Breaking the Code (32 page)

Agreed. But what?

I’m on the train from Derby to Crewe. I travelled to Derby with Edwina [Currie]. I like her, but I’m not sure that anybody else does. In the Tea Room, she’s the easy butt of every joke. In the Chamber, she speaks well, with conviction and authority, but no one seems to rate her. Perhaps it’s because she behaves like a man – she interrupts, she’s loud, she’s opinionated. I asked her why she turned down the chance to be in government again. ‘Who’d want to be Prisons Minister? And I couldn’t stand working for Ken Clarke again. He’s impossible.’ (I wonder how she’d have done as Prisons Minister. In the Tea Room queue, lining up for our lunchtime salads, David Maclean
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told me that drugs are now endemic in our prisons – in every prison – and there’s nothing we can do about it. Try to clear out the drugs and you’d have riots in every gaol in the land. With Edwina as Prisons Minister we might well have had riots in every gaol in the land…)

At Westminster, the right despise her, the old buffers regard her as a vulgar parvenu, and her natural allies, the Euro-enthusiasts, don’t love her as they might because she steals their limelight, treads on their toes. Happily, in South Derbyshire, where I’ve been doing my turn on her behalf, she seems genuinely quite popular. I’d half thought of trying to get out of going because today’s the day Mrs T. is in Chester, talking about her book at the Gateway Theatre, and they’d asked me to chair the session. In the event, I decided I’d better stick by Edwina and they’ve got Nick Winterton fawning on Mrs T. instead.

At lunch the Chancellor is in expansive mood – literally. Glass of wine in one hand, cheroot in the other, he tells us he’s ruling out early independence for the Bank of England, leans back with a contented sigh and a button bursts from his overstretched shirtfront, wings its way past Portillo’s ear and gently pings against a Treasury chandelier. Silence falls. We’re not sure whether to laugh. This is the Chancellor of the Exchequer after all. The team look down at the table, the Chancellor giggles, and we carry on as if nothing has happened.

He has given the Bank greater operational independence – they can publish their inflation report without Treasury approval now – and he may go further in due course, but clearly complete independence is a way down the road. Lamont is advocating it now
(as is Lawson), but I imagine KC sees merit in the final say on interest rates remaining in the hands of the elected politician who can take his own instincts as well as the statistics into account … especially, of course, when KC is the elected politician in question.

What nonsense it all is. Yesterday we were here till two in the morning struggling through the Lords’ amendments to the Railways Bill. Since it took five hours to get through barely fifty out of a total of 500, Tony Newton moved a guillotine motion to put a timetable to the proceedings. Uproar followed and tonight Labour mavericks have been seeking their revenge by lurking in the lavatories in the division lobbies so as to delay/obstruct/derail the votes. At about half past nine we were plodding through our lobby during the fifth division of the night when Greg Knight
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suddenly pounced on me.

‘Get back in there.’

‘What?’

‘Get back into the Chamber now.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve got to make a point of order. Complain about the delaying tactics. Get the Speaker to order the Serjeant At Arms to clear the lobbies.
Now
.’

When the whip speaks, you move. I stumbled into the Chamber, where all was chaos, several hundred people milling all over the shop. I said to the whip on the front bench, ‘I’ve been told to make a point of order.’

‘You’ll need the hat.’

‘What?’

‘Get him the hat.’

A collapsible black silk opera hat was produced from the clerk’s table.

‘Put it on, stay seated and catch the Speaker’s eye.’

During a division the rule is that you can only speak when ‘seated and covered’. Don’t ask me why. I suppose it’s so you can be easily spotted. I donned the ludicrous top hat, feeling quite as foolish as I must have looked, and made my protest. Would the Deputy Speaker call the Serjeant At Arms to clear the lobbies and note the names of those members who were causing the obstruction? No, he would not.

Immensely relieved, I sat back and took off the hat. The whip on the front bench whisked round and hissed. ‘Put it back on. Try again. Go on.
Go on
. Now, man,
now
.’

On went the hat once more. I made a further protest, again to no effect. I passed the
hat back to the whip. Someone called for it from the other side of the Chamber. It was flung over to Ernie Ross,
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tossed like a Frisbee. Then back it came to James Paice. Then it went shooting over to Mark Robinson.
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It whizzed here and there around the Chamber like a ludicrous flying saucer. Suddenly it disappeared and John Marshall
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was calling for attention. We turned to look at him and there he was, the Honourable Member for Hendon, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Lord President of the Council, seated in the Chamber of the House of Commons with a knotted hanky on his head.

It’s nearly two in the morning and I’m going home, but I just wanted posterity to know how we conduct our business here.

Lunch with Jeffrey [Archer] and half a dozen new boys at Jeffrey’s flat. The view is fabulous. The host is generous. His great strength is his loyalty. He is gung-ho for the PM without equivocation. He thinks the PM’s initiative on Northern Ireland could transform his premiership. Others are more cynical. ‘You can’t go wrong with a peace initiative. If it succeeds, you’re a hero. If it fails, at least you were brave enough to try…’

Under the Jumper
is published today. The House of Commons Librarian has sent me a note explaining that it is a custom of the House for members to present a signed copy for the Library’s ‘special collection’. Clearly knowing nothing about my wild and woolly past, she assumes the title is based on a line of T. S. Eliot and calls the book
Under the Juniper
… I enjoyed writing it, but I don’t think it’s going to enjoy quite the success of
The Downing Street Years
. (Evidently I was right to avoid Mrs T. in Chester. The locals are up in arms about the cost of the visit and the disruption caused. The Police Authority is considering sending her publishers a bill for £26,000 to cover the security costs involved and today’s postbag contains a hoity-toity letter from one of my activists: ‘I would have been very sorry to see you with even a walk-on role in the Thatcher circus. Lord Home of the Hirsel is the proper role model for all former Prime Ministers.’)

A sobering letter today too from Sir John Page:
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John Major will relaunch his faltering ‘back to basics’ initiative tonight by distancing himself from calls to cut back on welfare payments to single mothers. Amid signs that senior ministers are becoming alarmed that the Prime Minister’s social agenda is in danger of being bogged down in a political quagmire, Mr Major will turn the spotlight to his policies on education and law and order. We’re promised a new Criminal Justice Bill (the fifth in eight years), a Police Bill, and another Education Bill (the seventh in eight years). A full, fat legislative programme is going to be unveiled on Thursday and, according to Sarah Hogg
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and Jonathan Hill, every element of it will ‘go with the grain of our people’.

I suggested to the PM that less-legislation-not-more could be part of the back to basics programme. People are suffering from change-fatigue. We are going to have a Deregulation Bill essentially to undo all the unnecessary regulations
we
have introduced! Why not revisit the good old Tory adage, ‘When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change’? His eyes glazed over. A government that isn’t busy-busy-busy is perceived to have run out of steam.

The truth is there’s too much legislation, inadequately prepared, pushed through in too great haste. There was a good piece on all this by Anthony King
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last week. He noted that on John Patten’s last Education Bill there were 278 government amendments introduced during the Commons committee stage, 78 more on report, 258 more during the Lords committee stage, 296 more on report and 71 at third reading. King reckons this mania for legislation began with Thatcher. Action, revolution, change, never let up, never stop. ‘I tinker, therefore I am.’ King quotes Bagehot
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with approval: ‘If you are
always altering your house, it is a sign either that you have a bad house or that you have an excessively restless disposition – there is something wrong somewhere.’

Last night I spoke in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. I was called at 8.20 p.m. when all sensible people should be (and were) elsewhere, feeding their faces. Janet Fookes,
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birdlike and motherly, was gently clucking in the chair, John Patten flounced and bounced on the front bench, and I think I counted a total of six other lonely souls dotted about the Chamber. They weren’t there to hear my words of wisdom, of course: they were simply waiting to offer their own. Why did I speak? Because I had something to say? Yes, oddly enough. Was anyone listening? No. Will anyone read it in Hansard? No. Was there any point to it? None at all – except that someone’s got to speak because the whips believe they’ve got to keep the whole thing going till 10.00 p.m. regardless – even on a night like last night when there isn’t going to be a vote. Naturally, I can – and have – done a press release based on what I said, but you don’t have to go through the rigmarole of putting in to speak and hanging around for hours to make your ten-minute contribution to get a paragraph in the
Chester Chronicle
. Regularly I do press releases beginning, ‘Gyles Brandreth said in the House of Commons today…’ meaning that I dictated the words to my secretary in the purlieus of the House of Commons.

At prayers this morning I told the Chancellor that I’d been advocating a brief Budget statement. ‘The recovery is coming along nicely, we’ve had some encouraging figures, we had a very full Budget earlier in the year, steady as she goes – thank you very much.’

He laughed. ‘I think you’re going to be disappointed. It could be the fattest Finance Bill on record. You and Stephen [Dorrell] are going to enjoy that.’

‘As long as it doesn’t include VAT on reading.’

He disappeared inside a cloud of cigar smoke. ‘What about newspapers?’

Oppenheim looked up from the
Financial Times
. ‘You could hardly describe VAT on
The Sun
as a tax on knowledge.’

Last night I went to Enfield to speak for Michael Portillo. They treat him like a god. He
comes into the room and the crowds part like the Red Sea. He walks among them without
hauteur
but with a complete assurance, an absolute acceptance of the fact that they are the worshippers and he is the worshipped one. All this – in Enfield!

I’ve just come from doing
Loose Ends
.
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Without warning Ned [Sherrin] got me to tell the Queen Mary story and I stumbled through it because I couldn’t remember the pay-off. (As Kenneth [Williams] used to say, ‘For gawd’s sake, don’t tell a story unless you can get the bloody tag right. It’s all in the
tag
.’) The story starts with George V out walking in the garden of Buckingham Palace and asking why his customary equerry was not in attendance. He is told the man is unwell. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ asks the king. ‘Oh, you know, sir, the universal complaint…’ Next day, Queen Mary remarks to someone, ‘I hear His Majesty’s equerry is ill. What is the matter with him?’ ‘A bad attack of haemorrhoids, I’m afraid, ma’am.’ ‘Oh,’ says the queen, ‘Why did the king tell me it was the clap?’

As I write I’m in the plane flying to Manchester. Because we signed our wills this week, because the insurance means that I’m worth a lot more dead than alive, because the children are virtually grown up, because I’ve ticked off my little list of footling ambitions, because Simon is dying, I suddenly realise I’ve lost my fear of flying. If the plane falls out of the sky, so be it. I don’t want to die, but I’m not frightened in the way I used to be. I used to be
terrified
. Now, here I am, drinking my British Airways coffee, feeling childishly pleased because I’ve secured my favourite front row seat, feeling (dare I say it)
happy
. (Michèle says I dare not say it. She never lets herself feel happy because she knows the moment she lets her guard down, the moment she allows herself fleetingly to feel relaxed, the moment she thinks for a second ‘Well, things aren’t too bad’,
disaster
strikes.) I am even ready for what Chester has to offer this weekend: the dinner dance at Upton Golf Club, my quarterly meeting with the farmers tomorrow, Sunday lunch with Anne, Duchess of Westminster as guest of honour. (She’s wonderful value: a game old bird, with a deep-deep voice, a low-slung bosom and a big heart. She has no idea who I am, but so long as she’s got a fag on the go and there’s plenty of G in the G&T, she’s the easiest company in the world.)