An Unexpected MP

by Jerry Hayes

Gerry was a prodigious drinker. He was rarely seen without an industrial-sized gin and tonic in his hand. When on the terrace he would wave to passing pleasure boats, raising his glass with the salute ‘It’s all free.’ Sadly, it wasn’t.

  If he wasn’t on the terrace he could be seen with his long-suffering armed detective, chugging along the Thames in his little boat, gin and tonic in hand, entreating us to join him. The trouble is that Gerry tried to insist that his detective match him drink for drink. As the man was packing a weapon he politely declined, but agreed to join him drink for drink with tonic water. A few weeks later he was rushed to hospital. It took a while for the consultants to work out what was wrong. It was an unusual condition: quinine poisoning as a result of an overdose of tonic water. Well, at least he would never suffer from malaria.

  Gerry was the father-in-law of broadcaster Vincent Hanna, who sadly died before him. I once appeared on his late-night TV show just before the end of the 1992 general election. It was an interesting panel: Ben Elton, Tim Rice, Austin Mitchell and me. Austin and I were so exhausted from campaigning that we spent the first five minutes on air fast asleep. We awoke to the horror of Vincent announcing to the viewers that his guests were going to sing a song. And we did. It was all very odd.

  But not as odd as the week before, when I appeared on a popular yoof programme called The Word, which had become notorious for the outrageous antics of its presenter, Terry Christian. I suspect that I was asked because of an appearance months before on a dreadful little show when I’d become really exasperated by a ghastly presenter trying to make a name for himself by being rude to politicians. After about five minutes of cringe-making questions I’d finally been asked, ‘And what’s the worst sexual experience you’ve ever had?’

  My reply, not exactly Tolstoy, shut the little creep up.

  ‘Your mother.’

  The Word thought that they would be very clever and set up me and controversial Tottenham MP Bernie Grant with a Generation Game conveyor belt with everyday items on it for us to price. There was no problem until it came to a packet of condoms. I hadn’t a clue. So I pleaded ignorance, saying that I only bought my condoms by the gross and with spikes on. That at least made the hooched-up teenage audience less likely to brain me.

  But back to the big beasts. One of my first excursions into the Members’ dining room was a chance encounter with the Reverend Ian Paisley. I saw him sitting on his own, so I thought I’d be polite, and plonked myself down. And being even more polite, I asked if he’d care to share a bottle of wine.

  Not terribly bright. I learned that night that the DUP don’t approve of booze.

  In his drinking days, the Press Association’s legendary Chris Moncrieff went to interview the big man. Clearly he smelt like a Guinness brewery. Paisley exploded, refusing to be interviewed by a man who had ‘the devil’s buttermilk on his breath’.

  However, a few years later me and an Ulster Unionist MP decided to set the big man up. When dining together we provided him with a riddle, with the bet that in the unlikely event of him cracking it we would buy him the most expensive pudding on the Commons menu. Of course we set the riddle ridiculously easy so he couldn’t lose. The prize pudding duly arrived and the big man got stuck in. About five minutes into his pud, my chum, in fits of giggles, sniffed the air.

  ‘Ian, I can smell the devil’s buttermilk on your breath.’

  Then I got a fit of the giggles. Then we had to explain that the pudding that he had won was actually laced with about three liqueurs.

  We looked apprehensively at the big man, but the expected explosion never came. Just a chuckle and then a booming laugh. But he never finished his pudding. I once asked him if he would ever pray for me, as I was a Catholic.

  ‘Certainly. But not when you’re dead.’

  With Paisley I got away with just a polite smile every time we met, despite the fact that I had enough devil’s buttermilk in me to make a rather large Satanic cheese. He probably wouldn’t get on terribly well with Mike Burns, who was the larger-than-life political editor of Irish television, RTÉ. I am convinced that the man could walk on water (provided it was well diluted with Jameson’s Irish whiskey). Once, he found to his horror that the train taking MPs and the press back from a Blackpool Conservative Party conference had no buffet car. Journalists retired to the hotel bar in a state of shock. Mike just rang up the chairman of British Rail and it was sorted within the hour. Not even the Minister of Transport had the power to achieve that minor miracle.

  Bruce Anderson (known as the Brute) is another big beast in every way. He really has become the Michelin man of the commentariat. He has put on so much weight of late, you worry that at any moment he is going to burst out of his clothes like the Incredible Hulk. The Brute gives the impression of being a right-wing bruiser but actually his views tend to be well informed and middle-of-the-road. He once wrote a piece about me in the Evening Standard calling me a whinging, whining Tory. A few weeks later I bumped into him at a do in the American embassy. As we had both been drinking I thought I might have a bit of fun. I grabbed hold of his crotch and squeezed, enquiring who the whinging and whining Tory was now. At least he saw the funny side and we have been friends ever since. However, there were nearly fisticuffs when he read that I had voted against hunting with hounds.

  ‘Hayes, you little creep, you are a traitor.’ When I got out of this by saying, not entirely truthfully, that I had only done this for cynical political reasons, he smiled and bought me a drink, much relieved.

  The Brute can be a bit of a handful after a few glasses. Once, we were in a television debate about the future of the EU. Before the red light came on he spotted a Eurosceptic whose wife had died in mysterious (but later fully explained) circumstances in a remote part of Europe.

  ‘Ah,’ he hissed, ‘Europe is a convenient place for you to dispose of inconvenient wives, isn’t it?’ It did not go down well.

  One of my favourite MPs was Peter Lilley. We were elected together in 1983. Charming, very bright and on the inside track, he stood out as someone who would go far. However, he was done a terrible injustice. There was an urban myth that he was having an affair with Michael Portillo. This was utterly baseless and totally untrue. But I can shed light on how this rumour came into circulation. I was having lunch with the editor of a series that I occasionally used to present. We were in the Atrium, a grim aircraft hangar of a restaurant much loved by the media as it was in 4 Millbank, where the television and radio studios are. Things were getting a little jolly and we started chatting about Members.

  ‘I see Portillo has changed his bob for a bouffant,’ my chum commented, referring to Michael’s latest haircut.

  ‘I suspect it’s because he is shagging Lilley,’ I joked. All very jolly banter.

  A few weeks later a mate from ITN sidled up to me saying he had got some high-grade gossip. My eyes sparkled. ‘You’ll never believe it, but Portillo is shagging Lilley.’ My face reddened. ‘But that’s utter bollocks,’ I protested, guessing that someone had been earwigging our jokey conversation and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  Over the years, the more I’ve tried to explain what really happened, the more I am just met with cynical disbelief. So, guys, I am very sorry and am fond of you both.

  Sadly, there was another occasion when my mouth got me into trouble. My dear friend Paul Routledge of the Mirror (of whom you will read more later) and I were having what he would call a ‘three-bottler lunch’. We were gossiping and joshing around and I recalled a nonsense piece of gossip involving Ann Widdecombe having a fling in the spare bedroom of David Amess’s in Basildon with a 55-year-old Catholic altar boy who was also an MP. We both had a good laugh and staggered off to do some work. A few days later he sidled up to me and thanked me for a story I had given him which he had written up in his Observer column, Captain Moonlight. I was a bit puzzled and asked him which story.

  ‘Oh, the Widdecombe one.’

  ‘Blimey, you haven’t written it, have you?’<
br />
  ‘Yes, it was a cracker.’

  ‘But it’s not bloody true.’

  ‘Shit.’ To her credit, Ann let ‘Routers’ off fairly lightly, as he is one of the really good guys in life. He prostrated himself in abject apology and donated a sum to one of her charities.

  But I am not the only person much misunderstood. My old friend Richard Benson QC dines out on a true story of when he was a student in the 1960s. He used to share a flat with a lad who had just got a coveted job as a copy-writer for J. Walter Thompson. He was even more excited because he had been tasked to pitch some ideas to clients the next morning. So they went out to dinner to toss around a few suggestions.

  ‘What’s the product?’ enquired Dickie.

  ‘A vaginal deodorant,’ sighed the lad. After a few hours and an awful lot of drink, Benson came up with a brainwave.

  ‘I have a name that says what it does on the tin. You will call your deodorant SPRUNT.’ After much laughter they swayed back to the flat. The next day Benson hadn’t heard a word from his friend until the door opened and the lad slunk into the flat looking thoroughly miserable.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve been sacked.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They didn’t like my SPRUNT pitch.’

  ‘For God’s sake, it was meant to be a joke.’

  Benson is a very fine advocate and has an amazing fund of stories. I once asked him why, in his Who’s Who entry, he has put ‘founder member of the THC’. I asked him what it was all about.

  ‘Ah, one evening I was having a drunken dinner with some very pretty girls. I was playing the game ‘Fiery Finger’, where you dip it in a liqueur, light it and snuff it out with your mouth. One of the girls asked if I could do it with my dick. I agreed, provided one of them snuffed it out. The trouble is that dipping your dick in alcohol and lighting it is not a good idea, particularly when the girls are in such hysterical laughter they forget to snuff it out. I had to shove it in an ice bucket.’

  ‘But the THC?’

  ‘The Torched Hampton Club. The trouble is the bloody thing swelled to the size of an orange so I took it to my GP, who told me I didn’t need a doctor but a psychiatrist.’

  Many years ago Benson offered me some wise advice to help me survive the rigours of the Bar.

  ‘Never miss the chance to have a pee. Don’t trust a fart. And never waste an erection, particularly if you are on your own.’ Priceless.

  One of the greatest parliamentary beasts was the legendary Willie Whitelaw. God, could that man drink. In the days when he was Ted Heath’s Chief Whip, it was his occasional duty to rise from his place and move ‘that this House do now adjourn’. One evening after a very good dinner he misread the time. It was fast approaching ten o’clock. So he staggered to the Bar of the House, slurred the magic words and then collapsed in a heap.

  Willie’s idea of a light lunch was a bottle of champagne, a bottle of white, a bottle of red and a couple of large brandies. When he had his first heart attack his doctor advised that he just confined himself to one champagne before lunch. As was ordered and with much self-control, he did. Just one bottle.

  Willie had a great knack of getting himself out of trouble in pre-recorded radio interviews. If he didn’t know what the hell his interviewer was on about he would have a major coughing fit which made the interview unplayable. He would then politely ask what it was all about and after it had been explained in painstaking detail he would ask to start all over again. His answers would then be word perfect, mined from the information received from the hapless reporter. Willie also had a reputation for discretion. Very often in the Smoking Room you could hear him booming to a minister, ‘I want to tell you something in absolute confidence.’ To this day I am never quite sure whether this was a ruse to plant misinformation or just that he had a very loud voice.

  Denis Healey was another class act but could be one hell of a bully in the chamber. Watching him lock horns with Michael Heseltine when he was at Defence was very exciting theatre. It would be late at night, everyone would have been drinking and it almost got physical, with Healey, an enormous presence and a former beach master at the D-Day landings, aggressively shouting at Hezza to sit down, with ‘you bastard’ more sotto voce.

  People moan today about the standard of behaviour in the chamber but it is a teddy bears’ picnic compared to those days. Aggressive, alpha-male stuff from many of those who had actually fought hand-to-hand in the war. That’s why the women were so tough in the 1980s. Dame Janet Fookes eventually became a Deputy Speaker, but before that she was on the Speaker’s panel of chairmen. That means she chaired standing committees. Janet is charming, mild-mannered and utterly indomitable. Cross her in committee at your peril. Once, the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan (another charming man), absent-mindedly crossed her line of sight while sneaking out.

  ‘Order, order,’ boomed the great Dame. ‘The Right Honourable gentleman may be Home Secretary but he will abide by the courtesies of this committee.’ I have never seen a tall man shrink so visibly, go so pale nor look so utterly terrified. Today’s bunch weep to the press if another Member so much as frowns at them. And the men are as bad as the women. The Wrekin MP Mark Pritchard is meant to have got rather upset because a Cabinet minister told him to fuck off. For God’s sake.

  Tam Dalyell was a formidable and tenacious backbencher. He once roamed the palace at the time when we were horrendously starved of accommodation and found fifty forgotten rooms. He also terrified ministers with his supplementary questions, asking a simple ‘Why?’ Devastating, as it doesn’t give the poor things time to think. Tam is a thoroughly decent fellow although rather an eccentric, who lives in a great stately pile in Scotland called The Binns. Once he invited a group of colleagues for dinner in his great hall. Expectations were high. They dined on scrambled eggs and a glass of sherry. And disappointment.

  And Tony Benn? What a joy. Wrong on just about everything, but in such a charming and elegant way that you instinctively knew he was principled. I would always go to him for advice on procedure and he would always be helpful.

  And Michael Foot. Delightful, kind, thoughtful, compassionate, literary and sincere, but temperamentally unsuited for office. He was kind enough to invite me to his eightieth birthday party at the Gay Hussar as I was a ‘decent Tory’. I am very proud of the Rowson cartoon of the event, with me sitting at the feet of the great man, which adorns a wall. Outside the gents. Well, you can’t have everything.

  The final big beast in this chapter is Ian Gow, Thatcher’s delightful and effective PPS. Charming, bright, witty and murdered by terrorists who planted a bomb under his car at his home. At the by-election in Eastbourne the Tories had the brainwave of selecting my old chum Richard Hickmet, who was an excellent MP for Scunthorpe but lost his seat. What the strategists overlooked was that there is a large Greek population in Eastbourne and that Richard’s second name is Saladin. He is a Turk. And he lost. Sometimes you want to weep.

  So, where are the big beasts now? On the Tory side, apart from Cameron, Osborne and May the nearest contenders are Eric Pickles and Michael Gove. Labour has more of a problem. Apart from tackling energy prices and identifying the cost of living as a major political issue, Miliband still hasn’t quite found his voice. But Leaders of the Opposition rarely do. Ed Balls is probably the one big beast they have left.

  Though he has been wrong on just about everything, he is a formidable opponent. Those who know him tell me that he can be quite charming. The jury is out on that one.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE JUNKETEERS

  The House of Commons is a very hospitable place and I do not mean the friendliness of colleagues, rather the rivers of corporate hospitality that are available. Some of my more cynical chums would arrange their day by accepting a breakfast meeting, a lunch, a couple of receptions in the afternoon, a dinner and then be bought drinks by journalists until the House went up early the next morning. These were the sort of people we dubbed the Jun
keteers. The Members who would only put their hands in their pockets to scratch their dicks. Most of them, not surprisingly, are now dead. Buried, as a cremation would have been far too dangerous.

  To accept corporate hospitality it’s best to be choosy. Always accept offers from local businesses in the constituency. It’s just good manners and common sense. And if you are tempted by glossy lobbyist events, make sure you only go to those that can assist job creation in your patch. That is, after all, what you are paid to do.

  But in the 1980s MPs used to swarm to freebies like locusts devouring the harvest. I remember having my first lunch with International Distillers & Vintners (now Diageo), who used to have a large presence in Harlow. They remarked how abstemious I had been. This rather shocked me as it had been a splendid lunch with some great wines. Then they told me they had once invited a parliamentary committee over for a light lunch, only to discover that they were filling their pockets with the free cigarettes on the table and taking what was left of the wines and spirits for the coach back to the Commons. Their snouts were so far in the troughs that even the pigs complained.

  One of my most mystifying invitations was from John King (later Lord King), the chairman of British Airways. He had assembled his board at a then popular Westminster restaurant, L’Amico. I was the guest of honour and no expense had been spared. At the end of the evening I rose to thank my hosts for their kindness and generosity, adding that I was a little bemused to be invited as I had absolutely no knowledge of airlines or airports. ‘Ah,’ said John, ‘and we will be so honoured to teach you. After all, we are the major employer in your constituency.’

  ‘What, Harlow? Stansted Airport is still tiny and not even in my patch.’

  ‘Harlow? What’s Harlow got to do with it? You’re the MP for Hayes.’

  ‘Actually, John, I’m Jerry Hayes. Terry Dicks is the MP for Hayes & Harlington.’

  There was a brief but deadly silence and then the whole room erupted with laughter. John King and his deputy Colin Marshall became good friends. But I don’t know what happened to their personal assistants.