Breaking the Code E-Book

Gyles Brandreth

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1228

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

"Brandreth is the true Samuel Pepys of our day." Andrew Neil, BBC Radio Five Live "Brandreth, for my money, offers about the most honest, and the most amusing, account of the demented, beery futility of the Tory-ruled Commons in the 1990s." Boris Johnson, Daily Telegraph "Hilariously acute ... Irresistible." Matthew d'Ancona, Sunday Telegraph "Extremely touching ... Brandreth emerges as a decent, amusing, talented and charming man." Simon Heffer, Daily Mail "As a witty and insightful chronicler ... Brandreth is unsurpassed." Michael Simmons, The Spectator Gyles Brandreth's revealing journal paints an extraordinary portrait of Whitehall and Westminster in our time - warts and all. Brandreth - MP for Chester and government whip - enjoyed a ringside seat at the great political events of the 1990s, from the fall of Margaret Thatcher to the election of Tony Blair. With candid descriptions of the key figures of the era, from the leading players to the ministers who fell from grace, and a cast that includes the Queen, Bill Clinton and Joanna Lumley, these widely acclaimed diaries provide a fascinating insight into both the reality of modern government and the bizarre life of a parliamentary candidate and new MP. Controversially, Breaking the Code also contains the first ever insider's account of the hitherto secret world that is the Government Whips' Office. This new, complete edition features material previously excised for legal reasons, as well as additional diaries that take the story on another ten years to the departure of Tony Blair and the arrival as Tory leader of David Cameron - a bright young hopeful when Brandreth first meets him in 1993.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FORBREAKING THE CODE

‘A wonderful book. A serious contribution to history, as well as funny and touching, Breaking the Code is how politics genuinely is.’

DANIEL FINKELSTEIN, THE TIMES

‘Searingly honest, wildly indiscreet, and incredibly funny … Breaking the Code is the best book I’ve read this year.’

LYNDA LEE-POTTER, DAILY MAIL

‘Brandreth is the true Samuel Pepys of our day.’

ANDREW NEIL, BBC RADIO FIVE LIVE

‘Brandreth, for my money, offers about the most honest, and the most amusing, account of the demented, beery futility of the Tory-ruled Commons in the 1990s.’

BORIS JOHNSON, DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘Hilariously acute … Portraits withering in their accuracy … Irresistible.’

MATTHEW D’ANCONA, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘One of the most attractive things about these diaries is that the diarist is (like Alan Clark) one of those who can admit, even to himself, to having human weaknesses … Extremely touching … Brandreth emerges as a decent, amusing, talented and charming man.’

SIMON HEFFER, DAILY MAIL

‘The sheer madness of Westminster is perfectly reproduced.’

IAN AITKEN, THE GUARDIAN

‘As a witty and insightful chronicler Mr Brandreth is unsurpassed.’

MICHAEL SIMMONDS, THE SPECTATOR

‘Brandreth has produced something unexpected: a political book about the Major years which makes perfect holiday reading … A fine and sympathetic writer – a good witness. His unpretentious book should stay in the repertoire for many years.’

MICHAEL HARRINGTON, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘Lots of good raw material here for historians.’

IAN MCINTYRE, THE TIMES

‘This book is a joy. For anyone interested in politics – indeed, for anyone not particularly interested in politics, but still fascinated by people – it’s a complete delight. It is funny, informative and irreverent, and, more important still, it opens a window on the Westminster world which has been tightly shut since some time in the middle of the last century … Shrewd … Perceptive … And really very, very funny.

I laughed until I almost cried … You can open the book at any page and read with relish.’

JULIA LANGDON, GLASGOW HERALD

‘Brandreth proves to be an entertaining, indiscreet and fluent diarist.’

ALAN TAYLOR, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

‘Enormously entertaining.’

SIMON EVANS, BIRMINGHAM POST

For Michèle

who had the worst of it

and made the best of it

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationIntroductionAbbreviationsFootnotingEpigraphI 1990II 1991III 1992IV 1993V 1994VI 1995VII 1996VIII 1997Postscript: May 1997–June 2007Afterword: July 2014IndexCopyright

INTRODUCTION

Can history repeat itself?

Not exactly – of course not. But I must say, as I sit here in the summer of 2015, re-reading my diary from the 1990s, there are aspects of the past that seem to be very present.

In 1992, I became an MP at the general election where almost every opinion poll leading up to polling day predicted either a hung parliament or a small Labour majority. In the event, the Conservative Party, led by John Major, won the election and secured an overall majority of twenty-one seats in the House of Commons. The expectations of the pollsters and the pundits were confounded: the voters, it turned out, did not see the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, as a potential Prime Minister. In retrospect, Mr Kinnock’s triumphalist cry of ‘We’re all right’, delivered at a rally in Sheffield eight days before polling, was seen as premature.

At the 2015 general election, where again almost every opinion poll predicted a hung parliament or a narrow Labour victory, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, a week before polling day, unveiled an eight-foot, six-inch slab of limestone inscribed with six pledges and promised to erect the mighty stone in the garden of 10 Downing Street when he became Prime Minister. It was not to be. The Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, won the election and secured an overall majority of twelve seats in the House of Commons.

Mr Major’s re-election in 1992 was unexpected, but he did not have long to savour his success. As you will discover (or be reminded) in the pages that follow, within weeks of his electoral triumph, his party was engulfed in what amounted to a European civil war. And in 2015, within weeks of Mr Cameron’s unexpected outright election victory, this is the front-page headline in the Daily Telegraph on the day that I happen to be writing this: ‘Tory mutiny on EU referendum: Downing Street chaos’.

As a good European, Alphonse Karr, sometime editor of Le Figaro, famously put it, way back in 1849: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Of course, things do change. The drama of Mr Cameron’s premiership will be different from Mr Major’s in many ways, although, incredibly, some of the cast – almost a quarter of a century on – remain the same. (The political cartoon in today’s paper features Ken Clarke and John Redwood, as recognisable as ever and both still MPs.) One thing that the Cameron and Major administrations will have in common, however, is their dependence on the Government Whips’ Office.

John Major began his second term as Prime Minister with a majority of twenty-one. As his years in office rolled by, death, disloyalty and defection reduced that majority to nil. David Cameron has begun his second term as Prime Minister with a majority of just twelve. Managing a government with a wafer-thin majority is not easy and the Government Whips’ Office is central to the endeavour. And how it does that job is at the heart of this book, which is why, when the book first appeared, a number of good people – friends and former colleagues – viewed its publication as an act of betrayal.

On the first anniversary of the 1997 general election, when extracts from my diary appeared in a Sunday newspaper, the Conservative Chief Whip telephoned me at home. He was a model of quietly spoken courtesy. I would have expected nothing less: James Arbuthnot, MP for North East Hampshire until 2015, is a gentleman. (Eton, Captain of School; Trinity College, Cambridge; in the expenses furore of 2009, he immediately apologised and repaid the public funds he had claimed for the cleaning of his swimming pool.) He said to me, ‘Gyles, you do know that you are breaking the whips’ code, don’t you?’

I did. And it troubled me. Government whips do not talk about their work, do not discuss their role, do not describe the way they go about their business. They never have – or, at least, they never had until I published Breaking the Code.

The day after getting the Chief Whip’s call I happened to find myself at a BBC studio talking to Anthony Howard, veteran political commentator and then (perhaps appropriately, under the circumstances) obituaries editor of The Times.

‘I’ve got a moral dilemma with these diaries,’ I said.

‘No, you haven’t,’ said Tony. ‘You’ve got a personal dilemma. It’s not a moral issue. Government whips are government ministers, paid for by the taxpayer. What they do and how they do it are matters of legitimate public interest. If by publishing your diaries you’ll be burning your bridges, that’s a personal matter. That’s for you to decide.’

I decided to take the risk, not only for reasons of cash and vanity, not simply because I enjoy reading other people’s diaries and I hope that others may enjoy reading mine, but because I was not convinced that the secrecy surrounding the Whips’ Office – and much else that happens in Westminster and Whitehall – is either right or necessary.

In my telephone conversation with the Chief Whip, he reminded me that part of the potency of the Whips’ Office derives from the mystery surrounding it. He echoed Walter Bagehot’s famous line on the monarchy: ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic.’ But Bagehot died in 1877. We are now well into the twenty-first century and whips are neither magicians nor Freemasons: they are Members of Parliament with a specific job to do. Their task is to manage and secure the parliamentary business of the government of the day and, in so doing, manage and understand their fellow MPs. If they are more open about the way they operate I can see no harm in it, and, even, some good.

On the day Breaking the Code was published, a large brown envelope was delivered to my front door. Inside it was a second envelope. Inside that was a sheet of white paper that contained nothing but a large black spot: a mark of shame. I had betrayed the Office and the Office wanted to make that fact clear to me. I was not in any doubt and so not surprised, in the months that followed, to find former fellow whips, when I chanced to meet them or to pass them in the street in Westminster, avoiding my eye or, in some cases, deliberately turning away and cutting me.

It is more than twenty years since I joined the Whips’ Office and I believe by most (if not all) of my former colleagues I have now been forgiven – or forgotten. Happily, Breaking the Code was well received when it appeared – and not only by the reviewers. Several of the leading characters in the narrative wrote to tell me that I had got it ‘about right’. The book played a part in the development of two successful plays about the workings of the Whips’ Office: Whipping It Up by Steve Thompson (2006) and This House by James Graham (2012). And in 2005, a former head of the Whips’ Office, Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry, Chief Whip during Margaret Thatcher’s final year in power, published his own account of the history and practice of parliamentary whipping.

These diaries, of course, cover more than my sojourn in the Whips’ Office. The extracts begin in May 1990, when I was deciding it was about time I got into Parliament, and end in May 1997, when the electors of Chester decided it was time I got out. Those seven years take us from the fall of Margaret Thatcher to the election of Tony Blair, and in choosing the material for publication – reducing the potential of more than a million words to one manageable volume – my aim has been to provide both an informal record of some eventful years in British politics and one individual’s account of the everyday reality of what is involved in becoming a parliamentary candidate, securing a seat, fighting an election, arriving at Westminster, and, once there, attempting to climb the greasy pole. In its way, I hope that aspect of the book is as revelatory as my account of life as a government whip.

In 1990, I was working mainly in television and publishing. I was also non-executive director of a successful company (Spear’s Games, manufacturers of Scrabble) and deputy chairman of a failing one (the Royal Britain exhibition at London’s Barbican). In my spare time I was actively involved in the work of the National Playing Fields Association, the national trust of recreational space. Once I became an MP, I was wholly engrossed in my political life. For five years my routine hardly varied: Mondays to Thursdays I was at Westminster, morning, noon and night. I would leave my home in Barnes, south-west London, at 7.00 a.m. and get back at midnight. On Fridays and at weekends I was mostly in my constituency. I hope I was a conscientious MP. I certainly tried to be. The diary was written in various places: in my study at home in Barnes; in bed at our flat in the centre of Chester; on trains and planes going to and from the north-west; at the House of Commons, occasionally in the Chamber itself, mostly in the Silent Room in the House of Commons Library, my favourite place in my favourite part of the Palace of Westminster. I have a wonderful wife and remarkable children. That they barely feature here reflects not only the editing process, but also the fact that the committed MP all too easily loses sight of his family.

When I was at Oxford in the late 1960s, I was interviewed by the Sun newspaper and, if the cutting is to be believed, boldly declared that my life’s ambition was ‘to be a sort of Danny Kaye and then Home Secretary’. My plan didn’t quite work out. I became a minor-league TV presenter and a Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty’s Treasury. I have no regrets, but no illusions either. These are not a distinguished Cabinet minister’s memoirs. These are the daily jottings of a novice backbencher turned government whip. They reveal assorted weaknesses: impatience, intolerance, intemperance, vanity, egoism, faulty judgement, lack of discretion, absurd ambition (quite embarrassing at times), a naive eagerness to please. Alarmingly, I am not sure they reveal any strengths at all – other than a keen sense of the absurd. But they are what they are, edited yes, but undoctored, presented as they were written on the day, without stylistic improvement, without benefit of hindsight.

Meeting Gordon Brown at 11 Downing Street in 1998 (he was not recruiting me to the Third Way: we were having coffee after appearing on Frost on Sunday), the then Chancellor of the Exchequer told me that he had enjoyed reading my account of life at the Treasury under Kenneth Clarke and Norman Lamont. ‘I was particularly fascinated by the meeting you called “Prayers”,’ he said. ‘We don’t have “Prayers”.’ Times change. Longserving MPs of all parties tell me that the camaraderie and clubbability of the House of Commons that I knew in the 1990s has gone. The more civilised working hours introduced by New Labour have seen to that. And several MPs from intakes after mine have told me that, having read my diaries, they marvelled at the ready and regular access backbenchers had to the most senior members of the government in John Major’s day.

John Major is the principal player in this story. He makes an unlikely hero: he is not ‘box office’ in the way that Margaret Thatcher was. But to me he is a hero nonetheless and, re-reading these diaries and reflecting on his record and on the way he kept the show on the road in the most inauspicious circumstances, my admiration for him continues to grow. He is more interesting than most people realise, and more achieving. It is not easy being Prime Minister, as Gordon Brown demonstrated.

‘A decent man dealt an unlucky hand,’ was Douglas Hurd’s assessment of Mr Major. What history’s judgement will be is still too soon to tell. What is certain is that John Major led the Conservative Party to a remarkable victory against the odds in 1992 and led them to an historic defeat in 1997. What happened in between is what this book is about.

As a postscript, I have added some extracts from my diaries covering the decade following 1997. I have included them to tie up a few loose ends and to give a flavour of ‘what happened next’, but I have kept them brief because in politics, in my experience, you are either in the game or you are out of it. For a few years I was in it and – for all the horrors I describe in the pages that follow – there is nowhere else that I would rather have been.

Gyles Brandreth

2015

ABBREVIATIONS

A – also known as Drinks – the meeting of a team of supportive backbench MPs specially recruited by the Whips’ Office

BNFL – British Nuclear Fuels Ltd

CGT – Capital Gains Tax

CSA – Child Support Agency

DfE – Department for Education

DNH – Department of National Heritage

DoE – Department of the Environment

DoH – Department of Health

DPM – Deputy Prime Minister

DSS – Department of Social Security

DTI – Department of Trade and Industry

ECOFIN – Meeting of the EU Economic and Finance Ministers

EDCP – Ministerial Committee on the Coordination and Presentation of Government Policy

EDM – Early Day Motion

EMU – Economic and Monetary Union

ERM – Exchange Rate Mechanism

ETB – English Tourist Board

FCO – Foreign and Commonwealth Office

GATT – General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

HRH – His Royal Highness: in the context of the diaries, usually the Duke of Edinburgh

IGC – Inter-Governmental Conference

MBNA – Maryland Bank of North America

MEP – Member of the European Parliament

MoD – Ministry of Defence

NFU – National Farmers’ Union

NPFA – National Playing Fields Association

PC – Privy Counsellor

PMQs – Prime Minister’s Questions

PPC – Prospective Parliamentary Candidate

PPS – Parliamentary Private Secretary

PR – Proportional Representation

PUSS – Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State

Q – a weekly meeting of backbench MPs supportive of the government

QMV – Qualified Majority Voting

RHF – Right Honourable Friend

SDP – Social Democratic Party

SFO – Serious Fraud Office

SoS – Secretary of State

UU – Ulster Unionist

FOOTNOTING

I have tried to keep footnotes to a minimum, but felt it right to include brief details of the constituencies of Members of Parliament when they make their first appearance in the diary. When their party allegiance is not given they are Conservatives. If they have died since the diary was written I have added their dates as well. I have also provided footnotes introducing members of my family and friends on their first appearance, but not people to whom only passing reference is made or whose names will be familiar already to the general reader.

‘Nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all.’

ARTHUR BALFOUR, PRIME MINISTER 1902–6

CHAPTER I

1990

TUESDAY 1 MAY 1990

I spoke, not very well, at the London Playing Fields Society centenary dinner at the Savoy.1 The meal was something of a struggle. I was seated next to Field Marshal The Lord Bramall KG, GCB, OBE, MC, JP,2 whose terrible dandruff was wafted straight from his left shoulder onto my petit tournedos de boeuf aux echalotes every time a waiter breezed past. The Duke of Gloucester gave his I’m-rather-shy-but-really-very-willing-decent-and-determined speech (which went down well) and our diminutive Minister for Sport3 scored with a nice mixture of laughs and exhortation. As he left he said to me, ‘When are you joining us at Westminster?’ I said ‘I don’t think I am’, but, of course, I want to.

SUNDAY 6 MAY 1990

Breakfast at TV-am4 with Brian Johnston5 (who is lovely and up there with the Queen Mother as one of the four or five people in the land who can do no wrong) and Carol Thatcher6 (who is lovely too in her funny lumpen way and who’s played a fairly tricky hand pretty faultlessly). We talked about Michael Whitehall7 and Carol said Michael’s story about the taxi is quite true. When they were going out, Michael picked her up at No. 10 one evening and asked to use the phone to ring for a cab.

‘Where are we picking up from, guv?’

‘Downing Street,’ said Michael.

‘Oh, yeah?’ said the voice, ‘No. 10 is it?’

‘Yes,’ said Michael.

‘Oh, yeah?’ repeated the voice, ‘And what name is it?’

‘Whitehall.’

‘Oh yeah. A likely story.’ At which point Carol grabbed the phone from Michael and said, ‘We’d like a taxi for Whitehall at 10 Downing Street please.’

‘Oh yeah. And I suppose you’re called Thatcher are you?’

‘As a matter of fact, I am.’

The taxi never came.

BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY, 7 MAY 1990

Simon8 came for lunch. He’s been out of Noel & Gertie for two weeks having an ingrown hair removed from under his left arm. We laughed a lot, but he seemed a bit bleak. He went off to see Frankie Howerd’s one-man show and we stayed in and watched Ken Dodd’s This Is Your Life.

TUESDAY 8 MAY 1990

TV-am and breakfast with John Denver.9 On to Royal Britain10 and more crisis talks. Walk to the Savoy for the NPFA fund-raising lunch. Prince Philip11 (in his electric taxi) arrived ten minutes early, but this time (unlike last time when I was in the loo) I was on the doorstep ready and waiting. He’s very good: easy, relaxed, apparently interested, informed, concerned etc. even though, poor bugger, he’s been at it relentlessly for forty years plus. At the lunch – a smallish group, selected high-rollers (at least, that was the idea…) – HRH spoke well: no notes (certainly not the ones I’d provided!) and his usual trick of being sufficiently indiscreet to make his audience feel they were being ‘let in’ on something. Colin Sanders,12 bless him, offered £50,000 there and then. So did Roger Levitt.13

Supper with Anne Maxwell14 in her basement flat in Ladbroke Grove. There’s a touch of the Carol Thatcher good-hearted jolly-hockey-sticks about her, and, like Carol vis-à-vis Mrs T., Anne manages to be loyal to her awesome parent without apparently becoming his creature. I’m not sure the same can be said about brother Kevin who left the table at ten to return to the office: ‘There’s a lot still to do tonight. I’ve got to sign an Australian affidavit. It certainly can’t wait till morning.’

WEDNESDAY 9 MAY 1990

At Royal Britain our overdraft has topped the million mark and is being extended little by little (guaranteed by Richard)15 while we search for extra funds and/or a buyer. John Broome, founder of Alton Towers, came today and declared that he would take it on – for a controlling interest. He’d pick up the overdraft and spend £2.5 million to give the show the ‘wow’ factor and jack up the marketing. Was it all bluff and bombast? We left it that he’ll come again and take a closer look – when he gets back from his day-trip to New York tomorrow…

Lunch at the House of Lords with Lord Raglan,16 Prince Philip’s suggestion as NPFA’s man in Wales. Amiable, clear-thinking, amusing – and the name has a ring to it. Lord Longford pottered up and asked if I was still standing on my head. Then he tried to persuade me to show him there and then. I told Raglan that Longford was the only man I knew who could embrace a totally naked woman and apparently not notice it.17

THURSDAY 10 MAY 1990

TV-am. On air at 6.10 a.m. At 7.30 a.m. breakfast at the RAC with decent, generous Christopher Laing,18 who confides that he’s going to give £100,000 to the appeal. Brilliant.

At Royal Britain nothing so obviously brilliant, but a glimmer of hope. J. Paul Getty Jr’s ‘man of business’ calls. ‘My client is capricious. He might like it very much. He might not like it at all.’ What a perfect partner he would make! He is seeing JPG on Monday and will report back. If JPG comes to see the exhibition he will want to be totally alone. ‘There must be no one else in the building.’

SUNDAY 13 MAY 1990

Took Benet19 to see Charles Dance as a wonderful Coriolanus at the RSC yesterday: power politics and a fickle public. Glorious.

Today at TV-am: Brian Sewell20 (very queeny), Anthony Burgess21 (getting frail) and Tony Holden22 (in happy form). Tony told me a story told to him by Basil Boothroyd who was given an office at Buckingham Palace at the time he was writing his authorised biography of Prince Philip. Arriving for work one morning, crossing the courtyard, gravel scrunching under foot, the eyes of a hundred tourists boring into him, Boothroyd encountered the Queen’s Private Secretary coming the other way. Boothroyd paused to greet him. Pleasantries were exchanged. Courtesies were extended. The weather was discussed, the Queen’s blooming health was touched on, the vigour and charm of the Queen Mother marvelled at, progress on Basil’s book reported – then the Private Secretary threw in gently, ‘If you’ll forgive me, I must be on my way. I’ve had an urgent call to say my house is on fire.’

TUESDAY 15 MAY 1990

At TV-am ‘Dr Ruth’, a tiny American agony aunt, soft, round and ridiculous, a little bundle of fizzing energy, squeezed me tight, held my hand, and pressed her card on me with the words, ‘Call me, young man, call me anytime. I mean it. That’s the number. Be sure to call now. If you’ve got a problem, I’m here to help.’

THURSDAY 17 MAY 1990

I’m writing this on the train to Truro with Michèle.23 We’re off for three days’ civilised filming: Trewithian, Glendurgan, Mount Edgcumbe.24 There’s an hilarious picture of John Selwyn Gummer25 on the front page of The Times: ‘Where’s the beef? Mr John Gummer pressing a burger on his reluctant daughter Cordelia, aged four, at Ipswich yesterday to underline his message that beef is safe.’ Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr have died. The joy of a train journey like this is it gives you the time and space to read the obituaries with a clear conscience. Jim Henson is one of my heroes: a true innovator. He gave us the original Fozzie Bear to put on show at the Teddy Bear Museum.26

TUESDAY 22 MAY 1990

Breakfast with Richard Harris,27 lunch with Wayne Sleep,28 late supper with Jo and Stevie.29 And in between all the laughter and campery, real anguish. Royal Britain is going to fail. Four years’ endeavour going up in smoke. It’ll cost us £100,000 plus. It’ll cost poor Richard [Earl of Bradford] millions.

WEDNESDAY 23 MAY 1990

The word from Bucharest: ‘Mrs Edwina Currie,30 attired in bright red shoes and red polka-dot dress, walked into a Balkan-style controversy yesterday as she praised the conduct of an election won by a crypto-communist landslide that opposition politicians have likened to the vote-rigging practised under Nicolae Ceausescu.’

The word from the Barbican is similarly tragic-comic: J. Paul Getty Jr is not intrigued; John Broome calls to have another look round, but bows out by phone from Heathrow at 4.30 p.m. Richard battles valiantly with Frank (the bank manager) for an extra £50,000 to get us through the next fortnight. Richard: ‘We’ve a man flying in from Canada on Sunday and tomorrow we’re seeing Prince Rupert Lowenstein who manages the finances of the Rolling Stones.’ (This last provokes a coughing spasm from Michèle and hysterical giggles from me.) Richard keeps going: ‘A man is flying in from Canada, Frank. He’s coming from Toronto. It’s a long way to come to say “no”!’

BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY, 28 MAY 1990

Twenty years to the week since I started my Finals at Oxford (Scholar, President of the Union, editor of Isis, jeunesse d’oré, so much promise!)

I find myself in a television studio at break of day (5.00 a.m.!), the early morning toast of the ITV Telethon: standing on my head, unravelling the world’s biggest jumper, leading the dawn sing-along with Rustie the Caribbean Cook. Something’s gone wrong somewhere.

TUESDAY 29 MAY 1990

Went to lunch with Roger Levitt at Devonshire House, 1 Devonshire Street, round the back of the BBC. It was all very smooth and indulgent. I was there to follow through his promise of £50,000 for the appeal. By the time we got to the coffee it was clear it wasn’t going to be forthcoming. Instead: ‘Now, Gyles, what you should be doing is letting us look after all your insurance and pension and investment business – and introduce us to your show business friends. Give us the names and addresses, bring ’em in, bring ’em to lunch, that sort of thing. You’ll be doing them a favour – and you’ll get commission – good commission – you can give it to the charity, keep it for yourself, that’s up to you.’

He combines the look of a Mexican bandit with the manners of a North Finchley wide-boy. After lunch he took my arm and escorted me down the stairs and into the street. His Roller was waiting, purring, at the door, chauffeur at the wheel.

‘Hop in, Gyles, hop in, it’s yours – wherever you want to go.’

‘I’m only going to the Underground.’

‘It’s yours, Gyles – get in, get in.’

He positively pushed me into the back seat and slammed the door and stood waving cheerily on the pavement as the car drove off. We turned the corner and I asked the driver to drop me at Great Portland Street tube.

WEDNESDAY 30 MAY 1990

The Canadian saviour flew in and flew out. No go. It’s all over. I’m now on the train to Cambridge for a meeting at Bidwells in Trumpington where we are gathering to discuss the timetable and detail of the liquidation. If the bank had allowed us up to £1.5 million, with Richard’s guarantee, we would have had the rest of the year to find a purchaser. The banks are bastards. Always have been. Always will be.

SATURDAY 2 JUNE 1990

A bleak week. Late on Wednesday afternoon I saw the staff at Royal Britain one by one and told them the news. I did it as well as I could and stayed pretty steady until I got to the last of them who was so decent about it that I couldn’t quite stop the tears welling and the lump in the throat. It was a good idea: we just got it wrong. The liquidators arrived on Friday morning, full of the jolly banter of the professional mortician. And last night we had a late consolation supper with Simon [Cadell] and Stevie and Jo. Jo was wonderful: ‘Tchah! bah! baff! piff-paff! Away with despair, to hell with woe!’

SUNDAY 3 JUNE 1990

I am on the sleeper to Liverpool at the end of a funny, thought-provoking day. It began at TV-am where I’m doing Sundays as Ann Diamond’s side-kick. Norman St John-Stevas31 arrived as a complete self-parody: hooded eyes, luminous nose, teasing mouth.

‘Gyles is very charming, isn’t he?’ he murmured to Anne.

‘Yes,’ said Anne.

‘Exactly.’ Norman closed his eyes. ‘That’s why you mustn’t trust him. Charming people are never to be trusted.’

Edward Fox32 and David Owen33 were the main guests. We invited them to taste-test the new range of British Rail sandwiches designed by Clement Freud34 and then turned to the overnight news: the sad death of Rex Harrison.35 Because Edward had recently been appearing with Sir Rex in The Admirable Crichton, Anne looked to him for some appropriate actor-laddie reminiscences. The poor girl didn’t get far.

Anne: Did you know Rex Harrison?

Edward: Yes.

Anne: Did you like him?

Edward: Yes. Ver’ much.

Anne: What was he like?

Edward: Erm … er … a genius.

Anne: What kind of genius?

Edward: (pause) A genius.

Anne: But how did the genius manifest itself?

Edward: (pause) Either the sun shines. Or it doesn’t.

Anne: He was very much a stage actor?

Edward: Yes.

Anne: And films?

Edward: Yes.

Afterwards, I joined David Owen for breakfast in the canteen. He was going on to meet up with his SDP colleagues to decide whether or not to disband their party in the wake of their dismal showing in the Bootle by-election. He said that while his party might now be dismissed as a joke, he believes that he personally still has credibility.36 He quoted a couple of opinion polls showing that the public would rather have him as Prime Minister than either Margaret Thatcher37 or Neil Kinnock.38 He prophesied that the general election will be very close, with Thatcher the victor by a narrow margin (‘They vote for her hating her because they know where she stands’) and his hope is that in the run-up to the election the polls will show it to be so close that Kinnock will turn to him to deliver key votes in key marginals. He says he will stand out for a few concessions – the Scottish Assembly, proportional representation in the Euroelections – and in the event of a narrow Labour victory he can see himself as a possible Foreign Secretary. ‘It can’t be Kaufman.39 Kinnock would do better to bring Healey40out of retirement for a couple of years.’ He isn’t bothered that Kinnock’s no intellectual titan. ‘He’ll manage the party and the civil servants can run the country.’ I hoovered up the bacon and baked beans. He ate a single orange and then went out into the forecourt where half of Fleet Street seemed to be waiting to photograph him. It was an exciting conversation and it’s left me thinking: if I don’t stand in this election, I’m going to have to wait another five years. Go for it, boy.

MONDAY 4 JUNE 1990

David Owen hogs the headlines: ‘Decade of hope ends in humiliation … Owen’s odyssey from giddy heights to political failure … Owen – the great might-have-been.’ SDP RIP. What does David Sainsbury41 do with his money now?

Up on the Wirral we have a good day. It’s the opening of the Inner City Village Hall. HRH is very mellow. The only problem is the weather. As we await the royal arrival, the wind blows and the hapless ladies in the line-up battle to keep their hats on and their skirts down. Inevitably, as it lands, Prince Philip’s helicopter makes matters worse and most of the bobbing up and down, the curtseying and the handshaking, is done with left hands on head and skirts bunched and held steady between knocked-knees.

SUNDAY 10 JUNE 1990

The failure of Royal Britain is the lead story in the Mail on Sunday financial section:

Unicorn Heritage, the brainchild of TV presenter Gyles Brandreth, has folded. The company, which raised over £7 million to stage a permanent exhibition of the monarchy at London’s Barbican Centre, is to go into voluntary liquidation … Unicorn was sponsored by BES specialists Johnson Fry. ‘I told investors from Day One that the company would either make you a fortune or lose all your money,’ said chairman Charles Fry.

The truth is the idea was okay, but the product wasn’t quite right, the initial management wasn’t quite right, the marketing was off-target and the location was a disaster. Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.

MONDAY 25 JUNE 1990

On Friday I was at the Connaught Rooms for the Unicorn Heritage Creditors Meeting – a humiliation and a nightmare. On Saturday I was back at the Connaught Rooms presiding over the National Scrabble Championship Finals! I am described on the front page of today’s Times as ‘the high priest of trivia’. Michèle says, ‘If your claim to fame is that you founded the Scrabble Championships and you go on wearing those silly jumpers, what do you expect? People will take you not for what you are, but for what they see. That’s life.’ Bah.

Long letter from Windsor Castle. HRH has been brooding about the Inner City Village Hall:

I think it should be possible to refine the design with a view to reducing costs still further. For instance, there is a lot of wasted space above the changing room and office area. It might be worth looking at the idea of putting the changing rooms etc. area outside the main hall as a ‘lean-to’. The ‘lean-to’ could then be fitted on to the hall in the most convenient place. This would also add some flexibility to the design by adding it either at one end or along one side or the other…

We go to Wimbledon, the royal box. It’s a treat and lovely to be asked etc., but we mustn’t accept again. The lunch is jolly (ish), but the tennis is wasted on me. I have not the least idea what is going on.

FRIDAY 13 JULY 1990

The hottest day of the year finds us filming in the glorious garden of Hadspen House. Tomorrow, Stourton. Sunday, Stourhead. Also feeling the heat is Nicholas Ridley42 who looks set to be booted out of the Cabinet having given an interview to The Spectator in which he declares that Germany is trying to take over Europe…

MONDAY 20 AUGUST 1990

As the world prepares for war, the Brandreths prepare for Italy. President Bush is planning a lightning strike against Iraq as Saddam Hussein rounds up Americans, Britons, French and Germans in Kuwait. In Barnes we pack our bags because tomorrow we’re off on a lightning trip of our own – to Verona in Colin and Rosie Sanders’ private jet. It’s all right for some … It’s all right for us. This is typical of Colin: after the Royal Britain collapse he called and said, ‘You need cheering up. Let’s go to the opera.’ And so we are.

WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 1990

The Arena di Verona is amazing: a vast, outdoor amphitheatre, the third largest in the Roman world, seating 20,000 and more. Since AD 30 it’s seen Christians thrown to the lions, gladiatorial combat, bullfights, public executions, but tonight, for us, it was Tosca. We sat in the best seats in the house (of course), slim flutes of champagne in hand (naturally), surrounded by exhausted victims of corporate hospitality. Next to us, bewildered Japanese; immediately in front, a group who had started the day in Ohio and were fast asleep (all eight of them) way before the end of Act One. Even better than the show (a Philistine speaks!) was the post-Puccini supper – a late-night cold collation back at the hotel: antipasto di frutti di mare, wafer-thin carpaccio with rocket salad and parmesan, washed down with buckets of chilled Prosecco. As a rule I subscribe to the Noel Coward line that ‘work is more fun than fun’, but once in a while the soft life can be very sweet.

FRIDAY 24 AUGUST 1990

Wednesday night was sensational: the show rivalled the midnight feast! It was Zorba the Greek. At first, Colin was disconcerted to find it was a ballet, not an opera, but it was so fantastic, and such a surprise, such an unexpected treat, we were all bowled over. Essentially it was the ballet of the movie, with the Mikis Theodorakis score and Mikis in person on the podium! It was a life-enhancing triumph, my best ever night at the opera.

Yesterday was pretty good too. We flew to Venice for lunch. Colin hadn’t realised it was only down the road, so we’d hardly taken off before we landed. And in the evening we were back at the Arena for the Verona standard, Aida, through most of which Colin kept muttering ‘Where are the elephants? Where are the elephants? It isn’t a proper Aida without elephants.’

At the airport this morning it’s back to reality. We buy newspapers (‘Angry Bush takes a step closer to war’, ‘40,000 reserve forces called up by US’) and, now we’ve been part of it for seventy-two hours, notice that the private-jet-set get a tangibly mixed reception. We’re whisked past the bucket-shop hoi polloi, to be sure, but our passage through customs and passport control isn’t so smooth: there’s a fair bit of that just-because-you’re-filthy-rich-don’t-think-you’re-getting-any-special-treatment-from-me atmosphere in the air.

THURSDAY 30 AUGUST 1990

This may be the day that changes my life. I hope so.

As far back as I can remember I have wanted to be a Member of Parliament. At Betteshanger, in 1959, I was the Liberal candidate (age eleven). At Bedales, in 1964, I came out for Sir Alec.43 In 1970, the election that brought Ted Heath to power was held on the last day of my Finals.44 I took the train to London to vote, went back to Oxford to party, and returned to London again to be on call overnight at Television Centre as the ‘Conservative Voice of Youth’ (!), alongside Jack Straw45 for Labour. In the mid ’70s I toyed with getting myself onto the candidates list (but didn’t follow it through) and I’ve kept in touch (sort of) with Oxford contemporaries who are in there now, but until this year, this summer really, these past few weeks, I haven’t sensed that I was going to go for it, to make it happen. Well, now I am.

It’s really rather funny to be forty-two, to be aspiring to be a Member of Parliament, and to have not the least idea how to set about it. I probably appear as cocky and confident as they come: in truth, I’m as diffident and as uncertain as all get-out. Anyway, the point is: this morning I took my courage in my hands and called Jeffrey Archer.46 I began dialling (only Jeffrey’s number could contain the digits 007) and then – suddenly – lost my nerve and hung up. I sat looking at the telephone, staring at it stupidly, and then, saying to myself, out loud, ‘Don’t be such an idiot, pull yourself together man’, I picked up the receiver and dialled again. Jeffrey was there, and easy and helpful and kind.

‘Yes,’ he barked, ‘It’s about time. As I said to your mother, “If only he’d got on with it when I first told him to, he’d be in the Cabinet by now.”’

I don’t know quite how or where or when Jeffrey can have met my mother, but never mind. He explained that I’ll only get a seat if I’m on the official candidates’ list (which I knew) and that the man I need to see (which I didn’t know) is one Tom Arnold, son of the impresario, MP for Hazel Grove47 and vice-chairman of the party in charge of candidates.

I call Central Office right away. Tom Arnold isn’t there. I speak to a terrifying young woman with a triple-barrelled surname and marshmallows in her mouth. I don’t say who I am or why I’m calling – I mutter, ‘It’s not urgent, I’ll call back’ and hang up. But this afternoon (having discovered from Who’s Who that Tom Arnold also went to Bedales!) I write to him, saying here I am, this is who I am, and can I come and see you? So the deed is done.

FRIDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 1990

A letter arrives from Mrs Camilla Barnett Legh, Candidates Department, Conservative Central Office: ‘Sir Thomas Arnold has asked me to thank you for your letter of 30 August. Perhaps you would be good enough to telephone this office in order to make an appointment to see Sir Thomas at your convenience.’ We’re on our way! … Or so I think until I telephone Mrs Barnett Legh who tells me (from a great height) that the earliest, ‘absolutely the earliest’, Sir Thomas can fit me in is Monday 5 November at 3.20 p.m. An appointment two months down the road at twenty past the hour does not suggest an urgent desire to see me nor the prospect of an extended interview, but what can I do? Be grateful I suppose – and hope the election isn’t called meanwhile.

I still haven’t told Michèle what I’m up to.

SUNDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 1990

Mrs T. is on Frost saying she expects to be around for a good few years yet, certainly till she’s seventy. ‘Some people started their administrations at seventy.’ She’s ridiculous, but wonderful.

SUNDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 1990

The news is not good. The World Health Organization is predicting that thirty million people will have Aids by the year 2000. The Chancellor of the Exchequer48 is forecasting ‘the most difficult few months of the cycle’. And Michèle is saying, ‘The recession is coming. We’ve got to batten down the hatches.’

SATURDAY 6 OCTOBER 1990

Hot news: Britain is to join the European exchange rate mechanism on Monday when interest rates will be cut by 1 per cent to 14 per cent. Everyone agrees it’s a brilliant move: Major, Hurd,49 Kinnock, the Bank of England and the TUC. Nigel Lawson50 is euphoric: ‘I warmly welcome this historic decision which I have long advocated.’ Mrs T. is giving a press conference outside No. 10. ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ Naturally there’s heated speculation about ‘a dash to the polls’ – and I haven’t even had my frigging first interview yet!

Jill Bennett51 has died. I last saw her not long ago, very drunk at the Caprice. We embraced like long-lost lovers, but she hadn’t a clue who I was. I doubt any of the obituaries will feature one of my favourite filthy Coral Browne52 stories. As a girl Jill had had a passionate affair with a much older actor, Godfrey Tearle I think. Said Coral, ‘I never could understand what Godfrey Tearle got out of his relationship with Jill Bennett – until one night I saw her eating corn-on-the-cob at the Caprice.’

TUESDAY 16 OCTOBER 1990

These charity lunches are quite a burden. Making it happen, making it work, making it all seem effortless. Anyway, I put Joanna [Lumley] next to HRH at lunch today and it solved everything. She’s perfect and he’s charming and they looked as if they were actually having quite a jolly time. Small talk with royalty isn’t easy. Being normal with royalty is impossible.

There’s that great line of Joyce Grenfell’s mother: ‘When royalty leaves the room, it’s like getting a seed out of your tooth.’

FRIDAY 19 OCTOBER 1990

The Lib Dems have won Eastbourne with a 20 per cent swing from the Tories, Howe53 and Major are at loggerheads, the rift on monetary union is rocking the party, and this is the moment I choose to enter the fray! Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe I’m right not to have told Michèle. Maybe my destiny is to be the high priest of trivia. Today I had sessions on Puzzle World, the Butlin’s project, and the TV Joke Book. Tomorrow I’m in Stratford leading the Pudsey Bear Parade. And on Monday I’m at Merchant Taylor’s Hall hosting ‘The Barbie Summit’. Apparently, I’ll get to meet the original Ken and Barbie – ‘in person’.

So this is it…

‘Gyles Brandreth – who was he?’

‘Oh, you know – the poor man’s Jeremy Beadle.’

FRIDAY 2 NOVEMBER 1990

Geoffrey Howe has resigned in protest over Mrs T.’s attitude to Europe. ‘I can no longer serve your government with honour.’ There’s a wonderful picture in The Times of the Thatcher Cabinet in 1979. Eleven years later and there’s not one of them left. She’s eaten every single one … By way of tribute at the Caprice at lunch I chose steak tartare and was delighted Colin Moynihan hadn’t cried off. He’s fun, puck-like, and friendly. He seemed very sanguine about Mrs T.’s own prospects – rather less so about his own. He’s got a majority of 5,000 but on current form reckons that won’t be enough. I didn’t ask him about Tom Arnold. I’m not sure why. I think it’s partly awkwardness, shyness even, partly self-protection. If I don’t tell anyone I’ve put up for something, if I don’t get it nobody knows and I can pretend (even to myself) it never happened.

MONDAY 5 NOVEMBER 1990

‘Thatcher moves to fight off Heseltine54 threat’ was today’s headline. This I did not discuss this afternoon when I had my brief encounter with Sir Thomas Arnold MP. I reached St James’ station at three o’clock and contrived a roundabout route (via Victoria Station!) so that I walked into 32 Smith Square on the dot of 3.15. I was expected. A girl emerged, easy, friendly, and ushered me past a mighty free-standing portrait of Mrs T. in all her glory towards a little side door that led to what felt very much like the back stairs. Up we went, round bends, along narrow corridors, on and on, until we reached the great man’s door. She knocked. A grunt, ‘Come!’ She opened the door and in I went. The office was tiny, more a vestibule than a room, and Sir Tom, my sort of age but looking older, sat behind his small, sparsely covered desk peering over half-moon specs and effortlessly exuding the discreet charm of the seasoned Tory MP. We exchanged pleasantries (it turned out he was only at Bedales for about ten minutes) and then I came to the point. Could I join the candidates list? Sir Tom was cordial but non-committal. Then he turned to gaze out of the window, narrowed his eyes a moment, touched his mouth with a finger and said, as if thinking out loud, hardly above a whisper, ‘Officially, the list is closed. It’s all done and dusted. But … you never know.’ He turned back to the desk and flashed a crinkly smile. He opened a buff folder.

‘Here are the forms. If you care to fill them in and let me have them back, we’ll take it from there.’ He opened his diary. ‘Let’s meet again on, say, 19 December at 6.30 p.m. Will that suit?’

It won’t suit at all, but I said, ‘Yes, yes, of course, thank you, thank you so much.’

I was out by three-thirty, the conversation was brief and straightforward, but the combination of Sir Tom’s manner – the hushed tone, a certain urgency of delivery, a face with a touch of sadness in repose transformed by sudden brilliant smiles – and the smallness of the room itself gave the meeting an oddly conspiratorial quality. At Oxford I always felt a little hurt that no one had approached me about the possibility of joining MI6. I imagine the initial interview would have felt something like this afternoon’s encounter.

TUESDAY 6 NOVEMBER 1990

At noon I was at Buckingham Palace, standing outside the Chinese Drawing Room (or is it the Yellow Drawing Room and I think it’s Chinese because of the vases and the chinoiserie on the walls?), awaiting the arrival of HRH. As the clock struck he emerged from a door at the far, far end of the long corridor and I watched him walk towards me. He was alone and came quite slowly. It’s an odd thing to say, but he seemed almost vulnerable and for the first time made me think of my father. Anyway, we went through the ceremony – handing over certificates to worthies in the playing fields movement – and he laughed because I had arranged the group differently from the last couple of times – ‘Can’t leave anything alone, can you?’ – and he did his stuff with the usual aplomb and then wandered off to the next engagement (horologists I think he said).

I went on to meet up with Peter Marsh.55 From Greek prince to Greek god. Peter is decking himself out as a portly Adonis these days: gold at the wrist, gold around the neck, I swear there’s a gold rinse in the hair – and why not? He’s being fantastic with the appeal and he said something that struck home: ‘If you can’t convey the essence of your message in fewer than eight words, you’re not clear about your message. Slogans and catchphrases shouldn’t be glib; they should go to the heart of the matter.’ He’s certainly delivered for us. HRH and I burble on about playing fields and playgrounds, and the value of sport and recreation, and the threats and the dangers and the needs and whatnot, and Peter has summed it up in seven words: ‘Every child deserves a place to play.’

WEDNESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 1990

‘Hurd says Heseltine is “glamour without substance”.’

‘Heseltine says he won’t stand against Thatcher this month.’

Just as I need the Conservative Party to start thinking about me the buggers seem to have other things on their minds … Undaunted (quite daunted actually) I have now written to my three potential sponsors. The form requires ‘Names and addresses of three responsible persons who will support your candidature. These should include, if possible, one MP and a constituency chairman. At least one of your referees should have known you for ten years or more.’ I don’t know any constituency chairmen, so I’ve gone for my local MP (Jeremy Hanley)56 and two Cabinet ministers: one a former party chairman, John Gummer (whom I first met twenty years ago at one of Johnnie and Fanny Cradock’s parties when he was squiring Arianna Stassinopoulos) and William Waldegrave,57 since Saturday the Secretary of State for Health.

SATURDAY 10 NOVEMBER 1990

‘By-election disasters in Bradford and Bootle.’ ‘Heseltine steps up the challenge.’ ‘The recession will last until Spring.’ Very cheery. Yet there is better news in Barnes: I’ve signed to do my first commercial (should total £20,000) and I’ve told Michèle what I’m up to on the political front. Sweetened by the former, she seems fairly relaxed about the latter. I think she thinks it won’t happen. I think she’s right.

MONDAY 12 NOVEMBER 1990

My back has gone again. I cannot move at all. At all. I can’t get to the osteopath and until the spasm subsides apparently there’s nothing she can do here. I hate this when it happens, not just because I hate being trapped like this, but also because I know it happens when I’m tired and tense and anxious – and I don’t like to admit I’m ever tired or tense or anxious! Michèle says, ‘Oh God, not another mid-life crisis – spare us’, but in fact she’s being wonderful (as ever) and she’s cancelled everything for the next three days. I need to be up by Thursday for the Coopers Lybrand speech in Sutton Coldfield.

WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER 1990

‘Howe attack leaves MPs gasping.’ I watched it on the box and it didn’t seem that devastating. Damaging certainly, but fatal? I wonder.

THURSDAY 15 NOVEMBER 1990

‘Heseltine flings down gauntlet for leadership’ – and proposes an early Poll Tax review, which has to make sense.

I’m on my feet again and off to see the osteopath at ten. I’ve used the three days in bed to draft and redraft my application form. ‘Why do you wish to become a Member of Parliament?’ ‘What makes you think you would be a good candidate?’ ‘What aspects of campaigning do you most favour?’ ‘What do you feel are your major strengths and attributes?’ The easiest page was the last one: ‘Is there any serious incident in your life or aspect of your character, either personal or business, which might cause you and the party embarrassment if they were disclosed subsequent to your selection?’ No. ‘Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence?’ No. ‘In a typical year, how many days do you have off work because of illness?’ None. 1990 just isn’t typical…

William Waldegrave’s reply is in: ‘Thank you so much for your kind words about my new appointment. It was very thoughtful of you to write. I need all the encouragement and support I can get in what is obviously an enormous job – though a very interesting and challenging one. I would be delighted to be one of your sponsors. Please use my name freely.’ Hooray.

FRIDAY 16 NOVEMBER 1990

Gummer says yes. Two down, one to go. Meanwhile, on the main stage the Thatcher camp say they expect her to win on the first ballot, but one of the opinion polls says Heseltine as leader would give us a 10 point lead.

On the train to Sutton Coldfield I read the Muggeridge58 obituaries. He was a desiccated old tortoise, self-opinionated, self-righteous and when I fell out with the rest of the Longford Committee and published that diary of our antics in Copenhagen he tore me off a strip (‘and to think you have enjoyed nut rissoles at my table’). As a performer he had a certain style, but for all his professional piety and late avowal of the ascetic life, he was a dirty old man. I’m trying to remember who told us about having to break his thumb when he tried to jump her when she was making a phone call in the bedroom at somebody’s party. It wasn’t that long ago.

TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 1990

Letter from Jeremy Hanley:

I would willingly sponsor you for the candidates list although I think you have far more to offer the world than to waste your time traipsing through the lobbies of the House of Commons late into the night when you could be giving brilliant after dinner speeches. Personally I think you would be a superb Member of Parliament, but the life involves very little free time to pursue other careers, quite contrary to the popular view of MPs with their ‘noses in the trough’ or being very ‘part time’ members. Frankly I would send you straight to the House of Lords!

WEDNESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 1990

Last night’s vote: Thatcher 204; Heseltine 132. She was four short of the 56-vote lead she needed to secure an outright win. I watched it live and the way she swept towards the camera – ‘I fight on, I fight to win’ – was wonderful to behold. But the feeling seems to be it’s all over.

FRIDAY 23 NOVEMBER 1990

There’s a magnificent lead letter in The Times today. It runs to five words. Peter Marsh would approve. ‘Donkeys led by a lion.’

Apparently she began yesterday’s Cabinet meeting with tears in her eyes and a written statement in her hand: ‘I have concluded that the unity of the party and the prospects of victory would be better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet colleagues to enter the ballot.’ I watched her bravura performance later in the Commons. She was quite magnificent. ‘I’m enjoying this! I’m enjoying this!’ It was so impressive – whatever you thought of her – and rather moving, ditto.

SATURDAY 24 NOVEMBER 1990

A pleasantly late and liquid night with Jo and Stevie and Simon followed by an unpleasantly early start to get to King’s Cross by 8.50. I’m touring the New for Knitting shops.59 Yesterday, Ilkeston. Today, York. Another train journey, another good obituary. Roald Dahl60 has died. He was a genius, but odd to look at and really quite creepy to be with.

TUESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 1990

I spent a long day at Shepperton making the Birdseye Waffle commercial: eight hours to shoot thirty seconds. In the real world Mrs Thatcher is now backing John Major. I’m backing Douglas Hurd. In the world of Birdseye Waffles no one seems the least bit interested in who our next Prime Minister is going to be.

LATER

The result is in. Major, 185; Heseltine, 131; Hurd, 56. John Major becomes the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Rosebery in 1894 and Michèle tells me that my man coming in last is a useful indication of the reliability of my political instincts.

SATURDAY 1 DECEMBER 1990

There are now no women in the Cabinet (a mistake I would not have made) but Ann Widdecombe61 joins the government for the first time. The paper describes her as ‘a doughty fighter’. At Oxford she was a funny little thing. But mock not, Brandreth. She’s in the government. You aren’t.

SUNDAY 9 DECEMBER 1990

This weekend we went to see Benet’s Twelfth Night (I love that play), put up the Christmas tree (our best ever – I know I always say that, but I think this time it’s true) and, with champagne from Ros and Mart,62 toasted the house of Thatcher. The Queen has given Mrs T. the Order of Merit and Denis gets a baronetcy. (In due course it’ll be ‘Arise Sir Mark…’ That’s the irony.) Tomorrow at 10 a.m. I’ll be at the Dance Attic in Putney Bridge Road with a lordly title of mine own. It’s Day One of the Cinderella rehearsals and I’m reviving my Baron Hardup. Bonnie Langford is Cinders, Brian Conley (whom I don’t know at all) is Buttons, and Barbara Windsor (whom I know and like a lot) is the Fairy Queen. I’ve got third billing, above Barbara, which is all wrong, of course, shaming really, but there we are.63

WEDNESDAY 12 DECEMBER 1990

Tonight we are not going to Jeffrey [Archer]’s party. I wanted to go, but Michèle can’t face it. ‘All that nonsense of “Krug and shepherd’s pie”, and there are always too many people, and nobody wants to talk to the wives – ever. It’s just self-regarding men preening themselves, looking over your shoulder all the time for someone more interesting, more famous, more like them. Ghastly. Never again.’

We didn’t cry off from drinks with the Queen last night however. Perhaps it would have been better if we had. Neither of us was in tiptop form. When Her Majesty arrived, Michèle forgot to curtsey – and then remembered forty seconds into the small talk and suddenly, unexpectedly, without warning, bobbed right down and semi-toppled into the royal bosom. My performance was hardly more impressive. As the canapés came round I found myself in an isolated corner, stranded with Her Majesty, frantic for food (I hadn’t eaten since breakfast) but obliged to pass up on every tasty morsel that came past because the Queen wasn’t partaking and I somehow felt it would be lèse-majesté for me to be eating when she wasn’t. All I could think about was how hungry I was. My desultory attempt at conversation can best be described as jejune.

GB: Had a busy day, Ma’am?

HM: Yes. Very.

GB: At the Palace?

HM: Yes.

GB: A lot of visitors?

HM: Yes.

(Pause)

GB: The Prime Minister?

HM: Yes.

(Pause)

GB: He’s very nice.

HM: Yes. Very.

GB: The recession’s bad.

HM (looking grave): Yes.

GB: Set to get worse, apparently.

HM (slight sigh): Yes.

GB (trying to jolly it along): I think this must be my third. Recession, that is.

HM: Yes. We do seem to get them every few years – (tinkly laugh) and none of my governments seems to know what to do about them!

GB (uproarious laughter): Yes. Absolutely. Very good.

(Long pause. Trays of canapés come and go.)

GB: I’ve been to Wimbledon today.

HM (brightening): Oh, yes?

GB (brightening too): Yes.