‘Frank loved novelty as long as it was old. The giving of benefits explained so much. Thatcher is hopeless at giving – honours, houses, anything’, he said. “She never wants anything for herself and thinks that that makes meanness alright. No wonder even her friends are beginning to hate her”.’
‘“I sensed that problem right at the start”, he said in a rare act of boasting. “At first I thought it good that MPs cheered her because they agreed with her, rather than in the hope of distant knighthoods or peerages. Now I am not so sure”.’
‘This was our first political conversation that did not concern such now neglected topics as Michael Heseltine, numbered money supply targets, nuclear MIRVs and the reform of the Rates. It was about how giving and receiving were arts in Seneca’s time, lending too, and that it was a dangerous mistake, in Seneca’s view, to look for loyalty or gratitude from a gift or loan, certainly not immediately, directly or from every act, and that the powerful, especially the very powerful, should give as though the act of giving were the virtue itself.’
‘A long pause followed this first extract from the age of Nero, a silence broken only by the sound of a single glass settling on beer-sodden crisps. Frank nodded in agreement. He even made a note in his little pocket book. He then asked me sharply why, if this were so, I behaved as though it were not so.’
‘Because his second point was about journalism, a directly related problem, in his view. There were two kinds of journalists, he went on. And lest I was in any doubt, I was the wrong sort and he was the right sort.’
‘I might be a deputy editor and leader writer now: but fundamentally I was the kind of journalist who, when I saw politicians saw backhanders and backscratchers, and when I spotted the smallest exchange of benefits smelt a corrupt deal, a cover-up, a crime – or a story of a crime. In spirit I had never left the Sunday Times where I began. He, on the other hand, studied why people acted not what they did, ideals as virtues in themselves, intentions more than outcomes, the good above the true, the links that bound the world of politics together, without which there would be nowhere for me to dig for dirt, nothing political at all.’
‘We talked about Latin for two hours. It did not take many Latin sessions for Frank to be sure that he and Seneca and Margaret (never mind about me) were made for one another.’
21.7.14
Miss R turns a new page in her SENECA notepad. She also has a red-and-black-squared calendar for 1987 on her knee and a slim edition of ‘On Gifts’ in English from an American university.
‘How much gratitude should parents expect for gifts to their children?’
It is like a test. She stops before I can give Seneca’s best reply. She points to her list of dates and names, all of them still from the 1987 election. ‘What was all that about heaven, or not heaven? Who was young? Go back to The Old Rose. Go slowly.’
‘Fine. I will. Concentrate. We will be talking about forgotten politicians.’
‘When Ronnie arrived and sang out to the bar that “it was not very heaven to be David Young”, he was referring to a court favourite of the time, a tall telecommunications tycoon, one of the flat-faced men, then famous for his reputation as “the man who brought Mrs Thatcher solutions” when other ministers “brought her only problems”.’
Miss R makes two vertical lines to form what could be a chart.
‘Young’s unheavenly battle at this time was with the party chairman, Norman Tebbit, nominally in charge of the election campaign, still blasted by pain from the IRA attack on the Tory conference hotel in 1984, bitter in personality and appearance, and considered by Young to be Margaret’s current biggest problem.’
‘There were writers fighting on all Tory sides. Tebbit had a novelist assistant called Michael Dobbs who later became Baron Dobbs of Wylye. “Why lie?’ by name; Why not lie?” That was David Hart’s response when he heard the news of the honour he would have loved for himself. Dobbs had the doctorate in nuclear deterrence strategy that David did not, and his enviable bestsellers starred a machinating minister, Francis Urquhart, (“you might very well think that: I couldn’t possibly comment”) whose plots owed much to the Tory politics of his time. Dobbs was another survivor of the Brighton bomb and Ronnie deemed him a dangerous opponent for anyone.’
‘The party’s most successful writer was Jeffrey Archer, later Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare but at this time no longer even Conservative Deputy Chairman because of an imminent libel case about a prostitute at a railway station. He was still available to the Tebbit side and on offer to the Young side or to any other that would have him. I remember how Frank always defended Archer to me, suspecting that I had some kind of jealousy towards him, while invariably abusing him to anyone else.’
‘Young, said Ronnie, complained of every day walking on eggshells, watching his ankles for wild animals. The draft Election Manifesto had three different covers from which Margaret Thatcher had to choose, each with supporters for whom variations in cream and blue card were versions of holy writ.’
‘A core reason for the election date, which few agreed was the right election date, was the fear that, with further delay, the would-be-winning team would have turned its razors on itself. Already there were stories of one man’s cocaine habit and another’s sexual appetite for boys, each charge delivered, and duly tagged, to any journalist who might believe it.’
‘Young had his own team of writer-plotters, Ronnie himself, who was a help, and David Hart, who mostly was not. David’s newest interest at this time (and his newest was always his greatest) was in a new party, its symbol a splayed capital M like a gull in flight, which could take over the Conservatives from within. Its shock troops were to be Conservative students with a penchant for rough stuff at meetings; and some mothers from the outer London borough of Haringey (not a place that David had ever been to) who disapproved of gay rights.’
‘As we sat at the back of The Old Rose, Ronnie was just about to give his latest report, about to count the Tory Party casualty figures, when Frank motioned that he should stop and began reading loudly in Latin.
‘Nec facile dixerim, utrum turpius sit
His style was to stretch all the vowels like a headmaster acting the role of priest,
infitiari an repetere beneficium; id enim huius crediti est, ex quo
making it clear that he could go on forever if necessary,
tantum recipiendum sit, quantum ultro refertur. Decoquere vero
and that we had no choice but to listen.
And then he began the same lines again.’
‘These were words that he had not studied before and did not understand. This was Frank’s test. He was challenging Ronnie to keep up with Seneca’s syntax, anything, it seemed, to stop the stories of electoral strife. Ronnie stopped and stared at Frank as though at a mad man.’
‘There were secrets, Frank said in explanation, that should not be revealed in front of journalists, even friendly journalists, indeed especially friendly ones like me because they were often the most dangerous of all. I sometimes wore a red tie, as David Young had been heard to remark, suggesting that red allegiances were not far away. I was sometimes heard to praise Michael Heseltine. I was severely prone to the “error Heseltinensis”.’
‘This tactic achieved its end. A Latin lesson might stimulate political discussion. It could also close one down. Frank was beginning to sound like Seneca himself, spraying dark aphorisms of anxiety behind columns of purple.’
22.7.14
Miss R and I begin easily now where we stopped last time. She is back in her power jacket. She is writing detailed notes as well as checking her recorder. She is in the middle of a story that she wants to hear.
‘A week later, after a week of rage within the Tory camp, David came too to our retreat. I hadn’t invited him. I thought that he would prefer his splayed letter M party to our own. Frank would certainly never have invited him to our lesson. Surprise appearance was David’s usual way. The man who looked like Lord Lucan often d
isappeared like him.’
‘David was an especially disappointed courtier at this time, a man behind the political curtains who feared that he would be stuck there. He yearned for the recognition to which a trusted adviser was due. He saw a world of important meetings happening elsewhere and in his absence. He would have loved to spend time in those offices of Wapping that are now empty air and black holes. He would have loved an open welcome in Downing Street. He was never encouraged to come to either place.’
‘So he came to The Old Rose – in shorts, sweatshirt, crossgarters and with a bodyguard who shared both his helicopter and his armoured car. He noted the same woman and man who had first greeted Ronnie, the regular guardians of the Highway doors. He commented loudly, as Ronnie had not, that their tarmac and concrete hairstyles well suited the road outside. This pub, he complained, was virtually a part of the road. Except when he was reporting on “real Britain” for “the Lady”, anything as real as The Old Rose offered David few charms.’
‘His first topic was the allegation that the wealthy shire Tory, Peter Morrison, Margaret’s confidant, senior party aide and critic of homosexual law reform, had a police-recorded penchant for the buggery of boys. Woodrow said that the man was “useless” to Margaret anyway. Frank, freshly imbued with the example of Seneca, wanted to discuss whether hypocrisy (though not the sex with boys) was quite as bad as we liked to think.’
‘David’s main message to us was that he had been doing some “tags” and that he knew where some of this “muck” was coming from. Frank told him that in The Old Rose we had Stoicism and the fourth declension on our minds. This in no way dimmed David’s desire to tell us what he had exposed. As soon as he had acquired a drink (which took him rather longer than it took Ronnie), there was no option but to listen.’
‘I already knew about these tagging tricks. David had boasted of them before. No good ever came from them. During the Miners’ strike he had arranged for an untrue “exclusive” about the Chairman of the Coal Board to be passed to a suspect reporter; and he had delightedly read the story the next day in reports by that man and his fellow-traveling friends.’
‘During the Falklands War he had invented a weakness in the Task Force defence and “fed it”, in the jargon of journalism, to a hostile critic. The recipient of the fabrication had been too smart to use it himself but had passed it on to several left-thinking colleagues who were not so squeamish and one whom David was most surprised and pleased to identify.’
‘This sort of behaviour gave David the keenest pleasure. It was better than sex, he said. He pretended to use it primarily for his British Briefing, a photocopied monthly list of secret subversives in responsible places, particularly in newspapers and the BBC. He knew how unreliable the method was and how, for journalists of every political persuasion and none, there were stories that were simply too good not to use if others were using them. He just couldn’t help himself.’
‘Tagging gave him thrills, the closest thing, he used to say to screwing a tight culo. David used to speak often of fornication, one of his favourite words, but this was a strong simile even for him. That was how important ‘tagging’ was.’
It is also strong language for Miss R who, when I repeat it, grimaces as though to a swearing child. ‘Normally he restricted himself to talking about his pleasures through his collection of I Modi, those tastefully classicised positions in which the culo and potta belonged to an Ariadne or Venus or Messalina.’
Miss R again gives her ‘where are we going now?’ look.
I apologise. ‘There will no more references to sex in this story if it continues on its current course.’
She now looks disappointed.
‘So, just for the purposes of completion, Ronnie was not a very sexual man. He was widely believed to be a ‘closet queen’ (to use the language of that time) and only the occasional ‘Downing Street garden girl’ (80s language again) contested that this was the truth.’
‘And Lord Wyatt?’
‘Woodrow was a veteran connoisseur of the female form, as his published diaries show, but the only yearning he ever suggested to the editor of his columns was for the novelist Beryl Bainbridge. Perhaps he thought it the only one that would interest me.’
‘Frank Johnson?’
My level of intimacy with Frank was lower still. He was handsome and admired by numerous beautiful women, justly proud of his hair and later married to an elegant Scottish aristocrat. Sexually for the Senecans, that is the sum of things.’
‘No new lines of inquiry will be necessary in this area’, says Miss R in a rare attempt at humour. She sounds like a probation officer.
‘Back in 1987 in our Latin corner of The Old Rose David was still attempting to engage us with his latest tag-data. He had incriminated a distinguished journalist for passing scandal about one of David Young’s alternative election team. Frank covered his ears. He refused to listen. He was being purist and Frank “did purist” very well. Unless David was going to talk about Seneca, he did not want to hear from him.’
‘David was not to be so easily discouraged. If Seneca was the price of entry to our party he was well prepared to pay it, much better prepared for a Latin lesson than any of us expected him to be.’
‘From his country house in Suffolk he employed many savants in disciplines that he might sometimes need. There was an anti-Darwinian ornithologist, a theorist of watercolours, some varyingly disciplined relics of the CIA, an Egyptologist who believed in pyramids built by visitors from space. He fed them all fine wines and chocolate squares and they fed him cues for his erudition or his jokes. He knew of the new Latin enthusiasm at Wapping and from one or other of these men he had already begun his studies.’
‘So David sat back smugly in the best Old Rose chair, the only one with arms. He began talking as though from a script, an actor confident in his lines. He was always ready, he said, to sniff the ancient air, to hope to absorb learning as perfume was absorbed in a shop, as Seneca himself once said.’
‘Frank began to snigger but, when we looked longer at each other, we could not stop showing that we were impressed. David had assimilated some Senecan axioms that suited him well. If we wanted to talk Latin when we ought to be talking elections, he was happy to join us, to check that he had understand each ancient point properly so far.’
‘First: was it really true that vast wealth was no bar to virtue, that Seneca saw money as of only secondary importance? He very much hoped it was. He had had no idea that Thatcherism was born so early.’
‘Second: was it true that poverty did not matter either, that some people were always going to be poor, that virtue and poverty sat easily together. In his view, (and might Seneca have agreed?), no British voters in 1987 were truly, materially poor. Some were grateful for their benefits but many were not.’
‘Third: Seneca did not have to deal with the bloated modern welfare system. What Margaret Thatcher’s voters lacked was not money but soul, nothing physical but something spiritual, ideals to aim for, to miss, as ideals were always missed, but to aim for again and again.
David had already written a pamphlet on this theme, The Soul Politic, one for which, he believed, he had himself benefited much less than he deserved.’
‘Hypocrisy, he went on, challenging us to stop him as we usually did, was a charge too readily hurled at Seneca. And anyway was hypocrisy much of a crime? David Hart was rich and others were not. Britons were good Stoics, not obsessed by economic advance. Nor did they care about what journalists called “double-standards” but most saw merely as ordinary life. Frank nodded his agreement at this, silently suggesting that, if a true Senecan myself, I should abandon my investigation of Tory election troubles and get back on the path of helping the election to be won.’
‘Just as Ronnie had begun to agree with Frank, more loudly than usual, “readying myself in the wings” as he used to say, David’s driver burst through to the back of the bar and said that “the best friend” wanted him immediately on the c
ar-phone. With expanding smugness David smiled and, without having discussed in any detail what his tagging might do for his “best friend”, or any other friend, returned to his Mercedes.’
‘Frank and I looked at each other again, even more ruefully than ten minutes before. We had not learnt what we had planned to learn; we were behind in our grammar book; and we had heard a set of Senecan questions that hardly disgraced the unruly questioner whom intellectually we liked to look down on.’
‘It was always easy to underestimate David. He studied as though in an anthology or dictionary. But in tiny shards he studied with care. He cited Seneca against giving universal benefits, against giving indiscriminately to the undeserving. I listened to him despite myself. Margaret Thatcher too, his “best friend” also listened to David Hart despite herself – and also despite dozens of others saying that she should not.’
‘She was said to like his flamboyant militarism. Maybe she did. If she chose her funeral service herself like the characters on that Greenwich stage on the night I first saw her, she shared a self-image with the most bellicose men of Rome.’
‘David was always keen to be seen as an army man. Like Seneca, David saw life as a war even though he had never fought in a war. He used to apologise to her for his artistic and philosophical temperament but say that art and philosophy was what her warrior’s character needed most.’
‘He affected to despise the merely material. He wrote plays about ancient religions and played the thinker himself. He believed in the power of an idea to change a voter’s mind, a belief that surprisingly few politicians hold. He talked much of democracy even though he was not much of a democrat.’
‘In David’s absence, as though to avoid commenting on what he had said, Frank and Ronnie began a discussion about how rich Seneca had really been. The richest great writer who had ever lived, said Ronnie. Richer than Tolstoy?, Frank countered sceptically.’
The Senecans Page 13