Breaking the Code (57 page)
Authors: Gyles Brandreth
Parliament reassembles tomorrow. We had a whips’ meeting today at No. 12 at 3.30 p.m. We agreed that Thurnham heads the list of the Unstable. I said that he’s prim, prissy, prickly, self-pitying and unpredictable. He wants love and a safe seat. The root of the problem is that he announced that he was retiring (because he didn’t fancy defending Bolton North East, majority 185!) and then decided to put in for Westmorland (majority 16,000 plus) and didn’t even get an interview. He feels ‘let down’ by the party. The party should at least have secured him an interview. That could and should have been achieved and wasn’t. Now he’s bitter – and his resentment is being fuelled by his wife who feels that neither her contribution nor Peter’s great gifts have been properly recognised. I explain that I’m the wrong person to woo Peter because I’ve only been here five minutes and he’s been here twelve years. The Chief agrees to ask the PM if he will entertain Mr and Mrs Thurnham to tea. Unbeknownst to Peter I have established an excellent telephone relationship with his association chairman (Norman Critchley, good man) who is keeping me posted with news of Peter’s behaviour in his patch.
Andrew Rowe is reported as saying he would ‘owe it to his constituents’ to resign the whip if the party lurched further to the right, but we agree this isn’t a serious threat. Emma’s ‘a cow’, Thurnham’s ‘sad’, but Andrew’s fundamentally sound and ‘a gent’.
Ashby has to stay high on the list, not because he’s about to go overboard, but because his failed libel action has left him with a bill of around £500,000. According to Derek Conway, we don’t need to search for funds to bail him out, because his admirable daughter has money and is coming to the rescue. We know his prospects are bleak, we assume his constituency will ditch him, we imagine he can’t be getting much work at the Bar, we agree we need to keep a close eye on him, ‘keep him busy’ and lard him with tlc [tender loving care].
I’m on the 9.45 a.m. flight from Heathrow. Mrs T. is on the rampage – and the front page – big time. ‘I am not sure what is meant by those who say that the party should return to something called One Nation Conservatism. As far as I can tell by their views on European federalism, such people’s creed would better be described as no-nation Conservatism.’ To say we don’t need to move to the right is ‘baloney’. She knows exactly what the party and the country need: more Thatcherism, pronto.
The crafty little garden gnome [Robin Cook] is already exploiting the situation: ‘John Major has to decide whether he sees himself in the tradition of Thatcher or Keith Joseph or the One Nation tradition of Disraeli and Iain Macleod.’ The potential for grief is considerable.
In the departure lounge my pager went: ‘Call the Chief at once.’ I called from one of the payphones, surrounded by eavesdroppers.
‘Where are you?’
‘Heathrow.’
‘Good God, are you leaving the country?’ Banter over, he got to the point: ‘Contact all the ministers on your card. Tell them we want no reaction to the Thatcher speech. The Prime Minister is handling it. We want no other comment of any kind.’
This is really bad. I have cocked up. I’ve survived, but it’s not good. I failed to speak to Alistair Burt on Friday and he’s written a letter to
The Times
taking issue with Lady Thatcher. I left a message on one of his numbers, but I didn’t chase him and I should have done. By the time I got hold of him this morning, it was too late. He sent the letter on Saturday, they’re publishing it tomorrow. If we try to retrieve the letter it will just fuel the row. Alistair admits he was a fool to send it, but, of course, if I had done as instructed he wouldn’t have done. When the Chief heard about the letter, he was
incandescent
: ‘He’ll have to be sacked.’ I have not seen the Chief angry before. It is a truly terrifying sight.
‘He expressly disobeyed the Prime Minister’s instruction. He’ll have to go.’ The Chief was raging, red-faced, raving. He looked at me, ‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’
I am ashamed to say I answered ambiguously. ‘Yes, he knows he shouldn’t have sent the letter. He’s full of regrets.’
‘Fuck his regrets. Get him over here.’
I scuttled down to the Lower Whips’ Office. It was empty. I called Alistair at the DSS. He was remarkably calm – and very sweet: ‘I don’t want to drop you in it,’ he said, ‘but
somehow they have to know I didn’t get the message.’ The Deputy arrived in the room. We were alone. He said, ‘Look at me. Now tell me the truth. It’s just between us. No one else will ever know. You didn’t speak to him did you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’
‘Okay, if ever anything like this happens again come straight to me. Now forget it. I’ll sort it.’
And somehow he has. Alistair has had his knuckles rapped, but nothing more. I saw the Chief a few moments ago. He made no mention of it.
Our voting procedure is absurd. This is what happens. A division is called. Two government whips and two opposition whips volunteer as tellers and give their names to the Speaker. Then one of our whips and one of their whips go and station themselves by the exit door of each of the voting lobbies. The members vote by filing past a clerk sitting at a desk on a raised stool (he ticks their name off on the register) and then exit, one by one. As they pass through the doors, the government whip counts them through, counting out loud, ‘One – two – three – four – etc.’ doing his best not to be distracted by the nudges, banter and asides of colleagues as they come shuffling through. The numbers counted, the whips return to the Chamber and hand the figures in to one of the clerks. The clerks then write the figures out on a form: ‘Ayes to the right, so and so; Noes to the left, such and such.’ The senior whip on the winning side then reads out the result of the vote to the House.
What I didn’t realise until half an hour ago is this: the figure the whip gives to the clerk is the figure that counts – and if he gets it wrong, too bad. Never mind what it says on the register, never mind how many people actually voted, what the whip says goes. And last night it seems I miscounted by six! Fortunately, the Labour Party was not out in force and we had a comfortable majority, but had it been one of our tight ones we’d have lost –
thanks to me.
I am being gently joshed in the office about this. The error was discovered when they were going through the voting lists for broken pairs and absentees. Yes, you would have thought counting from one to 300 relatively easy, but it isn’t. I fear that on nights when I’m on telling duty I shall have to lay off the vino.
I’m in the Chamber virtually full-time this week. Yesterday, the Housing Bill Second Reading. Today, opposition Day: privatised water companies debate. Tomorrow, local government finance. Gummer is leading every day and
pace
all the jokes about him (‘The weak are a long time in politics’) the reason he has survived in government so long is
because he is just so good. I endorse the David Curry
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line: if Gummer had been six inches taller and had a voice half an octave lower he’d have held one of the great offices of state. As it is, he comes across like a pixie on Benzedrine. He loves to attack, he’s wonderfully combative, but he knows his brief, he knows what he wants and he gets it.
I’ve just come from prayers. Invariably he arrives late (just as the meeting is due to start he phones from the car to say he’s reached Marble Arch), but he’s worth waiting for because when he arrives he wants to be larky, he wants to have fun. He sits enthroned in the corner, flicks his tie over his shoulder, sips his coffee and says, ‘What scandal has the whip brought us?’ And before I can answer (and I do try to come up with titbits to keep him amused) he’s continuing: ‘Gentlemen, I think you will want to know that I have decided to cull the ruddy duck. The white-headed duck must be conserved, and the ruddy ducks must pay the price. We must ready ourselves for the ruddy duck flak.’
I am going to see Michael Forsyth. He is speaking at the bicentennial Burns Night dinner at Guildhall or the Mansion House or somewhere. The PM and the cream of the establishment will be there. Michael wants some laughs, some poetry, some high emotion and a sustained standing ovation. I am to assist.
Edward Leigh has sent Alastair [Goodlad] a very interesting letter:
It is fairly clear that these defections that have caused us so much grief are not so much fundamental differences of principle or policy as a cry for help or frustrated ambition … The difficulty is that Parliament and the role of MPs assumes that we are still nineteenth-century gentlemen of independent means with a part-time interest in politics. The truth is that most MPs are career politicians who want to have some sort of role in government or of monitoring it effectively.
His analysis is spot on: ‘The Select Committees are powerless debating shops based on lowest-common-denominator consensus-making and backbenchers’ speeches are hardly reported and responded to only in passing by ministers.’ Too many backbenchers have too little to do, so they end up craving attention and can only get it by making dissenting contributions on radio and TV. Edward understands the problem and has come up with five pages of specific proposals – e.g.:
1. Expand the number of MPs who can work in government. There are about 95 ministers and whips, but there are 109 government agencies employing over 300,000 people. Edward suggests these agencies have chairmen appointed who are Members of Parliament. The advantages would include meeting the ‘democratic deficit’ argument that the agencies are drifting away from the control of Parliament.
2. Beef up the Select Committees by giving the chairmen the status (and salary) of a Minister of State and the deputy chairman (from a different party) the rank of an Under-Secretary.
3. Standing Committees at the moment perform little useful function. Backbenchers are put on them as a chosen government supporter and encouraged to say little or nothing and opposition members to filibuster. Could we not make all Standing Committees into much smaller temporary Select Committees with a government majority working to a timetabled schedule taking evidence and making technical improvements, with partisan amendments reserved to the Report Stage?
4. ‘Debates on the floor of the House are increasingly avoided by members.’ They are too long, you won’t be called at a reasonable hour, you won’t be reported, even the ministers’ aren’t listening. Edward suggests shorter debates, timed speeches, proper ministerial responses – and, best of all, votes grouped together at 7.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. so we don’t keep up this farce of padding out debates with meaningless speeches from obliging stooges who are just standing up and spouting to fill the time and do the whips a favour.
He’s come up with about thirty specific suggestions – all of them seem to have something to commend them. He’s sent a copy of the paper to the PM and the DPM as well as the Chief. It’s superb stuff which we should certainly be developing. Why am I certain then that it is going to be comprehensively ignored?
Our tails are up. The PM is in cracking form. At PMQs he’s outscoring Blair every time. Today he was outstanding. We’re having fun with the Harriet Harpie hypocrisy charge
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– and making it stick. Even the opinion polls are moving a point or two our way. In the Tea Room we seem to have rediscovered the will to win. For about three weeks we’ve been on an almost even keel. Is this a record? Of course, it’s fragile. Next week, the Scott Report. Who knows what happens then?
Meanwhile, this morning we embarked on the Housing Bill. This is the first major piece of legislation I have taken through committee. We only have a majority of one, but I’m hopeful that I’ve got a reliable, pliable crowd. I’ve included Ashby as part of our policy of keeping him usefully employed. (The joy of the system is that the whips select who serves on the committee: genial coves are in, trouble-makers are out.) It’s going to run at least till Easter and my aim is to have happy bunnies all the way.
Round One to us. The Scott Report was published at 3.30 p.m. The House was adjourned for ten minutes while several hundred members descended on the little window in Members’ Lobby to collect their copies. It comes in five volumes, running to 2,000 pages – and that’s what’s saved us. There’s so much in it that by selective quotation you can come to what conclusion you please. Sir Richard Scott has not brought in a verdict: he has simply presented his findings so that we can decide. We have: not guilty! Ian Lang was formidable. He got up and asserted categorically that the report clears Waldegrave, Lyell and the rest and there’s an end on it. He turned on Cook: all his accusations were without foundation, he should apologise to the House and the ministers forthwith – or resign. When Cook got up, we all cried, ‘Resign!’ Cook fought back with counter-quotations, but it was too late. Lang had told us that the report ‘wholly vindicated’ our lads so that was that. The truth is the report is fairly damning – the ministers
did
give misleading answers, there was ‘a failure by ministers to meet the obligations of ministerial accountability’ – but he accepts there was no ‘duplicitous’ intent and in one bound we’re free. William is now touring the TV studios proclaiming his innocence and his gratitude to Sir Richard: ‘The inquiry has cleared my name and my honour.’ Nick Lyell is not so obviously off the hook, but because of Scott’s footling double negatives – he does not accept that Lyell was not personally at fault – and because he doesn’t question Lyell’s good faith, the Tea Room conclusion is that we’ve got away with it – Scott-free!
The papers do not make comforting reading. Thurnham is the lead story: ‘Majority cut
to two as Tory resigns whip.’ Michèle said, ‘He’s one of yours, isn’t he? Bit careless.’ We tried to woo him every which way, but if someone is determined to be unhappy what can you do? We wheeled in Michael Howard (his old friend from Cambridge), he saw Waldegrave, he saw Lyell, the PM saw his entire family! Indeed, when I left last night, the PM thought he might have done the trick. Peter had agreed to ‘think it over’. He appears to have thought it over on his way to the
Newsnight
studio. He’s calling himself an ‘independent Conservative’ so we’re going to be as friendly to him as possible in the hope that we can somehow win him back. Meanwhile, we won’t have his vote on Monday – and if we lose on Monday (which we well might) there will be a confidence vote on Tuesday.