An Unexpected MP

by Jerry Hayes

  The privatisation of BA is a story almost beyond belief and it couldn’t happen today. Privatisation was a manifesto commitment, but for some reason, perhaps because the Transport Secretary Nick Ridley and John King disliked each other, no Bill had appeared. So Ian Greer, the most influential parliamentary lobbyist of all time (sadly, cash-for-questions led to his downfall), was hired. He had a cunning plan. Stick a tail on it and you could have called it a fox. What he did was rather basic, but amazingly effective. He bussed 132 Tory MPs to the Savoy. We were greeted by some of the most beautiful and alluring air hostesses, who filled us with the finest champagne and canapés. And then lunch. Mountains of smoked salmon washed down with the choicest of Montrachets. Then a saddle of lamb accompanied by a really good claret. Then a delicious pud helped by a delightful Château d’Yquem. And finally, cheese, brandy and cigars. Then the lights went down, a stirring promo for British Airways played and the Ralph Richardson figure of John King addressed us. He reminded us of our manifesto promise to privatise BA, a promise Ridley was not honouring. What were we going to do about it? I tell you what we did. We gave Ridley absolute hell. BA was privatised within the year. What endeared me particularly to John was that just before his wife died he bought her a magnificent and expensive diamond necklace which she adored. He placed it around her neck in her coffin. What a lovely old romantic.

  But not all captains of industry had the charisma of John King. One of the most unpleasant and rather scary invites was from Arnold Weinstock, at the time a great industrialist and voted for many years Businessman of the Year. Well, he may have been a great businessman, but he was rather lacking on the human being front. About ten of us, including some senior people like Douglas Hogg, were invited to his corporate headquarters for dinner. The food was great, but Weinstock was a megalomaniac monster. He had surrounded himself with cooing sycophants with their tongues so far up his backside that you needed a team of sniffer dogs to remove them. He hectored, lectured and was gratuitously rude. Then he turned to one of the guests, an MP for a constituency with a large Weinstock factory. ‘And how many people do I employ in your patch?’ he loftily enquired. Before the lad could reply, a flunkey whispered that it was around two thousand. Weinstock smiled and barked ‘Sack ’em all’ to some senior bod. And smiled. On and on it went. A relentless and horrible exercise in power and manipulation.

  At the end of the meal, Weinstock casually turned to his staff: ‘Those men I sacked – reinstate them.’

  I was almost tempted to join the Communist Party there and then. But it was an important lesson: the need to encourage a strong but responsible trade union movement. The trouble was that Thatcher gave the impression that she wanted to break the unions. After all, they had destroyed Ted Heath’s and Jim Callaghan’s governments. The truth is she wanted to democratise them and take them back to the principles on which they were founded: looking after the interests of their members. And while the likes of Weinstock ruled the boardrooms, they were never needed more.

  One of the perks of the job is occasionally getting to see what makes the royals tick. So it was out of sheer curiosity that I accepted an invitation to lunch with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace. Ten of us were shipped in to discuss the Prince’s Trust. The trouble with meeting him is that we are so conditioned by the press that he is a bit of an odd bod who is cranky about organic farming, talks to trees and is a homeopathy nut. I found him a delight. Relaxed, unaffected and passionate about the Trust, which has improved the life chances of thousands of young men and women who would have been thrown on the junk heap of political complacency.

  We were in that part of the palace where they all wave from the balcony and dining in a room decorated in the most appalling Chinese taste. So, for a joke, he gave us a Chinese meal. I hadn’t appreciated how much the royals dislike the palace as it is far too big and rather over the top. A bit like Dame Shirley Porter’s bathroom. Anyhow, I remarked how close we were to that famous balcony. ‘Oh,’ said Charles, ‘has anyone got a camera? Your constituents would love a snap of you waving to them.’

  Sadly, nobody did. And the iPhone was just a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye.

  However, there were events so ghastly that colleagues would prefer to eat their own spleens rather than attend. At the pinnacle of sheer torture was the annual Essex National Union of Farmers dinner. It was always held at the Farmers’ Club, a solid, tweedy place for solid, tweedy people, with the walls spattered with pictures of odd-looking cows and stranger-looking sheep. The food was hearty, with slabs of beef in Desperate Dan sizes. As a precaution against what was to follow, most of us fortified ourselves with vats of red wine. After a nursery pudding, we’d be beaten, whipped and generally turned over by ruddy-faced men of the soil, berating us for reductions in their incomes, for the horrors of the Common Agricultural Policy and for what a grim lot farmers had. We would all leave at 9.30 for the ten o’clock vote even if there wasn’t one.

  But for every turkey (in the non-EFU sense) there could be a moment of pure joy with unexpected consequences. The British Midland Airways launch of their direct flight to Florence was one. It was held at the Goring Hotel, a favourite haunt of the royals and the place Kate Middleton and her family holed up before the royal wedding. The food was great and the ambience wonderful, probably because it is still a family-run hotel. What intrigued me was the cream envelope nestling discreetly by every place setting. Probably some blurb by the chairman. But, out of courtesy, I slipped it into my pocket and forgot about it. In fact, Ali eventually opened it when she was about to send the suit to the cleaners. She let out a whoop. It contained two club-class tickets to Florence on the new service. Nowadays the Independent Parliamentary Standards lot would have had a fit and the red tops a field day. ‘MPs board plane of shame’, they would scream. Yet it was all perfectly innocent. In the ’80s we were paid very little. £12,000 was my first salary, with expenses for living, a secretary, a travel warrant to the constituency and a small petrol allowance. That was it. Ali had to buy a second-hand Olivetti to type the letters. Where it all went so horribly wrong was a conspiracy between the party leaders to fudge MPs’ pay, as there is no popular time to announce an increase. The Faustian pact was low pay in return for generous allowances. Sadly, in 2005, when Gordon Brown was throwing money around like a drunken sailor, it got totally out of control. MPs were entitled to tax allowances for food, gardening and just about anything that an inventive and imaginative mind could make a claim for. Worse, they were encouraged to claim for the maximum that they could, on the basis that the Treasury would claw back any surpluses. The reason there were all these daft claims for duck houses, moat cleaning and manure was because they had to justify the £200 a month that they could claim for just about anything. It is not popular to say so but there was very little corruption, just MPs working a system which had been encouraged to spin out of control. Now there has been an overreaction. Hair shirts and monk-like behaviour are now de rigueur. So, will a fair balance ever be struck? No. Will MPs ever be paid sensibly? Certainly not.

  People have forgotten that the issue of whether we should build a tunnel under the Channel had been rumbling on for years. And, like anything with a whiff of garlic or froggy gravy, it bitterly divided the Conservative Party. The level of intellectual debate amounted to three clichés: ‘We are an island nation’, ‘It will open the floodgates to immigrants’ and ‘The Channel is nature’s barrier against rabies’. Needless to say all these arguments were eventually exposed for what they were: as barking mad as the illegal, foaming, rabid French dogs that were to be let loose on a cowering British public.

  At last it was built. There was to be a grand opening ceremony. And there were to be free trips for MPs and peers before the service came on line. This was going to be exciting. Perhaps more exciting than we bargained for if there had been a fire or a bomb, which had the potential of wiping out a large portion of the legislature. Actually travelling on Eurostar to Paris proved to be great fun, not just becaus
e of the great food and wine but also to witness the delightful boneheadedness of some colleagues. I was sitting next to some old boy who didn’t appreciate that although we had been waved through Waterloo Station the French would want to see our passports. He thought that I was mad, as did half the carriage. They changed their minds when Special Branch officers averted a diplomatic incident at the French end of the tunnel. Of course, the main topic of discussion was which restaurants we should visit in Paris. Remember, these were the days before you could browse the internet and book in advance. This rather confused a charmingly dim upper-crust couple who could see absolutely no point in going out for a meal in France. All that foreign food, how ghastly! ‘Marigold has prepared a splendid picnic!’ he hoorayed at Mach 3. It was so reassuring to see that Great Britain was being represented so well abroad.

  But for sheer, opulent vulgarity which would make a Katie Price wedding seem like a finger buffet with Pope Francis, there was an event thrown by a wealthy constituent which took a lot of beating. We spent a joyous afternoon at the Newmarket races and then were bussed back to their pad, which appeared to have been designed by a combination of Liberace and David Blunkett. To our collective amazement, they had erected a succession of marquees to give the effect of a Roman banquet. Actually, it was more like a prelude to a Roman orgy. Stuffed swans were brought in by semi-naked male and female slaves. And the antechambers were petalled pools with reclining nudes of all sexes. And the splendid David Emanuel was on hand to give a little ‘zhuzh’ to the dress he had designed for our hostess. He was also making a programme about parties for Channel 4. ‘Jerry darling, let’s do an interview.’ As the camera was just about to roll I noticed that one of the chaps had a rather large penis on display in one of the pools, joined by a girl who was flashing her labia like a pair of flippers. I certainly didn’t want that little lot in shot: the News of the World would have had a field day and the local God-botherers would have been gunning for me. So, out of a sense of decency, I adorned both with a handful of petals. After a spectacular banquet and entertainment by Madame JoJo’s finest (spectacularly beautiful women who were really blokes), I ended up dancing on the table with a belly dancer. This was over the top, the height of vulgarity, a parade of immense wealth which could have been given to deserving causes. But I have not enjoyed myself so much for a very long time.

  The event to approach with extreme caution was the Scotch Whisky Association Christmas party. The trouble was that so many of my colleagues regarded this as ‘so much to drink, so little time’. Dear old George Foulkes (now in the Lords) was very keen to sample his country’s favourite drink. I dread to think how much he hoovered up that evening. And then the division bell rang and off he flew to the lobby. Sadly, George thought that it would be fun to run into St Stephen’s Entrance screaming ‘batman, batman’ and flapping his coat tails. It would have been very amusing if he hadn’t accidentally bumped into a little old lady, who fell to the ground. Mortified, he did his best to apologise and try to get her to her feet. But his feet were the problem, and he kept falling over. Unfortunately, the only officious police officer in the building intervened, which led to George spending a few hours in the cells.

  If you think the Scotch Whisky Association is a worry, St Patrick’s Day at the Irish embassy can be lethal. I’ve known journos who’ve spent the whole night going round and round the Circle Line after one of those shindigs. But their do at a Tory Party conference proved the undoing of the splendid Nicholas Scott. He claimed that he had become a little unwell due to a couple of glasses of wine and painkillers for his bad back. The Irish ambassador had other views and came out with what he thought was a helpful statement that Nick was enjoying Irish hospitality so much that they kept the bar open for him.

  The next day, Scott joined us in the Spanish Bar (a Blackpool watering hole in the Winter Gardens). I was with my press mates, enjoying a couple of sharpeners before lunch. ‘Hi,’ says Nick, not looking at his best. ‘Do you know, I just can’t remember how on earth I got home last night?’

  That’s when we showed him the front-page photo in the Mirror of him comatose in the back of a police car. Oh dear.

  BBC hospitality can be pretty impressive too, although nothing as over the top as my Roman orgy or paddling through pools of whiskey at the Irish embassy. One lunch that sticks in my mind was with Duke Hussey, the war hero chairman of the governors. Duke was a very impressive guy and spectacularly brave. He lost a leg in battle and nearly died. Over lunch, he asked me what talent they should be looking out for. I told him that there were two young political reporters who were rather impressive, Huw Edwards and Jeremy Vine. Gentlemen, I think you owe me a drink.

  At the end of the meal Duke was kind enough to lend me his car for the trip back to the Commons. As I opened the boot to put in my briefcase I noticed a long package wrapped in brown, with a little tag marked ‘The Chairman’.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘The chairman’s spare leg, sir. He never travels without a spare leg in the boot.’

  Bless.

  The saddest invitation was lunch with the directors of Sky TV. We were having a great time and were mightily amused that none of the media moguls could work the giant, multi-screened TV in the boardroom. They had to get a lad from IT to sort it. After a lot of fiddling around, the great beast flickered into life. We all thought that it was very funny that none of these great television titans could actually switch on the TV. Well, it proved to be good background noise to some pretty interesting conversation, until there was a news flash. Something to do with an incident at a school. And then before our eyes the horror of the Dunblane massacre unfurled. It was some of the most distressing television I had ever seen. All of us were moved and most of us were choking back sobs. We decided the best thing to do was go back to our families and hug our kids. It was a very traumatic day.

  CHAPTER 9

  MEDIA TART

  A few days after my election I received a phone call from Anglia Television asking me if I would care to pop up to Norwich and take part in a discussion programme about the death penalty.

  Capital punishment used to be debated in the House once a parliament. And pretty unedifying spectacles they were too. I was never one of the hang ’em and flog ’em brigade despite the fact that my grandfather had been murdered when I was twelve. I remember that when my father first broke the news to me he wept. It was first time I had ever seen him cry. My father was in the navy during the war and had been shipwrecked three times by the time he was twenty. He didn’t talk about it too much, but when you have seen your friends floating in the water, machine-gunned by German U-boat crews, and witnessed others have their skin peeled off them by superheated steam after a torpedo has slammed straight into the engine room, it must have a devastating effect upon a young man.

  To make matters worse, after the murder, as my dad had been the last to see his father, he had been arrested while his mother lay critically injured in hospital. He was now a murder suspect. My grandmother still had a bullet lodged near her lung when she died many years later. As it happened, the murderer was a young thug after the takings from the family business. He had flown over from Bermuda and shot my grandfather as soon as he opened the front door, with a gun concealed behind a newspaper. He then rushed up the stairs and shot my grandmother through the chest. That was his undoing. He had grabbed one of the chrome bars on the stairway, leaving a perfect set of fingerprints. He was sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released after seven years.

  My grandfather was a popular figure in the East End of London and I will never forget how our local greengrocer offered to have the murderer killed in prison. My dad declined, but the boys broke his hand in such a way that he could never fire a gun again.

  This is not the sort of book for me to set out at length why I never voted for the restoration of the death penalty. In a nutshell, I was convinced that state killings only provided a recruiting sergeant
for the men of terror. And as I was a barrister, I knew only too well how serious miscarriages of justice can take place.

  So off I rolled to Norwich. I was to be interviewed by Anglia’s political editor Malcolm Allsop; on the other side would be Eldon Griffiths, the right-wing Tory MP for Bury St Edmunds. Eldon was late, so there was no time for a rehearsal or proper introductions. He just sat down, shook me by the hand and the cameras rolled. After I’d said my anti-hanging bit, Eldon launched in. ‘Well, that’s the sort of view I would expect from a representative of the Labour Party.’

  Malcolm and I were rather taken aback at this. When I recovered I politely pointed that we were members of the same party. Eldon, to his credit, was mortified and offered profuse apologies and suggested that we reshoot the question. I could see the pleading look in Malcolm’s eyes. So I suggested we carry on as no one would notice. Well, of course they did. This was great TV and when I entered the division lobby after the programme had been transmitted there was great amusement among the Cabinet, who were slapping me on the back.

  After that I had a long and happy relationship with Anglia TV. They were like a family. When you rolled up to do a programme there would always be the same crew. A joy.

  My favourite programme was the Anglia TV Christmas show where Charlie Kennedy, Graham Bright, John Gummer, Clement Freud and I played the most ridiculous parlour games. The public loved it.

  John Gummer is an amazingly witty and entertaining guy. But if you believe what you read in the press, he was a preachy, sanctimonious little prig. Nothing could be further from the truth. After recording one of these shows he nearly got us thrown out of an Indian restaurant because he was making us laugh so much.