Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  But none of this prevented Brown’s ascent to the job of his dreams. In August 1966 he became Foreign Secretary, a post that provided a constant supply of foreign dignitaries for him to insult. During a trip to Brussels, the Belgian government held a banquet for Brown and his party. Just as dinner was winding down Brown stood up, waved his arms, and said: ‘While you have been wining and dining here tonight, who has been defending Europe? I’ll tell you who’s been defending Europe – the British Army. And where you may ask are the soldiers of the Belgian Army tonight? I’ll tell you where the soldiers of the Belgian Army are. They’re in the brothels of Brussels!’47

  At a reception held in honour of the Turkish President at Hampton Court, Brown ignored the speech carefully crafted for him by officials and instead congratulated the Turkish President on being married to the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’. The Foreign Secretary, who had been drinking at a Soviet Embassy party earlier in the evening, then started lashing out at the Church. When students from the Royal Ballet School began to dance, Brown said to an astonished President Sunay, ‘You don’t want to listen to this bullshit – let’s go and have a drink.’48

  But perhaps the most memorable George Brown drinking story of all comes from a trip to Brazil. The British delegation was invited to a diplomatic reception for some visiting dignitaries from Peru, held at the Brazilian President’s Palace of the Dawn. Brown had already spent the early part of the evening drinking. The setting was sumptuous. According to someone who claimed to be there, Brown made a beeline for a ‘gorgeously crimson-clad figure’. He asked the person to dance and received this reply: ‘There are three reasons, Mr Brown, why I will not dance with you. The first, I fear, is that you’ve had a little too much to drink. The second is that this is not, as you seem to suppose, a waltz the orchestra is playing but the Peruvian national anthem, for which you should be standing to attention. And the third reason why we may not dance, Mr Brown, is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.’

  The one small caveat to this magnificent tale is that it is probably not true. There is no evidence in the Foreign Office archive that George Brown ever visited Brazil, or that he drunkenly propositioned the Archbishop of Lima.49 But this apocryphal incident is entirely plausible because it fits so well with Brown’s general behaviour.

  This is why Private Eye put a photograph of Brown on the front cover in February 1967, standing alongside Harold Wilson and the French President Charles de Gaulle. A drunk-looking Brown is depicted singing the Hokey-Cokey, while Wilson says to the French President, ‘George est un peu fatigué, Votre Majesté.’

  The satirical magazine had another swipe at the Foreign Secretary when it imagined that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had sent a dispatch to embassies abroad advising them how to deal with the foreign press. It listed six characteristics associated with George Brown – tired, overwrought, expansive, overworked, colourful and emotional. And so the phrase ‘tired and emotional’ was born, the universally understood political euphemism for being drunk.

  According to fellow Cabinet member Denis Healey, Brown’s frequent inebriation led to a dysfunctional decision-making process: ‘I had to work with him because I was Defence Secretary at the time when he was Foreign Secretary and we arranged that we would meet once a week for an hour. I found I had to have the meetings before twelve in the morning, because otherwise there was the risk that George would be the worse for drink. It was a very, very serious problem with him.’50

  Perhaps the Foreign Office did that to ministers then. As the historian Peter Paterson points out, all three Foreign Secretaries between 1964 and 1970 – Patrick Gordon Walker, Michael Stewart and George Brown – were convicted of drink driving after leaving office.

  Brown had a regular habit of phoning Harold Wilson and threatening to resign when he was piqued by some perceived slight. He felt excluded from Wilson’s inner sanctum and drink exacerbated his sense of grievance. Wilson, the technocratic Oxford economist, and Brother Brown the working-class trade unionist, clashed quite easily but the Prime Minister was forbearing. When Brown fired off his resignation letters to Downing Street, Wilson would say ‘file it with the others’ and wait for his Foreign Secretary to simmer down and sober up.

  Brown had been Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Economic Affairs during a serious balance of payments crisis, and Foreign Secretary at the time Britain was trying to join the European Common Market and the United States was stuck in the quagmire of Vietnam. These were important jobs and it was not just Private Eye that asked whether Brown’s drinking damaged his ability to do them properly. On 4 October 1967, the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror’s editorial read: ‘The trouble with George Brown is not that he drinks too much but that he drinks at all.’51 The newspaper said the Foreign Secretary had two personalities, Mr Brown the statesman and George the clown. When the BBC’s Robin Day interviewed Brown at Labour’s annual conference later that day, he quoted directly from the article. Brown tetchily acknowledged that times had changed: ‘Nobody would pretend that Sir Winston Churchill didn’t drink alcohol. It would be absurd to pretend. But there was then an unwritten rule that you didn’t say it. Now today we are opening the whole lot up. I’m not pretending that I don’t drink alcohol. I work jolly hard. I work very many hours every day. I don’t do other things that people might frown upon. If we were living in a reasonable society I think the press and the radio and the television commentators would live by the rules we lived by yesterday. But if you want yourself a Foreign Secretary who doesn’t do anything that’s wrong I’m not the guy you want but I reckon the fellow you’ll get won’t be a very good Foreign Secretary.’ Brown added with a theatrical flourish the famous quote by Stanley Baldwin: ‘Power without responsibility has been the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.’52

  In March 1968 the government was grappling with yet another economic nightmare, a crisis in the international gold markets. Late one Saturday night senior ministers were summoned to decide whether to have an emergency bank holiday on the Monday and close the London gold market. Nobody could track down the Foreign Secretary, so the Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, and Wilson made the call without him. When Brown discovered that he had not been consulted he erupted, phoning Number 10 at 1 a.m. and demanding a Cabinet meeting. The next morning he again rattled off a letter of resignation and this time Wilson accepted it, to the relief of many people in the government. In the view of Joe Haines: ‘That was all drink, he ruined what might have been a good career through drink.’53 Brown never held office again, and he resigned from the Labour Party in 1976 in protest against a government bill to strengthen trade union ‘closed shops’. As he was leaving Parliament he fell over into the gutter beside his car, and the pictures were plastered over the next day’s newspapers. They suggested drink; he blamed his bifocals. It was an ignominious end for a man whose prodigious talents had drowned in a bottle.

  Brown’s resignation prompted a warm tribute from The Times, which admired his stand against Labour’s drift to the left and contrasted it with Harold Wilson’s style of leadership. Describing Brown as one of the most patriotic Englishmen of his time, the newspaper’s editorial concluded: ‘When it comes to the heart of the matter, to the courage that supports a nation, Lord George-Brown drunk is a better man than the Prime Minister sober.’54

  A Rake’s Progress

  George Brown was not the last of the seriously embarrassing ministerial drinkers. The Conservative MP and minister Alan Clark, now remembered only for his racy diaries, would have fitted well into the age of the eighteenth-century rake. Unfortunately, his arrival in office coincided with the stricter disciplines of Thatcherism, even though the Lady herself was very partial to a glass of Bell’s. Her press secretary Bernard Ingham says daytime ministerial drinking began to tail off in the early 1980s: ‘Indulgence was out and earning your keep was in. The Thatcher idea of “apply yourself boy” was increasingly there and the 1970s was probably the last decade of the long liquid lunch
.’55 But Alan Clark clearly had not got the memo, and the castle-owning, car-collecting, womanising aristocrat lived a life reminiscent of those earlier rakes, Dashwood and Fox. Lord Armstrong says Clark’s drinking was at odds with the time: ‘We all had concerns about Alan Clark, who drank inside the office and outside it. His drinking was habitual and he didn’t understand that you couldn’t combine that with being a serious minister.’56 Clark was maverick, charming and indiscreet. Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary, described him as ‘the Lucifer of the Thatcher government; a brilliant, dark, quixotic, bawdy presence’.57

  First elected to the House of Commons in 1974, Clark got monstrously drunk on his first day in Parliament.58 After a decade of saying whatever he wanted and giving Conservative whips a headache with his frequently controversial off-message remarks, Clark was asked to join the government in June 1983 in the post of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Employment. Clark was a good friend of Ian Gow, Margaret Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary until 1983 and her eyes and ears in the Commons. As Gow, who was later killed by the IRA, briefed the Prime Minister over gossipy late-night whiskies in Number 10, Clark was recommended for promotion to the front bench.

  And so it was that Alan Clark found himself standing at the Commons dispatch box on the evening of 19 July 1983 with the job of introducing a rather dry piece of government business. Clark’s diary entry for the week is innocuously titled ‘AC presents the Equal Opportunities Order to the House of Commons’. If that’s all he had done, the moment would never have been remembered. But Clark had decided to go wine tasting with his friend Christopher Selmes, a financier who often spent Christmas with the Clarks at their chalet in Zermatt. Officials had written the statement Clark was due to deliver but he had barely glanced at it by the time he headed off to the event. The wine slipped down well, as the new minister recorded in his diary: ‘We “tasted” first a bottle of ’61 Palmer, then “for comparison” a bottle of ’75 Palmer then, switching back to ’61, a really delicious Pichon Longueville. By 9.40 I was muzzy … the text was still virtually unmarked and unexercised.’59

  Clark’s diary deliciously captures the subsequent shambles. He is driven back to the House of Commons in his ministerial Austin Princess. Sitting on the back seat smoking a Havana cigar, he turns his attention to the statement and tries to read it using the tiny reading light in the car roof. The words are dreary Whitehall waffle and a muzzy Clark, vitalised by the vintages, has no patience with it. It is after ten o’clock when he stands up in the Chamber, which is surprisingly full for a late-evening session. Clark begins to read the statement.

  The insouciant Eton and Oxford-educated author of several acclaimed histories thought the words he had been asked to deliver to MPs were woeful:

  As I started the sheer odiousness of the text sank in … give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives and convoluted apology. Stir in a directive from the European Court of Justice and you have a text which is impossible to read – never mind read out. I found myself dwelling on, implicitly, it could be said, sneering at, the more cumbrous and unintelligible passages.60

  Drawling his way through the statement, Clark started to skip paragraphs, then pages. At one point the minister told MPs that he might have to rattle through certain passages ‘at 78 rpm instead of 33’ and his delivery accelerated. He was gabbling along when up shot the Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, Clare Short, on the benches opposite to make a point of order – ‘dark-haired and serious with a lovely Brummie accent’, Clark noted down later. Short said she had read that MPs were not allowed to accuse their colleagues of being drunk, but that she really believed the employment minister was incapable: ‘It is disrespectful to the House and to the office that he holds that he should come here in this condition.’

  The Commons erupted. ‘Screams, yells, shouts of “Withdraw”, counter-shouts. General uproar … I sat, smiling weakly, my lips dry as sandpaper.’61 Word of the kerfuffle quickly spread around the bars. The Chamber began to fill up and the Leader of the House, John Biffen, appeared in his seat. The Deputy Speaker, Ernie Armstrong, bellowed for the House to come to order and told Clare Short to withdraw her remark. Speakers stood up to criticise Clark and the chaos almost caused the government to lose the business in the House.

  The journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris remembered the night in his memoirs: ‘I’m a little ashamed to say we all thought it was amazingly funny. Alan got away with it because he was handsome, charming and did subtly crawl to Mrs T – but in a way he was clever enough to disguise. In his place I would have sunk.’62

  On the way home from the Commons, Clark’s driver Joan asked what the row in the Chamber had been about.

  ‘They were saying I was drunk,’ said Clark. ‘But I wasn’t was I?’

  ‘No minister, of course you weren’t. I’ve never seen you drunk,’ replied Joan.

  ‘That’s that then,’ Clark wrote.

  The following morning the minister issued a statement firmly denying drunkenness: ‘Miss Short’s allegation is completely baseless, as anyone who knows me would testify.’63 Clark assured his boss Norman Tebbit that drink was not responsible for his peculiar performance at the dispatch box and his fledgling ministerial career survived, with Mrs Thatcher’s affection for him proving crucial. Less favoured members of her government would have been axed. This was also a time before television cameras had been screwed into the wooden ceiling of the Commons chamber. Today a drunken dispatch box performance would instantly go viral on YouTube and mean curtains for a minister’s career.

  Alan Clark hated what he regarded as his sentence at the Department of Employment, spending most of his time trying to find ways to massage the rising unemployment figures in order to make them look more presentable. More to his taste were subsequent junior postings in trade and defence, where he stayed until he quit the Commons in 1992. His frank, funny and waspish diaries, with their lascivious tales of lust and longing, brought him huge notoriety and embellished the personality displayed at the dispatch box in the summer of 1983.

  Clark was the last minister to be accused of being drunk in the House of Commons. In that one incident a reputation was born. But was he drunk? Years later, his wife Jane said: ‘I never remember Al drunk.’64 But while he could have been honing his statement into something readable, Clark was instead quaffing ’61 Palmer. It did not make him incapably drunk, but the alcohol did remove a mental brake that other ministers would have been too nervous to release. In the Sunday Times at the end of the week, Hugo Young wrote a column headed ‘Alas he was Sober’ and then skewered Clark for being ‘arrogant, facetious and brimming with self-amusement’.65 Which is exactly what readers of his diaries came to relish about him.

  A Lost Leader

  The late Labour leader John Smith was certainly a hearty social drinker. Older MPs smile warmly when they remember evenings sharing a whisky or three with the droll and loquacious Edinburgh lawyer in his Commons office behind the Speaker’s chair. Smith’s fatal heart attack in 1994 was as traumatic for Labour as Hugh Gaitskell’s sudden death had been thirty years earlier. Both were much-liked party leaders who seemed poised to become Prime Minister at the time of their deaths. Instead, it was Tony Blair who walked into Number 10 three years after Smith died. In his memoir, Blair remembered his predecessor as a stupendous toper:

  He could drink in a way I have never seen before or since. I don’t mean he would ever be in drink when he needed to be sober – he was a complete professional – but if there was an Olympic medal for drinking, John would have contended with such superiority that after a few rounds the rest of the field would have simply shaken their heads and banished themselves from the track.66

  There had been one epic drinking session in Shanghai in the late 1980s, at the end of which Smith led the Chinese officials in an arm-linked rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. He relished camaraderie an
d late-night conversation, powered by tumblers of Scotch. Smith was a close friend of Blair’s pupil master and mentor, Derry Irvine, Lord Chancellor in the Labour government and another hard-drinking Scot. According to Blair:

  John would love to talk, reminisce, relax and wind down. Drink was a relaxant. In this regard, he was like Derry. They would never do it before a big occasion, but the two of them together betokened a monumental session that, if the time was free, could start at lunch time and go on well into the night.67

  Blair stresses that drink never impaired Smith’s performance the following morning and the lack of a hangover meant he had no reason to limit his drinking the night before. Derry Irvine seemed to have the same (Scottish?) facility. The overnight train that took Scottish Labour MPs back home on a Thursday night provided such a well-oiled experience that it became known as the Sleeper of Death.