He could not leave it any longer, he wanted to ask me if I would marry him…. I was overjoyed, tremendously happy and elated. Of course, I said yes…. He said I must be patient as it would be some time before we would be able to marry. His Ministerial job [as a junior trade minister] would require him to travel a great deal over the coming year, but he would see me whenever he was in Brussels for Council meetings and we could meet in England for weekends. He said that we would start our new life together when I came back.23
Do you see what he did there? Parkinson had managed to install his mistress safely overseas, complete with a cover story for when he wanted to see her, just by telling her what she wanted to hear. All he had to do was extract himself from his obligation when her time in Belgium was up, which he duly did a week before her return: ‘half way through lunch he suddenly said that he could not marry me after all, and that he could not leave his wife.’24
He did not intend to stop seeing her, however. Their affair went on for a further two and a half years, with Keays forced to jump through ever more elaborate hoops on Parkinson’s behalf. Once, he took her on holiday to the Bahamas, but made her fly out a full ten days ahead of him, only joining her for ‘a few blissful days’ after a ministerial trip to South America.25 On another occasion, when his car was stolen with two of his ministerial red boxes inside during an overnight stay at her London home, he refused to let her enlighten the police about where it had been taken from, ‘saying that if the boxes were not found it would be the end of his political career and that was quite bad enough without revealing his affair with me as well’.26 Leaving the boxes unattended was a serious breach of the rules and Parkinson got a deserved ticking-off from the home secretary for it. He then told Keays the whole incident was her fault. She decided that she didn’t want to see him any more. Undeterred, he took to turning up and banging on her front door in the early hours; the second time he did so, she let him in. Despite the obvious trajectory of his career after Thatcher promoted him to chairman of the party in September 1981, Keays believed him when he offered her yet another promise: he would give up politics and marry her after the next general election.
By the time the campaign for that election was under way, Keays was pregnant. ‘It was dreadful,’ she recalled of breaking the news to him. ‘He begged me to have an abortion, saying that if I had the baby I would destroy his career…. He said that I had better understand that he would never marry me and that if I had the baby he would never have anything to do with me again and never wanted to see the child.’27 That was the only promise Cecil Parkinson made to Sarah Keays that he would keep.
For the next few weeks Parkinson pestered Keays to abort their baby from every possible angle, ‘ringing me up late at night and early in the morning, and coming to see me’.28 He brought his wife, Ann, and three grown-up children into it, demanding ‘whether it was right to set the life of one person against the life of four others’.29 He told her the baby ‘would hate me for destroying his or her father’s career’.30 And then, on polling day itself, 9 June 1983, he changed tack, and pledged that he would leave his wife, marry Keays and help her bring up their baby together. What’s more, he was about to go in and tell Mrs Thatcher so. ‘He begged me to believe him, saying he knew he had behaved abominably, but that he had come to his senses and hoped that I would be able to forgive him,’ wrote Keays two years later, admitting that ‘even now I think he did mean what he said then.’31
Parkinson did tell the prime minister about his affair that afternoon – but it may have been because he didn’t have much choice. Already sure her victory was in the bag, she had him in to Number 10 to offer him one of the top jobs – ‘Foreign Secretary for two or three years, then Chancellor’ – and Parkinson, in the account he later gave to Mrs Thatcher’s authorized biographer, said he told her that having ‘two Special Branch men next to me all the time’ would not be helpful while he was dealing with the ‘very big personal problem’ he had to tell her about.32 Instead, he left Downing Street with the promise of a new job in charge of the Department of Trade and Industry; what he was going to do about the baby was left unresolved. According to Parkinson, ‘Mrs Thatcher was immensely sympathetic, not at all censorious.’33
The following day, Parkinson’s fortunes changed. A few hours after inviting Parkinson to join her in victoriously waving to the crowds from the window of Conservative Central Office, Mrs Thatcher opened the first set of red boxes of her second term as prime minister and found inside one a ferocious letter from Sara Keays’ father telling her all about her new secretary of state’s behaviour. ‘Some five years ago he came to see my late wife and myself to tell us he was in love with Sara and intended to divorce his wife and marry her,’ Colonel Keays informed her. ‘For some undisclosed reason he changed his mind. However, he continued to pursue my daughter in spite of our very determined efforts to get the whole situation terminated.’34 Parkinson was called to a ‘most ghastly meeting’ with Thatcher. ‘He said some terrible things about me,’ Parkinson protested to Sara in a phone call afterwards.35 Parkinson phoned the prospective grandfather the following day to assure him he ‘intended to do the right thing by Sara’. According to Sara’s retelling, Parkinson said, ‘I am not a rat, Colonel Keays – you are speaking to your future son-in-law.’36
Anyone remotely familiar with the situation could have been forgiven for not rushing out to buy a hat for the wedding. In August Parkinson summoned Keays, three months pregnant, to his solicitors’ office and informed her that he was staying with his wife after all. ‘Then he reverted to the line he had taken before polling day, reproaching me for not agreeing to have an abortion, saying that I had tried to destroy his career and his marriage, but that I was not going to succeed,’ recalled Keays.37
With this turn of events, Keays finally – and rather admirably – decided to test the proposition. With ‘frightful men’ from the tabloids circling, she insisted on a joint statement being put out about her pregnancy, making it clear that their relationship had not only lasted ‘a number of years’, but that during it Parkinson had ‘told Miss Keays of my wish to marry her’ and then gone back on his word.38 The statement was issued on 5 October, along with a terse one from Downing Street saying that Mrs Thatcher considered it ‘a private matter. Mr Parkinson is a member of the Cabinet, doing a good job, and the question of resignation does not and will not arise.’39 The Iron Lady could not have been more wrong. Versions of the story sympathetic to Parkinson began to appear in the press, and Keays was enough of a political insider to be able to read between the lines and spot the activity of government aides. More than one paper directly, but falsely, accused her of getting pregnant deliberately in order to entrap her man, while ‘he was praised for his courage and his handling of his “ordeal”,’ she fumed. ‘The entire Save Parkinson campaign was dependent on the destruction of my reputation.’40 And she wasn’t having it. The full, unedifying details of their twelve-year relationship were unveiled to readers of The Times the following week, right in the middle of the Conservative Party Conference. ‘I’ve had it, haven’t I?’ said Parkinson to a colleague when he saw the first edition.41 He resigned that night.
Cecil Parkinson’s daughter Flora was born on New Year’s Eve 1983. As promised, he supported her financially, but he never had any contact with her. As a single mother, Sara Keays coped with diagnoses of Asperger’s and epilepsy as well as a major operation when Flora was four to remove a brain tumour. Around Flora’s tenth birthday, renewed press interest led to Parkinson and Keays – communicating through their lawyers – to take out a joint injunction to protect their daughter’s privacy. Sara subsequently fought against the injunction when she realized how restrictive it was. The result was a second court order specifically aimed at Sara. The effects, she later claimed, were so draconian that Flora could not appear in her school photo, or have her name printed in the programme of an ice-skating show she took part in. When the order finally lapsed on Flora’s eighteenth birthday,
Flora took part in a documentary in which she said, ‘I would like to meet my Daddy. I would like to see him…. I would like to go to the cinema with him and have some fun.’42
She never got to. In January 2016, Parkinson’s death was announced in the Daily Telegraph. The obituary said he was the ‘Beloved husband of Ann’ and listed his children, grandchildren and even step-grandchildren.43 There was no mention of Flora whatsoever.
‘My wife Judith and I have been experiencing difficulties in our marriage and we want to sort the situation out for the sake of each other and especially for our two young children. This I hope we can do in private. We both further hope these sensationalised disclosures in today’s newspapers will be put aside and that we can be left to resolve these matters in private. We will be making no further comment.’
David Mellor, statement to the press, 19 July 1992
David Mellor sometimes seems to go out of his way to behave appallingly. For instance, in 2014 a recording made public by The Sun in which he hurled abuse at a taxi driver: ‘You’ve been driving a cab for ten years; I’ve been in the Cabinet, I’m an award-winning broadcaster, I’m a Queen’s Counsel – you think that your experiences are anything compared to mine?’44 But in the episode that made him most famous, he was just one of a huge cast of people behaving pretty disgracefully.
For one, there was Nick Philp, the landlord who bugged the flat where Mellor cheated on his wife and who sold the recordings to a Sunday tabloid. Then there was Antonia de Sancha, the thirty-one-year-old Mellor was cheating with. She didn’t exactly cover herself with glory by announcing, ‘I would never stoop so low as to do anything to get money in this situation,’ then signing on with publicist Max Clifford. There’s nothing to be said in favour of Clifford, who has since been jailed for a series of sex offences. And finally there were the tabloid editors who competed to buy both the landlord’s and de Sancha’s stories in the gleeful knowledge that Mellor, as the minister responsible for the media, was considering new privacy curbs on the press. In fact, the only entirely innocent people were probably Mellor’s wife, Judith, and their kids, as the politician pointed out the day after his affair was revealed while making not one, but two requests in the course of four short sentences that their privacy be respected.
Exactly five days later, Mellor marched Judith and his sons, aged twelve and eight, out in front of a mob of journalists to pose for photos with him. He even threw in his in-laws, Edward and Joan Hall, for good measure. The elderly couple’s gritted-tooth smiles were rather at odds with their own comments to the press a few days earlier, which had appeared beneath the Sun headline ‘IF HE’LL CHEAT ON MY DAUGHTER, HE’LL CHEAT ON THE COUNTRY’.45 In the intervening period, Mellor had taken the precaution of making a phone call in which he ranted: ‘if you talk about me again you will not see your grandchildren.’46
Before the flashbulbs had faded there were signs Mellor realized the appearance was a bad idea. ‘I don’t want it to look too much like a cynical photocall,’ he told the press who had been summoned to his home by ‘sources close to the minister’, a traditional Fleet Street euphemism in which the first three words are completely redundant.47 When Mellor was asked – not unreasonably – about how he was getting on with his family, he had the gall to reply, ‘we are all resolved that all these matters are going to be discussed in private.’48
Other members of the motley cast made decidedly different resolutions. De Sancha, whose career as an actress had never quite got off the ground, suddenly became one of the most famous people in the country. She now found herself dumped by Mellor after what she claimed to have thought was ‘a genuine relationship based on deep affection’49 and reading concocted tales in the tabloids of past jobs in ‘seedy vice dens’ and roles in ‘soft porn movies’ – and barely recognizing herself in them.50 ‘She said so much had been written about her that was wrong, and she asked me to put the record straight,’ Clifford recalled.51 He quickly set about doing exactly the opposite.
The exclusive deal he brokered for de Sancha with The Sun kicked off on 7 September with the headline ‘MELLOR MADE LOVE IN CHELSEA STRIP!’ It came complete with a mocked-up photo of the minister in the kit of his favourite football team. Further revelations were staggered throughout the week, including the lie that the couple liked to suck each others’ toes. ‘Complete and utter garbage’, de Sancha admitted later. ‘I hate feet.’52 As for the football kit claim, ‘It was all rubbish made up by Max. I was in his office when he first came up with the soccer strip story to a Sun journalist. I was amazed.’53 Having been outbid for her story, other papers naturally lined up to denounce her as ‘shameless’ and ‘tawdry’ for selling it. Clifford also took de Sancha around the TV studios, touting imaginary biopic offers from ‘top Hollywood film executives’.
De Sancha did, however, manage to quash some of her publicist’s suggestions, chiefly that she pretend to be pregnant with Mellor’s child in order ‘to keep the story hot’. ‘It was just awful, awful, awful,’ she said later.54 On this her ex-boyfriend Mellor agreed. ‘It should be quite clear to everybody who knows about Max Clifford and his antics that all this so-called new information are fantasies worked up to justify the large fee obviously being paid,’ he announced in the week of the Sun series. ‘It’s disgusting that such a man can be accepted by newspapers as a witness of truth.’55
His statement hit on the point that elevated this particular sex scandal from the tabloids to the broadsheets. When the story first broke, it had been difficult to perceive anything in the minister’s behaviour that had any bearing on his job, and Prime Minister John Major – a close friend of Mellor’s – had been quick to turn down his offer to resign. But among Mellor’s responsibilities at the newly created National Heritage department was oversight of the media. This was in an era when surreptitiously taped phone calls by both Charles and Diana were turning up in the papers, along with long-lens photos of their sister-in-law Fergie, and Mellor had only a few months earlier commissioned a review of press regulation – including consideration of the vexing suggestion that regulation be taken out of the industry’s own hands. Mellor had earlier made it pretty clear which side of the argument he was on by warning that ‘the press – the popular press – is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon’.56
Patsy Chapman, the former News of the World editor who now worked at the existing watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission, claimed his announcement of the review had come just twenty-four hours after the News of the World put allegations of Mellor’s affair with de Sancha to Mellor, and received the answer – via Tory PR man Sir Tim Bell – that it was ‘rubbish’.57 The PCC ostentatiously downed another glass, announcing: ‘In the case of politicians, it is right for the public to be informed about private behaviour.’58 ‘The Mellor affair demonstrates why MPs of all parties join the clamour for a privacy bill – They don’t want the press’s torch of freedom shone into the dark crannies of their own lives,’ declared a leader column in The Sun, whose own editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, was shortly afterwards discovered to be cheating on his own wife with a much younger girlfriend.59 The Mail’s Sir David English – found guilty of ‘gross misconduct’ by the press watchdog a few years earlier for waving his chequebook at relatives of a serial killer and then lying about it – announced that Mellor’s position was untenable and he must resign from the government.60
He didn’t – that is, not until a more substantial scandal, regarding a holiday the Mellor family had taken at the Marbella villa of the daughter of a financial backer of the Palestine Liberation Organization, burst into the headlines towards the end of September. After loudly demanding on Newsnight, ‘Who decides who is to be a member of the British cabinet – the prime minister or the editor of the Daily Mail?’, Mellor answered his own question by quitting the following morning.61 ‘TOE JOB TO NO JOB’ was The Sun’s rather magnificent take.
Early on, the Financial Times, while rising above the murkier details, had declared that ‘most observers at Westminste
r believe that whatever happens to Mr Mellor, the row has postponed indefinitely any prospect of the government introducing new privacy legislation.’62 They were right. When Mellor’s reviewer, Sir David Calcutt QC, reported back the following year that the PCC was ineffective, could not command public confidence and ought to be replaced with statutory controls on the press, the issue was kicked very far into the long grass.
The tabloids had won.
‘I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false.’
Bill Clinton, White House news conference, 26 January 1998
You can understand quite how excruciatingly embarrassing it must have been for Bill Clinton. They were, as he pointed out, ‘questions no American citizen would ever want to answer’.63 And it was hard to see how his fooling around with a twenty-two-year-old intern in the Oval Office three years previously could have anything to do with the topic – some real estate investments Clinton and his wife Hillary had made in the seventies – that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had been appointed to look into four years earlier. Over the course of his inquiry, however, the thing had just kept mutating and expanding, taking in lurid conspiracy theories about the death of one of their former colleagues, the finances of the White House travel office, the use or misuse of FBI files, a number of businesses in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas and, it started to seem, any other area of the president’s past in which Starr thought he might be able to dig up dirt. Finally, with lifelong Republican Starr having long since crossed the line from diligent lawyer to obsessed stalker at the cost of some $25 million to public funds, the investigation had metastasized, enveloping another long-running embarrassment for Clinton: a case for sexual harassment brought by an Arkansas state employee called Paula Jones. Already Jones’ harassment suit had entailed having the supposedly ‘distinguishing characteristics’ of the presidential penis aired in legal documents, and Lewinsky had been called to give evidence in the case. Now, Starr was asking whether or not the president had asked Lewinsky to lie in her deposition. The questions had got very personal. And he didn’t want to answer them.
The Lies of the Land Page 5