Breaking the Code (10 page)

Mr Major (who has rather a Pooterish turn of phrase at times) is in the paper rebuking the ‘dismal johnnies’ for being gloomy about the economy. Apparently he is standing by his man, Norman ‘Green shoots/Black eye’ Lamont, who is ‘doing a difficult job jolly well.’ Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But out here in the boondocks they’re still feeling the pain, the recession is bloody, and if you’re in debt, out of work and up the creek, homely reassurance from that nice Mr Major at No. 10 doesn’t cut much mustard. It’s no use telling people they’re getting better when they’re still hurting. They simply won’t believe you. And they don’t believe us. It’s pretty dismal on the doorstep.

When I last went to Dublin to appear on Gay Byrne’s famous
Late Late Show
show, I seem to remember being invited to join Danny La Rue in a couple of choruses of ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’. Our hapless Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
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appeared on the show on Friday and was persuaded to sing solo, giving us a couple of verses of that old saloon-bar stand-by ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’ – doing so within a few hours of seven men being killed in an IRA bomb attack in Co. Tyrone. I may be new to this game, but I think even I would not have landed myself in that one.

‘Brooke hanging on’ is the lead story today, along with ‘Tories dampen April 9 speculation’. I read in
The Times
that Norman Lamont has rejected 3 March as a possible Budget date and ministers are ‘trying to prevent an unstoppable momentum building for a 9 April election.’ It seems 7 May is the preferred date. I say two things: 1) Let’s stop
buggering about and get on with it. 2) It’s fascinating to me that, as the adopted candidate in a make-or-break constituency, I know no more of what’s going on than what I read in the paper. My only communication with the party I serve is a weekly policy brief sent to me by Central Office (lots of facts and figures on everything from social security to the cost of Trident) which is vaguely interesting but basically useless. I can’t use the material when I’m out canvassing because on the doorstep statistics mean nothing, and I can’t use it for my press releases because the local press will
only
cover stories with a local angle.

This may be a ‘key marginal’ but as far as I can tell we’re completely on our own. It’s just me and Vanessa and our ageing activists against the world! That’s not entirely fair. Central Office do send us visiting ministers – usually giving us all of seventy-two hours notice to set up an ‘event’ that’ll do justice to the visiting VIP. Today, for example, I took our dogged-does-it Environment Minister
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to Chester Zoo where a) I discovered we are working ‘with our partners’ on a European Zoos Directive (God save the mark!) and b) I had to struggle to ensure that I ended up in the pictures with him when what the photographers really wanted was the Minister and the baby hippo. The trick is to make sure you are in
every shot
and in actual physical contact with the central figure in the picture. If you’re on the end of the line they can crop you. If you’re in nine of the shots but not the tenth, the tenth is the one they’ll use. Pictures are everything. Appear in a couple of photographs, pop up on the local TV news, and the supporters purr, ‘Oh, you’ve been busy!’ Kill yourself from dawn till dusk tearing round the constituency doing good works but fail to have your picture in the paper and they look at you reproachfully, lips curling, ‘We haven’t seen much of you lately, have we?’

I spent the morning ‘saving’ a nursery school and the afternoon learning about the severe financial challenges facing the Chester Branch of the RNLI. Michèle is currently donning the appropriate gladrags as we ready ourselves for the Newton Branch Twenties Evening. We came up via Wilmslow last night and stayed with Neil and Christine Hamilton at their handsome Old Rectory at Nether Alderley. We were given the Barbara Cartland suite (pink and perfect) and, with due reverence, shown the very loo on which the Blessed Margaret had once sat. Mrs T. is their goddess (you sense they really do
adore
her), but there’s a happy photo on display of Christine and John Major in a fond embrace on the night Mr Major made it to No. 10. Christine is loud and splendid and winks a lot. She’s Neil’s House of Commons secretary and before Neil got in
she looked after Gerald Nabarro – whose portrait by John Bratby adorns the drawing-room wall. Because my father was his solicitor I quizzed her about the truth about Nab and the car that went the wrong way around the roundabout, but didn’t get very far. Neil is very funny, and wicked, and clearly likes to go as far as he can and then a little bit further. He’s a government whip and explained some of the process to me: each whip (there are fourteen in all) is attached to one or two different departments of state and also has a number of MPs in his region in which he takes a special interest. I asked if I’ll be in his flock if I get in.

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘After the election I’ll be a departmental minister of some sort.’

‘Is that certain?’

‘Oh yes. A couple of years in the Whips’ Office and then you move on.’

‘Aren’t you ever moved out?’

‘Oh no, the Whips’ Office look after their own. That’s the whole point.’

I am on the 8.45 from Preston, coming from the North West Area Ball at Haydock Park and going towards Saethryd’s fifteenth birthday celebrations in London. There are gigantic headlines this morning: ‘Leaders hail new world order.’ It seems ‘world leaders yesterday laid plans to transform the UN into a global peacemaker.’ Depressingly, this won’t mean a dickiebird on the doorstep – where I’m berated about the recession, asked ‘what are you going to do about the schools then?’ and invited to get a new bus shelter along the parade, but have never, ever – not once – been cross-questioned on world affairs. I also read that we’ve had the driest January since 1837, which reminds me that I’m contemplating giving up alcohol for Lent.

There’s an amusing piece by Matthew d’Ancona in
The Times
today on Churchill the toper. Never averse to a glass of hock at breakfast, apparently Winston as Prime Minister, in his late sixties, could consume a bottle of champagne at lunch, followed by a few brandies. Then, after his siesta, he’d move on to Scotch and soda before returning to champagne and cognac in the evening, coming back to whisky and water once more as he worked into the small hours. Pitt the Younger ‘liked a glass of wine very well and a bottle still better.’ Asquith’s penchant for brandy had him unsteady at the despatch box and Ernest Bevin’s secretaries complained that he used alcohol like a
car uses petrol. When I first met George Brown
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– on a television programme with Molly Parkin,
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in Cardiff in the early ’70s – by mid-evening he couldn’t stand up. By ten o’clock he and Molly were crawling round the hotel bedroom on all fours. Sober I liked him a lot (the long-suffering Sophie too) and, when we went round to their flat in Notting Hill Gate and he was on the wagon, he was very engaging, but not a great one for detailed reminiscence: he conceded that he’d drunk so much when he was Foreign Secretary that a lot of what had happened had become a blur. He had a fine signed photograph of JFK, but no anecdote to go with it. I never drink before six and I never drink before speaking and I only drink wine, but I’d still like to drink a little less of it. Ash Wednesday here I come.

Yesterday, four-and-a-half hours non-stop pounding the beat, followed by the Ball Committee Meeting, the Upton Heath AGM (thirteen of the old faithful in a small hut in a large field), and the Upton Grange Valentine’s Evening (as Michèle said, ‘You really do know how to show a girl a good time!’). Today, from London word has reached us along the crackling airwaves that the beleaguered Tories have been battered and bruised by the fall-out from ‘Black Thursday’, a bleak day of grim statistics, the worst of which is the sharp rise in unemployment, while here in Chester our schedule (on what my darling wife is describing as ‘a high day of romance’) has included breakfast at the Gateway Threatre, the Boughton Branch coffee morning, lunch with the headmistress at the Queen’s School, tea with the Blacon Handbell ringers, drinks with Lord Waddington
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in the Association Hall (it was good of him to come, I know, and kind of him to speak, I’m sure, but, oh, the
tedium
of it!) and eventually the razzle-dazzle of the Chester Nomads Hot Pot Supper at the Christleton Country Club. This then is the reality of grassroots politics in the ’90s.

Yesterday I met the Foreign Secretary [Douglas Hurd] for the first time. I was impressed.
I liked him too: he seemed civilised, cool, amused. Central Office told us we could have him in Chester for just forty-five minutes from 3.00 to 3.45, so, at Vanessa’s suggestion, we did a walkabout in front of the Handbridge shops and a photocall down by the river. In all we must have encountered thirty to forty shoppers, passers-by, tourists: they all recognised him and were happy to shake his hand. No one raised a political issue of any kind. I kept saying, ‘Mr Hurd and I share a birthday, you know’ and he kept saying ‘Gyles is a good chap’ and that was about it. The photographers had us crouching on the banks of the Dee feeding the swans. That was the shot they wanted and that was the shot they were determined to get. The swans were rather reluctant to play ball, however, which meant that the Foreign Secretary and I had to spend a good fifteen minutes waddling on our haunches at the water’s edge. Said Mr Hurd with a wan smile, ‘I don’t think Mr Gladstone did a lot of this, do you?’

Before the Hurd visit I had an interesting lunch with the leading house-builder in these parts. He wants chunks of the green belt released for development. Sir Peter and the senior Conservatives on the city council seem to agree. I sense the Conservative in the street feels differently. Over lunch I sat on the fence, but I may need to come off.

This morning I had coffee with an elderly Tory very much of the old school. Sir Jack Temple
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was Peter’s predecessor. He’s old and frail and blind, but he couldn’t have been more courteous and sweet. I don’t know that his several years at Westminster made much impact on the course of our island history, but he is clearly a good Cheshire man with good Cheshire instincts. He told me that his trademark was spotted ties – ‘never wore anything else – people knew who I was’ – and that the way to do canvassing was ‘to get your driver to take you very slowly through all the villages – you sit on a rug on the bonnet and just wave at the people as you drive past – never stop – never get off – just keep driving through – that way they get to see you, but there are no damnfool questions’.

Another of my-kind-of-Tory Cabinet ministers came to Chester today. David Hunt [Secretary of State for Wales] seems utterly straightforward, very friendly, less forbidding than Douglas Hurd, less the statesman more the family solicitor and, consequently, probably a touch more user-friendly on the doorstep and on the box. I took him for lunch to the Sealand Sewage Works where Welsh Water, bless them, organised a brilliant
photo call amid 20-foot high fountains of raw sewage and served us an alfresco feast of prawn sandwiches. This may sound improbable, but it is true.

A week of memorable evenings. On Tuesday night I was guest of honour at the Sealand Branch Evening at the Deaf Centre in South View Road, where they did not want to hear what I had to say: they wanted to play bingo. I let them have their way. On Wednesday night I was in Paris for the Spear’s board meeting
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and was quite mesmerised by the explicit pornography on the television in my hotel bedroom. (Interestingly, gripping as it was, I switched off after a couple of minutes, thinking that somehow – even though I was quite alone in a locked room a thousand miles from the constituency – I might get caught and it really wouldn’t do for a prospective candidate to be found watching porno in Paris in the run-up to a general election.)

On Thursday night I found myself entering the front door of 11 Downing Street for the very first time. The Chancellor and Mrs Lamont were ‘at home’ and, somehow, I received an invitation. I know Norman slightly: he was President of the Union at Cambridge a few years before I was at Oxford and our paths crossed then, and I’ve met him since at Jeffrey [Archer]’s lunches, and I like him; he’s droll, raffish, a little frayed at the edges – but my problem is I can’t quite take him seriously as Chancellor. He may well be excellent at the job – on the stump I say he’s outstanding, of course – but the truth is I find it hard to take people altogether seriously when I
know
them. (That’s one of the reasons I find it hard to take myself seriously – though I know I must. In this game, taking yourself seriously is part of the job.) Because I was coming in from Paris I was a little late. I bounded in, across a small hallway and up the stairs (past framed cartoons of previous occupants) into a large reception room packed with happy chatterers all taking themselves very seriously indeed. Norman was friendly and welcoming and optimistic. ‘We’re going to win the election. Of course we are, dear boy. I’m not moving out of
here
.’

Yesterday I was back in Chester – more door-knocking, five hours of it, including a woman in Vicar’s Cross who said ‘I’m not talking to you – you never come to my door’ – ‘But I’m at your door, madam!’ – ‘Go away, I’m not talking to you – you never come to my door’ – followed by an evening with the farming folk in Aldford. This evening it’s the Guilden Sutton Quiz Night. This is politics in the fast lane.

There’s been an IRA bomb at London Bridge, twenty-nine hurt.

Last night we were dined by Shirley Porter
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at Westminster City Hall which turns out to be a modern office block in Victoria and consequently quite soulless. Shirley, London’s own Mrs T., a beady-eyed bundle of energy and obsessive commitment, moved from table to table making sure we were all keeping the faith. She knows what she wants and she gets it, and if, for a nano-second, you look diffident or uncertain she makes you feel utterly ashamed. I’m just watching a lady with a softer centre on the box: it’s a giggly Norma Major tossing a Shrove Tuesday pancake. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and I go on the wagon.