When Margaret Thatcher stepped down as Prime Minister on 22 November 1990 she predicted the Conservatives would win a fourth general election. On 9 April 1992, John Major her successor duly did so, having removed the first agent of her nemesis, namely the poll tax. He had not removed the second: the European incubus, or, to be more precise, the Maastricht Treaty and the looming prospect of a single European currency. It was, arguably, the biggest crisis in the Conservative Party for 150 years in the view of Michael Spicer, a leading ‘rebel’. Other rebels, including Christopher Gill, were suspended from the parliamentary party over Europe. They describe the Kafkaesque progress of the Maastricht Treaty’s passage through Parliament. ‘The lady across the water,’ sighed one MP, ‘we miss her so!’
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 provoked the first Gulf War. The UN-sanctioned force of mainly American and British troops won the battle but failed to press home the victory. In the US, the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century was conceived.
John Major’s government grappled with the outbreak of rivalries and violence in a part of Europe that since the Second World War most people had been happy to forget – the Balkans. In June 1991 Paddy Ashdown, the future UN High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, confided to his diaries that he ‘didn’t even know where all the countries were’.
Alec Guinness, surveying the political and cultural landscape asked ‘Oh, Sceptre’d Isle set in the polluted sea, where are we heading?’
Meanwhile the defeated Neil Kinnock had handed on the reform of the Labour Party to John Smith, his successor. Had Smith survived, how might the future Labour Party have looked? After a short but intense struggle with Gordon Brown, Tony Blair took over as party leader. Blair and his fellow modernisers, especially Peter Mandelson, gave new impetus to the modernisation process. They looked back at the internecine strife of the 1980s and concluded that to have a chance of re-election the Labour Party would have to avoid division over policy and organisation, concentrate power in its leadership and abandon any pretence of socialism. New Labour, the Third Way and the Stakeholder Economy had arrived.
Giles Radice witnessed the transition. Chris Mullin, another Labour MP from the north of England, began his diary the day John Smith died and, nor far away in Northumberland, a miner’s son, Jimmy Wilson, described how the inexorable decline in the mining industry had affected his family.
In 1995, ‘mammal, father, artist, musician’ Brian Eno kept a personal diary; coincidentally it was the year the troubles in Bosnia developed, in which Eno became closely involved. Over the course of three years, Lord Longford wrote a ‘Prison Diary’ – as visitor rather than inmate; and fragments of a diary by Alan Bennett from 1995 to 2004 record the ridiculous and the sublime in England either side of the new century.
Despite political emphasis on being British, the word began to lose what meaning it once had. Devolution of power to Wales and Scotland, membership of (as it now came to be called) the European Union, and large-scale immigration from across the globe* all undermined the significance of, and the long-term prospects for a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Tuesday, 27 November 1990
I spent a long time at Shepperton making the Birds Eye 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 Birds Eye Waffles, no-one seems the least bit interested in who our next Prime Minister is going to be.
Gyles Brandreth
Tuesday, 27 November 1990
What will Major be like as PM? He has risen swiftly, almost without trace. He has few definite views, except his support for a so-called ‘classless society’. His voice is a boring monotone. Lisanne thinks, however, that he has a nice smile and will appeal to women voters.
In the evening, just after the result is announced [we visit] the Jenkinses’ house in Clapham: Peter Jenkins, Polly Toynbee, James Naughtie and other BBC and independent journalists are present. John Birt, BBC supremo, is also there with his wife. Much muttering about the inadequacy of Neil. The trouble with journalists is that they have helped to get rid of one leader and would now like to have a go at another.
Giles Radice
Wednesday, 16 January 1991
Gulf War Day 1
An awful sense of gloom pervades. War could be declared at any second. It all depends on the military now.
The Parliamentary Party meeting was chiefly on the Gulf situation. Everybody agrees with the line, except Simon Hughes,* who agonised in his usual Jesuitical way about the peace movement in the Party having no spokesman in Parliament and that he should do it. We listened patiently. You can always trust Simon to take out his conscience and wash it clean of all stains.
Home at 11.00 and Newsnight. War seems only a few days away. With this in my head I tumbled into bed at 11.50 and turned on the radio to discover that it had started fifteen minutes ago. I leapt out of bed, called Alan [Leaman] who had already got the news, and dictated an early comment. I did a quick round of television and radio interviews until about 2.30 saying we must support the Government and hope for a quick victory with minimal casualties.
Paddy Ashdown
Thursday, 24 January 1991
I find it strange, as a woman, this war.
It’s certainly the biggest logistics exercise since the Normandy landings, and the fire power is just staggering – explosives with one and a half times the power of the Hiroshima bomb were dropped in the first sortie … So I find it, secretly, very exciting and can’t get enough of it. There’s something powerful and emotive about this war which helps me understand why men enjoy it.
Edwina Currie
Thursday, 28 February 1991
The Gulf War is over. Too soon I think. Bush has ordered a ceasefire. Now a long and messy interlude with Saddam stalling and dodging and quite likely to start shooting again. The Foreign Office has no idea what it wants. Never seems to have given any thought to the post-war pattern, the western military presence, commitments – OBJECTIVES. I could write a scintillating picture on this but I’m exhausted and my morale is at zero.
An article in The Times by Robin Oakley – a man who always ignores me – about the leaderless Right. No one mentions my name. How quickly this can happen!
Alan Clark
Tuesday, 12 March 1991
Panic before the dinner party. Mrs [Conrad] Black could not come.
Annunziata Asquith was tried but she had to go to a Benjamin Britten opera … We then tried Robin Day to ask if he had got somebody he could bring with him which he duly did.
There were some attacks made … on Robert Maxwell. Everybody agreed that he was a crook, including the Airlies, but in some ways likeable.
Conrad said he couldn’t possibly do any deal with him, he was so dishonest and devious and wriggled out of things.
I like Conrad more and more. I had thought he was overweening at one time but he is becoming less bombastic and aggressive the more confident he gets, as is often the way. I think I must mention to Major to give him a peerage. That would bind him very strongly because I think he has loyalty in his make-up quite keenly.
Woodrow Wyatt
Sunday, 12 May 1991
Wembley
To Wembley with Kate [Ashdown’s daughter] for the Simple Truth concert in aid of the Kurds of Iraq. Everyone gathered in the VIP lounge including Mary Archer, who is much prettier than she appears on television. He was there too, poncing about and generally being obnoxious.
Kate was in great form. Although plunged into the company of some pretty dizzy names (Marmaduke Hussey, Michael Checkland, Princess Diana etc.) she was totally unawed by them and chatted away as though she had known them all her life. I was very proud of her.
Diana left at 9.00 and Kinnock shortly afterwards. We stayed until about 10.15 so Kate could hear her favourite, the Gypsy Kings (awful noise). We then left through the back of the stage, where Kate had a chat with someone called Chris de Burgh, who was obviously terribly exciting but of whom I had never heard.
Paddy Ashdown
Saturday, 29 June 1991
I have fixed to do TVAM tomorrow on the dreadful complexities of the growing crisis in Yugoslavia. Tim Razzall* had to show me maps as I didn’t even know where all the countries were. We spent an hour or so over a couple of whiskies talking about Yugoslavia and what I would say the following morning.
Paddy Ashdown
Gelston, Lincolnshire
I am hard at work trying to finish my Europe book.
I am now trying to write the chapter that shows why the British are slowly becoming more European. As I sit in our orchard I can see at least five churches. I reflect that, if I was sitting on a hill in Burgundy, Umbria or Bavaria, I would be able to see a similar number. We are part of the same Christian culture as the continental mainland. Also consider Labour’s astonishing conversion on Europe, much influenced by Jacques Delors and his vision of Social Europe.
Giles Radice
Monday, 19 August 1991
On holiday in Italy
I listen to the wireless from England as I swim. Then momentous news came. An emergency committee of eight had put Gorbachev under house arrest and taken control because the country was slipping into an ungovernable state. The Communist hardliners were established and the clock was to be put back and never forward again.
I went past Norman [Lamont’s] window on my way to breakfast, he was just waking up, and I shouted ‘Gorbachev’s gone. He is in prison. Now what about your defence policies?’
Woodrow Wyatt
Wednesday, 6 November 1991
It may not be suicide. It could be an accident. Or murder. Was he an agent for Mossad? He was a monster. And a crook. I know: I sat in reception at Maxwell House for hours on end, saying, ‘I’m not leaving without a cheque in my hand,’ and meaning it – and getting it – after months and months and months of waiting. Maverick, money-maker, MP, rogue, he really was August Melmotte in The Way We Live Now.
Neil Kinnock is completely over the top ‘This is truly tragic news.’ That he [Maxwell] was ever taken seriously by the Labour Party is amazing. It was pitiful when Peter Jay* allowed himself to become his poodle-cum-chef-de-cabinet.
I must write to [his wife] Anne, but I’m not sure what to say.
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 11 December 1991
Westminster
Go on to Channel 4 early morning news programme to denounce John Major’s negotiations at Maastricht. He says, ‘Game, set and match for Britain.’ I ask ‘How can that be when you have had to have not one but two “opt outs”?’ I am genuinely astounded that Major has been prepared to let the eleven other members go ahead with a European Social Chapter without Britain.*
In the Commons, Major is welcomed by the Tories as though he is a triumphant hero … he may have united the Tories but at the cost of weakening Britain’s European position.
Giles Radice
Sunday, 2 February 1992
Chester
Yesterday I met the Foreign Secretary [Douglas Hurd] for the first time. I was impressed. I liked him too: he seemed civilised, cool, amused. Conservative Central Office told us we could have him in Chester for just 45 minutes. The photographers had us crouching on the banks of the Dee feeding the swans. That was the shot they wanted and that was the shot they were determined to get. The swans were rather reluctant to play ball however, which meant the Foreign Secretary and I had to spend a good fifteen minutes waddling on our haunches at the water’s edge. Said Mr Hurd with a wan smile, ‘I don’t think Mr Gladstone did a lot of this, do you?’
Before the Hurd visit I had an interesting lunch with the leading house-builder in these parts. He wants chunks of the green belt released for development.
Over lunch I sat on the fence, but I may need to come off.
Gyles Brandreth
Tuesday, 3 March 1992
Told Ken Baker that I thought they could do a very good election ploy by announcing the internment of the terrorists in Northern Ireland again and also by announcing that we are going to have identity cards which everybody else in Europe does.
This would stop not only terrorists getting in and out so easily but it would also stop the flood of illegal immigrants pretending to be political refugees.
He disagreed about the internment. He thinks that if you did introduce it, it would simply make southern Ireland a safe haven. But he is attracted by the idea of the identity card.
Woodrow Wyatt
Monday, 16 March 1992
John Smith’s shadow budget has to be good news.* The pundits are saying it’ll cost middle managers £1500 a year. That’s exactly what we need. The Conservative voters who have been crucified by the recession (and I’ve met quite a few and they’re angry) will vote elsewhere this time, but the Tories who are simply wavering (they’ve been bruised, they’re fearful of negative equity, they’re worried about redundancy, but they’ve still got a house and a job), they could come back to us at the last minute, clinging on to nurse for fear of something worse.
Gyles Brandreth
Friday, 20 March 1992
Sir Leon Brittan, the Competition Commissioner at Brussels, came to lunch. So did Chips Keswick, Chairman of Hambros.
Leon is brimming full of cleverness, shrewdness and intelligence. I always liked him though we fell out for a period when he was trying to push us into a political federation of Europe and shove on top of us a single currency and a single European bank.
On that subject Chips said there was still a chance for London to have that bank. Leon said ‘I think that we have missed the boat now. It will probably go to Amsterdam because people don’t want it to go to Germany. Of course if you had been willing to join the single currency and had been willing to accept the European bank, it very likely would have gone to London.’*
Woodrow Wyatt
Tuesday, 31 March 1992
Chester
Mr Major brought his soap box to Chester this morning and it was a triumph.
There was excitement, a sense of occasion in the air. As the minutes passed and word went round the city centre more and more people thronged the square. The police reckoned there were 2,000 at least by the time the battle bus arrived. The door opened, we all roared and the Prime Minister with a grin and wave plunged into the throng. It was amazing. The crush was incredible.
We were surrounded by police, TV crews, cameramen and at the Prime Minister’s right hand throughout was Norman Fowler.
As we pushed forward, with supporters and shoppers and gawpers pressing towards us, leaning out to touch the Major anorak, reaching out to shake the great man’s hand, Norman Fowler kept up a running commentary: ‘The soap box is just to the right, John. Look towards the balcony now, see the camera, now wave. And now to the left, there’s some girls at the window, another wave. That’s it, good, good. It’s going well. Nearly there.’ Major then clambered on to the soap box and made a proper speech – ten minutes and more – all straightforward stuff, no great rhetoric but somehow phenomenal. Here was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on a soap box in the rain, telling two thousand of the people of Chester what he wanted to do for his country. It worked a treat. There was some jokey heckling, which he handled nicely.
Gyles Brandreth
Chester
To Blacon, and the worst of the high-rise blocks. They are squalid and soulless, the public parts filthy, the walls covered with mindless graffiti. The Right to Buy has made no impact here. When doors were opened every flat looked equally unloved, unkempt – and then you’d find one belonging to an elderly person, who opened the door a crack, and then opened it wide and you could see how house proud they were and sense how they must hate living where they do, with the neighbours they have to endure. And if and when I become a Member of Parliament, will I be able to make any impact on all that?
Gyles Brandreth
Thursday, 9 April–Friday, 10 April 1992
General Election
As I left [Yeovil] for London at about 2.30 a.m. it became clear that we were having a bad night. We lost … Kincardine and … Eastbourne, but gained North Devon and North Cornwall. Elsewhere we missed, although we did shorten the distance between us and the Tories in a number of seats in the south and west. But by 2 o’clock, the stunning news was that Major had a majority and Labour had lost. A terrible night for Labour. I saw Kinnock on television and he looked broken.
The fact is that we have more MPs, even though our vote has declined.
Paddy Ashdown
Monday, 13 April 1992
Gelston, Lincolnshire
Neil Kinnock resigns. Denis Healey calls him ‘Labour’s Gorbachev’. His tragedy is that, despite all he has done to make Labour electable again, he has never been trusted by the electorate. Despite that, I think he would have made a good Prime Minister and I write a note to tell him so.
I am still dumbfounded by the extent of Labour’s defeat – only 35% to the Tories 42%.
Was it John Smith’s tax plans coupled with the Tory lies which scuttled us? Or was it more profound, Peter Jenkins’s ‘structural’ reasons? Can Labour ever win?
Giles Radice
Tuesday, 28 April 1992
Withdrawal symptoms only flare periodically but a lot of suppression is going on. So in subconscious it festers. I dream of reviving Commons privileges, Tea Room, reference library and so on which I wake and realise are closed to me forever.
I am ‘put out’ by my friends ignoring me. Especially wounded by Richard [Ryder]. I did think that he was a friend, and I a confidant of his. I am filled too with distaste and resentment at all the new Conservative MPs and some of the new Ministerial choices.
I suppose, if I were to get my peerage promptly I could still ‘catch up’, swoop into the Tea Room, mob around. But notification for the Dissolution Honours has passed, and so – almost – has that for the Birthday.*
Alan Clark
Monday, 18 May 1992
The Tea Room talk is of Thatcher’s speech in the Hague. We need to watch out: the Germans are coming and the EC is ‘scurrying to build a megastate.’ It seems somewhat over-alarmist to me but Bill Cash and co evidently agree with her every word. ‘The lady across the water,’ sighed Nick Budgen, ‘we miss her so!’†
Gyles Brandreth
Westminster
A narrow majority of Danes (48,000) reject Maastricht in a referendum. Political Europe is stunned! The antis everywhere are cockahoop. In the Commons, Major makes a statement saying that the government is still committed to the Maastricht treaty but that debate on the Bill will be delayed until the situation is clearer. Peter Shore says it is a great day for democracy, Benn says how about a referendum in the UK. Only Heath says stands firm.
Giles Radice
Wednesday, 3 June 1992
House of Commons
I came in expecting an all-night sitting but further consideration of the Maastricht Bill is now postponed, instead we had a rather briefer debate on the Rio Earth Summit. I sat through all five and a half hours of it (in a largely deserted Chamber) in order to make a seven minute contribution.
There are 651 MPS but right now – registering concern for the future of the planet – there are just a dozen of us.
Gyles Brandreth
Tuesday, 7 July 1992
I am worried that the oncoming economic depression will be much deeper than most people think and could seriously unfix the whole political and economic system. I don’t want us to get out of the ERM [the Exchange Rate Mechanism] – indeed I think that would be a disaster – but it may well turn out to be less a disaster than the alternative. I just hope my sense of foreboding is wrong.
Politics seems completely up in the air at the moment. Nobody knows which way to go. It’s like when the birds stop singing and the air goes still just before the thunderstorm breaks. Or that moment of stillness at slack water before the tide starts moving in the opposite direction.
Paddy Ashdown
Chester-le-Street
As I drive into Newcastle for lunch at BBC North headquarters it becomes clear that the government has a major currency crisis on its hands. Interest rates have gone up by 2 % to 12% but sterling is still on the ERM floor. All day I follow the crisis on the car radio as I go from meeting to surgeries. Interest rates are subsequently raised by a further 3% to 15% all to no avail. At 7.30 pm Lamont finally announces that the UK has been driven out of the ERM – and the pound is floating …
Typically the yuppies in the City celebrate bringing sterling down in champagne.
Giles Radice
Thursday, 15 October 1992
An enormous public outcry against the government’s decision to close thirty one pits, putting 30,000 miners out of a job at the bottom of a recession. Heseltine and the PM appear shocked by the reaction – shows how out of touch they are. Tory MPs rush on TV to denounce the government.
Giles Radice
Wednesday, 9 December 1992
Alex Allan [John Major’s Private Secretary] came over and showed me the Prime Minister’s statement which announced that the Prince and Princess of Wales were about to separate.
The statement was very simple, claiming there was no constitutional issue. I am not so sure.
Major is describing the purely legal position. But it seems inconceivable that Diana could be Queen now, or that there would not be a problem about the alternative Court that Diana is likely to set up. She will have no private life and any man who visits her (or any woman who visits Prince Charles) is bound to be under public scrutiny. This is just a gradual way of stepping into divorce. The constitutional implications of that would be very considerable. Perhaps even the disestablishment of the Church (hurray).
Paddy Ashdown
A thousand beacons blazed across the European Community at midnight to usher in the single market: one Europe of 340 million people. Mr Major (somewhat startlingly) sees 1993 as ‘the year of charity and helping your neighbour’. This makes me a little ashamed to confess that I see 1993 as the year of looking after Number One!
Gyles Brandreth
Thursday, 21 January 1993
I have just come down from the committee corridor here, with colleagues from the National Heritage Select Committee we have been taking evidence from Kelvin MacKenzie, bovver boy editor of the Sun …*
This is the mother of parliaments. Gerald [Kaufman, the chairman] is one of Her Majesty’s Privy Councillors. When witnesses appear before us we expect a touch of deference, a bit of forelock-tugging, a certain becoming modesty. We don’t expect what we got just now: a cocky, Jack-the-lad, bruiser, joker champion of the working man. He came on strong and he walked off triumphant.
We were lambs to the slaughter – and in large part it was our own fault. We hadn’t prepared a considered line of argument. We hadn’t done our homework. Complacency and laziness lead inevitably to humiliation.
Gyles Brandreth
During 1993 Paddy Ashdown took time ‘outside Westminster’ to visit several areas of Britain, staying for days at a time with families whose lives and work he followed and recorded in a journal.
Monday, 1 March–Wednesday, 3 March 1993
Cornwall, aboard the trawler Silver Harvester
With the nets safely streaming astern of the Silver Harvester and making their way back to the sea bed, we turn our attention to the fish now lying in a muddy heap on the deck. The pile we have drawn up from the sea bed includes old boots, rocks, shells, star fish, rubbish ditched from previous ships in passage and, of course the fish that give the Silver Harvester its living. The job now is to sort them out. In the midships of the boat are two sets of four baskets into which the fish are thrown. One is for round fish (cod, hake, whiting and pout). The second is for flat fish (lemon and megrim sole, plaice, brill, dabs and turbot). The third is for monkfish, some three or four feet long … The last basket is for sole, dark and muddy green as the sea bottom, which are our most prized and valuable catch. There are also separate baskets in the midship areas for octopuses, squid, scallops and gurnards which are red, spikey and used for cat food.
When we have sorted the takeable fish into baskets I open a small metal trap door in the sides of the guard rail and using a combination of high pressure sea water hose and an implement like an overgrown squeegee mob, push what is left back out to the sea.
By my calculation I push over the side a weight of fish equal to that we have put into the baskets. But they are all too small, of a kind that we are not allowed to take. All these fish will die because their swim bladders will have been burst by the release of pressure as they are drawn to the surface from the sea bottom. But the laws passed by Parliament in the name of conservation say that, whether they die or not, the Silver Harvester cannot bring them to shore for human consumption. They must be left at sea to be food for the gulls or to rot on the sea bottom and pollute it.
But now they will have to cope with a fresh problem; the new Sea Fish Conservation Bill which we have just passed through Parliament. Mike [Hosking, the owner] believes this piece of legislation will prove dangerous, unworkable and extremely damaging to the British and Cornish fishing industry. Under the new regulations French fishermen will have the right to lift more fish out of Cornish waters than Cornish fishermen take. The French quota for cod, for instance, is 13,380 tons in the box which includes the Cornish coast, whereas Britain’s quota is 1,450 tons …
Paddy Ashdown
BBC Question Time
I think I did OK. No obvious gaffes. I played it straight down the line.
(I think I also blotted my copybook by asking one of the production team what sort of rate David Dimbleby is on. I had to sign a piece of paper accepting a fee of £50. That’s their standard apparently. I said, ‘It’s monstrous, you get four guests on the show for a total of £200. This is BBC prime time. We should be paid properly. What’s Mr Dimbleby on – a thousand, two thousand? Look, I’ll do it for a quarter of whatever he’s getting.’ They were not amused. They take themselves – and Mr Dimbleby – very seriously.)
Gyles Brandreth
Monday, 10 May 1993
Number 10 for lunch. There were ten of us in the small panelled dining room on the first floor.
My suggestion that John Smith’s lamentable performance last Thursday might prove to be the beginning of the end for him prompted the PM to reveal that he has ‘a finger tip feeling’ that John Smith won’t be leader of the Labour Party at the next election. ‘It’s just a finger tip thing, a pricking of my thumbs. I’m not sure why, but I just don’t believe John’ll make it.’
‘Who do you think it will be?’
‘John Prescott or Bryan Gould.’
Later Convivial drinks in John McGregor’s room to mark the successful conclusion of the Railways Bill. We have privatised the railways.
‘Will it work?’ I asked, innocently.
John gave his Mr Pickwick’s laugh. ‘It had better.’
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 9 June 1993
Heard Norman Lamont’s devastating resignation speech in which he said that the Tories were ‘in office without power’ which is the title of one of my volumes of Diaries. He also talked about sound bites and public relations which is also one of my themes. I must say it was a very effective speech and did an awful lot of damage to Major, who spoke later and didn’t do very well.
It was a beautiful hot evening. It is so rare in Britain to be able to sit out into the night.
Tony Benn
Monday, 21 June–Tuesday, 22 June 1993
Toyota car factory, Derby
I ask Bryan Jackson, a director of Toyota, who is now showing me around and who has spent a life time in the car industry, how many people would have worked in such a press and weld shop ten years ago. ‘A very great deal more,’ is his laconic reply. (In this shop, assembling 200 car bodies a day, there are 160 robots and fewer than 20 people.)
Toyota, now among the top three of the world’s leading car manufacturers by volume, invested £700 million in this Derby car manufacturing factory and a further £140 million in an engine manufacturing plant in North Wales to feed it.
I have come here not to marvel at automation, but to learn about the new working practices, management style and production techniques which many believe Britain will have to adopt if we are going to rebuild our manufacturing industries again.
Bryan tells me that, after recruiting their workforce, they sent many to Japan for training at Toyota’s main factory … many had brought back the Japanese practice of doing exercises before work.
This has caused some suspicion and amusement amongst the wider population of Derby.
Paddy Ashdown
Tuesday, 22 June 1993
Michael [Heseltine] has had a heart attack in Venice. The pictures of him being carried off to hospital, his spindly legs exposed to the world, were certainly an invasion of his privacy. Interestingly the Tea Room reaction has been one of shock rather than sympathy, concern for the Government’s dwindling majority rather than concern for Michael’s health. People here admire him, respect him. They don’t appear to love – or even like – him very much.
By uncanny coincidence, Heseltine’s henchman, Colonel Mates, the man who led Heseltine’s campaign to oust Thatcher in 1990 is also swinging in the wind. He’s hanging on (just) but he’s doomed.*
It turns out that the Party accepted £440,000 from Nadir, so now we’re all tarred with the same brush.
Gyles Brandreth
Tuesday, 20 July–Thursday, 22 July 1993
Debate on the Maastricht Treaty
I worked at home and turned my mind to the court case where Lord Justice Watkins and Mr Justice Auld agreed to accept an application by Lord Rees-Mogg, backed by Sir James Goldsmith, to declare the Maastricht Treaty illegal. I spoke to the Clerk of the House about this because it seemed to me to be a breach of the Bill of Rights, and he said, ‘Yes, I agree.’
Of course, I’m against Maastricht and Rees-Mogg’s trying to kill Maastricht, but that’s not the way to do it.
Wednesday Went to see the Speaker at 11 and she was tremendously supportive. I had a phone call later from her saying, ‘I am going to make a statement and you can reply.’
So I drafted a speech and took it to the Speaker’s Office and the Clerk’s Office.
At 3.30 the Speaker made her statement which was very good. I then made a statement almost as long, which was very well received, and the House really responded because I was defending Parliament against the courts.
Thursday Mass coverage of the Speaker’s ruling. The Times and Telegraph had it on their front page.
I’m not optimistic [about the Commons rejecting the Treaty] but I say this two and a half hours before the vote.
Went into the House at the very end and of course it was absolutely packed. The Speaker’s Gallery was full, the Serjeant at Arms gallery was full, the Public Gallery was full.
The first vote – on the Labour amendment to include the Social Chapter – took place; the lobby was crowded and the Speaker was there. The place was tremendously tense with excitement, the Press Gallery was jammed with people standing.
As the rumours spread, Richard Ryder, the Tory Chief Whip, came in and nodded at the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister smiled so we thought we’d lost …
Finally at about quarter past ten the tellers lined up and the word went round: ‘It’s a tie.’ 317 for the Labour amendment calling for the social chapter to be included and 317 against. So the Speaker got up and read a statement and declared that, in accordance with precedent, she would cast her vote [against] and ‘the Noes have it.’
So then there was a division on the Government motion itself … and the Ulster Unionists went in with the Government. This is what proportional representation would mean if you had a little National Front group: they would be selling their support for all sorts of things.
Then we waited again with great tension and excitement.
Ray Powell was the chief teller and he said, ‘Madame Speaker, the Ayes to the right were 316, the Noes to the left were 324.’
So both motions were defeated and we are back where we were.
I must admit I waved my order paper, a thing I’ve never done before in my life but I was so excited.
Major got up. He had prepared a statement. ‘I’m going to put down a motion of confidence in our policy on the Social Chapter and if that is defeated there will be a general election.’
Tony Benn
Friday, 23 July 1993
The House meets at 0930.
After the front bench speeches at the beginning of the debate are concluded the Fresh Start Group* convenes to take stock. In the light of the outcome of yesterday’s cliff-hanger, there is no stomach for opposing the vote of confidence and in any case, with the Ulster Unionists bought off, the prospect of defeating the Government is at best tenuous. There is also an uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassing fact that each and every one of us was elected barely twelve months ago in the Conservative cause. The fact that the Government is now supporting policies which are entirely alien to its Conservative roots and traditions is something which the rank and file Party members have yet to understand. It is therefore with heavy hearts that we choose to do the decent thing and live to fight another day …
The Government motion is carried by 339 votes to 299.
When in the fullness of time the people do realise what has been done in their name their retribution will be decisive and maybe, as far as the Conservative Party is concerned, terminal.
Christopher Gill
Friday, 30 July 1993
We have lost Christchurch to the Liberals. Robert Adley’s majority of 23,000 has been transformed into a Lib Dem majority of 16,400 – a swing against us of 35%, the biggest anti-government swing since the war.
Gyles Brandreth
Friday, 6 August 1993
The news from the Balkans continues to be absolutely tragic. You’ve got Paddy Ashdown and Clinton and other people demanding the bombing of Serb forces or Serbia, and the United Nations commander there warning against it because, he says, if you bomb Serbia they will attack our forces and, of course, we’ll be involved in the combat.
You have to be prepared to put a huge army in and occupy the whole of the former Yugoslavia and impose a settlement. This is one of the difficulties.
Tony Benn
Wednesday, 29 September 1993
High conference drama! John Smith, who was on the brink of a highly damaging defeat this morning, wins a narrow but decisive victory this afternoon. John opens the debate in an undemonstrative but firm way and ends his speech by repeating how important it is for Labour to modernise itself. The leader of the AUEW [the Engineering Workers], Bill Jordan, makes the best speech – Labour must show that John Smith, not Bill Morris, nor John Edmonds,* ‘leads the Labour Party’. Morris and Edmonds make the ‘dinosaur’ speeches.
John Smith has the bright idea of asking John Prescott to wind up. Prescott is incoherently eloquent. Most of his speech is a diatribe against the modernisers, but he ends strongly by saying that John Smith has put his head on the block and he deserves the support of Conference.
Giles Radice
Friday, 8 October 1993
Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool
‘Let me tell you what I believe … It is time to return to the old core values. Time to get back to basics. To self-discipline and respect for the law. To consideration for others. To accepting responsibility for yourself and your family, and not shuffling it off on the State. Madam President, I believe that what this country needs is not less Conservatism. It is more Conservatism … It is time to return to our roots.’
It went down wonderfully well. He (Major) did it wonderfully well. I watched it, cocooned inside the Channel 4 commentary box, surrounded by professional cynics, but even they had to concede he’d touched a chord with the faithful. They don’t adore him as they adored Thatcher, but they love him and they share his nostalgic longing for Miss Marple’s England.
Gyles Brandreth
Saturday, 9 October 1993
It has been said that if a Labour conference makes you wonder why you are a member of the Labour Party, a Tory conference supplies you with the answer.
Michael Howard’s nasty conference speech on law and order and his unpleasant attack on one-parent families, Peter Lilley’s extraordinary diatribe against so-called ‘foreign’ scroungers and the faces of the Conservative delegates are almost sufficient an argument in themselves for voting for the Labour Party.
Giles Radice
November 1993
Wearmouth Colliery
[On my father’s feet] were black, steel-toe capped safety boots. He was wearing orange overalls, the same type that had adorned our washing line every week for as long as I could remember. He had thick, black rubber protection pads on both knees. Around the belt on his waist was a self-rescuer, a miner’s lamp and a black battery … a cable led from the battery on his waist to a light attached to the front of the helmet …
Before entering the hole into unknown territory we put gloves on and crawled on our hands and knees. My father and I went in last.
The tunnel was very narrow and the roof was only four feet high so standing was impossible … The only light came from our cap lamps and there were puddles of water everywhere. To the right of us I saw a raised metal track and a gap of five feet, and there it was, a massive wall of coal.
My father … said, ‘This is an historic moment for me. My Dad did this with me when I was 15 and his dad before him. Switch your light off.’ I obeyed him and we were plunged into darkness. I held my hand up in front of my eyes and I couldn’t see anything at all. It was a very poignant moment and I felt as if a thread of continuity had been broken in my family for ever as I would never experience this again, certainly not with my offspring.
We switched our lights back on as we heard a rumbling noise in the distance. I could make out lights and figures coming towards us as the noise got louder and louder. Soon the noise was deafening, like a constant crashing of rocks together and I saw the shearer for the first time. It was a magnificent sight I thought. The shearer was a huge cylinder with spikes all around, spinning fast and advancing towards me. I pinned myself against the wall … I watched the shearer cut through the coal like a knife through butter, the coal falling effortlessly onto a belt behind … the miners following the shearer were bare chested or only wearing vests. I was glad that I was wearing knee pads as sharp rocks protruded from the floor. Now I knew how my father’s legs had blue scars on them, like veins in a Stilton cheese … caused by the coal dust getting into cuts …
My father shouted ‘Before the shearer comes back we have to move the roof supports forward and let the rock fall in. If we don’t, the pressure on the face by the millions of tons of rock and water above us will squash us like ants.’
Jimmy Wilson
Monday, 15 November 1993
The truth is there’s too much legislation, inadequately prepared, pushed through in too great haste. There was a good piece on all this by Anthony King (of Essex University) last week. He noted that on John Patten’s last Education Bill there were 278 government amendments introduced during the Commons committee stage, 78 more on Report, 258 more during the Lords committee stage, 296 more on Report and 71 at Third Reading. King reckons this mania for legislation began with Thatcher. Action, revolution, change, never let up, never stop. ‘I tinker, therefore I am.’
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 1 December 1993
I gathered up my things from the office and dashed home … for the Blair dinner.*
I found Blair engaging, very intelligent and constructive. There is very little between his thinking and mine. We have come to the same analysis from different directions. He seems utterly committed to ensuring that the Labour Party does modernise its approach and rethink its ideas, and sees nothing inconsistent between an approach which is based on these lines and socialism in its modern guise. I told him that I too was committed to the reshaping of the centre but that I was not interested in Lib/Lab electoral pacts. I was interested in creating a pluralist system of politics, not in preserving the present structure in a new configuration. Blair agreed to go away and talk to Brown and Mandelson. He is suggesting a further dinner at his house in January. Mandelson may come to this and I may think it right to invite someone from our side – probably Charles Kennedy.
Paddy Ashdown
Saturday, 8 January 1994
A belated New Year tour d’horizon written on the train from Newcastle to London …
Despite the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, there is a pervasive feeling that the élan has, for the moment gone out of the European idea. The destruction of a tight ERM in late August at the hands of the markets has put paid to the idea of a single European currency, at least for the short term. And all the Euro-enthusiastic leaders are under pressure – Delors, Kohl, Mitterrand. Meanwhile the massacres in Bosnia are a terrible reproach to European pretensions – and of course to NATO as well.
There are [other] grounds for cautious optimism – the PLO and Israel have signed a preliminary agreement and are still talking; there will be ‘free’ elections in South Africa; and the Major-Reynolds peace initiative in Northern Ireland has not yet foundered.
Giles Radice
Monday, 14 February 1994
Last week’s tragedy* is followed by this week’s farce – or, as it turns out, this week’s light romantic comedy. Hartley Booth, Mrs T’s soft-lipped, wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-goose successor in Finchley, has resigned as Douglas Hogg’s PPS following the revelation of his infatuation with a 22-year-old art college model turned political researcher. Apparently there was no affair, merely a tendresse.
Graham Riddick (admiring the newspaper photograph of the fair Emily): ‘I’d have given her one, wouldn’t you?’
Bob Hughes: ‘Hartley Booth is a gentleman.’
John Sykes: ‘He’s a wanker.’
The Tea Room is not taking this latest calamity very seriously.†
Michele [Brandreth] is joining me for a Valentine Day supper in the Churchill Room.
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 30 March 1994
I go to a supper that the American Minister is throwing … for MPs involved in the Euro debate. Listening to the passionate speeches from my Tory colleagues among whom the antis, including the voluble Bill Cash, predominate, I begin to wonder whether the question of Europe will actually break the Tories. The antis are so determined that they are unlikely ever to compromise. Is Europe an issue that, like the Corn Laws, will lead to a split on the right of British politics or at least make the Tory Party impossible to lead?
Giles Radice
Monday, 11 April 1994
Teresa Gorman rings to say we must build up a right-wing candidate against Major. I don’t know whether she has herself in mind after a spoof article in The Times last week by Matthew Parris naming her as the Duchess of Billericay. She would certainly have PMT licked and takes all the right kind of hormone treatment on which she recently lectured in Scandinavia.
Michael Spicer
Sunday, 8 May 1994
Here we go again. Poor Michael Brown [Tory MP and whip] has been outed by the News of the World. They are bastards. And he is a fool. He took a young man on a Caribbean holiday. There’s some dispute about the boy’s age, but he’s certainly under twenty one – and the eighteen-plus legislation doesn’t come onto the statute book before the autumn.
You’ve got to pity the poor PM too. As Michele says, ‘That’s Back to Basics gone to buggery.’ (My wife is very funny.)
Gyles Brandreth
John Smith is dead. Carol Roberton at the Sunderland Echo broke the news. A massive heart attack, she said. He had been rushed to Bart’s Hospital. No announcement yet, but obituary material coming through on the wire. After I put the phone down I turned on the television just as the surgeon at Bart’s was announcing his death.
Chris Mullin
Wednesday, 18 May 1994
Ken Livingstone (an amusing cove, easy, friendly, pleasantly absurd) is going to stand in the Labour leadership race, but won’t declare until after John Smith’s funeral on Friday. Blair is way out front. We want Beckett or Prescott, of course. Brown might be best for them long-term: he’s the one I find most approachable, most human, and he still seems blessed with a touch of socialist zeal. However they seem to be setting their hearts on the Young Conservative …
Gyles Brandreth
Sunday, 12 June 1994
European Election results
The papers are having a full-scale love affair with Blair.
Labour’s vote up right across the country, sweeping out the Tories and holding up too high for us to win the seats we had targeted in the South.
On the wretched David Dimbleby results programme, which was, as usual, heavily weighted against us, Charles Kennedy got very touchy with Peter Kellner and Peter Snow. Snow brought back the bloody swingometer, which even denies our existence!
In the end we left, quietly satisfied by the two seats in the South West but disappointed by our narrow failures.
Paddy Ashdown
Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, Westminster
Mo Mowlam’s media conference.* There was a lot of crap about information superhighways and the wonders of optical-fibre networks all designed to intimidate us into doing away with regulation and allowing the market to let rip. A dreary man from BT told us that it was already possible to transmit the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica round the world in less than half a second and that optical fibre made possible a simultaneous two-way conversation between every man, woman and child on the planet. A fat lot of use if you are starving.†
Chris Mullin
Thursday, 11 August 1994
Flassan, Provence, on holiday with the Blairs
By now, he [Blair] had also let me know, and sworn me to secrecy, that he was minded to have a review of the constitution and scrap Clause 4. I have never felt any great ideological attachment to Clause 4 one way or the other. If it made people happy, fine, but it didn’t actually set out what the party was about today. It wasn’t the politics or the ideology that appealed. It was the boldness. People had talked about it for years. Here was a new leader telling me that he was thinking about doing it in his first conference speech as leader. Bold. I said I hope you do, because it’s bold. I will, he said. And he had a real glint in his eye.
He knew that in terms of the political substance, it didn’t really mean that much. But as a symbol, as a vehicle to communicate change, and his determination to modernise the party, it was brilliant.
Alastair Campbell
Thursday, 1 September 1994
The news is that the IRA have declared a ‘ceasefire’. If this can be made to last, if we can inch our way towards some sort of constitutional settlement, this will be the PM’s greatest achievement. For over a quarter of a century there has been bloodshed and terror within the United Kingdom. Over three thousand have died, tens of thousands have been wounded … and now it’s stopping.
Gyles Brandreth
Monday, 12 September 1994
At 7 o’clock to Rupert Murdoch’s cocktail party. What a gathering! And what a flat! All brightly coloured walls, chromium plated knobs and rather garish modern pictures. There was a lady harpist in the foyer as we came in. She played well, but looked ridiculous.
Then upstairs. The whole of the Murdoch empire was there. And some interesting others as well: Tony and Cherie Blair, Michael Howard and Ken Clarke. Also there Anthony Lester and Richard Branson, Arnie Weinstock, Woodrow Wyatt, Mo Mowlam.
Later I heard that John Major had been invited but had demanded to see the guest list. To which Murdoch said ‘Stuff him, this is my party not his’ – so he didn’t come.
Paddy Ashdown
Monday, 26 September 1994
Strasbourg
A little Euro junket organised by Jack Cunningham. We arrived about two and went immediately to the European Parliament – a monstrous carbuncle of steel, concrete and glass, grafted onto a magnificent medieval city. Our party consists of about twenty MPs, including several good friends. Object of exercise: to familiarise ourselves with the EC and meet our Euro colleagues. About time I learned about the EC since, like it or not, it is destined to play an even greater role in our lives. I am astoundingly ignorant about Europe. This is the first time I have set foot in France for twenty years.
Everything about the European Parliament seems ludicrous. The committees meet three weeks a month in Brussels and in the fourth week the entire circus moves to Strasbourg for the plenary session. Every month tons of papers are transported back and forth in a long convoy of pantechnicons, trailed by hundreds of officials. Outside every MEP’s room is a steel trunk into which the members pack their papers for transport back to Brussels or vice versa. The Parliament has virtually no power over the executive. Commissioners make statements, but cannot usually be cross-examined. Obtaining an answer to a written question can take weeks.
Chris Mullin
Saturday, 8 October 1994
At the end of Conference they played ‘The Red Flag’ in jazztime and people waved Union Jacks, just like demonstrators for the Queen. Another Mandelson gimmick. Just turns your stomach.
There’s a semi-fascist element in the Labour Party at the moment, a ‘hand over to international capitalism, wave your little Union Jack’ tendency.
Tony Benn
Tuesday, 1 November 1994
The entire day has had a weird Alice in Wonderland feel to it. We [the Conservatives] want to conduct the enquiry into ‘cash for questions’ in private, simply publishing the report at the end. Labour say the hearings should be held in public. Tony Benn (the Mad Hatter) is defying the Speaker (the Cook? The Duchess?) taking his little tape recorder into the sessions and producing his own minutes for distribution to the press. Tony Newton (the White Rabbit) is scurrying hither and yon trying to keep everybody happy and falling between all the stools.
It’s exactly 4.00 am and the division bell is going.
Gyles Brandreth
Thursday, 17 November 1994
Westminster
I meet Tony Blair. He has moved back to Neil Kinnock’s old office. He is in ebullient form, excited by the Clause 4 campaign. He says that Labour is going to be very pro-European. He is revealing about Robin Cook and his treachery over Clause 4 at Conference. He says that he told Robin that he expected his support. ‘Your problem, Robin, is that nobody trusts you,’ he told him, ‘otherwise you would be sitting in my seat.’
Giles Radice
Thursday, 15 December 1994
I chatted to Tessa Jowell, one of the brightest of the new London MPs and a keen Blairista. She said that most of Tony’s supporters had voted for him because they believed he was a winner, and if he turned out not to be, his support would swiftly melt away. We talked about education. She said Tony’s decision to send his son to an opted-out school eight miles from home was not controversial among most of her electorate. Education in parts of Southwark was in a state of collapse. Dulwich, her constituency, is full of private schools and most of the middle classes have long since evacuated their children. She wants to see inner city schools providing breakfast for the poorest children and homework clubs for those whose home environment doesn’t enable them to do homework. She also wants to see independent schools encouraged to open their facilities to local state schools …
Chris Mullin
Tuesday, 3 January 1995
We pray for peace throughout the world but I can’t help rejoicing at the way the Chechen fighters are picking off invading Russian troops and knocking out their armoured vehicles. And yet the pity of it all: the Russians we see on the screen look like bewildered schoolboys, the Chechens alert and dedicated young men.
Alec Guinness
Tuesday, 10 January 1995
I had my postponed meeting with Hayden Phillips to discuss Honours.* Hayden of course didn’t want the meeting to happen in the first place. Indeed after he’d ushered me to a corner of his office and tea had been served and the door securely closed, he murmured, ‘This meeting isn’t taking place, you understand.’ ‘Of course,’ I murmured back.
I think Hayden does take it seriously. He enjoys the power of patronage. He also likes playing at being conspiratorial. For much of the meeting he held his notes close to his chest – literally – and when I mentioned a name he would glance slyly down at his papers and then purr at me. ‘Mmm – something for Alan Bates? Mmm, yes, I think we can help you there.’ He played a funny cat and mouse game with a document which he flashed in front of me, then half-showed me, then pulled away from me, then gave me, murmuring silkily ‘I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t … but why not?’ I presume he had intended to give me the paper – ‘Honours In Confidence’ – all along, but by going through the little arabesque he heightened the drama and made me feel I was getting more out of him than I actually was.
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 18 January 1995
New York
I love this National Debt clock on 6th Avenue clicking up $10,000 a second. What a great piece of public art! I’d love to make clocks like that for everything – good news and bad: increase in world population, deaths due to wars, deaths due to Aids, growth in number of cars, forested acreage of the world etc., etc. And then a whole range of other displays, showing changing demographics such as age distribution in the population. A whole area made of information.
Brian Eno
Sunday, 29 January 1995 Evening Standard
Film Awards
Sat next to Nicola Pagett, which was a comfort. The vast banqueting room was jammed full and hot. Richard Harris, at same table, wore a sort of piratical evening suit and had his hair in a fetching little ponytail. He made a funny speech. Diana Rigg, looking stunning in black, made a charming but over-the-top citation about me. People were up and down and up and down to receive trophies for Four Weddings and a Funeral. The trophy is very handsome – a silvered version of Piccadilly’s Eros. It could prove a lethal weapon for dealing with burglars if you could summon the strength to lift it. And if you dared, the legal consequences of defending your own person and property. Will 1995 be the year of Universal Suing? Policemen, I read, are resorting to the courts because of the state of their nerves after the horrid things they have seen at football matches; and a lot of soldiers want compensation because they have discovered that war is beastly. Oh, Sceptred Isle set in the polluted sea, where are we heading?
Alec Guinness
Monday, 20 February 1995
The PM was on a roll tonight, exhilarated by the triumph of the London–Dublin framework document. There’s going to be a Northern Ireland Assembly (with PR); a North/South body with members from both the Assembly and the Irish parliament; an end to the Irish constitutional claim to NI and changes to our legislation to give the people of NI the option of staying part of the UK or voting for a united Ireland. Paisley is ranting that Major has ‘sold out the Union’ … but in the Chamber and the Tea Room it went down well.
[Later at Number10 for a reception for the London arts community] he was at his absolute best: there was energy, easy charm, a sense of purpose. He stood in front of the fireplace on a little footstool and gave a gem of a speech. He talked about the artists who have made Downing Street what it is – he talked about the craftsmen, the furniture makers, the painters. He thanked and celebrated the artists in the room, buttered them up like nobody’s business.
I wheeled Hugh Grant over to meet Norma and the light flirtation (on both sides) was charming to behold.
Under cover of the framework document we’ve slipped out an announcement on prescription charges. They’re going up by 50p to £5.25.
Gyles Brandreth
Friday, 3 March 1995
The flight over Egypt was interesting and ended dramatically with us very close to the pyramids – actually my best view. Then from Cairo on to London, devouring newspapers senselessly … Stepped right back into the British class system with the awful ‘cocky’ driver who called me ‘sir’ (which I don’t like) in a really nasty, sarcastic way (subtext: ‘Sir? You? What a fucking laugh!’) which I hate even more.
Home, pulling out the spoils of war, kids climbing all over me.
Brian Eno
Saturday, 4 March 1995
Skegness
Arrived in time to hear most, if not all, of Tony Blair’s speech. He was standing at the rostrum smiling, talking about the need to project our values in a new way, and so on.
Paddy Ashdown would have agreed with all of it; the delegates clapped and applauded and gave Blair a little standing ovation.
I walked to the station, icy cold. Skegness station is just like a cattle shed. I had to get a train from there to Grantham; then I had to wait for an hour in Grantham, pretty well, to get a train to Peterborough; and then I had to wait for fifty minutes in Peterborough to get a train to King’s Cross. All in all it took me about five hours to get home.
I thought it was a complete waste of time in a way, except for its value as an observation of the Labour Party at this particular period. The Labour Party is unquestionably in a time of transition. The leaders never believed in Clause 4 but there was a sort of place for socialists. There isn’t any more – young people come in who don’t know anything about socialism; we don’t talk about socialism; we just prattle on about values and fairness and equality, without any substance at all.
Tony Benn
Wednesday, 8 March 1995
First appointment is to speak to a bunch of City ‘compliance’ officers (whose job it is to see that their firms keep to the regulatory rules). They think that the Tory regulatory framework has been a failure but are apprehensive about what a Labour government would do. Briefed by our front bench I say that we would get rid of self-regulation because it has failed, as the pensions mis-selling, the Lloyds fiasco and now the collapse of Baring’s demonstrate.*
Giles Radice
A forty-mile section of the Antarctic ice cap has detached itself and is floating free. Evidence of global warming? Scientists are estimating that, if the entire ice cap were to melt, the seas would rise by between 120 and 300 feet. Of course it will take several generations, but that is not a long time in the history of the world. By the end of Sarah’s life [Mullin’s older daughter] the process could be well under way, unless we wake up in time, but I don’t think we will. One half of the human race is entertaining itself to death and the other half is clinging to life by its fingertips. Only a catastrophe which hits Europe or North America will make any difference – and by then it will be too late.
Chris Mullin
Friday, 7 April 1995
Rewatched mind-shifting programme about lesbian motherhood – a subject about which I’ve thought little and then probably with a slight, under-the breath ‘YUK.’
I now feel that possibly the only people who shouldn’t be questioned closely about their intentions when having children are lesbian couples. It made it clear to me that the biggest source of confusion in the whole gender topic is the assumption that the biological fact of one’s body (whether you’re physically ‘male’ or ‘female’) is ‘hardwiring’, whereas it has a very complex connection with your behavioural and psychological style …
In the documentary, people kept popping up to say that they considered children needed a man around to create the right sexual balance. This is clearly absurd. When has there ever been the ‘right’ sexual balance? Would we know it if we saw it? Some of those lesbians looked like they’d make much better fathers than a lot of guys I know.
Instead of thinking of people as male or female, think of a multi-axial field of possibilities running between these two poles. Then look at people as disposed throughout it – and capable of shifting when mood and circumstances require. Encourage exploration. Encourage new hybrids.
Brian Eno
The courts have ruled that local authorities have no power to ban the export of live animals, on the grounds that it is a legal trade and they don’t want mob rule. Really the language of judges and the protection of profit are disgraceful. Old ladies in woolly hats who go out there because they believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, are described as a mob and all the courts are doing is protecting profits. Utterly revolting but there was a marvellous interview (on television) with Nancy Phipps, whose daughter Jill had been killed at Coventry airport on February 1st by a truck, saying that nothing would stop them.*
Tony Benn
Friday, 5 May 1995
I take the train down to London to attend a meeting of a group of experts from St Antony’s College, Oxford (on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Germany) with Tony Blair. Sensibly, Tony gets us to go to his house in Islington. We sit on the sunny patio and go through our paces.
Tim Garton Ash, who is much more impressive as a presenter of these issues than the others, says the key issue in Eastern Europe is entry to the EU. He reminds us that there is ‘no social base for democracy’ and membership would underwrite it there. He argues that Britain has a common interest with Germany in enlargement.
I reflect on the way back to the North-East for a presentation and signing of my book at the Durham University bookshop, what an enormous burden is being placed on Tony’s young and inexperienced shoulders.
Giles Radice
Wednesday, 10 May 1995
Liberal Democrats’ Parliamentary Party Meeting, Westminster
The PPM was the worst I have ever experienced. Those who promised to back the proposal† didn’t, despite the fact that they had all received a brilliant and supportive minute drafted by Chris Rennard [Director of Campaigns]. Alan Beith said if we abandoned equidistance it would be misunderstood. Malcolm Bruce agreed. Don Foster was helpful but stressed no pacts, no mergers. Bob Maclennan hardly said anything. Liz Lynne said it was appalling … Simon Hughes entered the debate in a thoroughly confusing way and lost everybody after half a minute.
The whole thing then spun steadily out of control. I had to send a message out to Jane half way through saying we’d have to cancel our attendance at tonight’s Guildhall dinner for the 200th anniversary of the Red Cross, for which she had come in all dressed up.
At 7.45 pm the meeting broke up in disarray. I went out, weak-kneed with despair.
Paddy Ashdown
Monday, 12 June 1995
Mrs T is rocking the boat. The Baroness has been on the radio telling us how much she admires Mr Blair, how she’s ‘absolutely against’ the single currency, how she’s glad Major is going more sceptic, how what we really need is more Thatcherism – ‘we must get back to Conservative policies.’
Gyles Brandreth
Thursday, 22 June 1995
As I take my seat aboard the Paddington/Worcester train a man leans over from a seat on the opposite side of the gangway to ask me if my name is Christopher Gill. He is Sebastian Hamilton [a reporter] and when I ask him where he’s going he tells me he is going to our meeting in Malvern.* Mildly interested to know why the Sunday Times consider our meeting worth reporting he tells me that it is because his editor is fascinated to know whether the public meetings we are holding in different parts of the country are the beginning of a revival of this rather old-fashioned mode of political campaigning …
Realising that my five colleagues (Richard Body, Nick Budgen, Tony Marlow, Richard Shepherd and Teddy Taylor) must be in a different part of the train I move to another carriage which is where, an hour or so later, Sebastian finds us chatting, completely oblivious of the news he now imparts. ‘Major has resigned.’ [As leader of the Conservatives.]
The news is staggering – it is barely credible – but Sebastian, who has the benefit of a mobile phone, assures us that it is only too true.
Inside the Winter Gardens (Malvern) an audience of close on a thousand people welcome us with rapturous applause. The atmosphere is electric. Suddenly this long-scheduled meeting is in the cockpit of national politics and the sensation that history is being made as we speak is inescapable.
Christopher Gill
Friday, 23 June 1995
The media seem to have gathered round the national parish pump to discuss the challenge to the Prime Minister and Mr Hurd’s resignation [to campaign for the leadership], and to speculate on Messrs Portillo, Lamont and Redwood. Barely a word about Sarajevo.
Alec Guinness
Monday, 26 June 1995
Redwood is the challenger. I’ve just witnessed his extraordinary press conference. JR was quite impressive in his funny Daddy Woodentop way, but his supporters – ye gods! I’ve a feeling they may have kyboshed his campaign before it’s even started. It wasn’t what they said: it was how they looked – Teresa (Gorman) to the right of him in a hideous day-glo green and (Tony) Marlow to the left in a ludicrous striped blazer. Every picture tells a story: this one said, ‘Here’s a truly barmy army.’
He has some more credible backers as well – Lamont and Edward Leigh were on parade – and in the Tea Room suddenly everybody is much more tight-lipped.
Gyles Brandreth
Members’ Dining Room, House of Commons
My heart sank. Making small talk with the PM is never easy.
Silence fell. He looked at his plate. I burbled stupidly. He was monosyllabic. I burbled some more. Silence fell again. I thought, ‘Poor sod, this could be his last night as Prime Minister and he’s spending it with me, like this!’ And then a gallant knight rode to the rescue. In came the Rt Hon Peter Brooke, CH, and sat down beside me. He looked across at the PM and said he had just finished reading an article about a certain Surrey cricketer whose heyday was in the 1930s. The name meant nothing to me, but the PM brightened at once. Peter continued, describing some particularly memorable match from the glorious summer of ’37 and within a minute the pall that had engulfed the table lifted and Peter and the PM talked cricket – talked 1930s cricket! – in extraordinary, animated, fascinated, happy detail.
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 12 July 1995
A statement from Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind about the catastrophic situation in Bosnia. Dreadful, mealy-mouthed stuff. He spoke as if both sides were to blame. Fifty years after the defeat of fascism, ethnic cleansers are on the brink of triumph in Europe and no-one wants to lift a finger. My view is the same as it always has been: overwhelming force. If it had been used at the outset we wouldn’t be in this mess now.
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, came to the select committee to talk about judicial appointments. An impressive man. Thoughtful, softly spoken, courteous and radiating integrity. His great strength is that he was brought in from outside the English legal system – and the Tory Party – in an attempt to bust the mighty vested interests. He hasn’t entirely succeeded, but not for want of trying. One of Thatcher’s better appointments.
Chris Mullin
Saturday, 5 August 1995
Yes Europe has failed … a lot of the British Left – the people you’d expect to sympathise with Bosnia – actually back the Serbs, because Serbia is a traditional ally of Russia, because Serbia was anti-fascist (i.e. anti-Croat) in WW2 and because certain parts of the left think that any friend of America (which Bosnia has been) must be an enemy of the left – so, ridiculously, that translates into support for Serbia. As a result of all this, Blair has said nothing whatsoever that would reveal even the beginning of a policy line on this. He’s so anxious to get elected he can’t say anything about anything – and doesn’t.
Letter to Stewart Brand from Brian Eno
Tuesday, 5 September 1995
All day (9–7) working on finishing Help record*… Tapes appearing from everywhere, me trying to keep some mental track of it. Everything that comes in sounds good: no duds.
Planes and helicopters and couriers standing by. We have to reach the planes with the tapes – which are being sent to Hamburg, Blackburn and somewhere in Holland – or else the records, CDs and cassettes will not be pressed in time for a Saturday release, which means it’ll be held over till next week – when Blur are releasing. So Blur will get the number one spot – which we would like, thank you. Enjoyable panic, but I went into Hitler mode in the last few minutes.
Brian Eno
Wednesday, 11 October 1995
Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool
The talk of the town is Portillo’s effort yesterday. It was clearly as crude as they come – awful mock heroics, cheap Brussels-bashing, wrapping himself in the Union Jack – but the activists stood and cheered and roared for more. He was shameless.
Don’t mess with Britain – don’t mess with Portillo. Having paraded Nelson, Wellington and Churchill as his heroes/role models, he coasted to his climax on the coat-tails of the SAS. ‘Who dares wins!’ The PM [John Major] was on the platform so he had no alternative but to lead the ovation – and I presume No 10 cleared the speech in advance.
Gyles Brandreth
Friday, 13 October 1995
Any Questions [on Radio 4]: what a mealy-mouthed bunch. Oh for someone to say, ‘Actually I’m not in the least patriotic – in fact, I feel more loyalty to Cuba than to England. Also I think taking drugs is a marvellous eye-opener, pornography is a fun method of self-enlightenment, and I would like to see religions taxed heavily’ (all in a horsey, upper-class ‘Camilla’ voice).
Brian Eno
Thursday, 2 November 1995
In the evening to South Africa House, to the showing of Trevor Baylis’s wind-up radio. Baroness Chalker gave a very confident and endearing speech. I looked at that little radio and thought about the potential it has, and thought ‘Bugger – if I’d done only one thing in my life that was as clear and simple and useful as that.’ But the good news is that the simple ideas haven’t all been used up.
Brian Eno
Monday, 6 November 1995
An extraordinary photograph, taken by the Hubble space telescope, has appeared in the papers over the weekend. It shows wide columns of gas and dust six million million miles high giving birth, we are told, to new stars. Two current catch-phrases come to mind – ‘How do they do that?’ and, ‘I don’t believe it!’
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
On Saturday evening Matthew* was viciously struck on the back of his head. He was taken to hospital for x-ray; reports are OK.
Rabin has been assassinated in Tel Aviv.
A police horse has been stabbed in the head by a football hooligan.
Alec Guinness
Friday, 24 November 1995
Yesterday I found myself at short notice taking part in the Radio 4 Moral Maze programme. The subject was with special reference to the case of Frederick and Rosemary West. He committed suicide some time ago but she has just been convicted of ten murders.
As I sat and listened outside to the three previous speakers being interrogated I found myself very critical (we all were) of the panel. It was like a viva being conducted by four soi-disant dons interrupting each other and the interviewees incessantly. When my turn came I was determined to make my two heartfelt points: (1) we must hate the sin and love the sinner; and (2) Jesus Christ came to seek and to save those who were lost.
One of the panel, an academic of some kind, began quoting the gospel against me. I asked him snappily, ‘Are you a Christian?’ and when he said he wasn’t, derided him unkindly. I was surprised to be told that, although this programme comes under the auspices of the religious affairs department, God is not usually mentioned.
Lord Longford
Friday, 12 January 1996
Lady Thatcher looked radiantly aggressive on the box making a speech about One Nation and No Nation. I admit I don’t quite understand what it all means: or why owning your own home, if you are one of the lucky ones, makes you a One Nation person. Disraeli, we are told, talked of Two Nations – rich and poor – but now I read he never got round to One Nation. On good authority we have been informed that the poor will be with us always. Obviously it is our duty to try to help all we can (without becoming Mrs Jellybys) – but I could do without advertising slogans and ‘sound bites.’
Alec Guinness
All the little Blairites are rushing around talking about a stakeholder economy as though they have been familiar with the concept all their lives, whereas in truth none of them had ever heard of it before Tony made his speech in Singapore last week.* Ken Purchase [Labour MP] said to me, ‘If stakeholding is such a good idea, why have we had nothing to say about the destruction of “mutuality” in the building societies? – surely the very essence of stakeholding.’ Quite so. The reason is, of course, because the societies are handing out big dollops of money to their members in exchange for their acquiescence and we dare not offend the middle classes by uttering home truths about greed and short-termism.
Chris Mullin
Tuesday, 23 January 1996
Prime Minister’s Questions was absolutely hilarious. Kenneth Baker began by asking John Major whether he didn’t agree that the decision by Harriet Harman to send her child to a grammar school showed that she must be a stakeholder at heart. Major agreed. Then Blair got up and said, ‘You can’t use an eleven year old child to undo the damage done by the Government.’ So Major said, ‘Well all I am doing is being tough on hypocrisy and tough on the causes of hypocrisy,’ which was a mockery of Blair’s famous phrase that Labour would be tough on crime and the causes of crime.
Then another Tory got up and said, ‘Shouldn’t the Prime Minister congratulate the head of St Olave’s School on attracting children from fifteen miles and two boroughs away.’
The Tories just collapsed in laughter and the Labour Party was incensed with anger – left, right and centre. I don’t think Harriet has any idea what has happened.
Tony Benn
Pale sunshine all day: quite a lot of frost.
Most MPs are putting out feelers for more pay; a few suggest that double their present salaries would be acceptable. Rather a lot, I think, for so much yah-booing. Could not a scheme be devised whereby MPs were paid for by those who voted for them but not, of course, by those who opposed their election? It would make for an interesting disparity of rewards. A letter in today’s Telegraph points out that the US House of Representatives has only 435 members for a country with about five times our population. Perhaps we could get along quite well with only 300 representatives. Now there would be an economy.
Last night we watched, aghast, a TV programme about American mothers training their tiny-tot little girls in the arts of seduction for a glitzy appearance at the Southern Charm Pageant in Atlanta, Georgia. As rabid ‘stage mothers’ they made our own appalling breed of ambitious mums seem only partially insane.
Alec Guinness
Friday, 2 February 1996
Somerset
A little before 4 a.m. the telephone rang. Jane went to take it. I could hear from the sound of her voice that something was wrong and leapt out of bed. Jane said ‘They have got our car!’ It was Steph from next door saying that our car was on fire. She had rung the fire brigade.
I immediately rang the police, dressed and dashed out, locking the door behind me and telling Jane under no circumstances to come out into the road. Almost immediately I met Steve [Radley, our other neighbour] running out of his house. We rushed round to … find the car well and truly ablaze.*
The police took statements while Jane made tea for the firemen – all thirteen of them. Then Steve came out with some more tea and flapjacks. It became quite a midnight party.
I am now scared to death of the house being fire-bombed with Jane inside. I rang the burglar alarm people to order a new security light and some smoke alarms, and then permanently closed off our letter box as the police said there was a danger of petrol being poured through it.
Paddy Ashdown
Monday, 26 February 1996
I was wrong last week about the snowdrops making a poor showing this year. In the last two days they have put in tardy, rather scattered appearances; far from spectacular but a happy reassurance that spring will come.
A suicide bomb in Jerusalem has killed twenty five people. Here the IRA has indicated that it is to step up its terrorist attacks and no warnings are to be given. The contempt one feels outstrips any apprehensions. In Dublin, Belfast, New York and London yesterday there were massive peace rallies, which is a comfort …
There is a photograph in the paper of a flock of alpaca being reared near Pulborough. They look lovely and not as daunting as llamas. I want one for my birthday but I fear the idea will be frowned upon. Only as a pet, of course, and perhaps as a pullover.
Alec Guinness
Sunday, 3 March 1996
City of Chester
I had a two and a half hour surgery. I had to keep shifting in my chair and jabbing my fingernails into the palm of my hand to stay awake.
It was the usual mixture: housing, Child Support Agency, difficult neighbours, ‘the school won’t do anything for Darren – they think he’s thick but he’s got dyslexia.’ The only diversion was to have two transvestites on the trot – except they were both so pathetic.
The only bit of light-relief on the radar screen is moon-faced Ron Davies, Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, who has marked St David’s Day with a delightfully loopy attack on Prince Charles. Ron says that a man who talks to vegetables, kills animals for pleasure and betrays his wife isn’t fit to be king.
Gyles Brandreth
Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, and her husband Jon Halliday came to dinner. They are working on a biography of Mao and Jon is going to Vietnam in search of people who had dealings with him, which is why he contacted me.* The Mao project will take three years and they are interviewing everyone who has ever met him including Heath, Bush and Kissinger. Jon said Kissinger was trying to distance himself from his earlier enthusiasm for Mao. Although banned in China Wild Swans has opened a lot of doors …
We talked about political heroes. Jon reckons that Chou En-lai is the greatest political figure of the century. Jung is understandably wary of heroes, given her experience of China, but she suggested Vaclav Havel and Gandhi. Mandela we all agreed on. Jon suggested the Dalai Lama, who certainly has my vote. I suggested Ho Chi Minh and Pope John XXIII, both of whom remained humble to the end of their lives.
History we agreed will be kind to Gorbachev, but he, of course, is seriously flawed by his neglect of the home front.
Chris Mullin
Friday, 15 March 1996
We all mourn bitterly the horror of Dunblane. Mr Major and Mr Blair went up there together to express the national distress and the Queen, they say, will follow. No Moderator, no Archbishop, can give explanation or comfort however well intentioned their consoling words.
The gloom spread through a day which, starting cold, and dim, managed to provide some hazy sunshine by noon, and the warmth of the afternoon produced little clouds of dizzily whirling midges.
Alec Guinness
Wednesday, 20 March 1996
I was home by nine. Supper in the kitchen with M [Michele Brandreth] and Jo [Lumley]. Pasta and peppers of course. M doesn’t eat meat and Jo’s virtually a vegan. They think we’ve known about the dangers of BSE for years and we’ve been keeping quiet because we don’t want to upset the farmers.*
Gyles Brandreth
Wednesday, 27 March 1996
Our beef is now banned around the world. The British beef market has collapsed – and no one in government – least of all the Agriculture Minister – seems to have a clear idea what to do.
According to Roger Knapman last week we were considering slaughtering all 11 million cattle in the country; this week it’s four million. We’re saying ‘beef is safe’ but, because nobody believes us, we’re going to have to slaughter half the cattle in the kingdom at a cost to the taxpayer of something around £6 billion! … It’s beyond belief.
Gyles Brandreth
Tuesday, 9 April 1996
France
I am reading Roy Jenkins’s Gladstone. I never realised what turmoil there was in the 1840s and 1850s. Full of parties dissolving and people defecting from one side to another.
It took four decades for the old political structures to dissolve and the new shape of politics to emerge with the Tory and Liberal national parties. I have become convinced that the same thing is happening now.
I have for some time thought that the current shape of party politics in Britain cannot contain all the different forces that are contained within it. So one of the historic roles of the Liberal Democrats, and of my leadership of the Party, is to use this opportunity and my relationship with Blair to start the process of creating a completely new shape for our politics. There is after all no reason why the Labour Party, any more than the Tory Party, should remain the same forever.
If as it appears, I have more in common with Blair than he has with his left wing surely the logical thing is for us to create a new, powerful alternative force which would be unified around a broadly liberal agenda.
And the sooner we do that, the sooner we will stimulate the break-up of the Tories into pro-European, one-nation Tories like Kenneth Clarke, and the anti-European xenophobes who have taken control of the party under Major.
Paddy Ashdown
Saturday, 11 May 1996
This afternoon we watched the Manchester United and Liverpool confrontation at Wembley. It all seemed rather even paced, good tempered, and [Eric] Cantona scored the only goal – for Man. Utd. I am no aficionado of the game but it seemed to me there was a touch of genius in the sheer direction and power of Cantona’s goal – which was made from quite a distance. I hope the hooligan who abused him last year is squirming somewhere on a bar stool. And now it appears that a Liverpudlian fan spat at Cantona when he received the trophy.
Alec Guinness
Saturday, 18 May 1996
Manchester City Hall
National Policy Forum. In a very surly frame of mind. How I resent giving up a weekend to listen to hours of claptrap. ‘Dad, why are you always going to meetings?’ asked Sarah. Why indeed?
Gordon Brown was much in evidence, exuding artificial bonhomie. What a contrast to Blair who is so relaxed, confident and above all capable of listening. Gordon is constantly wringing his hands and unable to sit or stand still for longer than a sound bite. He made an unscheduled address to the plenary session in an attempt to damp down the outrage at his review of child benefits,* but he was received without enthusiasm. There was the usual talk of tough choices … Someone asked if we couldn’t consider some other tough choices, such as progressive taxation? There is no doubt that Gordon – and Tony (who is obviously in this up to his neck) – have blundered. All that assiduous wooing of the middle classes squandered in a single act of foolishness.
At the workshop on foreign affairs I suggested that we say something about our alleged commitment to amend the Treaty of Rome to have farm animals treated as sentient beings rather than agricultural products. It beats me why we never make more of this …
Chris Mullin
Friday, 31 May 1996
Chichester, Sussex
The city has streets and streets of immaculate seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses, particularly round Pallant House; they’re manicured and swept clean and at night are as empty as a stage set. It’s quiet too except (and this is a feature of English county towns) in the distance one suddenly hears whooping and shouting and the sound of running feet as young drunks somewhere make their presence felt and kick out against this oppressive idyll.
Alan Bennett
Tuesday, 11 June 1996
Brixton Road
A man came to give the boiler its annual check-up. A former employee of British Gas, he was a victim of privatisation. He now worked for a sub-contractor. No holiday pay. No sick pay. He was paid only by the job. If no one was at home, he got nothing. I asked what training the new masters provided. None. There was still a plentiful supply of employees trained by the public sector. What would happen when they ran out? Who knows? He said that the billing people were all temps, employed only two months out of three. No job security. No pensions. No nothing.
In fairness he did say there had been a lot of abuses under public ownership … there was a saying among the Islington [public sector] workforce, he said: ‘One week’s work, six months’ sick pay.’ That’s one thing we never face up to on the left.
Chris Mullin
Saturday, 17 August 1996
[Story breaking in the Daily Telegraph] that Michael Howard’s new (and in my view undesirable) ID cards were carrying the EU flag. I have tried to stress that Michael Howard is fighting to include the Union Jack.
Michael Spicer
Friday, 27 September 1996
I rang Shirley [Williams] at about four in the afternoon … Shirley doesn’t have a very high opinion of Blair. She had previously, but it has diminished. She thinks he is a fixer and she doesn’t know what he stands for. I assured her that it wasn’t a burning ambition of mine to be a Cabinet minister. And she should know that.
It was my burning ambition however to deliver the Party to a stronger position and, if the opportunity arose, into government. I want to increase, perhaps to double, the number of MPs we have. I would much prefer to have over forty MPs in the next parliament and not be in Cabinet than, let’s say, thirty and be in.
She replied, ‘Position is much stronger if being in government is not a burning ambition for you. Most people want to be in government terribly, but then realise how powerless they are when they get there.’
Paddy Ashdown
Tuesday, 1 October 1996
Labour Party Conference, Blackpool
Tony’s speech in the afternoon, to which I listen in a packed Winter Gardens, is a success. There are longeurs, especially at the end, and unfortunate phrases such as ‘only a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years.’ How can you prepare for a thousand years? And referring to a ‘thousand years’ carries with it dangerous Hitlerian associations. And what on earth does ‘Labour’s coming home’ mean? Yes, I know about England’s European Cup song.
But Blair shows that Labour really does have an alternative agenda – education, social cohesion and community, political and democratic reform, and cooperation in Europe.
Two sentences are memorable: ‘Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education’ and ‘We are back as the people’s party; and that’s why the people are coming back to us.’
Giles Radice
Thursday, 7 November 1996
Whitemoor Prison, Cambridgeshire
To Whitemoor High Security prison near March in Cambridgeshire: March, that fogbound halt where I used to change en route from Leeds to Cambridge forty-five years ago. That station has gone now and the prison is built over what once were the marshalling yards, the ground too saturated in mineral waste for much else. Not that this makes it very different from the surrounding countryside, as that’s pretty thoroughly polluted too, all hedges gone, the soil soused in fertiliser, a real Fison’s Fen …
From a distance the prison might be an out-of-town shopping mall, Texas Homecare, Do it All and Toys ‘R’ Us. There’s a creche at the gate and a visitors’ centre, as it might be for Fountains Abbey or Stonehenge.
While the prisoners are brought down I wait in a little common room with one or two instructors and interested parties: a blind boy who teaches maths; Anne Hunt who has been seconded from UEA; and another teacher who has come over from Blundeston Prison near Lowestoft to hear the talk. Which is actually no talk at all, as the prisoners rather than be lectured at prefer to ask questions. There are about two dozen, mostly in their twenties and thirties, the most interested and articulate a Glasgow boy with a deep scar on his left cheek, who did Talking Heads* as an A-level set book last year and is counted one of their successes.
The predominant feeling is one of waste, that these men have been locked up and nothing is being done with them. With resources stretched to breaking point, these classes are the next target in the event of further cuts. And this is the other impression one comes away with: the universal hatred and contempt for Michael Howard – prisoners, warders, teachers, everybody one speaks to complaining how he has stripped away from the service all those amenities which alleviate the lives of everyone cooped up here, warders and prisoners alike. Indeed one gets the feeling that the only thing that is holding the prison service together and making it for the moment work is this shared hatred for Michael Howard.
Alan Bennett
Tuesday, 26 November 1996
At 8.15 am, with half a dozen others, I boarded a coach at the Members’ entrance and set off for BBC Television Centre. Here John Birt and his senior managers – of whom there were many – briefed us. The BBC, far from sticking at what it is good at, has ambitious plans to expand into commercial activity and use the proceeds to subsidise the core business. ‘We intend to be a pioneer of the digital age,’ was how Birt put it. Murdoch and the licence fee were their chief concerns. ‘We’re not indulging in hyperbole,’ he said. ‘We believe we are at a critical moment.’ Murdoch had taken extraordinary risks with an untried technology and he had won. He had tied up rights on soccer and movies for years to come. He had a subscription base of four to five million. It was not worth anyone else’s while to invest in a set-top box because no one else had the ‘drivers’ – soccer and movies rights – to make it saleable. Therefore everyone was going to have to use his system and it was vital that it be properly regulated, particularly the electronic programme guide. Otherwise, how will the consumer find other services in a world where the dominant player controls access? Birt added, ‘Every member of the government now regrets that Murdoch was allowed to get into that position.’
Chris Mullin
John Major’s premiership had lasted six and a half years: the election victory in April 1992 had been an unexpected bonus for the Conservatives and Major’s government continued for a full five years. The General Election of 1997 was therefore set for 1 May. Alan Clark had stepped down from his Plymouth seat in 1992, much to the disappointment of his diary readership, and almost immediately regretted it; in 1997 he decided to seek the Tory candidature of one of the safest seats in the country, Kensington and Chelsea, resuming his diary of political life. Suffering bouts of illness almost from the start, Alan Clark sadly did not survive the Parliament.
In January 1997 the election campaign, under the Party leaders Tony Blair, William Hague and Paddy Ashdown, was underway, Ashdown having held numerous discussions with Tony Blair since December 1993 about the Liberal Democrats’ role in a Labour government.
Wednesday, 1 January 1997
Somerset
During the morning I completed the new version of the Partnership Agreement [‘Partnership for Britain’s Future’] and spoke to Archy [Kirkwood]. Donald Dewar* is off in the Cotswolds living like a hermit in a cottage. He has taken a suitcase full of books with him. Apparently this is his dream way to spend the New Year. What a strange man.
Paddy Ashdown
Sunday, 19 January 1997
Today there was big coverage about a woman called Nicola Horlick, a pension fund manager with Morgan Grenfell earning £1 million a year, who has been sacked. She has got PR people and lawyers working for her and she flew to Germany to see Deutsche Bank, who own Morgan Grenfell. Thousands of miners, steel-workers and car-worker are sacked, but her dismissal gets major coverage. She is claiming £1 million compensation and then, blow me down, today in the Sunday Express there was a headline: ‘I want to be a Labour MP now,’ says Nicola Horlick.
Mandelson is a friend of hers.
Tony Benn
Jack Straw, Shadow Home Secretary, addressed the Labour peers. The audience was courteous but I would think sceptical. I put a question in this way: ‘When I visit prisons, as I do once or twice a week, I am always asked by staff and prisoners, “Will things be better under Labour?” May I have an answer from Jack, with whom we all sympathise in this tragic dilemma?’
I was referring of course to the clash between traditional Labour support for penal reform and a desperate competition for votes with the Conservatives. Of course we are all longing to win the election. Jack talked away in reply, but he reminded me of the Irish orator who wound up a speech by saying, ‘Mind you, I’ve said nothing.’
Lord Longford
Monday, 3 February 1997
Today we launched our tearful lion poster as part of our Euro-sceptic tilt – and Robin Cook has helped considerably with his timely suggestion that we’ll be part of the EMU by 2002, come what may.
Gyles Brandreth
Sunday, 9 February 1997
Saltwood Castle
I am sitting at the kitchen table; outside is dark and misty. Around me are spread all the constituency engagements, and the active election planning … the old warhorse smells powder! Bogus of course, because hard to lose this one. In the night I worried if I might be assassinated during the campaign? I don’t want to be paralysed, as politicians often seem to be after such attempts.
Alan Clark
Friday, 21 February 1997
To the High Court, just in time to see the three men falsely convicted of murdering Carl Bridgewater walk free. The crowd blocked the Strand. A lot of old friends turned up including three of the Birmingham Six, Paddy Hill, Bill Power and Gerry Hunter.
I had heard that the men were in bad shape but they put on a pretty good show. They said they weren’t bitter, just angry. They said some nice things about Ann Whelan, the mother of one of them, who is the real hero of the hour. I have only a walk on part in this one.* The day belongs to Ann, the solicitor Jim Nichol and Paul Foot.
Chris Mullin
Wednesday, 5 March 1997
Nick Budgen gets a very dusty answer at PMQs on 4 March when he raises the question of immigration. When at [today’s] ’22 Committee† the question is posed as to whether or not the Government are prepared to make immigration an election issue the Chairman moves the business swiftly on without the least attempt or opportunity to discuss what is, after all, a very serious political issue. Marcus Fox’s notion that the interests of the Conservative Party are best served by sweeping all controversial subjects under the carpet is profoundly mistaken but the assumption must be that this is what the top brass want. Mercifully the Stalinist mentality which pervades the ’22 Committee is not at all evident at the smaller special interest group meetings which continue to provide fora for frank exchanges and meaningful discussions.
Christopher Gill
Thursday, 6 March 1997
Launch our Euro-movement ’97 campaign. This is timed for the lull before the election and is designed to counteract the propaganda of the sceptics by setting out the benefits of British membership of the EU. Of course, we have very limited resources – only a quarter of a million compared with Sir James Goldsmith’s £24 million with which he is financing his Referendum Party.
Giles Radice
Newbury
[Visited a school with David Rendel] We were met by a large crowd of Newbury By-pass protestors* and Green Party activists, many dressed in animal costumes, demonstrating outside the school gate.
When we came to leave, Special Branch said I was to jump into the car and drive out through the protestors, so they didn’t block the bus. I said, no, I would go out and have a little debate with them.
The usual jeering when I went out, but I said ‘Let’s go off into a corner, away from the road, and you can make your points to me.’ So we did surrounded by press and cameras.
I spotted somebody dressed up in what I thought was a badger’s outfit. So I said, ‘I would like to hear from this badger first.’ The lady dressed as a badger complained, ‘I am not a badger, I am a dormouse.’
I apologised profusely for the misunderstanding but said I had been reliably informed she was a badger; why was she masquerading as a dormouse? She said, ‘No I am a dormouse and we dormice are feeling very sad and lonely, as are all our friends the rats, the voles, and the bats.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I would like to hear from some more animals on this. Are there any other members of the animal kingdom who would like to join the debate?’
I spotted a cow. ‘Now, this cow no doubt wishes to make a point.’
The two people in the cow costume waddled forward and said something to the cameras – to a fit of hysteria from the press.
But the Greens took it all terribly seriously. It all made for fine entertainment on the evening news.
Paddy Ashdown
Labour press officer quote of the day (quote of the campaign perhaps): ‘Later today Tony Blair will be spontaneous. Tomorrow he will be passionate.’
Gyles Brandreth