Breaking the Code

by Gyles Brandreth

  MONDAY 7 FEBRUARY 1994

  This is truly appalling. Stephen [Milligan] has been found dead. He may have been murdered. I know it can’t have been suicide. I have just come from the Smoking Room where Bill Cash told me there’s a rumour going round that it was some sort of sex killing. ‘I don’t think you’ll like the details.’

  I cannot believe this has happened. I am going home.

  TUESDAY 8 FEBRUARY 1994

  When I saw Stephen on Friday he was in cracking form. I think he said he was going to play golf on Saturday. Anyway, yesterday, when he failed to show up for various appointments in the morning, and wasn’t answering his phone, Vera, his secretary, grew concerned and, after lunch, she decided to go to Black Lion Lane to find out if he was all right. When she arrived, the milk was still on the doorstep and there was no reply when she rang the bell. She let herself in with her spare set of keys and she found him dead, lying on the floor in the kitchen, naked apart from a pair of stockings and a suspender belt, with a flex tied round his neck and a black plastic bag over his head.

  She called the police at about 4.20. She called Gerry Malone361 and Gerry and Norman Fowler went together to Hammersmith Police Station. Incredibly, by five, or soon after, we’d got word at the House that an MP had been found murdered. Immediately I thought it was Stephen. Then I thought ‘it can’t be’. I called him at home. The machine answered. I didn’t leave a message. Somehow I knew it was him.

  It seems that, either alone or with a companion, he was playing some sort of bizarre sex game. A piece of orange was found in his mouth. Some kind of drug could have been in the orange. The bag was over his head and the flex was around his neck to restrict the amount of oxygen getting to his brain and so increase the sexual thrill.

  This doesn’t seem like Stephen at all. It is so horrible – and pointless. And, of course, – and, for once, understandably – the press is having a field day. There are pictures of us together at the Oxford Union in several of the papers. He was my friend. He was my best friend here. And now he’s gone. It is so maddening – and so stupid. He was so happy with his life here, so fulfilled. And he was loyal. He would have been mortified by the effect of all this on the party in general and the PM in particular.

  I wrote to his parents this morning, simply saying how wonderful he was. I wrote to Jonathan Aitken too because I wanted Jonathan to know how much Stephen loved being his PPS. When he got the job, I said to Stephen, ‘What do you actually do?’ ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said, ‘but it’s wonderful!’

  At 2.35, after prayers, the Speaker made the formal announcement to the House: ‘I regret to have to inform the House of the death of Stephen David Wyatt Milligan, esquire, Member for Eastleigh, and I desire, on behalf of the House, to express our sense of the loss we have sustained and our sympathy with the relatives of the Honourable Member.’ We murmured our ‘hear-hears’, then we had Defence questions. I had one about Bosnia. And, afterwards, as we trooped out, Jonathan gave me a note in response to mine:

  Poor Stephen! How cruel it seems that such venial sins of the flesh should have had such catastrophic consequences. He was such a good and decent man that I feel confident that the celestial trumpets will be sounding for him despite his temporary bad press on earth. I have written to his father and stepmother. When the pain recedes I feel sure they will recognise how much they have to be proud of in Stephen’s life and good works. But oh the pain, the tears and the waste of it! Requiescat in Pace. Thanks for writing. Perhaps to correspond is to heal for both of us.

  WEDNESDAY 9 FEBRUARY 1994

  It’s rolling on. The Ministry of Defence has to assert, ‘There are no security implications in the death of Stephen Milligan.’ The Sun has ‘gay soccer star Justin Fashanu’ claiming that Stephen introduced him to ‘two high-flying Tory MPs for three-in-a-bed sex romps’. I don’t believe it. That he subscribed to a dating agency called ‘Drawing Down the Moon’ is quite possible. I think he wanted a family life. He sat in our kitchen only a few Sundays ago saying how he envied us our marriage and our children. There are now pictures of Julie362 in all the papers. He was quite open (at least to me) about how he had used her at the time he applied for Eastleigh. The Associations prefer a married man, so Julie tagged along as Stephen’s girlfriend/fiancée. They both knew what they were doing – even if the Association officers didn’t. The games we have to play, the white lies we have to tell…

  Norman Fowler has just told me that when he and Gerry [Malone] arrived at Hammersmith Police Station on Monday night they had to join the queue at the desk, lining up with a prostitute, a vagrant and a busker – who favoured them with a song. Peter Luff363 is saying it’s like living in a Michael Dobbs novel. It’s more like a Joe Orton farce. Paul Channon says there’s a dangerous feeling in the air that reminds him of 1963, the time of Profumo, the end of Macmillan. I’ve just been listening to the poor PM on the radio dismissing the latest wave of leadership speculation as ‘empty chatterings’ (it’s just his sort of phrase, isn’t it?) and getting the line on Stephen quite wrong. He said Stephen must have been ‘pretty unhappy, pretty miserable’. I know he’ll have meant well, I know it was off the cuff, but it’s completely wrong. Stephen was gloriously happy. He’d had another good week in Parliament. He was looking forward to promotion. I imagine he went for his round of golf and came home and thought he’d play his little sex game as a weekend celebration – as a treat.

  FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 1994

  At 2.00 p.m. yesterday I was summoned to a meeting in the Lower Ministerial Conference Room. Jeremy Hanley and Douglas Hogg364 gave a briefing on Bosnia and the NATO decision to use bombing to secure Sarajevo. They put it over well, involved us and took questions, but there was something unreal about the session. It is serious – and they are serious – but somehow I find it difficult to take them seriously. Sitting there, watching the presentation, I felt like an extra in a ’50s comedy, with Jeremy as a tall Kenneth More and Douglas as a squat Richard Wattis. That said it was a worthwhile exercise. Giving the backbenchers advance warning of announcements, keeping them in the loop, always pays off. I am encouraging Stephen D. and Portillo to do much more of it. Michael [Portillo] shares my view of the special advisers: lack of focus, poor follow-through and slow turn-around.

  At dinner David Amess did sterling work paying court to Lord Hailsham,365 who joined our table. (Their Lordships who were previously MPs have free access to the Members’ Dining Room, Smoking Room and Tea Room, but we see them rarely.) Said QH: ‘The government is doing well in truth, and in the sight of God, but not, alas, in the view of the public.’

  At the ten o’clock vote Patrick Cormack rumbled towards me and asked me to do the obituary of Stephen for The House magazine. The whips seem to dismiss Cormack as a puffed-up pompous self-regarding old fart, but I have to say he has never been anything but amiable to me. Anyway, I’m pleased to have been asked. I have been reading Churchill’s Great Contemporaries again and I want somehow to incorporate Churchill’s brilliant description of F. E. Smith: ‘In every affair, public or personal, if he was with you on the Monday, you would find the same on the Wednesday, and on the Friday when things looked blue, he would still be marching forward with strong reinforcements. The opposite type of comrade or ally is so very common that I single this out as a magnificent characteristic. He loved pleasure; he was grateful for the gift of existence; he loved every day of his life. But no one could work harder. From his youth he worked with might and main. He had a singular power of concentration and five or six hours of thought upon a particular matter was always within his compass. He possessed what Napoleon praised, the mental power de fixer les objets longtemps sans être fatigué.’

  It’s absurd to make comparisons between two such different animals from two such different eras, especially when one reached the summit at about the age the other was just starting out, but several of the qualities Churchill found in F. E. were there in Stephen too: a delight in life, loyalty, persistence, perseverance and the po
wer of concentration.

  And speaking of loyalty, I’m scribbling this on the 8.50 to Preston, whither I’m bent to do my bit for Robert Atkins366 and the South Ribble Ladies. Robert’s a bit of a boom-boom merchant, but I imagine if he’s with you on Monday he’s with you on Friday too. I’m not sure he’s as much of a bosom-buddy of the PM’s as everyone says (he fans the myth a bit – ‘I call John every Sunday – we have a bit of a jaw – I tell him how it’s looking’) but I am always careful to treat him as if he is…

  MONDAY 14 FEBRUARY 1994

  The roller-coaster continues. Last week’s tragedy is followed by this week’s farce – or, as it turns out, this week’s light romantic comedy. Hartley Booth, Mrs T.’s soft-lipped wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-goose successor in Finchley, has resigned as Douglas Hogg’s PPS following the revelations of his infatuation with a 22-year-old art college model turned political researcher. Apparently there was no affair, merely a tendresse.

  Graham Riddick367 (admiring the newspaper photograph of the fair Emily): I’d have given her one, wouldn’t you?

  Bob Hughes: Hartley Booth is a gentleman.

  John Sykes:368 He’s a wanker.

  The Tea Room is not taking this latest calamity very seriously. Poor Hartley is a kindly, good-hearted fellow, never destined to go very far and now destined to go absolutely nowhere. He turns out to be forty-seven, a happily married father of three, a Methodist lay preacher, and – wait for it – a minor poet. On Saturday night he was denying any improper relationship, but then he was confronted with copies of poems he had sent to his inamorata – sentimental love poems to make the cheeks burn and the flesh creep. Poor sod. He is a nice man – and ridiculous. (He’s one of dozens here that I marvel at. How could he secure a safe seat? I realise now that I could have walked in anywhere. No wonder Seb and I were parcelled off to the marginals: they needed the rock-solid seats for the loons, goons and no-hopers. There are scores of colleagues, in every part of the House, which I would consider unelectable. Sitting ten feet away from me here in the Library is a Labour member who is, without question, completely gaga.)

  Never mind this latest bit of nonsense – never mind the Sunday Telegraph poll telling us 64 per cent of the electorate consider us ‘very sleazy and disreputable’ – the PM is letting it be known that he will be ploughing on with Back to Basics.

  Michèle is joining me for a Valentine’s Day supper in the Churchill Room. The harp music can be a bit lugubrious, but the food is surprisingly good and, as we’re on a running whip, there’s doesn’t seem much alternative.

  MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY 1994

  O joy, o rapture! Dennis Skinner has been caught with his trousers down and his muffler up. It turns out the Beast of Bolsover has a wife at home and a mistress in London. The lucky lady is his 47-year-old researcher Lois and the Beast of Legover (as we must now think of him) has been photographed, cap down over his eyes, woolly scarf up to his nose, in the bushes near their love-nest. The delight this has engendered at both ends of the Tea Room is palpable. Phillip Oppenheim was very funny: ‘It’s comforting to know that Dennis is human after all, but this does not reflect well on his researcher’s tastes.’

  I never knock him when I’m away from here, because the public admire him. He’s like Madam Speaker – you can’t knock her. The punters see them on the box and like their style – barmaid and barrow-boy. Yes, Dennis can be funny and effective, but his reputation as an outstanding House of Commons man is overdone. He is certainly in the Chamber all the time, but I’ve never seen him on any committees, serving on bills, doing the drudgery, and while once in a while he hits a bull’s-eye there’s a whining sourness to most of his rants. I admit I’m prejudiced. He – and Bob Cryer and, worst of all, Derek Enright369 – chip away at me, with nasty, narky jibes about the ETB grant – oh, it’s all part of the game I know, part of the rough and tumble – and there’s nothing I can do about it except patiently wait and watch for them to take a tumble. The whirligig of time … one down, two to go.

  TUESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 1994

  Extraordinary goings-on last night. We were besieged. The Palace of Westminster was surrounded by a marauding mob of gay rights protesters outraged at the failure of Edwina’s attempt to introduce an equal age of consent in homosexual relationships. The amendment would have legalised consenting sex at sixteen. It was defeated by 307 to 280. There were only a couple of dozen from our side who voted for sixteen – a mixture of libertarians and liberals and (who knows?) one or two (or three or four?) closet queens encouraged by the whips to vote with us and reduce the risk of being outed by Tatchell370 and his merry men. I missed the beginning of the debate – the living members of the Wednesday Club were raising their glasses in memory of Stephen [Milligan] and Judith [Chaplin] – but caught Tristan [Garel-Jones] who was wholly convincing (by all accounts the speech of the night) and Chris Smith371 who was overly sentimental. Choice quote of the night came from Sir Nicholas Fairbairn who probably scored a parliamentary first of some sort with his assertion, ‘Putting your penis into another man’s arsehole is a perverse act…’ When I saw him later he could barely stand. ‘I hear you were fairly forthright tonight,’ I said. His eyes were closed, his head was lolling, but he managed to hiss, ‘I thought getting back to basics was part of our policy.’

  When the result of the vote on consent at sixteen was announced – my ‘friend’ Mo Mowlam and my true friend Andrew Rowe372 (a really good man: why isn’t he in the government?) telling on our side; Bill Walker373 and Richard Page374 telling on theirs – there was pandemonium in the gallery and, within moments, word had reached the streets and there was a near-riot at the St Stephen’s entrance with protestors attempting to storm the building. We then went on to vote for the compromise: reducing the age from twenty-one to eighteen. That secured an easy passage, 427 to 162, and that was that. Hearing the place was surrounded and escape impossible, I adjourned to the Smoking Room for a drink. At about 11.30 I made my way out into Whitehall, calling ‘I voted for sixteen! I voted for sixteen!’ as the police let me through the gate. The rumble of the crowd turned instantly from jeers to cheers – loud and generous. They cleared a path for me. If they’d had them, I felt rose petals would have been strewn before me. It was very funny.

  The gays who have been to see me in Chester will be happy. Quite a few of the activists will feel ‘let down’. (That’s the way they always put it when I do something they hate.) I’ve tried to explain that I’m not advocating sex at sixteen for anyone. I want to decriminalise it, not promote it. Michèle thinks the age of consent should be fixed at sixty for all.

  THURSDAY 24 FEBRUARY 1994

  Went down to Woodmancote for Stephen’s funeral. Just a small party from Westminster: me and Michèle, Jonathan Aitken, Andrew Mackay (Stephen’s whip), Julie. It was a lovely service – ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want’, ‘He who would valiant be’, an extraordinary address by Stephen’s vicar from Hammersmith – and then we had to troop out into the graveyard for the interment. We were only a matter of thirty or forty feet from the hedge surrounding the churchyard and right along the lane, standing on stepladders to get a better view, were the press – photographers, cameramen by the dozen. All they wanted was a shot of Julie with a tear in her eye. They snapped away ferociously until they got it. Stephen was laid to rest to the sound of clicking cameras.

  At the eats afterwards Stephen’s father was so brave. He’s deaf so we shouted our condolences and he barked back. He played the perfect host and insisted that we be celebratory – thanking God for Stephen’s life and achievement. I can think of nothing worse than losing your child in your own lifetime – nothing.

  TUESDAY 1 MARCH 1994

  The advent of women priests has driven John Gummer to Rome.

  Peter Bottomley375 has just driven yours truly to Eltham – and back. We set off the moment the seven o’clock vote was through. We arrived at the hall about eight. I walked through the door, onto the platform, was introduced at once, spoke fo
r half an hour, waved at the applauding crowd and retreated to Peter’s car. We sped straight back. I’ve really no idea where I’ve been or what I said, but as Virginia’s coming all the way to Chester on Friday I didn’t feel I could duck out. I had to get back by nine because, as ever, I’m on the Finance Bill and, as ever, divisions are ‘imminent’. Peter is likeable but definitely in some difficult-to-specify-way odd. He has bees in his bonnet. We all care about road safety, but he can talk about it for hours without pause. He said he’d asked Mrs T. to bring his ministerial career to an end because you cannot have two high-fliers in one family and it had to be Virginia.

  I am struggling with a paper the Treasury has prepared for No. 10. The PM asked us to come up with a rebuttal of Harriet Harpie’s assertion that the 1993 Budgets had put up the average tax bill by £22.32 a week. The excellent Mridul Hegde has produced ten pages of paperwork, blessed by Sir T. Burns, Culpin et al,376 that does exactly that – I think. That’s the problem. Mridul says £22.32 is misleading and offers several alternatives – £9.45, £11, £15.65 – each of which can be justified in different ways, if you read, understand and absorb the small print. The challenge is to settle on one figure that the PM can use and justify in a couple of phrases, and that the Chancellor can ram home every time he opens his mouth. Aye, there’s the rub. KC sees all this ‘presentational nonsense’ as a waste of time. Getting him to agree a coordinated line, getting him to marshal his ministers to go out and preach it, simply isn’t his style. Meanwhile, out there in voter-land, the punters think taxes have gone up by £22 a week and the poor are getting poorer simply because that’s what Harriet and Gordon Brown tell them morning, noon and night.