Breaking the Code (72 page)

The
Evening Standard
seems to concur, describing her as ‘the greatest courtesan of the twentieth century’.

At around six the Deputy [Andrew Mackay] and I nipped over to Sarah Willetts’ private view somewhere off Sloane Square. The pictures are wonderful, Mediterranean and classy, but Sarah was a touch unreal and David quite twitchy. Why became apparent when the man from Special Branch appeared, flashed his badge and started casing the joint.

David whispered, ‘The PM’s due at seven – and look who’s here.’ A hack from the
Evening Standard
(looking like a refugee from
The Munsters
) was monopolising Sarah – ‘and we told No. 10 there’d be no press. What do we do?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, helpfully.

Andrew took me by the arm and said, ‘If the Prime Minister is coming, I think we’ll just slip away. With a close vote tonight I wouldn’t like him to see two members of the office out socialising. Just in case it goes wrong.’

It didn’t go wrong. It went rather well. ‘Censure Vote Backfires on Labour’ is the headline.
And
we won the Test against New Zealand. The PM will wake a happy bunny.

Dewar deserves the rotten press he gets this morning. He played it badly. Because the issue was Hogg’s handling of BSE, he took the support of the minority parties for granted, which they resented, and then hyped it up as an attempt to bring down the government. The media played along – BBC2 cleared the decks to bring you the entire debate live and in colour, schedules were disrupted to rush you the result as it comes through – so the effect of our victory – a majority of thirteen, with three Labour members missing – has been to exaggerate our triumph, give Labour a bloody nose, and make us look and feel safe for 1 May.

It’s particularly gratifying to have come through it unscathed because, in truth, on the issues involved there is quite a case to answer! Roger Freeman gets – and deserves – much of the credit for establishing confidence that we had some idea what needed doing and some commitment to doing it. That one Cabinet minister has to be brought in to make up for the inadequacies of another Cabinet minister is simply extraordinary, but actually we got away with it. We’ve also got away with spending £3.3 billion tackling the crisis without resolving it!

I stood at the bar of the House to listen to Roger’s wind-up and he did a marvellous
job: hubbub all around, intemperate catcalls from the opposition benches, but on he rolled imperturbably, while beside me a colleague muttered, ‘This is the night manager at the Ritz stepping forward to sort out the double booking.’

At breakfast Stephen was buoyant and delightful. ‘Last week was a setback, there’s no use denying it’. We readily agree that the upside is that he’s now universally recognised as one of The Contenders (with cartoons galore to prove it). The downside is the damage to his reputation as a safe pair of hands. Of course, it’s wholly unfair. As Stephen pointed out, if you want a good example of a safe pair of hands you should consider his handling of the paedophiles at Ashworth Hospital – ‘Whitemoor Prison with knobs on’ – but successfully defused last week in under twenty-four hours. There are few prizes for keeping the dogs quiet in the night, but when the barking starts the fall from grace can be swift and merciless. Remember John Moore?
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Danny’s private verdict (whispered on the way to the lift): ‘If we get anything like it again and soon, the press will link last week’s gaffe back to the early days at Heritage and he’s doomed.’

Overall, Danny was more positive: ‘Our tracking surveys are moving the way we need them to, slowly. And the press have changed since we shifted on Europe. It may not be enough, but at least it makes you feel what you’re doing is worthwhile.’ There’s another nice embarrassment for Labour today: their plan to privatise the Tote, floated on Saturday, running on Sunday, denied on Monday. Seb has spotted a horse called ‘Pause for Thought’ running this afternoon and is constructing an amusing question for PMQs this afternoon. (Is this the way they did it in Disraeli’s day?)

I told Stephen about my encounter with the No. 10 team in the hinterland of the House of Lords. Stephen shook his head. ‘That’s JM’s trouble. He’s paranoid.’

I smiled. ‘Perhaps he has good cause. Look at us.’

Ninety-five Conservatives voted against the government on the Firearms Bill last night. It’s bad, but there’s worse to come. In the bath, I have just heard Malcolm Rifkind say to John Humphreys [on BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme]: ‘No, we are not neutral. We are actually on balance hostile to a single currency, but we accept that you have to think very carefully about these matters before you rule it out completely.’

Oh dear, oh dear.

At 12.30 I went to see the Chancellor. He was sitting alone in the middle of his vast table, puffing at his cigar, signing constituency letters. He laughed, but he was angry. ‘I heard Malcolm. I went into the kitchen to listen to it properly. The Foreign Secretary did not take the government line, Gyles, so when I was doorstepped I said it must have been a slip of the tongue. We are
not
hostile to EMU. Government policy remains unchanged.’

I asked if perhaps he thought he should agree a full response with No. 10 or the DPM or Central Office.

He got up and gazed out of the window. Through a cloud of smoke, almost in a whisper he said, ‘The truth is, Gyles, that, privately, John has changed his mind. He’s changed sides. It happened last summer. That’s the problem.’

The
Evening Standard
has the headline: ‘RIFKIND v. KEN: NOW IT’S WAR’. The party chairman, on the stump in Wirral South, has backed Malcolm and declared he was speaking ‘for the full Cabinet’. ‘Downing Street, floundering, repeatedly refused to say whether Mr Major supported his Foreign Secretary or not.’ When I talk to Alex Allen at No. 10 he sums it up with commendable economy: ‘I think we have an inherent problem here.’

At five o’clock the Chancellor addresses the 1922 Committee. He speaks on automatic pilot and manages to get through it without mentioning Europe once. Questions are not invited. Afterwards, he is chased down the corridor by lobby correspondents, but his lips remain sealed. We take refuge in his room at the Commons and find his desk piled high with tins of baked beans. (Heinz has sent him a case of forty-eight with a note: ‘We sense that not enough of our product has passed through the Clarke household.’) We sit in front of the TV, sipping whisky and white wine. Ken shakes his head: ‘I’m not going to Ronnie Scott’s tonight. I know what Malcolm’s up to. And he must be stopped.’

John Gummer, pop-eyed and incandescent, puts his head around the door: ‘Can I have a word? All I want to say is this: they can go more sceptical if they like, but they’ll do it without me.’

A messenger arrives from the Treasury: ‘The Foreign Secretary is having dinner with
a Mrs Allright (
sic
),
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but he could be free to see you at Carlton House Terrace around 10.00 p.m.’ On the television we see Norman Lamont opining: ‘Oh, yes, the party on the whole is hostile to EMU.’ John Gummer: ‘If anyone asks me if I am hostile I shall tell them I am not. And if the government says it is hostile I shall resign. And I shan’t be alone. And if it brings down the government, so be it. I am going to telephone the PM now. The leadership we have had on this has been appalling – and I’ve never said that before.’

Over dinner Hezza tells me how once – and only once – a solution to a problem came to him in a dream. It was at the time of Greenham Common, when he was Defence Secretary, and the Greenham women and the flower children were planning to surround the place, just holding hands. To move against them would be a PR nightmare. In his dream Hezza saw the solution: leave the country! The next day he flew to Germany, visited our troops, and flew straight back – with a message to broadcast to the waiting media: ‘I’ve been in Germany today, talking to our service people, young men and women who are risking their lives to defend our freedoms, to defend the freedom of the protestors at Greenham Common. It did the trick.’

At about 10.20 p.m. the Chief Whip phones Carlton House Terrace. Ken and Malcolm are already there. ‘Shall we go?’ A policeman shows us into a tiny lift and we make our way to the Foreign Secretary’s flat. In the small wood-panelled sitting room, beneath the little print of Saint George, Glenfiddich is being taken and peace is breaking out. Malcolm is nursing a bishop’s mace. Ken is nursing a whisky. Malcolm has apologised for the word ‘hostile’. Ken has apologised for the phrase ‘slip of the tongue’. A compromise statement is agreed and the No. 10 press officer called. He’s at home and we’ve woken his baby. Nevertheless, he’ll get the statement out in the early hours. Mission accomplished. Bomb defused. The Chief and I teeter down the stairs into the night, the Chief reminiscing: ‘The first time I came here, I met RAB on these stairs. He had a withered hand, y’know.’

The
Times
headline: ‘Major–Blair clash electrifies MPs’. Not quite, but last night’s debate on the constitution was certainly a Big Occasion, with a full house and a strong showing from the boss. William [Hague] skewered Blair with a couple of fearless interventions. Several around me sensed it as a defining moment. ‘William’s now the one to watch.’

When it was over half a dozen of us had a drink with the PM. He was pleased with the way it had gone. And rightly. He had a beer. And then a second. And lots of peanuts.
As always, long silences fell. For once, I resisted the temptation to try to fill them. As he left (dragged away by the invaluable John Ward – ‘I know what he’ll be like in the morning’) someone murmured, ‘A little touch of Harry in the night.’ So, for at least one of our number, the magic holds.

Derek Lewis has published an account of his brief time as head of the Prison Service. He gets Michael Howard completely wrong: ‘He is a dark, closed-up person, who rarely relaxes and seldom shows a warmth in his political capacity.’ In fact, Michael is warm, generous, sunny, sometimes funny. His capacity for work is extraordinary and his efforts at the Home Office have been Herculean – going every inch of the way against the grain of the Queen Anne’s Gate culture. Michael Forsyth told me that he and Howard used to pass papers to one another personally to keep the diluting-influence of the civil servants at bay. Clearly Howard doesn’t come across on TV. Lewis (who comes over as both plausible and pleasant on the box) concedes that Michael was ‘brilliant in the debate’. It was an extraordinary afternoon, one of those rare occasions when what happens in the chamber of the House of Commons actually makes a difference.

Ted [Heath] has gone to town. He’s been on the box telling us that Labour’s got it right – on the minimum wage, on the Social Chapter, on a Scottish assembly! On the radio John Biffen and George Walden, a couple of smug self-indulgent old farts (who aren’t standing, of course) tell us taxes are going to have to go up whatever the Chancellor says – ‘everyone knows that’. With friends like these…

Anticipating another tight vote last night we hauled in our troops from far and wide – from sickbed and safari – and then ended up with a majority of thirty!

Ted came lumbering up to me, shoulders heaving, wreathed in mischievous smiles: ‘See – I’m still with you!’ Silly old goat. The PM shrugged, ‘People don’t take him seriously any more, do they?’

Winston was back from Paris. I had paged him on Thursday night – at the behest of the police who wanted to warn him of a death threat – and he said, ‘I got your message. I was at the Paris Opera. You spoilt the second act. I thought I must have missed a vote or something.’ I’m impressed his pager works internationally. I suppose with Winston it needs to.

One evening last summer we were coming through the division lobby together and I remarked on his unusually casual appearance.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s maddening. I’ve been running late since lunch. I didn’t have time to change. The service at the Cipriani was dreadfully slow today.’

The DPM had returned from the London Fashion Week dinner. ‘I’d only eaten the first course.’

‘Why on earth do you go to London Fashion Week?’

‘Because I invented it!’

EDCP with Hezza in the chair. We rattle through the forthcoming attractions. Virginia has an announcement on violence on TV. And she’s going to ban another satellite porn channel.

‘Can’t we have any fun?’ murmurs Tony Newton, lighting up. There is momentary consternation. He quickly adds, ‘I haven’t even got a satellite dish, of course.’

Brian Mawhinney bleats: ‘This isn’t supposed to be just a diary of events. We’re supposed to decide what we’re going to
say
. What are we going to say this week?’

‘Well,’ says Tony, risking a second sortie, ‘we could start by saying to the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary, “Why don’t you talk to one another?”’

Nobody laughs.

It’s difficult to know when to laugh in this business. Charles Lewington tells me that Page Three lovely Melinda Messenger is about to endorse the PM. ‘That’s worth twelve points in the polls, isn’t it? I’m seeing
The Sun
on Monday. Shall I give it to them? What do you think?’

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I arrived at No. 11 at 9.30 a.m. to find the Chancellor in mellow mood, bleary-eyed but well-scrubbed. It took ten minutes to sort out the coffee. ‘Why won’t it boil?’ He hadn’t switched on the kettle. ‘We’re out of milk – hold on.’