Breaking the Code (60 page)

Lord Archer is wandering the corridors of Westminster urging us to take Sir James Goldsmith and his ludicrous Referendum Party seriously. Sir James (bronzed, rich, mad) is putting £20 million into his campaign and threatening a candidate in every seat where the Conservative is not committed to a referendum – not
our
referendum on the Euro,
his
referendum on the whole future of our relationship with the Union. Jeffrey has produced a list of the seats most vulnerable to Goldsmith interference. Chester, naturally, is high on it. Jeffrey has lost about a stone and, in his breast pocket, alongside his Goldsmith list he has a card with the details of his diet. He has promised to send me a copy. (I could do with losing two stone. In photographs, face forward, if I push my head towards the camera the chins disappear and I don’t look too bad – but caught at the wrong angle and I recognise the awful truth.)

The good news is that Alastair Campbell
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and co. are going into overdrive in their desperation to gag Clare Short. She said on the box on Sunday that she favoured a fair tax system where ‘people like me would pay a little bit more’. She’s been yanked off the airwaves by the spin doctors and locked in a darkened, airless room. With luck, the way she’s been gagged will provoke further outbursts. We want her making mischief, but we don’t want her sacked. (The truth is we should be as ruthless and determined to succeed as they are. But we aren’t. We’re flabby and weary and only seem to have energy sufficient to pull ourselves apart. I said to Jack Straw in the Tea Room, ‘Why are you looking so cheerful?’ ‘Because I’ve been here for seventeen years. It’s a long time. We’ve been in opposition for all the time I’ve been here. And soon we’re going to be in government.’)

I’m just in and pleasantly squiffy. M’s asleep. Felix
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is climbing all over the desk, bumping his head up against mine. We’ve just had the whips’ dinner with the PM, preceded by our annual ‘assessment’ of the government. This is an interesting ritual. We all turned up at No. 12 at 2.30 p.m. Dress was casual. I wore a suit without a tie, but the others came
kitted out in the assorted versions of what a Tory MP wears on a Sunday afternoon, ranging from cravat, blazer and slacks to cavalry twills, hacking jacket and knitted yellow tie. I admired Roger Knapman’s highly polished brown shoes. I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got any brown shoes.’

Roger looked bemused. ‘What do you wear on Sundays?’

I looked down at my ordinary, everyday, workaday footwear. Roger said smoothly, ‘The rule is “brown shoes on Sunday” because it’s the servants’ day off.’

I tried to rally, ‘But does a gentleman wear brown shoes in London?’

‘As a rule,’ said Roger, ‘a gentleman is not seen in London on a Sunday.’

Banter behind us, we took our places. Shana had prepared a dossier for each of us, like an exam script, a page for each department of state, arranged alphabetically, from Agriculture through to Wales, with each of the departmental Ministers and PPSs listed according to rank, with a space below their names for comments. The idea, the Deputy explained, was for the whip for the relevant department to give his assessment of the performance of his Ministers, concentrating not so much on the Cabinet members – as the PM gets to see them in action anyway – as on the rest. Who merits promotion? Who needs a rest?

The exercise took three solid hours. There was joshing now and again (‘If you could put Ann Widdecombe’s brain inside Virginia Bottomley’s body – think of it!’ ‘Yes, but what if it all went wrong and you got Virginia’s brain inside Ann’s body …’), but on the whole the assessments seemed to me to be carefully made and well-judged. There were no revelations and no excoriations. We seemed to bend over backwards to be fair (Roger was unduly circumspect re Hogg) and it was evident that former members of the office are reviewed with a specially light touch – e.g. we all know that David Davis
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is unhappy, already difficult, potentially more troublesome, feeling overworked and undervalued, and believes he should be in the Cabinet
now, now, now
– but that’s not quite how it came across. And perhaps it didn’t need to because we know it – just as we know that Arbuthnot
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is rising effortlessly (the Ian Lang of his generation?), that Andrew Mitchell is almost crazy with ambition, that we will continue to keep faith with John Taylor for all his endearing frailty because he is ‘one of us’. The only exception to this rule that I noticed was in the case of Willetts. It’s not just envy of his intelligence: I think they feel when he was in the office he didn’t
quite
‘fit in’. The truth is he couldn’t wait to get out.

As usual, the Chief said nothing but his grunts said it all. When I was talking up Douglas
French,
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impatient clearing of the throat on my right made it evident I should move on and that poor Douglas’s prospects are poor. When I was talking up Seb, there was a gentle, encouraging gobbling noise from the Chief’s end of the table. Clearly Piers Merchant
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has done something to upset somebody. His name produced splenetic spluttering all round. Overall my interpretation of the Chief’s guttural emanations of the afternoon leads me to believe that David Curry and Michael Ancram are both comfortably ahead of David Davis in the Cabinet queue.

We broke to change for dinner. I went with Richard Ottaway to his house in Victoria, put on my tie, read the papers, returned for 7.30 p.m. The Chief served his lethal Martinis, the PM was himself – friendly, decent, unstuffy, collegiate. He is encouraged by the Clare Short row (‘If we give them enough time, they’ll begin to unravel…’), depressed by the latest from Norman Lamont (‘How and why he thinks Goldsmith can do us anything but harm, I just don’t know…’) I was alarmed to find myself sitting next to him for dinner (junior’s perk), but it wasn’t a problem: he talked to the table as a whole. The only ghastly moment came after we’d raised an informal glass to Her Majesty on her seventieth birthday and I embarked on my story about the Queen and the recession and her nine Prime Ministers not having a clue – and, suddenly, in full flight realised that the story as told by me on automatic pilot is both
lèse-majesté
and patronising to the PM. In desperation and through an alcoholic haze I tried to edit/adapt/improve the tale as I told it and ended up rambling
hopelessly
. Sniggering giggles from Liam: ‘Aren’t funny stories supposed to have a punchline, Gyles? Oo, that was it, was it?’ Fortunately my blushes were quickly obliterated by an extraordinary, lengthy, impassioned outburst from Simon Burns at the end of the table – ten minutes of inane burbling on behalf of the Chelmsford fire brigade! As ever, the wise ones kept their mouths shut. The idiots were on song.

For the second or third time, I cancelled my lunch with Robin Oakley
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at Simply Nico. We’d said we ought to have lunch after the Queen’s Speech when I’d made my joke about being mistaken for him by one of Blair’s spin doctors. But the truth is I’m not comfortable with journalists. Because I’m watching what I say, I can’t relax. Because I’m not giving them what they want, I feel I’m lunching under false pretences. So here
I am, alone in the Library. It’s 1.15 p.m. I’ve had my smoked mackerel, tomato salad and shredded carrot and I shall return to the Tea Room for a coffee at 2.00. This afternoon’s excitements include the whips’ meeting at 2.30 p.m., William Hague’s Rotary Club tea at 4.00 p.m. and a curious encounter with the Deputy in his den at 4.30 p.m. When he said ‘Can I have a word?’ and pulled me out into the corridor my heart began to pound. I thought, ‘What have I done now?’ It turned out that he wanted to suggest we put our heads together to see if we can’t come up with an idea for a television sitcom!!

5.30 p.m.: Jenny/Di. I never go over to 7 Millbank now. I get them to come over here and we sit at the table off the Cromwell lobby, at the foot of the stairs with the Spencer Perceval bust.
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6.30 p.m. Raymond Robertson – to work on his speech for the Scottish Conference. 7.30 p.m. Letter-signing in here. 8.00 p.m. Dinner. 9.00 p.m. Bench duty. The Northern Ireland (Entry to Negotiations etc.) Bill may well be keeping us here late into the night. (It transpires that Mo Mowlam has a research assistant paid for by Mirror Group Newspapers – a fact that doesn’t feature in the Register of Members’ Interests. We’re hoping to have some fun with that…)

Christopher Milne has died. He was a good man, gentle and amusing.
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The obituaries all play up his resentment of his parents and Pooh and the whole Christopher Robin phenomenon, quoting his line that he believed ‘my father had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’ But that was how he felt in the ’40s. In the end he felt quite differently. His marriage, the bookshop in Dartmouth, his own success as a writer, changed all that. He wasn’t reconciled to his parents, but he came to terms with who he was. I liked him. It was a privilege to know him. I shook the hand that held the paw of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The Housing Bill is behind us! We concluded the Third Reading fifteen minutes ago. During the course of the day we had five divisions and I am proud to report that we managed each one of these within two to three minutes of the times I predicted. As far as the office is concerned, that’s all that counts. They don’t give a toss about the quality of the legislation or the content of the debate. I was determined to deliver it all on schedule
and that I did is thanks entirely to Gummer, Curry and Clappison
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who all played ball. They
rattled
through it. When I said ‘You’ve only got two minutes on this clause’ that’s all they took – and when they strayed I yanked the back of their jackets and down they came. It’s a complete game – but today it was a fun one.

We survived the vote on the extension of leaseholders’ rights with a majority of two. And, yes, we even kept David Ashby on side! Gumdrops had been reluctant to move on the equal rights for homosexual couples (‘Gyles, you and I move in sophisticated circles, some of our best friends really are gay, but to validate homosexual partnerships in
legislation
will send out the wrong signal to the majority of our electors who do not move in the sort of theatrical
millieu
to which we are accustomed’ – he has a way with words) but he accepted that if it came to a vote we’d lose so he agreed to a compromise: a beefed-up guidance note putting the principle of equal rights on paper but not on the statute book.

The bigger picture is less rosy: beef, Europe, the leadership – it’s all as bad as ever. Chancellor Kohl lunched at No. 10 and was served Aberdeen Angus. I said to the PM, ‘Did he eat it?’ The PM looked at me and half raised an eyebrow – which makes me think he didn’t! The prospects for Thursday [the local government elections] are dire and there’s a rumour swirling round the lobby that Hezza and the PM have done a deal that if we see meltdown on Thursday Major will step aside and Heseltine will take the helm. It’s cobblers. It makes no sense, it isn’t true, but the leadership is a sore that won’t heal because we just keep picking at it.

A bad night. Richard Short, Neil Fitton, Joan Price, Sue Rowlandson, John Ebo,
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all lost their seats. These are five of our best people. Richard is the Lord Mayor. He is devastated, poor man. I went to the count and told them this was an opinion poll on the government not a reflection on them. They know it’s true, but it doesn’t make it any better. All afternoon with Stuart I toured the committee rooms. Our activists are getting ever older, thinner on the ground and more demoralised.

Tomorrow the PM will issue his rallying cry – ‘We fight on, we fight to win. The election’s a year away. The economy will turn it round for us, just you wait and see’ – and we are charged with ringing round our cards, ‘steadying the nerves, taking the temperature’.

I talked to Neil [Hamilton] who was in excellent spirits. He didn’t appear to have registered that there were local elections going on. He is obsessed with his case to the exclusion of all else. He is hopeful that a Lords amendment to the Defamation Bill is going to enable him to pursue his case against
The Guardian
after all. Essentially we are having to revise the 300-year-old Bill of Rights to accommodate Mr Hamilton – and we’re doing so a) because it’s probably right (i.e. the original Act was created to protect parliamentary privilege and
The Guardian
is now using it to deny Neil access to justice) and b) because if we’re to survive for another twelve months we can’t afford to have a single colleague going wobbly. We need them all – the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Speaking of which, Sir George is still with us – just.)

In the division lobby last night, during the ten o’clock vote, the Chief padded over to me.

‘Play Bridge?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. It was a question expecting the answer yes. A government whip plays Bridge – by definition. ‘The Prime Minister needs us.’

‘What?’ I suddenly had an awful vision of having to sit down to play cards with the PM. ‘I er—’

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ve left you a good hand. See you there.’ And that was that.

I ankled it back to the Pugin Room where I’d left Michèle and her brother and sister-in-law.

‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve got to go and play a hand of Bridge on behalf of the Chief Whip who has been called in to see the Prime Minister.’

‘Oh,’ said Mike, ‘so that’s how the country’s run.’

I left them to finish their coffee and scuttled over to Lord North Street. It must be twenty years since I played Bridge, but last night, though I didn’t have the first idea what I was doing, the cards were kind and my partner turned out to be Tim Sainsbury (I imagine a veteran of the green baize table) and it was really rather
fun
.