Murderers and Other Friends (14 page)

At Harrow I experimented with various political beliefs. I became, for a short while, a one-boy Communist cell and received instructions from King Street. I greatly admired the anarchists in Andalusia, and found their creed particularly attractive in a school where there were strict rules about the number of jacket buttons you could undo at various stages of your career. I wrote up for anarchist literature but found, quite naturally, that it seemed to be a movement without leadership or a defined programme. I knew, however, that I would always be on the left of the political spectrum. Lord Byron's Turkish slippers and some of his manuscripts were in the school library. I spent some time by the tomb in the churchyard on which he lay to write poetry. He was the one Harrovian with whom I felt any deep sympathy, and he had made a maiden speech in the House of Lords in defence of the unemployed Nottingham stocking weavers, threatened with the death penalty for destroying the machines which were depriving them of work. A close association with the children of the British upper classes at Harrow caused me grave doubts about their ability to run the country. My political path was already determined.

Needless to say, I didn't get to Spain to fight the Fascists. I was an incompetent member of the Corps at Harrow and, at Oxford, found to be medically suspect, so I didn't even fight the Germans or the Japanese. I went from the isolated and privileged world of middle-class education into a propaganda film unit where my friends were carpenters, electricians and prop men, and when I went to meetings I was called not Mortimer, as at school, but Comrade and Brother. I don't think anyone who hasn't lived through those years can understand how different they were from the hopelessly divided and aimless Britain of today. Certainly men and women were dying abroad and in the Blitz, but there was an extraordinary feeling of unity, a common aim which was not only to win the war but to create a juster society after it was over. Now no one can talk of a juster society without being first asked how much it is going to cost and then greeted with almost universal derision.

The longing for fairer times was deep rooted, widespread and passed almost unnoticed. It grew as a result of Army Education and men and women on lonely stations having time to read. When the war in Europe ended, and the election came in 1945, everyone expected Churchill who had, after all, won the battle, to win. The Labour landslide was as great an unexpected victory as Lloyd George's triumph forty years before. It seemed that in the foreseeable future there would be no more unemployment or class divisions, and very few Conservatives. The Attlee government, which introduced a welfare state supported by all parties for many subsequent years, was the most creative and successful of this century. With the gently decreasing faith and optimism with which Graham Greene used to go to Mass, I have continued to vote Labour and have held opinions which now seem, I'm sorry to say, to have gone out of style.

Like the old actors, the politicians of those times were giants compared with their modern counterparts, now that political oratory has degenerated into meaningless sound bites. Nye Bevan could spellbind an audience, introduce the Health Service and turn up at parties of poets and art students. Ernest Bevin was the embodiment of British common sense. The old voice of the Labour Party is, perhaps, too seldom heard now; although you can hear it from Barbara Castle, Minister of Labour under Harold Wilson and rejected by Callaghan, who still brings back the sound of that great government after the war, eloquent, scornful and unfashionably optimistic.

In the forties I was occupied with becoming a barrister, publishing my first novel, making a living for my first wife and various children and stepchildren, divorcing people, contesting wills and writing for anyone who offered to pay me. I contributed to women's magazines, wrote a history of costume for Moss Bros and captions for the Hall of Coal in the Festival of Britain. I had little time for political life. The Attlee government faded in the Age of Austerity, but the old-style paternalistic Conservatives did nothing to destroy the Welfare State and talked to union leaders over beer and sandwiches. I can never understand why this civilized method of government is now thought ludicrously inappropriate.

As I write, the Conservative government is entertaining the nation with a number of more or less ridiculous scandals which seem to forecast its political demise. The same thing happened in the early sixties, when the fact that a Minister of War was sharing a mistress with a Russian diplomat escalated in the most bizarre way and a leading politician offered to be medically examined to establish the fact that he wasn't the mysterious masked man who acted as a butler at orgiastic dinner parties. It also led to Harold Wilson's election as the second Labour Prime Minister since the war. His first government was one of considerable achievement; but when he was later returned to power, after Edward Heath had unwisely tried to tangle with the miners, a good deal of the sparkle seemed to go out of Labour politics. It was during that election, which he won by only a handful of votes, that I first met Mr Wilson.

Stanley Baker, an actor who played heavies, was in charge of Harold Wilson's television commercials and through him I met Marcia Williams, who, though much pilloried in
Private Eye
, had considerable charm and a sort of toothy allure. I was to help write some of Harold Wilson's speeches and, when we met, he seemed enormously cheerful, making a succession of jokes like a sardonic North Country comedian. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Labour voters in most of the wards north of Watford and, when he had discussed them with us, he asked Marcia to come with him when he was to have his ‘photey' taken. I noticed that he kept his best cigars in his briefcase and always smoked a pipe in public. He said if he won the election he'd get the RAF to fly him back to London from his constituency ‘in state'. I wrote a lot of things for him to say, tapping the old well of emotion, never entirely dried up, which had led me to the Labour Party during the war. I have to admit that he rewrote most of it, and since then I have only written for actors and done my best to make sure they don't change the lines.

When the election had been won and the RAF had presumably flown the Prime Minister back to Downing Street, Stanley Baker and I were rewarded by lunch at Number Ten, at which Marcia was present. Something was going on with the Russian fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and Archbishop Makarios, then the Prime Minister of Cyprus, had disappeared in a mysterious manner and his whereabouts were unknown. Before lunch Mr Wilson was saying that he supposed he ought to have sent a British destroyer but he had nothing in the area, and here he grinned at us all, but one small rowing-boat. The conversation turned to a Tory scare about Edward Short, an ex-headmaster and somewhat dull Labour minister, having a Swiss bank account. ‘I don't believe Edward Short's ever been to Switzerland, except on a package tour,' Mr Wilson told us. ‘I'm going to call for a full and impartial judicial inquiry. And what I mean by an impartial inquiry is that when I see my enemy with his balls hanging out and I have a hammer in my hand, I strike!' In time the matter of Edward Short's alleged Swiss bank account, like many better and more fascinating rumours, was flushed down the toilet of history.

At lunch he asked us about the state of the British film industry and said, ‘And how
is
Sir Michael Balcon?' as though the great days of the Ealing comedies had never passed. When the coffee was served, the Prime Minister stood up, chuckling with delight, and made a surprise announcement. ‘We all admire your skirt, Marcia,' he said, ‘but now I want you all to meet a character who has a skirt which is much longer than yours.' At this point a pair of double doors was thrown open and there stood a man with a beard, a tall black hat, a floor-length cassock and a pectoral cross. ‘Archbishop Makarios' – the Prime Minister was clearly delighted with this
coup de théâtre
—
‘I'd like you to meet Stanley Baker and his colleague John Mortimer. You know, we've got the Archbishop into Claridges. The Foreign Office found him a pair of pyjamas; luckily he doesn't need a razor!' We left Downing Street having promised to tell none of the waiting journalists about the surprising appearance of the Archbishop, and that was about the last I had to do with high affairs of state.

The final departure from my father's life, the wrench I was not able to achieve when I stood and thought about it in his room in chambers, happened finally on the other side of the world. It occurred in that Reader's Digest of a city, linked by a causeway to the wilder shores of Malaysia, where they discuss making chewing-gum illegal, where Chinese families burn paper Mercedes, paper TV sets and paper video tapes to placate the spirits of the dead, and where Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who was allergic to opposition politicians, was prime minister for many years and thought that the words law and order were in the wrong position. Order has always seemed more important to Mr Lee than law.

My first trial in Singapore happened long before I took the Great Decision, however. It was the winter of discontent when a few gravediggers went on strike and the British public came to believe that, if you died under a Labour government, you had little or no chance of a decent burial and would probably be put out in a black plastic bag with the rubbish. I was going, I thought, to a tropical Old Bailey, a far-flung outpost of what was once the Empire, where they still wore wigs and gowns and said ‘if your Lordship pleases', and no doubt had tiffin. I discovered that if you are fond of shopping and eating out, Singapore is the place for you. If your interests extend to politics you had better stay away. Mr Jeyaretnam could not control his political longings and refused to leave the country. As a consequence he was the subject of frequent and ferocious litigation which he endured with a courage which I found both magnificent and foolhardy.

Ben Jeyaretnam is a Tamil, a devout Christian who worships in Singapore's Anglican cathedral and took his Bible to comfort him in prison. He was married to an English solicitor and has two sons who both got Double Firsts at Cambridge. He is a grey-haired man with bright brown eyes and a look of resolute cheerfulness, even during the days of direst trouble. He has long mutton-chop whiskers which he strokes repeatedly, as other men might fiddle with executive toys or click worry-beads. He had been a government servant and sat as a judge. His political views are, as far as I could ascertain, those of a right-wing member of the Labour Party. Indeed, if he were in England, he might be a Liberal Democrat. He is opposed to Singapore's draconian laws which prescribe death for a number of offences, flogging for many more, and led not only to the long imprisonment of a woman playwright for expressing her opinions but to the surprising discovery that a tombstone could be guilty of sedition.

In 1971 Ben became the Secretary-General of the Workers Party, an organization which, in the 1968 elections, only fielded two candidates and gained no seats. Despite the government's unassailable position, and the minimal threat to its majority, the Workers Party was accused of being a subversive organization financed from Kuala Lumpur This allegation was made by a candidate for the government party, the PAP, a Mr Tay Boon Too. The Workers Party sued him for libel and lost the case; this was to have important repercussions many years later.

Ben Jeyaretnam stood in the 1976 election. His government opponent dwelt on the fact that he didn't speak Chinese and suggested he would be of no use to his constituents. Nevertheless he got 40 per cent of the votes and he was followed by enthusiastic crowds round the workers' flats who called out ‘we want Jeya!' repeatedly. He became something of a hero for his opposition to the monolithic power of the government, and no doubt began to see himself as a statesman with a popular following, the Nehru or Nelson Mandela of Singapore. The government worked overtime to extinguish such hopes. During the campaign Ben had made some criticism of the Prime Minister and, after the votes had been counted and the inevitable conclusion reached, Mr Lee Kuan Yew issued a writ for libel against him. As Ben wrote later: ‘Lee brought out a QC, Mr Robert Alexander, to appear for him at the trial. I therefore felt I had to get the services of a QC myself. Mr John Mortimer of
Rumpole of the Bailey
fame agreed to come out at a special fee.'

On my first visit the old Singapore hadn't been entirely obliterated or moved into high-rise shopping precincts. A little of Chinatown remained. The food stalls in parking lots and on street corners, where you could dine lavishly for a dollar on savoury Malaysian omelettes and spiced mutton soup, were still there. At Fatty's in Albert Street an almost circular Chinaman used to lay his tables in the middle of the road and serve delectable Cantonese cooking. When the traffic got busy, your table might be seized from under you and hurried inside the restaurant to prevent a collision between the sweet and sour fish and a battered pick-up truck.

Penny and I were taken to Bugis Street where, out of politeness to our hosts, who had recommended this delicacy, I sat nervously eating a grey, ‘hundred-year-old', hard-boiled egg. It started to rain gently as a girl with long legs and the contemptuous expression of a
Vogue
model came towards us, stalking among the stray dogs and cats and the bubbling food stalls as though she were coming down the catwalk at Yves St Laurent. She sat with us and, when asked what she would have, growled, ‘I wanna 7-Up!' in the deep voice of a stoker in the Merchant Navy. She told me that most of the models who hang out in Bugis Street had ‘had the operation' in England. The ‘Billy Boys' who had not been fundamentally changed were condemned by the order and law of Singapore to a side-street. The rain came down harder and we had to leave her and the hundred-year-old egg. Later I read a touching letter in the
Straits Times
: ‘I am a secondary school student and,' the writer confessed, ‘in the past whenever I saw a male transsexual, I would deliberately stare at him as if he was something strange. Now I realize that such people must suffer enough pain without more being inflicted by people like me. [Signed] “Sorry”.'