An Unexpected MP Read online

  ‘See tha fence over theeer?’ he said in his impenetrable Glaswegian accent. ‘Thass weer I shagged the missus for the feer taame.’ And who said that the age of romance is dead?

  There were some speakers who could pull the crowds. As soon as their names appeared on the annunciator the chamber would fill. Michael Foot, Tony Benn and Enoch Powell were firm favourites. Footy was at his best without a note and Powell presented beautifully crafted works of intellectual art. I shared a desk in the library with Enoch for a few months. A tiny, trim little man, with piercing blue eyes and a strong Black Country accent. Macmillan refused to have him sit opposite him in Cabinet as he was of the view that ‘he had the eyes of a fakir’. Enoch was always studiously polite, but didn’t like to be disturbed. He had a way of dealing with snorers. He would creep up behind them and bang two large books together. It always worked.

  He also was rather irritated by the then Commons barber. He was more lethal with a cut-throat razor than Sweeney Todd and made me look as if I had been hurled through a car windscreen the one and only time I used his services. He also never stopped talking. This used to annoy Enoch, as he wished to be immersed in his own thoughts. So on one occasion the barber asked him what sort of haircut he would like. The grim reply was, ‘A silent one.’

  Enoch, although sometimes a little quirky and remote, had a dry sense of humour. Back in the mists of time I was travelling on the train to Oxford to stand in for Ken Clarke (then Secretary of State for Health) at an Oxford Union debate, and found that Enoch was sitting in the seat next to me. We had a delightful chat and as we were walking in the direction of the Union a chanting mob could be heard. Poor Enoch had to put up with a lot of abuse after his Rivers of Blood speech. On one occasion we appeared on Any Questions together. Protesters water-bombed us and the programme came off air for about ten minutes. So I thought that a few words of encouragement were needed during our Oxford walk.

  ‘I’m sorry you have to put up with so much abuse, it must be dreadful.’

  He smiled and simply said, in that lilting Black Country accent, ‘If you listen carefully you will hear that the abuse is aimed at you, not me. I’m off to dinner with some friends.’ And with that he raised his trademark homburg hat and disappeared into the night. He, of course, was quite right. It was my blood the mob was baying for.

  The chamber is the ideal killing field for the assassin. Winston Churchill famously put the boot into Neville Chamberlain with ‘England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.’ But weeks later the coup de grâce was given by Leo Amery (Julian’s father), who invoked the words of Oliver Cromwell when he dissolved the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat here too long for any good you are doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’

  The most devastating and lethal speech I ever heard was Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement. It was said that it took him ten years to make it and ten minutes for his wife Elspeth (a formidable lady) to write it. In those days, if you attacked the leadership it was done through coded language. If ever there was any likelihood of trouble, rather than sit on the benches I’d pop up to the overspill gallery, whereby I was facing colleagues and could see their expressions and gauge the mood of the party. For those not old enough to remember, Thatcher’s star was not just on the wane, it was about to explode. Neil Kinnock was twenty-nine points ahead in the polls. Ministers were being ignored and humiliated by her and none more so than the quiet, gentle and academic Howe. We thought that he would be mildly critical and did not expect the detonation of a political grade-A weapon whose shock waves still resonate throughout the party. It is well worth looking at the film clip. Sitting just behind Howe was my old chum the ginger-haired David Sumberg. When the knife is finally plunged you can see Sumberg’s look of shock and watch him mouth the words ‘fucking hell’. That really summed it up. We knew that now the Lady’s days were numbered.

  A golden rule is that whenever you expect trouble in the chamber it rarely happens. The debate on the Westland debacle, in which Heseltine resigned from Cabinet as secret papers on the ownership of that helicopter company had been leaked to the press, was expected to be a cliffhanger, perhaps the end of the government. To paraphrase, it was all about whether Westland should be owned by the Americans or the Europeans. Hezza thought it was a No. 10 plot to undermine him, which it probably was. In fact, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, treated this extremely seriously and bravely threatened to send Scotland Yard into No. 10 unless there was full cooperation. Thatcher never forgave him and eventually sacked him as Lord Chancellor some years later.

  The time came for the big debate. Although this was essentially a beltway story, the whips were very jittery about the outcome. We were told that the Lady had a letter of resignation in her handbag. Although I never believed a word of it.

  This was Neil Kinnock’s big chance for a knock-out blow. We watched with trepidation as he rose to speak. We shouldn’t have bothered: he bombed. Too wordy, too shouty, and missing his target.

  But Westland claimed the scalp of Trade Secretary Leon Brittan, whose department was accused of leaking the document. I like Leon. Kind, decent, honourable and intelligent. His problem was that he was very tall, a QC, and had the look of an armed robber with a stocking stretched over his head. People thought that he was talking down to them when nothing could be further from the truth. What deeply disturbed me was the whiff of anti-Semitism that began to pollute certain sections of the party. A number of colleagues whispered that the trouble with this Cabinet was that there were too many Estonians and not enough Etonians. I felt ashamed of them.

  But I do like Neil Kinnock. He is brave, good-hearted and great company. He was just unlucky and had a propensity to bang on a bit. He once helped end any hope of a ministerial job for me under the Lady, although I was doing rather well on that score myself. At Prime Minister’s Questions he shouted at her to give the Hon. Member for Harlow a job. Well, that was it.

  I was once at a do where he and Hezza were speaking. We were on a three-line whip, which means that the only excuse for non-attendance is death. I looked at my watch. Five minutes to go. Damn, I was stuffed. When we eventually headed for the door I was looking a bit forlorn. I was due a serious bollocking from the whips. Neil sidled over.

  ‘Don’t worry, boyo, I’ll give you a lift back.’

  So there I was in the back of the Leader of the Opposition’s car with the man himself, sweeping through Carriage Gates. Heaven knows what people would have thought. Neil read my mind.

  ‘Leave it to me, boyo. Look those whip bastards in the eye and tell them you were with me. I’ll ring the Chief and explain.’ To his credit, he did. And my genitalia remained intact. For the time being.

  It is hard to believe that cameras were only introduced into the chamber in the late 1980s – and then only after a row. But the absence of television hid a number of sins, notably of extreme drunkenness and bad behaviour. Viewers would have missed the swaying and the final collapse onto the benches of Nicky Fairburn after slurring a question. They would have also missed a rather drunken Ron Brown throwing the mace to the ground and a senior Labour whip marching in to punch him in the stomach, throw him over his shoulder and give him a good kicking, within earshot of us all.

  Dear old Ron was affable but quite bonkers. His face was horribly scarred after he had received 5,000 volts in an industrial accident. The word was that this had scrambled his brain. I remember coming back from a run and having a shower in the Members’ changing room, then a rather Victorian affair with a tanning lamp that was built in the ’20s and looked as if it was on loan from Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory. A very dangerous machine indeed. Anyhow, as I was sluicing myself down, I heard gruntings and groans and then squeals of ecstasy. I looked in the end cubicle and there was Ron indulging in Ugandan discussions.

  We eventually had a rather pompous debate about what to do with Ron, who, although as mad as a box of frogs
on speed, was quite a pleasant guy. One Tory, it may have been Peter Bottomley, rose to support him. Dear old Peter, although well-meaning, inadvertently had us rocking in the aisles and crying with laughter. ‘Does the House not think’, he said portentously, ‘that we are using a sledgehammer to crack a—’ but before the word ‘nut’ could be uttered the House was too paralysed with mirth to do anything but whoop for the joy of it all.

  Viewers would also have missed out on Dr Alan Glyn, the Member for Windsor. Poor old Alan was very elderly and very infirm and, according to the wonderful Steve Norris, had ‘more dandruff than a dead badger’. He was a small man with a limp and a Hitler moustache. The limp, he claimed, was as a result of him being a British spy monitoring the Soviet invasion of Prague. The truth is that he fell asleep by the road and a Land Rover ran over his leg.

  The old boy had pretty well lost the plot in the 1980s and could barely walk or talk. He would just raise a paw in welcome and wobble off into the distance. Although he did keep repeating, when occasionally speech was restored, that he was both a doctor and a barrister and ‘fucking useless’ at both. The joke was that people wore medical alert bracelets with ‘not to be treated by Dr Glyn’ on them.

  Alan always used to stay at the same hotel in Windsor on election night, with his wife, the delightfully dopey Lady Rosola. In the middle of the night he was desperate for a pee and wandered into what he thought was the bathroom. In fact it was the wardrobe, which fell on top of him. The old boy, after a bit of a struggle, fell asleep. The next morning Lady Rosola noticed that he wasn’t there and assumed he’d gone off to a meeting. So she went home. Of course, Alan was still asleep in the upturned wardrobe, only to be found by a startled chambermaid several hours later.

  Another little oddity viewers would have been interested in were the hairy grey suits worn by Toby Jessel, the Member for Twickenham. I once asked him what they were made of.

  ‘Why, poodle hair, of course,’ he replied, in a way that suggested that anyone who didn’t have a suit made of the stuff must be very eccentric. Evidently some relative used to breed poodles and gave him a bolt of their hair once a year. Perfectly normal.

  The chamber can also show empathy and love. This was evidenced in one of the last days before Geoffrey Dickens tragically died. He was an enormous man, as broad as he was tall. In another incarnation he had been a nightclub bouncer. Sadly, he was struck with cancer, and he wanted to see his old friends for the last time. It was a pitiful sight. There was not an ounce of flesh on him. He hardly had a voice and was connected to a chemo drip. It is on these occasions that the House is at its best. People from all parties rallied round, patted him on the back, gave him a hug, shook him by the hand and wished him well. We all knew that this was the last time he would be with us. It was.

  Geoffrey, in his heyday, was an old right-winger with a foghorn voice. Everyone flooded into the chamber to hear his speech in favour of Clause 28, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Dickens wasn’t blessed with the keenest of intellects and he couldn’t understand why the House was cracking up with laughter at his attempts to be statesmanlike. Lines such as ‘I’m not against homosexuals, many would bend over backwards to help their fellow man’ and ‘I don’t object to homosexuality, it’s just that my constituents don’t want it rammed down their throats’ were delivered with total innocence. He really wasn’t being deliberately homophobic, just a bit dim.

  Some Members are naturally funny. One of my favourite speeches was by Rhodri Morgan (who eventually became a splendid First Minister of Wales). It was at about 5 a.m. and everyone was fairly worse for wear. He was making a speech about the role of Richard Branson, who had been appointed Litter Czar. He reminded us all of the time Branson and Thatcher did a photo shoot picking up litter in St James’s Park. He came out with this cracker:

  ‘Who does she think she is, John F. Kennedy?’ This rather confused us and one drunken voice shouted for an explanation.

  ‘Ich bin ein bin liner,’ he grinned.

  We had been brilliantly set up for that one.

  Sometimes a good lunch would generate serious mischief. My famous question to the Chancellor Nigel Lawson comes to mind. As soon as I got to my feet, two well-refreshed grandees picked me up and suspended me over the benches, just to alleviate the boredom of what was to come. This is probably the only time a parliamentary question has been asked in mid-air. Nigel just couldn’t understand why my supplementary caused so much hilarity. He was, of course, facing the opposite direction.

  Mind you, Nigel was a genius at the despatch box. One night we heard that some official in the Treasury had cocked up a major privatisation. Lawson was due to make a statement at ten. We all trooped in expecting humiliation and disaster. In he marched with a statement scribbled on the back of an envelope. Heaven knows what he said, it was all horribly technical. But it solved the problem and we cheered him to the rafters. He had saved the day. It was a tragedy when he was forced to resign.

  One strange ritual which has now been abolished was the little bit of theatre when an MP wanted to raise a point of order during a debate. To be called by the Speaker, the MP would have to reach under the Serjeant-at-Arms’ chair and remove a collapsible top hat, sit down, put it on and make his point of order. When finished, he would toss it across the chamber like a Frisbee to anyone else who wanted to raise a point of order. Some of the old boys used to get very excited when the lovely Clare Short sat there in the top hat. They thought that she looked very burlesque. In those days they were a pretty sexist lot. And it could become very uncomfortable when some of the post-erectionists wanted to wax lyrical about the sexual charms of Margaret Thatcher.

  Sometimes, Hansard writers (the people who take a shorthand note of proceedings) get it horribly wrong. It’s rare, but it happens. The classic was when John Butterfill gave a perfectly straightforward supplementary question to some minister. When he checked the record the next day to admire his words of wisdom, they had been traduced to ‘this is total bollocks’. How that ever appeared is still one of the great unsolved parliamentary mysteries. The chamber is a funny old place.

  CHAPTER 4

  ANNIE’S BAR

  One of the most fascinating institutions on the parliamentary estate was Annie’s Bar. I say ‘was’ simply because this jewel in the crown of Westminster watering holes is no more. It is deceased. And it had beautiful plumage. Yet it was pushed off its perch by hair-shirted Blairites who didn’t approve of the drinking culture that had dominated the place for so many years and despised by the new breed of well-scrubbed Follettised Labour women who convinced themselves that anyone who was over the age of forty, liked a drink and possessed a penis (whether in working order or not) was the enemy. Quite why women are known as the gentler sex is a total mystery to me. Covering their antics for Her Majesty’s press for a few years showed many of them to be the most ruthless, hard-nosed bunch it has ever been my misfortune to encounter, making Lucretia Borgia look like Shirley Temple. You may recall that Barbara Follett was a Labour MP evangelical about getting more women into Parliament and gave hopefuls lessons in what to wear to make an impact with selection committees. We once did a television interview about women.

  ‘And what have the Tories ever done for women?’ she snarled.

  ‘Well, we made Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister,’ I offered.

  ‘But she was not really a woman, was she?’ This caused me sleepless nights. But there is an uncomfortable truth that there are still not enough women in Parliament. Harriet Harman has been fearless and determined, as has David Cameron. But all parties still have a very long way to go. What is an even worse national disgrace is the inequality of pay between the sexes, which still persists.

  I was blessed with the extraordinarily high calibre of the women MPs I encountered when I was first elected. The likes of Dame Elaine Kellett Bowman, Dame Janet Fookes, Dame Marion Roe, Dame Jill Knight and Edwina Currie were all highly intelligent, opinionated and incredibly brav
e. If any mere man tried to patronise them you would find out who the superior sex really was. And on the Labour side you had Audrey Wise, Gwyneth Dunwoody, Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell, Clare Short and Margaret Hodge; none would take any nonsense. There were many more. All of these women were formidable but kept their femininity. If someone had told them to ‘calm down, dear’ in the chamber they would have either regarded it as a bad attempt at humour or just defenestrated the poor sod.

  I was particularly fond of Gwyneth Dunwoody. She was delightful, but terrified the life out of most of her colleagues. One day I was being playful with her in the chamber. Afterwards I sidled up to her cheerily, saying words to the effect of ‘that was fun’. She just smiled at me, said, ‘Just like this,’ and kneed me in the groin. I had learned my lesson.

  Dame Elaine Kellett Bowman, the feisty MP for Lancaster, didn’t take any prisoners either. She used to call me Bubbles, after the famous Pears soap painting of a little boy with blond curly hair blowing bubbles. She was well known for treating Budget Day as a very special event. So much so that rather than queue up outside the chamber before it was unlocked to guarantee a seat, she used to sleep wedged against the door on the cold stone floor in a sleeping bag.

  One morning I passed her recumbent form only to spot the wonderfully outrageous Nicky Fairbairn standing over her, having a swig from the phial of vodka he used to keep in the top of his silver-topped walking cane. It was, after all, quite late at 8 a.m. ‘You know, Jerry, this is how I love to see her. Comatose.’ And off he staggered to refill his morning’s supply. He wouldn’t have had the nerve to say that if she had been awake.