Breaking the Code (28 page)

We’re just in from Jeremy Hanley’s farewell bash at the Northern Ireland Office. Drinks, nibbles and a window view of Beating Retreat on Horse Guards Parade – a slightly grander affair than last Friday’s effort in Chester. The Prince of Wales was on the podium (no sign of Colonel Ropes) but as the massed bands were floodlit and Charles wasn’t, we cannot be certain whether or not the heir to the throne saluted better than I did. (We can guess…) At lunch Michèle sat next to his father and made him laugh a lot. Afterwards I made the rather po-faced gathering laugh a little by saying the Queen hadn’t put a foot wrong in forty years – and nor had Prince Philip. He’d put his foot
in
it now and again, but that was different … The event was my swansong as NPFA chairman and HRH presented me with a hideous framed caricature that looked nothing like me but seemed to delight everyone else. NPFA Scotland presented me with a gold medallion inscribed to ‘Giles’.

This keeps it all in perspective.

At 6.30 p.m. I made my way to Downing Street. I am not blasé. It is very thrilling to walk up Whitehall in the early evening sunshine, to smile at the policemen who swing
open the gates for you, to stroll to the door of No. 10 and have it opened before you’ve even knocked. It is thrilling and extraordinary to be me walking alone along the corridor that leads from the front door straight to the Cabinet room.

What is alarming is to get there, to turn left at the end of the corridor and walk into the small study that is the office of the Prime Minister’s political and parliamentary secretaries and suddenly think, ‘Oh dear, is this it?’ The room is impressive enough (the customary panelling and leather), it’s the people. There’s nothing wrong with them – they’re decent, loyal, determined. It’s just that they don’t seem special. They seem ordinary and I think I want to feel that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is surrounded by people who are
exceptional
. It reminds me of the moment in
The Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy, awed and trembling, goes to see the Mighty Oz, all-knowing, all-powerful, and her little dog pulls back the curtain to reveal the great wizard for what he is: a sweet old bumbler pushing buttons and pulling levers to very little effect.

Graham Bright is Tweedledum. I’m not sure what to make of Jonathan Hill.
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He’s personable, intelligent, articulate, but extraordinarily laid back under the circumstances, and so young.

We were meeting to discuss Wednesday night’s big speech – a debate on the economy with John Smith opening. I said I thought Friday’s rallying call at the Women’s Conference had worked well. I liked ‘I’m fit, I’m well, I’m here, and I’m staying.’

‘A bit defensive?’

‘A bit.’

‘On Wednesday we’ve got to come out fighting and end up on top.’

‘Agreed.’

Jonathan is working up a draft. I said I’d fax through some ideas. I left feeling that these well-intentioned, reasonable, responsible, relatively inexperienced guys recognise there’s a problem, want to do something about it but aren’t quite sure what.

In the Whips’ Office they seem to have a firmer grip on what needs to be done. I arrived for Drinks (now, for some reason, rechristened A and under the command of Bob Hughes) to be asked, ‘What do you know about Gordon Brown?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is he gay? We need to nail the bugger. If there’s dirt to dish this is the week to dish it.’

After several minutes of fairly disgusting banter the mood of the meeting was that Gordon ought to be gay, could indeed be gay and should in fact be gay, but maddeningly we have no evidence of any kind to suggest that he
is
gay!

I suggested too that, given the Michael Mates
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affair, this was perhaps not the ideal week for highlighting buggery in high places. Colonel Mates, of course, is as straight as they come (ramrod back, black bushy eyebrows, slightly preposterous military bearing), but the watch he presented to Asil Nadir bore the unfortunate inscription, ‘Don’t let the buggers get you down’. (The whips view on Mates seems to be that he may be an idiot, but he isn’t a crook. He interceded on Nadir’s behalf because he took a sympathetic interest in his case. One of Nadir’s advisers was one of his constituents. The Serious Fraud Office confiscated Nadir’s own watch in one of their raids. Mates replaced it as an act of friendship and solidarity. He had no idea Nadir was going to jump bail of £3.5 million a few days later…)

This is Michèle’s and my twentieth wedding anniversary. I love my wife very much and the only thing I don’t like about being an MP is that I’m always here – and she isn’t. We had a celebratory lunch on Sunday with Simon [Cadell] and Veronica Hodges,
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but the Finance Bill Committee has kiboshed the dinner I’d planned for tonight. Heigh ho. I’m not sure what the answer is.

Life could be worse. I could be Michael Mates. He looked pretty strained last night. The Tea Room view this afternoon is that we can’t afford another fuck-up, so, fair or not, he ought to go now. The SFO are investigating Nadir for fraud amounting to tens of millions. You can’t have ministers of the crown appearing to side with a crook. At Questions the PM took a more generous line: ‘It was a misjudgement, but it is not a hanging offence.’ Tony Marlow’s verdict: ‘The Prime Minister just can’t get anything right, can he?’

This morning, our first prayers with the new Chancellor. It is going to be very different. And rather fun. This afternoon, the old Chancellor had some fun of his own. At 3.30 p.m., to a packed house, he made his resignation statement. It was fairly devastating stuff. ‘Since the war only two Conservative Chancellors have succeeded in bringing inflation down to below 2 per cent. Both of them were sacked … I am delighted to hear from the Prime Minister that policy will not alter … I now wish to say one thing to him: there is
something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The government listens too much to the pollsters and the party managers … There is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power.’

I sat behind the poor PM. He didn’t flinch. For twenty minutes he hardly moved. Others turned to look towards Norman; the PM, with studied neutrality, gazed steadfastly ahead. Norman’s statement left our side numb, shell-shocked, silent, and the opposition benches cock-a-hoop. John Smith could hardly have asked for a sweeter curtain-raiser. He took full advantage of it. And when he got to his peroration – ‘the stark reality of a discredited government presided over by a discredited Prime Minister’ – how they roared. We cheered our man, of course, but our hearts weren’t entirely in it and while the PM did valiantly, in truth he survived, he didn’t triumph.

At around midnight, just after the second vote, Stephen [Dorrell] found me in the Smoking Room. He was in state of high excitement. ‘The PM wants me to draft his speech for Friday – the Welsh Conference. We need to get the government back on track. Shall we go to my room?’

I was ready for bed. I was ready for bed partly because I’d had several glasses of wine and partly because I have a wife to go to bed with. Stephen, I imagine, had had several glasses of orange juice and his wife is at home in Worcester. He had no incentives for bed. We set off for his tiny room and I perched on the edge of an armchair while he began bashing out a speech. Soon after one I threw in the towel and left him to it.

He has just faxed me the material he is sending round to No. 10. The covering note is good:

The advice is sound, but the speech (six pages, single spacing) will go the way of most of my contributions. It’s solid stuff – sound money, the role of government, managing the
public finances, improving public services, jobs, education, nationhood – it is indeed what we’re about – but it won’t set the valleys alight, it won’t do the trick.

I don’t see how the poor PM can take much more of this. He’s battered from dawn till dusk. PMQs were chaos. Some Labour chap got in with a very funny opening dig suggesting that the government was beginning to look like the seaside hotel that’s just collapsed and crumbled down the cliff face, and John Smith followed up with a triple whammy exploiting Norman’s barbs from yesterday. The PM did his best, but he played straight into Smith’s hand:

PM: As one of my predecessors might have said, we’ve had a little local difficulty. We shall get over it. I am going on with the work in hand.

Smith: Doesn’t the Prime Minister understand that when he announced business as usual this morning he caused apprehension throughout the land?

The only good moment in the Chamber came later when Archie Hamilton gave a little gem of a four-minute resignation statement.
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It was wry, funny and self-deprecatory; the antithesis of what Norman gave us yesterday. Archie told us he was looking forward ‘to spending more time with – pause – my constituents.’

Word has just reached us from No. 10. Stephen’s speech has been gratefully received and will form a substantial part of the PM’s Welsh oration. Well, yes, perhaps this is a weekend for being dull-but-worthy. Let’s get back to basics.

The full complement of Q gathered at No. 10 for a splendid lunch in the state dining room. A drained and rather blotchy-looking PM presided. The gathering was arranged a while ago to celebrate our achievements. Tony Durrant, as chairman, made a little speech, rather sweet and bumbly, reminding the PM that we’re his secret weapon – good men (plus one woman, Angela Knight)
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ready to go over the top at a moment’s notice. He said it as if he believed it – and, in truth, there is a value in what we do. We meet once a week and a little bit of bonding is no bad thing; we can be briefed on what to say; we can be relied on to ask whatever questions the whips provide; those
of us with the requisite courage/foolhardiness/ambition turn up in the Chamber and do our best to bate the opposition. No doubt it could be much more effective, but it’s better than nothing.

There were thirty-four of us in all, eight already in government, the rest lusting to be. I sat between DD of the SS, as happy as a sandboy now he’s a minister, and Roger Evans, whose elevation to office can’t be far off. (He’s round and rather Dickensian, a lawyer, Welsh and sharp, so that something in the Welsh Office is as good as
guaranteed
. If you are Welsh or Scots and not a total halfwit eventual preferment is a certainty. Rod Richards
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was there. I think he
speaks
Welsh so his future is doubly assured.) When the PM gave his response he did his best to summon up some energy, but it simply wasn’t there. He fell back on a few clichés and, unfortunately, he was still speaking when half a dozen of us had to make our excuses and leave. I had to be in the Chamber by 2.30 p.m. as mine was the very first question (urging the Secretary of State for National Heritage to give support to Chester Cathedral) so I sort of bobbed backwards out of the state dining room muttering apologies under my breath while the Prime Minister chuntered on. I paced back to the House with Stephen Milligan. It’s a pleasure to be with him. He is enjoying life here so much even the disasters seem to delight him. He’s a loyalist through and through, but he expatiated on the complete failure of the reshuffle with gusto. ‘It’s simply blown up in the PM’s face. Too little too late.’

It’s 9.30 on Tuesday night. I’m in Committee Room 10 where we are on Day 6 of our weary trudge through the fetid swamp of the 1993 Finance Bill. The crone of Cambridge
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is on her feet droning on about the costs of relocation while poor Michael Portillo, bored out of his elegant skull, is immediately in front of me, head in hands, wishing he was at the Mansion House listening to the new Chancellor of the Exchequer making his debut there. Michael
bought
white tie and tails for the occasion and then found that Harriet Hopeless
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wouldn’t pair. She’s a cow. (She’s also an inexplicable half-inch away from being wonderfully attractive. In the right light and when she’s facing you – so you don’t notice the incipient widow’s hump – she’s almost gorgeous, but then she opens her mouth and suddenly you realise she’s not that pretty, she’s not that bright and – worst sin of all – she has no sense of humour.)

It’s twenty past midnight and we’re still here. Apparently all-night sittings are part of the macho tradition of the Finance Bill. At 11.30 p.m. we took a half-hour break, agreed between the committee chairman and the whips on each side. We descended to the Smoking Room and I began by buying Michael a drink and ended up buying a bottle of champagne for the gang: MP, Stephen [Dorrell], John Cope, David Amess and my new whip, Michael Brown. He’s delightful, full of Tiggerish bounce, but I’d have thought a surprising choice for the Whips’ Office. He doesn’t seem particularly discreet (or bright) and I imagine he’s gay. (I don’t know, of course. Unless one has actually witnessed the act of darkness taking place, how can one know? The rumours persist about Portillo and Lilley, and about Alan Duncan
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and William Hague, but is there any truth in them? Almost certainly not, but we don’t like to discount them totally because we do enjoy the frisson of possible scandal.) David Amess is another wholly likeable fellow, a complete quainty whose chief delight in life (I am not exaggerating) seems to be to go off with Ann Widdecombe to say prayers.