Breaking the Code (83 page)

Theatre Royal, Newcastle. I spent the day in the House Manager's office writing up my interview with John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State. He didn't give much away – beyond a huge dressing gown which had been presented to him as a present in South Africa and which he decided to offload onto me. ‘It'll make a change from your bloody ridiculous jumpers.'

He has a colourful way with words. When I arrived at his office – Dover House, Whitehall – I was told he was running late. But I knew he was there because I could hear him stomping about and swearing like a trooper. The air was blue with his effing and blinding, but when, finally, I was admitted to his presence he was all smiles. It's a nice office – spacious, gracious, overlooking Horse Guards Parade, with its own small garden – and I imagine the trappings of power have helped him go native.

Does he share my misgivings about the impending war against Iraq?

‘No. Tony [Blair] has got good judgement and the courage to be a little ahead of one – and that's what you want from your leaders – and, hopefully, it'll work out.'

‘Thousands could be killed, John. Innocent people, children. Do you lose sleep about that?'

‘I do. I do think about that, and so does Tony, I'm sure. Blimey, you can't help thinking it.'

I filed the interview at 6.00 p.m. and at 7.30 p.m. I was on stage for the show. This is a lovely theatre (Frank Matcham, 1901) and the audience was perfect. Twenty minutes in I had found all the energy I needed. Tonight there really was magic in the air. Halfway through the performance Andrew C. Wadsworth said to me in the wings, ‘This is one of my happiest ever nights in the theatre.'

I am on the train back to Victoria, writing up my interview with Edwina [Currie]. She has been giving me a masterclass in the art of adultery. ‘Only meet your lover every two weeks,' she counsels. ‘If you leave it much longer between encounters, it's harder to recover the feeling. If you meet too frequently, you get completely overwhelmed. You can get addicted to this sort of thing, you know, so it's unwise to be doing it every week or every night. Once a fortnight is about right.'

My friend knows of what she speaks. In 1984, when she was thirty-seven and a recently elected backbench MP, she embarked on a four-year affair with John Major, then forty-one and a government whip. Her revelation of the affair [in her parliamentary diaries, published this week] has brought the world's press to a handsome, converted malthouse in Nutfield, Surrey, where, with cameras, microphones and notebooks at the ready, they are encamped around the self-confessed adulteress's front door. Because I am a chum and have been invited to lunch, I slip in through the back door unnoticed.

It is a tasty lunch, prepared and served by Edwina's new husband, John Jones, sixty-one, a good-humoured chain-smoking former Metropolitan Police detective, who seems to have the measure of his wife. When Edwina shows him a picture of her and me together at Oxford and giggles, ‘Doesn't Gyles look like a young John Major?', Mr Jones chuckles obligingly, pours out the coffee and says, ‘I'll leave you two to get on with it.'

Given the media scrum she has been in all week, and the obloquy that, generally, has been heaped upon her, Edwina is looking remarkably pulled together. ‘I'm shattered,' she says, ‘but I'm okay.'

‘Are you really?' I ask.

She doesn't answer. She claps her hands and laughs. ‘This Sunday I could have talked to the
News of the World
for £50,000. I'd far rather talk to you for love. Where shall we begin?'

‘At the beginning,' I suggest. ‘When exactly did the affair start?'

‘I can't tell you because I can't remember. It was in the autumn of 1984. I didn't write anything down deliberately because it seemed to me the best camouflage was to leave no traces, but in my little appointments diary there's a big star against a certain date early in December 1984 so I think we'd got there by then.'

I want to discover things the published diaries don't reveal. ‘How did you and John Major organise your trysts?'

‘Sex is important to you,' I say, a little awkwardly.

‘I like it,' she says, grinning at me. She opens her eyes wide: ‘I like it, Gyles, I like it … I wish John could have been as good a Prime Minister as he was a lover.'

I think he was a good Prime Minister. Edwina disagrees. And that's why she has decided to tell all. ‘There has been this huge mystery as to how the party began to collapse so spectacularly. What happened? Whose fault was it? Was it an accident? I don't think it was an accident. I think it could have been avoided. I felt I had a duty to report and put in my piece of the jigsaw – and a hell of a big piece it was.'

‘Oh come on, Edwina, let's keep this in perspective. How big a piece was it really? Wasn't it just a four-year bonk?'

‘No, no, not at all.' She narrows her eyes. Clearly I am missing the point. Patiently she tries to explain:

‘There are two puzzles about John Major. The first puzzle was how this interesting, warm, intelligent man, who, on a personal basis, was a great guy, could come across to the public as so wooden and boring. He did. We can't argue with that. But the greater puzzle was how come someone who was a serious risk-taker, a chancer, an imaginative leaper in the dark, someone who was not by nature cautious, suddenly became a man who found it almost impossible to take a decision and whose entire administration was bedevilled by procrastination, incompetence and lack of intelligence?'

She pauses, smiles coquettishly and raises an eyebrow: ‘Could it be that during the '80s, when he was a junior minister, he was getting a lot of help and encouragement from certain quarters that wasn't available later?'

So it wasn't the fiasco of the ERM, the rows over the Maastricht Treaty and a rapidly dwindling majority that brought about the demise of John Major's government. It was the fact that Edwina was no longer on hand to help steel her man and steer the ship of state.

You couldn't make it up – but, amazingly, I think she believes it.

She has not done this for the money – certainly. She has done it because she feels she is being written out of history and wants us to know that she was there. She has done it, too, because John Major (understandably) made no mention of her in his memoirs and that's rankled.

The real horror of what she's done is the hurt she will have caused Norma – the embarrassment that will never go away. I wish she had kept her secret and I tell her so. And to make sure that I don't give her a false impression as to whose side I am on, at the end of our conversation I produce a piece of paper I have brought with me:

‘Edwina, you say that you have published your diary as a piece of history. I accept that. But can I read to you what I fear may be the verdict of history on you? I wrote this on the train coming to see you. “As a broadcaster, as a novelist, as a parliamentarian,
she was of little consequence. Her only claim to fame was as an aspiring politician's easy lay.”'

Edwina interrupts: ‘I wasn't easy—'

‘Let me finish. “And what is worse, she was guilty of hurting and humiliating someone who did her no harm.”'

Edwina's eyes are full of tears.

‘Gyles, I have lived my life in a truthful way. It is better to live with the truth, however unpalatable, than to live with a rosy fiction that is actually very cruel to all the people involved. I do not feel guilty. I am not ashamed. When I was a little girl, my mother used to say, “Always remember: God is watching.” Well, I do.'

I went to the memorial service for Gerald Campion at St Paul's, Covent Garden. His performance as Billy Bunter on TV throughout the '50s was one of the delights of my childhood. It was a privilege to know him.

The memorial service for Iain Duncan Smith will be upon us shortly, I'm sure of that. His support at Westminster has evaporated completely. The week has been a total fiasco. It began with him stamping his foot about gay adoption – demanding support he could not command. By close of play on Monday, when a third of the Conservative Party in Parliament had failed to follow him into the required division lobby, even his friends were shaking their heads wearily. They knew it was a mess, and wholly unnecessary.

What they had not reckoned on – nobody had – was their leader's ability to turn a crisis into a calamity. Monday night's high drama became Tuesday morning's high farce. First, IDS failed to turn up at a scheduled press conference on housing (leaving two hapless front-bench colleagues, unbriefed, facing the cameras and blowing in the wind); next, amid mounting hysteria, he summoned the media to Central Office, managed to be filmed at the window gauchely rehearsing what the hacks took to be his resignation speech, and then appeared, not to fall on his sword, but to brandish it in the face of his colleagues and demand that the party ‘unite or die'. It wasn't heroic: it was just embarrassing.

On Monday night, he shot himself in the foot. On Tuesday he shot himself in the face. He is now fatally wounded. The party will survive, but he will die: it is not a question of if, but when.
691

We had a wonderful show last night [of
Zipp!
at the Duchess Theatre] and two strong shows today. And in between I joined the peace march along the Strand – my first peace march since I took part in the great anti-Vietnam War march on Washington DC in 1966, when I was eighteen. This war against Iraq is wrong – and if Ken Clarke had become leader of the Conservative Party we might have been spared British involvement. Ken has been against it from the start. Given the number of Labour MPs against it, without whole-hearted Conservative support Blair might not be able to get the vote he needs in the House of Commons.
692

This was the week that war broke out – and I was the subject of
This Is Your Life.
According to President Bush and his sidekick, Tony Blair, the mission is straightforward: ‘to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people'. It may prove easier said than done, but what do I know? The invasion began on Wednesday. On Thursday the [Duchess] theatre was empty (almost) – though the show went well. And tonight, at 9.45 p.m., on stage, as the curtain fell and we were taking our calls, Michael Aspel suddenly appeared, holding his red book… ‘Gyles Brandreth, this is your life…'

It was completely, wholly, utterly unexpected. The cast had dropped not a hint. The ‘catch' achieved, I assumed the filming of the show would happen at a later date, but no: it happens right away, before the ‘subject' gets a chance to run away or change their mind. By the time we got to the studio it was gone 11.00 p.m. By the time the recording was done, it was one in the morning! I walked through as though in a trance. Only two things that I remember now clearly: 1) feeling sorry for the studio audience who had waited all evening to discover who the subject was and it turned out to be me; 2) feeling
overwhelmed with pride – and joy – and gratitude – when the doors on the set opened and my lovely wife and three gorgeous children walked on. They looked so
beautiful
.

Baghdad has fallen; Tikrit has fallen; essentially the Iraq War is won, even if the fighting hasn't stopped. I am having coffee at the Salvador Dali Museum by the St Petersburg Quayside, Sarasota, Florida, USA. The sun is shining brightly. (Perhaps God approves of our victory?) I flew in to Tampa last night to appear on the Home Shopping Network at five o'clock this morning to sell the Teddy Bear Museum range of bears to HSN viewers across the nation. Mission accomplished, I am flying back home tonight. As they say: you couldn't make it up.

Rosa Monckton's KIDS Gala at the Grosvenor House Antiques Fair. Rosa's daughter, Domenica, has Down's syndrome and, famously, Diana, Princess of Wales was her godmother. But for her death Diana would have been doing the honours tonight, but in her place we have the next best thing – the actress Elizabeth Hurley – and a very good thing she turns out to be. She even comes equipped with her own equerry: her discreetly charming boyfriend, Ram. As master of ceremonies, before dinner it is my duty to escort Elizabeth around the assorted Antiques Fair stands. I do just that and I have to report that La Hurley plays her part to perfection: she is a princess in all but title. At several of the stands, the people she meets curtsey to her. I promise this is true.

When we have walked the circuit (and Ram has collected the assorted posies and gifts presented to Elizabeth and is clutching them manfully to his chest) it is time to draw the raffle. This we do halfway up the grand staircase in the Great Room: me in the middle, Elizabeth on one side and the Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, on the other. ‘Here they are,' I announce, ‘Elizabeth Hurley, cutie, and Cherie Booth QC.' The crowd cheers indulgently as we draw ticket after ticket after ticket… There are too many prizes in every raffle in my experience, but what can you do? We do our best and just as we are nearing the end of the ordeal I suddenly feel a hand tugging at my trousers and I hear a voice – an American voice – hissing at me: ‘Gyles. Gyles! We've got royalty here. American royalty.' I look down and there is Ruby Wax, on her knees by my knees. ‘Come on, kid. Get done with the raffle. Liza Minnelli is waiting.'