Breaking the Code (19 page)

A week is indeed a long time in politics. In Brighton just seven days ago my excellent activists stood and cheered our leader to the echo. Today they seem to want his guts for garters. The news that British Coal is going to close 31 pits with the loss of 30,000 jobs has galvanised them in a way I’ve not known before. They are
passionately
opposed to the policy. There are no mining interests in Chester (and needless to say I know absolutely nothing, zero, zilch, nix, about the subject) but my people are united: Something Must Be Done. To defuse the bomb (at least from a personal point of view) I’m calling a special Association meeting for Sunday morning. Branch officers can consult their branch members and bring me their views. ‘Tell me what you think on Sunday and I will tell Mr Heseltine on Monday,’ is the line I’m taking.

A long day, good in parts. Dinner with the county councillors (‘We can’t betray the
miners like this’), surgery (nearly three hours of it), a visit to the Oxfam area office at Boughton, a photo call with the war widows, and, best of all, Neil Hamilton with the Chamber of Commerce. Neil was quite brilliant. His theme: the decimation of red tape; his challenge: if there’s a bit of unnecessary red tape that’s got a stranglehold on your business get me the details and I will deal with it personally. He was effortlessly on top of his brief. He even managed to say all the right things to the market traders. Good turnout, good press, good egg.

He was also very funny. Had I seen the pictures of
Il Presidente
, in full flying fig, flak jacket, helmet, goggles and all, touring the Westland helicopter headquarters? ‘Isn’t he marvellous? 30,000 miners on the dole today, 120,000 building workers out of work tomorrow, you
know
it makes sense. Fly me, I’m Hezza!’

It also turns out that most of the Cabinet were completely unaware of the decision to close the pits and were taken totally by surprise. Neil says there’s no question of a U-turn. There’s no going back. ‘Drift and dither? That’s not our style.’ He’s wicked.

It was worth doing the meeting this morning. The troops want the policy reversed – however illogical, whatever it costs. They want the message relayed to the Prime Minister and Mr Heseltine personally. They want me to report back.

We went for a jolly lunch with the Barbours
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at Bolesworth Castle. Since the
on dit
is that the family fortune was founded on the slave trade, we didn’t spend too much time on the plight of the mining community. They are generous hosts. We quaffed and sluiced, admired their pictures, admired their furniture, enjoyed their guests – two of whom I pretended to know but couldn’t place and one of whom stole the show by telling us she used to go out with Bill Clinton. This was at Oxford, twenty-five years ago. Was he interested in politics then?

‘Not that I remember.’

What was he like?

‘What was he like? He was absolutely
gorgeous
.’

Volte-face
. U-turn. Climb-down.
Il Presidente
came to the House and ate humble pie.
Yesterday there was ‘no alternative’ to the closure of the pits, ‘none’. Today he found one. He told us that British Coal will now be allowed to proceed with the closure of only ten of the pits. The future of the rest will be reviewed in due course, ‘after consultation’. He’s come up with a £165 million aid package to soften the blow in the affected communities and Peter Walker
204
is going to coordinate it. (Apparently Major and Hezza cobbled this together late last night and they had an emergency Cabinet meeting this morning to get it endorsed.)

I arrived too late to bag my seat, so I viewed the proceedings from the members gallery. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The jeering was fairly sustained and not confined to the opposition benches. At first Heseltine kept his head down and just ploughed through his script, but eventually the barracking got to him. ‘Stop being so plain bloody stupid’ he snapped. Almost all the interventions were hostile. Only Edwina rode to the rescue – when the pits closed in her constituency George Brown was the MP and in the government, but no help was forthcoming then, and the South Derbyshire experience shows that, given time, there is life after coal. I’m sure she’s right, but I’m not sure anyone wanted to hear the truth. The opposition were baying for blood and – never mind the rights or wrongs of the issue – our side are angry that we’ve been landed in this mess on top of everything else.

In the Tea Room we loyalists sat silently while the rebels let rip. ‘This is typical Heseltine, arrogant, impetuous, thinks he can steamroller anyone and anything. Well, he can’t.’ Winston [Churchill]
205
rode his high horse. Trying to sound Churchillian, he just sounds pompous – but out there, in viewer-land, they’re full of admiration for his stand. And Elizabeth Peacock,
206
not I imagine the bear of brightest brain, has become the miners’ Joan of Arc. Flushed with the success of her latest interview on the green, she said to me, ‘What the Prime Minister asked us to accept was a human disaster and a public relations catastrophe. You have to agree.’ I suppose I do. If the closures are inevitable, they should have been phased in, and the announcement has been an undeniable turbo-charged cock-up. The likes of Bill Cash are simply shaking their heads and saying, ‘He’s simply not up to it.’

Sir Marcus gave an interesting account of his lunch with the PM at the Carlton Club. It was to mark the seventieth anniversary of the creation of the 1922 committee but the festivities didn’t go quite as planned. For a start, the poor PM turned up late because of the emergency Cabinet; then the 1922 executive turned on their leader – ‘over the lamb chops – in a genial sort of way, you know’ – telling him how badly this whole wretched business has been handled;
then
the PM turned on them, admonishing them for not giving him the public backing he needs.

As arranged, I met up with Archie Hamilton.
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I think we’re making progress on the Cheshires.

There is an extraordinary story on the front page of
The Times
. ‘Mr Major leads a surprisingly solitary life … Mrs Major spends much of her time in Huntingdon with the children and when her husband first arrived at Downing Street he could find no one to iron his shirts. He would go for days eating little or nothing. Eventually a maid was hired and Wrens brought in to prepare him a breakfast every morning … He is frequently lonely and unsure of his real friends. He trusts Mr Mellor, Richard Ryder and Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare.’ Oh dear, oh dear.

Well, he could be lonelier still after tonight.

The great debate came and went and we survived. A full House: 320 to 307, a majority of thirteen. Elizabeth Peacock and the Wintertons were our rebels. Churchill, Cash, Cormack and co. stayed on side. As we filed out after hearing the results, Geoffrey Dickens chuntered, ‘That was fun.’

‘An utter shambles,’ said someone, ‘a complete and utter shambles.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ chortled Geoffrey, ‘That was fun.’

DD of the SS told me to present myself at the Lower Whips’ Office at 5.30 p.m. ‘We meet every Monday, just before Q. It’s just half a dozen or so good men, ready to go over the top. We call the meeting Drinks. There aren’t any, of course. It’s a code word. When you get a message saying “Come for Drinks” you’ll know what it means.’

In fact, wine was on offer, and nuts, and we sat in the corner, six of us huddled together on low sofas, and Bob Hughes
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explained to us that we were ‘sort of snipers’ who had to be ready to lob in the odd grenade, torpedo the enemy, throw the opposition
off the scent. The metaphors were mixed, but the message was clear. Risk life and limb and, who knows, promotion could come your way…

Of course, it could be a general election that comes our way. From Egypt (where he is laying wreaths on the field of El Alamein) the PM has let it be known that the consequence of a defeat on Maastricht on Wednesday week could lead him to call an election. ‘Idle threats – it’s hardly the way to win friends and influence people, is it?’ harrumphed some splendid old cove in the Smoking Room. (I think it was Sir Anthony Grant.
209
I’ve still not mastered all the names. No doubt one of the reasons I’m not Prime Minister.)

I hosted our President’s Club reception down in a marquee on the terrace. Forty or fifty activists donate £100 per year and their reward is a lunch in Chester and this gathering today. The challenge for the member is to come up with a guest speaker to give the event the oompahpah it needs. They have to have a Cabinet minister, but any old Cabinet minister won’t do. William Waldegrave? ‘No one’s really heard of him.’ Norman Lamont? ‘He’s not very popular right now.’ Peter Brooke? ‘Oh, that’s a bit disappointing.’ For today’s fest I secured David Hunt (who is excellent), but registering the degree of excitement his name engendered when I broke the news, I managed to save the day by adding Jeffrey Archer to the mix. It went well. Jeffrey and David did their bit like old troupers and, despite all the whispering behind the canapés (‘is there really going to be an election?’), manfully we toed the line. Inflation’s down, the recession’s receding, the future’s bright.

In fact, we’re not being threatened with a general election after all. The latest line from Admiralty House is that if we lose next Wednesday’s vote, it’s the PM who goes. It’s his job on the line. Back me or sack me. And the fix the rebels are in is this: lose Major and who do they get? Clarke? Heseltine? It seems ingenious. Jeffrey thinks it’s brilliant. (Perhaps he thought of it?) ‘We’ve got to back John all the way.’ I agree and said so later to the lugubrious Sir George Gardiner,
210
who looks like a dying llama, a veritable deaths-head at any feast. ‘That’s all very well,’ he said, moistening his lips and blinking at me through his gig-lamps, ‘but he’s not helping himself the way he’s carrying on. This bullying the party with stupid, meaningless threats, it’s infantile.’ Ours is not a happy ship.

I am not sure we are going with the grain of the British people. According to the latest MORI poll, 60 per cent think Lamont should go and, if there was a referendum tomorrow, 59 per cent would vote against the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. Of course, there isn’t a referendum tomorrow, but there will be a vote here at ten o’clock. If we win, we soldier on. If we lose, Major goes. And then what?

Willie Whitelaw
211
was at dinner tonight and spent the whole evening sighing, shaking his head, wobbling his jowls in despair. ‘I don’t know what’s become of us.’ What is the answer, Lord Whitelaw? ‘Unity,’ he banged the table with his glass. ‘Unity. Unity. It’s the Tory Party’s secret weapon.’ When I said goodnight to him his oyster eyes were brimming with tears.

We survived. Thanks to the Lib Dems. On the key vote, twenty-six of our side rebelled and six abstained. If Paddy and his merry men hadn’t ridden to the rescue, we would certainly have lost and both Major and Hurd would have resigned. As it is, the PM’s had a triumph, John Smith looks like an unprincipled opportunist, and it should be fairly plain sailing from now on in.

The debate was rowdy and predictable. The PM was good, John Smith was positively poor. I intervened on him – not because I had anything useful to say but because I wanted to earn brownie points with the whips. (That’s the way it seems to work. The only people intervening on the front-bench speakers are either loonies with an axe to grind or those frantic to climb the greasy pole. It’s really very silly.) I stayed for the first couple of hours (Heath good, Ashdown excellent) and returned around nine for the wind-ups.

Poor Hartley Booth
212
was the last backbencher to speak on our side. No one was listening. No one at all. As he chuntered on, halting, struggling, the Chamber was filling up, the hubbub growing. Several hundred highly excitable middle-aged men and women, many the worst for wear and all talking volubly, laughing and grunting, meandered back to their places with a complete and utter disregard for poor old Hartley. Several times the Speaker tried to restore order, but no one, no one at all, was the least bit interested in what the hapless bugger had to say. When Cunningham and Hurd got to their feet, we concentrated, the sense of ‘occasion’ returned, but each side was so busy barracking
the other we still couldn’t hear a thing. Indeed, the only way to hear was to sit back and put your ear to the amplifier that’s built-in to the back of the benches. When it came to the votes, tensions were running feverishly high. Later DD of the SS tried to imply he’d had a pretty good idea of what the numbers would be all along, but I don’t believe it. I don’t think anyone knew what the outcome would be. When we won the first vote, the one on the Labour amendment, by just six there was uproar. The next vote was inevitably going to be even tighter. The whips were working overtime. You could see Heseltine and Lamont earnestly pleading with the renegades. And when it all came right the whole place went berserk. We stood and cheered and waved our order papers. Those of us who were near enough patted the PM on the back.

There’s a rumour going round that it was rather closer than it needed to be. David Lightbown,
213
all twenty stone of him, pursued one of the rebels into the lavatory and was so engrossed in the task of ‘persuading’ his prey to do the decent thing, he missed the vote himself!

This morning I took part in a truly bizarre ritual. It involved my rising at six and spending two and a half hours alone up a turret in a small, deserted, windowless room. As a result of my endeavours I have secured the opportunity to present my first Ten Minute Rule Bill.

What this means is that three weeks from today I will have ten minutes at prime time (after PMQs and before the business of the day) to outline my proposed piece of legislation and present it to the House. To secure this benefit you have to be first in the queue when the Bill Office opens. To be first in the queue you have to be first in the waiting room. To be first in the waiting room you have to be there at eight o’clock. I arrived at 7.30 a.m. and found the Bill Office up eight flights of stairs in a tower off Members’ Lobby. The Office itself was closed, but opposite was an ante-room, where dawn was breaking through a dormer window. There I sat reading the paper, for two and a half hours. At around nine, through the open door, I saw assorted clerks arrive and go into the Bill Office opposite. None glanced my way. A little before ten I walked across the hallway, knocked on the Office door and went in. The clerk sat behind his desk. He didn’t look up. I coughed.