Breaking the Code

by Gyles Brandreth

  LATER

  What larks! Sandra Howard has written to Sarah Thurnham: ‘It’s not an easy thing to write and Michael has no idea that I’m writing (and trying to defend the government and the party!), but he and I have such a bottomless well of admiration for you both and feel so desolate that you should have felt so badly as to not be able to stay loyal to a great and good party – and an honest and caring party at heart.’ This letter, sent on Saturday, has come to light because Thurnham’s secretary ‘inadvertently’ faxed it to the local newspaper!

  The Chief’s initial reaction was a spluttering ‘Good God! What next?’ but the office view now seems to be that once we’ve weathered the embarrassing headlines – ‘Home Secretary’s “admiration” for defecting MP’ etc. – overtures like this may help bring Peter back into the fold. We all know that Peter is a self-indulgent tosser, but the policy is to treat him quite normally, as though he is very much still ‘one of us’.

  SUNDAY 3 MARCH 1996

  M says Simon is much weaker, sleeping most of the time, can’t really talk but gives a wan little smile when you peer into his face. It is so wretched.

  I had a two-and-a-half-hour surgery. I had to keep shifting in my chair and jabbing my fingernails into the palm of my hand to stay awake. It’s like going to the cinema or the theatre now – just suddenly sitting still in one warm place and I begin to nod off. It was the usual mixture: housing, CSA, difficult neighbours, ‘The school won’t do anything for Darren – they think he’s thick, but it’s dyslexia.’ The only diversion was to have two transvestites on the trot – except they were both so pathetic. One of them has been hoping for a sex-change operation for nearly thirty years. He/she comes to see me every six weeks or so, looking like a tragic drag queen, awful white make-up over his stubble. This time he brought his mum with him. She must have been seventy, tiny, dotty, wearing a little fur hat, loaded down with carrier bags. She kept repeating, ‘If that’s what he wants, let him have it, let him have it.’

  The only bit of light relief on the radar screen is moon-faced Ron Davies,549 shadow Secretary of State for Wales, who has marked St David’s Day with a delightfully loopy attack on Prince Charles. Ron says that a man who talks to vegetables, kills animals for pleasure and betrays his wife isn’t fit to be king. We’re jumping up and down, calling for Ron’s resignation, but of course we don’t really want him to go. We want him to hang around as long as possible: we can have a lot more fun with this boyo before we’re through.

  TUESDAY 5 MARCH 1996

  I am, of course, an idiot. We know that. I thought I could ‘contain’ David Ashby. I thought that he liked and trusted me and that I had the measure of the man. Apparently not. We suffered our first defeat on the Housing Bill today because Ashby voted with the opposition. I should have seen it coming. Glenda [Jackson], looking more sour-faced than ever, tabled an amendment that would give homosexuals living in council or housing association property the right to remain in the property if their partner dies. I’m quite sympathetic to the amendment, so is David Curry, but Gummer is dead against it so there we are. Ashby told me last night that he felt he would have to vote with Glenda. I told him that I didn’t expect us to reach the amendment till Thursday (a lie) and that I hoped he’d think it over (true). I also said, quite casually, that I had a spare ‘pair’ to offer him today (another lie) so that if he wanted to have the day off he could. He said he would. I thought my scheme had worked, but this morning, just as we were reaching the amendment, in he toddled.

  ‘The amendment’s come up earlier than you expected,’ he whispered to me as he sat down behind me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pathetically, ‘we’re rattling along nicely now.’

  ‘I’m going to have to vote with Glenda, you know.’

  I pleaded with him to abstain. I said, ‘You’re meeting with your Association on Friday. You want their support. This isn’t the week to vote against the government.’

  He wouldn’t be persuaded. He made a long, rambling, emotional speech about a gay friend of his who had lost his partner. He told the story with tears in his eyes, voice quavering. He was doing this for him. The moment the damage was done, from the booth just outside the committee room I paged the Deputy, then I telephoned Gummer. He wants us to reverse it on the floor of the House. I’m not sure we can. Or should.

  Gentle ribbing in the office followed: ‘Your friend Mr Ashby seems to have let you down. It was your idea to have him on the committee, wasn’t it?’

  I had to put a report in the book, but I couldn’t get into the wretched safe to get a book to write in. The safe is vast and ancient. We can all remember the combination – the digits from the date of the PM’s birthday – but only Tim Wood seems to have the knack of turning the dial, so if he isn’t around we can’t get into the bloody thing.

  THURSDAY 7 MARCH 1996

  Simon died last night. He was my oldest and best friend.

  FRIDAY 8 MARCH 1996

  Simon gets a wonderful press. He claimed he never read his notices, but I think he’d have been pleased with these. It is my forty-eighth birthday. Ma and Gin joined me and Michèle for lunch in the Stranger’s Dining Room. It was a bit bleak. I couldn’t concentrate. Last night we had the whips’ dinner. I wasn’t in the mood, but I felt obliged to go. Actually, I was probably pleased to have the distraction and, at least, by being subdued I managed to avoid saying anything I might live to regret. It’s rather an odd lads’ night out really. Because we’re male, because this is the whips’ letting their hair down, we somehow deliberately coarsen ourselves for the evening, use bad language when we wouldn’t normally, give the gathering an artificial ‘stag night’ feel. It was the mixture as before: Italian food, much wine, banter and silly games, plus Greg’s video – a curate’s egg of a home movie, Greg’s Guide to How to Be a Whip into which (incredibly) he’d managed to incorporate a clip from my Birdseye Waffle commercial of six years ago. He works hard – and successfully – at forging us into a cohesive and contented group. We do feel bonded. There is a freemasonry between us.

  SUNDAY 10 MARCH 1996

  Drove to Honington for Simon’s funeral. We arrived at the same time as the Sindens. They were outside the church reading the cards on the flowers. Jeremy is dying too.550 He was so brave and jolly and sweet about Simon it was quite heartbreaking. I read the lesson without tears or a crack in my voice – which is really all I wanted to achieve. The church is small and the nave quite narrow and when I walked back to my pew I somehow brushed the coffin – and thought immediately of Pa. When he died I remember my mother stroking his coffin as it was carried into the church. She stroked it so tenderly. I’ve had that picture in my head all day.

  MONDAY 11 MARCH 1996

  Lunch with the PM at No. 10. We’re back in shambles-ville. He was shaking his head wearily and muttering about the sceptics being ‘up to their tricks again’, but if he lacks the authority to command his own Cabinet it’s not altogether surprising he can’t control the lower ranks. There’s no doubt the PM wants to promise a referendum on monetary union, but because Ken won’t wear it he daren’t. Listening to him hemming and hawing (oh so reasonably) it’s clear as crystal we’re going to have weeks of debilitating shilly-shallying on this, weeks of weak government, and then, when the damage is done, we’ll concede that we’re going to have a referendum after all.

  Of course, the poor man, who was having one of his looking grey-as-slate days, feels boxed in whichever way he turns. We had some deregulating measure in the pipeline – to take ‘the burdens of red tape off small businesses’ by taking away a raft of employment rights from the workers – but he says we’re going to have to abandon it because we now realise we won’t be able to push it through. As usual, we’ve had the worst of both worlds. We’ve floated the idea, seen the row looming and retreated.

  We’re back to the old Tea Room talk: the leadership is decent but weak, roll on defeat and let’s get a new leader. Chris Patten is this week’s pick of the left – bu
t, as Stephen points out, it won’t be him since he won’t be an MP. The new flavour of the hour on the right is Michael Forsyth, but, given his majority, post-election he won’t be an MP either.

  The above I did not discuss with the PM. I assume he knows it, though this is an area where (so far as I can tell) the Whips’ Office let him down. If Ottoway knows what Heseltine is really thinking about his medium-term prospects he’s not reporting it in the book. If Portillo is plotting and one of our number knows it, he’s not saying. I certainly don’t relay the full tenor of my weekly meetings with Dorrell and Finkelstein. The PM believes we’re onto a winner with the notion of a grammar school in every town. It’s his current ‘Big Idea’. He thinks Gillian [Shephard] is dragging her feet on it – which she is, and understandably, because in principle the idea may be appealing, but it’s fraught with difficulties. There’s certainly no lusting for a grammar school in Chester – from anyone. I did not say this to the boss because I felt this wasn’t a day for negative contributions. I kept my small talk to Will Carling who is stepping down as the England captain for ‘rugby reasons’, ‘nothing to do’ with his personal life.

  I said, ‘Carling says he’s going “on his own terms”.’

  The PM grinned (for about the only time today), ‘Yes, that’s the way to do it.’

  WEDNESDAY 13 MARCH 1996

  We were halfway through the morning meeting when Murdo came into the room, ‘We’re getting reports, Chief, of a terrible tragedy in Scotland. A gunman appears to have got into a school and murdered a large number of children.’ We didn’t know how to react, so we murmured, tut-tutted, shook our heads for a moment and then carried on. At 12 noon Bowen got up to open the champagne and I trooped round the table with the silver goblets. Somebody should have said, ‘Under the circumstances I’m not sure this is appropriate’, but nobody did, so it was the ritual as usual, champagne on the carpet and all.

  THURSDAY 14 MARCH 1996

  We have just had the statement on Dunblane. The horror of what happened is unbearable: sixteen children and their teacher murdered in cold blood by a man called Thomas Hamilton, a former Scout leader who had some sort of grudge against the parents at the school. Michael Forsyth went up yesterday with George Robertson.551 It’s in Michael’s constituency; he’d actually met the man, he’d been to see him at his surgery. Michael said there was nothing about him that would have given you an inkling that he was capable of so terrible an act. Michael’s statement was perfectly judged. It was clear, simply expressed, softly spoken, exactly right. He was deeply impressive – as was Robertson.

  As, indeed, in a quite different way, was Ian Paisley. He rose, like an Old Testament prophet, and his voice rumbled round the Chamber. Customarily, when we hear him he’s ranting. Today it was Paisley the preacher (biblical texts and all) and you could see how he has built up his following. Everyone got it right really, except – dare I say it? – poor Nicholas Winterton. The sentiment was fine – ‘Isn’t it wonderful how the love of little children has brought the House together? I pray that it will do so more often’ – but there’s something about the jerky way he barks out the words – getting all the emphases wrong – that always ruins it. And there’s a sense too that he says what he says not just because he cares, but because he wants to be in the spotlight. Today wasn’t a day for wanting to be in the spotlight.

  FRIDAY 15 MARCH 1996

  We’re flying to Manchester. Last night we had M’s birthday supper at San Remo, a little Italian restaurant at the top of Castelnau by the Bridge. It was just the two of us, a tiny candle-lit table in the corner. It was like going back twenty-five years. The candle should really have been stuck in a basket-clad Chianti bottle. We had moules in a cream and white wine sauce and I don’t think I have enjoyed a meal more ever. The whole meal cost less than half a starter at Le Manoir. ‘This is what we like, isn’t it?’ said M. It is.

  What she doesn’t like is what we’re embarking on now – a full ‘constituency weekend’, lunch with the bishop, the Ellesmere Port Conservative Association dinner, the Cheshire Yeomanry en fete at the Town Hall. She doesn’t dislike it – she says all the individual elements are fine (and she’s brilliant at them) – it’s just not what she wants to be doing for the next twenty years. Politics is a way of life and not one she enjoys. ‘You’re out five nights a week, sometimes six. The only night we know we’ll have together is Sunday and then you’re so shattered all you do is fall asleep in front of the box.’ It’s true. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m reconciled to losing my seat. The other, of course, is that while government is exciting (I am loving the Whips’ Office), being a backbencher is a pretty thankless occupation – the status has been tarnished, the money’s derisory, the potential for influence pitifully slight. We have our AGM tonight and I’m going to be readopted as our candidate, nem. con. I shall fight the good fight with complete commitment, but when I lose I shall be able to do so with a good grace because it’s certainly what M wants and it’s sort-of what I want. I shall miss the thrill of government and the camaraderie of the House. Clearly what I need is the House of Lords!

  M is very funny. Driving to the airport (we get a free parking space, courtesy BAA) I said, ‘But you’ve got to admit we’ve met some interesting people.’

  ‘You’ve met some interesting people,’ she squawked, ‘What have I met? Boring men who only want to hear how wonderful they are and ghastly women who ask, “What’s he really like? Do you knit his jumpers?”’

  I think she should write a novel about constituency life. You could have the Bishop and the Dean at the heart of the story. They’re both good people (we really like them, admire them, enjoy their company) but they are ripe for literary exploitation. The Bishop552 is tall, thin, balding, set to retire, ready to retire, slightly disappointed. A hymn-composing evangelical who kindly gave us a copy of his sex manual (dedicated to his wife Myrtle), he and the Dean (stocky, golden head of hair, port-coloured face) do not see eye to eye. At all. I suspect the Dean is at fault here, but, poor man, he has had quite a cross to bear: a brilliant, mad, alcoholic wife. We used to see her fairly regularly, but the ‘embarrassing moments’ became ever more frequent. When the Queen came to the Cathedral, the Dean’s wife circled round her muttering like a demented witch.

  It was agony.

  MONDAY 18 MARCH 1996

  Something’s up. I’m not sure what. I’ve just seen the unflappable Roger Knapman553 looking almost wild-eyed. I said, ‘How are you?’ He mumbled and began gathering up papers from his desk. I said, ‘Anything serious?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Deadly serious. For the government, for all of us. It could be devastating.’

  WEDNESDAY 20 MARCH 1996

  Stephen cancelled breakfast and, last night, I stood in for him at the United & Cecil Club dinner. All yesterday, all this morning he worked on his BSE statement.554 He was excited in anticipation of it and exhilarated at the way it went. He did well: he was clear, moderate, totally on top of the brief, and managed to walk the wire, getting the facts out into the open asap while trying hard not to sound alarmist. But I was a little alarmed to see the adrenalin flowing at quite such a pace. Clearly he feels this is going to do him a lot of good, plenty of exposure, leading from the front, proof that he can handle a delicate issue with a sure touch. He wants to do all the broadcasts, be seen in the front line. When I said, ‘Are you sure?’ he looked at me as though I was quite barmy. I persisted, ‘I just don’t see this as a winner. You’ve done the responsible thing today, getting it out into the open. Now lie low. Let Hoggie get the flak from the farmers.’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘No, no, no, I’ve got to run with this one. It’s important.’

  Harriet [Harman, shadow Health Secretary] was at her worst. Whining, whingeing, scare-mongering. I imagine she’ll have done herself a lot of harm. If ever she gets into government she’ll be a disaster.

  We finished early. I was home by nine. Supper in the kitchen with M and Jo [Lumley]. Pasta and peppers – o
f course. M doesn’t eat meat and Jo’s virtually a vegan. They think we’ve known about the dangers of BSE for years and we’ve been keeping quiet because we don’t want to upset the farmers.

  WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH 1996

  This morning we trooped through from No. 12 to No. 10 to have our picture taken with the PM. He was at his twitchiest. And with cause. The handling of the beef crisis is going from bad to worse. Our beef is now banned around the world. The British beef market has collapsed. And no one in government – least of all the Agriculture Minister – seems to have a clear idea what to do.

  According to Roger [Knapman], last week we were considering slaughtering all eleven million cattle in the country; this week it’s four million. We’re saying ‘beef is safe’ but because nobody believes us we’re going to have to slaughter half the cattle in the kingdom at a cost to the taxpayer of something around £6 billion! This could be announced any minute now – except we’re not sure how practical it is. Who will do the slaughtering? How many years will it take? How do we dispose of the carcasses? Nobody knows! The PM is ‘impatient’. Hogg is evidently all over the place. Roger describes the ministerial meetings quite dispassionately, he adds no ‘colour’, but his unvarnished literal account makes it plain it’s chaos. Hogg hasn’t got a grip, Angela Browning (the PUSS) appears to be the best of the bunch, but the back-up from the civil servants is woeful. Stephen (who is still high on it all) was so eager to rush out his statement they clearly hadn’t had time to think through the consequences. And they had no contingency plans. It’s beyond belief. Now we’re simply reacting to events, making it up as we go along.