Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  Journalists often lunch in pairs so they can compare notes, corroborate a story and split the cost. But what is the purpose of all this lunching? Peter Oborne is dismissive of the question. ‘As Michael Oakeshott, the conservative political philosopher would have said, there is no purpose to a lunch. It is simply something you enjoy. If someone goes into a lunch with the purpose of extracting some piece of information from a politician it becomes a frightfully tedious and unpleasant business. The purpose of the lunch is the lunch itself,’ he tells me emphatically.12

  Oborne is someone who valiantly continues the lunching tradition of Alan Watkins and other Fleet Street ghosts. A lunch should be long, convivial, loosened with wine and formed on friendship. ‘I find it very hard to meet a politician for lunch without having several drinks. Drink makes you feel more relaxed and at ease with the world. If you don’t drink you feel ill at ease, particularly with someone you don’t know.’ Oborne laments the sobering up of lunch over the last twenty years. They’ve become, he believes, functional, transactional occasions at which younger journalists approach the politician in the same way a tearaway young bowler has a crack at the batsman’s middle stump.

  Many journalists do expect something in return for their hospitality. The Guardian’s Michael White says he’s never believed in lunch as a means of story transmission, but there are tales of journalists throwing their knife down and crying, ‘I’ve just bought you two bottles of wine and you haven’t given me a thing!’13 Politicians very rarely turn up to a lunch with a little gift-wrapped story. But in the meandering course of conversation something may be said about a colleague, a policy being cooked up, or a disagreement within the party, that makes the journalist’s pulse jump. After scribbling some notes in the restaurant loo, ‘Few pleasures on this little green planet are so glorious as tucking a real story into your breast pocket and returning for some cheese and a final glass of claret,’ says Andrew Marr.14

  Jon Sopel was a political correspondent for the BBC between 1989 and 1999, a decade that spanned the defenestration of Thatcher, the disintegration of Major and the early dominance of Blair. Lunch mirrored the drama of the time. Sopel remembers taking Alan Clark, then Minister for Defence Procurement, out to lunch in Belgravia. ‘He turned up with this raven-haired beauty. Anything between nineteen and twenty-three years old. She didn’t say a word during lunch, just sat there looking pouting and gorgeous. It was clear his lunch was preparation for afternoon activities that I suspect had nothing to do with the Ministry of Defence. I thought it was unbelievable. The brazenness!’15 These were the days when broadcasters too would share a bottle of wine with their contact, maybe a couple of brandies, then trundle back to the office and go on air.

  Gossip gleaned over lunch is easier to spin into a newspaper story than into a television or radio piece. A print journalist can construct a front page lead from an off-the-record lunchtime comment that shifts the political weather. ‘Cabinet sources’ make daily appearances in most newspapers, mischievously commenting on the Prime Minister’s competence or another colleague’s troubles. These stories are often plausible, but standing them up and putting a name to the quote is usually impossible. The deal is clear: off-the-record anonymity for a glimpse behind the curtain. But while these stories invaluably illuminate the rivalries, frictions, ambitions and tensions within the government or a political party, they are very rarely challenged for being wrong or misleading.

  Plate 1 A three-bottle politician. Sir Francis Dashwood, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Plate 2 “An Election Entertainment” by William Hogarth.

  Plate 3 “Canvassing for Votes” by William Hogarth.

  Plate 4 George Brown on the cover of Private Eye.

  Plate 5 Draining the Valentia Vat c.1890.

  Plate 6 Ted Heath meets Annie at the re-opening of Annie’s Bar, House of Commons, 1968.

  Plate 7 On the Palace of Westminster Terrace.

  Plate 8 Charles Kennedy the day before he resigned as Liberal Democrat leader, January 6 2006.

  Plate 9 “Sometimes I drink a prodigious amount”. Boris Johnson at a London brewery in 2011.

  Plate 10 Winston Churchill and General Eisenhower at Colonial Williamsburg in 1948.

  Plate 11 Margaret Thatcher celebrates 25 years in Parliament with husband Dennis, 1984.

  Plate 12 Pint-papped: Nigel Farage in a Westminster pub, May 2014.

  Plate 13 Peter Mandelson at the Gay Hussar restaurant.

  Plate 14 Tony Blair at Trimdon Labour Club, 2002.

  Plate 15 US Congressmen celebrate the end of prohibition, 1933.

  Plate 16 President Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev toast the Treaty of Moscow, 1972.

  Plate 17 President Barack Obama at Hayes Bar in Moneygall, Ireland, May 2011.

  Plate 18 Boris Yeltsin at a Kremlin ceremony for military graduates, 1999.

  Plate 19 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin celebrating Churchill’s birthday in Tehran, November 1943.

  Plate 20 Poster criticising government plans to reduce the number of pubs, 1908.

  In contrast, it would be very unusual for a broadcast journalist to clatter onto the Ten O’clock News or the Today programme with a story sourced solely from an off-the-record lunchtime chat. The audiences are bigger, the stakes higher and the scrutiny by party and government press managers more intense. Off-the-record conversations are certainly used by political broadcasters, but usually to colour coverage of stories that are already up and running. For the broadcasters in particular, the political lunch is in part about building a relationship and establishing trust. Mobile phone numbers are usually swapped, and it’s much easier to call an MP or minister with a question at 6.30 in the morning before appearing on the Today programme if you’ve previously met over lunch or a glass of wine. The politician may feel a vague sense of obligation to pick up your call.

  If all this seems rather murky, that’s because it is. There is no rigid set of rules underpinning these liaisons. What’s the difference between an ‘off-the-record chat’ and a ‘background briefing’? When can a reporter use ‘senior Cabinet minister’, ‘friends of a senior Cabinet minister’ or ‘senior government source’? What does ‘senior’ even mean? Who decides? The political lunch often ends not only with coffee and tiramisu but an awkward haggle between politician and hack on the terms of the conversation that’s just taken place. And that’s no guarantee the delicate deal won’t backfire. In the early 1990s Jon Sopel and his BBC colleague Mark Mardell took the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke, out to lunch at the now defunct Chez Nico at 90 Park Lane, then one of the best restaurants in London. At the time Clarke felt he was being undermined on Europe and economic policy by others in the Conservative Party. Over lunch he said: ‘I’m going to tell the kids in Tory Central Office to get their scooters off my lawn!’ It was characteristic Clarke, rumbustious and outspoken.

  The next day Sopel reported these remarks on Radio 4’s World at One, attributing them to a ‘senior Tory’ and saying they implied the source might resign. Pandemonium broke out at Prime Minister’s Questions two hours later. The Opposition leadership gleefully leapt on the remarks, and then the Labour MP Frank Dobson revealed he’d seen Sopel and Mardell having lunch with Clarke at Chez Nico two days before. ‘Ken’s cover was totally blown and he had to make a statement saying he wasn’t going to resign,’ remembers a rather rueful Jon Sopel. He and Mark Mardell both wrote letters to the Chancellor apologising for the fact he’d been unmasked. But Sopel is certain they were right to report what Clarke had said. ‘My job as a journalist is not to keep secrets, broadly speaking. You’re not just going out to lunch. You want to get stuff on air.’16

  It was this sort of napkin-dabbing indiscretion that the next government wanted to stamp out. Labour returned to power with the former political journalist (and former alcoholic) Alastair Campbell in charge of Downing Street communications. Iron message discipline was the party’s mantra and Campbell knew how many unhelpful, embarrassin
g stories started life in Westminster’s restaurants. So Number 10 insisted ministers should not fraternise with political journalists over lunch without telling the press office first. Campbell wanted to keep tabs on who was talking to whom. The most loyal ladder-climbers obeyed, while others found more discreet restaurants to subvert the edict.

  But the political lunch was by now becoming a drearier date. It started to become routine for ministers to turn up with their special advisers, who would stiffen the atmosphere and make sure a pair of journalists didn’t corroborate a story that wasn’t entirely true. And today the political lunch can be as demoralising as a lifeless soufflé. In the view of Peter Oborne, ‘There is no member of the current Cabinet or front bench who you could think of having a really agreeable lunch with. Not really, it’s gone. Ken Clarke was the best. He didn’t try and bore you with his latest policies.’17

  What about the view from the other side of the table? Kenneth Clarke first became a Tory MP in 1970, and was a minister in every Conservative (or Conservative-led coalition) government from 1979 until he rejoined the backbenches in July 2014. The cigar-puffing jazz-lover has had a lot of lunches, but says today’s are meaner and drier than the ones politicians used to enjoy. ‘Politicians, journalists, lawyers all drank like fish thirty or forty years ago. They were much more proficient at their jobs than today’s generation. But they had practice, they were able to do it. Today’s generation are more earnest, more abstinent. Lunches are altogether cheaper, lighter things.’18

  What are politicians thinking as they head off to meet a journalist for lunch? The former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell says the successful lunch works if there’s an exchange of information between the two sides of the Westminster village: ‘I’m thinking how much I can tell him without causing trouble at party HQ. There’s a clear understanding on these occasions that the journalist will give you some gossip you haven’t heard but in return you’re expected to provide some of the information that isn’t publicly provided.’19 Both the politician and the journalist are keen to enhance their standing in the eyes of the other, and swapping gossip proves they’re in the know.

  Cherry Soup and Slivovitz

  Several popular political lunch spots are a short walk from Parliament. Quirinale for delicate but pricey Italian; the Cinnamon Club for modern Indian set in a book-lined Victorian building that used to house Westminster Library. A more informal spot is St John’s, in the crypt below Smith Square, whilst the fanciest restaurant close by is Roux at Parliament Square. Osteria Dell’Angol opposite the Home Office feeds a few politicians too.

  To avoid being seen with their contact, journalists need to go further afield, and most have a preferred hideaway in Soho. For many years Shepherd’s on Marsham Street has been a favourite destination for Tories who enjoy its posh pie and pudding. In 2013 Labour MPs feared the loss of their most treasured restaurant, but so far the Gay Hussar in Soho’s Greek Street survives almost unchanged since it opened in 1953.

  This Hungarian relic, sitting amid the frenetic churn of Soho’s restaurant scene, has been defiantly cranking out food that has rarely been fashionable or refined. Typically, slabs of fish terrine, cherry soup or herring with sour cream to start, followed by goulash (beef, venison or veal), goose and crispy roast duck. There are schnitzels and fatty pink sausages as well as sides of cabbage and cucumber salad. Paprika makes an appearance in most of the dishes. This is belly-filling, snooze-inducing cuisine. As one enthusiast quipped, the Gay Hussar is a great restaurant so long as you don’t eat the food or drink the wine.

  But it’s not the menu that has made this a dining shrine of the left (and some intrepid Conservatives) for decades. It’s the experience of travelling back to a time of Bevanites and long political lunches. Political history is soaked into the wood-panelled dining room walls. It’s easy to imagine Harold Wilson or Michael Foot having strolled out of the cramped, cosy restaurant just before you arrive. The faded club atmosphere echoes with past political gossip and plots. Every wall, nook and cranny is covered with political cartoons, photographs and books. Tony Blair’s grin shines out over the restaurant, his autobiography squashed into a shelf. But this was never a New Labour sort of place. It’s too louche, too old-fashioned, too eccentric. Now New Labour has closed its doors while the Gay Hussar stumbles on, just.

  It was opened by Victor Sassie, its owner for thirty-four years. Victor (as regulars affectionately call the late proprietor) was actually not from Hungary but from Barrow-in-Furness. He launched the Gay Hussar after learning to cook in Budapest before the Second World War, and it soon became the Labour Party’s salon.

  Over several lunches, dinners and bottles of Hungarian wine with its most devoted patrons, I mop up its stories. Ian Aitken, the Guardian’s political editor from 1975 to 1990, recounts Victor asking regulars what they’d ordered. ‘You can’t have that,’ he’d snap, ‘that’s rubbish. That’s tourist rubbish.’ He’d then march to the kitchen and change the order. Sometimes he’d snatch away the plates of food already delivered. The restaurant ran on political gossip and Victor would trundle between the tables spreading around the stories he’d just picked up.

  It was the Bevanites (although not Nye Bevan himself) who first frequented the place in the late 1950s, and in the 1960s and 1970s it had a peerless reputation for political gossip and intrigue. The former Foreign Secretary George Brown was once thrown out for groping a woman on the next table. And in an upstairs room (still known today as the Tom Driberg Memorial Suite), the sexually voracious and eccentric Labour MP is said to have propositioned Mick Jagger while trying to entice the Rolling Stone into politics. Jagger fled.

  ‘He may have been tempted to do things for the Labour Party but he didn’t want to do things for Tom Driberg,’ sighs the Gay Hussar’s manager, John Wrobel, as he leads me around the creaky upper floors. He tells me the Gay Hussar has hosted Tory politicians as well as Labour. The ‘wets’ who were loathed by Margaret Thatcher sought refuge in the restaurant, as did the Eurosceptics famously branded ‘bastards’ by John Major. And after the 2010 election the whole Conservative Party whips’ office had dinner in an upstairs room to put their stamp on the place and rub in their victory. They haven’t been back since.

  The Gay Hussar’s glory years, the 1960s and 1970s, came to an end when journalists were relocated from Fleet Street to Canary Wharf and Wapping. The head count of hacks dropped, but it remained dear to Labour. In 1981 Tony Blair had several lunches at the Gay Hussar to discuss his search for a parliamentary seat with Tom Pendry, a Labour MP and drinking partner of Blair’s Bennite father-in-law, Tony Booth. During the New Labour years the whips’ office had its Christmas meals in a top-floor room, and a photograph on the stairs shows an angry-looking Gordon Brown leaving the restaurant with his spin chief Damian McBride at 1.30 in the morning, shortly before he became Prime Minister. It was the end of a long, tense dinner with newspaper editors upstairs. The late Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam once surprised diners by swearing and crying after peeling a chilli and then rubbing her eyes. Regulars over the years have included Barbara Castle, Neil Kinnock, Roy Hattersley and Michael Foot, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday at the Gay Hussar in 2003.

  Shirley Williams describes the establishment as a place for ‘left-wing life-lovers’. But if you look around the restaurant you observe that it is – and always has been – predominantly full of men. The crimson wall of Martin Rowson caricatures is a political rogues’ gallery of blokes. ‘The clubbishness of England is a very deep feedstock for the way politics is run and lived and I think it’s a shame. But that’s how it is,’ Williams says ruefully.20

  But it is precisely the clubbishess of the Gay Hussar that its fans relish. The Labour MP Tom Watson – known in here as Tommy ‘two dinners’ Watson – says it’s the nearest thing Labour has to the Conservative clubs of Pall Mall. ‘The aspirational classes within the Labour Party need this place,’ he laughs.21 And with the food goes the booze. After a particularly
liquid lunch, Watson once went upstairs for an afternoon nap. He was given a tablecloth as a pillow and revived with fresh mint and a glass of chilled wine. The Mirror journalist Kevin Maguire can often be found in the Gay Hussar too, and has seen many MPs stagger back to the Commons after a long lunch. He points out that there’s been very little fighting in here over the years because diners have been so inebriated: ‘They haven’t had the power to throw a punch.’22 There were wails of anguish when it seemed the Gay Hussar was poised to shut, but it’s since had a new lease of life. Tom Watson is now Labour’s Deputy Leader, and the left-wing nostalgia embodied by the restaurant is back on the party’s menu for the first time in thirty years.

  Yet the political lunch may be in permanent decline. Michael Frayn’s 1967 novel Towards the End of the Morning captured the bibulous, nicotine-fingered, expenses-fiddling world of Fleet Street journalism:

  Various members of the staff emerged from Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark hour of the morning, walked with an air of sober responsibility towards the main entrance, greeted the commissionaire and vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their friends and draw their expenses before going out again to have lunch.

  Before newspapers went online a journalist could sink a bottle or two with a politician at lunchtime, but sober up enough to bash out their story in time for the presses. That world has vanished. Now lunch is snatched between tweets. The political hack’s smartphone sits blinking on the table. There’s no escape from the day’s snowballing story. There’s fresh copy to file and new lines to chase. News moves faster than Frayn could have imagined and the deadlines are continuous. So there’s neither the time to booze at lunch nor the funds. The expenses racket that paid for the three-bottle lunch has been shut down. Most hacks and politicians have lost the habit of lunchtime drinking and sobered up. But so have pin-striped City boys and delivery van drivers. The boozy political lunch has gone the way of the footballer’s half-time cigarette. Politics and journalism are now healthier trades, if rather less colourful ones. The lobby remains dominated by men, but there is less machismo and more professionalism. Before MPs’ hours were changed by Robin Cook, they could saunter into Parliament after lunch to begin their day in the Commons at 2.30 p.m. Now their working day more closely mirrors the nation’s, and this has squeezed out the time for lunchtime boozing.