An Unexpected MP (9 page)

Sadly, we only did three programmes on nationally networked LWT. There were rows over money and they wanted to put in teams of writers and completely mess it up.

Ed is a great practical joker. You had to be prepared for just about anything if he was about. Once, when the House was debating the Dangerous Dogs Act, I was asked to pop over to IRN to do a live interview on it down the line. It started quite well until I heard barking in the studio and then felt a scuffling around my ankles. And then something biting my ankles. Of course it was Ed on his hands and knees. I completely fell apart and pretended that there were technical problems. Heaven knows what the poor fellow who
was trying to interview me in another studio thought was going on.

Also when I am around Ed, particularly at parties, I have to watch out for my hair. He has a habit of creeping up behind me with a lighter and setting fire to it. A lovely, lovely man who has forgotten more about broadcasting than I shall ever know.

I do have a great deal of affection for LBC. I cut my teeth there in the old Gough Square offices with Pete Murray. Pete was the very first DJ in Europe, if not the world. He started on Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s. He was
playing
music for the kids well before the pirate ships, let alone Radio 1. But he did have a disconcerting habit of popping off to the loo when the news came on, leaving his teeth on the table. He’d always come back with ten seconds to go, reinsert his gnashers and we’d restart the programme.

Next (actually it was about ten years later), Ed Boyle’s parliamentary rep got a rather interesting offer. Every Tuesday at 11 a.m., Charlie and Ken and I would appear on an LBC round table. Our host was the phenomenally famous Michael Parkinson. The programme proved to be very popular,
particularly
with taxi drivers.

The reason that we, along with Tony Banks, were
hoovering
up the media opportunities is because, for politicians, we were pretty truthful. We told it as it was and if that got in the way of the party line (which used to change like the weather anyway) it didn’t really matter too much. What we didn’t do, which seems to be the norm today, is make personal attacks on our leaders.

Parky was great fun and obviously the consummate
professional
. It would be amazing to roll up at ten and get chatting
to those megastars he would be interviewing. Most were a delight. I once bumped into a wheelchair-bound Ginger Rogers. For those of you under fifty, let me explain that she was once the dancing partner of Fred Astaire and the most famous actress in the world. I asked Parky what it was like interviewing her.

‘Bloody nightmare. I’d prefer to do ten rounds with Cassius Clay than interview her.’

It is worth remembering that Parky was a distinguished journalist well before he became famous as a chat-show host. He covered the Korean War and slept in the bath for safety. He was also a brilliant sports journalist and really passionate about sport, particularly cricket. He found it utterly
incomprehensible
that Charlie, Ken and I had about as much interest in sport as in eating our own spleens.

Parky is a very entertaining, warm guy. We had great fun, the deep well of his stories seemingly bottomless, and he was a generous host. Every so often he would take us out for lunch. Being old school, Parky’s idea of lunch was the same as ours: start at about 12.30 and finish sometime around six, if it was a short one. He used to take us to Langan’s when it was a proper restaurant and not some gastronomic wilderness infested with Essex scrap metal merchants and their bottle-blonde mistresses. He was always given a side table so everyone knew he was there. This was rather handy, as every time he was noticed a bottle of champagne would arrive. And there was a hell of a lot of champagne. Once, Parky thought he would lay on a treat for Charlie Kennedy. There was a very beautiful television actress (whose blushes I will spare), and Charlie was always banging on about how much he fancied her. So, just
after pud, this vision of pulchritude sat down with us for one of the bottles of champagne that were beginning to queue up for our attention. What should have been love at first sight, or at least a shag, turned into a disaster. The poor girl had just come from one of many consultations with her gynaecologist and spared us none of the grisly detail. Charlie should have been creaming in his jeans rather than being on the verge of throwing up. For the rest of us it was great entertainment.

It is difficult to choose my favourite Parky story, as there are so many. But I still dine out on the one when he was the first British journalist to interview Cassius Clay after winning the world heavyweight title. Parky is waiting nervously inside the trailer while the champ is having a shower. ‘Suddenly, Clay was standing in front of me stark bollock naked.’

‘And?’ we asked aghast.

‘And he had the smallest cock I have ever seen.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing, he’s the bloody world heavyweight champion.’

Parky, what a great man.

Sadly, he went on to greener pastures and left us in the hands of the ghastly Richard Littlejohn. We took an instant dislike to each other. I think he saw me as a cocky little
clever-dick
. I saw him as an arrogant bully with the brain the size of a pea. I didn’t last more than a few weeks before he booted me out. Littlejohn was not very popular with the staff. His driver, a tough little Scot, became thoroughly fed up with his boorish behaviour after a drink. He once had to pick Littlejohn up after a session in the pub when he was at his most
irritating
, needling the poor guy mercilessly. This was unwise as the driver did a little bit of debt collecting on the side and was not
afraid to give a stern warning that if he kept it up he would lamp him. Well, it never came to that. Littlejohn just passed out, and his limp form was laid in the back of the limo like a snoring Jabba the Hut. It was eventually dumped outside his front door, with the driver ringing the doorbell to alert Mrs L.

Well, Littlejohn didn’t last all that long. The chair was taken by a former Radio 1 DJ, the thoroughly likeable Simon Bates, and I was reinstated. Simon is another one of the great gods of radio. My affectionate memory of him is him taking out his chrome stopwatch and talking live for ten minutes without a note. ‘Luv, it’s amazing, this gift I have for being able to witter on about absolute shit.’

Simon is a fascinating guy with a gift for gossip which makes me look positively discreet. He started off work in a slaughterhouse, which he hated after he was offered fresh blood sandwiches for lunch. He then moved to New Zealand as a cattle inseminator. He gave up sitting in the back of a small truck masturbating horny bulls for broadcasting … tough choice.

The wonderful thing about Simon is that he is great fun. One evening we had all been out on the town and the next morning we had the eleven o’clock show to roll out, with the alcohol still coursing through our veins. In those days I rented a flat in St George’s Drive in Pimlico. I staggered out of bed to pick up the morning paper. As I was completely naked, I
carefully
opened the front door and slowly inched my arm out to collect
The Times
on the doorstep. Unfortunately, I slipped, fell onto the pavement and heard the depressing sound of the front door slamming shut. So there I was, starkers on the pavement with only a newspaper covering my modesty. Thank heavens
it was a broadsheet. It goes without saying that I didn’t have a key on me. What on earth would I do? Then I remembered that there was a retired professor, an elderly spinster, on the top floor. I pressed the bell.

‘Yes?’

‘Er, Professor, this is Jerry Hayes from downstairs;
unfortunately
, I’ve locked myself out.’

‘I’ll be down straight away.’

‘Only one slight problem. I have no clothes on.’

Bless her, she didn’t bat an eyelid.

I rang up our producer to ask if the car could come a little later as I needed to shower and get dressed. I explained why. Five minutes later the phone rang and I received a tirade of abuse from a madman accusing me of being a pervert. It took a minute for me to realise that this was Bates winding me up.

Trevor McDonald also sat in the host chair for a while. One of the most pleasant and unassuming people that I have ever worked with. One day, off air, he remarked that he couldn’t understand why so many presenters opened their homes to
Hello!
magazine. I explained that it was because they were paid about £100k. This rather shocked him. But two months later, guess whose house appeared in
Hello!?

Finally, that great Australian broadcaster Mike Carlton briefly took over the show. He wasn’t well known over here but in his own country he was a legend. And, at twenty-one, he was the youngest reporter to cover the Vietnam War. He once took me out for what I can only describe as a marathon lunch at the Ritz. When we both staggered out I suggested we go and have a drink in Annie’s Bar at the Commons. By this time Mike was in full Aussie mode. He was on great form. He
fell off a bar stool, thumped a fellow journo and was escorted off the premises. It was a wonderful afternoon.

The next day, the boys thought it might be a good idea to wind him up. So, on House of Commons notepaper they drew up some mad admonishment from the Speaker for his clear contempt of Parliament which could carry the penalty of imprisonment in the Tower of London. When Mike received it he was petrified. What should he do? I explained that there was an ancient ceremony by which he could purge his contempt. So I took him back, where he expected terrible humiliation. But it was just the boys in fun mode, ready to buy him drinks and slap him on the back. That, mercifully, was the only violence that happened that day.

Probably the weirdest experience in television is working with puppets. I used to do quite a bit for
The Big Breakfast
and was once asked to do a slot with Zig and Zag. I hadn’t got a clue what to do and just sauntered into the studio to see two Irishmen lying under trellises with the famous puppets on their hands. I suppose simulating a conversation with
imaginary
friends is something I had been well trained for.

I
f you think that David Cameron is deeply unpopular with some of his backbenchers, it’s as nothing compared to the visceral loathing that Margaret Thatcher suffered in her early years. As is the case with most leadership elections, the party did not elect her because they thought that she would be a fantastic success, but rather because all the other candidates were tainted with the past. Try to remember the traumas of the Heath government. He wasn’t expected to win in 1970. His victory came as a shock, particularly to Harold Wilson, who found himself with nowhere to live, virtually penniless. Heath had a horror of the same fate and allowed Wilson to stay at Chequers until he could find a home and, more
importantly
, he passed legislation granting a car and a pension for all former prime ministers.

Probably the biggest disaster to befall Heath was bad luck. His heavyweight and cerebral Chancellor, Iain Macleod, died at No. 11 within a few months of taking office. He was replaced by a comparative lightweight, Tony Barber. And when a massive hike in oil prices and an explosion of greed among the trade unions began wrecking the economy, Heath made a fatal error of judgement by turning his economic policy on its head.
The famous U-turn. That was the beginning of the end, with the ‘Who governs Britain?’ election blowing up in his face.

Heath became bitter, brooding and remote, and Thatcher, a horse so dark as to be almost invisible, had the courage to stand for the leadership and win. Harold Wilson, now ensconced back in No. 10, cracked open the champagne.

More fool him.

But Thatcher was a pretty hopeless Leader of the Opposition. Shrill and humourless at the despatch box, out of step with her male, patrician shadow Cabinet and genuinely hated by many of her backbenchers. Those who were in the Whips’ Office at the time told me how she would seek solace with them, often in floods of tears. Even when she won the 1979 election, most backbenchers wanted her to fail. Even when the fleet sailed to liberate the Falklands, few believed there would be a fight; rather a capitulation. Many were willing her to get it wrong. God, Tory backbenchers can be a ghastly, self-centred,
mutinous
bunch. Things don’t change.

According to Ferdinand Mount, who worked closely with her, even that consummate patrician gentleman Lord Carrington privately referred to her as ‘that fucking petit bourgeois woman’. Compared to that, Cameron has had it pretty easy.

And, like most Leaders of the Opposition, she didn’t know too much about foreign policy. Jonathan Aitken, who blotted his copy book with her for dumping her daughter Carol, once said that she knew so little about the Middle East that she thought Sinai was the plural of sinus.

But through sheer drive, determination and force of will she moulded her party and the country (although not all of it) to
her very simple beliefs of thrift, hard work, sound money and aspiration. She was the very first anti-Establishment Prime Minister who had a direct line to the public. Thatcher destroyed the cosy Conservative/Labour arrangement where everybody knew their place in society and everybody trusted that the political elite knew what was best for them. She believed in the individual. The importance of aspiration. The importance of hard work and education as a way out of poverty. That any ‘place’ in society should come not through birth, but through ability. And, most important of all, that owning a home and a business was now open to everyone.

Today, we all take that for granted. In the 1970s it was considered revolutionary, if not downright subversive.

Sadly, Thatcher and I didn’t get on from our very first
meeting
. I was brought up in the days of Macmillan and Heath. Macmillan was my great hero. He was the man who coined the phrase ‘banksters’, who wanted to turn the Conservative Party into something more socially democratic, who believed in building homes for the poor. He was haunted by the horrors of the Great War, where so many young men died and he survived.

He famously wrote to his director of policy saying, ‘The middle classes clearly want something, please jot down
whatever
it is on a couple of sides of notepaper and I’ll see if I can give it to them.’ Macmillan once briefed the press after a meeting with Thatcher, saying she made him feel that he had just failed in Geography. They did not get on.

Thatcher’s real problem was that she was devoid of any sense of humour. I was at the Young Conservative conference when she laid out her stall to be leader. Her biggest applause
and laughter came when she told a story about how, during a game of golf, Willie Whitelaw ‘had me at the eighteenth hole’. She hadn’t a clue why we were laughing. And that was the trouble. The Commons is a very clubbable place, but she wanted none of it. Not because she was a woman; it’s just that she never did small talk. When she lost the leadership there was a dread of standing next to her in the division lobby simply because she attempted it. And not very well. It was like Edward Scissorhands trying to make balloon animals. Some locked themselves in the loo till she had passed.

And yet Denis was great fun. He once came down to Harlow to speak on my behalf. The first thing he did was tell my guys that he’d given security the slip but had ‘pranged’ the Cortina. ‘Anyone here got a garage?’ We sorted him out.

He was also hoovering up the gins and noticed a local reporter taking a picture. ‘Be a good chap and bin that, will you? I’m president of a few rugby clubs and the boys would be a bit upset to see a drink in my hand.’ Utterly preposterous, of course, but the press bought it and loved it. That man had charm in buckets.

One of the perks of being a government MP was being invited to the No. 10 summer party. The trouble was that the Lady made us queue up and shake her by the hand before we could get a drink. If she liked you, she would grasp you and hang on forever. She used to use this to great effect at
funerals
. On the death of some prominent Russian she grabbed Brezhnev by the hand and wouldn’t let go. She knew how to milk a photo opportunity.

But if she didn’t like you she would give your hand a quick twist and give your shin a slight tap. She did that to me once
and I ended up sprawled in front of Denis (I had had a couple of sharpeners). ‘Looks like the old girl doesn’t like you, old boy,’ he grinned.

There was a wonderful No. 10 do when Norman Lamont (then Trade Minister) had been splashed all over the papers for shagging Olga Polizzi. The boyfriend had returned home and found Norman in the boyfriend’s monogrammed silk jimjams. As a result, Norman sported a beautiful black eye. Suddenly the word went round that he was coming up the stairs. So, just as he’d finished the handshake and got the disapproving look, a few of us were dancing behind Thatcher with one hand over an eye. I know, I know, it was very childish. But it was fun.

I remember uncomfortable meetings with her in the early days as Leader. As a YC area chairman I would be summoned into the shadow Cabinet room for lectures. We totally
disagreed
on monetarism (although she was proved to be right) and in one of the newly released documents she had written by our names ‘and each one more ghastly than the other’. I think I fitted the bill rather well.

The trouble is I always managed to say the wrong thing to her. I had just come out of Annie’s Bar one day when she was in full sail in one of the corridors with a flotilla of flunkeys trailing in her wake. She gave me a steely stare with those piercing blue eyes drilling into me. ‘Jerry, have you voted?’ A good time for a joke, I thought.

‘Well, Prime Minister, I’ve been in Annie’s all afternoon and I really can’t remember.’ If looks could kill.

On our first meeting after the 1983 election she invited us to No. 10 for a celebration drink. As we all staggered out I was chatting to Cecil Parkinson, newly appointed Secretary
of State for Trade and Industry. It was at this point that the ghastly Mark appeared and obviously wanted to
buttonhole
Cecil for some deal or other. I should remind you that Mark had been in a car rally in the Sahara and had got lost. So much so that Mum had persuaded the RAF to find him. Unfortunately, they did. Anyhow, Cecil politely indicated that he would rather eat his own spleen than talk to Mark Thatcher. So he used the oldest trick in the book. ‘Mark, have you met Jerry Hayes?’ Of course he bloody hadn’t and wouldn’t want to unless I owned some floozy-infested club. So I thought this was a good time for an icebreaker. ‘Hi, Mark, did you find your way here all right?’ It did not go down well.

One of the most unnerving experiences was walking into the Members’ dining room to discover that the middle table had chairs leaning against it in the same way that Germans placed their towels on sun loungers. This meant only one thing: Thatcher was coming in for dinner and her PPS would be trawling the corridors for blood sacrifices. I was about to make my escape when the delightful Michael Alison nabbed me. ‘How lovely to see you. Would you care to have dinner with the Prime Minister?’ What could I say? ‘No, I’d rather have a consultation with Dr Shipman after having sex with Teresa Gorman and a BSE barbecue with the Gummers’?

God, they were grim affairs. Do you have a drink or do you sip mineral water? And if you decide to tipple, how much? Anyhow, when I could take no more of some little creep dribbling all over her, the division bell rang. Glorious relief. But this was my second parliament and I was a ‘senior’
backbencher
(what a joke!), so we took a leisurely pace in these matters. This seriously irked madam. In full Lady Bracknell
mode she addressed the dining room: ‘Is anybody going to vote?’ To a man and a woman we all trooped into the lobbies. Even the Labour Party.

The first meeting at the PM’s office behind the Speaker’s chair was another nightmare. She knew how to put you at ease. ‘Whatever you do, don’t line up.’ I was talking to Giles Shaw, the Minister for Police, when our turn had come for an
audience
. ‘Good to see you, Giles, how are things at Environment?’

‘Actually, Prime Minister, I’m at the Home Office.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she hissed. And that was it.

When she made her little speech at the end, she pointed to an alcove. ‘That’s where Marcia used to sit,’ she said with considerable distaste. She was referring to Marcia Falkender, the great friend and gatekeeper of Harold Wilson and author of the famous ‘lavender list’ of baubles for his resignation honours.

Michael Alison once again nabbed me in the lobby one evening. ‘The Prime Minister would love you to pop in for a drink and a chat at No. 10. Seven o’clock OK?’ My heart sank. I had been particularly rebellious during the last few weeks, so this was going to be a hairdryer-meets-handbag event.

I arrived at seven o’clock sharp and was led up the grand staircase and into the white drawing room. ‘I’m afraid the Prime Minister will be a little late. May I offer a gin and tonic?’ said the butler. How could I refuse? And it would give me time to think of a cunning strategy to weasel my way into her affections. What could I do? Aha, a little bulb glowed above my head. There was much talk about President Reagan launching a bombing attack on Tripoli and the party line was diplomacy. That’s the right message. She’ll love it.

Eventually, she arrived and I launched myself into full oleaginous mode. ‘Prime Minister, you are so right not to allow Reagan to use our island as an aircraft carrier.’ At that she tugged at her pearls and gave me a stare. ‘The reason that I am late is that I have just given the order for the F111s to bomb Tripoli.’

So I thought it wise to change tack. ‘Douglas [Hurd, then Home Secretary] did a great job this afternoon on relaxing the Sunday trading laws.’

She smiled. So I warmed to my theme. ‘He even promised a free vote at third reading.’ The smile withered; her neck went red.

‘He did what?’ she shouted, then brought it down an octave (mustn’t be disloyal about a Cabinet minister to a little oik like me). ‘He did what?’ she purred, but was not amused, as Hurd must have taken a gamble to get the second reading through.

Finally, I thought, I’m now so totally stuffed I might as well tell the truth.

‘Prime Minister, don’t you think that sometimes people perceive you as inflexible and insensitive?’ This did not go down well and she reached to press a button in the wall. What flashed through my mind was: Oh God, my chair is like Sweeney Todd’s. I’m going to be hurtled down to a pie factory in the basement.

Actually, she was just calling the butler. ‘Mr Hayes will have one more gin and tonic and will be leaving us.’ The next ten minutes were not easy.

So off I went to the Smoking Room for a quick drink. The mood was sombre. We all thought that the bombing of Tripoli was a disaster. Then a young sprog bounced in. He was in a
terrible state. ‘I’ve just read the tapes [the Press Association news wire outside every room]. Terrible news. The Americans have just accidentally bombed the French embassy.’ An almighty cheer went up. The champagne was uncorked and a very good evening was had by all.

To be fair, she did her best to be kind in difficult situations. One former governor of the Bank of England wrote that he could take the bollocking but being forced to eat the cream bun afterwards was more difficult.

But back to the humour-free zone. Everyone knows about ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’. It is worth trawling back through the newsreels to see some classics. I hope they are on YouTube. During the 1979 election she pops into a hardware shop, picks up a drill and comments, ‘This is the biggest tool I have ever had in my hand.’ The camera crew cracked up. She was bemused.

And then after the Iraq War (the first one), she sat astride an enormous field gun and asked the assembled press, ‘Do you think this will jerk me off?’

Finally, my favourite. The Lib Dems had just changed their logo to a bird. Aha, think the speech-writers, we work in the dead parrot joke from Monty Python. Of course she had never heard of it and even when it was explained she just didn’t understand. So she read it out and got rapturous applause. She was rather impressed and a little confused. So she went up to her speech-writers and said, ‘This Monty Python, is he one of us?’