Breaking the Code (75 page)

Day 8 of the campaign doesn’t begin too badly. Overnight we manage to shift the focus from sleaze to The Great TV Debate – which is amazing since, as yet, it’s a non-event (and may prove to be such even if it does materialise) – and today there’s a leak from the Labour manifesto suggesting firms could be forced to recognise and negotiate with unions where they are supported by a majority of the workforce. We’re dubbing it ‘Blair’s big pay-off to his union backers.’ Is this our first whiff of spring?

Two clerks from the Treasury caught up with me at 7 Millbank. They needed a Lord Commissioner to sign three Treasury Warrants. The first was for £215,096,760 and 90p.
The next was for £1,554,472,000 – my first billion-pound cheque. The best was yet to come … in the foyer of 7 Millbank, witnessed by the security man and the lad on the switchboard, amid much giggling, I signed a warrant for £96,861,662,000! I was relieved to see that HM The Queen was my co-signatory and interested to note that her signature is as large and loopy as mine.

The English Patient
has won nine Oscars. The
Telegraph
tells us that personal incomes have risen by 56 per cent since 1979. John Redwood has been persuaded to cancel the press launch for his anti-EMU tract,
Our Currency, Our Country
. Convicted terrorists have been foiled in their attempt to dig their way out of the Maze Prison. And Allan Stewart, mutton-chopped axe-swinging former Minister, has decided not to contest our safest seat in Scotland for ‘health and family reasons’ – the tabloids got wind of a dalliance with a lady he encountered at a drying-out clinic! All in all, this has probably been our best day yet. The worst that befalls us is that the PM is photographed visiting a shop called Slees. (Slees Home Hardware of Braunton, Devon.)

I rather doubt whether anyone is listening, but if they are they’ll have noticed that this week we’re winning. The unions are back. We’ve raised the spectre of beer and sandwiches at No. 10. At last, Blair is on the defensive.

At 7.45 a.m. I called Sheila Gunn at Central Office. As she picked up the phone she was shouting across the room, ‘You’ve no idea how
isolated
we feel.’ Sheila’s i/c the PM on tour and ‘We’re having teething problems, that’s all. We haven’t got the bus and the plane yet and communication’s terrible, so there we are in the middle of nowhere doing our press conference on education, as agreed, and up here they’ve decided to switch to the unions and nobody’s bothered to tell us. Never mind.’

‘Keep smiling.’

‘God, I am. I’ve given strict instructions. At all times we’ve got to reflect the mood of the boss, take our look from his look.’

‘I’ve seen the pictures – you’re beaming beautifully in every one – and you’re holding out the recorder to catch every word.’

‘Only the machine doesn’t pick up half of it – and we’re supposed to get it transcribed, but that doesn’t seem to be happening either. Happy days.’

Talked to Christine Hamilton who was sounding amazingly chirpy. ‘The Association’s being just wonderful. It’s been terrible and I’ve had the lot – screaming habdabs, hysterics, crying buckets – but our people locally are being just fantastic. I don’t know what we’re going to do about the press. Do you know what the Editor of
The Times
said on Friday? At an editorial conference, Michael Gove suggested a piece outlining everything we know about Al-Fayed and Peter Stothard said, “No, that would blunt our attack on the MPs.”’

Oops! There goes another one … Tim Smith is stepping down in Beaconsfield. ‘Ex-minister quits over sleaze – Tory who accepted £25,000 goes, but Hamilton fights on’. I’ve always rather liked Tim. I didn’t know him well at Oxford, but re-encountering him at Westminster, twenty years on, he seemed a decent cove: genial, civilised, intelligent, upright, the sort of person you’d expect to find as a party treasurer and junior minister,
not
the sort you’d expect to see slinking out of the side-door of Harrods clutching brown envelopes stuffed with used banknotes. He was certainly very effective on the Finance Bill and, last night on the box, brave Jenny at his side, he made a dignified fist of his resignation – and looked as upright as ever: ramrod back surmounted by ovoid head, a blanched version of the Green Mekon. Poor man.

Hang on! There’s more! News is coming in that Piers Merchant, 46-year-old husband, father and MP for Beckenham, is having an affair with a seventeen-year-old Soho nightclub hostess and was photographed kissing her in the park on Tuesday night. You couldn’t make it up! Clean-living, conscientious Piers, vegetarian, teetotal, Peter Lilley’s exemplary PPS, so frequently ‘in the frame’ for promotion but never quite making it on account of his apparent lack of charisma. Little did we know … What an idiot! He’s denying it, and wife, family and constituency are right behind him, of course – but it’s still morning and I imagine by nightfall he’ll be gone.

Hezza was on the radio just now and magnificent – but it’s an impossible wicket and the whole thing’s a ghastly nightmare. Yesterday Mawhinney wheeled out Margaret Thatcher to bash Blair for toadying to the unions – she’s clearly barking, but she’s undeniably a superstar, and it was a coup, and it should have, and would have, led the news, and dominated the front pages, but for Tim Smith. Today Gumdrops and the Chancellor are launching our Green manifesto, but thanks to Piers and his teenage sweetheart we can forget it.

It’s beyond belief really. The poor PM will be in despair, but at least we have the Easter weekend coming up: then on Tuesday we can pretend the past fortnight hasn’t happened and have a go at starting all over again. (Actually, if Neil’s going to go eventually – and
when the pack want blood they usually get it – he ought to go
now
or we’ll have ‘sleaze’ dogging us all the way …)

The nearest the
Today
programme gets to acknowledging Good Friday seems to be an item about a Finn who has rerecorded the hits of Elvis Presley
in Latin
and sent a copy to the Vatican. At the bus stop outside the church I see a respectable-looking, elderly lady engrossed in her morning newspaper. The Good Friday headline: ‘I’M SO VERY VERY HORNY’. This is the passion in which the nation is enthralled this Holy Week.

Piers is hanging on. Neil is hanging on. Michael Brown is now under threat. I like Michael: he’s a jolly, bouncy Tigger, who fell from grace when the tabloids discovered he’d taken a young man on holiday to the Caribbean… He also accepted £6,000 from Ian Greer Associates for introducing US Tobacco to IGA and campaigning against a ban on Skoal Bandits, a chewing tobacco linked with mouth cancer, and didn’t declare the payment in the Register of Members’ Interests because he didn’t think it necessary. Downey is still to bring in his verdict: meanwhile a friendly Cleethorpes councillor is accusing poor Michael of behaving in an ‘unethical and dishonourable’ way.

So what do we reckon: three down and three to go? Of course, we haven’t had the Sundays yet.

‘THIRTY-NINE DIE IN MASS SUICIDE.’ Surprisingly, this turns out not to be the campaign team at Central Office, but a bunch of UFO nuts in San Diego. Here on Planet Election ’97, it is the Prime Minister’s fifty-fourth birthday, and it would be difficult to imagine a worse one. In many ways, the farce is turning to tragedy. Allan Stewart has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Paisley and I’ve just been talking to an alarmingly volatile Christine Hamilton:

They’re in a bad way. Understandably.

Annette Dorrell has had her baby: a 10 lb 1 oz boy ten days overdue. Michèle said: ‘Poor Annette!’

I am feeling distinctly woozy. The Barlows [Stephen Barlow and Joanna Lumley] took us to Bibendum where Jo spoonfed me my very first oyster – ‘49-year-old has taste sensation: “A mouthful of the blue lagoon” he says’ – and Stevie lavished extravagant wines upon us: champagne sec, pre-pre-prandial; champagne demi-sec, pre-prandial (‘we’re building now’); Martini (‘straight up with a twist’), to brace us while we order; something Alsatian and sensational, for the starters; a red Burgundy and brilliant, with the lamb; a desert wine with a difference (‘not too sweet: we need to complement the chocolate truffles’) … a happy-happy evening that had us teetering into the street a little after one. Twelve hours later and I’m teetering still.

Meanwhile, the Tory Party is tottering. Are we on the brink of meltdown? The overnight sensation has been the resignation of Micky Hirst
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as chairman of the party in Scotland. He has gone with commendable speed in anticipation of the Glasgow
Sunday
Mail
’s claim that he has admitted to ‘a series of homosexual encounters’. Apparently Paul Martin, a former personal assistant to Hirst, was ‘said to have boasted openly’ that they were lovers. Is this the same Paul Martin whose ‘friend’ was also said to be the ‘friend’ of Michael Brown when he resigned? It’s going to get to worse.

It
has
to get worse because Central Office have briefed that Major and Mawhinney want Merchant and Hamilton
out
– and they won’t go! The Beckenham crowd have backed Piers 43 to 3, so as far as Piers is concerned that’s that. If the Duke of Wellington and Lloyd George and Steve Norris can get away with wholescale philandering, why should a hapless young man entrapped by
The Sun
have to fall on his sword? There was no affair: just a moment of folly in the park.

And Neil, we know, is digging in. He won’t like the line in the Sundays: ‘Major has also withdrawn his support for Neil Hamilton…. He wants both Hamilton and
Merchant to go before he launches the Tory manifesto on Wednesday.’ Teddy Taylor, John Townend, Jim Spicer have all been on the radio just now urging Neil to put party before self, ‘however unjust, however unfair’. Judging from my conversation with Christine, they’re likely to be disappointed.

When I spoke to Alastair [Goodlad, the Chief Whip] yesterday I told him I was planning to go down to the river to watch the boat race. ‘You couldn’t contrive to rescue a couple of drowning oarsman, could you? Create a bit of a diversion?’

‘What if I have to give them the kiss of life?’

‘Oh God! … Happy Easter.’

The signals are confused. This morning’s
Telegraph
is unequivocal: ‘Mr Major is determined that Mr Hamilton, the MP for Tatton, has to go before the Conservative manifesto launch on Wednesday. One senior minister said: “It is time to do the decent thing – accept a revolver and a bottle of whisky and get it over with.”’

But the radio news takes a very different line: ‘Conservative Party sources confirm that it is up to local associations to decide who their candidates will be…’ It seems that in the dark watches of the night we’ve changed tack!

Neil calls. He’s amazingly collected. And cool. And funny. Michèle tells him he and Christine looked very pulled together on their way to church.

‘Yes,’ says Neil, chortling,

He was as resolute as ever:

All the front pages boast a double whammy of absurdity: Elton John, pomaded and peruqued, a perfect fright in silver and white, arriving for his fiftieth birthday fancy dress party, and the BBC’s war correspondent, another fright in white, offering himself up as the anti-corruption candidate in Tatton!
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I’m sure both gentlemen will have thought it a fun idea at the time – but I imagine, as the night wore on, Elton wearied of those high heels and that two-foot confection of curls (topped with a bespangled ship in full sail!) and I’m certain that Bell will rue his ill-judged foray into the political arena before the week is out. He says he expects his career as a candidate to be the shortest on record because he hopes and expects Mr Hamilton to stand down. He has underestimated Mr Hamilton…

And Mrs Hamilton! I have just been listening to her on the radio – a galleon in full sail: magnificent. She’s revving up to manic overdrive, but she wasn’t over the top – yet. (With Bell I imagine it’s not so much mania as a delayed mid-life crisis worsened by vanity, a misplaced sense of self-importance, and a sad touch of the poor-me’s: ‘the BBC don’t value/use/understand me any longer’).

I called Christine and left a congratulatory message on the machine. I called Joanna to tell her how funny (and seductive) she was on Clive James. When Stephen [Dorrell] called he sounded a bit bleak.