An Unexpected MP (7 page)

‘What’s the product?’ enquired Dickie.

‘A vaginal deodorant,’ sighed the lad. After a few hours and an awful lot of drink, Benson came up with a brainwave.

‘I have a name that says what it does on the tin. You will call your deodorant SPRUNT.’ After much laughter they swayed back to the flat. The next day Benson hadn’t heard a word from his friend until the door opened and the lad slunk into the flat looking thoroughly miserable.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve been sacked.’

‘Why?’

‘They didn’t like my SPRUNT pitch.’

‘For God’s sake, it was meant to be a joke.’

Benson is a very fine advocate and has an amazing fund of stories. I once asked him why, in his
Who’s Who
entry, he has put ‘founder member of the THC’. I asked him what it was all about.

‘Ah, one evening I was having a drunken dinner with some very pretty girls. I was playing the game ‘Fiery Finger’, where you dip it in a liqueur, light it and snuff it out with your mouth. One of the girls asked if I could do it with my dick. I agreed, provided one of them snuffed it out. The trouble is that dipping your dick in alcohol and lighting it is not a good idea, particularly when the girls are in such hysterical laughter they forget to snuff it out. I had to shove it in an ice bucket.’

‘But the THC?’

‘The Torched Hampton Club. The trouble is the bloody thing swelled to the size of an orange so I took it to my GP, who told me I didn’t need a doctor but a psychiatrist.’

Many years ago Benson offered me some wise advice to help me survive the rigours of the Bar.

‘Never miss the chance to have a pee. Don’t trust a fart. And never waste an erection, particularly if you are on your own.’ Priceless.

One of the greatest parliamentary beasts was the legendary Willie Whitelaw. God, could that man drink. In the days when he was Ted Heath’s Chief Whip, it was his occasional duty to rise from his place and move ‘that this House do now adjourn’. One evening after a very good dinner he misread the time. It was fast approaching ten o’clock. So he staggered to the Bar of the House, slurred the magic words and then collapsed in a heap.

Willie’s idea of a light lunch was a bottle of champagne, a bottle of white, a bottle of red and a couple of large brandies. When he had his first heart attack his doctor advised that he just confined himself to one champagne before lunch. As was ordered and with much self-control, he did. Just one bottle.

Willie had a great knack of getting himself out of
trouble
in pre-recorded radio interviews. If he didn’t know what the hell his interviewer was on about he would have a major coughing fit which made the interview unplayable. He would then politely ask what it was all about and after it had been explained in painstaking detail he would ask to start all over again. His answers would then be word perfect, mined from the information received from the hapless reporter. Willie also had a reputation for discretion. Very often in the Smoking Room you could hear him booming to a minister, ‘I want to tell you something in absolute confidence.’ To this day I am never quite sure whether this was a ruse to plant
misinformation
or just that he had a very loud voice.

Denis Healey was another class act but could be one hell
of a bully in the chamber. Watching him lock horns with Michael Heseltine when he was at Defence was very exciting theatre. It would be late at night, everyone would have been drinking and it almost got physical, with Healey, an enormous presence and a former beach master at the D-Day landings, aggressively shouting at Hezza to sit down, with ‘you bastard’ more
sotto voce.

People moan today about the standard of behaviour in the chamber but it is a teddy bears’ picnic compared to those days. Aggressive, alpha-male stuff from many of those who had actually fought hand-to-hand in the war. That’s why the women were so tough in the 1980s. Dame Janet Fookes eventually became a Deputy Speaker, but before that she was on the Speaker’s panel of chairmen. That means she chaired standing committees. Janet is charming, mild-mannered and utterly indomitable. Cross her in committee at your peril. Once, the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan (another
charming
man), absent-mindedly crossed her line of sight while sneaking out.

‘Order, order,’ boomed the great Dame. ‘The Right Honourable gentleman may be Home Secretary but he will abide by the courtesies of this committee.’ I have never seen a tall man shrink so visibly, go so pale nor look so utterly terrified. Today’s bunch weep to the press if another Member so much as frowns at them. And the men are as bad as the women. The Wrekin MP Mark Pritchard is meant to have got rather upset because a Cabinet minister told him to fuck off. For God’s sake.

Tam Dalyell was a formidable and tenacious backbencher. He once roamed the palace at the time when we were
horrendously starved of accommodation and found fifty forgotten rooms. He also terrified ministers with his
supplementary
questions, asking a simple ‘Why?’ Devastating, as it doesn’t give the poor things time to think. Tam is a thoroughly decent fellow although rather an eccentric, who lives in a great stately pile in Scotland called The Binns. Once he invited a group of colleagues for dinner in his great hall. Expectations were high. They dined on scrambled eggs and a glass of sherry. And disappointment.

And Tony Benn? What a joy. Wrong on just about
everything
, but in such a charming and elegant way that you instinctively knew he was principled. I would always go to him for advice on procedure and he would always be helpful.

And Michael Foot. Delightful, kind, thoughtful,
compassionate
, literary and sincere, but temperamentally unsuited for office. He was kind enough to invite me to his eightieth
birthday
party at the Gay Hussar as I was a ‘decent Tory’. I am very proud of the Rowson cartoon of the event, with me sitting at the feet of the great man, which adorns a wall. Outside the gents. Well, you can’t have everything.

The final big beast in this chapter is Ian Gow, Thatcher’s delightful and effective PPS. Charming, bright, witty and murdered by terrorists who planted a bomb under his car at his home. At the by-election in Eastbourne the Tories had the brainwave of selecting my old chum Richard Hickmet, who was an excellent MP for Scunthorpe but lost his seat. What the strategists overlooked was that there is a large Greek
population
in Eastbourne and that Richard’s second name is Saladin. He is a Turk. And he lost. Sometimes you want to weep.

So, where are the big beasts now? On the Tory side, apart
from Cameron, Osborne and May the nearest contenders are Eric Pickles and Michael Gove. Labour has more of a
problem
. Apart from tackling energy prices and identifying the cost of living as a major political issue, Miliband still hasn’t quite found his voice. But Leaders of the Opposition rarely do. Ed Balls is probably the one big beast they have left.

Though he has been wrong on just about everything, he is a formidable opponent. Those who know him tell me that he can be quite charming. The jury is out on that one.

T
he House of Commons is a very hospitable place and I do not mean the friendliness of colleagues, rather the rivers of corporate hospitality that are available. Some of my more cynical chums would arrange their day by accepting a breakfast meeting, a lunch, a couple of receptions in the
afternoon
, a dinner and then be bought drinks by journalists until the House went up early the next morning. These were the sort of people we dubbed the Junketeers. The Members who would only put their hands in their pockets to scratch their dicks. Most of them, not surprisingly, are now dead. Buried, as a cremation would have been far too dangerous.

To accept corporate hospitality it’s best to be choosy. Always accept offers from local businesses in the constituency. It’s just good manners and common sense. And if you are tempted by glossy lobbyist events, make sure you only go to those that can assist job creation in your patch. That is, after all, what you are paid to do.

But in the 1980s MPs used to swarm to freebies like locusts devouring the harvest. I remember having my first lunch with International Distillers & Vintners (now Diageo), who used to have a large presence in Harlow. They remarked how
abstemious I had been. This rather shocked me as it had been a splendid lunch with some great wines. Then they told me they had once invited a parliamentary committee over for a light lunch, only to discover that they were filling their
pockets
with the free cigarettes on the table and taking what was left of the wines and spirits for the coach back to the Commons. Their snouts were so far in the troughs that even the pigs complained.

One of my most mystifying invitations was from John King (later Lord King), the chairman of British Airways. He had assembled his board at a then popular Westminster restaurant, L’Amico. I was the guest of honour and no expense had been spared. At the end of the evening I rose to thank my hosts for their kindness and generosity, adding that I was a little bemused to be invited as I had absolutely no knowledge of airlines or airports. ‘Ah,’ said John, ‘and we will be so honoured to teach you. After all, we are the major employer in your constituency.’

‘What, Harlow? Stansted Airport is still tiny and not even in my patch.’

‘Harlow? What’s Harlow got to do with it? You’re the MP for Hayes.’

‘Actually, John, I’m Jerry Hayes. Terry Dicks is the MP for Hayes & Harlington.’

There was a brief but deadly silence and then the whole room erupted with laughter. John King and his deputy Colin Marshall became good friends. But I don’t know what happened to their personal assistants.

The privatisation of BA is a story almost beyond belief and it couldn’t happen today. Privatisation was a manifesto
commitment, but for some reason, perhaps because the Transport Secretary Nick Ridley and John King disliked each other, no Bill had appeared. So Ian Greer, the most influential parliamentary lobbyist of all time (sadly, cash-for-questions led to his downfall), was hired. He had a cunning plan. Stick a tail on it and you could have called it a fox. What he did was rather basic, but amazingly effective. He bussed 132 Tory MPs to the Savoy. We were greeted by some of the most beautiful and alluring air hostesses, who filled us with the finest
champagne
and canapés. And then lunch. Mountains of smoked salmon washed down with the choicest of Montrachets. Then a saddle of lamb accompanied by a really good claret. Then a delicious pud helped by a delightful Château d’Yquem. And finally, cheese, brandy and cigars. Then the lights went down, a stirring promo for British Airways played and the Ralph Richardson figure of John King addressed us. He reminded us of our manifesto promise to privatise BA, a promise Ridley was not honouring. What were we going to do about it? I tell you what we did. We gave Ridley absolute hell. BA was
privatised
within the year. What endeared me particularly to John was that just before his wife died he bought her a magnificent and expensive diamond necklace which she adored. He placed it around her neck in her coffin. What a lovely old romantic.

But not all captains of industry had the charisma of John King. One of the most unpleasant and rather scary invites was from Arnold Weinstock, at the time a great industrialist and voted for many years Businessman of the Year. Well, he may have been a great businessman, but he was rather lacking on the human being front. About ten of us, including some senior people like Douglas Hogg, were invited to his corporate
headquarters for dinner. The food was great, but Weinstock was a megalomaniac monster. He had surrounded himself with cooing sycophants with their tongues so far up his backside that you needed a team of sniffer dogs to remove them. He hectored, lectured and was gratuitously rude. Then he turned to one of the guests, an MP for a constituency with a large Weinstock factory. ‘And how many people do I employ in your patch?’ he loftily enquired. Before the lad could reply, a flunkey whispered that it was around two thousand. Weinstock smiled and barked ‘Sack ’em all’ to some senior bod. And smiled. On and on it went. A relentless and horrible exercise in power and manipulation.

At the end of the meal, Weinstock casually turned to his staff: ‘Those men I sacked – reinstate them.’

I was almost tempted to join the Communist Party there and then. But it was an important lesson: the need to
encourage
a strong but responsible trade union movement. The trouble was that Thatcher gave the impression that she wanted to break the unions. After all, they had destroyed Ted Heath’s and Jim Callaghan’s governments. The truth is she wanted to democratise them and take them back to the principles on which they were founded: looking after the interests of their members. And while the likes of Weinstock ruled the
boardrooms
, they were never needed more.

One of the perks of the job is occasionally getting to see what makes the royals tick. So it was out of sheer curiosity that I accepted an invitation to lunch with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace. Ten of us were shipped in to discuss the Prince’s Trust. The trouble with meeting him is that we are so conditioned by the press that he is a bit of an odd bod
who is cranky about organic farming, talks to trees and is a homeopathy nut. I found him a delight. Relaxed, unaffected and passionate about the Trust, which has improved the life chances of thousands of young men and women who would have been thrown on the junk heap of political complacency.

We were in that part of the palace where they all wave from the balcony and dining in a room decorated in the most appalling Chinese taste. So, for a joke, he gave us a Chinese meal. I hadn’t appreciated how much the royals dislike the palace as it is far too big and rather over the top. A bit like Dame Shirley Porter’s bathroom. Anyhow, I remarked how close we were to that famous balcony. ‘Oh,’ said Charles, ‘has anyone got a camera? Your constituents would love a snap of you waving to them.’

Sadly, nobody did. And the iPhone was just a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye.

However, there were events so ghastly that colleagues would prefer to eat their own spleens rather than attend. At the pinnacle of sheer torture was the annual Essex National Union of Farmers dinner. It was always held at the Farmers’ Club, a solid, tweedy place for solid, tweedy people, with the walls
spattered
with pictures of odd-looking cows and stranger-looking sheep. The food was hearty, with slabs of beef in Desperate Dan sizes. As a precaution against what was to follow, most of us fortified ourselves with vats of red wine. After a nursery pudding, we’d be beaten, whipped and generally turned over by ruddy-faced men of the soil, berating us for reductions in their incomes, for the horrors of the Common Agricultural Policy and for what a grim lot farmers had. We would all leave at 9.30 for the ten o’clock vote even if there wasn’t one.

But for every turkey (in the non-EFU sense) there could be a moment of pure joy with unexpected consequences. The British Midland Airways launch of their direct flight to Florence was one. It was held at the Goring Hotel, a favourite haunt of the royals and the place Kate Middleton and her family holed up before the royal wedding. The food was great and the ambience wonderful, probably because it is still a family-run hotel. What intrigued me was the cream envelope nestling discreetly by every place setting. Probably some blurb by the chairman. But, out of courtesy, I slipped it into my pocket and forgot about it. In fact, Ali eventually opened it when she was about to send the suit to the cleaners. She let out a whoop. It contained two club-class tickets to Florence on the new service. Nowadays the Independent Parliamentary Standards lot would have had a fit and the red tops a field day. ‘MPs board plane of shame’, they would scream. Yet it was all perfectly innocent. In the ’80s we were paid very little. £12,000 was my first salary, with expenses for living, a
secretary
, a travel warrant to the constituency and a small petrol allowance. That was it. Ali had to buy a second-hand Olivetti to type the letters. Where it all went so horribly wrong was a conspiracy between the party leaders to fudge MPs’ pay, as there is no popular time to announce an increase. The Faustian pact was low pay in return for generous allowances. Sadly, in 2005, when Gordon Brown was throwing money around like a drunken sailor, it got totally out of control. MPs were entitled to tax allowances for food, gardening and just about anything that an inventive and imaginative mind could make a claim for. Worse, they were encouraged to claim for the maximum that they could, on the basis that the Treasury would claw
back any surpluses. The reason there were all these daft claims for duck houses, moat cleaning and manure was because they had to justify the £200 a month that they could claim for just about anything. It is not popular to say so but there was very little corruption, just MPs working a system which had been encouraged to spin out of control. Now there has been an overreaction. Hair shirts and monk-like behaviour are now de rigueur. So, will a fair balance ever be struck? No. Will MPs ever be paid sensibly? Certainly not.

People have forgotten that the issue of whether we should build a tunnel under the Channel had been rumbling on for years. And, like anything with a whiff of garlic or froggy gravy, it bitterly divided the Conservative Party. The level of
intellectual
debate amounted to three clichés: ‘We are an island nation’, ‘It will open the floodgates to immigrants’ and ‘The Channel is nature’s barrier against rabies’. Needless to say all these arguments were eventually exposed for what they were: as barking mad as the illegal, foaming, rabid French dogs that were to be let loose on a cowering British public.

At last it was built. There was to be a grand opening ceremony. And there were to be free trips for MPs and peers before the service came on line. This was going to be exciting. Perhaps more exciting than we bargained for if there had been a fire or a bomb, which had the potential of wiping out a large portion of the legislature. Actually travelling on Eurostar to Paris proved to be great fun, not just because of the great food and wine but also to witness the delightful boneheadedness of some colleagues. I was sitting next to some old boy who didn’t appreciate that although we had been waved through
Waterloo Station the French would want to see our passports. He thought that I was mad, as did half the carriage. They changed their minds when Special Branch officers averted a diplomatic incident at the French end of the tunnel. Of course, the main topic of discussion was which restaurants we should visit in Paris. Remember, these were the days before you could browse the internet and book in advance. This rather confused a charmingly dim upper-crust couple who could see absolutely no point in going out for a meal in France. All that foreign food, how ghastly! ‘Marigold has prepared a splendid picnic!’ he hoorayed at Mach 3. It was so reassuring to see that Great Britain was being represented so well abroad.

But for sheer, opulent vulgarity which would make a Katie Price wedding seem like a finger buffet with Pope Francis, there was an event thrown by a wealthy constituent which took a lot of beating. We spent a joyous afternoon at the Newmarket races and then were bussed back to their pad, which appeared to have been designed by a combination of Liberace and David Blunkett. To our collective amazement, they had erected a succession of marquees to give the effect of a Roman banquet. Actually, it was more like a prelude to a Roman orgy. Stuffed swans were brought in by semi-naked male and female slaves. And the antechambers were petalled pools with reclining nudes of all sexes. And the splendid David Emanuel was on hand to give a little ‘zhuzh’ to the dress he had designed for our hostess. He was also making a programme about parties for Channel 4. ‘Jerry darling, let’s do an interview.’ As the camera was just about to roll I noticed that one of the chaps had a rather large penis on display in one of the pools, joined by a girl who was flashing her labia like a pair of flippers. I certainly
didn’t want that little lot in shot: the
News of the World
would have had a field day and the local God-botherers would have been gunning for me. So, out of a sense of decency, I adorned both with a handful of petals. After a spectacular banquet and entertainment by Madame JoJo’s finest (spectacularly beautiful women who were really blokes), I ended up dancing on the table with a belly dancer. This was over the top, the height of vulgarity, a parade of immense wealth which could have been given to deserving causes. But I have not enjoyed myself so much for a very long time.

The event to approach with extreme caution was the Scotch Whisky Association Christmas party. The trouble was that so many of my colleagues regarded this as ‘so much to drink, so little time’. Dear old George Foulkes (now in the Lords) was very keen to sample his country’s favourite drink. I dread to think how much he hoovered up that evening. And then the division bell rang and off he flew to the lobby. Sadly, George thought that it would be fun to run into St Stephen’s Entrance screaming ‘batman, batman’ and flapping his coat tails. It would have been very amusing if he hadn’t accidentally bumped into a little old lady, who fell to the ground. Mortified, he did his best to apologise and try to get her to her feet. But his feet were the problem, and he kept falling over. Unfortunately, the only officious police officer in the building intervened, which led to George spending a few hours in the cells.