Breaking the Code (37 page)

The gays who have been to see me in Chester will be happy. Quite a few of the activists will feel ‘let down’. (That’s the way they always put it when I do something they hate.) I’ve tried to explain that I’m not advocating sex at sixteen for anyone. I want to decriminalise it, not promote it. Michèle thinks the age of consent should be fixed at sixty for all.

Went down to Woodmancote for Stephen’s funeral. Just a small party from Westminster: me and Michèle, Jonathan Aitken, Andrew Mackay (Stephen’s whip), Julie. It was a lovely service – ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want’, ‘He who would valiant be’, an extraordinary address by Stephen’s vicar from Hammersmith – and then we had to troop out into the graveyard for the interment. We were only a matter of thirty or forty feet from the hedge surrounding the churchyard and right along the lane, standing on stepladders to get a better view, were the press – photographers, cameramen by the dozen. All they wanted was a shot of Julie with a tear in her eye. They snapped away ferociously until they got it. Stephen was laid to rest to the sound of clicking cameras.

At the eats afterwards Stephen’s father was so brave. He’s deaf so we shouted our condolences and he barked back. He played the perfect host and insisted that we be
celebratory
– thanking God for Stephen’s life and achievement. I can think of nothing worse than losing your child in your own lifetime – nothing.

The advent of women priests has driven John Gummer to Rome.

Peter Bottomley
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has just driven yours truly to Eltham – and back. We set off the moment the seven o’clock vote was through. We arrived at the hall about eight. I walked through the door, onto the platform, was introduced at once, spoke for half an hour, waved at the applauding crowd and retreated to Peter’s car. We sped straight back. I’ve really no idea where I’ve been or what I said, but as Virginia’s coming all the way to Chester on Friday I didn’t feel I could duck out. I had to get back by nine because, as ever, I’m on the Finance Bill and, as ever, divisions are ‘imminent’. Peter is likeable but definitely in some difficult-to-specify-way
odd
. He has bees in his bonnet. We all care
about road safety, but he can talk about it for
hours
without pause. He said he’d asked Mrs T. to bring his ministerial career to an end because you cannot have two high-fliers in one family and it had to be Virginia.

I am struggling with a paper the Treasury has prepared for No. 10. The PM asked us to come up with a rebuttal of Harriet Harpie’s assertion that the 1993 Budgets had put up the average tax bill by £22.32 a week. The excellent Mridul Hegde has produced ten pages of paperwork, blessed by Sir T. Burns, Culpin et al,
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that does exactly that – I think. That’s the problem. Mridul says £22.32 is misleading and offers several alternatives – £9.45, £11, £15.65 – each of which can be justified in different ways, if you read, understand and absorb the small print. The challenge is to settle on one figure that the PM can use and justify in a couple of phrases, and that the Chancellor can ram home every time he opens his mouth. Aye, there’s the rub. KC sees all this ‘presentational nonsense’ as a waste of time. Getting him to agree a coordinated line, getting him to marshal his ministers to go out and preach it, simply isn’t his style. Meanwhile, out there in voter-land, the punters think taxes have gone up by £22 a week and the poor are getting poorer simply because that’s what Harriet and Gordon Brown tell them morning, noon and night.

The PM has had rather a frustrating time with Jimmy Young [on BBC Radio 2]: ‘I shall fight on as leader whatever the outcome of the European elections. I was elected with the largest vote any party or any leader has ever had…’ I have had rather a frustrating morning at the Treasury. I began by sitting in on Alan Howarth’s delegation to see Sir John Cope about tax breaks for charities. I think John had forgotten we were coming. He was genial (as ever) but you felt he hadn’t the least grasp of the detail of the subject and he certainly had no plans to do anything very much about it. Perhaps there is nothing he can do, but come away from a comparable meeting with any number of other ministers – Widdecombe, Hanley, Burt,
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Freeman, Maclean, Norris – and they give the delegation the impression that you have been galvanised by them, that this is an issue of as much burning importance to you as to them, and that, thanks to this very meeting, it’s going to be Action this Day – and, in Ann’s case, invariably it
is
action this day.

John, bless him, seemed to think the meeting had gone rather well and together we toddled along to the Chancellor who, when I told him the backroom boys at No. 10 were keen to get the Treasury team ‘out there’ putting our message across, gave me very short shrift. ‘We never stop. I spend half my life lunching for England. You tell ’em.’

I am forty-six today and weighing in at thirteen stone. I can live with the former, but I should do something about the latter. (I asked Michèle what she’d like for her birthday – ‘You to be the weight you were the day we met.’ If I really loved her I would deliver, wouldn’t I? Well, I do really love her, so what’s stopping me? a) Exercise doesn’t interest me at all and b) when the Committee breaks tonight I shall be in the Smoking Room having a glass or three. Resolution: from tomorrow, no from tonight, no spirits and a salad every lunch.)

Bad news for the PM. Sir George Gardiner, death’s-head at any feast, has been re-elected chairman of the 92 Group – which now boasts 107 members, all too many of them openly hostile to Major. ‘Our’ man, Sir Anthony Durant, chairman of Q, good-hearted buffer, to the right (sort of) but wouldn’t rock the boat, got nowhere. And I shall get nowhere with the memo I’ve drafted to give to the Chancellor:

Even though this is the approach the Labour Party takes, even though this is what No. 10 wants, even though Portillo and Tony Nelson certainly agree, and David Ruffley is bouncing about with enthusiasm, I know it’s a waste of time. KC has been in government so long,
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and is so comfortable in government, so easy with the way he handles it himself, he simply can’t see the necessity. If he’s himself, and simply talks good sense, he assumes the message will get across.

Anyway, it’s worth a try. Oppenheim clearly thinks it’s laughable.

The twenty-five calls made a day to the Citizen’s Charter Helpline cost £68 each. This unhappy bit of intelligence is not something we want raised at PMQs. One of the roles of A and Q is to ensure that all the questions coming from our side give the PM an opportunity either to shine or to bash the opposition or, preferably, to do both. Unfortunately, our leader doesn’t make it any easier for us to the recruit helpful questioners by the way in which he regularly appears to ‘put down’ those that have been ‘put up’ to ask him planted questions. Some poor sap – Olga [Maitland], Nick Hawkins,
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anyone, me – is given a question, gets up, asks it precisely as drafted and agreed with No. 10, and instead of getting a warm and winning reply, is given a sort of patronising brush-off by the boss who appears to snicker in collusion with the opposition implying ‘Who are these children coming up with these creepy questions?’

Today I sought out Seb [Coe] and gave him a soft-ball question on the Missing Persons Helpline. It was topical, it was safe and it was what No. 10 wanted. It was not a success. Seb struggled to get it out, lost his way, stumbled and dried. (The Chamber is a bearpit.) The PM gave him fairly short shrift.

Last night, in the large ministerial conference room, Douglas Hurd held a pow-wow on QMV and ‘enlargement’.
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He was smooth, emollient, ‘Hurdy’, but there’s going to be trouble, no doubt about it. I reported this to the Chancellor at lunch. He just can’t see it.

‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’

‘Perhaps you should spend some time in the Tea Room,’ I ventured.

‘How can I when I’ve got to make all these speeches you keep urging on me?’ He laughed. He’s irresistible. But, increasingly, he’s out of touch. Howard, Portillo, Lilley, they work the Tea Room. Howard told me he eats in the Dining Room at least once a week ‘without fail – you must’. KC simply assumes good sense will win the day. It isn’t necessarily so.

I’m writing this in the Finance Bill Committee. Alistair Darling
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(not a wholly attractive specimen but needle-sharp) is droning on. When we break I’m going over to Jonathan Aitken’s for another soirée with Richard Nixon. As Bernard Jenkin
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put it, ‘The Great Host and the Great Liar with the great and the good at their feet.’

At PMQs I asked a question on inward investment – that was the brief. As I got to my feet, the jeering from the other side was extraordinary. Purple-faced Enright with a jabbing finger, yelling ‘Give back the money!’ I ploughed into my question, but the roar grew. Madam Speaker called the House to order and I started again. I got through it and the PM’s reply was fine. It was an unpleasant experience, but one, I suppose, that I’ll have to get used to. Several years ago, in the last parliament, Quentin Davies had some problem with sheep on his farm – a critical report from the farming inspectorate or some such – and, to this day, whenever he gets to his feet in the Chamber there are sustained braying choruses of ‘Baa! Baa!’ from the opposition benches. It is all very silly.

The serious news is that the PM is standing firm on QMV. And he thinks he can do it without delaying the enlargement process. The nub of the issue is that when we joined the Community the way QMV worked meant that the representatives of about 30 per cent of the Community’s population could be voted down by the remaining 70 per cent. Now the ratio is about 40 per cent: 60 per cent. That’s a trend that’s going to be perpetuated on enlargement. There are ninety votes on the council of ministers. Delors and the Commission are proposing that the blocking minority be extended to twenty-seven. We want it to stick at twenty-three – and, according to the PM, at his rabble-rousing best, ‘We will not be moved by phoney threats to delay enlargement.’ He had our sceptics whooping with delight as he derided John Smith as ‘the man who likes to say yes in Europe – Monsieur Oui, the poodle of Brussels.’ (Yes, it is rather a cringe-making turn of phrase – produced, I imagine, by Jonathan Hill – and one the poor PM may come to
regret. But it prompted a roar and, at least for this afternoon, it did the trick. The problem is, the way Douglas Hurd tells it, without bringing down the whole pack of cards the PM won’t be able to deliver.)

A bumpy ride for the boss at PMQs. He had to sweet-talk Teddy Taylor on the European Court, shore up the Attorney-General on the muddle over public interest immunity orders, and rebuff John Smith who (frankly) got it spot on when he accused the PM of trying to face two ways simultaneously, appeasing the sceptics one day, reassuring the rest of us the next. We did our yobbish best to barrack Smith, boorishly shouting him down as best we could (with Oppenheim fearlessly to the fore), but he wasn’t thrown. He’s impressive. And the PM was valiant. He was standing firm. Twenty-seven isn’t on. He won’t have it.

We had the Lilleys to dinner last night. Joanna [Lumley], bless her, kept the table on a roar and Stevie [Barlow] was funny and delightful. Gail [Lilley] was alternately skittish and daffy; Peter was subdued, weary, washed-out, no doubt wondering why he’d let himself in for an evening of tiresome banter when at home he’s got three red boxes overflowing with unfinished paperwork. And, of course, he’s brooding about the QMV debacle. The PM, having said ‘No surrender’, is now suing for peace. Hurd is going to come back with a compromise and Peter and Portillo and Michael Howard and Redwood will huff and puff, but they’ll be outgunned by Hurd and Heseltine and Clarke. Is it customary to have a Cabinet so fundamentally – and openly – divided? Did Ted and Sir Alec and Macmillan have to put up with all this?

A horrible afternoon. Last week the PM marched us up to the top of the hill and today he marched us down again – and at PMQs he paid the price. It was the worst it’s ever been. We heard him in stony silence. It was the silence that made it so eerie and uncomfortable.

I am afraid A and Q failed to deliver. We didn’t have the stomach for it, we lacked the courage. Our man was alone out there and we did nothing to help him. We sat on our hands, we averted our eyes. John Smith asked simply, ‘Does the Prime Minister agree
with the Foreign Secretary that the blocking minority in the enlarged community will be twenty-seven?’ The PM flannelled. John Smith repeated the question. The PM flannelled some more. For the third time, Smith repeated the question: ‘The blocking majority will be twenty-seven? Yes or no?’ The PM was quite white, his mouth was dry and his hands shook as he held his folder. The other side jeered and we all sat in complete silence looking at our knees. It was desperate. He was so alone – and I suppose we left him there to swing in the wind because this particular nightmare was of his making, his and his alone.