The Senecans

by Peter Stothard

  Miss R is being patient despite herself. ‘Was Woodrow the only one who “knew”?’ She voices the quotation marks of doubt.

  ‘Oh no. Woodrow was one of many in the Locarno Room who “knew” about the “black dog” that bit the PM on the day that he lost his economic policy. But he did not know what was about to be said about it in The Times the next day. That was what he would have wanted to know the most. The Black Wednesday event was in the past, but not yet safely in the past. Woodrow knew merely what had happened, alongside others of the sharp-nosed, the thick-necked and at least one well informed woman.’

  ‘There was a small group at the end furthest from the entrance, “where Lord Salisbury had once had his desk” a man said, “where the Locarno Treaty itself was signed” added another. This area was as though roped off by invisible red threads. No one approached too near. I recognised there one of the most powerful marble men who, in Frank’s report to The Old Rose, had spoken of the hour in which the heartbeat of government had stopped.’

  ‘Amid the rest of the throng there were two others who had done the same, with added details about pillow-biting in the purple-plumped upholstery of the prime ministerial bedroom. How did they know? They had reliably heard.’

  ‘“Can Major take the strain?” ran the headline when I left the office. “Did he crack up?” asked the second paragraph. Journalists were quoted. “Friends of” were invoked. Minor errors were still unspotted. It was not a great piece of work but a gripping one. The first edition was already rumbling towards the presses, soon to be on its way to Cornwall and Scotland and to those desks in Whitehall whose occupants had the task of seeing first what others would see soon enough.’

  ‘I was still keen to tell Woodrow before he learnt of this from anyone else, or still worse from the morning paper itself. I owed him that, a debt of etiquette even though he would be horrified, I was sure, to hear what I had done. Or maybe he would have pulled back his shoulders like a sly bird and laughed.’

  ‘An adviser likes an early warning whatever his view of the news. How can he advise what others cannot advise unless he knows what others do not know? He wants to know when every little bomb will explode, particularly when he is one of those who have lit its long and multi-stranded fuse. Woodrow would never know about the fuse (I would naturally protect my source from himself) but he was never going to know about the explosion if he stayed inside the knot of statues beside the blue-panelled wall.’

  ‘I slipped out to the foot of the stairs, thinking that I might catch him as he left. I wanted to speak to a few others too. I wanted to speak to David and Ronnie and to Frank but none of them was necessarily going to be there, Frank the most likely, David almost certainly not, Ronnie, well one could never be sure. Then suddenly, and behind the last curve of the staircase, I saw all four of my Senecans, the last time that I ever saw them all together.’

  ‘This was absolutely a surprise. Events were ever more driving us apart. Frank and I kept up a little Latin and some plotting against some mutual enemies but he had adopted the distance from the Senecans that he thought appropriate for the new Deputy Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Woodrow thought David now as nothing but a spiv, Ronnie as a pen-for-rent who was lukewarm to John and a fanner of Margaret’s worst Queen-over-the-water fantasies.’

  ‘David thought Woodrow a toad and Ronnie a useful idiot. Ronnie, while still happy to play Seneca with me, thought David a bit deranged, very dilatory at Latin, and he did not think of Woodrow much at all. But this time, this one and final time, they looked like life-long friends.’

  ‘Ronnie and David stood apart but talking. Between them were two locked bicycles, not a standard Foreign Office feature and neither of the machines belonging to my conspirators. I say conspirators because on this occasion they truly did look like conspirators too, as though they intended to be seen in a conspiratorial pose or, at least, did not at all mind.’

  ‘I was confident about the non-ownership of the bicycles because Ronnie still rode only in his elderly Rolls Royce which he could always somehow, somewhere park. David liked best to travel by helicopter, often piloting himself, dreaming of swoops against striking miners, somehow maintaining his licence even when the wasting disease had destroyed the voluntary use of his limbs. On land he was always driven – by a man in a Mercedes, not always the same man in the same Mercedes – and to have seen him on a bicycle would have been as unlikely as seeing Seneca or Socrates on one.’

  ‘I saw them together as I watched Woodrow reach the last stone step, slipping slightly on the last of the red carpeted strips, righting himself by a straightening of his tie. I think of him now as a man of slippers. He made so many jokes, threats and quotes about the slippery slopes of power. At this point he was merely mumbling his way out, mumbling towards Frank, who was just arriving, and Ronnie and David whom he seemed not yet to have seen.’

  ‘Ronnie and David, though talking, seemed also not quite to have met. Each was looking past the other’s shoulder like parrots kissing in cages. For David a conspirator’s cloak was a familiar guise, his essential nature as his enemies saw him. His distant stare that night more than usually brought to mind Lord Lucan evading capture for the murder of his children’s nanny, a man backed into a corner but certain that with a moustache and a limousine he would escape.’

  ‘Ronnie was smiling into a different empty space. He looked at that moment like the most lauded of film idols, with the kind of face that Margaret Thatcher, in so many instances, had so clear a liking for, an even, varnished gaze. David still complained that honours were her form of sexual favours. Ronnie was manifestly her type, the friend of Greer Garson and Celia Johnson, the toast of Hollywood in the years when she was still studying her chemistry books, still not yet embarked on her career as a whipper of cream.’

  ‘Frank was running his hand across his thick black hair, looking around, already sketching the scene into his diary. Each of the Senecans looked as their undertaker or favoured biographer would want them to look, Ronnie as open and natural as an actor can easily be, as pale as David was dark, Woodrow in a worsted hue, a spotted grey, Frank in Marks & Spencer blue. Each had his position. I was sure that later they were planning to meet.’

  ‘Ronnie seemed the most commanding. Margaret Thatcher’s once favourite speechwriter knew already what was coming in The Times the next day. He was almost the first to know. I had phoned him from the car. The others did not. Or, at least, they did not know so from me.’

  ‘Ronnie was also by a foot the tallest. This gave him the greatest opportunity for the avoidance of meeting eyes. He swivelled away as though to check on his bicycle while somehow at the same time grasping Woodrow’s hand. All four then shook hands, not what the thick-necked men up in the Locarno Rooms would naturally do to their friends. At that moment each wanted unequivocally to be a stranger.’

  ‘What was going on?’ Miss R asks if I know now any more than I knew then.

  ‘I know less’, I answer. ‘You should have found me earlier.’

  She purses her lips.

  Maybe both of us are going to write about this time together. She said as much at the start. My own diary began as a defence against her, just as sometimes I used to write as a defence against Frank. I am wondering about her ‘Thatcher project’ and if she is really a writer. If she is I doubt that the books will be very much alike. She is writing history. I am writing non-fiction. There is a difference.

  If I were Miss R, the historian, I would have to decide on the credibility of my sources, the reliability of each man or woman whom she has chosen to interview. I would judge the significance of all the various plots against John Major, those that were real but unimportant, those that were important but imagined. For non-fiction I just record what happens in this emptying room.

  Of course, if I were a novelist of newspapers, vying for a place on Miss R’s freshest pile, it would be possible to finish the story in any way I chose, finding plausibilities that might satisfy her better than an
ything I have said so far. If I were fully infected with fiction I could build upon an unsupported possibility a narrative in which Ronnie knows most from those closest, Woodrow hears quickly too, and Frank gleans added details from the Mandarins. Maybe Frank hopes that, by publishing them, I will prove to everyone his worst illusions about The Times. Motives of everyone would be mixed, a hope of pleasing and appeasing Margaret, a hope of advancing a new Tory leader, a hope of advancing themselves, a simple love of mischief.

  Miss R puts her notebook on top of her fiction pile. She returns coldly to her questions. ‘What happened next?’

  There is a call from outside, some TLS problem of today. I have to leave – and ask her to leave – before I can answer.

  15.8.14

  ‘What happened next?’ Miss S scrawls the words like graffiti in her second yellow SENECA notebook.

  I do not answer immediately. I like to answer her quickly. She is more likely to believe me if I do.

  ‘What happened to whom?’

  ‘To you’, she says.

  ‘Nothing, not immediately’, I reply. ‘One of Seneca’s most influential contributions to “self-improvement” was what he called his “Way”. Every night a man should think back over his day, questioning his own intentions, wondering whether a more virtuous decision might have been substituted for every decision taken.’

  ‘Seneca’s Way is not the way of newspapers. Critics charge that editors are too able to be thoughtless and ruthless, too powerful, too little accountable and sometimes we have all been so. We take positions and change them. Each day the present so quickly obliterates the past that a thought about an old thought hardly ever happens.’

  ‘Did nothing happen at all?’

  ‘Officially, not very much.’

  ‘The next time I was in Downing Street I was told by an aristocratic aide – firmly as though to a misguided child – that since John Major and I were “both from the same sort of background” we surely ought “to understand each other much better than we seemed to do”. It was “in all our interests”.

  ‘The next time I met Woodrow he responded with denial and rage. There was not the slightest scintilla of truth in our story. The sooner that I slipped off the “slipper wheel” the better.’

  ‘I repeated “not the slightest scintilla” to David. Not a spark of truth, he queried, showing off his new interest in Latin. He doubted that. Men like Woodrow always liked to use Latin words for lying. That was a good reason for learning more of their language. There surely had to be a spark of truth in the Prime Minister losing his mind as well as his temper. He would find out.’

  ‘The next time I met Ronnie he was unusually quiet. Margaret, he said, was doubly disappointed – both that the incident took place and that The Times published it. “The first, I think, rather more than the second, my dear”.’

  ‘Frank laughed. He had already moved on, just as I had, just as all journalists do.’

  18.8.14

  ‘Yes, but how did you yourself feel about what you had done?’ Miss R has been coming back and forth for four months and this morning, for the first time, she asks the desperate question that journalists normally ask much earlier, especially those broadcasting on TV or radio. I should respect her, I suppose, for holding back so long.

  How did I feel? There is nothing I can say. I am beginning to wish that I was part of a more conventional interview, one of those where the subject can promote achievements and success, provide a ‘balanced view’, ideally slightly unbalanced in the interviewee’s interests. I could describe my encouragement of young writers, some important ‘scoops’ on schools and prisons policy if I could remember them, and lunches with Social Democrats to discuss libel law reform. It is too late for that now.

  Miss R and I look again together down the cobbled street to The Old Rose. I see Ronnie and Woodrow, the L and M in wary alliance. I see David and Frank, H and J, hyphenate and justify as the type-setters used to say. Together we see the plant and the spaces within the plant, red against black, black against red. Remembering Woodrow makes me remember again the roses on trellises that we thought might brighten the Queen Mother’s Wapping day. The colleague who rescued me from my ‘do you keep a diary, ma’am?’ gaffe did so by asking our guest a question about rose-growing in Scotland.

  19.8.14

  ‘Why, if the “breakdown” story wasn’t true, was it so widely believed?’

  Miss R sweeps her eyes this morning across the piles she created yesterday. I look back at her in mock surprise.

  ‘Who’s saying it wasn’t true?’

  ‘Almost everyone, as far as I can see.’

  ‘But that is because John Major is now respected. Everyone who came after him was so much worse. The same thing happened to Roman emperors. The best route to a glorious reputation is to be followed by fools.’

  ‘The early 1990s were such a crazy, toxic time. A “believing age” had been replaced by a different age, a brutal but mercifully short age, of believing anything at all. The “hard thinking” had become the “no thinking” and the “soft thinking” of New Labour was still ahead.’

  Miss R flicks back through her notebook.

  ‘Margaret Thatcher had been forced from office. John Major had won an election without her. But in many places, among many people, it was as though she were still in power – or still about to return to power. Nero was the same.’

  ‘Did you keep up the Latin lessons?’

  ‘Since Frank had now joined Lord Black at the Sunday Telegraph, he and I met less often. But at least three of us still met occasionally in The Old Rose, still talking, at Frank’s insistence, mostly of Latin matters.’

  ‘Ronnie was the most regular other attender, Woodrow the least. David said that there were certain times when simply no one could discern fact from fiction.’

  Miss R looks blankly around us. She point to what little is left on the political shelves in a hopeful seeking of help.

  ‘Every reader who cares can now know the official history of the 90s. There are countless books, some of them here about to be dumped into their own yellow skip. No one will rescue “the Bastards’ Tales”, the boasts of how John Major was harried to defeat in 1997, never recovering from that Black Wednesday of 1992 when the pound collapsed from its European restraints (certainly), the central policy of the government collapsed (certainly) and the Prime Minister himself left a vacuum at the centre of power while he found a pillow on which to bite (possibly, possibly not).’

  Once upon a time I might have written a different account of those years, a traditional Editor’s verdict with much ‘allegedly’, many cautions and caveats. This year Miss R is looking from me only for what others cannot or may not tell her. Then she will move on.

  20.8.14

  Each time she leaves she takes a few of the books she wants. Her mind is on the letters now. At the top of her carefully tied bundle there is one that I have had my eye on ever since she pulled it from the piles. I can tell her about if she asks. Its date is November, 1993.

  Mr V barely registered John Major. Three years after the fall, the words from Walton were still of the ‘assassination’ of Mrs Thatcher. What was a fading term even among her friends was long a living fact for him, as for other adherents, a constant cause of scratchy italic rage. For years he wrote as though the coup against her had only just taken place, or he had only just now read about it, or that it might in good time be reversed.

  Margaret had deserved a dignified departure, he wrote. He wrote this repeatedly. Instead, she was betrayed by everyone who had once relied on her (and that included me), shoved before parliament to answer some last questions, prodded into declaring how much she was enjoying herself, and sent away to live in a housing estate. Her successor looked like the man who used to collect the takings at the Odeon.

  Miss R picks up this letter and holds it gently in her hand. I have read it many times. It is written in a pale brown ink, a colour barely browner than salt water over sand, readable
only in parts even when I first received it, now hard to discern at all except by nib marks. It seems like the note of a failing man except for Mr V’s proud boast that he has returned to balsa.

  He has carved a sculpture of his heroine’s final parliamentary performance inside the Palace of Westminster. He has received local acclaim for it. Photographers have visited from The Chronicle. He wants to know when I might come and see what I can so readily imagine, the green leather benches made cream, the rejected Prime Minister as a stooping letter P, the sculptor in aertex and white.

  21.8.14

  Miss R is agitated again today. She does not want to tell me why. She sounds like a writer who has lost confidence in her project. I have known enough of those – and been one sometimes myself too. Instead of more chronology she wants much more ‘context’. Context is her new word. She listens less and searches more. She sifts letters from newsprint and puts poems next to grammars.

  ‘I need more to read.’

  I know now that our interview is coming to an end. I have one suggestion. Although Margaret Thatcher was never famed for encouraging the arts, this final period did inspire one too little-known novel. I can already see my copy close to where she is leaning her hand. Philip Hensher’s Kitchen Venom, published in 1996, was – and still is – the best book about this final phase of the Thatcher era.

  Today it lies sullenly on the floor, in bookish protest that no one has opened it for a long time, the blue-covered version although I think there is also somewhere a cream one and a pink. It is a highly Senecan novel, dark, epigrammatic, suffused with philosophy and revenge, narrated in part by the Iron Lady herself as a deposed but not quite departed ghost.