An Unexpected MP

by Jerry Hayes

  The next day, the boys thought it might be a good idea to wind him up. So, on House of Commons notepaper they drew up some mad admonishment from the Speaker for his clear contempt of Parliament which could carry the penalty of imprisonment in the Tower of London. When Mike received it he was petrified. What should he do? I explained that there was an ancient ceremony by which he could purge his contempt. So I took him back, where he expected terrible humiliation. But it was just the boys in fun mode, ready to buy him drinks and slap him on the back. That, mercifully, was the only violence that happened that day.

  Probably the weirdest experience in television is working with puppets. I used to do quite a bit for The Big Breakfast and was once asked to do a slot with Zig and Zag. I hadn’t got a clue what to do and just sauntered into the studio to see two Irishmen lying under trellises with the famous puppets on their hands. I suppose simulating a conversation with imaginary friends is something I had been well trained for.

  CHAPTER 10

  SHE

  If you think that David Cameron is deeply unpopular with some of his backbenchers, it’s as nothing compared to the visceral loathing that Margaret Thatcher suffered in her early years. As is the case with most leadership elections, the party did not elect her because they thought that she would be a fantastic success, but rather because all the other candidates were tainted with the past. Try to remember the traumas of the Heath government. He wasn’t expected to win in 1970. His victory came as a shock, particularly to Harold Wilson, who found himself with nowhere to live, virtually penniless. Heath had a horror of the same fate and allowed Wilson to stay at Chequers until he could find a home and, more importantly, he passed legislation granting a car and a pension for all former prime ministers.

  Probably the biggest disaster to befall Heath was bad luck. His heavyweight and cerebral Chancellor, Iain Macleod, died at No. 11 within a few months of taking office. He was replaced by a comparative lightweight, Tony Barber. And when a massive hike in oil prices and an explosion of greed among the trade unions began wrecking the economy, Heath made a fatal error of judgement by turning his economic policy on its head. The famous U-turn. That was the beginning of the end, with the ‘Who governs Britain?’ election blowing up in his face.

  Heath became bitter, brooding and remote, and Thatcher, a horse so dark as to be almost invisible, had the courage to stand for the leadership and win. Harold Wilson, now ensconced back in No. 10, cracked open the champagne.

  More fool him.

  But Thatcher was a pretty hopeless Leader of the Opposition. Shrill and humourless at the despatch box, out of step with her male, patrician shadow Cabinet and genuinely hated by many of her backbenchers. Those who were in the Whips’ Office at the time told me how she would seek solace with them, often in floods of tears. Even when she won the 1979 election, most backbenchers wanted her to fail. Even when the fleet sailed to liberate the Falklands, few believed there would be a fight; rather a capitulation. Many were willing her to get it wrong. God, Tory backbenchers can be a ghastly, self-centred, mutinous bunch. Things don’t change.

  According to Ferdinand Mount, who worked closely with her, even that consummate patrician gentleman Lord Carrington privately referred to her as ‘that fucking petit bourgeois woman’. Compared to that, Cameron has had it pretty easy.

  And, like most Leaders of the Opposition, she didn’t know too much about foreign policy. Jonathan Aitken, who blotted his copy book with her for dumping her daughter Carol, once said that she knew so little about the Middle East that she thought Sinai was the plural of sinus.

  But through sheer drive, determination and force of will she moulded her party and the country (although not all of it) to her very simple beliefs of thrift, hard work, sound money and aspiration. She was the very first anti-Establishment Prime Minister who had a direct line to the public. Thatcher destroyed the cosy Conservative/Labour arrangement where everybody knew their place in society and everybody trusted that the political elite knew what was best for them. She believed in the individual. The importance of aspiration. The importance of hard work and education as a way out of poverty. That any ‘place’ in society should come not through birth, but through ability. And, most important of all, that owning a home and a business was now open to everyone.

  Today, we all take that for granted. In the 1970s it was considered revolutionary, if not downright subversive.

  Sadly, Thatcher and I didn’t get on from our very first meeting. I was brought up in the days of Macmillan and Heath. Macmillan was my great hero. He was the man who coined the phrase ‘banksters’, who wanted to turn the Conservative Party into something more socially democratic, who believed in building homes for the poor. He was haunted by the horrors of the Great War, where so many young men died and he survived.

  He famously wrote to his director of policy saying, ‘The middle classes clearly want something, please jot down whatever it is on a couple of sides of notepaper and I’ll see if I can give it to them.’ Macmillan once briefed the press after a meeting with Thatcher, saying she made him feel that he had just failed in Geography. They did not get on.

  Thatcher’s real problem was that she was devoid of any sense of humour. I was at the Young Conservative conference when she laid out her stall to be leader. Her biggest applause and laughter came when she told a story about how, during a game of golf, Willie Whitelaw ‘had me at the eighteenth hole’. She hadn’t a clue why we were laughing. And that was the trouble. The Commons is a very clubbable place, but she wanted none of it. Not because she was a woman; it’s just that she never did small talk. When she lost the leadership there was a dread of standing next to her in the division lobby simply because she attempted it. And not very well. It was like Edward Scissorhands trying to make balloon animals. Some locked themselves in the loo till she had passed.

  And yet Denis was great fun. He once came down to Harlow to speak on my behalf. The first thing he did was tell my guys that he’d given security the slip but had ‘pranged’ the Cortina. ‘Anyone here got a garage?’ We sorted him out.

  He was also hoovering up the gins and noticed a local reporter taking a picture. ‘Be a good chap and bin that, will you? I’m president of a few rugby clubs and the boys would be a bit upset to see a drink in my hand.’ Utterly preposterous, of course, but the press bought it and loved it. That man had charm in buckets.

  One of the perks of being a government MP was being invited to the No. 10 summer party. The trouble was that the Lady made us queue up and shake her by the hand before we could get a drink. If she liked you, she would grasp you and hang on forever. She used to use this to great effect at funerals. On the death of some prominent Russian she grabbed Brezhnev by the hand and wouldn’t let go. She knew how to milk a photo opportunity.

  But if she didn’t like you she would give your hand a quick twist and give your shin a slight tap. She did that to me once and I ended up sprawled in front of Denis (I had had a couple of sharpeners). ‘Looks like the old girl doesn’t like you, old boy,’ he grinned.

  There was a wonderful No. 10 do when Norman Lamont (then Trade Minister) had been splashed all over the papers for shagging Olga Polizzi. The boyfriend had returned home and found Norman in the boyfriend’s monogrammed silk jimjams. As a result, Norman sported a beautiful black eye. Suddenly the word went round that he was coming up the stairs. So, just as he’d finished the handshake and got the disapproving look, a few of us were dancing behind Thatcher with one hand over an eye. I know, I know, it was very childish. But it was fun.

  I remember uncomfortable meetings with her in the early days as Leader. As a YC area chairman I would be summoned into the shadow Cabinet room for lectures. We totally disagreed on monetarism (although she was proved to be right) and in one of the newly released documents she had written by our names ‘and each one more ghastly than the other’. I think I fitted the bill rather well.

  The trouble is I always managed to say the wrong thing to her. I had just come out of Annie�
��s Bar one day when she was in full sail in one of the corridors with a flotilla of flunkeys trailing in her wake. She gave me a steely stare with those piercing blue eyes drilling into me. ‘Jerry, have you voted?’ A good time for a joke, I thought.

  ‘Well, Prime Minister, I’ve been in Annie’s all afternoon and I really can’t remember.’ If looks could kill.

  On our first meeting after the 1983 election she invited us to No. 10 for a celebration drink. As we all staggered out I was chatting to Cecil Parkinson, newly appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. It was at this point that the ghastly Mark appeared and obviously wanted to buttonhole Cecil for some deal or other. I should remind you that Mark had been in a car rally in the Sahara and had got lost. So much so that Mum had persuaded the RAF to find him. Unfortunately, they did. Anyhow, Cecil politely indicated that he would rather eat his own spleen than talk to Mark Thatcher. So he used the oldest trick in the book. ‘Mark, have you met Jerry Hayes?’ Of course he bloody hadn’t and wouldn’t want to unless I owned some floozy-infested club. So I thought this was a good time for an icebreaker. ‘Hi, Mark, did you find your way here all right?’ It did not go down well.

  One of the most unnerving experiences was walking into the Members’ dining room to discover that the middle table had chairs leaning against it in the same way that Germans placed their towels on sun loungers. This meant only one thing: Thatcher was coming in for dinner and her PPS would be trawling the corridors for blood sacrifices. I was about to make my escape when the delightful Michael Alison nabbed me. ‘How lovely to see you. Would you care to have dinner with the Prime Minister?’ What could I say? ‘No, I’d rather have a consultation with Dr Shipman after having sex with Teresa Gorman and a BSE barbecue with the Gummers’?

  God, they were grim affairs. Do you have a drink or do you sip mineral water? And if you decide to tipple, how much? Anyhow, when I could take no more of some little creep dribbling all over her, the division bell rang. Glorious relief. But this was my second parliament and I was a ‘senior’ backbencher (what a joke!), so we took a leisurely pace in these matters. This seriously irked madam. In full Lady Bracknell mode she addressed the dining room: ‘Is anybody going to vote?’ To a man and a woman we all trooped into the lobbies. Even the Labour Party.

  The first meeting at the PM’s office behind the Speaker’s chair was another nightmare. She knew how to put you at ease. ‘Whatever you do, don’t line up.’ I was talking to Giles Shaw, the Minister for Police, when our turn had come for an audience. ‘Good to see you, Giles, how are things at Environment?’

  ‘Actually, Prime Minister, I’m at the Home Office.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she hissed. And that was it.

  When she made her little speech at the end, she pointed to an alcove. ‘That’s where Marcia used to sit,’ she said with considerable distaste. She was referring to Marcia Falkender, the great friend and gatekeeper of Harold Wilson and author of the famous ‘lavender list’ of baubles for his resignation honours.

  Michael Alison once again nabbed me in the lobby one evening. ‘The Prime Minister would love you to pop in for a drink and a chat at No. 10. Seven o’clock OK?’ My heart sank. I had been particularly rebellious during the last few weeks, so this was going to be a hairdryer-meets-handbag event.

  I arrived at seven o’clock sharp and was led up the grand staircase and into the white drawing room. ‘I’m afraid the Prime Minister will be a little late. May I offer a gin and tonic?’ said the butler. How could I refuse? And it would give me time to think of a cunning strategy to weasel my way into her affections. What could I do? Aha, a little bulb glowed above my head. There was much talk about President Reagan launching a bombing attack on Tripoli and the party line was diplomacy. That’s the right message. She’ll love it.

  Eventually, she arrived and I launched myself into full oleaginous mode. ‘Prime Minister, you are so right not to allow Reagan to use our island as an aircraft carrier.’ At that she tugged at her pearls and gave me a stare. ‘The reason that I am late is that I have just given the order for the F111s to bomb Tripoli.’

  So I thought it wise to change tack. ‘Douglas [Hurd, then Home Secretary] did a great job this afternoon on relaxing the Sunday trading laws.’

  She smiled. So I warmed to my theme. ‘He even promised a free vote at third reading.’ The smile withered; her neck went red.

  ‘He did what?’ she shouted, then brought it down an octave (mustn’t be disloyal about a Cabinet minister to a little oik like me). ‘He did what?’ she purred, but was not amused, as Hurd must have taken a gamble to get the second reading through.

  Finally, I thought, I’m now so totally stuffed I might as well tell the truth.

  ‘Prime Minister, don’t you think that sometimes people perceive you as inflexible and insensitive?’ This did not go down well and she reached to press a button in the wall. What flashed through my mind was: Oh God, my chair is like Sweeney Todd’s. I’m going to be hurtled down to a pie factory in the basement.

  Actually, she was just calling the butler. ‘Mr Hayes will have one more gin and tonic and will be leaving us.’ The next ten minutes were not easy.

  So off I went to the Smoking Room for a quick drink. The mood was sombre. We all thought that the bombing of Tripoli was a disaster. Then a young sprog bounced in. He was in a terrible state. ‘I’ve just read the tapes [the Press Association news wire outside every room]. Terrible news. The Americans have just accidentally bombed the French embassy.’ An almighty cheer went up. The champagne was uncorked and a very good evening was had by all.

  To be fair, she did her best to be kind in difficult situations. One former governor of the Bank of England wrote that he could take the bollocking but being forced to eat the cream bun afterwards was more difficult.

  But back to the humour-free zone. Everyone knows about ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’. It is worth trawling back through the newsreels to see some classics. I hope they are on YouTube. During the 1979 election she pops into a hardware shop, picks up a drill and comments, ‘This is the biggest tool I have ever had in my hand.’ The camera crew cracked up. She was bemused.

  And then after the Iraq War (the first one), she sat astride an enormous field gun and asked the assembled press, ‘Do you think this will jerk me off?’

  Finally, my favourite. The Lib Dems had just changed their logo to a bird. Aha, think the speech-writers, we work in the dead parrot joke from Monty Python. Of course she had never heard of it and even when it was explained she just didn’t understand. So she read it out and got rapturous applause. She was rather impressed and a little confused. So she went up to her speech-writers and said, ‘This Monty Python, is he one of us?’

  But she could be very grumpy. It is no secret that she liked a drink, as did Denis. One evening I was on board a City of London boat with a crowd to watch her switch on the lights on a newly tarted-up Tower Bridge. One of the officials came up to me in despair.

  ‘The old girl is in a filthy mood. We’ve given her the finest champagne but she’s still spitting tacks.’ And there lay the problem.

  ‘Look, it’s after 9 p.m. She likes a glug of whisky. Call up a police launch, send them to Majestic and buy a bottle of J&B.’

  And that’s what they did, to delighted smiles.

  In another chapter I will describe the downfall. But for this one, let us end on a happy note. I last saw her when she had begun to lose the plot, a few years ago at Jeffrey Archer’s seventieth birthday party in Grantchester. It was a magnificent affair. They always are. Jeffrey and Mary are delightful and generous hosts. Most of the Cabinet were there, along with John Major. After a wonderful afternoon, Kit and the Widow came out to entertain us. Suddenly, a sheet was unrolled and we found ourselves singing an Indian takeaway menu to the tune of ‘Nessun Dorma’. It was riotous. It was fun.

  Margaret had a smile on her face. For once, I think she got the joke. I was never a great fan, but it was deeply distressing to s
ee her in her final years.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE MINERS’ STRIKE

  Margaret Thatcher was extraordinarily fortunate in her opponents. General Galtieri, the President of Argentina, who invaded the Falklands; Michael Foot, whose 1983 election manifesto was described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’; and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. If you really want to understand the appalling vanity and extraordinary lack of judgement of this man, it is well worth reading Paul Routledge’s brilliant and insightful biography. Some people say that it was Thatcher who destroyed the miners. In reality it was Scargill.

  Industrial relations destroyed the Heath and Callaghan governments. Ironically, Margaret Thatcher would probably never have come to power if Barbara Castle’s plans for the unions had come to fruition. Promoted to the Cabinet by Harold Wilson, Castle was a fiery, diminutive redhead. And a determined, forceful politician. As determined and as forceful as Thatcher. She too was a force of nature. She realised that the unions had to be tamed and democratised. So she came up with a plan. The notorious ‘In Place of Strife’.

  Harold Walker, her Minister of State at Employment, told me the real story in Annie’s Bar one day. Castle had been secretly drawing up the plans for months. Even he, as her deputy, had been deliberately kept in the dark.

  The relationship between the unions and Labour had always been fraught with difficulties. This plan must not leak or else it would be dead in the water. And never forget how closely the unions worked with Labour in those days. There were regular beer-and-sandwiches meetings in the Cabinet room. And they had a snout in the trough of every major government decision. However, most of them preferred a decent glass of wine, in the same way that Wilson smoked cigars rather than a pipe. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the age of spin began with Alastair Campbell. Walker got wind of Castle’s plans and began to challenge her. She always denied that ‘In Place of Strife’ existed. Until one day he had had enough and directly asked her about it.