Breaking the Code (67 page)

Where will it all end?

When will it all end?

That’s easier. 20 March, 10 April, 1 May are the obvious election dates. And I’m going for 10 April, a) because it won’t be quite the last gasp, and b) because we can then avoid the humiliation of the Wirral South by-election. At Barry [Porter]’s funeral the activists were confident of victory, but even with a majority of 8,000 I’d have thought there’s no hope. There’s certainly no hope for me in Chester. I have mixed feelings about it. Michèle has none.

We’re snowed in here [in Suffolk, staying with Simon Cadell’s widow, Beckie, and their two sons] so we can’t go back to London as planned. We’re sitting by the fire drinking Simon’s special peach and champagne cocktail instead. I’m reading Richard E. Grant’s film diaries (my Christmas present from M – ‘fucking fantastic – yeeeesssss!’ Never mind the language, feel the verve) and the new novel by Michael Dobbs (cosy and quite comforting: Dobbs does for Westminster skulduggery what Agatha Christie did for the country house murder). Beckie’s done just the right lunch to go with the weather (roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, glorious gravy, mellowing Burgundy), we’ve watched
Babe
on video with the boys (it’s odd and sentimental, but eventually it works) and we’ve pondered the mysteries of the New Year’s Honours. If an OBE for Joan Collins, why a CBE for Ned Sherrin? Are these the fruits of feasting with panthers? Still no knighthood for Donald Sinden. Virginia is on side, Murdo is on side, the PM is supportive. I took it up with him again before Christmas.

I said, ‘When everyone thinks it’s right and richly deserved and wants it to happen and it doesn’t, it’s so frustrating.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been trying to get a knighthood for Alec Bedser. It isn’t easy.’ But it can be done. Today Bedser has his K and the PM has a happy start to his year.

Or does he? The lead headline in today’s
Telegraph
: ‘Dorrell urges Europe rethink’. The PM will not be amused. I call Stephen. He’s delighted. Of course. For him to succeed we need support from the centre and the centre-right, and the centre today is Eurosceptic. This isn’t mere positioning. Stephen’s view on the EU has changed markedly over the last three years, but the message has only filtered out fitfully. I speak to Tim [Rycroft] who says: ‘Well, we agreed before Christmas the time for subtlety was over.’

Back to London. We shared a taxi to Ipswich with a garrulous lady who was on her way to a funeral in York and talked non-stop in the manner of Hyacinth Bucket scripted by Alan Bennett. The icy roads were a nightmare too.

As we got in the phone was ringing. Little Michael Jack,
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eager-beaver Financial Secretary, was on the line. ‘You know today’s the day we publish the Finance Bill. I’m supposed to be on the media spreading the good news on the economy and what happens? I’m pulled from every programme and the whole thing is hijacked by the Secretary of State for Health banging on about Europe. It is so bloody frustrating.’ He is right to be angry. I call Stephen and give him Michael’s number.

Stephen calls. The Prime Minister has been on the line, ‘seriously dischuffed’. The poor PM has his New Year ‘relaunch’ all set up –
Frost on Sunday,
ad campaign on Monday, press conference on Tuesday – and what is today’s helpful headline? ‘Dorrell sparks Tory feud over leadership’. The PM wants to know what Stephen proposes to do about it. The PM favours a statement from Stephen via PA asserting that Stephen and the government are as one. Stephen prefers a single briefing of one Sunday lobby correspondent along the lines of ‘this isn’t about the single currency – it’s about ambitious change within the EU – it’s in line with the government’s own White Paper – I’ve said all this in public before (true) – I didn’t time it as a New Year bombshell (also true: Stephen gave the interview early in December) – this isn’t about the leadership of the Tory party (ho-ho), it’s about the clear difference between us and Labour (and it is that too).’

The PM also wants to know why Stephen hadn’t cleared his pronouncements on the future of the European Union with the Foreign Secretary. ‘Er … er…’ Stephen had at least got clearance from Tony Newton to do yesterday’s round of radio and TV interviews.
(Tony is chairing EDCP
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in the absence of the Deputy Prime Minister who is in East Africa bird-watching. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is being ‘kept in close touch’, is in Mexico, also bird-watching.) Unless health is the subject under discussion, the PM does not want or expect to hear Stephen on the airwaves for the foreseeable future.

Today’s headline beggars belief: ‘TORY MP: MY LOVE FOR GAY TEENAGER’. You can only pity the poor PM! He turns up for his New Year
Frost
interview, armed with his Dorrell answers, ready to lay into Labour, happy to assert that ours is the party of the Family, and what does he find? The
News of the World
– and every other paper – packed with choice extracts from Jerry Hayes’ passionate notes to an eighteen-year-old ‘Young Conservative and Commons researcher’: ‘I’ve just been crying my eyes out. I can’t help it. I love you with every fibre of my body.’ Yup, it does make you want to weep.

Despite this, the PM does rather well. He usually does. Before Christmas Howell told me that he favoured ‘a presidential campaign, distancing the boss from the rest of the rabble’ and this, clearly, is what we’re going to get. Of course, it won’t work – both because EMU is a real issue that isn’t going to go away and because the public made up their mind about a year ago and nothing we can do will persuade them to change it now.

Not a bad press for Stephen. Gerald Scarfe’s cartoon has him as a vulture perched on the end of the PM’s sick-bed.

Last night we had Noel [Davis], Harry [Audley], Joanna [Lumley] and Stevie [Barlow] for supper in the kitchen. Noel was frighteningly wheezy, but as funny as ever. He offered an old Ralph Richardson story he claims he hadn’t heard until recently. Sir Ralph, on stage, mid-scene, suddenly staggers towards the footlights. The rest of the cast is alarmed. The audience holds its breath. ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ asks Sir Ralph. A voice from the rear of the stalls calls out. Richardson peers out towards the voice and says, ‘Terrible play this, eh doctor?’

As my chestnut-I’d-only-just-picked-up I offered Bernard Shaw being set the poser: ‘You are in the National Gallery and it catches fire. Which one painting would you try to save?’ GBS: ‘The one nearest the door.’ This prompted Joanna to give us her story of a private dinner at the V&A at which, before dinner is served, the distinguished guests are invited to examine some of the museum’s choicest treasures – exquisite boxes of ivory, silver and gold, designs by William Morris, sketches by Leonardo, the Thomas-a-Becket reliquary. At table, Joanna finds herself seated next to John Paul Getty Jr and asks him,
‘If the lights had gone out when we’d been looking at all those fabulous treasures, what would you have been tempted to slip into your pocket?’

‘I’d take the da Vinci notebooks,’ says Getty.

‘Why?’ asks Jo.

‘Oh,’ says Getty, ‘I could buy the rest.’

Went to the Caprice last night with Ros and Mart [Jarvis] and so missed The Great Debate on the monarchy – clearly a collector’s item of a fiasco. Poor Trevor!
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Until last night he belonged to that select band who Can Do No Wrong. Robin Day is huffing and puffing with due pomposity: ‘The programme consisted of two hours of ignorance, distortion, prejudice, half-truths, crude assertion, bad temper and cheap personal abuse.’ The old fart makes it sound quite watchable.

Talk to Danny who reports that the PM did well at his first presidential press conference – except that he didn’t say any of the things they’d briefed him to say so that the press are writing it up as a bit of a non-event. Happily, today Kevin Keegan has resigned from Newcastle and Richard Branson is lifting off in his balloon so Blair’s New Year launch is nicely sidelined. Harold Elletson calls. Tony Benn has written to the PM to enquire if it’s true that

Harold is in the pay of MI6 and, if it is, isn’t that ‘an office of profit under the Crown’ incompatible with his membership of the House? It can’t be true – can it? ‘TORY MP IS A SPY’ – that’s all we need!

Talking of all we need, speak to Christine and Neil [Hamilton]. They seem brighter, but still in limbo, waiting, hoping, praying that Gordon Downey [the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards] will produce a report that lifts the clouds. ‘Our life has been ruined, utterly ruined. Until Neil is exonerated we can’t start living again.’

Jolly lunch with Laurie Mansfield, who is off to Hollywood tomorrow. Laurie (who is a Major fan and whose agency represents Jim Davidson, Paul Merton, Julian Clary, Hale & Pace etc.) advises strongly against the PM appearing on showbiz-type shows. ‘It takes an entertainer to be entertaining on an entertainment programme.’ Blair at the Brits or with
Des O’Connor was embarrassing – also Blair was tempted (one would be) into elaborating an incident in his childhood to turn it into a full-blown anecdote (‘How I became an airline stowaway’) only to find it blowing up in his face when his dad emerged from the woodwork to tell us he has no recollection of any of it…

Mihir Bose
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points out that this is an established British political tradition. F. E. Smith’s father went on several holidays to Egypt and F. E. claimed to have travelled with him, regaling audiences with tales of how he sailed through the Med, stayed at Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo, even rode a primitive bicycle from the city to the pyramids – to the wonderment of the Egyptians. However, when John Campbell came to write F. E.’s biography he thoroughly investigated these favourite stories in the F. E. repertoire and found them to be complete fiction. F. E. never left Birkenhead as a boy.

To Chester for the enthronisation (
sic
) of the new bishop – a contemporary from Oxford. Never mind the police looking younger: when the bishops start to be contemporaries…
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The ninety-minute service was an odd hotchpotch of familiar and unfamiliar ritual, ancient tradition, ecumenical moments and evangelical flourishes. There was the one customary embarrassment we all dread: making the sign of the peace – assorted Lord Lieutenants, High Sheriffs, Mayors, aldermen, military personnel and the lone MP (the only one without uniform or vestments) turning awkwardly to one another, shaking hands with as few people as possible, resolutely refusing to catch anybody’s eye. All the processing is splendid – but absurd. The most moving moment came when the new bishop’s wife and three of their children led the prayers and did it with wonderful certainty and simplicity. The bishop ended his sermon with a prayer from Dag Hammarskjold: ‘For what has been: thanks. For what is to come:
yes
!’

At lunch I sat between the Bishop of Blackburn
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and Lady Temple
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and thought to myself, ‘This is provincial society and I’m part of it. It’s quite fun, but I can’t take it seriously and it’s not what I want.’ I learnt something useful from the Bishop of Blackburn (who was very convivial): a Very Reverend is a dean or a provost, a Right Reverend is a bishop, and a Most Reverend is an archbishop.

I’m just in from the King’s School Old Scholars’ annual dinner at which I was seated
next to the dean (the Very Reverend). We drank a
great
deal
of port and pretended to be a couple of minor characters from Trollope. He volunteered to bring me home. I assumed he’d have a driver, but no. He drove me himself, very slowly, very steadily, right in the centre on the road. He is a good thing.

Back to school. The atmosphere in the Tea Room is surprisingly buoyant. Jerry Hayes does well by being evidently present, self-deprecating and yet his curly-headed self.

‘You’re looking fit, Jerry.’

‘I’ve been on the
News of the World
diet. It’s a
very
fast way to lose weight.’

Last night we had the Wednesday Club to dinner. Willetts, Michael Trend (deputy chairman of the party), Charles Hendry (vice-chairman), Edward Garnier (PPS to the Attorney-General), David Lidington (PPS to the Home Secretary), David Faber (Stephen’s PPS), plus wives, or, in Faber’s case, plus girlfriend. In the early hours of this morning, she was my worry: the girlfriend – tall, slim, and, yes, she was called Sophie and worked for
Vogue
. Was it a dangerous mistake to play indiscreet games with an outsider in our midst? Were we going to be set up like the hapless Richard Spring? But David wouldn’t have brought her if he didn’t trust her, would he? And we weren’t that indiscreet – except we went round the table collecting predictions of the election result and only David and Sarah [Willetts] thought we could still win. And if we lose, who will be leader this time next year? It was a close-run thing: Dorrell one ahead of Howard with Portillo bringing up the rear. Michael Trend and his wife were joint but emphatic voices declaring that William Hague would slip through in the final round. ‘He’s the Cabinet minister constituency associations most frequently ask for.’

Breakfast with Stephen. He arrived late and (unusual for him) grouchy. He’d been on the
Today
programme with prissy Chris Smith, and perhaps Chris got the better of him? He missed Danny who came and went and left us with the message: ‘We need Peter Lilley. If we could secure Lilley, we’d have it sewn up. He knows he’ll never be the king, but he can be the kingmaker.’

Today, for the first time in three years I went back to the Treasury for prayers. When I first went, in 1993, when Norman [Lamont] was Chancellor (and Hague was his PPS and I was Stephen’s) I didn’t know what prayers involved or meant. Norman was quite
formal in the way he ran the meeting: the ministers (in armchairs) were invited to contribute in the correct pecking order while the PPSs sat behind (in upright chairs) and had to signal if they wanted to throw in their two cents’ worth. It’s all very different now … There’s a giddy atmosphere of
carnivale
. We all sit round the Chancellor’s table: there’s no pecking order: no agenda: and a general free-for-all ensues in which people speak over one another and the loudest voices seem to be those of the PPSs – notably Peter Butler
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(who has the sort of suspect moustache that goes with yellow string-backed driving gloves) and madcap Michael Fabricant (he of the straw-coloured wig, complete with pink highlights). The Chancellor looks on, benign but bleary-eyed.