‘He never wavered from his position that the Thatcher era was over. Ronnie and he still disagreed, merely agreeing to differ more quietly.’
‘There had been “eight good years”, David said, and the rest of her time would be only wreckage. He began to live more in the country and less in town. He was already looking to the future after his “best friend” had gone.’
‘But look at his books if you like. In Come To The Edge the owner of a great English house plots the founding of a Great England political party. The Conservatives are deeply infiltrated by Socialists. The landed and the landless are set to rise up against the mercenary middle class. In his fiction sat the seed of what he hoped would be the truth.’
‘And then as soon as Margaret Thatcher had fallen in 1990, he wanted her successor, John Major, to fall too. He had successfully predicted her end but had failed to see what would happen next.’
‘Chronology, chronology, chronology. You are moving too fast.’
‘There is not much dispute about Margaret Thatcher’s fall. ‘The riots against the Poll Tax simultaneously ruined her reputation for radicalism and for common sense. Geoffrey Howe, one of her once closest and dullest allies, condemned her in parliament. Michael Heseltine, the “Tarzan” who had been plotting against her since the Westland affair, made an open challenge. She treated none of them seriously enough. Within two weeks she was out and on her way to Dulwich, to that Barrat Home in which she did not stay for long.’
‘The victory in the race to replace her went to the plotter who seemed the least to be plotting. Ronnie’s friend, Geoffrey Tucker, genial Mr G, master of the plotters’ Chinese restaurant table in 1979, was the earliest to call me and predict that this would be John Major.’
‘David called unhappily with the same message well before it was a universally acknowledged truth. There was nothing, bar deceptive cunning, that David admired about the bank manager who was about to take the office of his heroine. Worst of all, the new Prime Minister’s advisers made clear, even before they took power, that they wanted nothing to do with David Hart, not even through back channels, not even in secret.’
‘Once John Major had caused a second surprise by winning an election in his own right in 1992, David retired still further to country life, plotting hopelessly from afar. Of the other Senecans, Woodrow slipped easily from helping Margaret to helping John, from an object of his devotion to a mere source of power. Ronnie did the same but with much more difficulty, arousing jealousy and anger in his Margaret that he found hard to bear. Frank and I merely returned to our work, I now as Editor of The Times, watching closely as the next phase of disintegration began.’
‘Every close watcher of the Conservative Party had the same problem at this time. Who was the one to follow? The answer should have been obvious. A Prime Minister has the power. But when Margaret Thatcher lost her starring part she never left the stage. Even two years on, every Tory who loved her thought her still the victim of a vicious stabbing. Every Tory who hated her found that hating their leader was still the best game they knew.’
8.8.14
Most of the books have now gone. All but a single chair has gone. Miss R has moved to the letters. She is sitting on the floor by the door and sifting through unbound paper. Her white shoes act as weights. She says she does not need me to talk. She needs to read. Some of what she is reading I know well. Other parts I do not.
The letters are all in the pile from Mr V. She holds one in which he boasted of his latest palaces of wood. She has another in which he showed his satisfaction when my father was dying. That was sixteen years ago. Mr V wrote that he was saddened but he was not a deceiving writer and he showed that he was not.
In other letters which Miss R now riffles through her hands, I learnt that he held my father responsible for his losing his job and his exile to Walton-on-the-Naze. He was not happy there. He liked to boast about Walton’s new fame as the home of the world’s oldest parrot, a fossil discovery from fifty million years ago, Palaeopsittacus Georgii, George’s Old Parrot, with its own fossilised seeds and nuts. He described how his balsa house stood once beneath ‘an avian sky, a sun-blocking mass of red, green, yellow, blue and shit’. But the glamour did not last.
One of the letters beneath Miss R’s left shoe is a full denunciation of my father. The reasoning is incomprehensible but the tone is not. Another is about Mrs Thatcher’s fate. In a third, from around the same time, Mr V says that he has ‘given up the balsa’. All remaining relics of Rome have gone. His old house and my old house have all gone under the knife. The price of new wood is now beyond his reach.
So, in 1998, when Max Stothard was dying, and when Mr V knew that he was dying, I was not surprised by the pleasure from Walton-on-the-Naze, well beyond the usual quiet relief of a survivor. None of what I read was new and it was all from a long time ago. It was my own response that surprised me more.
This was the first time I noticed how the dying of a person brings out memories so very different from a death. Mr V wrote abuse in my father’s final months that he would not have written when my father was dead. I, too, who loved my father, sat with him in the hospice and failed to focus on all that was his best, his easy pleasures, his tolerance, even his tested tolerance of Mr V, his modesty, his mass of brain, so much of it kept in reserve.
This was not what I expected. If ‘nil nisi bonum’ applies to the dead, how much more should it apply to those not yet quite dead. As soon as he was gone I was able to invoke the ‘nothing but good’ principle with ease, recall all his many virtues but when he was going I could not. I did the opposite.
While his nurses were carefully matching morphine to his pain I was thinking of what he had wasted of himself (I shudder at it now) and how he had done too little to understand my mother. I was remembering what Mr V had too fiercely said, almost agreeing with some of it: that Max Stothard was too fond of a quiet life, too content to get by, so lacking in imagination as to be almost wilfully bound to the here and now.
My father was wholly without rage, a true virtue for Stoics. But while he was dying I remembered the only time that I had ever seen him angry, the first time he said I should never see V or her father again, the time I disobeyed him and he hit me.
At the moment of his death I was not even thinking about him at all, but of a shirt I had seen in a shop window, and whether I had time to buy it before 5.30, the time when every shop in Chelmsford closed, the time that was never quite early enough for my father who loathed all shops, the thought of them even more than the reality. So when he drew his last breath my thoughts were on shopping, which I too hate, almost as much as he did.
And so it is today at the dying of a building. Miss R has not heard memories that my friends and colleagues would expect me to have. This is not what the memoir of an Editor is supposed to be, the kind of memoir that I could have written, of meetings with great men, of awards, successes, the kind that are spread over this office floor. Instead Miss R has heard different memories, the ones that she has asked for, worse ones, flattering to no one.
If the building were dead I might not be thinking of the plots of politicians and the sins of the press. I should be thinking of virtues and pleasures, scoops and scandals exposed, the friendships that were once within those walls, the triumphs, as we defined them for ourselves, the strategies hatched to sell more copies of The Times, the successes by which my own success was measured long ago.
Instead the plant has been dying and I have been describing to Miss R a band of squabbling ghosts, figures reduced to an H, an L, a T and a J. This morning there is a giant pipe, newly arrived on a pile of fibreglass and seed buds, like a tooth removed by dental engineering and cushioned on cotton wool. Beneath the high cranes there are low cranes, bobbing and bowing, dancing with the fire hoses.
11.8.14
I now have a firm date for leaving. I do not have much more time by this view of memories. Miss R has been sweating over my final boxes, making notes, checking letters and fil
es. Damp and pink silk do not fit well. We have snapped at each other for no good reason.
Gradually she is forming her own books into labelled piles. In five shelves yet to be emptied in front of my TLS desk, are more than a hundred books we have not touched yet.
These are the not very literate reminders of the decades when I had only to type the letter T for the letters H.A.T.C.H.E.R to follow.
Here sit rows of memoirs by so many Tory men whom no one wants to remember now, coy titles about kitchen cabinets and Tarzan, nicknames that a man hated when he was famous but, when he entered the ghost world, was all that remained, thick books with ‘blue’ in their titles next to thin books, more thick than thin.
Miss R has rejected Michael Heseltine’s Life in the Jungle (2000); First Edition, mint, 50p. She has found by luck or best interviewer’s instinct probably the only one of these that is worth taking to the new office, the only one that has found a life beyond the graveyard, albeit a fictional life.
Its title is Dancing With Dogma (1992); First Edition, Good, £5. Its author was the late Sir Ian Gilmour, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet, disloyal to her in every role he held. Sir Ian was one of Woodrow’s least liked Conservatives, an elegant journalist, sometime owner and editor of The Spectator, rich, urbane, ever delighting in his role as ‘wettest of the wets’, bitterly disdainful of her Falklands policy except to the extent that ‘it would surely do for her what Suez had done for Eden’.
His memoir’s cover shows him dancing at a Tory seaside ball with a Prime Minister whom he despised – and it is this image that has made the book survive, printed throughout the pages of the novel beside it on my shelves like Brighton Pier through Brighton Rock. The novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, won the Booker Prize in 2004 for this finest piece of Thatcher fiction, The Line of Beauty, a beautiful line that stretched through politics, cocaine, critical theory and the contours of arse and AIDS, gripping the Thatcher age in ways that Miss R and her colleagues will struggle to match. Other historians have already struggled.
For understanding the years of The Senecans the best fiction is often better than the best journalism. The Line of Beauty begins after the Falklands victory when the ‘pale gilt image of the triumphant PM’ is everywhere. Her recapture of Port Stanley merits an annual public holiday and a reconsideration of how we feel now about Lord Nelson’s long dominance of the skyline.
A Reaganite lobbyist promotes Star Wars technology as David Hart used to do. The rich get rich and ‘the poor get … the Conservatives’, is the line that lightens a dinner party. Madam’s ‘genius’ can move any conversation away from reality – from fine food, fetid neighbours and a pied a terre that is better described as a ‘fuck-flat’.
There is subtle textual and sexual variance. The gay hero, an outsider at the court of ‘the Lady’, catches a dance with her that causes rage among those whose claim is greater but whose opportunism is less. It is one of the finest novels of our time for imitating its world.
Miss R hasn’t read it yet. She places it on the pile that she has asked to take away.
12.8.14
Over the past few days the lawn down below has changed colour in the heat – from brown to bright green to an even brighter yellow around its edge. Despite the efforts of Wapping’s chemical gardeners, the edge of our newspaper lawn was often nauseous yellow where it met the concrete. This will be its final season.
‘It reminds me of Cyril Lawn’, says Miss R.
‘Don’t you remember? That artificial turf of the 1960s. My grandfather still uses it. A bit yellow now.’
‘Yes, I do. My father laid it in the corridor that led to our garden, plastic tufts sold to him under the slogan “THIS IS LUXURY YOU CAN AFFORD BY CYRIL LORD”. To his horror and distress our Essex patch of Cyril Lord’s Cyril Lawn became yellow within days.’
We talk, idly but cautiously. She does not mind incidentals about colours and carpets unless she sees the conversation hardening around places where she does not want to go. I try to ask more about her ‘Thatcher project’ but she is as vague as a party-going spy.
She wants only to return to the Senecans. She wants to take them beyond 1990, beyond the Thatcher fall. We start to talk about 1992 but her mood is more sceptical than before. She says that she does not accept what I’m telling her. I object. She goes back to exterior floor-coverings. I complain again.
‘Listen’, I insist after half an hour of politics and soft pile, ‘it was definitely Woodrow who first told me about John Major’s “breakdown” on Black Wednesday.’
‘Black Wednesday was what September 16th,1992 was called. It was in Margaret’s successor’s sixth month as an elected occupant of Number Ten and my own first week as Editor of The Times.’
Miss R is crisp.
‘I am not disputing the name of the day’, she says, ‘only your account of who told you what happened on it.’
My account, I know, does not fit with those of others.
‘Believe me. Woodrow Wyatt was both the source of the “breakdown” story and the man who most vigorously denied the truth of his own account. He was also the man who most aggressively abused me for publishing it.’
She nods as though I am giving in to her view.
‘Yes, this makes your research more difficult. It does not make my memory unreliable or my statement untrue. Denial of the truth is by no means unusual to a newspaper editor. It goes with the territory, as my father used to say, talking of territory that was somewhat different.’
I have known since April that Miss R would at some time reach this point. She has her four subjects. She still identifies them in her notebook by the letters we saw in the smoke when the building first began to fall, H for Hart, T for Millar, J for Johnson, L for Wyatt.
She has learnt a little now – more Latin than she wants to learn – about what brought the Senecans together and what did not. Today she wants to talk about their part in the most difficult day of John Major’s time in office, the day, as The Times reported, that he disappeared from view, abandoned his desk, becoming lost to his courtiers, civil servants and to the world.
John Major himself has always denied this. His is the official story. Maybe it was never very important anyway. But what Miss R wants to know is where I first heard the opposite.
‘I’m telling you again that it was Woodrow who told the story first. The other Senecans played their part but Woodrow was the first.’
She shakes her head.
‘Woodrow did not mean to be my source. He did not even know that I was about to overhear him in his borrowed office, one of those that are now a black square against the sky, at a desk where he was speaking on the telephone, and where he was listening, mostly listening, to someone else.’
‘So, yes, all that I am saying is that Woodrow knew about the “breakdown”. He was talking to someone else about it. Woodrow would not mind my saying that. He would always want to be known for knowing. I was not meaning to overhear. Nor did I think at first that I had overheard anything very much.’
Miss R’s eyes say that she is going to have to report this explanation back to someone else, and that she too is not going to be believed.
‘At the time in question’, I say as though in court, ‘I hardly knew even where I was. But it was somewhere in the windowless middle of that vertical chess board, the part they are blasting away now with fire hoses and cranes, the part where I never normally went, the place where the advertising sellers used to sit. I was looking for my columnist in the offices of the News of the World, also somewhere I had never been before.’
Miss R says nothing.
‘If Woodrow had wanted to, he could have come to see me in my own office. That would have been more convenient. But he normally preferred not to come to The Times. He thought that my colleagues disliked him. They did.’
‘He and I needed to speak only briefly, about some “crass” editing of his column, the commonest reason for us to meet face-to-face, blue-marked proofs in our fists.
I circled the blue-carpeted corridors where I thought he might be. There was no chance that he would be in the restaurant or at the hairdresser. Eventually I found him behind a door beside the red rail that ran around the atrium called Adland, the rail that is now that single spot of colour in the vertical squares of dust.’
‘He was talking on the telephone about the odds for a horse race. I waited and walked around the Adland corridor again, in a continuous square, back to where I had begun. He was still on the telephone.’
‘What I heard then seemed nothing at first. The clearest words were coat-hanger, vacuum, television and pillow. It could have been an order from a department store or the inventory of a holiday cottage. In its more mumbling themes the conversation covered “John’s terrible state”, the “heroic support” he was getting from a few of his very best friends and the incompetence of the Prime Minister’s office. None of this was much different from Woodrow’s usual tirades.’
‘Yet, as he went on, repeating, restating, turning the words around, the story was there, along with an anxiety in his voice, a slackening in his characteristic crisp twang. The Voice of Reason always spoke as he wrote, assuredly and with the aim of instilling assuredness in whoever was hearing or reading. This time there was a touch of fear.’
‘So yes, I heard the story more than once. And I heard it from Woodrow and from whomever he was talking to, a woman I am fairly sure. I did not wait outside any longer. I abandoned my mission to discuss his complaints. I walked away, around the red steel rails. Later he crossed the path into the Rum Store and came to see me at The Times. I mentioned nothing of what I had overheard.’
‘How much could you really tell from Lord Wyatt’s voice?’ Miss R is listening, languidly leaning against the door. Of the two of us she seems much the more at home.
She scribbles on her Seneca pad in symbols that must be some kind of shorthand. I cannot be sure, never having learnt it myself and still remembering the relief when I rose to a position on The Times where no one could expect it from me.
The Senecans Page 18