Breaking the Code (13 page)

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m the Member of Parliament.’

‘Good God, are you really? How’s it going?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

The small talk lasted moments no more, but as HRH chuckled, shook his head and returned to the procession the effect on my ‘friends’ the councillors was noticeable – and gratifying.

Frankie Howerd has died and I have started drinking. He was seventy-five, which surprises me (he seemed younger), and I’ve raised several glasses to him because he was very funny and I was genuinely fond of him – despite the fact that the last time we met he exposed himself to me. He pretended to have a groin strain, thrust a jar of ointment into my hand, pulled down his trousers and threw himself back onto the sofa.

‘Rub it in!’

‘Where?’

‘
There!
Haven’t you seen one before? It’s perfectly harmless. Treat it like a muscle.’

My first letter from the Prime Minister: ‘I am delighted to welcome you to Westminster when there is so much to be done. It will be hard work – but immensely worthwhile. I much look forward to seeing you when the new parliament meets. In the meantime, do take the chance to catch your breath!’ A letter too from Michael Portillo
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whom I’ve never met. Has he written to all the new boys? Lord St John of Fawsley writes in purple ink, ‘My dear Gyles, You will be a wonderful MP but practise a little economy of personality in the Commons. They don’t deserve to have too much too soon.’

I’m on the 9.03 to Chester, a day of canvassing for the local elections lies ahead. Benny Hill has died and the Prime Minister is allowing Norman Lamont to have Dorneywood, the government’s second grand grace-and-favour mansion as his official country residence. We think Rosemary will quite like that.

Jeremy Hanley is a good kind man. I caught the 7.39 from Chester and, as arranged, presented myself at the St Stephen’s entrance to the Palace of Westminster as Big Ben struck eleven. Tall, broad, beaming, Jeremy was waiting for me on the doorstep and gave me the most wonderful hour-long tour, introducing me to all and sundry in the most extravagant terms. He wouldn’t shake my hand. ‘Members of Parliament do not shake hands.’ The origin of the handshake was physical proof that your hand did not conceal a weapon, that you came in friendship: as at the House of Commons we are all
‘Honourable Members’ we don’t need to prove our good intentions towards one another so between one another we don’t shake hands.

Jeremy’s tour started at the Members’ Entrance where he introduced me to the policeman and explained that when waiting for a taxi we take precedence over anyone else in the line. There are 651 members and in the members’ cloakroom there are 651 coat-hangers arranged in alphabetical order. We found mine! Attached to it, attached to each and every one of the 651 coat-hangers, is a small loop of pink ribbon.

‘What’s it for?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The pink ribbon – that’s where you hang your sword!’

The authorities are clearly keen to discourage sword-fighting within the palace precincts. When we went into the Commons Chamber for the first time (I had never seen inside it before: it was so much smaller than I had expected) Jeremy showed me the two thin red lines woven into the green carpet in front of each of the front benches and said:

He tells wonderful stories wonderfully well:

Jeremy is now a minister (Under-Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office and pleased as Punch) and gets to sit on the front bench. He advised me to sit third seat in, third row up. ‘You can see and you’re seen.’ To bag a place you have to turn up in the morning, any time from 8.00 a.m., collect a small green ‘prayer card’, fill in your name and put the card on the seat you want. That reserves your place. To confirm your reservation you have to be in position at 2.30 p.m. sharp for prayers. Then the seat’s yours for the rest of the day.

It is difficult to describe quite how miserable I feel. I don’t think I should have done this. I fear I may have made a huge mistake and the horror of it is there’s no turning back. Joanna and Stevie came to supper. They’ve only just gone. They were so bright and sweet and full of congratulations, full of the excitement of it all. Joanna kept stroking my hair and saying, ‘You are my Prince!’ I didn’t have the heart – or the courage – or the wit – to tell them how bleak I feel. I haven’t told Michèle. She’s in the bath as I’m scribbling this.

The plain truth is today has been my first full day at the House of Commons and I have hated it. If you had seen me I don’t think you’d have known. I did my best to play the part, but when I got home I felt so low, hollow and quite desperate. It wasn’t just the particular humiliation that I’ll describe in a moment; it isn’t simply that I am forty-four and I have had a day feeling like an awkward fourteen-year-old; it is a sudden horrifying, overwhelming, all-enveloping sense that the Commons and all it stands for just isn’t going to be the place for me.

Here’s how it went. At 12.30 p.m., as arranged, I met Neil and Christine Hamilton in Central Lobby. Neil and I set off to bag our places in the Chamber. There were prayer cards everywhere, so Neil (who is now a junior minister at the DTI) said we should sit in the second row, just behind the Prime Minister. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ We filled in our cards and reserved our seats. We then had a jolly lunch in a not-very-jolly canteen somewhere in the bowels of the building.

At 2.30 we were back in the Chamber for the election of the Speaker. The place was packed. I sat immediately behind the Prime Minister, squeezed between Neil and the PM’s PPS.
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I knew at once that I was in the wrong place. I sensed immediately that where I was sitting, literally at the Prime Minister’s right ear, was wrong, preposterous, risible. I felt all eyes must be upon me and that every single person in the Chamber must have felt contempt for me and my presumption. In fact, of course, I know that’s hardly rational, no one was thinking about me at all, but that’s what I felt – and because I felt it I could feel nothing else. The whole amazing process of the election of the Speaker as good as passed me by. Ted Heath, as Father of the House, took the Chair. Some bent old stick
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proposed Peter Brooke.
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Tom Arnold seconded him, Tony Benn
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blathered on against. Peter Brooke then spoke for himself, all very self-effacing and over-fruity at
the same time. Then John Biffen
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and assorted others put forward the case for Betty Boothroyd.
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She spoke so much better than Peter Brooke, but when it came to the vote I voted for Brooke on the basis that I don’t know either of them and at least he’s a Conservative. (He was obviously also desperate: there were messages from him on both answering machines at the weekend.) When the vote was announced – Boothroyd 372, Brooke 238 – the place erupted. Miss Boothroyd was ‘dragged’ from her place (in the body of the Chamber, several rows back, needless to say) and we all stood and cheered. The opposition began to clap, so we clapped too. This is not what we do here: we cheer, we wave our order papers and we do not applaud. But we did. History was being made. The Commons has its 155th Speaker and she is the first woman. It was quite an occasion, but because I was so certain I was where I ought not to be I loathed every minute of it. And it went on for two hours.

At 5.00 p.m. I made my way up to Committee Room 10 for the New Members Meeting. All the government whips sat on the platform in a line and we new boys (plus the four new girls) sat, cowed, below at school desks – yes, school desks with ridges for your pencil and square holes for inkwells. It was exactly like a Dickensian school assembly photographed by David Lean in black and white. Even the jokes creaked: ‘And when there is a three-line whip you will be here to vote – unless you can produce a doctor’s certificate (pause) showing you are dead.’ As we shuffled out, my whip
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hauled me from the crowd. ‘I don’t know what you think you were doing sitting right behind the Prime Minister. Not a very good start. Don’t let it happen again.’

Trembling with the shame of it (and thinking ‘Fuck you’ at the same time – it is all so stupid) I went down to Central Lobby for my assignation with Angela Eagle.
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Smallish, youngish, short-lank hair, pointy nose, bloke-ish manner, not my idea of a fun time (as Simon [Cadell] would say, ‘She’s happier in Holland’)
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she’s the victor at Wallasey and the person I’m hoping will provide my ‘pair’. On advice, I called her the weekend after the election to ask her if we could pair. She said she’d think about it. She’s still thinking. We went down to the bar in the basement to talk it over. I bought her a drink (was that a mistake? I imagine she
lives
for political correctness) and pleaded my cause – rather too desperately I fancy. She’s ‘seeing one or two others’ then she’ll let me know. If I don’t have a ‘pair’ I shall be stuck at the House of Commons every night for five years. I cannot believe what I’ve let myself in for.

My humiliation has not gone unremarked. At the centre of Matthew Parris’s political sketch in
The Times
today we read: ‘Though Mrs Currie returns to her post as Madam Limelight, Gyles Brandreth (C. Chester) who,
on his first day
, walked straight into the prime TV “doughnuting” space behind the PM and sat down, is already mounting a challenge.’ This is exactly what I don’t want. If I’m going to play this game, I’m going to play it by the rules. I am going to start at the bottom and work my way up. I’m going to be one of the boys and do it their way.

I’m feeling brighter a) because it’s another day, b) because I’ve always known life was ridiculous anyway, and c) because Jeremy Hanley gave me and Michèle lunch in the Churchill Room. It’s the ‘grand’ restaurant where members can bring guests and we had a sort of window table – it’s below ground but on your toes you can see a bit of the river – and the food was rather good and we raised our glasses to one another and, suddenly, the place didn’t seem so bad after all. Jeremy is so proud and happy to be a Member of Parliament: ‘They can never take it away from you, Gyles. In 1992 you were elected by your fellow countrymen to serve as a Member of Parliament in the mother of parliaments. Ours is the oldest democracy in the world and you’re part of it. Whatever happens, in years to come, your family, your descendants will know that you’re the one who could put the letters MP after his name.’

Last night I did
Wogan
and used several of Jeremy Hanley’s stories (without acknowledgment). This morning I’m on the 9.03 pretending to work because with me is a reporter from
The Independent
who is going to spend the day with me on the local election campaign trail. He seems likeable and trustworthy. They’re the ones you’ve got to watch. My besetting sin is saying too much, wanting to please, hoping to ingratiate myself by giving them what they want. Michèle is always telling me I don’t need to fill every moment of silence that ever falls, that the responsibility for keeping the conversation going is not uniquely mine – so here I am, head down among my papers, apparently making notes on constituency cases while actually recording the news that Lymeswold (the English answer to Brie – which I loved) has bitten the dust and Fergie and Andrew are exploring the possibilities of a reconciliation.

Until I am allocated an office (which will be in a week or two apparently) I have to collect my Commons post from the post office off Members’ Lobby. It comes bundled together with string and I can sort it in the Library or back at home or on the train. I’ve
just been through yesterday’s bundle – upwards of sixty bits and pieces, a third of which can go straight in the bin. My vulpine whip, David Davis (DD of the SS), has sent me all his numbers. ‘I would be grateful if you could confirm your London number, your principal country number, and any other numbers you have. Please do not divulge my ex-directory number to
anyone
.’ I also have a copy of Tuesday’s Hansard featuring my name for the very first time. All afternoon we lined up to take the Oath of Allegiance at the Table of the House and then shake the Speaker’s hand. At the front of the queue at 2.30 were the government front bench (Hansard reveals their names in full: Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, Kenneth Harry Clarke, Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo, Virginia Hilda Brunette Maxwell Bottomley, Sir Patrick Barnabas Burke Mayhew
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– every name tells a story!), and there I was (‘Gyles Daubeney Brandreth, esquire, City of Chester’) bringing up the rear three hours later. The poor Speaker must have been punch-drunk shaking so many hundred hands all afternoon and, of course, I cocked up my moment of small talk. She said, ‘Welcome to the Commons. It’s nice to meet you,’ and instead of simply saying ‘And it’s nice to meet you too, Madam Speaker’ I grinned at the one-time Tiller Girl and said ‘Do you know, I think we have something in common. We’ve both appeared in pantomime.’ She looked neither amused nor interested. My hope is she wasn’t even listening.