The Senecans

by Peter Stothard

  ‘The Gerald Grosvenor of his day, said Ronnie, a Roman Duke of Westminster owning huge areas of the city centre, Italian estates and a retreat in Egypt; and the Rothschild of his day too, lending across the known world, furnishing mansions with his famed collection of ivory-and-lemon-wood tables. “So yes, richer than Tolstoy”.’

  ‘No, as Frank saw it, Seneca was not really rich. In the most vicious autocracies, with no power beyond the palace, no one ever owned anything. The Emperor could always take away what he allowed a man to win. That was surely why wealth was secondary in Seneca’s philosophy. It was always about to be lost. If a man was lucky he might be allowed to retire and keep a part of what he had but many were not lucky. I pushed my chair back against the wall.’

  ‘So, no happiness under a Labour government, Frank added, anxious that we had made our lunch unnecessarily dark. Unless Margaret gets a grip that is exactly what we will have, said Ronnie. Nil desperandum, said Frank, applying his new knowledge of the Latin gerund as David returned from his carphone and spat his Old Rose wine back into its glass.’

  ‘There was briefly a sense of anticipation, the hope for fresh “news from the front”, the latest instalment in the Tory plotting that so consumed us all. But David had no news. He was even more morose and wanted to talk only about himself. Because we were expecting better, we listened longer than otherwise we would have done.’

  ‘He was frustrated, he said. He wanted his benefit. He had earned his due. When Margaret Thatcher was at her most depressed, he had given her hope. She had become cut off from what he always called “the street”, those who had first put her in power, the people who she needed to keep her in power, the young who lived beyond the influence of the media, the men and women who sought moral leadership.’

  ‘He imagined a source of power – and, like a sorcerer, had told her that he was the link to it. To help prepare her for a trip to India he had cited a Tantric Swami who was guiding the Thatcher spirit from the Ganges. She had thanked him; he had made her laugh, or so he said.’

  ‘But in 1987 it was two years since David Hart had been at the height of his influence in Tory politics. He genuinely did dominate the defeat of the Miners’ strike, by being the first to define it. He took his literary alias and, as David Lawrence, tramped the streets of mining towns. He claimed direct connection to hidden realities. He enraged the conventional. He used his own money, his own lawyers, even his own helicopter.’

  ‘By the summer of her last election, in his shorts in the back of a Wapping pub, he was merely wanting to write a book about his role, at least to write a book that would place himself in what he saw as his own story. Margaret said that this would “break our understanding”. Ideally he wanted to be powerful again but he should surely get the honours that he felt he had waited for long enough. Surely Seneca, who urged against expecting rewards directly for good service, did not see reward as never coming at all?’

  23.7.14

  Miss R is becoming accustomed to my office furniture. She no longer sees books and boxes as obstacles, more as stepping stones. She stumbles, catches her low, blue heel in a red ribbon and splashes letters in pale brown ink across the floor. Her next question is brisk.

  ‘Did the Senecans meet again before election day?’

  She straightens her skirt and leans against a bookcase, one that is emptier than when she first arrived but still solid by the shifting standards of this room.

  ‘Yes, we did, about three weeks later. This time there was only one topic of conversation. This was the first day for the words “Wobbly Thursday”, June 4th, the day that the opinion polls showed the wrong opinions, when the Tory leadership thought that they might lose the election and began their most serious bout of tearing each other apart.’

  ‘Not even Frank wanted Latin lessons while this was the show on the other side of town. The Senecans were loosely distributed among all the warring factions whose very slightly different remedies were under vicious debate. Ronnie and the “no heaven to be Young” team were demanding a more central role for the Prime Minister and a more positive defence of her achievements. David argued that by seeming to reject retirement, telling a questioner that she wanted to “go on and on”, she deserved still greater obscurity. The party establishment view, with Norman Tebbit in the lead and the Senecan support of Frank, argued for a more aggressive approach to the Labour alternative.’

  ‘It all sounds ridiculous now, a set of “so what” details. But, like so many stories, like most of what goes into newspapers, it was the most serious of matters at the time. David Young himself telephoned to complain that our reporters were too kind to Labour. Ronnie complained that the TV cameras were too kind to Labour. Geoffrey “G” Tucker rang to say that Norman Tebbit was finished and Michael ‘House of Cards’ Dobbs too. He rang back ten minutes later with details of exactly which rooms in Downing Street were secretly occupied by his anti-Tebbit advertising agency clients and how the Prince of Wales now wanted their services for himself.’

  ‘Woodrow tried to remain above the fray, boasting of his direct line to Margaret who always “takes my calls”. He promised her that he was writing weekly in The Times instead of every fortnight so that he could “keep the muddled egg-heads in order”, me prominent among them, as well as “the masses” in the News of the World.’

  ‘Every time that something appeared in The Times to upset her he said that I would lose my place on the “slipper wheel”. If the Tories did lose the election, I would definitely lose my job and deserve to. He described Young and Tebbit as “partners in panic”, the first as “distant and weak”, the second as “confused and hopeless”. He wanted more emphasis on tax cuts to feed the voters’ greed. Wealth and the fear of losing it was what moved votes, whatever the nonsense about virtue that Frank Johnson had picked up in The Old Rose.’

  ‘Woodrow also wanted much more Margaret on show even if she was That Bloody Woman to the pollsters. Woodrow, like David, enjoyed citing his close hold on public opinion, based in his case on the word from far-flung race courses which he ruled as Chairman of Britain’s state-owned bookmaker. The further he travelled from the Thatcher court the more that he found the people fearing and respecting her. And let them bloody fear her, as long as they voted for her, he snarled, quoting the Emperor Caligula and, as if to fit in with the Latin lessons, attributing the line to Nero.’

  ‘Beneath this battling at the top was an underworld of businessmen seeking their own benefit from victory if it came. To Frank’s especial dismay (he despised commercialism in all its non-theoretical forms) there were two advertising agencies in this war, the incumbent holder of the party accounts, who had for eight years profited mightily from that position, and a rival, represented by Genial “G” Tucker, who wanted the same benefits for itself. So now, Mr G, leftist Tory and sometime champion of the Chinese food table, was a secret solicitor for an insurgent challenger backed by the farthest of the Tory Right.’

  Norman Tebbit (right) with David Young (centre)

  ‘Woodrow deplored “the Whitehall farce” in which one set of advisers hid in prime ministerial bedrooms to avoid being seen by another. He mocked the pathetic competition among ministers to appear in Party Political Broadcasts and to stop their enemies appearing. He attacked Ronnie, Frank and me for confusing the issues – and David most of all, for being “a fucking nuisance”.’

  ‘David was not part of any team. Snubbed by the Young faction (or so he thought), seeing Tebbit as barely more than a butler and Margaret as betrayed by everyone bar himself, he was planning a £200,000 campaign of his own, financed by himself and a few friends. He sat out the campaign in Belgravian and Suffolk exile, producing barely legal advertisements of sycophancy and abuse, lobbying for reduced rates in the newspapers to unleash them on the electorate.’

  ‘On Wobbly Thursday itself Tebbit and Young came to blows, or close to blows, the closeness of their fists depending on whose account was later believed. With seven days to go to the poll it
self, their supporters gathered eagerly behind them. There was grasping of lapels and the rattle of abuse. Share prices fell – and maybe were pushed. Profit made the strongest alliances.’

  ‘In Ronnie’s account there was rage like he had never seen in his political life, a destructive demonstration of the claim that ‘no plague has been more costly than anger to the human race’. He spoke these words in his sing-song quoting voice. Frank sneered and David sniggered before they realised that Ronnie was in theatrical-philosophical mode. This was still formally a Latin lesson. Seneca, he reminded us, had been very sound on anger, arguing that all rage was an affront to reason and that political ideas were as nothing to rage in brutal force.’

  ‘Even Frank, normally the purist in protecting the original purpose of our meetings, said that this was Seneca to excess. Our ancient mentor always put practice first and theory in its service. Could we please return to the anger among the Tories. Exactly who did what to whom? Why did anyone believe any of them?’

  ‘All sides, said Ronnie undeterred, had identified groups of voters that their opponents could not reach. ‘Our side has the “belongers”, he proclaimed as though this were some extraordinary discovery. For the duration of the campaign, he lost his dramatist’s irony altogether. Frank replaced his abandoned sneer with another fresher version of the same.’

  ‘The “belongers”?’, says Miss R.

  ‘Yes, the “belongers”. These were not little people from a story for children, not “the Borrowers”, indeed often not borrowers of money at all but “quiet Conservatives” who prized their positions in life and their privacy, kept themselves to themselves and hated Norman Tebbit as “the coldest man of the age”. There were temperature charts of names and chilliness-ratings to prove this point, said Ronnie in his own purposefully matching chill voice: “We need to win them back or Labour will win and where will any of us be then?”.’

  ‘“Still here”, said Frank, consulting his Swatch watch, the only kind he ever wore, smoothing his Marks & Spencer suit, ditto, sipping at his Fanta as though it were Puligny-Montrachet and studying his book of verbs.’

  ‘Immediately before Ronnie arrived with his news, Frank and I had been planning to move on from our verbs to some real Latin, a sentence or two at a time of Seneca on some appropriate topic. Possibly De Ira, Seneca’s youthful denunciation of anger designed to shame the Emperor Claudius. We had the full text, if we wanted it, in its fresh, unread-for-forty years Times Library edition.’

  ‘We also had Seneca on the ethics of buying white shoes’, I add, worried that I might be losing Miss R’s attention. ‘Should a virtuous man pay for white shoes if the shoemaker has died?’

  ‘Obviously not’, she says.

  ‘Or we could read more from other parts of De Beneficiis, some further discussion of gratitude for gifts.’

  ‘But, instead of reading any of these, we had to listen to Ronnie’s description of the Tebbit dining room at Tory Central Office where the serving women, trusted secretaries from the Chairman’s outer office, wore pinafores inscribed in italic red with the words “Norman’s Nosherie”.’

  ‘If only those Guardian writers who call us “cut off from ordinary people” had the slightest idea’, said the Prime Minister’s speechwriter, ordering some nacho chips from the barman whom he had adopted on his first visit. ‘You must promise me that none of this will be in The Times until the election is over’. I promised that I would not write a word till then and, after a few feeble attempts on deep-yellow salted corn, he left.’

  ‘Once Ronnie had gone, Frank decided to postpone our Senecan studies a little longer. As a reporter, I was pleased by what Ronnie had revealed. Wobbly Thursday, the day the Thatcher dream nearly died: this was a Times story, even if I had to wait till the last vote was counted before writing it.’

  ‘Frank was concerned that I should be even thinking of publishing any of Ronnie’s story, even when the election had been won, as it was surely going to be, despite the madness of the campaigners, indeed because of the madness, since, if there were really a chance of the Tories losing, everyone would surely be behaving better.’

  ‘That was the way in which Frank liked to think, with a studied realism which, with good intent, could be made real. Publication of “dirty Tory washing” would not be right at any time unapproved by him. It was not what he thought we should be doing. He agreed with Woodrow that our leaders in The Times, almost always my own leaders in The Times, were insufficiently supportive of “the greatest British leader since Churchill”.’

  25.7.14

  ‘The ‘Wobbly Thursday’ Tory scare, like so many election scares in every campaign, was more a safety-valve than a signal. On the Saturday after polling day Ronnie was sitting at the Trooping of the Colour beside the safely re-elected Prime Minister, she herself sitting on a House of Commons majority of more than a hundred and a gilt wooden seat that was not quite so comfortable.’

  ‘He would have felt more comfortable himself, he told me, if The Times that morning had not published a lengthy account of Downing Street rages, nerves and wobbles. It had all been “a lot of nothing”, he complained. I had quite spoilt his conversation with the ambassador of an African country whose name he forgot.’

  ‘Thankfully, Margaret had not seemed to mind, taking a certain satisfaction from the sight of the Queen for the first time processing beside the Scots Guards in a carriage rather than on horseback. Age was catching up on some. Others could go “on and on”.’

  26.7.14

  ‘Margaret Thatcher won the election but, in truth, she lost it. Her body might “go on and on”, or until someone pushed it out of the door, but the spirit was past. That was David’s ever clearer view, delivered some eighty miles northeast of Wapping, as he stretched out on an August afternoon in the garden of a house that, as he much liked to boast, was once home to a Gunpowder Plotter.’

  ‘Coldham Hall was a large red house at the centre of David’s deep green Suffolk estate. He and his friends were often franker there than they felt safe to be in London. At Coldham they could plot without codes. What better place to plan a coup, he laughed as I sat on the sloping grass, looking about at his guests and challenging me not to laugh back.’

  ‘I hope that I laughed both at him and with him. I don’t properly remember. I do remember the cast of regular other visitors, bird-painters, unemployable biologists, soldiers from small countries, businessmen in businesses from aircraft to high fashion, a pack that was constantly reshuffled but never changing very much.’

  ‘A coup?’, queries Miss R. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, in their jokes and maybe in their dreams.’

  ‘Coldham’s best known previous plotting owner was Ambrose Rookwood, a leading Catholic enemy of James I, disappointed in his country’s choice of despot and hopeful of faring better under a replacement. “Uncle Ambrose” was a man of principle in David’s minority view, a man more generally deemed deserving to be hanged-drawn-and-quartered, as indeed he was, no mercy shown, just as none had been shown to Guy Fawkes.’

  ‘David saw himself as a worthy successor to this “uncle” and his own reputation as similarly divided and traduced. He raised a toast to “owners past” every Fifth of November.’

  Miss R gives a tight smile.

  ‘David loved his house. His personal improvement to the Plotter’s legacy was a “Garden of Eastern Peace”, a circle of seats and Buddhist statues, all set at a sympathetic distance from where he landed his helicopter. This suited the prophetic and philosophical part of his nature which, he said, was too often misunderstood.’

  ‘His main prediction that day was that Margaret, for all her magnificence, would be gone within a year. Ronnie, sitting uncomfortably among minor masters of tranquillity, disagreed, angrily by his own peaceful standards. Grass, he said, always made him angrier than he would ever be in the Haymarket or The Old Rose. The two men would soon have sorely tested the local gods had there not been two others present who disagreed with ea
ch other more.’

  ‘Why were you there yourself?’ Miss R regularly interrupts any line of answering that she fears might fail to interest her. She is as constant in this as in asking ‘when was the first time?’ Sometimes I think her rude, sometimes as failing to recognise her own story, sometimes as pursuing a different story, one that I do not know.

  ‘There was good company. Ronnie was my best source of information on the Thatcher court’, I reply.

  ‘I know that already and this was not Ronnie’s house.’

  ‘Ronnie said that he would only go to Coldham Hall if I did. By being close to Ronnie there were so many duller people to whom I did not need to be close. David was useful in the same way, less useful but again never dull.’

  ‘I knew other Tory politicians too, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine who never became Tory leader, Michael Howard, who did, Norman Lamont, Woodrow’s great friend: that is just to remember a few who haven’t disappeared from history entirely. Don’t think I spent all my time with the Senecans and their kind.’

  ‘Were there really others of the same kind as the Senecans?’ She does not seem to believe me. ‘Why was everyone else there that day?’

  ‘We were supposed to be talking about foreign policy’, I tell her. ‘Only when an election is safely over does anyone want to talk about places other than here. David always liked to have his own foreign policy.’

  ‘That afternoon, two of his friends were in the Peace circle, Edward Teller, an elderly American known as “Father of the H-bomb” was arguing with Vladimir Bukovsky, a former guest of the Soviet Gulag, about the best way to deal with Mikhail Gorbachev.’

  ‘Saying what?’ She puts her notebook down.

  ‘Do you really want to know? Teller talked about the “nationalist Russian adversary whose nature was manageable by tough, traditional diplomacy”. Bukovsky preferred “helpless leader of an alien inhuman state”. Teller wanted “Reagan to be Reagan”. Bukovsky wanted desertion from Soviet armies and the arming of their Islamic enemies. That was the basis of it.’