The Senecans

by Peter Stothard

  ‘But then, as time moved on and a Labour victory in 1997 became absolutely certain, even David swung back towards backing Major, or telling me every day that he did, and that I should, and that everyone should. Woodrow hated David all the more for joining the sinking ship so late.’

  ‘Ronnie was keen that Margaret Thatcher jump aboard too. And sullenly she did so. At a dinner for the US general and politician, Colin Powell, I asked her if she would really prefer the Tory ship to sink. She smiled quizzically, looked away sadly and sharply, and answered a politer question from her neighbour instead. A few weeks before the poll she told me at an anniversary dinner in honour of Charles Douglas-Home that Tony Blair “would not let Britain down”.’

  26.8.14

  Miss R has a page of poems in her hand this morning.

  ‘What are these?’ She is playful, kicking her white shoes towards me in what may be self-parody, brandishing her electronic tablet like a table-tennis bat.

  ‘John Major used to protect himself from the Bastards’ abuse by writing every day a limerick. He showed them to no one, he told me much later, but the writing made him feel better.’

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘Not very. Inside so many public men, Ronnie used to say, there is a secret artist trying to get out. John Major was a deliberately secret poet; secrecy was the way he wanted it. Woodrow Wyatt was a sadly secret playwright; no one wanted to put on his plays; he did not have the money to put them on himself but he went on writing. David Hart was an almost secret novelist and playwright: he could pay enough for his works to be produced but not enough for them to be seen or read.’

  ‘In 1992, even Ronnie himself, once feted from Her Majesty’s to Hollywood, was fast becoming a secret playwright. His plays were deemed old-fashioned, doomed to be forgotten. He was merely a speechwriter and even his speeches were heard more often in Kentucky or Kansas (wherever Margaret Thatcher could earn herself $25,000 for making them) than in Brighton or Blackpool where her Tories too had cruelly moved on.’

  ‘Maybe Ronnie was right, that it was art that kept them all going, Major, Millar, Wyatt, Hart. Add Jeffrey Archer, whom Woodrow despised for his bumptious insecurity but envied for his powers of storytelling. Add Norman Tebbit’s man, Michael Dobbs, Lord Dobbs of Wylye and his House of Cards.’

  She taps in the names.

  ‘Add my fellow book-collector, Kenneth Baker, anthologist, former Booker Prize chairman, loyalist to both Thatcher and to Major, senior architect of the poll-tax policy that produced the change from the one to the other. Add Douglas Hurd too, thin, languid, kind, Etonian, a man who thrilled (well, a little bit) with his hardback thrillers, a holder of the highest offices of state and a candidate in his own mind to succeed to the premiership. Fiction is its own empire. The courtiers are characters and the author can never be wrong.’

  Miss R looks again at the poems which she has removed from their place on a dusty shelf between Messalina’s favourite position and my copy (her copy now, she seems to think) of Amsterdam. She reads a few lines to herself, smiles and asks if these are John Major’s finest.

  ‘No’, I say. ‘He said he would never let his own be published in his lifetime. After his death they will go to Churchill College, Cambridge, with the rest of his papers. They will sit beside the Thatcher archive of which, in one sense, they are part.’

  These ones are Ronnie’s and mine. One lunchtime at The Old Rose, we just imagined what they might be like.

  ‘Should I read them out aloud?’

  She does, with an Essex accent and youthful vigour. My co-author, if he were still alive, would have tried to coach away some of her vowels but would otherwise have been pleased. Each poem is on a separate page and there is a rustling and crackling between them.

  Sir Ronald wrote most of her speeches.

  He was one of the stickiest leeches,

  Who anyone saw

  In her underwear drawer,

  As cool as a boy stealing peaches.

  Woodrow Wyatt is all of a flatter,

  He’ll natter and natter and natter,

  He doesn’t much like me,

  He’d happily spike me.

  I’d rather be friends with a ratter.

  The best of those bastards was Frank.

  He said I’d be good in a bank. A bank?

  And he in a college,

  With people of knowledge,

  Where people like me stank and sank.

  Mr Hart says he’d like his new name,

  The one Margaret promised (that Dame!)

  But a Baron or Knight does not sound quite right

  For a smooth, oily bastard who smears me in spite

  And an ally whom no one will claim.

  On the Wednesday which some call a black one

  And others refer to as white,

  They say that a ghost speaking Sechuan

  Would have out-performed me in the fright,

  That I went back to bed

  And chewed pillows instead,

  As the pound shrank away in the night.

  ‘Do you have any more?’, she asks, standing up on her shoes as though she is about to dance.

  28.8.14

  This is a day of deep noise and dust from the cranes and wrecking balls. Down the cobbled street where H, T, L and J once walked are the new pink and blue doors of small businesses, Baguette Kitchen, Fake Sea Recordings and High Heels Low Life. Past these and then around the corner to the tables where the Senecans used to meet, the scene is of contrasting quiet.

  Far away beyond the chemical lawn and the chess board in the sky there is only a dusty neglect. No fire hoses play on the barricaded facade of The Old Rose this morning. There is no longer even a trace of the nearby night club whose name I forget, nor the fish-and-chip shop I never visited. The wreckers and removers have already paid their visit, leaving nothing but dandelions and a brown field of grass, discarded traffic cones and white plastic chairs.

  ‘Brownfield’ is in part a technical term here, a developer’s word for land that has been built upon before and can be built upon again without agitating defenders of ‘green fields’. During the construction of a new supermarket, the fish-and-chip shop, nightclub, pub and a Babe Ruth’s baseball restaurant were found to have sat above much that had been ‘built on before’. Not only were there previous ‘restaurants and associated leisure facilities’ from the 1890s and 1980s but also from around two thousand years ago. To take a flight of fancy, Petronius himself might have arbitrated the elegance of the decor and deemed it charmingly provincial. Seneca could have taken lunch here.

  Although none of us knew this in 1987, around the site of our impromptu Latin school there was all the time a Roman sports bar, for bathing, eating, drinking and swapping philosophies. Beneath the frying pans for fish and chicken nuggets the diggers found a site dating from the first to the fourth centuries, ovens and geysers, possibly a tower for observing unwanted guests, more remains of these earlier eateries than ours had left, amphorae for wine, broken glasses, hairpins, combs, earrings, a place for patching up one’s make-up, leather shorts, nail clippings, wheat, bones of pork, lamb, and chicken (mostly chicken), not quite what Trimalchio would have offered but good evidence of good times.

  I must not be too fanciful, tempted by the shock of this though I am. Seneca would not have visited there himself. The leader of our club was an asthmatic. North was his wrong direction. Phlegm fell heavy on his lungs. In his youth he swam in cold waters as cold as the Thames. There was a medical fashion for that but in most of his life he abhorred all fashion, perfume, bath oils and foreign fashions in particular.

  Seneca would also have been nervous for his safety in London, reasonably so, even more than in Rome. His personal reputation around these parts was poor, a result of some allegedly ruthless banking practices, a sudden decision to call in his British loans, maybe through inside knowledge of Nero’s plans to abandon our unprofitable island. This was one of the causes, his enemies claimed, of Boadi
cea’s revolt. His first attempt to resign from the court followed quickly afterwards.

  Then, maybe, Seneca was the saviour of Roman Britain. Once London had been reduced by the Iceni queen to a layer of blood and ash there was no prospect of withdrawal. Honour would not have allowed it. So, while Seneca survived in a weakened state, the life of occupation continued here more strongly, northwards as far as Hadrian’s Wall, with soldiers and sellers of goods from far afield, reading Latin (more poetry than prose), eating, drinking and taking the waters.

  Probably some of Seneca’s books, at least, were read where we used to discuss them, papyrus rolls and pamphlet bestsellers of their time. Many olive oil jars came from his home fields of Cordoba. Some of them survived to be discovered, slumped beside the coins that paid the bills and much graffiti of abuse, complaint and praise, everything that is now neatly set out in a report entitled ‘A Roman Settlement and Bath House at Shadwell. Excavations at Tobacco Dock and Babe Ruth Restaurant, the Highway, London, by Pre-Construct Archaeology Ltd (2011)’.

  29. 8.14

  ‘We began with David Hart. You wrote most in your letters about David Hart. Let’s end with him too. Let’s end when he ended.’

  Miss R is sitting on my empty desk. Next week I am going at last to Cordoba.

  ‘David was the last Senecan to die, in 2012, some fifteen years after Ronnie and Woodrow, six years after Frank. He died well by any Stoic standard. He died by changing in ways that put politics and plots into proper proportion, gradually losing the uses of his limbs, one by one, piece by piece, progressively, as his doctors told him.’

  ‘I particularly remember that P-word. It would always raise a smile – at least for as long as he was able to smile. David smiled at anything suggesting that any bit of him was “progressive”. He was sceptical of all progress, cheerfully calling Seneca to his support.’

  ‘Motor Neurone Disease?’ Miss R gives a look of questioning distaste.

  ‘It does not destroy everything, only voluntary muscles, fingers and thumbs the first, the tongue the worst. His sexual drive, he insisted, being involuntary, was undimmed. He flew his helicopter much longer that he was safe to fly it. He drank claret through a straw and employed an attentive nurse.’

  ‘In dying he did become a rather different man. With a disease challenging his every certainty about what he was, what any man is, he did become more progressive, certainly more of an optimist – about ideas and cures and even, to his and my surprise, about the new Labour Party. In his final years he became part of a new story, one that was lighter, more comic, less Senecan, not Senecan at all.’

  ‘This move had been looming for some time. Even back in 1997, when Ronnie and Woodrow were still alive and grumbling and grousing against New Labour, David decided that Margaret Thatcher was right about Britain being “safe with Blair”. He was delighted, before the election, when I first told him of her whispered message to me at that Reform Club dinner for his old friend, Charles Douglas-Home.’

  ‘He was thrilled at the polling day headline in the Sun, WHO BLAIRS WINS, a reminder that not everyone mocked his obsession with the SAS. He boasted that Seneca had adapted the line from Virgil. The slogan may not have worked for Michael Portillo but it was perfect for the man whom Margaret Thatcher had endorsed as her true successor.’

  ‘Britain, David suddenly declared, was assuredly safe in Tony’s hands. Saddam Hussein and other threats to Western interests were the ones who would soon not be safe. All was well. It began to matter to him rather less now who was leader of the Conservative Party.’

  Miss R seems unsure whether this is part of her research period or not. ‘When did he first feel his disease, first see it? When did his disease begin?’

  I am keen to be gone. I am thinking of Seneca now. In a wasted life, death begins sooner. In a fulfilled and virtuous life, death begins closer to the grave.

  ‘I don’t know precisely’, I reply.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘The last occasion that I clearly remember David holding a knife and fork was outside The Red Lion on Whitehall on July 30, 1997. I have that date in my diary. For a year or two afterwards I hardly saw him at all.’

  She writes down the words ‘knife and fork’ and scowls when I read them back to her.

  ‘Yes, the cutlery was stainless steel, dishwasher-approved, common stuff, recorded in my diary alongside the date, written down at the time even before I knew about the start of his long dying. David did not normally eat outside public houses, nor even in them, not even in our Old Rose or in those close to the centre of power – and none in London is closer than The Red Lion.’

  ‘He was on that night holding gingerly the tools with which other people ate. He was forcing the knife blade into the prongs, looking quizzically at a glass of pale wine. Perhaps he already sensed he had a problem. Perhaps he did not.’

  ‘More important then, he was there in the right place to mark the end of the Tory courts of Downing Street and the ascendancy of New Labour. Farewell to Seneca, farewell to the classics. Hail the New Romantics. If any event signalled that shift it was the one he had come to The Red Lion to observe. He could only observe it through me but that was fine.’

  ‘David would once have mocked what he was waiting then to witness, what he was prepared to wait outside a Whitehall pub to witness at one remove from the reality. But David was adapting enthusiastically to the new political age.’

  ‘Earlier in the afternoon he had confirmed that I was going to the “Cool Britannia” party and asked when I thought I would leave. He had placed himself with his knife and fork so that he saw me as soon as I emerged from the Downing Street gates and could usher me into his illegally attendant car. He was waiting because he said he had news. But he wanted to be the first to know the news from me.’

  Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher, the author in centre

  ‘The party given by Tony Blair to mark the difference between his own premiership and that of John Major, was not a small event but neither was it one to which David was invited, or could have expected to be. I was still Editor of The Times and would be there for another five years. He was only beginning to work on his links to New Labour, identifying a confidant with close access to the Prime Minister and a keen interest in arms trading and Machiavelli. If he was to learn what happened when Tony Blair and the rock stars closed the chapter on “thirteen years of Tory misrule”, he had to put up with second best.’

  His questioning that night was peculiarly insistent. I wondered why he needed to know so much gossip so quickly. He was impatient that there were so many stars whose names I hardly knew. He recalled sourly an election party at his London flat when I had sat next to Eric Clapton, an enthusiastic Thatcherite then, without immediately recognising “the guitar god” on his couch.’

  ‘It is possible that he already sensed the waste within his limbs that would come to make cutlery useless and wine accessible only through a tube. More likely he needed to pretend to someone else, some paymaster or client, that he still stood on the inside track of power, that whatsoever king might reign he was still the same wise courtier.’

  ‘I did everything that I could. I started for him at the beginning.’

  Miss R smiles approval.

  ‘The first three letters that I heard at the party were an explosive P, a hissing S and an F, which sounded as though several more Fs might soon follow it. This was not the kind of missing letter game that Ronnie used to play with Margaret. These were no quotes from Alexander Pope, no questions about which courtiers’ names could be written without a P, an S and an F.’

  ‘These letters were simpler than that. My Downing Street welcome was “piss off”. Since Noel Gallagher, the then famed profaner from Oasis was at least ten yards away, and talking to the Prime Minister, the words could only have come from the then not-yet-famed new chief of Downing Street, Alastair Campbell.’

  Miss R looks surprised at the idea that there was ever a time when Alastair Campbell was ‘not
yet famed’. His story is better entrenched in her personal history than anything bar the Poll Tax.

  ‘David laughed. He tried hard not to look surprised. He never wanted to show any shock at a fact. It was central to his sense of himself that he knew the facts. In 2014 it is a TV cliché that the new wise men of New Labour communicated by pisses, fucks and cuntings but in the summer of 1997 this was a glamorous secret. Alastair Campbell himself, soon to be the senior courtier in Tony Blair’s court, was still best known, even affectionately, as a mere former journalist, reformed alcoholic and one-time contributor to the erotic positions of Forum magazine.’

  ‘The Campbell anger – and the language that came from it – had not yet transformed its owner’s reputation. Rule by rage was rare in the Tory era. Senecan standards applied even where Seneca was unknown. Wobbly Thursday was an exception. That was why it brought such grief.’

  ‘When John Major described Michael Portillo and other Tory rivals as “bastards” he was speaking when he thought that no one else could hear. When a drink-fuelled Tory patrician called a rebel from his own side “a cunt” he was at least talking to me and not to the man himself. Ronnie and Woodrow did not agree on much but both disapproved of Major’s very private threat to “fucking crucify the Right”, Ronnie because he thought he should not say it, Woodrow because he knew he could not do it.’

  ‘Campbell, however, was different. Anyone whom he told to piss off was grateful not to have been cunted instead. And he did not care who knew. This was the sort of detail that David very much wanted to know.’

  ‘I was not too shocked myself. This choice of welcome was already almost familiar. Relations between Campbell and The Times were poor. Most of my first meetings with Tony Blair at Number Ten were taken up with the new leader putting the best possible gloss on his spin-doctoring spokesman. Protector and protected reversed their roles. Each time, just as Blair reassured me that some Campbellite abuse had been mere “over-excitement at the wonderful new challenges ahead of us”, Campbell himself would storm into the room with some new printed outrage in The Times. “I’m trying to defend you”, said Blair, “and shouldn’t it be the other way round and aren’t you rather undermining my case?”’