.’

  One would think he was pitching for a job running a children’s home rather than the leadership of the Labour Party.

  How had he coped when he’d lost his voice?

  Just for one second, again unable to resist a joke, he dropped his guard and became human again: ‘Oh home life picked up dramatically. I wasn’t able to shout at the kids.’

  On the way home, I tried to work out how I felt. You can’t help liking Neil Kinnock, as a man devoted to his family with a genuine desire to help those in need. With the leadership only a few days away, he is also obviously proceeding like a batsman on 99, determined not to say anything to rock the boat. Why then do I suspect him of ruthless ambition, calculation and extreme deviousness? Perhaps because these qualities are necessary in a successful politician, particularly one who is going to unite the Labour Party. It is sad that the mantle of power is already turning into a straitjacket.

  David Gower

  THIS PIECE WAS written in August 1983 before David Gower was made captain of England. Meeting him, I felt he had all the right qualities. History proved me wrong. He is probably too nice, but is just as much, if not more, value to the English side as a great batsman.

  ‘New Year’s Eve, Sydney,’ wrote the teenage daughter of a cricket correspondent in her 1983 diary. ‘At midnight as the fireworks went off, David Gower kissed me on the cheek – the year can only deteriorate from now on.’

  David Gower has that effect on people. He has the androgynous beauty that appeals to both sexes, curls as blond as the bleached Lord’s pitch, a puckish grin, and extraordinary eyes with their huge expanse of white below the dark blue iris. Despite the delicate features of Bubbles in the Pears Soap advertisement, he is macho enough to bat without a helmet, so there is only the blond curls and the perfect timing between him and death. How many female fans must have clasped their hands to their mouths on Thursday when he ducked into a short-pitched ball? And how many hearts fluttered with admiration as he battled on, still refusing the helmet.

  Despite the female adulation and even the most hardened cricket correspondents writing about his batting as though they’ve been kissed under the mistletoe, he has remained unspoilt. He had the good manners to answer my request for an interview by return of post in longhand. Although asked to, he didn’t reverse the charges when he rang long distance to arrange dinner. He was waiting in the hotel lobby when I arrived and promptly bought me a large drink.

  Later at dinner, he toyed with duck – perhaps an unhappy choice for a batsman – and downed a whole bottle of champagne without, regrettably, letting a single indiscretion fall from his perfectly formed lips. Like a yellow labrador whose master has been posted away to Germany, he is friendly but detached. Tim Rice who knows him well says he’s very shy.

  If you bred sportsmen, like racehorses, David Gower would have the ideal pedigree. The branches of his family tree are weighed down with hurdlers, lacrosse and hockey internationals, cricket and croquet players. A Monday’s child – appropriately fair of face – he was born on April Fool’s Day 1957, in Tonbridge, while his father, who was in the colonial service, was on leave. Although Gower has the placid, passive amiability of the baby of a large family, he was, in fact, an only child. Packed off to prep school at eight, he not only excelled at games but was exceptionally bright, later getting a scholarship to King’s, Canterbury, where he ended up with nine O-levels and three A-levels, with a distinction in history.

  His first real setback was at fifteen when his father, whom he adored, died of the terribly wasting illness, Hodgkin’s disease. The second was failing to get into Oxford. ‘I answered a question on King Arthur, whom I knew nothing about. The result was pure regurgitated Camelot.’ Instead he read law at London University, which bored him to death. He lasted two terms, then to his mother’s horror – she wanted him to get a degree first – he fled academic life to play cricket for Leicester. ‘I kicked off in the worst possible way, turning up for my first day’s training in a dark suit.’

  He was knocked into shape by that hardest of taskmasters, Ray Illingworth, who realised Gower’s genius would only succeed if he learned to apply it. Despite continual badgering from Illy, affection and respect grew between the two men. Reacting to the fiasco with the dark suit, Gower irritated Illingworth by dressing sloppily. One morning to tease him Gower came down to breakfast in a dinner jacket. Illingworth, however, had the last word. ‘Just come in, Gower?’ he said acidly.

  This tough initiation stood Gower in good stead. Seven years later, he has 52 Test matches, 3,000 Test runs and the vice-captaincy of England under his belt, and is estimated to be capable of making £100,000 a year. He gets a huge fan mail, but is modestly quick to point out that not all of it is complimentary. Someone recently sent him a cutting from an Australian newspaper with a headline: ‘Gower Flashes to Hogg’. Underneath they had written one word: ‘Numbskull’.

  He speaks ruefully of his one lapse in seven years of impeccable cricketing behaviour. In New Zealand this year, at the end of a punishing four and three-quarter months’ tour, he was batting when drunks invaded the pitch.

  ‘I told one to go away four times, but he kept on coming. Suddenly the fuse blew. I grabbed him round the neck and frogmarched him off. I got a letter from him later in the year, brought over by one of the New Zealand scorers.’

  ‘Was he apologetic?’ I asked. Gower laughed: ‘No, abusive. He said I was entirely responsible for him now having a police record.’

  A staunch Tory, who does the Daily Telegraph crossword every day, Gower is always ready to tell a story against himself. He was recently invited to a party at Downing Street. ‘Denis was very friendly and offered me a bite of gin, but Mrs Thatcher, despite her flashing teeth, didn’t know me from Adam. . . . The other day, I was asked to open a local gas board showroom. To send them up gently, I rolled up in a T-shirt of Snoopy lying in his kennel, saying: “I believe in conserving energy”. In fact it was a total bomb. Only five housewives turned up, and none of them had a clue who I was.’

  One reason perhaps Gower is able to laugh at himself is that for the past five years he has had the same enchanting girlfriend, Vicki Stewart, who obviously cherishes him and comforts him if he is down, but teases him unmercifully and bursts his bubbles if there is any sign of uppishness. Sadly for his female admirers, she is exceptionally pretty, with hair the colour of French mustard, a magnificent tan speckled with freckles, and large, wary, aquamarine eyes. She and Gower live together in a house in Leicester with three goldfish named Eric, and an adopted stray cat called Brian because he stayed close. Gower, according to Vicki, is not domesticated. He hasn’t hoovered for two years, but he can make ‘deflated omelettes’ and does his own packing.

  Like many cricketers he is highly superstitious. ‘If you made a hundred last time, you search frantically round for the same left sock, right sock, knickers, box, jockstrap and trousers to bring you luck this time. Then you get a duck, and try out a completely different combination next time.’

  Gower, something of a dandy on and off the field, is scathing about the official England touring uniform: ‘There’s never time for fittings, so we all go round like a team of Wombles in baggy trousers and flapping blazers.’

  David and Vicki are under constant pressure from the media, who can’t believe that today’s young can live together happily without necessarily needing the security of marriage and who are always proposing to David on Vicki’s behalf.

  ‘One paper wrote something so vile the other day,’
she said, ‘I went straight to the loo and threw up.’

  But on the whole the relationship is tender and sunny. When Gower went down to the Lord’s Test two days before Vicki, she bet him he wouldn’t dare walk into the hotel alone carrying a pile of her dresses. On the way in, he was barracked by an idling group of taxi drivers, and promptly cracked back: ‘You should see the matching handbags I’ve got for each dress, dearie.’

  It is this easy-going nonchalance, coupled with the exquisite, apparent effortlessness of his batting, that makes some people doubt his depth of character. He has been vice-captain for more than a year – the Gower behind the throne. But is he heavyweight enough to lead the side? Gower himself is edgy on the subject. He has got his batting together, he has learnt concentration, and insists he could do the job: ‘You needn’t be a bastard to be a good captain – just firm. And as a non-bowling captain I’m far more likely to be objective on the field.’

  Since the South African ban, with so few good batsmen around, the selectors are probably terrified Gower would lose form with authority. Tony Lewis, the cricket writer, disagrees with this. Gower, he says, has the ability to make people do what he wants without being aggressive, and like Red Rum, he rises better to the bigger challenge.

  His horoscope indicates both astonishing powers of leadership and generosity of spirit. The latter comes out in his latest book Heroes and Contemporaries, to be published in October, where he displays a wisdom and understanding of his colleagues way beyond his years. So one is treated to views of Willis stoically enduring red-hot needles through his toenails to drain off blood blisters after the day’s bowling; or of Rodney Marsh, magnanimous in defeat, charging into the England dressing room to celebrate, with huge ice packs on each knee to soothe the agony of bending down all day; of Brearley revealing gamesmanship by loudly discussing the weaknesses of an opposition batsman newly arrived at the crease.

  The best portrait, however, is of Botham, Guy the Gorilla, whose phenomenal energy constantly manifests itself in endless practical jokes. No cricket bag is safe.