An Unexpected MP (14 page)

He could have swung it for her. Just.

Fleet Street understandably went into overdrive. Mike Brunson and I sat down to work out the sums with a few bottles of wine. As old hands, we ignored the number
crunchers
. They were all talking about left and right, wets and dries. We knew better. Those whom she had never promoted, had slighted and sacked, no matter what their views, would vote against her in droves. Party elections are based on malice and malcontent rather than dogma. Mike and I were about three votes out.

But after her resignation and with Major in play, Hezza knew that he was doomed. He came up to me in the lobby and assumed that I was going over to the winning side.

‘Michael, you will not win and John Major is a friend. But I was one of those who urged you to stand. I will not be disloyal. But it is the end.’

And I wrote to John Major saying that despite our
friendship
it would be a shitty thing to drop Hezza in the lurch. But wished him well.

Oh, and if you are not convinced by now of my brilliant political judgement, you should have been a fly on the wall when, early one morning, I strode into the Commons with Sir Eldon Griffiths. He asked for my view as to what she would do.

‘I have no doubt that she will fight on,’ I said confidently. She resigned within the hour. At the very end I bumped into Cecil Parkinson at LBC.

‘Do realise what you have done?’ he asked with a pained expression. Sadly, I did.

Margaret Thatcher had saved the country, defeated the Argentinians, democratised the unions and helped free the Soviet Union. But she was leading the Conservative Party into electoral disaster. She had to go or else Neil Kinnock would have been the next Prime Minister. But it has bitterly divided the Conservative Party. I suspect that it will take at least another ten years before her political ghost will be finally laid to rest.

H
istory will treat John Major one hell of a lot better than his party did. By the time of the 1997 election the
Euro-obsessive
Amish wing of the Tories had put government into suspended animation, giving Norman Lamont’s bitter speech that we were ‘in office not in power’ more than a whiff of
credibility
. Despite the fact that the economy was booming and the deficit under control, people had bitter memories of crippling interest rates, bankruptcies and Tory MPs on the take. Couple this with the young modernising and charismatic Tony Blair and people weren’t afraid of Labour any more. Like vaginal deodorant and flares, the Tories had gone out of fashion.

But when John Major became Prime Minister in 1990 he didn’t have an enemy in the world. Despite a few
frustrating
years in the Whips’ Office his rise was meteoric. From Minister of State to Foreign Secretary to Chancellor to Prime Minister in a couple of years is a remarkable
achievement
. And he didn’t achieve this through endless scheming, plotting and trampling over the bloodied bodies of his political rivals. He did it through ability and charm. When he first became Prime Minister he was a little star-struck.

‘Well, now you’re Prime Minister you can have dinner with whomever you want.’

‘Really? Even Joanna Lumley?’ And his wish was her command. She came, bless her.

The trouble is that many people confused being a nice guy with being weak. Anyone who saw him in action knew that he was anything but. Challenging John Redwood to put up or shut up and having to sack his campaign manager, friend and Chancellor, Norman Lamont, were signs of enormous
courage
. The sad fact was that by 1997, seven years after the fall of a now worshipped Margaret Thatcher, nobody could have led the Conservatives to victory.

His early days were a fascinating insight into his mindset. During the leadership campaign one young MP rolled up on a Saturday morning to No. 11 (Major was Chancellor). He had brought his toddler son with him. Major could see that there was going to be trouble so he suggested that the little boy play in another room. It wasn’t long before the young MP set out his demands. He would vote for him provided that he was given a government job and a ring road round his
constituency
. John just smiled. ‘Thank you for your support, but I think it’s time for you to fuck off.’

The weird thing was the right thought Major was of their persuasion. I tried to explain to Gerald Howarth (now Sir Gerald and a former Defence Minister) that his views were not much different from mine. Gerald thought that I was quite mad. The fact that Ken Livingstone had once described Major as the most enlightened Tory chairman of housing he had ever met, when they served together on Lambeth Council, should have been a bit of a clue.

No doubt the unfortunate ‘I will be a back-seat driver’ from the Lady stiffened the sinews of the Wagnerian wing. In fact, the right thought that under his premiership there would be a glorious continuation of the mythical land of milk and honey provided by Margaret Thatcher. They were in for a bit of a shock. Although Tony Blair eventually gave us Thatcherism with a smile, Major gave it to us with a heart. Rather than plough on with the poll tax, its excesses and lunacies were ironed out.

One of the first visitors to No. 10 was Sir George Gardiner, a cadaverous old right-winger who was one of Thatcher’s
earliest
supporters and guardian of the True Flame of the Blessed Blue Shrine, the 92. Actually, although we lived on different political planets, I rather liked old George, a former
Express
journalist. We were having dinner one evening and I let it slip that it was my fortieth birthday. Suddenly he became wistful.

‘Ah, forty. That was when I had one of my finest mistresses,’ he sighed.

It is worth remembering that the right wing of the Conservative Party is utterly ruthless. They see compromise as weakness, a U-turn as a failure and being reasonable as a
personality
defect. Worse, they looked at everything through the prism of dogma which basically meant: the unions have to be smashed, healthcare should be insurance-based if we can get away with it, the unemployed should have to work for their benefits and we should have left the EU years ago. And they would be prepared to destroy anything that got in their way, including their leader and their party. Sounds awfully familiar. So Major was under no illusion about what this meeting with George was really all about. The conversation went rather like this:

‘Congratulations, Prime Minister, we are all behind you.’

‘Thank you, George.’

‘Obviously we want to help as much we can. But it would be much easier if you did it our way. If not, things could become difficult.’

‘Thank you, George, now why don’t you just fuck off.’

This was the beginning of the poisonous, corrosive,
destructive
relationship with the right. But even if Major had said, ‘Sure, George, you guys just tell me what to do,’ it would have made no difference. The right take no prisoners.

Graham Bright (now Sir Graham and police commissioner for Cambridgeshire, and a very old friend) became Major’s PPS. And a very effective one he was too. The trouble with being an affable fellow was that his enemies confused this with stupidity. The right nicknamed him Graham Dim. And he was anything but.

But Graham has a great sense of humour. I remember when Major had to make a decision on who to vote for as
chairman
of the European Commission. I asked Graham who he thought it might be. He paused and grinned. ‘Well, it won’t be the big fat sweating Belgian.’ And it wasn’t.

One of John Major’s earliest tests was in February 1991. I was in the Tea Room at lunchtime when he came and joined a crowd of us with a plate full of sliced tomatoes. We asked what had happened and he explained rather matter-of-factly that the Downing Street kitchens were out as the Provisional IRA had just bombed Downing Street and he needed his lunch. He was remarkably relaxed after what had happened. Not too many people realise how close the Prime Minister and senior members of the War Cabinet (first Gulf War) came to being
murdered on that day. The IRA had launched three mortar bombs, two of which failed to detonate and one of which exploded in the Downing Street garden, causing a massive crater. If there had been a direct hit they would have all been killed. But Major had another stroke of luck. A few weeks earlier the bombproofing of the Cabinet Room windows and the French windows that lead down to the garden had been completed. If they hadn’t then I suspect that there would have been some serious injuries, if not deaths.

The Cabinet followed the standard procedure and
sheltered
under the Cabinet table, which is specially reinforced. I remember speaking to John Wakeham that day, then Leader of the House, who had been horribly injured and lost his wife in the Brighton bombing. He told me how impressed he was with Major’s unflappability. While they were all crouching under the table waiting to be taken to a safer place he calmly commented that he thought that it would be a good idea to reconvene somewhere else. But what really impressed Wakeham was that Major gave strict instructions that as soon as they left the room they should telephone their wives and loved ones to tell them that they were safe before the news broke.

But my old friend Graham Bright, the Prime Minister’s PPS, had an even narrower escape. He was sitting in his Downing Street office, which did not have bombproof windows, just bomb-resistant curtains. He came into the Tea Room covered in glass. He was very lucky to be alive, as was Murdo Maclean, the private secretary to the Chief Whip.

In the early days of Thatcher, Graham asked me to sponsor his Video Recordings Bill. This was to get rid of the anomaly
that there was a classification of sex and violence for films but absolutely none for the newly emerging video market. The idea was to protect children. This had all-party support. Unfortunately, the lead minister at the Home Office was David Mellor. To be fair, Mellor can be a nice enough guy on occasion, but the air around him used to crackle with his ambition. He promised us that in no way would this Bill be hijacked to revamp the Obscene Publications Act, which was an unworkable piece of legislation put on the statute book in 1959. That is, until the Lady brought him in for a chat. She had been got at by Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. Mary, a former sex
education
teacher, was a lovely old duck but was on a crusade to clean up what she believed to be the filth on the television and radio. There were daily nipple and buttock counts, all lovingly researched by her outraged members. At the next standing committee meeting, Mellor came armed with amendments which had Whitehouse’s fingerprints smeared all over them. This was nothing more than an attempt to harden the Obscene Publications Act, with Parliament deciding what the public was allowed to hear, view or read. There was a bit of a row. We made it clear that the Bill would fall if there were any plans to tighten the Obscene Publications Act, as any all-party support would wither on the vine. Eventually, common sense prevailed and Bright, with me as his whip, pushed it through the Commons. David, to his credit, stood up to the Lady.

It is worth remembering that the Obscene Publications Act is rarely used nowadays. The offence was possessing material that tended to ‘deprave and corrupt’, which is very much in the eye of the beholder. In those days, selling magazines depicting
basic sex or an erect penis could attract a prison sentence. But the moral right wanted to make the sentences even stiffer. If you know what I mean.

But the Video Recordings Bill was not without its bizarre moments. Sitting in the ministers’ room in the Home Office watching
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and such cinematic triumphs as
I Spit on Your Grave
, where a woman graphically cuts off the penises of all those who have raped her, bordered on the bizarre. One day, Graham told me that he had been doing some research on telephone porn lines. He was so animated about regaling us with what he had heard that he spent most of the time wheezing into his inhaler. I suspect that it was all pretty tame by today’s standards. But I feared for dear old Graham’s health when he was on the line to some potty-mouthed granny doing her ironing while pretending to be an orgasmic Swedish nurse.

After winning the 1992 election, everyone expected
backbenchers
to be a happy, united little family. In their dreams. After reeling from the shock waves of Black Wednesday we had to endure the horrors of the Maastricht wars, with the right wallowing in ripping the party apart. Despite the fact that Major had won serious concessions from Brussels,
keeping
us out of the euro and the Social Chapter, nothing would ever be enough for them except a referendum, a no vote and a withdrawal. Preferably yesterday.

It was open civil war. The depressing thing was that these guys were so obsessed with the purity of their arguments they genuinely didn’t care if the Tories lost the election and let in a pro-Brussels Labour. Many were muttering that it would have been be better had we lost the 1992 election. And some
genuinely believed that it would be in the party’s interests to lose the 1997 election, as we could regroup with a Thatcherite leader and come out invigorated and refreshed. By this time, the argument went, voters would have sussed that Blair was a red-in-tooth-and-claw socialist and kicked him out. It goes without saying that this sort of Euro Wahhabism was aggressively promoted by those who had rock-solid majorities. Whoever won the next election would not affect them one jot. No wonder, Major confided to Mike Brunson, that they were bastards. Well, it was meant to be confidential except nobody had thought to tell him that his microphone was still live.

It is not easy to describe how poisonous the atmosphere was. There was almost a rerun in early 2013 when Euroloonery and Cameron vilification nearly ripped the party apart again. Post-1992, the usual suspects were in full throttle. Bill Cash, Teresa Gorman and John Redwood seemed never to be off the news, while, in the background, Michael Portillo was secretly preparing to ascend into prime ministerial heaven. Things were coming to a head.

One day I received a call from Graham asking me to join a few decent sorts for lunch at No. 10. These were always convivial affairs and while we were waiting for John we downed a few industrial-sized gin and tonics. This was at a time when
Spitting Image
was at the height of its popularity and the sketch of the PM being obsessed with eating peas off the end of a knife was very well known. Eventually he arrived, had a couple of gins and sat down for lunch. There on the table was an enormous tureen of peas.

‘Oh God, not peas again,’ he moaned. ‘Don’t they realise it’s a joke? I can’t stand the bloody things.’

At the end there was just John, Graham and me. We were despairing at the way the right was behaving. I cut to the chase.

‘If you don’t fuck them, they will certainly fuck you.’ A few weeks later he issued his put-up-or-shut-up challenge and in October 1995 John Redwood resigned from the Cabinet and threw his hat into the ring for the leadership. In turn Major resigned as party leader but remained as Prime Minister. It was a remarkably brave thing to do and one hell of a gamble. The battle for the leadership had begun. And in the space of just a few years the Conservative Party indulged itself in a destructive civil war. What was a little surprising was that Redwood and the rest of the Cabinet had undertaken not to stand. Most of us expected that the challenger would be Norman Lamont.

Norman Tebbit and Norman Lamont were the heavyweight Redwood supporters. The trouble with Redwood is that he is great company, highly intelligent and very pleasant, but on camera he looks completed deranged. He has the knack of making some of the most sensible proposals sound completely bonkers. It didn’t help that in his campaign launch he was surrounded by Teresa Gorman, Richard Body, Bill Cash and Tony Marlow (nicknamed Von Marloff) – not the sort of people you would necessarily choose to stand next to when there is a full moon. Dear old Richard Body once prompted Major to comment, ‘Why is it whenever I hear the name Body I always think of flapping white coats?’ And in India, Gorman would be considered sacred. They all looked madder than a box of frogs. Gorman’s was the first call I received after losing my seat in 1997.