Breaking the Code (46 page)

Lord, spare me from becoming a silly old buffer. Lord Charteris of Amisfield, former private secretary to Her Majesty, was interviewed by
The Spectator
. He thought he was giving an off-the-record briefing as background for a profile and is now aghast that his remarks have been reproduced. He’s a vain old fool. He simply couldn’t resist. His verdict on Fergie: ‘She is vulgar, vulgar, vulgar, and that is that.’ Charles’ marriage was doomed from the start: ‘The pity is that the Prince of Wales had to marry a virgin.’ He expects a divorce ‘sooner rather than later’, Camilla is ‘the love of the Prince’s life’. ‘When the dear, sweet Queen dies, although I wish she could go on forever, a council of succession will appoint Charles as head of state. I know Charles, know the man, and believe he will be a good king, a king for his time.’

When Charteris came to Chester (for which I was grateful, very grateful) my people loved him. Hobnobbing with an establishment grandee of the old school (and a royal confidant to boot) is their idea of heaven. It was mine too, I suppose, once upon a time. But the novelty’s worn off. This year I want to spend less time with complacent old farts who know it all and more with the likes of my new young friend Finkelstein.
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Danny (thirty-something, bright as a button, easy, funny, funny-looking) belongs to a breed I’d not encountered before I arrived at Westminster: people who write pamphlets. There are scores of them, earnest young men (they’re mostly men), producing earnest papers that nobody (other than other earnest pamphleteers) reads. But I think Danny is special. He was once an SDP groupie, now runs the Social Market Foundation (a think tank, funded by David Sainsbury, chaired by Will’s dad)
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and though he takes his work
seriously he seems to take himself less so. Anyway, we get on well (he laughs at my jokes), he has ambitions to get onto the candidates list (the name Finkelstein may prove a bit of a downer there), and he’s going to come on board as an informal adviser.

Breakfast with Stephen and Danny at 20 Queen Anne’s Gate. It’s a small office right at the top of the building – flight after flight. The exercise will do me good. Danny supplied coffee, croissants and diet coke (that’s all he drinks). He is very engaging – and just what Stephen needs. He can help draft speeches (which I hate doing) and he can keep S in touch with ideas/life beyond the DNH. (Ministers have so much departmental bumf to get through they have little opportunity to meet with other members of the government outside their department and no time at all to
think
about anything. Stephen’s mentor was Peter Walker who made it a rule to have half an hour written into the diary for daily contemplation. Stephen does not follow his example, but Stephen, of course, doesn’t want to think about the DNH!) We’ve agreed to meet every Tuesday morning like this. I’m delighted.

I had my postponed meeting with Hayden Phillips to discuss Honours. It was very funny. Hayden, of course, didn’t want the meeting to happen in the first place. Indeed, after he’d ushered me to a corner of his office and tea had been served and the door securely closed, he murmured, ‘This meeting isn’t taking place, you understand.’ ‘Of course,’ I murmured back.

Of the great mysteries of British society – how to get a table at The Ivy, who decides who features in
Who’s Who
– none is more shrouded in secrecy than the detail of the workings of the honours system. Honours are only to be discussed by the Permanent Secretary and the Secretary of State – nobody else (not the junior ministers and certainly not the Parliamentary Private Secretary) is to know what’s going on. Unfortunately this Secretary of State simply isn’t interested. He thinks it’s a lot of nonsense. It’s not why he came into politics and he’s not going to give it any time, but if it amuses me, that’s fine by him. It
does
amuse me. I don’t take it too seriously, but I go along with the Anthony Sampson
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line: ‘honours make people happier, and sometimes nicer.’ And, of course, if you don’t like them you can always turn them down. (‘To be Bernard Shaw is honour enough.’)

I think Hayden does take it seriously. He enjoys the power of patronage. He also likes playing at being conspiratorial. For much of the meeting he held his notes close to his chest – literally – and when I mentioned a name he would glance slyly down at his papers and then purr at me, ‘Mmm – something for Alan Bates? Mmm, yes, I think we can help you
there.’ He played a funny cat-and-mouse game with a document which he flashed in front of me, then half showed me, then pulled away from me, then gave me, murmuring silkily ‘I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t … but why not?’ I presume he had intended to give me the paper – ‘Honours in Confidence’ – all along, but by going through the little arabesque he heightened the drama and made me feel I was getting more out of him than actually I was.

Anyway, this is what I now know. Twice a year (around 1 May for the New Year’s honours, around 1 November for the Birthday list) the department submits its recommendations to No. 10. They end up with around twenty-four successful candidates, perhaps one Companion of Honour, a couple of knights, a dame, three or four Commanders of the Order of the British Empire, five or six Officers, six to ten MBEs. The final list is drawn from recommendations from different desks within the department, from outside suggestions, and from bright ideas conjured up by the Permanent Secretary. The department’s list is seen by the Secretary of State, who can comment, make suggestions, even tinker with the order of priorities, but it goes to No. 10 from the Permanent Secretary, not from the SoS. The essence of it is: it’s Hayden’s list.

‘I felt the K for Robert Stephens was right, didn’t you? I saw his
Lear
and thought, “Yes, yes.”’

‘Isn’t Donald Sinden on the list?’

He glanced down at his crib-sheet. ‘Mmm, doesn’t seem to be.’

‘He should be.’

‘It works on the escalator principle. You can be on the escalator for a year or two before you reach the top. I don’t think Donald Sinden’s been on the escalator in my time.’

‘I think he’s one for the escalator, don’t you?’

(Before he dies, Simon wants to see Don achieve his K and, if it can be done, it will be.) I threw out one or two other ideas – children’s writers and illustrators, Cliff, Elton, Cameron Mackintosh, George Speaight – and we agreed that I would return in a week or two for a further ‘meeting that isn’t’ equipped with a considered list of potential nominees. There will be nothing in writing, of course. Rule No. 1:

According to the ‘confidential’ paper I have before me, honours are given for ‘outstanding service (not for merely successfully filling a job for a long period)’; ‘it is unusual for a person with less than twenty years’ overall service to receive an honour’; ‘there should
be very strong reasons for putting forward people in their thirties or early forties; if they are good enough at that age for an honour it is possible they will subsequently reach a position eligible for a higher honour’. You are unlikely to get a knighthood before you are fifty; you won’t be offered a second honour within five years of receiving your first; and if you are expecting your gong on retirement, if you don’t get it in the list
immediately
following your retirement, you’ve missed the boat. And keep your nose clean: ‘It is important that those recommended for awards have a private character which reflects the high standard expected of recipients of honours. Nor should there be anything in their past history which would make the person unsuitable to receive an honour.’

Marginals Club dinner with Jeremy Hanley. Everyone likes him (you couldn’t not), but the verdict of his peers is damning: he’s punch-drunk and he’s blown it.

Small lunch with the PM at No. 10. I sat immediately opposite him. He was in good form, feels the year’s got off to the right start, sensed he’d scored a few points in his
Frost
interview. He thinks we’ve got Labour on the ropes over devolution. And Blair is vowing to renationalise the railways which could be useful. The PM has high hopes of Norman Blackwell.
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‘He’s fizzing with ideas.’ And he’s asked key departments to set up policy groups to develop radical new thinking ‘right across the whole range of government’. By the summer he wants to have the makings of ‘a new manifesto for the new millennium’. ‘And, as well as general themes, I want some bite-sized chunks of policy voters can get their teeth into.’

When I report the PM’s turn of phrase to Stephen he winces. ‘We’re forty points behind in the polls! It’s going to take more than “bite-sized chunks of policy” to turn the tide.’ It is going to fall to me to organise the national heritage ‘policy’ group. (Yes, it’s that unimportant.)

High drama in the middle of the night. I’d had a pleasantly liquid and gossipy supper with Seb and was gently wending my way along the Library corridor when around the bend swept Jeremy Hanley.

‘Go to the Prime Minister’s room at once.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Just go. Now. I’ll see you there.’

I beetled round the corner and down the corridor to the PM’s room. It was packed. There were thirty or forty of us, crowded round the table. I squeezed my way in and perched myself directly behind the PM’s chair. He looked calm but anxious. ‘If everyone’s here, let me tell you what’s happened.
The Times
have got hold of a paper they claim is the Anglo-Irish joint framework document and they’re publishing it in the morning. It isn’t what they say it is and what they are doing is grossly irresponsible. I don’t know what they think they’re playing at. There are black works going on at the crossroads of peace.’ He was angry, frustrated, desperate that this premature publication of an incomplete, unfinished draft could derail the peace process. He took us through what he’s achieved to date, told us not to take what’s in
The Times
at face value (‘It’s like the first chapter of an Agatha Christie mystery, it doesn’t tell the whole story’), and repeated that there would be, could be no betrayal of the Unionists. When he’d said his piece, he invited questions and for half an hour self-important colleagues made fairly obvious points in urgent and hushed tones to show that they understood the gravity of the situation. While one vain old goat was droning on, I caught Jeremy’s eye and, fearing I was suddenly going to get an attack of nervous giggles, leant back against the wood panelling – only to have the wall suddenly swing away behind me. It turned out I was leaning against a disguised door that opened onto the PM’s private loo. (I didn’t know he had one.) I caught myself halfway to the floor and for the rest of the meeting stood, half-crouching, frozen to spot.

This morning
The Times
is saying there’s going to be a joint North–South authority with executive powers and a declaration of ‘the birthright of everyone born in either jurisdiction to be part as of right of the Irish nation.’ Molyneux,
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Trimble,
457
John Taylor
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– they’re all crying ‘betrayal’. We’re getting a statement this afternoon and the PM’s going to broadcast to the nation tonight.

Paddy Mayhew did well. He was sombre,
sotto voce,
convincing. ‘Consent is the very foundation of everything we are seeking to achieve.’ The UUs are incandescent, but overall in the Tea Room on this one the troops are content.

I’ve just returned from dinner with the European Commission at 8 Storey’s Gate. They seem bemused by our goings-on. Quentin Davies (who is wildly pro-Euro) reassured them that we’ll be in EMU in 1999. I said I reckoned we wouldn’t join in the first wave, but we’d be there two or three years later. What does the Cabinet want? Half want in, half want out, and the sceptics are gaining ground. What does the party want? Fisticuffs in the street. Tim Renton
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is calling Portillo ‘a flat-earther’. Teddy Taylor is dancing in the lobby because Douglas Hurd has had his ‘position paper’ on the IGC [Inter-Governmental Conference] negotiations stuffed up his jacksie. ‘We’re all bastards now.’

And down at the shallow end of the pool, at the Department of National Heritage, things aren’t much better. I accompanied Stephen to the Heritage Select Committee this morning and, faced with fairly hostile questioning (Kaufman is so pleased with himself; Gorst is such an ass) my man didn’t do too badly – but on the way in one of the hacks hovering at the door asked him (I think quite innocently) what films he’d recently seen and enjoyed. Stephen couldn’t think what to say. He hasn’t been to the cinema in years. Films do not feature on his radar screen. His mind went blank. He said he couldn’t remember. That’s what’s going to make the headlines.

We must do something about it, both because it’s doing him harm and because we’re wasting an opportunity. At six I went to the Arts Council for a drink with Mary Allen
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and she asked, ‘How’s he getting on? Is he enjoying it?’ ‘He’s beginning to enjoy it,’ I lied, ‘sorting out the priorities.’

‘Now tell me, Gyles, what does he want from us?’ What on earth could I say? I simply blathered.

‘If Mr Dorrell does, as is rumoured, see himself as a future leader, he had better sharpen up his performance.’ This morning we agreed that if
The Times
is actually giving over a whole leader to Stephen’s ‘studied disdain’ of his portfolio, we need to take action fairly urgently. The trouble is, in this business, once you get a certain reputation it’s difficult to shift. Look at poor Jeremy. Michael Grade has sent over a batch of Channel 4 movies on video. John K. is putting
Four Weddings and a Funeral
in the Secretary of State’s box this weekend.