by Wright, Ben;
Churchill was a champagne connoisseur and his favourite was Pol Roger, either the 1921 or the 1928 vintage. In 1947 he told Odette Pol Roger, the grande dame of the champagne family, that ‘44 Avenue de Champagne, Epernay, is the world’s most drinkable address’; doubtless flattered, but canny, Odette sent him a case of the 1928 vintage every year on his birthday until supplies ran dry in 1953.45 After the war Churchill told Herbert Asquith’s daughter, Violet Bonham Carter, that he had ‘some relations’ with the Veuve Clicquot during the First World War but that it was not a patch on the Pol Roger.46 The company has made the most of its Churchill association, and in 1975 began naming its cuvée after him. Churchill enjoyed noggins of old brandy too, which helped to loosen up late-night conversation.
For most of his life Churchill survived on a drip feed of alcohol, supping steadily throughout the day and late into the night. His tumblers of whisky would have looked pretty transparent and were kept so with regular squirts of soda water. A glass of wine in bed for breakfast while he worked away on his papers was not a daily habit. But his intake of alcohol seems astonishing by today’s standards, particularly at a time of such colossal national crisis. And that raises a question: if Churchill had to lead Britain today in a fight for survival, would his drinking be tolerated by a more intrusive and censorious press? Probably not. There would be outrage in the political blogs at the leaked reports from Downing Street of his heavy champagne and brandy drinking. Following up the internet rumours on television, Andrew Marr might quiz Churchill on whether his borderline alcoholism made him unfit for office: ‘Prime Minister, people say you’re frequently depressed and have to guzzle lashings of champagne to function. Are those reports right?’
Second World War Churchill would probably just stub his cigar out on Marr’s sofa and walk off the set. A contemporary Churchill, if such a figure could be imagined, would be expected to weave his way around the question, make a non-denial denial and reassure anxious viewers that he was completely focused on the job. Instead, while Churchill led the fight to save civilisation, his appetite for alcohol was an accepted part of his complex, emotional and remarkable character. And since Churchill used alcohol to manage his moods and keep his mind sharp, it might even be concluded that drink played a small part in the Allied victory.
Wilson: Brandy takes the Strain
When 58-year-old Harold Wilson re-entered Downing Street in May 1974, he was a wearier, slower figure than the energetic young Yorkshireman who first became Prime Minister in 1964. In that first term he was the intellectually agile face of modern, meritocratic Sixties Britain, a grammar school boy who looked and sounded like the people who voted for him. Wilson worked hard at presenting himself as a man of industry, aspiration and simple tastes. And drink was part of that pitch. ‘I don’t do much socialising and my tastes are simple,’ he declared before that first election. ‘If I had the choice between smoked salmon and tinned salmon I’d have it tinned. With vinegar. I prefer beer to champagne and if I get the chance to go home I have a North Country high tea – without wine.’47
It was a compelling contrivance. In public Wilson drank beer and puffed a pipe. In private he smoked cigars and drank more spirits than his image suggested.48 The new satirists soon cottoned on to the artifice, but for much of the 1960s Wilson and his government had energy and vigour, despite the backdrop of growing economic crisis.
Wilson had not expected to win the first election of 1974 and retirement from front-line politics was already on his mind. The people who worked with him in Downing Street were very conscious of how he had changed, and one big difference was his intake of alcohol. Wilson had always enjoyed a drink and was pleased that he knew the difference between hock and burgundy, although ‘he is good at drinking either,’ Richard Crossman said later.49 But as early as 1964, it was becoming a necessary prop and his intake of whisky and brandy increased. In the view of one of Wilson’s biographers, ‘an occasional stimulant had become a need’.50
Wilson once said to an official: ‘I don’t drink too much because I am like a man who is always driving.’51 By 1974 he had been at the wheel of the Labour Party for eleven years and clocked up five and a half as Prime Minister; and by this time brandy had become a crutch to keep him on the road. Wilson had become more nervous about Prime Minister’s Question Time and habitually knocked back brandy before facing the Commons. His press secretary, Joe Haines, remembers the need for nerve-calming doses before the then twice-weekly Commons interrogation: ‘He always used to throw down a brandy at 3.10. And then it got to two brandies. He went in one day and the questions dragged on until 3.40. He came out and people flooded into the room and a private secretary said he’d done well. I told him his voice was slurred and that he couldn’t drink two brandies and perform.’52 Once the gruelling ordeal was over he would drink more brandy to recover.
Wilson was not alone in finding PMQs a nerve-shredding experience. Harold Macmillan was sometimes physically sick before walking into the Chamber, and Tony Blair described his weekly joust with MPs as ‘the most nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience’ of his Prime Ministerial life.53 But while Wilson drained a couple of glasses of brandy, Blair took a sleep-inducing melatonin pill the night before and ate a banana before going into the Commons. The same stress, different drugs.
It was not an easy time to be Prime Minister. In 1975 inflation hit 27 per cent, productivity was low, unemployment was rising, industrial relations were fractious and violence had broken out in Northern Ireland. To add to Wilson’s worries, the Labour Party (and the Cabinet) were split on the question of Britain’s future in Europe; and, on top of everything else, the Prime Minister believed there was a conspiracy – involving foreign intelligence agencies and possibly MI5 – to bring down the government. Downing Street was tense and dysfunctional, with Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines in bitter conflict with Number 10’s political secretary, Marcia Falkender. It was a toxic feud that continued long after they both left Downing Street. For years, Falkender had been Wilson’s most important and loyal political ally, but now her strident and angry presence was putting further strain on the Prime Minister, although he never stopped trusting her judgment.54 Bernard Donoughue, Wilson’s main policy adviser, says the Marcia Falkender situation was another trigger for Wilson to drink: ‘I observed, and others working in Number 10 remarked, that whenever he’d had a difficult telephone call from his political secretary, when he put the phone down he immediately went to the cupboard and took out the brandy bottle.’55 But Wilson stayed loyal to Falkender, misting out the problems with alcohol rather than taking them on.
Difficult meetings were preceded by brandy and civil servants disapprovingly noted Wilson’s habit of sipping from a glass during ministerial discussions. He once told Barbara Castle that brandy was the only thing keeping him going, and by the time of his resignation only alcohol was making the job tolerable. In his diary entry for 3 July 1974, Donoughue writes: ‘The PM … went to lunch with the press and apparently was the worse for drink. This was embarrassingly obvious when the Cabinet committee on Energy met in the late afternoon. He rambled and ministers looked embarrassed.’56 Joe Haines is blunt: ‘It was only the drink then that sustained him in the last year or eighteen months.’57
For a time Wilson decided he needed to lose weight and stopped drinking brandy. Instead he started drinking five pints of beer a day. As Philip Ziegler says: ‘On no one day was the input dangerous, but over the years the accumulated damage to his health must have been considerable.’58 Efforts to persuade the press that all was well and to keep the Prime Minister’s drinking secret were not successful, as Michael White noticed on the one occasion he visited Wilson at Number 10: ‘The only time I went to his rooms he was there alone with a bottle of Perrier water conspicuously on the table. Young though I was, I realised that a man displaying Perrier water is sending out false signals.’59 As Britain staggered through these turbulent, anxious year
s, the now baggy-eyed Prime Minister found consolation at the bottom of a bottle.
But as with Churchill, the people who worked with Wilson deny he was ever drunk or that the alcohol damaged his judgment. ‘If he was taking big decisions over incomes policy, the referendum, the economy, on Britain’s membership of the EU, that didn’t seem to produce the kind of stress that led to him drinking,’ says Bernard Donoughue. ‘The normal routine of policy choices which he was well accustomed to, which he rather enjoyed, didn’t seem to stress him in the same way.’60
If that is the case, why was Wilson clutching a brandy bottle for support by the time he left Downing Street? Joe Haines believes that Wilson knew his formidable mental powers were starting to misfire. Statistics could not be rattled off with the same quick precision and his appetite for the contents of a red box was shrinking along with his concentration. According to Haines, Wilson drank more because he knew his mind was beginning to deteriorate: ‘Drinking didn’t influence his thinking. His thinking influenced his drinking.’61 Twelve years after the cheerily dynamic Harold Wilson first walked into Number 10, a less sober and more world-weary Wilson surprised almost everyone by suddenly resigning in March 1976.
Thatcher: Winding down with Whisky
When a frail and confused Margaret Thatcher is filmed recalling snippets of her premiership, and conversations with her late husband Denis, through the fog of dementia, a chunky tumbler of whisky is often seen in her hand. Thatcher’s enjoyment of a stiff drink is a small detail the creators of The Iron Lady, the 2011 feature film about Britain’s first female Prime Minister, got spot on. While she wrestled with the trade unions, crushed the wets in her Cabinet, sent a modern Armada to win back the Falklands and brushed herself down after the Brighton bomb, a constant, comforting companion for Margaret Thatcher during her eleven years in Number 10 was a glass of whisky. It was savoured when Downing Street was winding down for the evening and the Prime Minister was ready to relax.
Relaxing was something Thatcher did not do very easily, remembers her Cabinet Secretary Lord Armstrong: ‘She liked a glass of whisky at six or seven o’clock and that very often turned into two glasses of whisky. It relaxed her at a time of day when she was beginning to feel frayed and it took her through the evening. She didn’t need the stimulus but it just relaxed her a little bit and that was useful. I never in the least felt I needed to say, PM, you’ve had enough.’62
And there is no evidence that she supped too much. But the unscrewing of a Bell’s whisky bottle marked the transition from the formal working day to an evening of red box reading and letter writing. Her pugnacious press secretary, Bernard Ingham, says the whisky was a useful lubricant: ‘We used to gather at about six in the evening in her room before she went off to dinner or to the House to tell her what was going on over a Bell’s – which she ruined with soda. And that I think certainly oiled the wheels of government. If you gather in a room with the Prime Minister who is having a drink it’s a more relaxed atmosphere and people relax at the end of the day and tell it as it is. She wasn’t exactly the most relaxed animal I’ve met in politics and to that extent it was beneficial.’63
Before she became Prime Minister, whisky was actually written into Margaret Thatcher’s diet. In 2010, details of her 1979 pre-election weight loss plan were released. The protein-packed regime revolved around eggs (twenty-eight a week), steak, grapefruit and salad and was typed up on a piece of yellowing paper found inside her 1979 pocket diary. At the bottom of the two-week diet plan the note reads: ‘Whisky may be taken on days when meat is eaten otherwise NO ALCOHOL’.64
In December that year, the new Prime Minister made her first official visit to the United States. After meeting President Carter, Thatcher hosted a lunch at the British Embassy in Washington and her whisky drinking was approvingly noted by the ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, in his diary entry for the day:
Mrs T took a glass of whisky. She had another during lunch as well as half a glass of red wine. I have noticed that whisky seems to be her favourite tipple and, as Peter Carrington (the Foreign Secretary) said to me later in New York, ‘Thank God she likes the stuff.’ She is disciplined without being puritanical, at least so far as the small pleasures of life are concerned.65
As a young Conservative MP, Michael Brown was regularly scooped up during late-night sittings by Ian Gow and taken to the Prime Minister’s Commons office for a gossip over a glass of whisky. Brown remembers Gow’s rather mean measures being topped up by Thatcher, her shoes slipped off and her legs tucked up on the sofa. ‘Thatcher was never drunk but she was very happy to have a decent slug of whisky,’ says Brown. ‘She understood the role alcohol had in oiling the wheels.’66 There were often House of Commons whisky bottles in the outer office awaiting the Thatcher signature, a tradition she started.
The journalist Petronella Wyatt said her father, Woodrow, was besotted with Thatcher in part because of her ability to drink with the blokes. ‘She was regarded by my father as an honorary man … It was spirits all the way – no nonsense about wine – stuff like scotch and gin.’67
Thatcher’s drinking was routine and controlled. But at times of high stress she seems to have imbibed more, just as other people tend to do. During the Falklands war, for instance, Thatcher drank whisky while she waited anxiously for news from the South Atlantic. Late at night the Prime Minister and her close assistant Cynthia Crawford would sit on the floor of the master bedroom in the flat above Number 10 and listen to the latest updates on the BBC World Service. They used to have a whisky and soda to calm their nerves, because as Thatcher explained to her companion: ‘You can’t drink gin and tonic in the middle of the night, dear. You must have a whisky and soda because it will give you energy.’68
The former chemistry student knew when she wanted alcohol to calm her and when she wanted it to give her confidence. Lord Armstrong agrees that those tense weeks in 1982 saw the Prime Minister drink more than usual: ‘I certainly remember times during the Falklands affair, waiting for news to come in and another drink would be had and that relieved the tension.’69
Margaret Roberts came from a teetotal, Methodist background. But then she married Denis Thatcher, the gin and golf loving businessman whose love of drink became part of his popular persona. It was satirised with extraordinary accuracy in the ‘Dear Bill’ letters in Private Eye, an imagined correspondence between the Prime Minister’s husband and a golf partner called Bill. The first letter appeared on 15 May 1979 and read:
Dear Bill,
So sorry I couldn’t make it on Tuesday … M. insisted I turn up for some kind of State Opening of Parliament or other. I had assumed now the election was over I would be excused this kind of thing, but oh no. I had just carried my spare clubs out to the jalopy when heigh ho! – up goes a window and M. is giving my marching orders. It’s off to Moss Bros. for the full kit, and at that moment, I don’t mind telling you, I couldn’t help thinking pretty enviously of you, Monty and the Major enjoying a few pre-match snifters at the 19th without a care in the world.70
Snifters; part of Denis Thatcher’s unique drinking lexicon. Bernard Ingham spent many long flights sitting next to the Prime Minister’s husband and can still rattle off the list: ‘I was able to compile Denis Thatcher’s tally of drinks in ascending order of alcoholic potency on account of sitting next to him on countless flights. Broadly speaking it went like this: An opener (the first one), a brightener, a lifter, a tincture, a large gin and tonic without the tonic, a snifter, a snort, a snorter and a snorterino – which more or less emptied the bottle in one go. Denis certainly enjoyed himself.’71
On one occasion the Thatchers were catching an early morning flight to India. The stewardess asked them what they wanted to drink and Denis requested a large gin and tonic. Shocked, the Prime Minister said, ‘Denis, it’s not even breakfast time!’ To which Denis replied: ‘It’s lunchtime where we’re going and I always like to arrive prepared.’72 Denis Thatcher used to boast that he and his friends could ‘drink en
ough to sink a battleship’ and turned down ice in his liquor because he thought it diluted the alcohol.73 He used to say ‘my glass isn’t working’ when the drink ran dry.
Carol Thatcher recalls a charity lunch at which Denis was asked how he spent his time as the Prime Minister’s consort. Instead of affecting an interest in charitable good causes, Denis declared: ‘Well, when I’m not completely pissed I like to play a lot of golf.’74 At a function in the shires, a Tory lady took Denis aside and discreetly sympathised: ‘Mr Thatcher, I understand you have a drink problem.’ Denis waved his glass and said: ‘Yes, Madam, I have. There is never enough of it.’75 Chris Moncrieff remembers a boozy Number 10 reception for Westminster journalists at which the Prime Minister’s husband regaled the hacks with advice about what to drink in different countries. Margaret Thatcher approached the group and asked what they were talking about. ‘Quick as a flash he said “architecture in Hyderabad” and proceeded to do so!’76
New Labour, New Sobriety?
The New Labour decade coincided with a panic about how much alcohol Britain was consuming. Tales of binge drinking filled newspapers and television news bulletins. While teenagers were filmed staggering around town centres drunk on alcopops, middle-aged, middle-class boozers watched the reports from their sofas while unscrewing the evening’s second bottle of pinot grigio. The government introduced longer licensing hours for pubs, and it seemed much of Britain was embracing the opportunities offered by 24-hour drinking. So it was fitting that the Prime Minister who oversaw this national inebriation was something of a lush himself.