The Senecans

by Peter Stothard

  ‘That was not the last time that they worked together but for a while it remained the clearest.’

  Miss R turns to a new page and draws two horizontal lines in blue.

  26.5.14

  ‘After that it was Ronnie who became my closest political “source”, the word that journalists use for the most useful of their friends. David knew less and was less reliable. Ronnie seemed to know everything and events usually confirmed what he said. In the following year, 1983, we were together in Blackpool for the fall of Cecil Parkinson, the party chairman who led her we-won-the-Falklands election campaign, a pale and flat-faced man, the kind she appreciated most and hated to lose.’

  Miss R stares into the outer office. A pencilled picture of a past TLS editor stares back at her. She blinks first and bids me to go on.

  ‘It is odd how so many of Margaret’s allies looked the same, the polished brows, cheeks that made mirrors, noses that in profile almost disappeared. Cecil was the model but I am remembering too Lord Hanson, the “asset-stripper” who helped to finance some of David Hart’s campaigns, Lord Quinton, the President of Trinity College, Oxford, who offered Roman philosophy and jokes – blurring faces now, men, always men, in whom she could see her own reflection. I am not being unkind to those men. It was Ronnie himself, who carefully shared this look, who first observed the pattern, treating himself like a casting agent, as though he were outside his own appearance, judging, deciding, noting what made Margaret feel good and what did not.’

  ‘The Times, to his great regret, was the tripwire for his “dear friend” Cecil, whose mistress, Sara Keays, gave us an “exclusive interview” about their love affair, her pregnancy and his failure to leave his wife. This was a story that most of us on The Times too would prefer to have analysed than reported. Even the journalists who were given “the scoop” were embarrassed. But there was nothing that they could to stop or even control it.’

  ‘The front page on the last Conference day was sensational. The Times was inexperienced at sensation and some of its Tory readers, an angry crowd of them harassing me on Blackpool Station, said that they would never read the paper again. What upset Ronnie most was that the revelation ruined the impact of the Conference speech. No one cared about his carefully crafted prose when there was a scandal.’

  She smiles.

  ‘In 1984 we were together again at the other seaside end of the country, in Brighton. He was the first to give me an insider’s account of the bathroom bomb in room 629 of The Grand Hotel, the blood in the rubble, the calm of “the Lady” who came so close to being killed by gelignite in clingfilm. He watched her leave in the back of a black Jaguar, “waving not driving” he said: Ronnie could not resist a literary joke in even the darkest times.’

  ‘He survived the blast himself, he said, because at the beginning of the week he had demanded a room that was closer to Margaret. It was on the back side of the corridor but he had seen the sea view quite often enough. His first thought as the ceiling crashed and he hit the staircase wall was “My God, the speech” and he collected its scattered pages on his hands and knees before joining the survivors in their deckchairs on the promenade.’

  ‘Ronnie saw politics overwhelmingly as the product of speeches. Writing for his mistress became the most important part of his life. He was jealous of her attention. He deplored rivals and knew how to make her deplore them too.’

  ‘He kept in his pocket a cutting of a sketch by Frank that described “the left-right conflict which dominates our time” as the one “between her left-wing speechwriters and her right-wing speechwriters”. It was almost a talisman. He liltingly mocked the chauffeur-delivered jokes from the novelist, Jeffrey Archer. He crumpled David’s cream-vellum couriered phrases too. It was at speech-time that I realised what Ronnie had and David most wanted, proximity to her person, and how Ronnie would never let David have it.’

  ‘When the two of us were alone together he liked to speak about politics and classics as one and the same. I told him about the sycophants’ lunch and he talked to me about Petronius. He told me about Denis Thatcher’s seventieth birthday party, a “gin and golf” affair where he sat between an unhappy Mrs Parkinson and an unhappier girlfriend of the Son, “Mark the menace” but still less of a menace in Ronnie’s view than the Daughter, whom her father called Carol Jane. Ronnie quoted lines about Trimalchio’s gold-grasping wife, Fortunata, and paused so that I could praise his powers of memory.’

  ‘A speechwriter needed to be close to his client’s family, Ronnie explained, just as Lucius Annaeus Seneca had been, the first speechwriter in the tradition in which Ronnie saw himself, a manager of Nero’s mistresses as well as one of the very first men to understand the principles of writing a speech for someone else to deliver, the science of it, the setting out of arguments that the writer would not necessarily use himself, the ranking of them in order, the grace notes for sliding from one to another, the way to memorise and deliver the words. What, why, when and how? Both he and Seneca knew why a speech had to answer those questions and how, by weighing the answers, a good speech could be distinguished from a bad one.’

  ‘Mrs Thatcher’s original voice oscillated in the range between parrot and owl. Ronnie and “one of her PR friends”, dealt with that together despite Ronnie’s belief that he could quite easily have done it alone. It was, in any case, a superficial problem. The permanent danger was that so many people hated her, particularly and most dangerously the people who said that they did not. “She used to spit out her words like my Latin teacher in Reading”, he recalled. “But when you think of the snakes that surrounded her, she should have turned them to stone. “Nero forced both Petronius and Seneca to commit suicide”, Ronnie added tartly, “although that would be quite inappropriate today”.’

  27.5.14

  Before Miss R leaves she asks if I was ever tempted from the outside into the inside of politics.

  ‘What about you?’, I counter.

  ‘My mother and grandfather were political enough for all of us’, she snaps.

  ‘Only once did temptation come’, I tell her. ‘It did not stay long.’

  ‘That moment was in 1985, the year before Wapping, when there was a move from somewhere to put me into a “Policy Unit”. The idea sounds even more absurd now than it was at the time. It would have been a bad mistake for everyone. Fortunately, the Mandarins, as Ronnie discovered, deemed me insufficient of a “team player” and “too liable to confide in others”.’

  She is almost out of the door, with her short blue jacket over her shoulders, when she asks a different question.

  ‘Did you ever meet a man called Sir John Hoskyns, Ronnie’s fellow plotter in the earliest days?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Was he really the clearest and cleverest man she had?’ She asks as though reading from instructions.

  ‘Well, he was the straightest-backed of the flat-faced men, a strategist trained in soldiery and computing. Clear? Yes. Clever? Yes. He produced a paper on how to crush the Left called Stepping Stones which even the boldest thought too bold. He was a good source to me. He trusted The Times in what was almost a family way. His wife was an artist friend of Charles Douglas-Home’s mother, the woman whom both John and CD-H called “the Queen of Norfolk”.’

  ‘Ronnie and I watched John Hoskyns as Margaret Thatcher drove him mad, as he tried to escape, as she would not let him go, as he tried to escape again and did. She accused him of wanting to hurt her cause by publicly leaving it. He thought that to be a suggestion from a tyrant. Ronnie asked if I remembered that scene where Seneca is trying to resign his offices and the mad, bad Nero refuses to let him go? I nodded. I knew it better than any scene in ancient history though Ronnie did not know that.’

  ‘I never spoke to anyone of Mr V in Walton. This was also the first time I heard a friend refer even obliquely to Margaret Thatcher’s madness. Her enemies spoke of it all the time.’

  ‘John wrote her “that cruel letter”, Ronnie whispered
. He sneaked to her room like “a ghostly apparition” and left it where she could find it by herself, alone, with no one to help her absorb the shock. A military man in a hurry, he thought she was missing so many chances, letting herself and the country down, preferring her own “intuition” to his own inexorable logic. She had never received anything like that letter before in her life’.

  Miss R moves back from the door, lays down her jacket and stops me there, just as I am about to reprise the importance of resignations, attempted resignations, failed resignations.

  ‘I already know what you are going to say’, she says.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘You’re going to tell me the story of the “slipper wheel”, the warning that the most important position is the one from which you are about to fall.’

  She says the words slowly, challenging me to contradict her.

  ‘Maybe we’ll come to the “slipper wheel”’, I reply.

  ‘So why’, she asks, shifting direction as she so often so disconcertingly does, ‘do you recall your time with Ronnie so well?’

  She moves her shoes closer together, white again today and almost side by side, edging away a pile of Seneca’s essays and letters, On Anger, On Mercy, On the Shortness of Life, On Style as a Mirror of Character.

  ‘Because, as a young reporter, I took good notes and because today I am older and leaving this office, leaving Wapping and in a mood to remember. Is that not what you want?’

  She looks out at the dirty sky.

  ‘And because Ronnie is worth remembering, worth reassessing. He took his responsibilities seriously, a seriousness that was hidden because he came to be known best of all for his jokes, his style, his elocutio as he put it. He was not a scholar. He affected a genial disdain for the professors whom he had left after his one Cambridge year. But it was dangerous ever to assume his ignorance. He once surprised a speechwriters’ party with his knowledge of a teacher at the court of Henry VIII, who translated works that he thought were by Seneca but that are not. In the 1970s he had wanted such a character for a Tudor play.’

  ‘Politics and writing were all part of the same business, he used to say. It was the business of being human. Some of his theatrical friends used to snipe at his working for “that ghastly woman”. Some of his political friends looked down on him as a showman. Their shared error was one of Ronnie’s favourite themes.’

  ‘Sometimes he took her on theatre trips, for pleasure, not instruction, the pleasure for her, most of all, of being applauded as she took her seat, a response that took him risk and trouble to arrange. Margaret the performer must never become too theatrical: actors, as Seneca knew, were not trusted to tell the truth. But neither must she neglect the artifice of the stage: if she was not noticed she was nothing. Politics was an art irreducible to logic – and Ronnie was a modest master of it, telling me many things and teaching me more.’

  Miss R turns a page in her book of roman numerals.

  June

  Stand, who so list, upon the slipper wheel,

  Of high estate; and let me here rejoice

  And use my life in quietness each dele,

  Unknown in court that hath the wanton toys

  —THOMAS WYATT after Seneca, Thyestes

  1.6.14

  It is much easier to write about Margaret Thatcher now that she is dead. This is not because last year I might have libelled her. I would never knowingly have done that. The dead cannot be libelled (that is one of the first laws that a journalist learns) but my ease in talking and writing does not come from freedom under the law. It comes because her ghost has gone too. She was a ghost even while she was still alive, someone whom journalists and politicians began to understand less and novelists rather more. It is better not to look directly at a ghost. This office is full of novels that Miss R should read, English not Latin, modern stories by Beryl Bainbridge, Philip Hensher, Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan, as well as those by Seneca and Petronius who were on the shelves first.

  2.6.14

  Miss R has not enjoyed her journey here today. I know this from the way she sighs and seizes the chair. She has come here not by car but on foot, avoiding the simplest route, varying her journey away from the clogged Highway to the path along the concrete banks of the canal. Searching for her notebook, chuntering to herself as much as to me, she complains of sweating roads, a jungle churchyard full of tropical birds, parakeets and budgerigars.

  ‘Are they escapers from a zoo, she asks, ‘or immigrants with nowhere else to go?’ This is not a good day for her white shoes.

  I know exactly where she has been and why she might feel sick. She has visited the site of the Latin lessons. She has put off till today the task of seeing the pub where Frank and I declined nouns and conjugated verbs. She has pushed open a door into the most ponderous of Hawksmoor’s churches. She has found a Bangladeshi playgroup in the gloom. She has walked the side roads where Ronnie illegally parked his car. And finally she has looked through broken windows at the place where we learnt The Usefulness of Basic Principles, where David showed off his homework and Woodrow checked on our progress and the problems of I Claudius.

  Sensibly, she did not stay there long. The roadside by The Old Rose is grassed and fetid now on even the best of days. The path down to the river will become even more disgusting until someone pulls a lever to put the canal water back. Maybe there is a leak, maybe the harbourmaster has lost his job. Whatever the cause of the drought each separate section of the Thames dock channel has suffered a separately shallow fate, the first part holding just enough cloudy river for a diamond drift of oil and leaves, the second dried and steaming, the third clear but toxic, the fourth full of floating blossom in a Petri dish of golden brown bubbles.

  I walked this way myself last week. It ought to be a way to avoid the polluted Highway. Instead, the air smelt worse – of vomit and of dead birds, visitors and natives, afloat on green slime as flat as a snooker table. As soon as the canal was behind me, even the fumes of limousines heading to Canary Wharf came as relief, even the lorries the length of small trains heading to the east coast ports.

  In 1987 The Old Rose was a haunt for drinkers, drunks and five Latin students. It is closed, planked and boarded now. it was the last survivor in what was once a string of pubs serving beer and petrol fumes, entertainments for Jack the Ripper’s victims, his tourist pursuers and the mistresses of J. M. W Turner, the “little fat painter”, as the locals knew him. Still standing, more or less, it is now the last survivor of the club that gives this book its name.

  No one should take this canal route till the water returns. Perhaps that will happen when the newspapers are gone. Sometime I have seen school parties here, groups led by anxious teachers seeking a brick-and-water classroom aid, a reminder of Britain’s sometime supremacy at sea, the decades when this channel connected dock to dock in a chain of trade that stretched almost to the coast.

  Sometimes the children are learning how to canoe.

  4.6.14

  ‘How about Lord Wyatt’, says Miss R, her mouth suddenly a thin red line of exasperation. ‘Newspaper columnist, bookmaker, diarist, wine-snob, friend of rich and Royalty.’ She is speaking as though reading. She is leaning forward. ‘There is much to say.’

  ‘You could have asked me before. The most important fact to understand is that Woodrow was a master of flattery. Visit Churchill College, Cambridge, the last resting place she chose for her papers. Look at the obsequious letters from those offering help. At the height of her power Mrs Thatcher attracted devotion of the kind that is good for no one, hymns to her virtue that eventually deafened her to all good sense. But the prime flatterer’s role – in this highly competitive field – was the one that Woodrow Wyatt held.’

  She scribbles in her book.

  ‘He didn’t hide it. He flaunted it. He used to boast how he telephoned to “cheer her up”, to tell her facts of her success that were “hidden from her by ministers”, to pronounce upon her natural virtues, to accept her
gratitude for his laudatory columns, to say how good her own newspaper articles had been, articles that she had sometimes never even seen before Woodrow praised them.’

  Woodrow Wyatt

  ‘Didn’t David and Ronnie do the same?’

  ‘David never came close enough to compete. Ronnie was a ruthless critic of Margaret by comparison with Woodrow’s Voice of Reason. Look in her archives for yourself. The longer that she remained in Downing Street the more dependent on nonsense she became.’

  Miss R signals for me to stop. ‘Go back a bit’, she says. ‘Start at the beginning, always at the beginning.’

  I’m going to make us both more comfortable. I point to a small padded sofa by the door, too old for the new offices, about to be abandoned in the move. I should help her but she does not wait to be helped. It is light enough for her to grasp it with one hand, a surprisingly strong right hand, to drag it across the paper stepping stones. She draws her arm across the view as though she were pulling aside a curtain. For the first time we sit down together, looking together down the cobbled road.

  ‘Woodrow and I were never close’, I begin – in preemptive defence of my failing to help her with whatever history faculty question she is working to answer.

  ‘You say you are interested in David Hart, Ronnie Millar, Frank Johnson and Woodrow Wyatt? Well, Woodrow and I spent the least time together of all the four men on your list. He was the most difficult. When he was alive we shouted at each other as much as we spoke.’

  From the new comfort of the sofa I point out some of the places where we used to shout, the collapsing upper floors, the barricaded doorways, the mangy plots of lawn behind the gates.

  ‘That was then and this is now’, she says, moving away from me along the seat where there is little room to move. ‘My job is just to find part of the picture. There are people working on this all over the place.’