An Unexpected MP (18 page)

One of my favourite Steen stings was when he rang up
Sun
editor Kelvin MacKenzie pretending to the legendary actor and director Dickie Attenborough. After a while, Steen had persuaded a doubting MacKenzie that he really was Dickie, and even got him to be enthusiastic about his latest exciting project, a musical about the
Titanic
.

‘But darling, there is a magnificent twist – she doesn’t sink!’

It is hard to believe that Britain’s best-known red-top editor had become another one of James Steen’s victims.

Punch
was going to be not just fun but one long, joyous party of lunches, pranks and Steenian mischief. And I was being paid.

I
ronically, my first difficulty on entering the press gallery was very similar to my problem in the first few months of being elected: where do I sit? Press accommodation in the Commons is very cramped. It is all open-plan, with rival newspapers sitting next to one another cheek by jowl. No newspaper has an office to itself. It is marginally better today, but not much. Getting a desk is very, very difficult. Journalists are separated by a corridor where there are offshoots. That corridor is known as the Burma Road and the offshoots, the Rampton Wing. So I was indebted to my old friend Ian Hernon for letting me squat at his desk in the best room, shared by Trevor Kavanagh and the
Sun
team, Joe Murphy of the
Mail on Sunday
and Patrick Hennessy of the
Evening Standard
. This place was a
powerhouse
of breaking news and a very good place to learn my new craft. And the hardened professionals showed me nothing but kindness and friendship. The atmosphere was great.

It’s hard to believe, but the best diary stories often come from other journos. If I couldn’t fit a story in one week, I’d give it to a mate and vice versa. Trade was great and the gossip awesome.

One guy who was really helpful was Piers Morgan. We
have been friends for years, although I haven’t seen him since his television stardom. I first met him when he was a student of journalism at Harlow College and gave him a tour round the House. I can never really understand the bad press he gets. I always found him friendly and a good laugh. I suspect that when you are made editor of the
News of the World
at the tender age of twenty-eight it will arouse a great deal of jealousy. And many journalists despised him even more when he became editor of the
Mirror
. It was really quite sickening to see the collective glee of chippy, older and far less talented hacks crowing over his sacking. But Piers is having the last laugh. All the way to the bank.

One day I bumped into him at a party.

‘Matey, I’ve got a great story which is a bit too gamey for a family newspaper; see what you can do with it.’

Gamey? It was beyond outrageous. The gist of it was that the chairman of a council had borrowed his next-door neighbour’s video camera. Eventually, he gave it back. One evening the neighbour’s family was sitting down to watch clips of a recent wedding. Excitedly, these pillars of respectability sat down with a sweet sherry or two as the camera was plugged into the television. The wedding was a great success, with oohs, aahs and tears. Suddenly, the picture began to fade and a new scene appeared. An enormous erect penis dominated the screen. And there was no doubt that it belonged to Mr Chairman.

But things got worse. The penis was then seen to penetrate the rear end of a dog. And after a bit of wobbly camera work, it became clear to this poor assembled family that it was
their
dog.

My editor, James Steen, thought that it was hilarious. But even
Punch
had a line in the sand.

James once sent me off to the Colony Room in Dean Street, Soho, to do a piece on an absinthe tasting evening. The Colony was a notorious hang-out for artists, reprobates and drunks. I had been a member for a few years. On Wednesday evenings a celeb would serve behind the bar. Mercifully, I missed the night when Damien Hirst did it – naked. But it was a fun place and I got some amazing stories. Sadly, it closed a few years ago.

To get into the place you had to press a button on a dingy green wall with the word ‘CUNTY’ on it. And when you went up to the bar you were greeted with amazing club memorabilia. Works by Hirst and many others. The ancient mechanical cash register also had ‘CUNTY’ emblazoned across it. This was because the legendary proprietor, a waspish old queen called Ian Board, long dead, used to call members ‘cunty’ as a term of endearment. Well, sort of.

Suggs from the group Madness was a regular, as was his fiery mum, Eddie. When we first met she nearly thumped me because I was a Tory. But after a while we became friends and still have the odd drink at the only place worth going to in Soho anymore, the French House.

The idea was that I was to write a louche piece about the Colony serving that badge of depravity, the
blindness-inducing
absinthe. It was all disappointingly tame. Nobody lost either their sight or their rag. I even moaned that the stuff had no effect on me whatsoever. Until I peeked into my
notebook
the next day to see a mass of unreadable gibberish. The danger with absinthe is not the high alcoholic content but its hallucinogenic effect. Well, I know now.

One of the most fascinating things about being in the
gallery after losing your seat is that one moment you are sitting on the green benches and the next you are sitting up in the gods with a bird’s-eye view of the chamber. And you can see everything. Every snigger, every whispered comment and every grimace. Since cameras were introduced, the habit of doughnutting had become popular. The idea was if one of your chums was speaking you would gather round, look up
admiringly
at your hero, nod sagely and smile in the right places. All in shot.

And then some bright spark mischievously invented the poisoned doughnut. The idea was that if a certifiably bonkers colleague was about to make a certifiably bonkers speech, out of solidarity with sanity, some of the hounds would surround the poor devil and rather than nod their heads in agreement would shake them in despair, grin and make signs to the forehead indicating that this was not the sort of person that they would wish to stand next to when there was a full moon. Sadly, the mad and the bad have sussed this one and ensure that when they speak they are surrounded by a praetorian guard of the deranged.

One of the many good things about working for a national was that it is a great handle to crowbar your way into other money-making activities. The first Labour Party and Tory Party conferences of 1997 turned into a little gold mine.
Channel 4 News
asked me to make short film about the Tory one and Rebekah Wade (as she was then) gave me a daily column on
The Sun
at Labour’s. I was so excited about the unlimited expenses that I texted my good chum Paul Routledge (Routers) of the
Mirror
that we could now get pissed courtesy of Rupert Murdoch. Unfortunately, he was
addressing a conference on the ethics of journalism, and read it out, to the cheers of the hacks.

I used those expenses to very good effect. After a refreshing lunch I suggested to Routers that he wait outside the main conference hotel while I grabbed us a cab. When I returned I saw him slumped on the steps with his hat fallen to the ground in front of him. Passers-by, who thought that the great man had fallen on hard times, were filling it with pound coins.

The Labour conference was a fascinating one. I remember attending a reception with Tony Blair at a time when a senior Tory was about to announce his defection to New Labour. Tony got to his feet and spotted me in the room. He gave me a quizzical look, as if to say, ‘You too?’ I just smiled and shook my head.

One of the highlights was the great Tony Banks speech at the Tribune rally. Tony was a minister and hated Peter Mandelson. ‘I don’t want to hear a word against that man. I want the whole bloody library.’ He was cheered to the
rafters
. This was the time when he rather innocuously referred to the new Tory leader, William Hague, as resembling a foetus. Mandelson leaked this to the press as a great insult, totally wiping out coverage of the real insult, which was to him.

Mandelson was a very shrewd operator and despised by the hacks. Except those lazy ones whom he used to drip-feed stories.
Punch
carried a piece (not written by me) about the rather gay parties he used to attend when he was in Rio. I was in the gallery at PMQs when Hague referred to him as Mandelson of Rio. Mandy was not amused.

And he was particularly unamused when the
Sunday Express
published details of his Brazilian boyfriend. Heads rolled and
Routers and I rolled up to the farewell do of the
journalistically
deceased at the Golf Club, then a hacks’ drinking den just off Fleet Street. Andrew Pierce, now a star at the
Daily Mail
, made one of the funniest speeches I have ever heard, telling us that Rosie Boycott, Amanda Platell’s replacement as editor, was well known for her scoops, ‘mostly vanilla, chocolate and strawberry’. All have done well but it showed the unhealthy power that Mandelson had over the press. If the mood took him he could and did destroy people’s careers.

He could also be very subtle. Once, when I was a Member, he sidled up to me and made a veiled threat.

‘I understand that you have been in the Red Lion making accusations against Gordon Brown’s sexuality. Desist, or there will be legal proceedings.’ And off he went.

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. But thinking about it a few years later, I realised that he was planting a seed about his old foe.

Brown, as is well known, is completely heterosexual. Once, a pretty young journalist told me that she fancied him and asked me to play Cupid. When I mentioned this to Gordon, he just grinned and walked off.

I never bothered to enquire if anything came of it.

One guy who gets a very unfair press is the king of all spin doctors, Alastair Campbell. We have always got on rather well, as I first knew him as a hack on the
Mirror
and
Today
. Even when I became a hack myself we would often have a laugh and a chat. He could be very tough. But that was his job: to instil ministerial discipline and try and get a grip on the media agenda, which could always spiral out of control with
journalists
forever seeking an angle. He used to keep tabs on ministers’
diaries so that he could work out who had been leaking to whom. One left-wing senior minister who was always good for an anti-Blair story would put our lunches down as a visit to the dentist. But as Ali once thumped Michael White of
The Guardian
, he can’t be all bad.

One day I was up in the gallery when I saw Ali in the PM’s press box, waving at me. Then he started nudging, winking and grinning. Then the penny dropped. That week I had
written
that ‘New Labour is nothing more than the politics of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. And the biggest winker of them all is Alastair Campbell.’

Thank God he found it funny. I would not have wanted to end up with the same fate as Michael White.

But once I did.

One day I was having lunch in the press dining room with some chums when the
Mail on Sunday
’s Simon Walters came up, frothing at the mouth. ‘Where is that bastard Hayes?’

Well, he found me and started giving me a good thumping. He was dragged off by
The Sun
’s Trevor Kavanagh.

Evidently,
Punch
had run a piece about Walter’s wife and I got the blame for it. In all honesty, I had nothing to do with it. But the
Telegraph
’s talented columnist Peter Oborne had wound him up in the bar about it. In truth, it was all a bit scary. Here was I having a quiet lunch with my chums in a room that was filled with the good and the great of Fleet Street and their distinguished guests to watch PMQs. Then my chum Simon waded in and pummelled me into a
quivering
wreck. A few days later I bumped into Michael White, who had witnessed it all. ‘Blimey,’ I said, ‘I was amazed to be thumped by Walters.’

‘You were not thumped at all. He beat the shit out of you.’

It wasn’t all that long before Simon and I made up and became good friends again. Last year he led me to the very spot and insisted that someone take a photo of us with our fists up and looking fierce. He is a seriously good guy and one of the most talented journalists that I have ever encountered. The scariest words that any politician can hear when they answer the phone on a Saturday night are, ‘Hello, this is Simon Walters.’

The 1997 Tory conference was a strange affair. People were obviously disappointed at being wiped off the political map but rather naively believed that this was just a blip. As soon as the party reverted to the true path of Thatcherism the voters would come flocking back and Blair would be unmasked as nothing more than a socialist fraud.
Channel 4 News
asked me to make a short satirical film of it all. It was the usual stuff, making mischief with an Ed Boyle-style voice-over
accompanied
by some appropriate music. I slow-moed a Tebbit speech played to the Queen track ‘I’m Going Quietly Mad’, with ‘The Party’s Over’ as the general background music. And to really make friends with the insannati I played a clip of some old duffer saying that the Tories would win the next election with a landslide, cutting away to a mechanical clown laughing
manically
at the end of the pier. This led to a lot more filmmaking, mainly for Andrew Brown (Gordon’s very civilised brother) for his Parliament programme. I slow-moed a Prescott rant to ‘Eat the Rich’ by Aerosmith and manipulated his mouth for the burp at the end of the song. It was also great fun to speed up William Hague’s shadow Cabinet in
Teletubbies
style, with their introductory song with Hague’s face superimposed on the sun. And when Humphrey the Downing Street cat
mysteriously disappeared, I managed a shot of him prowling outside No. 10 in time with ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ by Queen. I loved all this stuff, but there no longer appears to be a market for three-minute shorts taking the piss out of
politicians
. It’s a shame because they are incredibly cheap to make. And I am available.

At the Labour conference I was enjoying doing my daily
Sun
column. The trouble was that I couldn’t get an online connection so I had to dictate my copy down the phone. I only had one disaster. I had thought up what I thought was a clever little line to illustrate a mess-up in a National Executive Committee election. My bons mots were ‘the poll muddle martyrs’, of which I was rather proud. But pride comes before a fall. The next day I opened
The Sun
to see my baby delivered. Somehow, some sub-editor had managed to mangle it to ‘poll models’. I hit the roof and immediately got on to Routers.