Breaking the Code (35 page)

At one we trooped along the corridor to the Chancellor’s room. KC, in his shirtsleeves, glass of wine in one hand, sandwich in the other, belly to the fore, chuckled when I came in, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve ridden the storm.’

At Cabinet this morning they weren’t going to talk about Back to Basics, but they did – for over an hour. The upshot is that the theme remains central to the government’s purpose – and ministers are charged with promoting the policies that flow from it, remembering, of course, that it’s all about core values, ‘it isn’t a moral crusade’. KC explained all this with a humorous twist to his mouth and a slightly raised eyebrow to make it quite clear what a lot of nonsense he thinks the whole thing is. ‘And I shall be going on the telly later in a valiant attempt to dampen down the general hysteria.’

It’s getting worse. The district auditor has just published his report accusing Westminster Council of a ‘disgraceful, unlawful and improper’ £21 million vote-rigging scam – ‘gerrymandering’ to lure Conservative voters into marginal wards. Shirley Porter, Barry Legg,
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and an assortment of other councillors and officials are charged with
‘wilful misconduct’. It’s a nightmare. Poor Shirley. I can see her riding roughshod over mealy-mouthed wishy-washy fainthearted nobodies to achieve her ends, but she would not knowingly break the law. I’m sure of that.

Sir Marcus and his chums [the Executive of the 1922 Committee] have had an hourlong session with the PM. ‘I think you know me well enough by now, Gyles. I don’t pull my punches. We were very frank with the Prime Minister. At times like this you have to be.’

Apparently they told him the party rank and file are all for Back to Basics and, yes, it is a moral crusade!

I have just returned from the Smoking Room. The right think it’s a shambles, the left think it’s a pantomime. Edward Leigh wants the PM to play Back to Basics for all its worth. ‘This is our chance to tackle the permissive society. Let’s speak up for family values. Let’s be fearless. The trouble is, the moment anyone says “Boo” to the Prime Minister, he runs away. We’ve got to stick with this. It’s our only chance.’ Ian Taylor: ‘That way madness lies.’

I have dinner with a completely civilised trio: Nick Baker,
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Michael Ancram, Sebastian [Coe]. Because of Northern Ireland Ancram is now very close to the PM and full of praise for what he’s achieving. ‘Margaret would have wanted to solve it all at a stroke. The PM is ready for the long, slow haul, the patient painstaking inching along the road, three steps forward, two steps back, for as long as it takes.’

The headlines are terrible. ‘Vote-rigging scandal stuns Tories’. ‘Wilful, disgraceful, improper, unlawful, unauthorised’. Even Sarah Keays
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has crept out of the woodwork to dismiss Back to Basics as ‘a sick joke’.

I’m on my way to Chester – the Autistic Society coffee morning, the BT Pensioners Club lunch, the Blacon Ladies Guild – ready to put on my ‘business as usual’ face at the end of what the
Chester Chronicle
is pleased to call ‘the toughest week of my political career’. I have to say it hasn’t been that pleasant – but I have survived!

The local press hasn’t been at all bad – and the local people have been good, kind and supportive. There’s been some hate mail, but not much. The local Labour people have tried to fire a few squibs, but they would, wouldn’t they?

Nationally, it doesn’t look so good. Heath and Hurd are saying it isn’t a moral crusade; Redwood and Portillo seem to be saying it is. Portillo’s speech to the Way Forward group laments ‘the self-destructive sickness of national cynicism’ and is full of stirring (if self-evident) platitudes – ‘Social disorder follows when respect breaks down’ – but is somehow being written up as ‘Portillo’s bid to hijack the agenda.’ ‘The speech ran well away from the reassertion of the Back to Basics theme that ministers were supposed to be coordinating after one of the most disastrous weeks for a government in modern times.’ According to the
Mirror
, at the farewell dinner for Gus O’Donnell
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on Thursday night, the PM said, ‘I will fucking crucify the right for what they have done, and this time I will have the party behind me.’

There’s consolation of sorts in the news from Rome. When it comes to moral confusion we are not alone. A respected Vatican theorist has published an official manual for Catholic youth and, according to
The Guardian
, ‘Masturbation no longer a sin’ was the gleeful headline in several Italian papers yesterday. But Cardinal Biffi of Bologna is outraged. ‘It
is
a sin,’ he insists. Sensibly, Cardinal Hume has no comment. His mind is on higher things. Last night, at the Archbishop’s House in Westminster, he received the Duchess of Kent into the Roman Catholic Church.

I have just had a bizarre – and unpleasant – experience.

I had a ninety-minute surgery scheduled for 11.00 a.m. It was the usual mix – a couple of CSA cases, a housing problem, a neighbour problem, somebody’s grandmother’s heating problem and – booked in for 12 noon – a Miss Ann Rogers of 25 Bridges Street. When she phoned to make the appointment she told Gwyn her problem was ‘palaver’ with her landlord.

The 11.45 appointment failed to show, so I was alone in the office when Miss Rogers arrived. She was a young woman, with short dark hair and a common little face caked in heavy make-up. I said, ‘Come in, sit down; what can I do for you?’

As she came through the door she seemed nervous, flustered, even frightened.

I said, ‘Now, what’s your full address and phone number?’

She didn’t reply. She leant towards me and started talking about her ‘employers’: ‘They’re giving me a lot of aggro about you…’

‘About me?’

‘Yeah, you know. About you and me.’

I protested, ‘But we’ve never met.’

‘We have,’ she said, ‘You know we have. At Pinkies.’

My stomach lurched. I have heard of Pinkies, a local massage parlour, only because it featured in the Chester press when a murder took place there. Immediately I realised this woman was trying in some way to set me up.

I stood up. I repeated that we had never met and she knew it; I told her I had never visited Pinkies, I didn’t even know where it was located; I said that if she was having ‘aggro’ from her employers she should go straight to the police.

I showed her the door as she continued to protest that we knew one another, that we’d met at Pinkies. The interview can’t have lasted more than a couple of minutes. As soon as I had seen her out, I locked the office and walked immediately down the road and into the headquarters of the Cheshire Constabulary. I asked to see the senior officer on duty. I reported the entire episode to him. He took a photocopy of the appointment sheet and told me he would make out an incident report. He expressed the view that the woman was ‘probably trying it on’ having read about me in the papers this week, but he would send an officer to the address given by her ‘if it exists’. I’ve now checked. It doesn’t.

What is going on? Am I to be blackmailed for something I haven’t done?

First victim of the week: Gary Waller
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– of all people. Yes, Gary who? Inoffensive, mild-mannered, chubby, pint-sized, potters round the Library with beetle-brows … turns out he’s a demon between the sheets. Outed by
The People
the poor bugger has had to confess that he has fathered an illegitimate son by a House of Commons secretary
and
he has a separate girlfriend who had no idea. What next? It has all got completely out of hand.

The PM’s alleged line about crucifying the right is being comprehensively denied. No. 10 has contacted every one of the thirty-two guests at the dinner: no one heard the PM say any such thing – or anything like it.

At A and Q it’s business as usual. We must talk up the economy and cheer the PM. In the Tea Room there’s open debate as to who is going to be his successor. The view is that Clarke would beat Portillo, but the Eurosceptics have a horror of Clarke so has Heseltine’s moment come at last? That the clearly weird – Gardiner, Body, Skeet etc. – have lost faith in Major is hardly news. That Sir Marcus is shaking his head, and Geoffrey Dickens is huffing and puffing, and Geoffrey Johnson-Smith is tut-tutting – all that bodes ill for the boss.

On Monday night we finished voting at 2.00 a.m. Last night it was nearer 3.00 a.m. Stephen [Milligan] drove me home. He so loves the gossip and intrigue. He’s predicting a leadership election in July. Sir George [Gardiner] and the 92 Group are going to lead a delegation to the PM demanding a clear rightward lurch and Cabinet posts for Jonathan Aitken, Michael Forsyth and Neil Hamilton. If they don’t get their way they’ll ‘force the issue’. ‘What do we do?’ I asked. Stephen snickered: ‘Enjoy the show!’

Brian Redhead
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is on his last legs.

The
Sunday Times
speaks for Chester: ‘John Major’s prime ministership appears to be in terminal trouble.’ That, alas, was the verdict at the Chester Rotary Club dinner at the Town Hall last night. Perhaps the PM’s new press secretary, Christopher Meyer, will help him turn the tide. Meyer has produced a list of Ten Commandments – how to handle the hacks and come out on top. Be accessible. Be helpful. Be friendly, but not over-friendly. Do not waffle. Do not lie. Do not have favourites. Take journalists seriously. Make news. Save complaints for serious matters. Assume that everything you say will be reported.

9.00 a.m.: Gathering at No. 11. The Chancellor merry as a grig. Last night, when Sir George [Gardiner] and his ramshackle crew turned up with their list of ‘demands’, the
PM showed them the door. The Chancellor approves: ‘You can’t have the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom being dictated to by a bunch of backbench dinosaurs. All this nonsense has just got to stop. We must get on with the serious business of government.’

In the Tea Room all they want to get on with is the serious business of discussing the leadership. That’s the only thing anyone is talking about. Lamont is saying the PM is ‘weak and hopeless’ and, privately, all too many are ready to agree. As Tony Marlow bleats ‘Where does he stand on anything? Does anybody know?’ junior ministers shuffle in their seats, staring into their coffee cups, pretending not to hear.

Last night I had the Chester President’s Club up for their annual dinner. This is the highlight of their year. They pay £100 to belong. This is the big night out. Because we had the Chancellor of the Exchequer as our guest of honour we were blessed with a full house.

At 7.00 p.m. I got a message from the Chancellor’s office. ‘He’s running a bit late, he’s had to look in on the PM.’

At 7.45 p.m.: ‘I’m afraid he’s still with the Prime Minister. He should be on his way shortly.’

At 8.45 p.m.: ‘I’m afraid I don’t think he’s going to make it. Sorry.’

Sorry! I managed to locate Stephen [Dorrell]. He was in his room at the Treasury. Yes, of course, he’d come over and do a turn. He came, bless him, and gave an excellent off-the-cuff speech on the state of the economy. He saved the day – but he wasn’t the Chancellor and my hundred-pound-a-throw punters sat there looking at him glumly. What was worst is that I got the impression that most of them reckoned the Chancellor was never going to turn up, that I’d boasted that I could get him when really I couldn’t, that my running in and out of the dining room for 7 p.m. onwards bring reports from No. 11 was just a charade. At times I hate this job.

At lunch the Chancellor was his twinkling self. ‘Sorry I got tied up with the boss last night. It just sort of ran on and on.’ It seems the Chancellor was steeling the PM to address the troops: tell the backbenchers to stop feuding, tell the ministers that if they don’t behave themselves and toe the line they’re out. Give us the smack of firm government. Well, it’s worth a try.

A good day. I’m just in from darling Saethryd’s birthday supper at Riva
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and full of the joys of chilled Frascati. I spent the morning at the Commons in a fairly deserted Chamber taking part in the debate on the Energy Conservation Bill – not knowing a great deal about it, but rather enjoying the sound of my own contributions! At noon I popped over to Millbank to do a turn on Channel 4’s
House to House
programme – and didn’t cock it up. Then I returned to the House and had a quick lunch in the Tea Room with Stephen [Milligan]. He spoke in the debate. He is
very
good. I imagine he’ll be the first of our intake to become a minister. He wolfed his sandwich and disappeared to talk to his whip about his prospects: ‘I’m going to ask him where I’m going wrong.’ ‘But you’re not going wrong.’ Stephen shook with delight, ‘I know, but I want him to tell me!’ He has the singleness of purpose of the properly ambitious, but it doesn’t grate because he is so open about it. When we arrived and
The House
magazine asked us about our aspirations, creeps like me talked piously about the fulfilment to be had as a good constituency member. Stephen came clean: ‘I would like to be Foreign Secretary.’

Not such a happy day for poor Portillo. I had supper with him on Thursday night and he told me he was going to Southampton to address the students. He did not tell me he was going to say to them, ‘If any of you have got A levels it’s because you worked for them. Go to any other country and when you’ve got an A level you’ve bought it.’ He appears to have told his impressionable young audience that nepotism and bribery are rife across Europe. ‘If you’re in business in Britain and you secure a contract it’s because you’ve worked for it. In other countries you’ve got the contract because your uncle’s a minister and you’ve lined the pocket of some public official.’ Poor bugger, he realised his gaffe almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth and scurried after the journalists who were there in an attempt to retract what he’d said – but too late. Now the poor sod is all over the papers and the airwaves giving grovelling apologies, eating humble pie.