Breaking the Code (77 page)

My conscience is pricked. Mo Mowlam has been battling with a brain tumour. It’s the steroids that have made her bulge and radiotherapy that forced her into a wig. Michèle has long said that I shouldn’t make personal remarks.

What election? It’s a non-event. Nothing’s happening out there. I’ve spent the day in the sunshine, on the door-knocker, running up and down pathways in Boughton and Mollington and Christleton and Littleton and everyone’s perfectly friendly, there’s no hostility, but there’s no real interest either. Listening to the radio, watching TV, scanning the papers, it’s as though they’re covering a movie of an election, a soap opera, that you can tune in to if you’re so inclined, but it’s not obligatory, it’s certainly not real and it isn’t really that important either.

Talk to Danny who sounds tired but content. ‘The hours are horrendous. I start at six in the morning working on the PM’s brief for the day and keep going through meeting after meeting till the last which is with the party chairman at nine. And because there isn’t another meeting after it to go on to it can drag on – and on.’

I report on how it’s going in the boondocks – no anger, no evidence Labour landslide, the areas you’d expect to be supportive being supportive and really rather positive.

‘Yup,’ says Danny, ‘That’s the message we’re getting from all over. Honestly, I don’t know what’s happening any more.’

‘I suppose one in ten have a reservation – they’re either fed up or it’s Europe.’

Danny chuckles. ‘If we lose one in ten of our supporters, we’re simply washed away!’

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘You’re doing well. We’re winning the campaign.’

‘Yes, yes, we’ve softened up Labour, compared with a month ago we’ve really softened up Blair – but now we need something dramatic to happen.’

It has. Suddenly the wait-and-see EMU line is falling apart. After Angela Browning
was corralled, we had Angela Rumbold, vice-chairman of the party, coming out firmly against – but we could live with that because she’s a backbencher. Danny and co. have rightly taken the view that since we can’t stop them let’s make a virtue of the fact that we don’t stifle debate and let’s allow the electorate to know our instincts. Tonight though there’s real trouble: John Horam tries to have it both ways – the government’s right to negotiate and decide, but when the time comes he’ll be against it.
Newsnight
break this – and the first the hapless PM hears of it is as he comes off stage from the
Sunday Times
Q&A forum. I’m slumped in front of the box (Chicken Korma and three-quarters of a bottle of
rosé
down) when the phone goes. It’s eleven. I assume it’s Michèle. It’s
Newsnight
. Through the
rosé
haze I manage to stumble through the agreed line. ‘But should he be sacked or can he stay?’ There’s no line yet issued on this, but knowing what Danny feels and knowing we can’t start jettisoning junior ministers left and right at this stage of the game I burble on to the effect that Horam clearly supports the government – but he has a personal view that will only be relevant if and when we need to make a decision. I fall asleep with the radio on and seven hours of World Service later find myself waking up to hear Malcolm Rifkind taking exactly my line, but with greater sobriety and authority.

The shambles continues. A couple of our tosspot junior ministers have come out against the single currency, but at this stage in the game – and with members of the Cabinet continuing to send out mixed signals – what can the hapless PM do? At the beginning of the week he was in the West Country and realised that the people he was meeting had no idea we were already committed to a referendum on EMU – hence the decision to scrap the planned election broadcast and replace it with his face-to-camera impromptu address to the nation: ‘We will never take Britain into EMU. Only the British people can do that.’

The PM comes to Chester – or least I think he thinks he’s come to Chester. In fact, he’s in the adjoining constituency (which we haven’t a chance of winning) and the Central Office organisation is so cack-handed that a) he’s in a controversial out-of-town shopping precinct where there as many votes to be lost as won, and b) I only get to hear that he’s here half an hour after he’s gone!

Ah well…

Oh dear. The PM, off-the-cuff, has offered a free Commons vote on EMU – but hasn’t mentioned the idea in advance to Ken or Hezza so they’re both wrong-footed. The PM is unapologetic: ‘If I’d said “I’m frightfully sorry, that’s a very interesting question but I’d better go and ask Ken Clarke or Joe Bloggs or someone else before I give you an answer” – it’s not the way I operate.’

Ken knows he’s not being consulted and there’s nowt he can do about it. We’re making this campaign up on the hoof. Hezza doodled his idea for the ad featuring Blair perched on Kohl’s knee while waiting for a plane at Manchester airport. Central Office urged him to check it out with Ken, but he didn’t and, deplore it as the high-minded Europhiles do, perhaps it’s served its purpose.

Yesterday morning I did a ring-round of colleagues and the verdict was the same: it doesn’t feel too bad, there’s no open hostility, you don’t sense a rush to Labour. This is naive optimism, isn’t it? Look at the detail and one in ten of our supporters have gone wobbly. We’re going to be washed away.

David Hunt reckons his majority will be halved and Wirral South could go either way. He hadn’t seen the lead story in the Sundays: Redwood readying himself for an immediate putsch and Hunt galvanising 110 middle-of-the-roadsters to urge Major to stay on as long as he can to prevent a precipitate lurch to the right. As we stumble towards the finishing line, the press interest is switching entirely to the leadership struggle. This morning’s post has brought a charming handwritten note from one of the potential contenders (Michael Portillo). Nobody writes more notes than Michael. He’s almost too good at it: he remembers Michèle’s name (and how to spell it), the note doesn’t look rushed, and I feel ashamed for thinking he must have sent several hundred in recent weeks. Another contender has generously given time to stomp the streets of Chester: Peter Lilley, who may have the intellectual grasp of a leader-in-waiting, but is alarmingly lacking in the charisma stakes. He did two hours knocking on doors – he was tireless, he was magnificent – but I don’t think a soul knew who he was.

On my sortie to London yesterday I caught up with Danny who didn’t look nearly as weary as I feared given his dawn-to-dusk routine. How does Central Office rate the campaign so far? Week 1: a wash-out – all sleaze. Week 2: a bit of all right – Labour wobbled. Weeks 3 and 4: Not so bad – we’re scoring with Europe. ‘We told everybody the party couldn’t, wouldn’t hold together on EMU. We knew that the election address declarations
were coming. We were pretty sure there would be junior ministers who couldn’t contain themselves, so all along we knew that when the crisis came all we could do was ride over them. That’s what we’ve done and it’s worked.’ According to Danny our internal polling suggests we’re 12/14 points down – not 19/20 – and it’s coming our way. They’re contemplating leaking our polling data to give our troops a boost, stifle the mood of meltdown and pre-empt the post-defeat scenario becoming the story.

We gossiped about who had had a good campaign. Hezza – excellent. Howard – invisible. Clarke – ‘too all over the place – and Europe kills him’. Hague – an early flourish, but nothing now. Portillo – excellent.

Michael Howard came today and I was fearful of a disaster. We’d decided to take him to Christleton, to celebrate the local Neighbourhood Watch and to spare the police the nightmare of closing down half of Chester if we’d taken him on walkabout in the town. My fear was not that the photo call would flop, but simply that once the snappers had snapped we’d have fifty minutes with the Home Secretary and no one for him to see and nothing for him to do. On Tuesday I turned up in the village with a writer and photographer from
The Times
and what greeted us for our mass canvas? Three stalwarts, with an average age of eighty – it was a gift for the hacks: the cast of
Last of the Summer Wine
turn out for Brandreth! I pictured a repeat performance today. In the event, it was a triumph. All the local photographers were on parade: we were pictured by the pump house (yes, really parish pump politics!), and our fifty minutes was packed with action – the nursing home was having a charity day and gave us tea and cheers. A bearded lady kept saying to Michael, ‘You’re the best Home Secretary we’ve ever had. You should be PM.’ Michael beamed and beamed – and revealed brown teeth which I’d not noticed before. The dentist, the village post office, the pub (‘This is superb bitter,’ cooed Michael. ‘What is it? Bass? Yes, of course’), the mobile library, the parents collecting their offspring from school: we did ’em all. And Rachel Whetstone [Howard’s Special Adviser], bless her, brought a bunch of carnations for Michèle.

I spoke at Christleton High School at lunchtime. A large crowd, mostly hostile, including a chippy teacher in a black shirt and seed-packet tie who stood with his hands in his jeans and asked about sleaze. I was loud and theatrical, and almost certainly rather ridiculous. Tonight I spoke to a friendly handful at the Chester College – I was weary but spoke so much better.

Labour press officer quote of the day (quote of the campaign perhaps): ‘Later today Tony Blair will be spontaneous. Tomorrow he will be passionate.’

To BBC Manchester for a TV debate with an alarmed-looking Tony Lloyd (who’ll be a minister by Friday, God help us!) and husky-voiced Liz Lynne.
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I like them both. Tony was a regular at the French conversation classes: dogged but dim was my assessment.
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Our discussion on the box was rather fun – we were boisterous but evidently good-humoured, unlike the rather more watchable (and certainly more watched) debate on the other side which had Hezza and Prescott slagging each other off in no uncertain terms.

I reached Alistair and Cecilia’s [home near Tarpoley] by about 2.40 p.m. Michèle was already there. The champagne flowed – and the Macon – and the Burgundy – and the salmon was wonderful and the pheasant well-roasted and the apple pie and cream just right. They are good people. Alastair is gathering with the PM and Cranborne and co. at No. 10 on Wednesday night to plan for Friday. Dignity will be the order of the day.

Talked to Seb who didn’t know what the Falmouth verdict would be. The PM had been and done well.

‘Did you do the warm-up?’

‘No, we had Jeffrey. He did his ten-minute bark. It’s wearing a bit thin.’

This election’s all over. The focus now is entirely on the next election: who will be leader. Today’s papers reckon it’ll be between Hezza and Portillo. The confusion at the command centre continues. Indeed, the real confusion is: where is the command centre? In theory, it’s Mawhinney, Maurice Saatchi and co. at Central Office. In practice, it’s the PM, Robert Cranborne and co. at No. 10 and on the battle bus. Our messages have been all over the place: we abandoned the demon eyes because the PM lost his nerve/didn’t like them; we put the weeping lion to rest because he didn’t convince anyone; we’ve highlighted Europe, where we’re most divided, when all the research told us Europe isn’t an issue for the bulk of the electorate (‘it’s the economy, stupid’); and we’ve ended up with posters the length and breadth of the land saying ‘Britain is booming’ which the Chancellor of the Exchequer loathes and which even the experts agree are risky: see the word boom and you think of bust.

And here in Chester I can only report a dismal day on the Brandreth campaign trail.
Alternately it drizzles and sleets. The oomph has gone out of the activists and nerves are getting frayed. My support manager (early fifties) and my road manager (early seventies) almost came to blows outside the mobile library in Guilden Sutton. One felt the other was usurping his role: blood pressure and voices were raised. I disappeared inside the library and emerged to find them still at it. Fortunately rain stopped affray! We’d hired a bus for six o’clock to whisk sixty activists round town to show strength in numbers. About fifteen turned up, willing and cheerful, but the rain was driving and we’d have cut a sorry sight trundling round the bleak, deserted streets. Sensibly we aborted the mission.

Virginia [Bottomley] is coming on Wednesday. Her advance guard has just called: ‘The Secretary of State would like to arrange a person-to-person phone conversation for tomorrow evening. How late can she call?’ I suggested midnight – and could hear the intake of breath. What sort of feeble campaigner turns in at midnight? Two or three at the earliest – and then up again at six.

Virginia’s been and gone and it was another huge success! The walkabout was fine because the sun shone and, hooray, as well visitors from Texas, Germany, Japan, Stoke, Portsmouth, Woking, Plymouth, Flint and Connah’s Quay, we did meet Chester folk and they were jolly supportive. You’d still think we could win. As we ambled towards the cathedral Virginia juggled
sotto voces
to me with exuberant forays into the crowd.

‘If I want to get onto a Select Committee, who do I have to speak to?
Hello, I’m Virginia Bottomley, do you come from Chester?
It’s the Foreign Affairs Select Committee I want, not to be chairman or anything, just to be on it.
Will you be supporting Gyles Brandreth? Oh, good! He is good, isn’t he?
They quite like seeing a woman, whatever Brian says. It’s been a funny old campaign, hasn’t it? We keep changing tack.
How lovely to see you. You know Gyles, of course.
Should I call Alastair? What about having Hezza as acting leader for a while, like Margaret Beckett?
The Cathedral’s had half a million from the Lottery. I haven’t forgotten whose millennium it is!
Should I phone Alistair now or wait till Friday?’