An Unexpected MP (10 page)

But she could be very grumpy. It is no secret that she liked a drink, as did Denis. One evening I was on board a City of London boat with a crowd to watch her switch on the lights
on a newly tarted-up Tower Bridge. One of the officials came up to me in despair.

‘The old girl is in a filthy mood. We’ve given her the finest champagne but she’s still spitting tacks.’ And there lay the problem.

‘Look, it’s after 9 p.m. She likes a glug of whisky. Call up a police launch, send them to Majestic and buy a bottle of J&B.’

And that’s what they did, to delighted smiles.

In another chapter I will describe the downfall. But for this one, let us end on a happy note. I last saw her when she had begun to lose the plot, a few years ago at Jeffrey Archer’s seventieth birthday party in Grantchester. It was a magnificent affair. They always are. Jeffrey and Mary are delightful and generous hosts. Most of the Cabinet were there, along with John Major. After a wonderful afternoon, Kit and the Widow came out to entertain us. Suddenly, a sheet was unrolled and we found ourselves singing an Indian takeaway menu to the tune of ‘Nessun Dorma’. It was riotous. It was fun.

Margaret had a smile on her face. For once, I think she got the joke. I was never a great fan, but it was deeply distressing to see her in her final years.

M
argaret Thatcher was extraordinarily fortunate in her opponents. General Galtieri, the President of Argentina, who invaded the Falklands; Michael Foot, whose 1983 election manifesto was described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history'; and miners' leader Arthur Scargill. If you really want to understand the appalling vanity and extraordinary lack of judgement of this man, it is well worth reading Paul Routledge's brilliant and insightful
biography
. Some people say that it was Thatcher who destroyed the miners. In reality it was Scargill.

Industrial relations destroyed the Heath and Callaghan governments. Ironically, Margaret Thatcher would probably never have come to power if Barbara Castle's plans for the unions had come to fruition. Promoted to the Cabinet by Harold Wilson, Castle was a fiery, diminutive redhead. And a determined, forceful politician. As determined and as forceful as Thatcher. She too was a force of nature. She realised that the unions had to be tamed and democratised. So she came up with a plan. The notorious ‘In Place of Strife'.

Harold Walker, her Minister of State at Employment, told me the real story in Annie's Bar one day. Castle had been
secretly drawing up the plans for months. Even he, as her deputy, had been deliberately kept in the dark.

The relationship between the unions and Labour had always been fraught with difficulties. This plan must not leak or else it would be dead in the water. And never forget how closely the unions worked with Labour in those days. There were regular beer-and-sandwiches meetings in the Cabinet room. And they had a snout in the trough of every major government decision. However, most of them preferred a decent glass of wine, in the same way that Wilson smoked cigars rather than a pipe. Don't be fooled into thinking that the age of spin began with Alastair Campbell. Walker got wind of Castle's plans and began to challenge her. She always denied that ‘In Place of Strife' existed. Until one day he had had enough and directly asked her about it.

‘No such document exists,' she spat.

This was an unfortunate and fatal remark because Walker opened his briefcase and threw the document across her desk. The print unions had smuggled him a copy. After all, they had printed it.

It was the end of Labour's attempts to tame the unions. As soon as Jim Callaghan got wind of it, it was dead in the water. This one act to curry favour with the unions proved to be his nemesis and the making of Margaret Thatcher.

Callaghan never forgave Castle for attempting a policy that could have begun to set the economy on the right track and saved the Labour Party from itself. She was Health Secretary when Callaghan became Prime Minister. She was the very first to go. Her parting words were, ‘Jim, I don't mind being sacked, but to be replaced with David Ennals is an insult.'

The way in which Callaghan's minority government was ‘run' is a masterclass of how not to govern and a warning to the lederhosen brigade on the Tory back benches who think that you can push through any sort of legislative programme relying on the tiny parties. You can't. They will grab what gifts you have to offer and then stab you in the back.

I once asked Merlyn Rees, Callaghan's Home Secretary, how they managed to keep afloat for such a long time. He just chuckled and he told me how he and Jim used to patrol the Tea Room and bars and ‘give the boys what they wanted'. So Plaid Cymru got their own TV channel in Welsh, and the Northern Ireland and Scots nationalists got a few
gerrymandered
seats. Predictably, they all stabbed Callaghan in the back. This is always the price of minority government.

I was very fond of Merlyn. A really charming and caring man. He told me the story of how a man in a cloak appeared late at night out of the mist surrounding the Commons and so scared a driver that he accidentally ran the man over. The driver swore he ‘looked like Dracula'. Before the police arrived, the unconscious Dracula lookalike mumbled that he was an MP called Rees. The police cheered. Here was the Home Secretary being rushed to hospital. The police never like Home Secretaries. But their joy was short-lived, as the man in the ambulance was actually Billy Rees Davies QC, the ‘one-armed bandit' and thoroughly dodgy Tory MP for Thanet.

His nickname came from the fact that he only had one arm and was as trustworthy as a nine-bob note. He claimed that he lost his arm as a hero in the war. Like most of his life, this was fiction. He crashed a fuel tanker stolen from the Germans
that he was trying to sell on the black market – the arm went missing in action.

He was also a thoroughly corrupt barrister. I know; I was briefly in his chambers. Once, he was on his feet in the Court of Appeal when he asked the bench to excuse him for a moment as his client had passed him a billet-doux. One of the judges remarked loudly that this was probably a ‘Billy, don't'.

The one lesson that Thatcher learned after the horror of the miners' strike that destroyed the Heath government was to be prepared and choose your battleground carefully. In those days, the National Union of Mineworkers enjoyed power
unconfined
. They could bring the country to a standstill. Industry could be shut down and the lights switched off. They had done it before. They had slain a Tory government. But their leaders like Joe Gormley and Mick McGahey were a canny bunch of political operators. They knew what they could get away with and just how far to go – unlike Arthur Scargill, who was addicted to power and showed seriously flawed judgement.

In Thatcher's first term, she was wise to back down after a skirmish with the miners. Following the 1983 election she drew up plans to roll out a programme of industrial reform – but slowly and cautiously. She also hired Ian MacGregor, an old American strike-breaker, to run the Coal Board and made Peter Walker, that consummate political operator, Secretary of State for Energy. Walker had been very close to Heath at the time of his downfall and appreciated the need for coal stocks to be built up. He also understood that his department worked seamlessly with the NUM and that any plans he might be developing would be on Scargill's desk within the hour. Walker countered this by bypassing the Whitehall machine, ensuring
his private office dealt directly only with fellow Cabinet members' private offices. Secret and confidential papers were biked to them directly. He took his department completely out of the insecure Whitehall loop.

Peter was the first Cabinet minister to invite
backbenchers
to lunch in his office. I mean a proper lunch, with decent booze, laid on by private caterers at the department. Pretty young girls who had been to finishing school served us and he was wealthy enough to pay for them out of his own pocket, which he did. Politically, this was a very clever move, as he was able to keep backbenchers up to speed in private. Or as private as gossiping politicians ever can be.

One day he was a little late and insisted that he caught us up on the booze front. He let slip that MI5 had just told him that they had intercepted a container-load of cash from the Russians to support the miners' strike. He then said that he had insisted that the container be allowed to get to Scargill's people.

This rather confused us.

‘Why?' we asked.

‘Oh, we did a deal with the Russians. They send money in fraternal solidarity to the NUM and sell us cheap Russian coal so we can break the strike.' And I thought I was pretty cynical.

Once, when I was travelling back to Energy Questions, the cab driver performed the usual trick.

‘'Ere, you'll never believe who I've just had in the back of the cab.'

‘Try me.'

‘That Wedgie Benn.'

‘Mmm.'

‘You'll never guess what question he's got lined up for your Walker guy.'

‘Go on, mate.' And he told me.

I immediately rang up Peter's PPS to forewarn him. Poor old Tony Benn wasn't prepared for what hit him an hour later in the chamber.

The awful thing was that the miners were a thoroughly decent bunch. Never mind all the terrible pictures of violence on the picket line. Whole communities were under threat, not just jobs. And still in the old pit-villages some family members will not speak to each other for their past roles in the strike. It didn't just divide the country. It divided families and broke communities.

At the height of the strike I was wandering back to the Commons after a gossipy lunch with a journo. It was the day the miners were lobbying Parliament. And suddenly, in front of me was a platform, with some loudspeakers and about a thousand miners listening to rabble-rousing speeches. My beard and blond curly hair were spotted.

‘It's that Tory MP off the telly!' went up the cry. Oh dear. I was going to be lynched. ‘You gonna come and talk to us?' one jeered.

What on earth should I do? Try and do a runner, get thumped and end up on the news as a cowardly imbecile? There was only one course open to me. So I strode forward, hand outstretched, pretending that I was cool as a cucumber and not bricking it. The crowd parted only to swallow me up.

‘Of course I will speak to you,' I quavered.

And for the next hour I listened to their grievances and did my best to explain that it was no longer economically viable
to mine deep coal. We didn't agree, but they were polite. I saw in the flesh that these were some of Britain's finest, wanting to earn their living in the way their families had done for
generations
. Destroy this and their communities would collapse.

The miners were so let down by Scargill. He refused to ballot them on a strike. He turned down a billion-pound package to save jobs and start retraining. And he called the strike for the summer, when coal stocks were high. Insane, vainglorious fool.

In many ways, the miners' strike was the first whiff of the beginning of the end of Thatcher. It was a great victory for her personally and politically, but it rather upset the comfortable middle classes. If she treats the miners like that, what could she do to us? More prescient than they could possibly know.

S
ome MPs manage to turn overseas travel into an art form. One Labour guy from Liverpool was nicknamed Gulliver, and a Tory, Neville Trotter (to be fair, he had a constituency interest in airlines), was known as Globe Trotter. But before anyone gets all hot and bothered about how taxpayers’ money is wasted on MPs’ junkets, it is important to differentiate between select committee trips, where you are sent abroad to report on a specific issue, and all-party committee jaunts. The former are paid by the taxpayer and are all business and little play. The latter are funded privately and are designed to persuade MPs to go native – and they are all play.

In those days, BAA provided a free airport parking pass for all MPs. And when on government business we were allowed to travel business class and clock up air miles for our own use. In these straitened times this would be regarded as a terrible abuse. But in truth the taxpayer wasn’t footing the bill, so what the hell. Nowadays the
Daily Mail
expects all MPs to behave like monks. It may be why Yvette Cooper dresses like a nun on holiday.

I’ll deal with select committee trips a little later on. In the meantime it is worth having a look at the all-party groups. In
those days they hadn’t multiplied in the way they have today. To be a member of an APG was breathtakingly simple. I once blundered into a committee room looking for my old mate Derek Conway. He was there with three others.

‘Hi Jerry, this is the AGM for the APG on Morocco. We are missing a secretary. Are you interested? No work and a few free trips? Interested?’ Of course. But I wasn’t quite sure precisely where Morocco was. Despite this minor handicap I became the secretary. A week later I received a lovely carpet from the King and six months later, as the great expert, I was invited to the state banquet in his honour. All very strange, particularly as he was very late and had all his food cooked for him on a portable stove. But it was fun. Until I realised that the reception at the Guildhall was not one of those where they fill you with champagne until you are ready to burst, but a queue to be clapped in by the Common Council. But, thirsty as I was, the City of London always makes up for it on the booze front.

The king of APGs which involved overseas travel was Dr John Blackburn, a former policeman and all-round good guy. Unfortunately, he had a bit of a weakness. He could not resist chatting up (in a totally platonic way) any woman who crossed his path. If you entered the central lobby with a woman who could have won the Turner Prize for ugliness John would glide up in slow motion with hand outstretched. He would grasp the lady’s hand, make a great show of kissing it and then launch into his famous opening gambit. ‘My dear, how are your feet?’ This used to cause said woman much
confusion
until he offered an explanation. ‘I was so worried that you might have hurt them when you fell from heaven.’ For
reasons beyond my comprehension, they all loved it. And this was followed by one-liner after one-liner. He didn’t just lay flattery on with a trowel; you could almost hear the cement mixer chugging along in the corner. His favourite trick was to put his arm round some old duck with a face that would have sunk a thousand ships simply to get away from it, and call them his daughter, niece, younger sister or whatever he could get away with without making anyone not involved with this treacly love bombing violently sick. And when it came to love bombing John had earned his wings and a chestful of medals that would make Colonel Gaddafi blush. But oozing faux love to the wives of an African dictator or pawing a member of a Middle Eastern royal family doesn’t always make for good diplomacy. On at least two occasions he was nearly bundled into a plane bound for home. But John’s little vignettes provided us with endless entertainment. He was fortunate he wasn’t stoned to death, missing a limb, or even worse.

One of my early trips was to South Africa and was
fascinating
and a little scary. It was organised by John Carlisle, the Tory MP for Luton West, whom we dubbed the Member for Johannesburg West. The idea was to send out a few Tories who would be totally besotted with the wonderful concept of apartheid. Unfortunately, I had broken my index finger in a car accident so I insisted that my doctor strapped it up in such a way so that in every official photograph I look as if I am giving the finger. Which of course I was. Although on the plane over I had rather an embarrassing experience. I was seated next to a very pretty girl from Cape Town. She asked about my finger and offered her sympathy.

‘But how do you have a wank, then?’ she politely asked,
causing my two parliamentary colleagues Michael Knowles and Richard Hickmet, who were sitting in the row behind, to take an interest.

‘Ahem, well, erm…’ I stammered.

‘Let me give you a hand then,’ she kindly offered. The front page of the
News of the World
flashed before me: ‘MP joins mile-high club’. I made my excuses and feigned sleep. I think.

God, the Afrikaners were a ghastly bunch. Before each meal was a prayer. And then, when we were politely asked if we required something to drink, the splendid Michael Knowles would always save the day.

‘A large Scotch, please.’

Satan had entered the room, thank heavens or whatever. At one time we met ultra-right leader Jaap Marais, who looked a bit like a budgerigar with a squashed beak. His views were utterly vile. And his secretaries gave the impression of being a horrible Mengele experiment in breeding Aeroflot hostesses with Belsen guards. A deeply unpleasant experience.

One day I thought it might be a good idea to shake off our minders. Why not pop into Soweto? Why not slip into a church service with Desmond Tutu? So I looked him up in the telephone directory and gave him a ring.

‘Hi, Archbishop. I’m Jerry Hayes with a parliamentary delegation from Britain. Tomorrow is Sunday, any chance of us meeting up after your church service tomorrow for a chat?’ There was a sharp intake of breath then that famous Tutu chuckle.

‘Of course, but it is very dangerous.’

Dangerous? But we were British MPs. What could they do to us?

That line of thought was dangerously stupid, although I didn’t think so at the time. I had forgotten that Soweto was a serious trouble spot. Cars with white people were regularly attacked. The necklace, a tyre filled with burning petrol, was a favourite and barbaric means of execution.

Tutu told me where we could find him. Now, this will shock you. Nobody wanted to take us. So we bribed a driver and lurched through the rubble-strewn streets of Soweto with not a signpost in sight. They had all been torn down. Eventually we reached the church. It was packed. We were the only white faces, like the white spots on a domino. The organ swelled with the great hymns of the C. of E. tradition. ‘All People that on Earth Do Dwell’ sticks in my mind. It was not sung in English but in Xhosa. And then we all started to dance. An enormous African conga line towards (oh dear) the collection plate. I had only the equivalent of a South African £50 note. Sod it. I wasn’t going to be lynched. In it popped.

Afterwards I spoke to Tutu.

‘What message do you have for our Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher?’

He smiled and in that beautiful, melodious voice he just said this: ‘Tell her to listen to the victims of apartheid not the perpetrators.’

The man is a living saint.

Of course we tried to visit Mandela. Quite impossible. Although we did manage to have a chat with his lawyer. But I remember, years later, being at a reception given for him as President in Westminster Hall. He was being led down the steps by our Speaker, Betty Boothroyd. I could see the look of wonder in her eyes. Here was she, a former mill town girl, now
Speaker of the House of Commons, with the man she had fought so hard to free. And there she was arm in arm with this man who been imprisoned for twenty-seven years by an evil regime, urging peace and forgiveness. On that day we were all star-struck.

I remember the day Mandela was freed with great clarity. Ken Livingstone, Charlie Kennedy and I were doing our LBC slot, with Simon Bates in the chair. We were filling time with banter before the moment when Mandela strode to freedom. When it happened I was at the microphone and described it something like this:

To which Ken replied in his South London nasal twang, ‘Nah, it’s my hay fever.’ Bless.

Next on our travels we were off to see Chief Buthelezi, hereditary leader (not king, that was King Welcome) of the Zulus. Oxford-educated and highly intelligent, he lent us his plane to fly us to his fortress in Ulundi. I remember three things. He was charm personified. He gave me a pair of cufflinks. And our plane was guided down on a red dirt runway by one hundred bare-breasted Zulu women with red flags. You couldn’t make it up.

Then we went into Bophuthatswana. And what a dodgy
bunch they were. Ministers lived in the lap of luxury and travelled their impoverished land in shiny black Mercedes. This was a faux South African experiment in letting the blacks rule a homeland. In reality the government was just a puppet regime whose purpose was to supply black labourers to the south.

One evening, ministers invited us to a lavish dinner. We were all awash with drink and it was now time for dreary speeches. The trouble was that our host was not only very drunk, he was also very cross-eyed. I think he was intending to call someone else to speak, so Richard Hickmet and I had to guess which eye (one was pointing in his direction, the other in mine) was to be the victim. I took the challenge. Actually, it wasn’t too bad a speech, but it wasn’t that good either. I’m afraid I got a little carried away, ending up heaping praise on these ghastly crooks for ‘good governance … belief in democracy … blah, blah, blah’. Awful, hypocritical crap. But I didn’t want to end up fed to the crocs. My pièce de résistance was ‘… and nobody could accuse you of being corrupt whisky ministers swanning round your land in bulletproof Mercedes.’

I slumped down after polite applause to notice the table strewn with empty whisky bottles and, in the corner of my eye, the car park groaning with shiny bulletproof Mercedes. My lasting memory of South Africa then was of cowed black men who were too afraid to look white men in the eye. But what really shocked me was lunch with someone who was considered to be a progressive white woman. I had been rather impressed by what I had thought were her quite liberal views. Until she came out with a little tirade against her maid. ‘The trouble with the blacks,’ she confided, ‘is that they are born
liars and thieves. They just can’t help it.’ And that was from a liberal. Utterly depressing.

However, I will never forget how humour was the most effective tool of the liberal press to undermine the deeply unpleasant South African government. In the middle pages of a Cape Town broadsheet was a picture of soldiers with night sticks and assault rifles marching through a township. Women and children were cowering back in sheer terror. The headline cleverly escaped the censors.

‘Colonel “Blackie” Stewart takes his men on a “getting to know you” exercise.’

One day I received a message from the whips. President Reagan was flying to Britain; would I (with a few others like Fatty Soames and Steve Norris) like to go and meet him? Of course! So off we were bussed to the beautiful Regent’s Park residence of the American ambassador, Winfield House. It used to belong to a nymphomaniac Woolworth heiress unkindly known as ‘the mint with the hole’.

Meeting Reagan was fascinating. You could tell in those days the rank of each secret service officer by the size of their earpiece. They got smaller and smaller as the great man approached. Reagan was tall and affable, but read everything off a card. Like an actor with mini idiot boards. But the man oozed charm and charisma. Like a good actor, he stood on his marks and recited his lines, often written by his legendary speech-writer Peggy Noonan.

Reagan had the gift to move an audience, make them laugh and – something so rare in a politician – make them feel good about themselves. And that’s how he conquered America after the disaster that was the well-meaning, but utterly hopeless,
peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. It is a popular myth that Reagan was a bit dim. According to my friend Stephen Masty, who used to write his party speeches, this was way off-beam. Most of the really memorable lines were penned by Reagan himself.

The relationship between him and Thatcher was
remarkable
. They sang off the same hymn sheet. If any two people changed the course of history with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet arms reduction, it was their partnership. And they were not without affection for each other. It was rather moving that at his funeral she kissed his coffin. But she wouldn’t take any nonsense from him. Charles Moore’s brilliant biography of her shows her sheer force of will persuading him not to give in to the State Department’s policy of us doing a deal with the Argentinians during the Falklands War.

So here am I in an intimate setting with the most powerful man in the world. And can I remember a word he said to me? Sadly not. I really should have kept a diary.

A few weeks later I received a call from the embassy. Would I like to go on an all-expenses trip to the States for a month? Of course! But the trouble I had with the pairing whip, the delightful Tim Sainsbury (he of the supermarket), was
remarkable
. Remember, we had a tiny majority of 140. I fought and fought and fought to get on this once-in-a-lifetime trip and finally won.

It was my first time Stateside and I had a tremendous time, travelling enormous distances. I had a wonderful tour of the White House and in the West Wing hatched a plot with the neocon head of protocol. Neil Kinnock was due to meet the President, so how could we screw it up? The answer was: no moving pictures and black-and-white photos only.