Alan Rickman (27 page)

He turned out by her side on polling day, although he was spared the rigours of door-to-door canvassing. Other celebrity Labour supporters recruited by Rima included Lord Longford, Baroness Ewart-Biggs and the novelist, Ken Follett. Yet Rima is very protective of her boyfriend's privacy. ‘It wouldn't have been fair on Alan to ask him to canvass for me before. He's got such a famous face,' she told the Tory-supporting
Daily Telegraph's
Peterborough diary, whose 7 April edition mischievously published the most
unflattering picture of a glowering Rickman that it could find. ‘I might have produced Alan before if it was more of a marginal seat,' she conceded. ‘But he may sway the odd wavering voter on polling day.'

Indeed, four years later she was to explain to the
Daily Mail
's Nigel Dempster on 3 March 1996: ‘Alan is committed to the cause and he gives me a lot of moral support, but he doesn't come face to face with voters. He just delivers leaflets and then leaves. It could be embarrassment which stops him, I don't know. I won't push him. Not everyone enjoys being questioned on policy detail.'

The constituency was split in two for the purposes of the election: Ann Holmes was the Labour candidate for Kensington, standing against Conservative holder Dudley Fishburn, and Rima Horton was up against 58-year-old Sir Nicholas Scott's massive majority in Chelsea – the safest Tory seat in the country with an average of 60 per cent of the vote.

A somewhat strenuous private life had nearly led to Sir Nicholas Scott's deselection. In 1987 he was appointed Minister for the Disabled, but was to leave the post in 1994 after tabling amendments to wreck a Bill of Rights for the handicapped. In the process, the Tory Wet publicly fell out with his Labour-supporting daughter Victoria, a campaigner for the disabled movement, Rights Now, who had exposed the governmental tactics that halted the Disablement Bill.

It seemed as if nothing would unseat the accident-prone Sir Nicholas Scott, who drove a car that crashed and killed a man in 1957. A verdict of accidental death was recorded. In 1995, he ran off when his car shunted another into a toddler's pram; Sir Nicholas was later breath-tested. He was banned from driving for a year and fined £200 with £450 costs.

Rima had become the local Labour Party spokesman on education and town planning and, by 1992, she had become a senior lecturer in economics at the Surrey Polytechnic that is now Kingston University. Although she was the youngest, Rima was the only one of the three Chelsea candidates who coyly failed to give her age – 51-year-old Susan Broidy stood for the Liberal Democrats. Rima's manifesto, published in the
Kensington News
, simply recorded that she was born in Bayswater and had lived in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea for fifteen years. That was the time when she and Alan had first moved into her current flat in Holland Park in 1977.

Her brisk manifesto didn't even mention her marital status, or, rather, the lack of it. This was surprising, given the residual prejudice from some quarters of the electorate against married women standing for office. A single woman without children had and still has a positive advantage; single men had a harder time of it until openly gay Labour candidates began winning seats and thus made marital status irrelevant. The Tories, though, still tend to prefer their candidates with wives attached.

New Labour had sent Rima on the obligatory power-dressing course for the right business-like image, urging her to put her shoulder-pads to the wheel. Lecturing had taught her all about public speaking. Surprising, then, that Peter Barnes says she tells him that she still finds speech-making difficult. She speaks in a husky contralto with a slight lisp that makes her sound not unlike the actress Frances De La Tour; the effect is decidedly sexy. Rima owes her deep, rather thrilling voice to her smoking habit: she can be a bit of a Fag-Ash Lil and has been known to puff away during speeches. In argument, she's forceful but not strident. Of course there's nothing like the line ‘when I was talking to my MA students' to impress fellow Kensington & Chelsea councillors . . . those not covertly reading their horoscopes or
Private Eye
or playing with their pocket calculators at the time, as happened during one meeting in the council chamber that I attended.

Alan Rickman is frequently to be found in the public gallery, taking an active interest in Rima's latest pronouncements on pelican crossings or guardrails. Not that this chic and attractive figure with her distinctive dark-brown bob appears to need any moral support. She's incisive and highly articulate, pitching her arguments some way above certain heads in the council chamber who find themselves getting a free lecture on economics.

‘She's not rent-a-quote,' said Ian Francis, at the time news editor of the then
Kensington News
when I first contacted him back in 1995. ‘She's not on the phone to us straight away about some local issue. She usually waits to be approached, so she doesn't set herself up to be a great local media figure. She tends to stick to what's going on in the council chamber, so she's not a great public person.

‘There's no gimmick with her. Perhaps she hasn't mastered the public aspects of local politics – or has chosen not to.'

Certainly Rima is highly sensitive to Alan's phobia about the Press in general and critics in particular. If she were elevated to a
political position at a national level, it would make life very difficult for him which is why she has forced herself to be philosophical about election disappointments.

‘She's very feisty and no-nonsense: she doesn't suffer fools gladly,' added Ian. Nevertheless, he criticised the Labour Opposition in Kensington & Chelsea for being ‘exceptionally inactive. They're active on things like roofs leaking on local estates. But the council tax has just gone up, and there was no outcry whatsoever from the Opposition.'

Certainly it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the political scene is just a little too cosy in this Royal borough with its cast-iron Conservative majority. With Labour in a minority group there's a limit to what the Opposition can do with its numbers. Certainly Rima, whose politics are Centre Left and whose understated glamour is very much New Labour, is not about to woman the barricades.

‘It's a very boring political scene in Kensington & Chelsea,' was Ian Francis' verdict on the Nicholas Scott years. ‘Scott will give you a quote, but he won't be proactive.

‘Rima strikes me as a bit of a do-gooder. The ambitious ones are on the phone to us all the time; those who are more sanctimonious just get on with their work.'

She's certainly popular with colleagues from both sides of the political fence. She can be glamorous and she has a certain style. She wears chic, expensive-looking clothes, and, unlike many of the other councillors, her official photograph looks as if it was done in a studio

Indeed, the serious-minded Rima is almost a Sharon Stone in comparison with one (male) councillor, whose rugged features have been unkindly likened to a ‘Wanted' poster of an escaped convict and who is affectionately known as Magwitch behind his back.

She has a big voice and a glint in her eye, but it has been suggested that she's not a natural politician who maintains eye contact. This might come from being an academic, but she tends to fix on a point on the wall instead and her language can sometimes be a little high-flown.

Most Labour councillors are not exactly gad-about-town figures, but a sophisticated woman of the world like Rima adds a little local colour: she's a great fan of restaurants off the Portobello Road. Even
Tories like her: when I contacted him in 1995, the late Conservative councillor Desmond Harney swooned with old-fashioned gallantry at the mere mention of her name.

Nevertheless, her time had not yet come in 1992: the
Kensington News
' pre-election coverage was forced to conclude that Sir Nicholas Scott remained the firm favourite in the opinion polls for the General Election.

Ruby's show,
Wax Acts
, opened on April Fool's Day, 1992. The Election was held on 9 April, but Kensington and Chelsea, unlike most other constituencies, didn't start counting until 9 a.m. on 10 April. It would be another 24 hours before the results of Rima's bid to become an MP were known.

The public and most of the critics liked Ruby a lot. She had been directed by Alan only once before at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986, but the formula clearly worked for the grander stage of the West End.

Since Rickman and Wax had worked together at Sheffield Crucible in Peter James' production of
As You Like It
, they rehearsed her one-woman show on the Lyric Hammersmith stage where Peter was by then the Artistic Director.

‘Alan Rickman was the creator of Ruby Wax,' confirms Peter. ‘He suggested a format for her on TV. There was always something unlearned and spontaneous about her thing. Scripted stand-up was not as good for her as the spontaneous stuff.

‘Even Ruby doesn't know what she will do when she steps on stage. She starts with a clip-board and nothing else. Her career was greatly shaped by him. Yet there's nothing of the extrovert in Alan. In performance terms, she goes to get 'em while he waits for them to come.'

Alan himself told Valerie Grove in the April 1995 issue of
Harpers & Queen:
‘People assume she just stands at the mike and delivers routines. But she is the most deeply serious person about her work, tussling with very personal material about herself and her parents. It was achingly funny, but you can't be alone on stage for two hours without a sense of structure and lots of bloody hard work.'

Perhaps he allowed her a little too much leeway, according to Anthony Thorneycroft in the
Financial Times
: ‘Her show is discreetly directed by Alan Rickman, who might try to sharpen up the first twenty minutes.'

Charles Spencer of the
Daily Telegraph
, however, emerged as a convert: ‘I'd only seen her fleetingly on television and approached her one-woman show as an agnostic. After two hours in her company, however, I'm convinced that Ruby Wax is one of the finest comic talents of her generation . . . Constructing wonderful crescendos of fury and indignation . . . She has a splendid way with words, and her sheer vitality breaks down all resistance.'

‘Though a virtuous woman may be priced above rubies,' quipped
Evening Standard
reviewer Michael Arditti, ‘an outrageous Ruby produces a jewel of a show.'

She did have her detractors. ‘I ended the evening pummelled rather than entertained,' moaned Tony Patrick of
The Times
. And Jack Tinker of the
Daily Mail
was coolish, wondering if Ruby's well-developed self-esteem needed any support from him. ‘Why do I not fall down and adore her like the rest of her fans?' he asked rhetorically. They were very much in a minority.

Lucky Ruby, unlucky Rima. Nicholas Scott was returned with an overwhelming majority of more than 13,000.

The
Kensington News
reported that Labour candidate Rima Horton, accompanied by her actor friend Alan Rickman, was defiant. She proclaimed that Labour would fight ‘again and again' to change the future, echoing a famous speech by Hugh Gaitskell. Labour blamed a hostile Press and ‘lies' over its tax plans, and ten days later Rima was still fighting, urging a policy of non-cooperation with the hated Red Routes parking restrictions on main roads.

Rima subsequently made it onto a women-only Labour shortlist for the new seat of Regent's Park and Kensington North, but she lost out to Karen Buck, described rather graphically by the
Kensington News
' chief reporter Jonathan Donald as ‘a mighty political machine who fires off press releases'.

In early 1996, Robert Atkinson – Rima's fellow councillor from St Charles Ward – was selected as the Labour Party's prospective parliamentary candidate for the newly named Kensington & Chelsea seat from a shortlist of men and women that did not include Rima.

Rima simply didn't relish facing certain defeat for a second time in a General Election. Sir Nicholas Scott had been reselected for the Tories, only to be followed by the equally controversial Alan Clark on January 25, 1997. Kensington & Chelsea remains staunchly Tory, even after Labour's landslide victory in the 1997
General Election that prompted Alan to growl ‘About bloody time too.' Yet Rima won something of a consolation prize in 1995 when she became one of several councillors to write a monthly column on local issues for the
Kensington News
for a few years. ‘It's typical of her that she didn't approach us to write it,' said Ian Francis. ‘We approached her.'

Alan was profoundly depressed by Labour's 1992 election defeat in general and Rima's in particular, moaning about how unbearable it was, but he was too much in demand to mope around in this country as his Hollywood film career continued apace.
Bob Roberts
, which marked Tim Robbins' directorial debut, was a political satire on the rise of a right-wing politician with the unearthly, sanctimonious aura of a religious evangelist (as, indeed, so many right-wing American politicians are).

Robbins played the title role of this smooth paragon and Rickman was his sinister campaign manager, wearing pornographer's brown-tinted glasses that would make even Snow White seem seedy. The movie was a very effective satire on the Svengali-like spin doctors, the sound-bites, the campaign-bus briefings and all the paraphernalia of a modern politician on the move. So true-to-life were these acute observations that
Bob Roberts
seemed more like a documentary than a drama, with the inevitable distancing effect. Never was the audience drawn into Bob Roberts' heart or mind (we assume he had no soul); as for Rickman's character, he was a clever amalgam of all the shifty fixers in the world. So much so that you could swear you'd seen him somewhere before.

Barry Norman's
Film 92
reported on the making of
Bob Roberts
. Its screenwriter Gore Vidal was interviewed, claiming rather shakily, ‘It's a bit like
Dr Strangelove
.'