An Unexpected MP (3 page)

The chamber is the ideal killing field for the assassin. Winston Churchill famously put the boot into Neville Chamberlain with ‘England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.’ But weeks later the
coup de grâce
was given by Leo Amery (Julian’s father), who invoked the words of Oliver Cromwell when he dissolved the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat here too long for any good you are doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’

The most devastating and lethal speech I ever heard was Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement. It was said that it took him ten years to make it and ten minutes for his wife Elspeth (a formidable lady) to write it. In those days, if you attacked the leadership it was done through coded language. If ever there was any likelihood of trouble, rather than sit on the benches I’d pop up to the overspill gallery, whereby I was facing colleagues and could see their expressions and gauge
the mood of the party. For those not old enough to remember, Thatcher’s star was not just on the wane, it was about to explode. Neil Kinnock was twenty-nine points ahead in the polls. Ministers were being ignored and humiliated by her and none more so than the quiet, gentle and academic Howe. We thought that he would be mildly critical and did not expect the detonation of a political grade-A weapon whose shock waves still resonate throughout the party. It is well worth looking at the film clip. Sitting just behind Howe was my old chum the ginger-haired David Sumberg. When the knife is finally plunged you can see Sumberg’s look of shock and watch him mouth the words ‘fucking hell’. That really summed it up. We knew that now the Lady’s days were numbered.

A golden rule is that whenever you expect trouble in the chamber it rarely happens. The debate on the Westland debacle, in which Heseltine resigned from Cabinet as secret papers on the ownership of that helicopter company had been leaked to the press, was expected to be a cliffhanger, perhaps the end of the government. To paraphrase, it was all about whether Westland should be owned by the Americans or the Europeans. Hezza thought it was a No. 10 plot to undermine him, which it probably was. In fact, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, treated this extremely seriously and bravely threatened to send Scotland Yard into No. 10 unless there was full cooperation. Thatcher never forgave him and eventually sacked him as Lord Chancellor some years later.

The time came for the big debate. Although this was essentially a beltway story, the whips were very jittery about the outcome. We were told that the Lady had a letter of resignation in her handbag. Although I never believed a word of it.

This was Neil Kinnock’s big chance for a knock-out blow. We watched with trepidation as he rose to speak. We shouldn’t have bothered: he bombed. Too wordy, too shouty, and missing his target.

But Westland claimed the scalp of Trade Secretary Leon Brittan, whose department was accused of leaking the document. I like Leon. Kind, decent, honourable and intelligent. His problem was that he was very tall, a QC, and had the look of an armed robber with a stocking stretched over his head. People thought that he was talking down to them when nothing could be further from the truth. What deeply disturbed me was the whiff of anti-Semitism that began to pollute certain sections of the party. A number of colleagues whispered that the trouble with this Cabinet was that there were too many Estonians and not enough Etonians. I felt ashamed of them.

But I do like Neil Kinnock. He is brave, good-hearted and great company. He was just unlucky and had a propensity to bang on a bit. He once helped end any hope of a ministerial job for me under the Lady, although I was doing rather well on that score myself. At Prime Minister’s Questions he shouted at her to give the Hon. Member for Harlow a job. Well, that was it.

I was once at a do where he and Hezza were speaking. We were on a three-line whip, which means that the only excuse for non-attendance is death. I looked at my watch. Five minutes to go. Damn, I was stuffed. When we eventually headed for the door I was looking a bit forlorn. I was due a serious bollocking from the whips. Neil sidled over.

‘Don’t worry, boyo, I’ll give you a lift back.’

So there I was in the back of the Leader of the Opposition’s car with the man himself, sweeping through Carriage Gates.
Heaven knows what people would have thought. Neil read my mind.

‘Leave it to me, boyo. Look those whip bastards in the eye and tell them you were with me. I’ll ring the Chief and explain.’ To his credit, he did. And my genitalia remained intact. For the time being.

It is hard to believe that cameras were only introduced into the chamber in the late 1980s – and then only after a row. But the absence of television hid a number of sins, notably of extreme drunkenness and bad behaviour. Viewers would have missed the swaying and the final collapse onto the benches of Nicky Fairburn after slurring a question. They would have also missed a rather drunken Ron Brown throwing the mace to the ground and a senior Labour whip marching in to punch him in the stomach, throw him over his shoulder and give him a good kicking, within earshot of us all.

Dear old Ron was affable but quite bonkers. His face was horribly scarred after he had received 5,000 volts in an industrial accident. The word was that this had scrambled his brain. I remember coming back from a run and having a shower in the Members’ changing room, then a rather Victorian affair with a tanning lamp that was built in the ’20s and looked as if it was on loan from Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory. A very dangerous machine indeed. Anyhow, as I was sluicing myself down, I heard gruntings and groans and then squeals of ecstasy. I looked in the end cubicle and there was Ron indulging in Ugandan discussions.

We eventually had a rather pompous debate about what to do with Ron, who, although as mad as a box of frogs on speed, was quite a pleasant guy. One Tory, it may have
been Peter Bottomley, rose to support him. Dear old Peter, although well-meaning, inadvertently had us rocking in the aisles and crying with laughter. ‘Does the House not think’, he said portentously, ‘that we are using a sledgehammer to crack a—’ but before the word ‘nut’ could be uttered the House was too paralysed with mirth to do anything but whoop for the joy of it all.

Viewers would also have missed out on Dr Alan Glyn, the Member for Windsor. Poor old Alan was very elderly and very infirm and, according to the wonderful Steve Norris, had ‘more dandruff than a dead badger’. He was a small man with a limp and a Hitler moustache. The limp, he claimed, was as a result of him being a British spy monitoring the Soviet invasion of Prague. The truth is that he fell asleep by the road and a Land Rover ran over his leg.

The old boy had pretty well lost the plot in the 1980s and could barely walk or talk. He would just raise a paw in welcome and wobble off into the distance. Although he did keep repeating, when occasionally speech was restored, that he was both a doctor and a barrister and ‘fucking useless’ at both. The joke was that people wore medical alert bracelets with ‘not to be treated by Dr Glyn’ on them.

Alan always used to stay at the same hotel in Windsor on election night, with his wife, the delightfully dopey Lady Rosola. In the middle of the night he was desperate for a pee and wandered into what he thought was the bathroom. In fact it was the wardrobe, which fell on top of him. The old boy, after a bit of a struggle, fell asleep. The next morning Lady Rosola noticed that he wasn’t there and assumed he’d gone off to a meeting. So she went home. Of course, Alan was still
asleep in the upturned wardrobe, only to be found by a startled chambermaid several hours later.

Another little oddity viewers would have been interested in were the hairy grey suits worn by Toby Jessel, the Member for Twickenham. I once asked him what they were made of.

‘Why, poodle hair, of course,’ he replied, in a way that suggested that anyone who didn’t have a suit made of the stuff must be very eccentric. Evidently some relative used to breed poodles and gave him a bolt of their hair once a year. Perfectly normal.

The chamber can also show empathy and love. This was evidenced in one of the last days before Geoffrey Dickens tragically died. He was an enormous man, as broad as he was tall. In another incarnation he had been a nightclub bouncer. Sadly, he was struck with cancer, and he wanted to see his old friends for the last time. It was a pitiful sight. There was not an ounce of flesh on him. He hardly had a voice and was connected to a chemo drip. It is on these occasions that the House is at its best. People from all parties rallied round, patted him on the back, gave him a hug, shook him by the hand and wished him well. We all knew that this was the last time he would be with us. It was.

Geoffrey, in his heyday, was an old right-winger with a foghorn voice. Everyone flooded into the chamber to hear his speech in favour of Clause 28, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Dickens wasn’t blessed with the keenest of intellects and he couldn’t understand why the House was cracking up with laughter at his attempts to be statesmanlike. Lines such as ‘I’m not against homosexuals, many would bend over backwards to help their fellow man’
and ‘I don’t object to homosexuality, it’s just that my constituents don’t want it rammed down their throats’ were delivered with total innocence. He really wasn’t being deliberately homophobic, just a bit dim.

Some Members are naturally funny. One of my favourite speeches was by Rhodri Morgan (who eventually became a splendid First Minister of Wales). It was at about 5 a.m. and everyone was fairly worse for wear. He was making a speech about the role of Richard Branson, who had been appointed Litter Czar. He reminded us all of the time Branson and Thatcher did a photo shoot picking up litter in St James’s Park. He came out with this cracker:

‘Who does she think she is, John F. Kennedy?’ This rather confused us and one drunken voice shouted for an explanation.

‘Ich bin ein bin liner,’ he grinned.

We had been brilliantly set up for that one.

Sometimes a good lunch would generate serious mischief. My famous question to the Chancellor Nigel Lawson comes to mind. As soon as I got to my feet, two well-refreshed grandees picked me up and suspended me over the benches, just to alleviate the boredom of what was to come. This is probably the only time a parliamentary question has been asked in mid-air. Nigel just couldn’t understand why my supplementary caused so much hilarity. He was, of course, facing the opposite direction.

Mind you, Nigel was a genius at the despatch box. One night we heard that some official in the Treasury had cocked up a major privatisation. Lawson was due to make a statement at ten. We all trooped in expecting humiliation and disaster. In he marched with a statement scribbled on the back of an
envelope. Heaven knows what he said, it was all horribly technical. But it solved the problem and we cheered him to the rafters. He had saved the day. It was a tragedy when he was forced to resign.

One strange ritual which has now been abolished was the little bit of theatre when an MP wanted to raise a point of order during a debate. To be called by the Speaker, the MP would have to reach under the Serjeant-at-Arms’ chair and remove a collapsible top hat, sit down, put it on and make his point of order. When finished, he would toss it across the chamber like a Frisbee to anyone else who wanted to raise a point of order. Some of the old boys used to get very excited when the lovely Clare Short sat there in the top hat. They thought that she looked very burlesque. In those days they were a pretty sexist lot. And it could become very uncomfortable when some of the post-erectionists wanted to wax lyrical about the sexual charms of Margaret Thatcher.

Sometimes, Hansard writers (the people who take a shorthand note of proceedings) get it horribly wrong. It’s rare, but it happens. The classic was when John Butterfill gave a perfectly straightforward supplementary question to some minister. When he checked the record the next day to admire his words of wisdom, they had been traduced to ‘this is total bollocks’. How that ever appeared is still one of the great unsolved parliamentary mysteries. The chamber is a funny old place.

O
ne of the most fascinating institutions on the parliamentary estate was Annie's Bar. I say ‘was' simply because this jewel in the crown of Westminster watering holes is no more. It is deceased. And it had beautiful plumage. Yet it was pushed off its perch by hair-shirted Blairites who didn't approve of the drinking culture that had dominated the place for so many years and despised by the new breed of well-scrubbed Follettised Labour women who convinced themselves that anyone who was over the age of forty, liked a drink and possessed a penis (whether in working order or not) was the enemy. Quite why women are known as the gentler sex is a total mystery to me. Covering their antics for Her Majesty's press for a few years showed many of them to be the most ruthless, hard-nosed bunch it has ever been my misfortune to encounter, making Lucretia Borgia look like Shirley Temple. You may recall that Barbara Follett was a Labour MP evangelical about getting more women into Parliament and gave hopefuls lessons in what to wear to make an impact with selection committees. We once did a television interview about women.

‘And what have the Tories ever done for women?' she snarled.

‘Well, we made Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister,' I offered.

‘But she was not really a woman, was she?' This caused me sleepless nights. But there is an uncomfortable truth that there are still not enough women in Parliament. Harriet Harman has been fearless and determined, as has David Cameron. But all parties still have a very long way to go. What is an even worse national disgrace is the inequality of pay between the sexes, which still persists.

I was blessed with the extraordinarily high calibre of the women MPs I encountered when I was first elected. The likes of Dame Elaine Kellett Bowman, Dame Janet Fookes, Dame Marion Roe, Dame Jill Knight and Edwina Currie were all highly intelligent, opinionated and incredibly brave. If any mere man tried to patronise them you would find out who the superior sex really was. And on the Labour side you had Audrey Wise, Gwyneth Dunwoody, Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell, Clare Short and Margaret Hodge; none would take any nonsense. There were many more. All of these women were formidable but kept their femininity. If someone had told them to ‘calm down, dear' in the chamber they would have either regarded it as a bad attempt at humour or just defenestrated the poor sod.

I was particularly fond of Gwyneth Dunwoody. She was delightful, but terrified the life out of most of her colleagues. One day I was being playful with her in the chamber. Afterwards I sidled up to her cheerily, saying words to the effect of ‘that was fun'. She just smiled at me, said, ‘Just like this,' and kneed me in the groin. I had learned my lesson.

Dame Elaine Kellett Bowman, the feisty MP for Lancaster, didn't take any prisoners either. She used to call me Bubbles, after the famous Pears soap painting of a little boy with blond curly hair blowing bubbles. She was well known for treating Budget Day as a very special event. So much so that rather than queue up outside the chamber before it was unlocked to guarantee a seat, she used to sleep wedged against the door on the cold stone floor in a sleeping bag.

One morning I passed her recumbent form only to spot the wonderfully outrageous Nicky Fairbairn standing over her, having a swig from the phial of vodka he used to keep in the top of his silver-topped walking cane. It was, after all, quite late at 8 a.m. ‘You know, Jerry, this is how I love to see her. Comatose.' And off he staggered to refill his morning's supply. He wouldn't have had the nerve to say that if she had been awake.

But back to Annie's. It was steeped in history. The one which operated in my day had changed its location several times over the years; it used to be the office of Charles Parnell, who used to smuggle in his mistress, Kitty O'Shea, through the stone-mullioned windows. She was the go-between over Home Rule with Gladstone. It all ended in tears.

Annie's was the preserve of the press and MPs. A place of relative safety (whips were eyed with suspicion) where gossip and stories could be exchanged on lobby terms, which meant that the source would never be disclosed. So when you read a story beginning ‘Friends close to…' it very often meant that the guy had planted the story himself.

In the days when he drank, the legendary Chris Moncrieff would down half a dozen pints of Guinness in about twenty
minutes before filing another brilliant scoop for the Press Association. Chris is the finest reporter that I have ever come across because he is meticulous and fair. But, more importantly, he is totally honest. People trust him. And in Westminster that's a valuable commodity. A good example of this was when Denzil Davies was shadow Secretary of State for Defence. He was always at odds with Neil Kinnock's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. It came to a head one night when he rang up Chris and told him that he was going to resign. Being a true gent, Moncrieff, realising that Denzil was rather worse for wear in drink, said he would ring him back when he had sobered up and if he wanted to change his mind the first conversation would be forgotten. Eventually the call was made and a sober Denzil stuck to his guns. And Chris, through old-fashioned journalism, had secured the story of the year.

Denzil, in the days of Harold Wilson, used to be a Treasury minister under Denis Healey's chancellorship. Denis was a bit of an old bruiser and didn't like Davies's rather mild Welsh manner. Denzil once told me that he could not bear being told that he was a twat or a wanker or a bastard by Healey, so they agreed not to have face-to-faces, just written memos. But it made no difference, as Healey just used to scrawl twat, wanker or bastard in the margins.

The interesting thing about the lobby is that its patrons forge close personal relationships with politicians. It is symbiotic in that the journalist needs a story and the politician needs publicity. Every dog needs a lamp-post; it's just a bit difficult working out which one is which. Some criticise the lobby system as being too cosy. But you are more likely to get to the truth of a story if all parties realise at the outset that
everything that is said is unattributable and off the record. Ministers are far more likely to go off-message in private than in public. There is nothing more off-putting to voters than seeing robotic politicians failing to answer questions and sticking rigidly to dull scripts prepared by spin doctors. Rachel Reeves and Chloe Smith, take note. Well, at least Chloe has. She saw the writing on the wall after her
Newsnight
car crash and resigned a few months later.

Chris Moncrieff formed close relationships with everyone who mattered and an awful lot who didn't. He became close to Margaret Thatcher.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall at No. 10 on the very first Red Nose Day, when Moncrieff asked Thatcher to put on a red nose. And despite their friendship, the room became very chilly. She did not oblige. At the time of writing, Chris, who is well into his eighties, is still filing brilliant copy. And the new press bar bears his name. Deservedly so. Although sadly not a lot of serious drinking goes on in there any more. Many of the baby journos don't understand the importance of lunch or a few reviving drinks with MPs. They prefer to be rooted in front of their screens.

The great thing about Annie's Bar is that we had a fantastic camaraderie. No matter what allegiance we had to party or paper, we always helped each other out. One Christmas our delightful barmaid, May, was in floods of tears. She had spent a lot of time putting up the decorations only to witness a foul-mouthed and drunken Ron Davies (he of the last shoot-out at Gobbler's Gulch on Clapham Common) ripping them all down. Harold Walker, the Deputy Speaker, was so enraged that he made the ghastly Davies apologise and redecorate the place.

And you could always tell where certain journalists were by the placing of their drinks. You knew that Peter Dobbie of the
Mail on Sunday
couldn't be all that far away if there was a half of lager by the telephone.

It is worth remembering that in the early 1980s newspaper articles were actually typed on a typewriter. There were neither computer terminals nor laptops. And if you were away from the office (as all political journalists were), you just dictated your copy down the phone to a copy-taker, usually a middle-aged woman in Manchester. The capacity for totally inebriated journos to sober up just enough to be able to dictate a front-page splash from off the top of their heads never ceased to amaze me. I look back in wonderment on how I used to hold up some of the old boys with one hand while pressing the phone to their ear with the other while they dictated staggeringly good copy. One such gifted old friend was Adrian Lithgow of the
Mail on Sunday
. We became really good mates. A great journo and a delightful man. But sometimes a menace after a drink. One night he staggered into Annie's in a terrible rage.

‘Which one of you wankers has nicked my contacts book?' he screamed at nobody in particular. At that, a rather starry-eyed kid from the BBC, who had never met a real Fleet Street hack before, nervously smiled. Not a good move. Lithgow grabbed him by the lapels, raised him from his bar stool and threw him against the wall, with the parting words ‘you smug bastard' before heading off to the committee room corridor.

One of the most unpleasant experiences both MPs and journalists have to endure is the sheer drudgery and mind-numbing boredom of party conferences. But there was an upside. For
three weeks of the party conference season, Annie's Bar goes on the road, in those days to dreary seaside resorts. Ever tried to have a good time in Blackpool that doesn't involve slot machines and vomit? No, neither have I.

Once, I was sent by
The Big Breakfast
to find some youngsters, put them in fancy dress and take part in a daft competition. The trouble is that in the early hours the only people I could find were drunks and those just released from prison. I then had to dress as Elvis Presley and interview a Blackpool landlady with a singing dog. Needless to say the dog wouldn't even bark, let alone sing. Not my finest hour.

The tradition is that at party conferences, newspaper editors book a swish suite at the headquarters hotel, dine with the Prime Minister and then swan back to London, leaving the suite in the safe hands of whoever is covering politics. On one occasion it was Lithgow, then at the
Mail on Sunday
. It goes without saying that a whole crowd of us had rather a lot to drink that night. So I staggered into the twin bed next to Adrian and snored the night away until we were woken by the telephone. It was Lithgow's then girlfriend.

‘Where are you?'

‘In bed.'

‘You've got a woman with you.'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘But I can hear someone in the background.'

‘Oh yeah, but it's a guy.'

‘Arrrrrrrrgh!' Followed by much shouting, swearing and tears.

‘Err, I think she's got the wrong end of the stick here, mate,' says Lithgow, ‘and she's on her way up…'

So, with the presence of mind that only three bottles of
Merlot can produce, I threw on some clothes and jumped out of the window. To land in a heap in front of his girlfriend.

‘Hi there,' I spluttered, ‘Adrian's waiting for you. We had a great night together.'

Well, you know what I meant, but it was rather misunderstood.

Betty Boothroyd, before she became one of the finest Speakers the Commons has ever had, used to be a regular at Annie's and could be found swirled in cigarette smoke with a very large gin and tonic on hand. We would always be greeted with a cheery ‘'allo luveee'. I was one of the Tories who voted for her. And very proud of that, too. Mind you, it was either her or Peter Brooke, to whom humour is not a joke.

Annie's was not without its political dramas. Ken Clarke, even when in Cabinet, would pop in for a few pints and a cigar. One night, when things were particularly fraught with Thatcher (in those days, most of the time), one young journo rushed in and announced that he'd just heard that Michael Heseltine had resigned. Actually he hadn't (yet), but for the first time I saw the normally ebullient Ken turn as white as sheet, mutter ‘oh fuck', and leave the room. The telltale sign of just how serious Ken thought the situation was that he had left his pint on the bar.

Unthinkable.

The Annie's Bar crowd were fantastic. We often said that we were the very first coalition in modern times as we pretty well agreed how the country should be run. Remember, this included two journo legends, Nigel Nelson and Ian Hernon, who were firmly of the left, as were Norman Hogg (who lost out as Labour Chief Whip by one vote) and deputy shadow
Leader of the House John McWilliam. Now put them together with Tony Beaumont-Dark (the only man who could fall asleep standing up with a glass in his hand and not spill a drop) and Barry Porter, both of the right, and you had a very interesting mix.

Barry's memorial service was a very grand affair at the MPs' church, St Margaret's. John Major, Michael Heseltine and most of the Cabinet were there. It was a glittering occasion. I think Hezza rolled up because Barry was the first Thatcherite to publicly support him for the leadership. But at the service a beyond-the-grave note was read out. ‘Sorry, Michael, but in the end I still voted for the old girl.' I miss the old devil. Barry, that is.

Annie's was also a great link with the past. Lord Bruce of Donington was another regular. An interesting old boy with a dry sense of humour, he was elected in 1945 and was Nye Bevan's parliamentary private secretary. He knew Churchill, Lloyd George and all the greats of the time. He was a fund of stories. I once asked him how they compared with our modern politicians. He just smiled, took a pull of his pint and uttered words which any politician with pretensions should never forget: ‘All politicians have feet of clay. Most are wankers.'

Yet, despite his left-wing pedigree, Donald was to the right of Genghis Khan.