Breaking the Code (33 page)

A long forty-eight hours. To secure my rightful place behind the Chancellor for the Budget, I turned up at the Commons at 7.00 a.m. yesterday morning to join the queue. The Chamber opens at eight, when we fools rush in, armed with our little green prayer cards and bag our favourite places. By tradition Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman
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(knocking seventy)
is always at the front of the line. She brings a sleeping bag and a portable bed which she parks outside the door to the Chamber and she spends the night there, sleeping in the shadow of the statues of Churchill and Lloyd George. By the time I arrived there were about forty ahead of me, some standing, some squatting, quite a few with chairs they’d brought from nearby offices, and the line stretched back from the Chamber across member’s lobby through the swing door towards Central Lobby.

The Budget itself was a triumph for KC. It was a delicious, teasing, playful performance. He is a wonderful operator and such a likeable man. He’s had a superb press: ‘A Budget for economic and political recovery’ says
The Times
. ‘No smoke, no mirrors, just loads of chutzpah’ says Anatole Kaletsky. And so say all of us – though the Chancellor said to me last night, ‘It’s a golden rule – a Budget that’s acclaimed on the day doesn’t fare so well in retrospect. Let’s not get too cheerful too soon. Wait till they’ve read the small print.’

I think I’m weary through a surfeit of duchesses. I was on the bench till gone ten, not in bed till gone midnight, then up at dawn to fly to Manchester for the Waterstones’s Literary Lunch. The line-up was Trevor McDonald,
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Lt Col Bob Stewart, Fergie and me. Fergie
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spoke surprisingly well: she’d worked on her material, had several pages of notes written out in a large and loopy hand. She rather overdid her undying devotion to the present Queen and her grovelling gratitude for Her Majesty’s sustained and unstinting kindness to her, and I imagine her claims to have some sort of spiritual connection with Queen Victoria has the widow of Windsor spinning in her grave (and the likes of Lord Charteris positively spitting), but she was eager and good-hearted and nicely flirtatious in a gosh-golly-girls-in-the-dorm kind of way, and I liked her – especially because she gave me a copy of her book and bought three copies of mine.

‘What’s the worst thing about being royal?’

‘When you meet them, people remember what you say. And when you meet them for the second time, years later, they say, “You don’t remember me, do you?” I
hate
that.’

I was planning to come back by train because it was going to be easier for me from Euston. ‘No,’ she said, ‘Come on the plane.’

‘I haven’t got a ticket.’

‘I’ve got two tickets.’

‘Why?’

‘Just in case! I always get two … you never know.’

I imagine the money’s pouring away. She bought several copies of everybody’s books. She gushed and gladhanded and
yearned
to be wanted and liked and loved. Colonel Bob
did his best to imply an established intimacy. (‘Yes, Sarah, I’ll call you.’ It
has
all gone to his head.) Trevor and I settled for a new friendship and, while I imagine our hoots and giggles and guffaws will have been immensely irritating to our fellow passengers, we rather enjoyed the flight home.

As a consequence of being seduced onto the plane, I arrived late for the charity do at St James’s Palace. They were already
à table
. I went to apologise to our hostess, the Duchess of Gloucester, knelt at her side and said ‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ She was not amused. I compounded my
lèse-majesté
, by telling her (as Fergie insisted I should, absolutely insisted, ‘You must, please, please. I don’t see any of them now and I don’t want to be frozen out’) that I’d spent the day with the Duchess of York and ‘Sarah particularly asked to be remembered to you.’ The Danish duchess said nothing, nothing at all, frowned ever-so-slightly to get her ‘Who do you think you are?’ message across, and returned her attention to her plate.

I should have remembered that she’s not an easy ride. At the Roy Miles Gallery, at a private view, somehow we’d been left alone in the middle of a quite small room. I’d struggled with the small talk long enough. She was saying nothing: I had nothing more to say. I moved slightly closer to her and, while I burbled some inanity in her ear, behind her back I frantically gestured to Michèle to come and rescue me. Suddenly I realised that Her Royal Highness was gazing over my left shoulder into the mirror that was facing her. She was staring at the awful reflection of me frantically waving – and drowning.

Last night at the Foreign Office party, in the newly refurbished and quite splendid Durbar Room, I met up with Liza Manningham-Buller, whom I last saw when she played the Fairy Queen in my production of
Cinderella
at Oxford twenty-six years ago. She seemed remarkably unchanged, except that I gather she’s now one of our most senior spies, destined to be, if not already, the head of MI6.
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Extraordinary.

Tonight we’re voting on Sunday trading. I’m voting for total deregulation. I like these free votes. It is a relief now and again to be able to make up one’s own mind – even if, as in this case, my vote is going to upset the churches, M&S, and the small shopkeepers in Chester. Never mind. For once I shall do what I believe to be right and hang the consequences. There’s got to be
some
point to being an MP. (People are quite shocked when you admit that most of the time most MPs have no idea what they’re voting about. They just walk into the lobby where they see one of their whips standing and that’s that.)

The Treasury Christmas lunch was a fairly hard slog. The Financial Secretary entertained his team at Joe Allen’s, which was an ideal venue because the din and clatter were so great no one could hear anybody and the fact that nobody seemed to have much to say to anybody consequently didn’t matter. Stephen [Dorrell] is delightful, I like him more and more, but slumming it with the troops, small talk with the secretaries, seasonal banter with the lower ranks – these are not his forte. They are the sort of thing Mr Major does better than anybody. He (the PM) came to mingle with his men in the Tea Room this afternoon and did well. He’s engrossed in the Northern Ireland business and both his commitment and grasp of detail are impressive. He was busy sending out signals to reassure the UUs, he reiterated his line that having to deal with Gerry Adams
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would ‘make his stomach turn’, but he concedes there’s been a ‘chain of communication’ between the government and the IRA for years and there’s no doubt, before too long, we’ll be talking to the terrorists face to face. What happens to our fragile majority then?

We are in Framlingham with Simon and Beckie [Cadell]. Simon seems to be in much better shape. Beckie is a saint. The boys [their young sons] are amazing. They do their own thing, watch TV, play with the computer, scamper about outside, leaving us to get on with the serious business of working our way through Simon’s cellar. ‘We don’t know how long I’ve got,’ says Simon, in his best Ralph Richardson voice, dropping a splash or two of
pêche
into our mid-morning champagne, ‘so we’d better get on with it, eh cockie?’

We’ve had a merry Christmas. I imagine the PM was feeling relatively festive too – until yesterday when the
News of the World
brought us its latest world exclusive. Tim Yeo,
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our Minister for the Environment and the Countryside, has a love child! Michèle has been against him since she saw him lolling on the front bench with his feet up against the despatch box. ‘Arrogant sod.’ I tried to explain that they all sit like that. ‘No they don’t. Mr Major doesn’t. I tell you: Tim Yeo’s an arrogant bastard. The sooner he goes the better.’

According to today’s papers, the Prime Minister is taking a more charitable view. He is standing by his man. ‘Minister with love child wins Major support.’ ‘This is a purely private matter,’ says PM. Oh yes?

Yesterday: lunch with the Hanleys. Jeremy told a funny story. Pretty young diary secretary comes in to see her minister.

Secretary: Well, Minister, there’s good news and bad news.

Minister: Give me the good news.

Secretary: You’re not infertile.

Jeremy is loving the MoD. He rates Rifkind highly, he’s wary of Aitken. They’re both (Jeremy & Verna) quite seduced by the PM. People who get close to him invariably are. We went to John Schlesinger’s new flat last night. He thinks Major is quite wonderful too. Close up, the PM has a charm that disarms, that positively seduces. The flat is fabulous (an unexpectedly spacious duplex perched at the top of a single mansion block on the Gloucester Road) and the evening was very jolly. Eileen [Atkins] & Bill [Shepherd], Twiggy, Albert Finney and co. Noel
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was so funny. The stories just keep tumbling out – the old favourites and always one or two someone hasn’t heard before. The Gurkha story, which I love, seemed new to one and all.
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I doubt there’ll be much of that kind of humour
here
. We’re in Ablemont, in Normandy, staying in what I’m choosing to call ‘the valley of the Lilleys’. It’s a bourgeois house, not grand but solid, surrounded by farm buildings in the middle of nowhere. Peter and Gail escape here whenever they can. They say they just ‘hop over’. It took us rather longer to reach than that. We got to Folkestone to find the crossing cancelled. We moved on to Dover where they warned us the Channel was fairly choppy. This turned out to be something of an understatement. (Already we are dreading the return journey on Sunday.) It’s an odd party – Michael Brown, the Chopes,
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Peter Oborne
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(I am always wary when there’s a hack in the house) – but we’re promised plenty of wine, candles when the lights go (which apparently they will – they always do), no party hats but civilised parlour games. On the sideboard in the dining room there’s an elegant glass bowl engraved with a playful inscription to ‘The Bastards’. We arrived as night was falling, to see Peter through the window, sitting at his laptop, engrossed. What was he doing? ‘Looking for ways to reduce the social security bill.’ It is good to be spending New Year with the most
thoughtful
member of the government.