An Unexpected MP

by Jerry Hayes

  CHAPTER 15

  THE FALL

  The 1987 election had secured Margaret Thatcher another large majority and she wielded absolute control over her party. Or so she thought. It is a fatal error for successful leaders to start believing their own propaganda. And when you have a 50 per cent approval rating, have routed your opponents in the party, defeated the miners and are faced by a weak and divided Labour Party there is a danger of becoming a cult figure rather than a leader. And if you surround yourself with sycophants who cocoon you in your own political la-la land and you humiliate and ignore your senior ministers it is inevitable that it will all come to a sticky end.

  I always think that that overused phrase of David Maxwell Fyfe that ‘the secret weapon of the Conservative Party is loyalty’ is as hopelessly inaccurate as it is laughable. What makes it even more risible is that he coined this phrase two weeks before he was unfairly sacrificed by Macmillan in the Night of the Long Knives.

  The secret weapon of the Conservative Party is adaptability. We will borrow or even steal policies, perhaps even dogmas, provided that they achieve the party’s default setting: power. And if any leader, however revered and feted, proves to be an obstacle to re-election they will be destroyed. The Conservative Party has always been the cannibal of the political jungle. We eat our own and we do it swiftly.

  Many commentators cast the poll tax as the beginning of the end of Thatcher. This was only contributory. Her real problems began when her political secretary, Stephen Sherbourne (now Lord Sherbourne), left her side. He was one of the few people who would politely stand up to her and tell her when she was wrong. And she would listen. Her sensible and cerebral adviser, Ferdinand Mount, tried honesty. But it cost him his job.

  Stephen would have counselled her against the worst excesses of the poll tax and might just have saved her from her arrogance and hectoring. ‘Never explain, never apologise’ wears a little thin after a while. He might also have saved her from some seriously mad advisers, in particular the odious former Communist machine gunner in the Spanish Civil War, Alfred Sherman.

  Determination and grit go a long way in politics. But if it transforms into arrogance, it is lethal. Grim as it is, a party leader has to keep the team on side, listen to the moans of senior ministers, flatter backbenchers and at least pretend to consult the party.

  By 1989, Margaret Thatcher and her worshippers believed that she would (as she said to the press) ‘go on and on’. Coupled with attending a Guildhall banquet dressed not unlike Queen Elizabeth I, then, after the birth of a grandchild, the almost royal ‘we have become a grandmother’ utterance struck a sour chord with ministers and the public.

  An alternative to the rates had always been high in the public’s mind. It is instructive to consider the origins of the poll tax (it was actually the community charge, but we stupidly allowed the name to be hijacked). At every public and party meeting there was a strong feeling that the rating system was unfair. Why should a family of five in an identical house to their pensioner neighbour pay exactly the same as her when they used five times more services?

  So there was a groundswell for change. The theory was to let the local tax be levied on the individual rather than the household, with exemptions. This was a very good and very popular idea. Sadly, in reality it gave the impression of being administered by the inmates of Bedlam. Pensioners, students and those on benefits would have discounts or total exemption. But they would have to pay first and reclaim the money. Totally crackers and a political nightmare.

  And another barmy idea was to try it out in Scotland first and, to compound the lunacy, couple it with a property revaluation. So any financial gains were immediately lost. Our sensible theory to make the system fairer now looked punitive and expensive. It was a public relations disaster. And the punters didn’t like it one little bit.

  Of course, many of the poll tax riots were manipulated by the far left. But when 18 million refused to pay the community charge and 100,000 marched on Trafalgar Square, alarm bells should have been ringing in No. 10 that this was time for a compromise. But that was not the Lady’s style. To her, compromise equalled weakness.

  In those days we used to talk about the need for consensus politics. The look that you would get from her at the C word (far more offensive than the other one) was as if you had just served a rat sandwich garnished with Arthur Scargill’s blood as a jus. So, all criticism had to be in coded language. There was nothing wrong with our policies, oh no. It’s just we need to present them more clearly and we must listen. It sounds awfully familiar. Utter bollocks, of course, but it was the best we could get away with.

  So, party chairman Ken Baker joined the 1922 executive to troop into No. 10 to tell madam what needed to be done. I’m still not sure what they talked about or even if anyone got a word in edgeways, but there was a clear crossing of wires. The delightful Ken, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, appeared on the steps saying that she was ‘in listening mode’. A day or so later when the Lady was asked in an interview about this she looked rather puzzled: ‘Is that what he said?’ Things began to get worse.

  It is worth remembering that although Nigel Lawson was one of the finest and most reforming of Chancellors, his reflationary 1988 Budget stored up a whole raft of economic difficulties. The hike in property prices made and broke the loadsamoney classes. By 1990, inflation was running at 9.7 per cent and interest rates nudging 14 per cent. Worse, the deficit was beginning to soar. With unemployment still high and the country reeling from the poll tax riots, the mood was getting very ugly on the back benches. There was much speculation of a stalking horse. Eventually, we settled for the stalking donkey, a charming old toff called Sir Anthony Meyer. He was never going to win but the idea was to encourage a real candidate later. But the No. 10 rubbish machine was cranked into action. The Sun was tipped off that the old boy had been up to naughties involving a bit of S&M with a comely black lady. He and his equally elderly wife Barbadee were ambushed by a hack one Sunday morning after attending church.

  Any truth in the rumour that you have been engaging with a lady in bondage sessions, Sir Anthony?’

  Without breaking step and still arm-in-arm with Barbadee, he replied – not quite as they were expecting.

  ‘Oh, you mean Simone? Barbadee knows all about that, dear boy. Good day.’

  The now stalking stallion obtained thirty-three votes. A clear victory for Thatcher. But the writing was on the wall. Sadly, I didn’t have the courage to abstain or vote for him. The machine would have destroyed me.

  Then something came along that catapulted me into the media: the ambulance dispute. Pay has always been hotly fought over in the public sector and in the NHS in particular. Ambulance care was very different from now and my dear old mate Ken Clarke did not help matters by suggesting that they were ‘professional drivers’. In fact (obviously), they weren’t. Ken was getting muddled with the people who dropped off the old dears to outpatients.

  But this ignited a volatile situation. These guys were clearly underpaid and undervalued. Then, by chance, I was invited onto The Time, The Place, an ITV programme which was the forerunner to Kilroy, Vanessa and now Jeremy Kyle. In those days it was hosted by John Stapleton. Needless to say, despite my support for the ambulance men’s cause I was creamed simply because I was a Tory. Two days later I was approached by two trade union leaders, Roger Poole of the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and Bob Abberley of the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE). Would I be an honest broker between them and the government to break the deadlock? Of course.

  And what a decent bunch of guys, in the old-fashioned trade union sense of not playing party politics but just trying to get the best possible deal for their members. We became good friends.

  But it was a white-knuckle ride. Extraordinarily, Clarke, through no fault of his own, had never met any of the union leaders. The Department of Health, through their own depressing incompetence, were swapping round senior executives to negotiate. Minister
s were left out of the loop.

  I was able to sort this. Well, it was hardly political brain surgery.

  The ambulance dispute was a massive political disaster. Four and a half million people signed a petition in favour of the ambulance men and according to opinion polls the majority of Conservatives supported them too. The strike lasted for months and concluded reasonably amicably in March 1990. I was trying to do a deal for a pay review body, which the Treasury was resisting. To be honest, in hindsight they had good reason to: these bodies were fair but uncertain. The Treasury is obsessed with certainty. Mostly their obsession is misdirected.

  For months I had the media camping outside my house. I did my best to give a daily briefing about how it was all going. But my favourite experience was in December 1989. I was invited on a Friday to a very boozy lunch at a Chinese restaurant near where I lived. Negotiations were at a sensitive point. But it was the Friday just before Christmas. Nothing will happen, I thought. Wrong.

  It all went a bit mad. No. 10 wanted a chat. The chairman’s office wanted to be updated and so did Clarke’s office. So I am trying to balance all of this by talking with the health unions. I wanted everyone to be in the loop.

  So, what’s the big deal, you might ask. The big deal was that I could only get a signal in the gents’ toilets. And this was before the days of mobiles, just a cordless. So trying to get a deal with the unions, Thatcher, Clarke and Baker had a rather surreal backdrop. Drunks falling around, out of their brains and swearing. Boozers throwing up. Kevin having very noisy sex in the cubicles with Kali from Accounts and, the pièce de résistance, a German oompah band playing in the background. Well, we were in Essex.

  In March, the strike was over. No pay review body, but a commitment to paramedics and a promise to treat them as true professionals. Ken Clarke deserves much of the credit for this. He is a tough old warhorse. And he got it about right.

  I am very proud of my small part in this, as my son Lawrence is a paramedic. And he reminded me of the dispute when he looked it up on the internet.

  As a decent sort, John Stapleton invited me back to The Time, The Place. After the credits rolled, John opened something like this:

  ‘Well, a few months ago you howled at Tory MP Jerry Hayes. Now he has helped broker a deal. What would you say to him now?’ he asked, with a smile that expected an orgasmic televisual ovation for me. Needless to say, they howled at me far worse than Gordon Brown under a full moon with a warm Nokia in his hand and an adviser perched precariously on the stairs.

  But there was more trouble in store for us. The economy was overheating. I used to come up on the train to London with a senior Bank of England official called Ben Gunn. This was one of those joyous times when everyone was feeling happy. I had a smile on my face and not a political care in the world.

  ‘But don’t you get it, Jerry? It will all go tits up. Too much money chasing too few goods. Classic cause of inflation.’

  All the other guys in the carriage nodded. They were all bankers.

  But nobody in government seemed to get it. It was party time.

  Interestingly, Ben had another complaint. Nobody ever accepted his cheques because his was a Bank of England cheque book. They all thought it was a scam. The man who advised government on credit just couldn’t get any himself.

  In those days the NHS was even more of a poisoned chalice than it is now. In 1990, 83 per cent believed that the Conservatives weren’t the people to trust with it. I’ve written earlier about the effect of Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech. We all knew it was the end of the Lady. The question was when.

  A few weeks later I was on a speaking engagement with Hezza. He gave me a lift back to the Commons.

  ‘Why on earth don’t you stand? Have you lost all ambition?’ I asked.

  ‘Dear boy, this has nothing to do with ambition. It is timing.’ A few days later he threw his hat in the ring.

  The Thatcher campaign was a disaster. It reeked of complacency. John Moore was ‘running’ it yet spent most of his time in the States. One day, Michael Forsyth (who has since become a big beast) sidled up to me and casually asked if I was ‘on board’.

  ‘Not on board the Titanic,’ was my reply.

  Michael just smiled. There was no way the Lady could possibly be defeated.

  Probably the biggest mistake she made was not enlisting the services of Tristan Garel-Jones. He was the über puppet master who made Mandelson and Machiavelli look like gifted amateurs. He offered help. But he was not ‘one of us’ as he was to the left of the party and a pro-European.

  He could have swung it for her. Just.

  Fleet Street understandably went into overdrive. Mike Brunson and I sat down to work out the sums with a few bottles of wine. As old hands, we ignored the number crunchers. They were all talking about left and right, wets and dries. We knew better. Those whom she had never promoted, had slighted and sacked, no matter what their views, would vote against her in droves. Party elections are based on malice and malcontent rather than dogma. Mike and I were about three votes out.

  But after her resignation and with Major in play, Hezza knew that he was doomed. He came up to me in the lobby and assumed that I was going over to the winning side.

  ‘Michael, you will not win and John Major is a friend. But I was one of those who urged you to stand. I will not be disloyal. But it is the end.’

  And I wrote to John Major saying that despite our friendship it would be a shitty thing to drop Hezza in the lurch. But wished him well.

  Oh, and if you are not convinced by now of my brilliant political judgement, you should have been a fly on the wall when, early one morning, I strode into the Commons with Sir Eldon Griffiths. He asked for my view as to what she would do.

  ‘I have no doubt that she will fight on,’ I said confidently. She resigned within the hour. At the very end I bumped into Cecil Parkinson at LBC.

  ‘Do realise what you have done?’ he asked with a pained expression. Sadly, I did.

  Margaret Thatcher had saved the country, defeated the Argentinians, democratised the unions and helped free the Soviet Union. But she was leading the Conservative Party into electoral disaster. She had to go or else Neil Kinnock would have been the next Prime Minister. But it has bitterly divided the Conservative Party. I suspect that it will take at least another ten years before her political ghost will be finally laid to rest.

  CHAPTER 16

  JOHN MAJOR

  History will treat John Major one hell of a lot better than his party did. By the time of the 1997 election the Euro-obsessive Amish wing of the Tories had put government into suspended animation, giving Norman Lamont’s bitter speech that we were ‘in office not in power’ more than a whiff of credibility. Despite the fact that the economy was booming and the deficit under control, people had bitter memories of crippling interest rates, bankruptcies and Tory MPs on the take. Couple this with the young modernising and charismatic Tony Blair and people weren’t afraid of Labour any more. Like vaginal deodorant and flares, the Tories had gone out of fashion.

  But when John Major became Prime Minister in 1990 he didn’t have an enemy in the world. Despite a few frustrating years in the Whips’ Office his rise was meteoric. From Minister of State to Foreign Secretary to Chancellor to Prime Minister in a couple of years is a remarkable achievement. And he didn’t achieve this through endless scheming, plotting and trampling over the bloodied bodies of his political rivals. He did it through ability and charm. When he first became Prime Minister he was a little star-struck.

  ‘Well, now you’re Prime Minister you can have dinner with whomever you want.’

  ‘Really? Even Joanna Lumley?’ And his wish was her command. She came, bless her.

  The trouble is that many people confused being a nice guy with being weak. Anyone who saw him in action knew that he was anything but. Challenging John Redwood to put up or shut up and having to sack his campaign manager, friend and Chancellor, Norman Lamont, were signs of enormous courage.
The sad fact was that by 1997, seven years after the fall of a now worshipped Margaret Thatcher, nobody could have led the Conservatives to victory.

  His early days were a fascinating insight into his mindset. During the leadership campaign one young MP rolled up on a Saturday morning to No. 11 (Major was Chancellor). He had brought his toddler son with him. Major could see that there was going to be trouble so he suggested that the little boy play in another room. It wasn’t long before the young MP set out his demands. He would vote for him provided that he was given a government job and a ring road round his constituency. John just smiled. ‘Thank you for your support, but I think it’s time for you to fuck off.’

  The weird thing was the right thought Major was of their persuasion. I tried to explain to Gerald Howarth (now Sir Gerald and a former Defence Minister) that his views were not much different from mine. Gerald thought that I was quite mad. The fact that Ken Livingstone had once described Major as the most enlightened Tory chairman of housing he had ever met, when they served together on Lambeth Council, should have been a bit of a clue.

  No doubt the unfortunate ‘I will be a back-seat driver’ from the Lady stiffened the sinews of the Wagnerian wing. In fact, the right thought that under his premiership there would be a glorious continuation of the mythical land of milk and honey provided by Margaret Thatcher. They were in for a bit of a shock. Although Tony Blair eventually gave us Thatcherism with a smile, Major gave it to us with a heart. Rather than plough on with the poll tax, its excesses and lunacies were ironed out.

  One of the first visitors to No. 10 was Sir George Gardiner, a cadaverous old right-winger who was one of Thatcher’s earliest supporters and guardian of the True Flame of the Blessed Blue Shrine, the 92. Actually, although we lived on different political planets, I rather liked old George, a former Express journalist. We were having dinner one evening and I let it slip that it was my fortieth birthday. Suddenly he became wistful.