Letters from London (23 page)

July 1992

8
The Chancellor of the Exchequer
Buys Some Claret

H
istory, even when in trivial, jesting mood, often comes in incompatible versions. So during the last week of November the British public hunched frowningly over the following conundrum. Did a short, plump, middle-aged man, his hair mashed into a rather ridiculous graying quiff, enter Thresher’s “off-license” in Praed Street, Paddington, on the evening of Monday, November 16, and there purchase one bottle of Bricout champagne, plus a packet of Raffles cigarettes (total cost £17.47), or did the same man go into a different branch of the same liquor chain on the previous day and there buy three bottles of wine (total cost also £17.47)? It would matter very little to most of us, but it mattered very much indeed to the man in question, Mr. Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The story began on November 26, when
The Sun
published an irresistible tip-off from a mole inside the National Westminster Bank. The Chancellor, the informant disclosed, was currently £470 over the limit on his Access credit card; not only that but Mr. Lamont had breached his limit twenty-two times in the previous eight years, and had received no fewer than five written warnings after failing to
make the required monthly payments. Downing Street huffed and puffed at the news, denouncing the breach of confidentiality, and claiming that the latest unpaid bill had only gone astray because of building work at No. n, the Chancellor’s official London residence. Few were impressed by this flimsy defense, and opinion varied from those who saw a shocking failure of security on the bank’s part, plus a shocking intrusiveness by the press, to those who professed deep unsurprise at the financial revelations, given the wider state of the British economy under Mr. Lamont’s stewardship.

Tucked away in
The Sun’s
report, however, was a small paragraph about Mr. Lamont using his Access card in the Paddington area the previous Monday. The
Evening Standard
sent out a reporter and turned up John Onanuga, an assistant at the Praed Street branch of Thresher’s, who vividly recalled serving the Chancellor. According to Mr. Onanuga, Mr. Lamont had first examined a bottle of £11.99 Tescombes Brut champagne, the cheapest in the shop, and then moved up to the midrange £15.49 Bricout, which was being promoted, appropriately enough, as a “recession-busting” item. The Chancellor also bought a packet of Raffles 100s, a low-tar cigarette retailing cheaply at £1.98. Mr. Onanuga said that he had recognized Mr. Lamont, as had a woman in the shop, and had also noticed the House of Commons pass in his wallet; he added that the Chancellor had particularly wanted a bottle of champagne that was already chilled.

All this seemingly trite substantiating detail was in fact potentially lethal. Mr. Lamont is known to smoke only small cigars; his wife does not smoke at all. Raffles, in any case, is hardly a brand either of them would be likely to smoke; the cigarette’s image is one of down-market attempted glamor—you might expect a man who smoked Raffles to have a rusting car with a Playboy badge on the back, and a woman who smoked Raffles to dream of ensnaring her boss behind the filing cabinets at the Christmas office party. And what, moreover, about the chilled champagne? This hinted at—no, screamed—immediate consumption. On the Monday evening in question, Mr. Lamont had apparently left a civil-service select committee
at six-fifteen, and was next seen at an official reception at No. 11 a while later. Journalists muttered about “the missing hour and a half,” which translated into newspaper headlines like
WHAT WERE YOU UP TO NORM?
(Daily Star)
.

Fleet Street can scent the possibilities of sex like a tile-tripping tomcat; and while sex—by which we mean, of course, extramarital or otherwise nonconformist sex—is not in itself enough to burn a minister at the stake, it makes excellent kindling. The best way to bring down a member of the government in Britain is to link private indiscretion to public incompetence. Here the argument does not go: Ah, I see the Minister was engaging in sexual activity—well, that’s probably relaxed him after a tough week of decision making and sent him back to his desk with a fresh mind. No, the argument tends to run: Look what the Minister was up to when he should have been contemplating great affairs of state. At times, of course, the Minister in question aids and abets this latter interpretation. The last of John Major’s close associates to fall, David Mellor, then Secretary of State for National Heritage, made a phone call to his actress girlfriend in which he maintained that their previous sexual encounter had been so exquisite and so prolonged that he did not have the energy to write his next ministerial speech. Now, this could have been mere intimate praise, a lover’s courtesy, but the phone happened to be tapped, and British puritanism supplied the textual exegesis: Minister too shagged out to think straight. The illegality of the phone tap was a mere side issue in Mr. Mellor’s subsequent fall. So was the fact that most ministerial speeches are of such low quality anyway that an outside observer would be hard-pressed to judge where in the politician’s private sexual cycle any particular speech resided. Germaine Greer, when put up in debate against the sort of crusty old male who argues that women can’t do really complicated and demanding jobs, like fly an airplane or run the country, because, well, er, you see, the fact of the matter is that every so often, about once a month, actually, they, how shall we put it, become a little unreliable—Ms. Greer would on such occasions look the geezer magnificently in the eye and say, “Am I menstruating now?” Ministers might in turn try a similar ploy when
congratulated on an effective speech: “Fact of the matter is, old boy, had a spot of how’s-your-father last night, properly sets you up for speechifying, y’know.”

The most politically wounding part of the story ought to have been the details of Mr. Lamont’s Access account. If you want to connect private and public spheres of activity, and allege that behavior in one affects behavior in the other, then here was a vast opportunity. A private individual who heedlessly runs up debt, and by not paying off that debt incurs a punitively hefty rate of interest, who has to be booted into line by the credit authorities, and blames the builders for his failure to respond to his latest bill? Could there be any connection with a chancellor who presided over a whacking hike in public-sector borrowing, who kept the pound at an indefensibly high level, who maintained that Britain would never leave the exchange-rate mechanism until the day Britain left the exchange-rate mechanism, and who likes to blame everything on the Germans and the Bundesbank? Does this or does this not sound like the same man?

Mr. Lamont has not been one of the more impressive Chancellors of recent decades. He is said to be “overpromoted.” Apart from anything else, he never seems to exude much confidence that he
is
the Chancellor. I once saw a game show on television in which the same piece of music was played three times by a studio band, with a different conductor each time. The contestants had to guess which of the baton waggers was a real musical conductor, the other two being by occupation bus conductors. Mr. Lamont has always seemed the bus-conductor type of Chancellor: one who scoops his hands up and down while music is played but has no special idea what tune is coming out, or how the musicians manage their instruments. Most people admit to little understanding of economics, while worrying a fair deal about it; so public confidence in the Chancellor depends on more than just his choice of policy. An important part of his function is to look as if he knows what he is doing while blaming others—France, Germany, the world—for the economic ills of the nation; to maintain grandly that “we shall not be blown off course,” whatever the barometer indicates; and to reassure the public with an air of weighty savvy.
But what if the nation knows that it is suffering the worst recession in sixty years, that bankruptcies and mass redundancies continue unabated, and that the man in supposed charge of it all, who claimed to spot “green shoots” in the economy when others saw only a trampled mud field, doesn’t appear able to keep a grip on his own small private finances? In such a case, statesmanlike posing from the Chancellor is likely to carry less conviction.

But this is, of course, a position, an editorial statement, rather than a running story. Downing Street did not attempt to rebut the disclosures about Mr. Lamont’s lamentable credit record, because they were irrebuttable; the battle was fought over Mr. Lamont’s moral rather than financial creditworthiness, and took place amid the stacked pre-Christmas shelves of West London “off-licenses.” The full power of the British Treasury was now ranged against Mr. Onanuga. Officials telephoned newspapers with the Downing Street version of events: Mr. Lamont had never set foot in the Praed Street Thresher’s but had called in at another branch the previous day on his way back from his official Buckinghamshire residence; nor, of course, had he bought chilled champagne and a pack of Raffles—just three bottles of wine. Needless to say, this primary denial was little believed: would you take the word of an unnamed Treasury spokesman against that of an assistant in your local “offie”? Almost certainly not. Besides, Mr. Onanuga had apparently told his store manager and his girlfriend that he had served Mr. Lamont days before
The Sun
broke its story.

Thresher’s is a subsidiary of Whitbread, a large brewing company that is also—as conspiracy theorists were quick to point out—a major donor to the Conservative Party. (This last detail is probably not as significant as it seems: you would be hard put to find a company as large as Whitbread giving money to any party other than the Conservatives.) Thresher’s held an emergency board meeting at its Welwyn Garden City headquarters; thousands of credit-card vouchers were examined by staff; and at the end of it the company confirmed the Treasury’s version of events, while continuing not to specify the branch where Mr. Lamont had shopped, and denouncing its own employee’s story as “wholly inaccurate and without foundation.”

On the night of Sunday, November 29, in a final attempt to put the cork in the bottle, the Treasury released a copy of a Thresher’s register receipt bearing the Chancellor’s signature. This showed the date as November 15 (the Sunday), the time as 7:19
P.M
., and the amount paid as £17.47; it itemized two bottles of J. P. Bartier claret at £3.99, plus one bottle of 1990 Margaux from Sichel at £9.49. Mr. Lamont then released his own copy of the receipt, which added a final detail: the identity of the Thresher’s branch in question, one in Connaught Street, a few blocks away from Praed Street. Finally, a Thresher’s spokeswoman announced that Mr. Onanuga and his store manager had admitted that their story was “totally fabricated” but said that they “did not mean to cause Mr. Lamont any trouble.” So why might they have done it? Were they part, wittingly or unwittingly, of some wider conspiracy to undermine the Chancellor? Did they simply wish to wind up the press and set it running in best headless-chicken mode? Either way, the men were not produced for journalistic cross-examination and were suspended “in line with normal disciplinary procedures”—as if there had been anything normal about the preceding tale. Only a couple of minor points remained. When journalists tried to obtain from Thresher’s the two wines Mr. Lamont had bought only a fortnight earlier, they discovered that both had been taken off the shelves for what was described as “precautionary quality control.” And, lastly, it seemed strange that, given all the publicity, given knowledge of the exact date, time, and location of Mr. Lamont’s purchase, no one had come forward from the Connaught Street shop with any memory of having served the rather recognizable Chancellor.

So, after a week of vintage quibbling, the story petered out, with an appropriate tasting note from the wine writer Jancis Robinson. Asked if she had come across Mr. Lamont’s cellar selections, she consulted her records and found that she had dismissed the J. P. Bartier claret in a single word: “dirty.” The story was now also dismissed, though only in the sense that a small cloud can be swallowed up by a larger one. For it was at precisely the moment of the Praed Street affair that an earlier embarrassment in Mr. Lamont’s tenure as Chancellor
bobbed up again, like a dead dog in a dirty river. This one involved, well, yes, sex, though even the most prurient mind did not finger Mr. Lamont himself in this context. It began when he was appointed Chancellor in November of 1990; the job brought with it a salary of £63, 047, a government car, and the use of two houses: 11 Downing Street for work, and a forty-five-room Buckinghamshire mansion for weekends and holidays. This superabundance of housing meant that Mr. Lamont was able to rent out his own dwelling in Notting Hill. The following April it turned out that the tenant in his basement, one Sara Dale, who had described herself in her rental agreement as a “therapist dealing with stress and nutritional management,” was, in the language of the
News of the World
, a “busty hooker,” and that her therapy involved punishment and payment (ninety pounds per hour) of an all too predictable nature. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Lamont had met this professional lady; she had been found, it seems, by reputable agents who had taken personal references from “solicitors, a bank, and a building society.” When he heard that the story was about to break, Mr. Lamont not unnaturally went to see a solicitor. What was surprising was his choice of Peter Carter-Ruck & Partners, one of Britain’s best-known and supposedly most expensive libel firms. Their job was (1) to evict the embarrassing woman (not their normal line of business); (2) to handle press inquiries (though there was also the Treasury press office, which would not have charged for this service); and (3) perhaps most important, to warn newspapers to be careful what they wrote. As a further incentive to speed Miss Dale, Carter-Ruck took out a quite extraordinary writ for defamation against the therapist, alleging damage to the reputation of Mr. Lamont’s property caused by her presence in it. It seems that in British law you can libel a building. Whether prospective buyers or tenants might have thought that the property’s reputation had already been sufficiently diminished by having a politician living in it was not, alas, tested in court.