On the other hand, misfits and rough renegades were often the very people the Soviets did approach – on the grounds that they were seldom suspected. Par exemple, there was Guy Burgess. Father had become quite friendly with Burgess after meeting him at a London dinner party. The two of them had frequented a not very salubrious nightclub in West London called The Nest. On one occasion, when a customer at the adjacent table failed to stand for ‘God Save the Queen’, Burgess had knocked him down. In this way did the man establish his patriotic credentials.
Father enjoyed relating a story that had circulated when it was proposed that Burgess be posted to the Washington Embassy. A Foreign Office official had pleaded with him to behave with discretion while abroad.
‘Please, Guy,’ he said, ‘no racial incidents, no espousing of left-wing causes and for God’s sake no sexual scandals.’ Burgess had replied, ‘You mean I mustn’t make a pass at Paul Robeson?’
This caused Father such mirth when he told it, that he would have to pause in the middle to collect his wits before continuing. But when it was discovered that Burgess and Donald Maclean had flown to Moscow, Father was astounded. His highly defined notion of the English gentleman – a little bohemian perhaps, but loyal to the core – took a terrible drubbing.
Driberg was an even more complicated soul than the feckless Burgess. He had eyes like the opaque tinted windows on a stretch limousine; he could see out but you couldn’t see in. Like John Wilkes, he was prepared to sacrifice his best friend for the sake of a scurvy jest. A great proselytiser for homosexuality, Driberg maintained that all men concealed a feminine side that could be encouraged eventually and inevitably into active sodomy.
Father scoffed at this theory, saying,
‘Well, you never dared make a pass at me.’
Driberg was all sweetness and spite.
‘You’re not my type, dear Woodrow.’
To prove his point Driberg asked Father to name the most overtly masculine man he could think of in the then Tory government. Father thought for a bit and then settled on a well-known minister with shoulders like the Parthenon. Driberg returned gleefully,
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Father was called upon from time to time to act as Driberg’s unofficial scout with regard to his latest crise de coeur. There were plenty of crises. Like many homosexuals at that time, Driberg conducted a great many of his manoeuvres in public lavatories. It didn’t matter which country he was in as long as there were plenty of amenities. Occasionally he stretched the hospitality of his friends a little too far. Poor Sir Harold Acton, the elderly aesthete, was enraged by Driberg’s chasing his cook through the public lavatories of Florence. It was a case of picking up fag ends, Driberg joked. Sir Harold remained stonily unamused.
Oh, the fascination of sin and its misshapen shadow! Such was Driberg’s corruption that he tired of fleeing Italian carabinieri and sought new sensations of sexual tension. Decay was characteristic of the immediate prospect. His passionate absorption in risk led him to extend the field of his activities to the lavatories in the House of Commons. Then as now the Commons was closely policed by the sort of denizens of the law who firmly believed that homosexuals should, for their own moral health, be flogged over the yard arm. To Father this was not reassuring of Driberg’s chances of evading capture. He nonetheless, in a moment of rash amiability, agreed to stand guard outside the lavatory door.
‘Poor Woodrow must have terrible bladder problems,’ was the whisper raised in the House as sightings of Father moving quickly and furtively in the direction of the gentlemen’s cloakroom became more and more frequent. In the fulness of his gratitude Driberg leavened the hours of boredom in the chamber by teaching Father to sing the words, ‘the clerk will now proceed to read the orders of the day,’ to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’. But the likelihood of them both being covered with shame increased as the spring months quickened Driberg’s endorphins. He began to see sex simply as a mode through which he could realise his idea of summertime.
Perhaps inevitably, Driberg was heir to disaster. So too, nearly, was Father. One sultry afternoon he stood guard outside the lavatories when the division bell began to ring. Father was jerked out of his ruminations. For Heaven’s sake, what to do? The choice was stark. Either abandon his post or face the wrath of the whips. Father didn’t take long to decide. He abandoned his post, assuming that Driberg would have acted with similar circumspection. So immersed was the tireless seducer, however, that he carried on regardless. By this time a policeman had begun sniffing around the door, distracted by the sounds that did not quite resemble those produced by conventional ablutions.
Later that day Father was sitting in the bar nursing what he felt was a well-deserved gin when Driberg came upon his recumbent figure. He was trembling with rage and resentment.
‘Why the hell did you leave your post, Woodrow?’ he roared.
‘But I had to vote,’ Father protested. ‘Surely you understand.’
‘Maybe under some circumstances,’ said Driberg, beginning to calm down a little. ‘But in this instance anything might have happened.’
‘You see,’ he said, pausing and licking his lips and anticipating dinner, ‘I was buggering one of the cooks.’
9
Father sings the Blues
DURING HIS LIFE, Father only really revered three politicians. The first two were Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. The third was Hugh Gaitskell.
Decades before Tony Blair was as much as a glint in Peter Mandelson’s tie, Gaitskell was the gilded boy of the sensible wing of the Labour party.
Had Father possessed homosexual proclivities he might have been a little in love with this ivory-faced man.
Men and women found him charming. People said he had a certain kind of moral quality, one of virtual self-forgetfulness. Beneath his exquisite air was something that appeared tragic, he had the smile of a forest thing. Glamour transfigured him. When he walked into a room, lips parted in smiles of pleasure.
Moderate in his politics, Gaitskell became leader of Labour in 1955. He was revered by people like Father, who feared the leftward drift of the party towards nuclear disarmament and the trade union control of industry. To them he must have seemed something of an Arthurian hero. His private conduct was a different matter altogether; it was more Lancelot than Sir Galahad.
For years Gaitskell was married to an attractive woman called Dora. Yet other men’s wives were irresistible to him – as he was to them. I should know, actually; one of these was Mother.
It was not Father whom Gaitskell hoped to make a cuckold. My parents had not yet met; Father was then engaged on his third attempt at matrimony, to Moorea Hastings, the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon. Mother, meanwhile, was the dewy, domesticated bride of a Hungarian Baron; the possessor of a somewhat taciturn disposition. When she and Gaitskell met at the house of a mutual friend, the Labour leader was intrigued by her Mongol-eyed mystique which, he said, reminded him of maddened gypsies in the moonlight.
The pursuit had all the candour of passion; Gaitskell’s perseverance had its reward. One night the couple embraced behind the fridge in a friend’s kitchen. Mother said that being with Gaitskell was like standing in the eye of a wind; there was something enthralling in the exercise of his influence.
Sometimes he resorted to risks that, had they been taken under the present tabloid tyranny, would have stopped short the promise of a noble public future.
One night in the early Sixties, Gaitskell arrived on the doorstep of mother’s compact but imposing house in Devonshire Street. The Baron was out seeing patients. It was close on eleven when the rapturously ruffled pair heard a key turn in the front door.
It was too late for Gaitskell to make his escape. In any case there was no back exit. The Baron stood in the doorway surveying the scene like a potter who had encountered in his workshop two oddly shaped bits of clay. Naturally green-eyed, he could not yet believe that the leader of the Labour party was playing
Adam and Eve with his young and lovely bride. Still, what other explanation was there for his presence so late?
‘What can I do for you, Mr Gaitskell?’ the Baron asked, elevating his black eyebrows.
‘I’m awfully sorry, Baron Banczsky,’ said Gaitskell. He improvised wildly. ‘I came round because I had forgotten the name of the Romanian ambassador.’ He paused. ‘I hoped you could arrange for me to meet him.’
The Baron was nonplussed. And well he might have been. Mother was not Romanian but Hungarian. And as an émigré from Communist-controlled Hungary, her husband was unlikely to be able to facilitate a meeting with anyone’s ambassador.
For a while Gaitskell was the link on a chain that slowly pulled Mother and Father together. If his feelings for Mother were those of a suitor, he regarded the pugnacious Woodrow Wyatt as a friend and supporter.
Lively dispute balancing precariously on the edge of argument was at the heart of their conversation. Father often disagreed with Gaitskell over the small print of Labour policy and its presentation. Gaitskell in turn was enraged by his controversial suggestion of a Lib-Lab pact. Still the older man was adored by the younger with the uncomplicated devotion of an acolyte. In fine, when it came to the broad sweep, Gaitskell was no less than the embodiment of an idealised hero; one who, sword unsheathed, would slay the monstrous dragon of the Left. Besides, he held in his white hands Father’s hopes of a Cabinet position.
Fortune plays with men, eliciting dusty laughter from their tragedies. Within two years Gaitskell was dead. He collapsed suddenly of an illness that baffled doctors. They finally, fumblingly, diagnosed it as lupus. But Father was convinced he had been murdered. When the Bulgarian, Markov, was assassinated by injection through the sharp tip of an umbrella, it even suggested to Father that Gaitskell and others had been disposed of by the Soviets or their agents.
The idea of him as a Labour prime minister was anathema to them. He would have been an unshakeable and charismatic opponent of Communism They knew any successor would not approach his stature.
Poor Father. He cried himself to sleep and did so every night for a fortnight, a child whose friend and protector had been torn from him by evil men. As he drove past London landmarks he would say to himself, ‘Darling gallant Hugh will never see this again.’ Father said to Moorea, ‘His death was a bad day for Britain.’
It was also a bad day for Father, ending his prospects in the Labour party. There was to be a leadership contest, and one of the likely victors was a man called Harold Wilson, whom he regarded as a charlatan and a fraud. Shortly before the poll, George Wigg said to Father in the House of Commons tea room,
‘Harold Wilson’s going to win the Labour leadership. Support him and you’ll get a job in the next government. Otherwise . . .’
His voice had the 20/20 steeliness of a gangland hitman.
‘I can’t. Harold’s so dishonest,’ Father countered.
‘You’re a fool.’
With that Wigg stalked off.
To see a man Gaitskell despised filling his shoes was abhorrent to his friends. Father, with that quixotic streak that often came out like lightning in a storm, decided to support George Brown. On the credit side he was brave, willing to take on the left wing and perhaps able to rout them. The Broad Left would never have got into his government as they did in Wilson’s. He cared more about Britain than himself.
But on the debit side, he failed to display the behaviour appropriate to public life. Stories were rife about his drinking. How could Britain have a prime minister who could not hold his liquor, fell on the floor and was always insulting people? None of that mattered to Father, but it did to the Pharisees in the Labour party.
Brown was ahead on the first ballot, but not by enough. Seeing how well Wilson had done, many waverers went off to join him. On the morning after the first ballot Father met Brown for a drink in the Smoking Room.
‘Why do you think it went wrong?’ the deflated man asked.
‘It’s because you’re so dreadfully rude to people when you’re drunk, George.’
‘Oh, Woodrow’, he rejoined, ‘what makes them think I’m rude to them just because I am drunk?’
Harold Wilson inherited a party that was healthier than when Gaitskell had become leader. His predecessor had defeated the nuclear disarmers and stopped the advance of the lunatic Left. By this time Father had swapped his Aston seat for Bosworth. He did better at the general election than he had in 1959.
But Wilson declined to offer Father a job. It was not only his past closeness to Gaitskell that weighed in the scales. Father was bitterly opposed to one of his manifesto promises, the complete nationalisation of British Steel. In secret Father began to discuss with members of the Iron and Steel Board the possibility of a compromise between state and private ownership that would end the damaging seesaw of alternating governments. It would keep the companies intact and the profit motive alive, and stop the inevitable job losses.
With the help of the reed-like Liberal leader Jo Grimond, Father and his fellow Labour MP Desmond Donnelly drafted a letter to Wilson. A war of nerves began. To keep the Press interested, Father had a series of lunches at Tower House with people like Nora Beloff of the Observer and the Jesuitical William Rees-Mogg of the Sunday Times. Father was made the offer of a ‘good job’ before the Steel Bill, but he said no, and despite his curiosity even declined to ask what the job might be. But Wilson now announced that the long-awaited Bill would be preceded by a White Paper and then a Bill would come later in the session. The following day Father met Wilson in his room at the House. He got nowhere, but during the debate in the Commons he spoke for thirty-seven minutes to an attentive House. The government support melted away. It would after all listen to proposals for a less than 100 per cent nationalisation. Father and Moorea went off to eat dinner at the Savoy Grill.
In March 1966 Labour won a tremendous victory. Wilson was free to do as he chose, including the complete nationalisation of steel. The steel-owners saw their industry ruined and the country suffering the appalling losses that Father had forecast. In 1980 a three-month strike added to steel’s tribulations. Father’s relations with both sides were such that he was able to arrange secret meetings at his house between the union leaders and senior officials of British Steel. This led to the appointment of Harold Lever as chairman of a committee which brought the strike to an end. British Steel gave Father a decorative plate in gratitude.
Alas, the next four years in Parliament had a bitter and arid taste. Father’s only pleasure was to tease Wilson, like a bear baiting its despised keeper. When Nixon was elected President in 1968, Wilson pompously told the House of his wish to go at once to Washington to see the new President. He wanted to be first in the queue of Western leaders. ‘Why this unseemly rush?’ Father asked in the chamber. ‘Doesn’t the Prime Minister realise that when the President wants to see him he’ll send for him?’ The House dissolved in giggles at the Prime Minister’s discomfort.
By 1970 Father and Mother had been married for three years. The country was poised for a general election that Labour lost. It was partly to do with Wilson’s disagreements with the trade unions over their reform and partly with his own conceit. He toured the country, boastfully assuming the election was already won, asking people to have tea with him at Number 10 afterwards.
On the last day of the 1966 Parliament, Father meandered into the smoking room. Something made him subconsciously whisper goodbye to the familiar chamber and the corridors where he had gossiped, achieving in twenty-five years less than he had hoped. He was fifty-two.
A Tory MP said to him, ‘You’ve got no worries. Your majority is nearly 8,000, isn’t it?’
At Bosworth there was no Liberal candidate. That made Father a little nervous, as Bosworth was an area where Liberal candidates tended to draw votes away from the Conservatives to Labour’s advantage. There were many miners living there. Ironically they had been complaining about high taxes on their wages. It was Father’s policy to stay a
way from his constituency as often as possible during a campaign. Father’s logic was straightforward. He reasoned that the more he appeared on people’s doorsteps, the less likely they were to vote for him. This had worked in the past and his majority had gone up. But on this occasion he decided to take his new wife and see every householder in Bosworth.
Before each visit, Father issued a series of strictures to Mother against displaying the merest whiff of snobbism. But it turned out that the miners were the greatest snobs of anyone. As Disraeli had been one of the first to divine, many of them were natural Tory voters.
It took little more than largesse to coax them out. The Tory candidate was aided by Jonathan Guinness, Diana Mosley’s son, who after they emerged from the mines, encumbered them with champagne and smoked salmon. They naturally preferred this to Father’s democratic beer and sandwiches. For the first time in history a miners’ band played at a Tory party fête.
After the eve-of-poll meeting, Father was only slightly more sanguine than Richard III had been the night before Bosworth. As he drove through the fields, stopping to pay his respects at the chapel where King Dickon said his last mass, Father had a strange, sad premonition. He would never again see the field and villages, the grammar school in Market Bosworth where Dr Johnson, our distant relation, had once taught. Despair beat her barren bosom and Father harkened to the sound.
At about eight o’clock, reports started coming in that a large number of solidly Labour council estates had not bothered to turn out this time. At the count boxes that were usually two or three to one for Labour were coming out almost level. Still, Father could not quite believe he had lost.
He was out by just under a thousand. He asked for a recount. He was out by just over a thousand.
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