Breaking the Code

by Gyles Brandreth

  Hezza was on the radio just now and magnificent – but it’s an impossible wicket and the whole thing’s a ghastly nightmare. Yesterday Mawhinney wheeled out Margaret Thatcher to bash Blair for toadying to the unions – she’s clearly barking, but she’s undeniably a superstar, and it was a coup, and it should have, and would have, led the news, and dominated the front pages, but for Tim Smith. Today Gumdrops and the Chancellor are launching our Green manifesto, but thanks to Piers and his teenage sweetheart we can forget it.

  It’s beyond belief really. The poor PM will be in despair, but at least we have the Easter weekend coming up: then on Tuesday we can pretend the past fortnight hasn’t happened and have a go at starting all over again. (Actually, if Neil’s going to go eventually – and when the pack want blood they usually get it – he ought to go now or we’ll have ‘sleaze’ dogging us all the way …)

  GOOD FRIDAY, 28 MARCH 1997

  The nearest the Today programme gets to acknowledging Good Friday seems to be an item about a Finn who has rerecorded the hits of Elvis Presley in Latin and sent a copy to the Vatican. At the bus stop outside the church I see a respectable-looking, elderly lady engrossed in her morning newspaper. The Good Friday headline: ‘I’M SO VERY VERY HORNY’. This is the passion in which the nation is enthralled this Holy Week.

  Piers is hanging on. Neil is hanging on. Michael Brown is now under threat. I like Michael: he’s a jolly, bouncy Tigger, who fell from grace when the tabloids discovered he’d taken a young man on holiday to the Caribbean… He also accepted £6,000 from Ian Greer Associates for introducing US Tobacco to IGA and campaigning against a ban on Skoal Bandits, a chewing tobacco linked with mouth cancer, and didn’t declare the payment in the Register of Members’ Interests because he didn’t think it necessary. Downey is still to bring in his verdict: meanwhile a friendly Cleethorpes councillor is accusing poor Michael of behaving in an ‘unethical and dishonourable’ way.

  So what do we reckon: three down and three to go? Of course, we haven’t had the Sundays yet.

  SATURDAY 29 MARCH 1997

  ‘THIRTY-NINE DIE IN MASS SUICIDE.’ Surprisingly, this turns out not to be the campaign team at Central Office, but a bunch of UFO nuts in San Diego. Here on Planet Election ’97, it is the Prime Minister’s fifty-fourth birthday, and it would be difficult to imagine a worse one. In many ways, the farce is turning to tragedy. Allan Stewart has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Paisley and I’ve just been talking to an alarmingly volatile Christine Hamilton:

  The reptiles are back in force. We’ve been holed up here for three days. I’ve just been out and screamed at them ‘Get off my property. This is private property. Get off!’ I know it doesn’t help, but we’re at the end of our tethers. The party’s got to back us all the way. It’s going to, isn’t it? If the party lets us down now, I’m warning you … our book’ll be out before polling day … and we’ve got a thing or two to say about leadership … Heseltine should swing for what he said about Piers … If Neil goes down the pan … you haven’t heard anything yet… If Central Office start putting on any pressure, Neil can always stand as an Independent Conservative … It’s all such a nightmare.

  They’re in a bad way. Understandably.

  Annette Dorrell has had her baby: a 10 lb 1 oz boy ten days overdue. Michèle said: ‘Poor Annette!’

  EASTER DAY, 30 MARCH 1997

  I am feeling distinctly woozy. The Barlows [Stephen Barlow and Joanna Lumley] took us to Bibendum where Jo spoonfed me my very first oyster – ‘49-year-old has taste sensation: “A mouthful of the blue lagoon” he says’ – and Stevie lavished extravagant wines upon us: champagne sec, pre-pre-prandial; champagne demi-sec, pre-prandial (‘we’re building now’); Martini (‘straight up with a twist’), to brace us while we order; something Alsatian and sensational, for the starters; a red Burgundy and brilliant, with the lamb; a desert wine with a difference (‘not too sweet: we need to complement the chocolate truffles’) … a happy-happy evening that had us teetering into the street a little after one. Twelve hours later and I’m teetering still.

  Meanwhile, the Tory Party is tottering. Are we on the brink of meltdown? The overnight sensation has been the resignation of Micky Hirst651 as chairman of the party in Scotland. He has gone with commendable speed in anticipation of the Glasgow Sunday Mail’s claim that he has admitted to ‘a series of homosexual encounters’. Apparently Paul Martin, a former personal assistant to Hirst, was ‘said to have boasted openly’ that they were lovers. Is this the same Paul Martin whose ‘friend’ was also said to be the ‘friend’ of Michael Brown when he resigned? It’s going to get to worse.

  It has to get worse because Central Office have briefed that Major and Mawhinney want Merchant and Hamilton out – and they won’t go! The Beckenham crowd have backed Piers 43 to 3, so as far as Piers is concerned that’s that. If the Duke of Wellington and Lloyd George and Steve Norris can get away with wholescale philandering, why should a hapless young man entrapped by The Sun have to fall on his sword? There was no affair: just a moment of folly in the park.

  And Neil, we know, is digging in. He won’t like the line in the Sundays: ‘Major has also withdrawn his support for Neil Hamilton…. He wants both Hamilton and Merchant to go before he launches the Tory manifesto on Wednesday.’ Teddy Taylor, John Townend, Jim Spicer have all been on the radio just now urging Neil to put party before self, ‘however unjust, however unfair’. Judging from my conversation with Christine, they’re likely to be disappointed.

  When I spoke to Alastair [Goodlad, the Chief Whip] yesterday I told him I was planning to go down to the river to watch the boat race. ‘You couldn’t contrive to rescue a couple of drowning oarsman, could you? Create a bit of a diversion?’

  ‘What if I have to give them the kiss of life?’

  ‘Oh God! … Happy Easter.’

  EASTER MONDAY, 31 MARCH 1997

  The signals are confused. This morning’s Telegraph is unequivocal: ‘Mr Major is determined that Mr Hamilton, the MP for Tatton, has to go before the Conservative manifesto launch on Wednesday. One senior minister said: “It is time to do the decent thing – accept a revolver and a bottle of whisky and get it over with.”’

  But the radio news takes a very different line: ‘Conservative Party sources confirm that it is up to local associations to decide who their candidates will be…’ It seems that in the dark watches of the night we’ve changed tack!

  Neil calls. He’s amazingly collected. And cool. And funny. Michèle tells him he and Christine looked very pulled together on their way to church.

  ‘Yes,’ says Neil, chortling,

  On the way in I had to resist the temptation to deliver my Paschal sermon: ‘The message of Easter is that crucifixion is quickly followed by resurrection!’ On the way out I did mention to a couple of the reptiles that we’d been praying for the souls of the damned.

  He was as resolute as ever:

  I’ve parked my tanks on the PM’s lawn. I spoke to Mawhinney and Lewington yesterday and explained that there’s no way I’m going to be moved. I like Lewington, but he’s really not up to it. He’s certainly no match for Mandelson when it comes to the black arts. Mandelson is very clever, and very nasty. But he may have overplayed his hand. The media don’t like him. We should be taking the high moral ground now. We need someone from our side on the Today programme saying ‘So Labour don’t believe in the principle of innocent-till-proved-guilty any more?’ I tried to speak to the Prime Minister last night, but I was told he’d gone to bed. Well, it was 10.15 p.m. I imagine he’s one of the Ovaltinies, don’t you?

  MONDAY 7 APRIL 1997

  All the front pages boast a double whammy of absurdity: Elton John, pomaded and peruqued, a perfect fright in silver and white, arriving for his fiftieth birthday fancy dress party, and the BBC’s war correspondent, another fright in white, offering himself up as the anti-corruption candidate in Tatton!652 I’m sure both gentlemen will have thought it a fun idea at the time – but I imagine,
as the night wore on, Elton wearied of those high heels and that two-foot confection of curls (topped with a bespangled ship in full sail!) and I’m certain that Bell will rue his ill-judged foray into the political arena before the week is out. He says he expects his career as a candidate to be the shortest on record because he hopes and expects Mr Hamilton to stand down. He has underestimated Mr Hamilton…

  And Mrs Hamilton! I have just been listening to her on the radio – a galleon in full sail: magnificent. She’s revving up to manic overdrive, but she wasn’t over the top – yet. (With Bell I imagine it’s not so much mania as a delayed mid-life crisis worsened by vanity, a misplaced sense of self-importance, and a sad touch of the poor-me’s: ‘the BBC don’t value/use/understand me any longer’).

  I called Christine and left a congratulatory message on the machine. I called Joanna to tell her how funny (and seductive) she was on Clive James. When Stephen [Dorrell] called he sounded a bit bleak.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘It isn’t. I’m treading water. Health isn’t an issue, which is good, but Central Office isn’t using me, which is frustrating. It’s Hezza all the way. And William.’

  Yes, and Master Hague is proving very effective.

  TUESDAY 8 APRIL 1997

  At 6.00 a.m. we left London.

  At 11.00 a.m. we were on parade outside the Chester office. At quarter past, on the dot, the Foreign Secretary’s limo rolled up. Malcolm was excellent – lots of crinkly charm and beady-eyed interest. Happily we’d planned a proper programme for him and we had a good turn-out, so there were no longueurs and a relative sense that something worthwhile was accomplished. These ministerial visits can be hell: you’re advised that a VIP is on his way, it’s an honour and a treat and all that, but what on earth are you going to do with him for three hours? We’ll have this problem with Tony Newton, one of the loveliest human beings on the planet and one of the most effective members of HMG, but unknown, absolutely utterly unknown to the man or woman in the street.

  We had a fair press showing – all the local photographers plus a couple of radio stations. The cow from the BBC began by saying, ‘You’ll understand that legally we’re not allowed to mention Mr Brandreth by name’ and then spent most of the interview talking about Messrs Hamilton and Bell. I said, ‘Why can you mention the candidates in Tatton by name, but not the candidates in Chester?’ She didn’t have an answer.

  If I’d been desperate to win I’d have found it galling how much of Malcolm’s time in my patch was being taken up with the sleaze saga from the other end of the county. As it was, I was simply content that the Foreign Secretary should have an audience and not feel his journey had been wasted. A couple of weeks ago the Chancellor told me he spent seven hours travelling to and from the West Country to talk to one radio station and forty ageing activists in a dismal village hall … It happens all the time. We avoided it by whisking Malcolm round North West Securities and dragooning a hundred (and more) of our faithful to the Club for a sandwich lunch and questions. Having stifled yawns with the hacks and in the car and on the NWS tour, he summoned up the required energy like a trouper and gave a full-blown stump speech, all stops out. Good jokes, good points, good man. He’s been an MP for twenty-four years, a minister since ’79, but clearly he’s still ready for more.

  At 7.00 p.m. we went over to the hall for the adoption meeting. There was a full house, generous, supportive, willing us to win. The faces were all familiar. Of course they were. They are exactly the same faces as gazed up at me five years ago at my last adoption. That’s our problem in a nutshell: the stalwarts are still there, they’re just five years older. Many of my best people are now in their eighties and these are the good folk we call ‘activists’!

  We got home by ten and turned on the box for news of Cheshire’s other adoption meeting. Neil secured the necessary endorsement: 182 in favour, thirty-five against, four official abstentions and sixty-one sitting on their hands. The media scrum outside the Dixon Arms was wholly predictable. Christine, dismissing a hack wanting Neil to speak into his tape recorder: ‘We do not take orders from The Observer.’ Neil: ‘I feel like Liam Gallagher.’ (He cannot resist being funny: it was his joke about the wretched biscuit that really got up the PM’s nose and precipitated his forced resignation.)

  The most extraordinary feature of the Hamiltons’ amazing day was the Duel of Knutsford Heath. Neil and Christine, hand in hand, turned up at Martin Bell’s open-air press conference and photo call. With a steely sang-froid that would have done Joan of Arc proud, they marched resolutely towards Bell and the surrounding media posse. They pushed their way through and Neil extended his hand. Bell took it. Neil introduced Christine.

  ‘Do you accept that my husband is innocent?’

  Bell: ‘I don’t know. I am standing because a lot of local people have asked me…’

  Christine (lip curling à la Dame Edna): ‘I thought it was at a dinner party – in London…’

  Bell: ‘There is a question of trust. I cannot judge on questions of innocence until all the facts are made known.’

  Portillo, when he’s nervous/stressed/on the ropes, has a problem controlling his voice: the pitch alters, an odd seal-like bray brakes in. Neil, with perfect breath control, in his usual light tone, calmly enquired: ‘Are you prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt?’

  Bell (immediately, without thinking): ‘Absolutely.’

  Neil had got him! Christine bleated again about innocence, but Neil knew it was enough. He was off – and he’d scored. He knew it. We knew it. Bell knew it too: ‘My first mistake was not bringing my flak jacket.’

  WEDNESDAY 9 APRIL 1997

  The first day of the Brandreth campaign. There’s a set pattern to the next twenty-one days: a press conference every morning at nine, two hours walking the streets in one part of the constituency, another two hours in a different part (including a pub lunch), a break for an hour at home (to deal with correspondence, conceive and write tomorrow’s press release, call those who’ve called and have to be called back), two more hours in a third area, another break, then the evening round – tonight it’s the Business Club drinks, the YCs and then a gentle grilling at the hands of the Chester Branch of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (three turn up and two of them turn out not to be constituents). At least by planning my own diary I’ve been able to avoid the things I hate – the railway station at dawn, bearding half-awake commuters; primary school gates as the mums deposit their charges and try to race their pushchairs around and past you without catching your eye; the postal sorting office at 5.00 a.m. when they’ve been warned you’re coming and have hoisted the hostile posters in readiness.

  The straightforward street-walking and door-knocking I rather like – especially on a day like today when the sun shines brilliantly and you feel that a few weeks of this and you might even lose a couple of pounds. Sir Fergus and Lady Montgomery join us on the campaign trail. He’s a sweetie, a cherubic seventy-one, standing down, as much in love with a certain brand of show business (I first met him at Frankie Howerd’s memorial service) as with politics. Joyce [Lady Montgomery] had the solution to Tatton: Neil should have stepped aside and let Fergus stand on 1 May on the understanding that Fergus would resign as soon as Neil is cleared by Downey.

  We lunched at the Ring-of-Bells in Christleton. The association chairman’s wife is in charge of provisions and she’s toured all the pubs we’ll be visiting collecting the menus so that we can pre-order. I tell her she belongs to the Nick Soames school of canvassing: ‘If you have taken a morale bash in the morning, it is important to have a good lunch. It makes you feel a lot better.’ (I don’t share with her my favourite Soames story. A former girlfriend is asked what it’s like being made love to by Soames … ‘Like having a large wardrobe fall on top of you with the key still in the lock.’)

  THURSDAY 10 APRIL 1997

  ‘Labour poll lead slashed by the Tories.’ That’s the headline. According to MORI, we’re up six
points since last week. I must say it doesn’t feel too bad out there …

  The real front page treat in The Times, however, is the picture adjacent to the story: a delightful study of Melissa Bell, 24-year-old blonde bombshell daughter of the old fool. She’s gloriously photogenic and looks intelligent too. We’ll be seeing more of Melissa for sure. We’re seeing plenty of Tiger Christine too. Lynda Lee-Potter: ‘If there’d been more women like Christine Hamilton we wouldn’t have lost the Empire…’

  It’s Ma’s eighty-third birthday and I remember to call. I’m pleased. She’s pleased – and sounds in cracking form. I remember too to turn up at the Town Hall to register as a candidate and hand over my £500 deposit. I discover we’re getting a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate. I seem to recall that last time the Loonies endorsed me and didn’t put up a candidate of their own – so perhaps this is progress… How many votes do they take and from whom?

  FRIDAY 11 APRIL 1997

  Morning with a Duchess, afternoon at the sewage works, evening ploughing through six courses at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Such is the candidate’s lot.