Breaking the Code (16 page)

Rumour is rife that Portillo and Lilley have been caballing with Eurosceptics and don’t want the Treaty ratified in its present form. Heseltine was adamant: ‘We are committed to it; it’s in the national interest; of course we ratify.’

The PM is back from Rio and has apparently ordered a ‘marketing exercise’ by whips and ministers to convince us all of the merits of Maastricht. I’m ready to be convinced, but those that aren’t never will be.

David Mellor had his first outing as Secretary of State for National Heritage and used it (inter alia) to put yours truly in his place. With a view to triggering some kind words about the Voluntary Arts Network (chaired by Sir Richard Luce,
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former arts minister of this parish) I asked an agreed question about the need to recognise the contribution of the amateur as well as the professional in the arts. ‘Yes,’ responded Mellor smugly, ‘and I am sure that’s true in politics as well.’ It was a little sally that produced a good laugh (and I imagine Mellor can’t resist a good laugh) and I didn’t really mind except that people have been coming up to me ever since saying ‘Mellor shouldn’t have put you down like that – it’s disgraceful’. I’d have preferred them not to notice. Nobody paid much notice to the PM’s statement on Rio. The Earth Summit has produced an accord to save the planet, but in London SW1 all we care about is the future of Maastricht.

English football fans are rioting in Stockholm, there’s been an IRA bomb off Trafalgar Square, the Prince and Princess of Wales are evidently no longer on speaking terms, but the PM didn’t do too badly at Question Time. Blubber-lips Hattersley
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was up for the opposition and all over the place. The people we have to worry about aren’t the opposition, of course. It’s our own lot – and the trouble is, some of what they say is quite convincing. The interest rates are crippling and because of the ERM we’re shackled to them, regardless of what they’re doing to the small businesses of Chester (to say nothing
of the assorted Brandreth overdrafts). A good meeting with Kenneth Clarke in the Home Secretary’s room at the House. He’s very easy, very jovial. I warm to him immediately in a way, I imagine, I couldn’t warm to Heseltine in a hundred years.

I addressed the massed ranks of the Townswomen’s Guild at the Albert Hall yesterday. There were thousands of them – row upon row of good-hearted middle-aged bastions of Middle England. It was fun. I’ve just come from a long session with Emily Blatch at the DfE.
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The Townswomen would have loved her. I was seeing her because when I passed her in a corridor last week she said ‘Come and see me’ so I there I was. We sat on the edge of her sofa for an hour, almost holding hands. We talked about nursery education so intently. She’s wonderful and, apparently, very close to the PM, but what the meeting was
about
I’m not quite sure. Bonding, I suppose. That’s what the next meeting is going to be for sure: a sandwich lunch with Michael Howard at the DoE. I have to say that I’m impressed by how accessible all these Cabinet ministers are. You can see them whenever you want to – you can catch them in the voting lobby, you can make an appointment to go to their offices, you can hobnob with them in the Tea Room or the Dining Room. No one could accuse any of them of being in any sense remote. I said this to Bill Cash who said, ‘Not being remote is not the same as not being out of touch…’

Lunch with the Foreign Secretary, tea with the Prime Minister. And in between, Mr Major made his statement on the Lisbon Summit. Enlargement, subsidiarity, the GATT round, Yugoslavia – for an hour he batted away with skill and discretion, reiterating the government line but bending over backwards to offend the sceptics as little as possible. When he’d finished I set off for the Tea Room and found myself in the queue with Graham Bright.

‘The boss did well, didn’t he?’ he squeaked, piling the teacakes onto his plate.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘brilliantly.’

‘Come and tell him, he’s through here.’

The Tea Room is divided into two. In the first room there’s the food counter, the till and assorted armchairs and tables used exclusively by Labour members. The second room is ‘our’ room, with a couple of tables occasionally occupied by Liberals or Unionists. The
PM was sitting at the first table looking remarkably bright-eyed. There was an empty chair beside him. He patted it, ‘Now come on, Gyles, how’s it going in Chester?’ (He knows everybody’s name and makes a point of getting it in right away.)

I sat down and he patted my hand. He touches you every time you meet him. It’s wonderfully disarming. Graham gave the PM his tea and teacakes and perched on a chair behind him. Nobody could think what to say. Tim Devlin
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muttered something about how good he’d been just now. The PM nodded. Silence fell. Somehow we knew that talking about Europe, Maastricht, Jacques Delors wasn’t what our leader wanted, so to fill the void I suddenly heard myself saying, ‘What’s happening in Yugoslavia?’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Yugoslavia,’ and immediately he launched into a fifteen-minute impromptu masterclass on the tragedy of the Balkans. He took us through from the fourteenth century to the briefing he’d had from the UN’s General Mackenzie this lunchtime, and his grasp of the detail was astonishing. At one point he fished out his pen and on the back of a paper napkin drew a map of the territory around Sarajevo. He pinpointed the Serb and the Muslim encampments, he knew the names of villages, he seemed to know the names of the head men in those villages. He was very impressive. And when he’d done, he tapped the table twice with the palms of his hands and got up to go. He had only taken a couple of sips of his tea and hadn’t touched the teacake. I was eyeing the paper napkin. I thought it might make an interesting souvenir. Graham was ahead of me. He picked it up, folded it neatly and popped it in his pocket. He then popped a bite of the PM’s teacake into his mouth and, Bunter-like, toddled off after his master.

Later I was telling Peter Tapsell
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about the PM’s time in the Tea Room and he said, ‘Yes, he’s an attractive man, intelligent and well-intentioned, but he doesn’t frighten anybody, does he? When Margaret came into the Tea Room the teacups rattled.’

I was required to be in Committee Room 12 this morning at 10.30 for a Standing Committee on Statutory Instruments. I arrived at 10.32 and was given a bollocking by the whip. ‘You have to be here on time in case the opposition force a snap vote.’ There were only two or three opposition in attendance. I have no idea what it was about. The minister spoke, the opposition spokesman spoke, we all voted Aye and that was that. Funny way to run a country.

At six I went for a briefing with Malcolm Rifkind at the MoD. The whole feel of the place dates from a ’50s Ealing comedy (you expect the tea to be served by an orderly played by Norman Wisdom), but the beady-eyed Secretary of State comes over as both charming and sharp. This was a general canter round the course for the new boys and an update on Yugoslavia. We are going to be sending up to four RAF Hercules mercy missions a day to Sarajevo and the US are sending the marines into the Adriatic. I have a separate session with Malcolm tomorrow on the future of the Cheshires.

Later I came across Neil Hamilton and Michael Forsyth
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swooning over pictures of Margaret Thatcher in her Baroness’s togs. She was ‘introduced’ into the Lords yesterday. ‘Her Iron Ladyship,’ gurgled Forsyth. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ cooed Neil. ‘It’s almost too wonderful to bear.’

The good news is that, for the first time since partition, leaders of all the Unionist groups have agreed to have talks with the Irish government on the constitution of Northern Ireland. Paddy Mayhew is hailing it as a breakthrough.

The meeting with Malcolm Rifkind was here in his room at the House. He sat on a sofa and listened intently, a couple of officials took notes. Malcolm did a lot of nodding, asked a couple of questions, but gave nothing away. Was he just going through the motions? Do representations like this make any difference or do they do what they want to do regardless? I have no idea – but at least I can do a press release for the local papers declaring that I’ve ‘taken the case to the top’.

The 1922 Committee meets in Room 14 every Thursday at six o’clock. Sir Marcus and the other Committee bigwigs sit on the dais and we backbenchers fill the body of the room. Sitting right at the back, in a single row, are the whips, a line of vultures at the feast. Sir Marcus begins by inviting ‘the whip of duty to give us the business for the coming week’. This is read to us and we note what the whipping is and when we have to be on parade to vote. (Having no ‘pair’ I know I have to be on parade regardless!) Then assorted old boys catch the chairman’s eye and get up to make their point – though not tonight, because tonight we had the PM come in to address us. He spoke from very few notes (if any) and spoke well. It’s a funny sing-song voice he has, and an odd way of pronouncing certain words (wunt for want etc.); he’s not a natural orator, but there’s something about his dogged decency that is rather moving. Anyway, when he’d said his piece, we banged our desks and banged and banged them. I was next to Stephen Milligan. He said, ‘Keep banging. The whips are watching.’

Frankie Howerd’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Lots of oohs, aahs and titter ye nots … no … yes … it’s wicked to mock the afflicted. The best moment was Russ Conway accompanying the Graveney School Choir from Tooting singing ‘Three Little Fishes’; the worst Cilla Black – only because she kept bursting into tears and when the performer cries the audience doesn’t. Frank became a regular at Cilla’s house every Sunday – ‘always by invitation, usually his own’. The house was packed. I sat with Ernie Wise and came back with Fergus Montgomery,
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a Pickwickian colleague from Cheshire with a distinct theatrical bent.

A six o’clock briefing with Peter Lilley who has a wonderful portrait of General de Gaulle on his wall. Peter plans to make errant fathers contribute towards the upkeep of their children. ‘It won’t be universally popular; it’ll bring a lot of unhappy people to our surgeries; but it needs to be done.’ He comes over well. He has a courteous manner and rather a boyish look (given he’s forty-nine), but there’s nothing camp about him – rumours notwithstanding.

The first gathering of the National Heritage Select Committee. I’m on it because I got a call a couple of weeks back from the Chief Whip, indicating that, as I was a good boy, a place on a Select Committee could probably be mine – they’re ‘highly coveted’. If you want to be on a Committee you write to the Committee of Selection making your case for consideration. Nominally the Committee then ponders who should go where and then votes you in or not as the case may be. Clearly, though, it’s all sorted out by the whips beforehand – who’ll get in, who won’t and who gets to chair what. At the first meeting, Gerald Kaufman and Paul Channon
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(as the two senior members) danced a little minuet, both suggesting the other was best qualified to be chairman – but, in fact, it had already been agreed that Kaufman would take the chair. He looks like a tortoise without its shell, but he’s elaborately courteous and quite friendly in a spiky sort of way. I think it could be fun. There’s already talk of a trip to Australia.

At the end-of-term reception at No. 10, the PM looked preoccupied – as well he might: the pound is sagging, the Euronuts are rampant, Bosnia’s in crisis, though what
seemed to be exercising him most was the rebellion on the Office Costs Allowance. In the wee small hours (1.00 a.m.) around forty of our side voted with the opposition to increase our secretarial allowance by about £7,000 more than the government wanted. The PM had called for ‘restraint’ and kept shaking his head saying the vote was ‘sending out all the wrong signals’. Of course, we toadies all followed our leader into the lobby, knowing that the rebels and the opposition between them would give us the cash we need anyway. The new amount is £39,960 which – given the size of the mailbag and the level of constituency casework – is hardly excessive. I shall claim the full amount, or near it, and at the same time enjoy the plaudits that come from having voted for restraint.

Forty-eight hours of relentless good works behind me, I’m on the train back to London and supper with Stephen Milligan in Black Lion Lane. I have the papers laid out before me and the story of the day is sensational: David Mellor, our Minister of Fun, caught with his trousers down and his pecker up. The object of his affections, according to
The People
, not the long-suffering Judith Mellor, but one Antonia de Sancha, thirty-one, ‘an unemployed actress’. What next?

Mr Major has rejected David Mellor’s offer to resign. The tabloids are in full cry.
The Sun
says: ‘The clamour to draw a veil over David Mellor’s extra-marital activities reeks of hypocrisy. As the minister responsible for media issues, he has warned the press “it is drinking in the last chance saloon”. How can he be left in charge of a privacy bill?’ How indeed? It seems
The People
got its story by means of bugging La Sancha’s Finborough Road love-nest. That has to be an invasion of privacy, doesn’t it? No, according to Bill Hagerty, editor of
The People
: ‘Mellor has complained he’s been unable to write speeches because he’s too tired. Now we know why … Mr Mellor’s love-life has interfered with his effectiveness as a Cabinet minister – and that’s a matter of legitimate public interest.’

Stephen [Milligan]’s view is that it’s the recess, the silly season is upon us, it’s only sex, nothing serious (money is what matters), it’ll soon blow over.

By happy coincidence, there’s a piece in the paper by Cardinal Hume (fifty years a monk) on the joys of celibacy.