Breaking the Code (70 page)

The Chancellor has behaved well in Davos. The same cannot be said of Sir George Gardiner in Reigate. He has been deselected. The Whips’ Office view: it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow. He promised his Association he would be unequivocally loyal to the PM. He hasn’t been and now he’s paying the price. His lugubrious face peered out from most of the front pages on Friday, taking the shine off the PM’s second ‘presidential’ press conference – of course. It’s clear poor old George isn’t going to go without a fight: he’s digging in (the Chief has nicknamed him ‘Swampy’), he’s threatening legal action and the wags are saying ‘Oh dear, it looks as if George is turning ugly’ – a nice variation on the classic line about D. Mellor: ‘What
will
David do once his looks go?’

We have moved the writ for the Wirral South by-election, now scheduled for 27 February. With a world-weary smile, David Hunt (Wirral South) tells me our prospects are dire (I might have guessed!) which is why the press today is thick with speculation that, come 22 February, the PM may be tempted to call the general election for 20 March. If that happens we avoid a by-election – and a humiliation – but instead we march towards the gunfire six weeks earlier than necessary and face a certain rout.

My instinct is we’ll attempt to shrug off a defeat in Wirral South (‘This is what you expect at a by-election’) and hang on for 1 May. It is what the boys and girls want here and very much what our troops in the field believe would be best. (A major consideration, of course, is that if we wait till 1 May we move into another financial year and our pensions and redundancy packages will all be quite nicely enhanced.)

The
Sunday Times
featured the troubled love life of Dudley Moore, the secret love life of Lord Snowdon, and – another scoop! – speculation that John Major has told Stephen Dorrell he’ll have his blessing as his successor on the understanding that when Stephen becomes PM John can be his Foreign Secretary!

Back in the real world, Blair has played another ‘blinder’ by telling us (via the
Telegraph
, God save the mark!) that
defence
is his issue and the armed forces face a certain future under New Labour. Should we have anticipated this? Danny told me that, before Christmas, he’d set up what he called the ‘Red Group’: a weekly gathering that put itself into Labour’s shoes for an hour or so of fantasy politics in an attempt to be ready for what Labour might do next – so we can either pre-empt them or produce an immediate
counter-offensive. I suspect the Red Group will turn out to be another bright idea – borrowed from the US – that could work if executed professionally by grown-ups … but isn’t quite delivering the way we’re making it happen this time round.

Today we launched our tearful lion poster as part of our Eurosceptic tilt – and Robin Cook has helped considerably with his timely suggestion that we’ll be part of EMU by 2002 come what may. The campaign’s a victory for Danny and Maurice Saatchi and the PM and Malcolm Rifkind. What will the Chancellor make of it? Was he consulted?

At breakfast, Danny, increasingly pear-shaped, croissant in one hand, Coke in the other, is firmly of the view that if we can’t comfortably survive till 1 May we should go for 20 March and avoid the Wirral holocaust. He also reports that the manifesto is looking a lot better. It was never as bad as David made out, but, yes, it was drafted in Norman Blackwell’s plodding prose and didn’t have much sense of theme or purpose. David’s now closeted at No. 10 working on the prose and, between what the PM likes to call ‘bite-sized chunks of policy’, there’s a kind of core message emerging: stability v. risk.

Ludicrous fun and games on the Finance Bill. Because David Hunt was entertaining the President of the Law Society to lunch today and Angela Knight, Economic Secretary, wants to be away on Thursday afternoon, I suggested to my opposite number – a perfectly amiable shop steward from Coventry
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– that he might like to offer a couple of pairs. He declined. I then suggested that tonight, to make progress, we might need to keep the committee going till 10.00 p.m. – knowing full well he wants to be away from 7.00 p.m. He said he’d think about it and, a few moments later, flexed his muscles by pulling all but one of his side out of the committee room so that, suddenly, the committee became inquorate. We need at least thirteen in the room at all times and half a dozen of ours were out in the corridor having coffee, on the telephone, dictating correspondence, gossiping, going to the loo etc. Fearful that the chairman would suspend the committee, I got up on a point of order and began to blather: ‘Sir James, I can’t believe that we are inquorate given the eloquence of the Honourable Member who has the floor. It is simply that colleagues have gone to fetch others to come and hear his eloquence, to marvel at the power of his presentation, to take note of his unique way with words …’ by which time we’d got two or three of our chaps back and the committee resumed.

It was a narrow escape. Happily James Hill is a benevolent chairman: a splendid old combustion engine, good-humoured and good-hearted. Had his alternate, Gwyneth
Dunwoody
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(Hattie Jacques with attitude) been in the chair, we would have had at least a twenty-minute suspension and I’d have ended up with egg on my face. This charade over, the Labour whip and I then agreed that we would pull stumps today at seven (which he wanted) if we could also agree to reach Clause 30 by lunchtime on Thursday (which I wanted). So I didn’t manage to release Hunt early for his lunch, but at least Knight is sorted for Thursday. It’s just a silly game.

The high-jinks continued during the afternoon when we were interrupted three times by votes on the floor of the House – after one of which Peter Butler, the Chancellor’s PPS, failed to return. With a vote in the committee now imminent I got assorted members of the team to filibuster while frantically I telephoned and paged all and sundry – the Deputy Chief Whip, the Tea Room, Butler’s office, Central Lobby. I thought he might have been closeted with the Chancellor – but his line was engaged so I had to get the switchboard to break in on his call to discover if Butler was in with him. He wasn’t. Mouth dry, heart pounding, I paced the committee corridor until, all of a sudden, I sighted him: nonchalantly sauntering towards me, as cool and complacent as Mr Toad on his way to order a new motor. He hadn’t appreciated a vote was in the air. So sorry. Poop-poop.

Walking to Downing Street I bump into the BBC’s John Sergeant.

‘If you wait too long,’ he beams, ‘the public will get fed up.’

‘Isn’t it you lot who’ll get fed up? And what about the Lazarus factor? Aren’t we all hanging on for our man to work his miracle?’

John giggles: ‘Not any more. Unless you leap ten points in the polls it’s all over.’

Clearly, this morning the PM feels it’s far from all over. He’s very perky, hopping from one foot to the other, hands deep in pockets, flashing his engaging grin.

‘Have you seen it? Have you seen it?’ he asks, nodding towards a copy of the
Daily Express
lying open on the coffee table.

An NBC reporter, one Daphne Barak, has been to interview Tony Blair and her verdict is damning: ‘Never have I come across anybody quite as frightened, quite as uncertain, quite as eager to please.’

The PM already seems to have some of Ms Barak’s phrases by heart: ‘“Nervous, boring, empty, at a loss” – that’s more like it, isn’t it?’ He goes off to greet the Children of Achievement looking positively
jaunty
.

Leaving No. 10 I paused for a moment in front of the wonderful picture of Ellen Terry
and allowed myself a self-conscious, wistful moment. 20 March looks more likely now. The PM doesn’t want us to go to the country because we’ve lost a confidence vote – and after Wirral South there’s a danger of that. Charles Lewington has just called to get me to call Tim Rice to activate our Celebs for Major programme, ‘just in case we do go for 20 March’. In the Tea Room at lunch Michael Bates is adamant: ‘On 20 March I will lose my seat. On 1 May I can win.’ Ian Lang is looking very spruce in what he describes as his ‘election haircut’. If we were a plc rather than a party Ian would certainly be our next leader.

In the papers Elizabeth Taylor has had a stroke and Melinda Messenger (‘Page 3 Girl for the Thrillennium’) is alleged to have implants. In the Lords we have had a series of defeats on the Firearms Bill. No doubt we shall have severe problems if we attempt to reverse what their lordships have done.

In the Commons we’re in for a tight vote tonight. Winston is in Paris where his mother
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is dying. (Someone describes her as a remarkable lady who got where she did admiring rich and powerful men’s ceilings.) We’re bringing in our sick and keeping our fingers crossed. Ted said, shoulders heaving, mischievous grin, ‘You’ve got it completely wrong. It’s Liberal business today and there are no votes tomorrow. Keep us here and you’ll have a majority of 153.’

I said, ‘As a former Chief Whip, wouldn’t your policy be “Better safe than sorry”?’

‘No,’ he harrumphed and padded softly away.

I’ve just emerged from the Cabinet committee on science and technology. The Deputy Prime Minister took the chair. ‘It is now 3.30 p.m.,’ he began. ‘When Sir Maurice Bowra was Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and chaired meetings of convocation, they started as the clock began to strike twelve. It was always Sir Maurice’s aim to conclude the entire meeting, minutes, apologies, any other business and all, before the final stroke of twelve. I propose to conduct today’s proceedings upon similar lines. I have read the papers prepared for us and they seem to me to be entirely satisfactory. Unless colleagues have something material to contribute, I suggest we accept the proposals—’

‘— keeping within current spending limits,’ chirruped the Chief Secretary.

‘— and consider the results at our next meeting.’

From the far end of the table a hapless civil servant was heard to bleat, ‘Can we publish the reports?’
‘After we’ve considered the results – at our next meeting. This concludes the present meeting. Thank you.’

The clock on the TV monitor changed to 3.31 as we gathered our papers and, murmuring complacently ‘Now this is the way to do business’, made for the door. Poor Ian Taylor, our Science Minister, sat in his place, crestfallen, like a deflated balloon. He had a twenty-minute presentation all rehearsed and ready. Nobody in the room had wanted to hear what he had to say anyway. Now nobody was going to.

On the way out, I gave Roger Freeman the cash I owed him for the Heath dinner and, taking my £10 note, he told me that the cricket match depicted on the back of it is a scene from
Pickwick Papers
set in Dingly Dell – and Dingly Dell now forms part of Roger’s back garden. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer told Cabinet not to get their knickers in a twist about the design of the new Euro because nobody in their right mind ever looks at their money, the PM piped up, ‘There’s a cricket match on the back of the £10 note.’

‘The PM’, said Roger, ‘has a wonderful eye for detail.’

As I write this, Dawn Primarolo
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is grinding her way through the iniquities of the Insurance Premium Tax while the two Old Labour lags sitting immediately behind her – ruddy, sweaty, beer-bellied, one has a face that looks exactly like a fat old man’s bottom with a moustache clipped to it – gaze intently at her rear end. Angela Knight has just drawn this phenomenon to my attention: ‘Their instincts are entirely healthy – her backside is so much more appealing than her mind.’

We’ve had a fair bit of banter in this vein on the committee to date – and not merely as whispered asides. Discussing the economic advantages of motor cycles Phillip Oppenheim told us, ‘There is a saying about people with big cars: BCSD. I don’t know whether that also applies to motorbikes, but I can assure the committee I only have a small car.’ Much ribald chuckling ensued. His jest at Michael Fabricant’s expense was less flavoursome. Recalling how the Hon Member for Mid-Staffs had ridden a Yamaha to Gallipoli, Phillip said, ‘He informed me he had a sore backside at the end of the journey. I sincerely hope it was as a result of riding the bike and not any other action.’

I sat talking with the Deputy Prime Minister in his room at the Commons last night. I was in a low leather armchair: he was behind his desk, on a high-backed throne, as if presiding over a banquet in the guise of a medieval king played by Errol Flynn. He is
very like an ancient matinee idol in an MGM movie: the performance is stagey and the colour isn’t quite true, but there’s still something rather compelling about it.

We talked about our revised Euro stance: ‘Our sceptics are real monkeys, aren’t they? But we’ve given the monkeys something they can fall in behind, haven’t we? Of course, some of the
monkeys
will never be satisfied. They’re real monkeys, the lot of them!’ When he moved on admiringly to the tearful lion in our campaign poster it suddenly occurred to me that maybe he takes the Tarzan thing seriously and all his metaphors are drawn from the jungle…

He wasn’t amused to hear that colleagues would like us to accept the Lords’ reverses on the Firearms Bill. He was taken with the idea of highlighting the elimination of Third World debt as an international millennium project. He accepts all the arguments for playing it long on the election date, but understands the PM’s fear of losing a No Confidence motion after a defeat in Wirral South. ‘I remain convinced that, when it comes to it, it’s the pound in your pocket that determines the way you vote. Always has done, always will.’

In the Members’ Dining Room seven of us played the ‘Who-would-you-like-to-have-lead-your-platoon-into-the-jungle?’ game. Hezza didn’t feature. ‘Too old.’ Major? ‘Too soft.’ Clarke? ‘Too fat.’ The consensus was that Michael Howard might well survive but his men mightn’t; that George Young would be good for morale (‘and at least he’s tall so they’d shoot him first’); but that our front-runners were Roger Freeman and Tom King.