First Confession Read online

  From the Research Department, it was pretty inevitable that a career in Parliament would call. So it did, without my ever really seeming to make a decision that this was what I wanted to do. I followed the approved route. First of all, I fought a strong Labour seat in Lambeth. It covered the area where John Major grew up, though Conservatives like him were thin on the ground. There was a large West Indian community and too many high-rise blocks of flats where the lifts did not work. At the count on polling day, the elderly Labour MP (actually he was not much older than I am now), Marcus Lipton, took me to one side. ‘Don’t worry about losing,’ he said accurately and without difficulty predicting what would happen that night. ‘Conservative Central Office send a lot of fine young men down here to fight me. They all lose and then go on to get chosen for nice constituencies with big, green fields and even bigger majorities.’

  This was only partly true, certainly in my case. In the mid-1970s when I started looking for a seat with a good Conservative majority and a nice slice of country or suburb I fell by the wayside again and again. I was usually thought to be favourite; I am not sure that this helped. As an intellectual from the party HQ, I was suspect from the word go. Moreover, I might be clever enough to be made a minister and taken away from the constituency wine and cheese parties. (I was also thought to be slightly unkempt, a point picked up by Bryan Organ, who painted my portrait for Oxford University. ‘I think you’re naturally scruffy,’ he said, on first inspecting the new Chancellor.) I lost out among others to two subsequent friends, John Major in Huntingdon and Richard Needham in Chippenham. I was firm favourite (again) for South Dorset. Then Bath brought forward its selection meeting ahead of Dorset and I was chosen there rather than another older Balliol man, Peter Brooke. Disappointed, he travelled home to London and was shortly afterwards chosen to fight the very safe City of London in a by-election. Bath was not safe; in fact it was very marginal. The majority depended on the balance between the Labour and Liberal votes. Giving advice to anyone today embarking on a political career, I would strongly counsel in favour of targeting safe seats. Marginal constituencies are inevitably even harder work and threaten the perilous prospect of losing your seat and your career at just the wrong time, often for reasons that bear little relationship to how hard and well you have worked at holding on.

  My constituency was a beautiful city and my local Conservative supporters were friendly, diligent and kind. During the period when I was a Cabinet minister, I was asked by a neighbouring constituency with a large Conservative majority and a retiring MP to switch to them. I could not imagine how I could be disloyal to my team in Bath. This was regarded by one or two friends as a very unprofessional decision on my part. But, even though my local Conservative council, without ever consulting me, had appealed successfully against a change in the constituency boundary which would have benefited the Conservative Party (I cannot remember their reasoning, if there was any), I could not imagine how I would explain to my supporters that I was quitting and carpet-bagging elsewhere. There was, for example, one real ‘salt of the earth’ woman who ran the Conservative committee in a difficult, mostly Labour, ward. How would I possibly tell Joyce Godwin that I was off? She would have defended me loyally but it would have hurt her. Joyce never knew it but she was always my litmus test for the acceptability of a policy or political behaviour. (She was not a fan of the poll tax later, but then who was?)

  I worked hard in the constituency, harder when I was a minister than before. But the higher I went, the more local Liberals said that I was deserting the city for my Westminster ambitions. In my experience, and that of most of my political friends, there was invariably a disjuncture between the squeaky-clean image of Liberals and the way they fought elections. In my last Bath election, they targeted my party agent, who was ‘outed’ by the Sunday tabloids as an office holder in a regional gay organization. They need not have bothered. My ministerial responsibilities for the poll tax (I was moved to the Environment Department the year it was introduced) was like being handed the ten biblical plagues; moreover, it was coupled with a new local business rate, fairer than its predecessor but higher in a city like Bath, where the local economy had thrived. The Liberals could have sunk me on these issues without dragging my poor agent into the campaign.

  My feeling about Bath fell short of dewy-eyed love. I found regular surgeries burdensome but worthwhile. Sometimes you could sort out a problem and improve a constituent’s life. I was lucky to have a great House of Commons PA, now a Church of England vicar, called Freda Evans. She worked tirelessly to help those who came to my surgeries (with her charming spaniel, Sammy, at her feet day and night) and as a priest she looks after her parishioners in a run-down part of Birmingham with equal kindness. Yet so often I had to explain to a constituent that, for example, he or she was getting all the help that the state deemed proper and that there was no more that I could do to help. I am sure that in a marginal seat you have to say ‘No’ a lot more frequently than in a safer one. I liked getting involved with local churches, the university, the arts festival, civil society organizations. There were, however, a number of rather unattractive and mildly snobbish middle-class voters who wanted a Conservative Party strong enough to protect them from Labour taxes but could only imagine actually voting Conservative with their noses firmly held. They were a bit pleased with themselves, as if simply living in a neat Georgian house in that beautiful city and belonging to the Wine Society set them apart from the rest of humanity. When I lost Bath my sentiments at parting company were thus not those of unalloyed gloom. There were lots of exceptions: people like the single parent for whom I struggled for years to get proper recognition of the needs of her dyslexic child, a boy who went on in the year I lost my seat to win a place at university. I got particular satisfaction when I was able to deal with people’s housing problems. In Bath we had had a very tricky issue involving the maintenance of houses from a period when the quality of the concrete was suspect. There were enough cases like that for me to feel that the whole constituency relationship had been worthwhile, though sometimes it was touch and go as to whether I could satisfy all the demands made on me. Heaven knows what it must be like today with the internet and emails.

  The reward for constituency effort was Westminster, a seat in the self-styled Mother of Parliaments. In retrospect – I am not sure that I realized this properly at the time – the life is only really possible, fruitful and enjoyable if you have a great partner. All my closest political friends – William Waldegrave, John Major, Tristan Garel-Jones, Richard Needham and John Patten – have terrific wives who have sustained them through gloom, public failure, tabloid assault, boredom and a horribly demanding working regime. Of course, there are other occupations where success (or survival) must be as demanding. But I reckon that there are particular combinations of circumstance which make a political life a killer. Compared to average earnings it is well paid – and much better today than was once the case. But I cannot think of any of my political friends who could not have made more, far more, in another job, and probably without similar stress. When I became a Member of Parliament, the salary was £9,450. Today, it is £74,000 and all the allowances for offices, housing and pensions have increased substantially. The system got into disrepute because instead of taking higher salaries, there was a ‘wink-wink’ connivance at allowing these allowances to drift upwards with insufficiently rigorous oversight. So Parliament endured a torrent of journalistic outrage at MPs inflating their expenses. It was inexcusable but expressions about pots and kettles did come to mind.

  What of the other strains? How, first of all, if you are married or have a partner and family do you organize your family life in a way that balances it, Westminster and the constituency? We decided that we had not got married in order to live apart as many MPs and their wives do. Over the years I have been quite surprised not by the number of MPs’ marriages that fall to pieces but the number that survive. But having two homes – in our case a central London flat and a c
ottage just outside the constituency – put a lot of pressure on my family. I would usually go down to the constituency by train on Friday mornings in a first-class carriage. Lavender would follow in the car full of yelling children, dog and the weekend’s provisions just in time for the rush hour, and in the winter the dark woods and narrow lanes of west Wiltshire. Who do you think got the better part of this deal? We shared the rush hour journey home on Sunday evening in our second-hand estate car. I bought my first new car (a Vauxhall) when I joined the Cabinet. After all this shunting about how do you explain to your partner the ridiculous disparity between perceived success and failure. You are either too much in the spotlight or not in it enough. You do not have to go into politics. No one is forcing you. So don’t ask for sympathy or tears. Today, though this may just be an elderly man’s view, I have the impression that fewer really good people think that the political game is worth the candle.

  So my friends – all of us have remained married to our partners – were lucky, and I have been too. I cannot imagine my life without Lavender; indeed the thought of her dying before me (the bloodless word is pre-decease) fills me with horror. I have no idea how I would deal with electricity failures, or leaks, or the car or pretty much anything technical, or bills, or tax returns. But far, far more important is the great void there would be in my life. Since we met and fell in love at university – she is still today as pretty, cool and feisty as she was then – I have never thought that I could spend my life with anyone else. Lavender lost her father, an Olympic athlete, before she was born (he was killed – we recently discovered – by ‘friendly fire’ in Normandy), and her mother in a car crash when she was sixteen. Maybe this has helped to make her such a good mother – best friend to her daughters as well as one they clearly think is, like their father, occasionally a bit dotty. Like the Old Testament Ruth, she went where I went and lodged where I lodged, not without questions but always without reproach. She also sacrificed her career as a barrister for me (though when we returned from Hong Kong she successfully retrained and practised as a family mediator). Today, I sometimes look at couples in restaurants, dining together and never exchanging a word beyond ‘Put your phone away.’ Life is not like that for me. So we get older together, enjoying most of the same things, like sport, travel, books and dogs and of course arguing about them; forgetting these days many of the same things; helping each other to remember names of friends, books and flowers; suffering just a little from similar aches and pains. I regularly count my blessings but perhaps do not celebrate them sufficiently often, or with sufficient noise.

  Arriving at Westminster was not as big a deal for me as for most new MPs. As a member of the Conservative Research Department I had been in and out of Parliament, not least in the days before there was much in the way of security. I knew my way around the great neo-Gothic building with its frescoes recounting what we imagined our history to have been – the rise of a great sea-faring nation from one triumph of liberal accountability to another. Everywhere were the statues of the parliamentary giants who had preceded us. They had presumably found themselves as nervous as we were when confronting a chamber when in political trouble, full of colleagues whose notion of collegiality would often be overwhelmed by the prospect of an enjoyable brouhaha. It was the chamber that excited me; I never felt a sort of clubman’s affection for the place as a whole. At least I did not encounter such a sentiment until one occasion after I had lost my seat, when I was dining with friends who were still MPs, and said ‘goodnight’ to them as they dashed off at ten minutes to ten to vote. For a few moments I really did feel bereft.

  All that voting, in those days at all times of the night, meant that you had to hang around the building for hours. It was not in fact quite as bad for me because we had a flat ‘on the bell’, which would literally ring just inside our front door to summon me to do my democratic duty. I could just get back to the division lobbies within the ten minutes allowed for a vote. As it was a bit of a scramble, like the rest I spent too much time drifting around the library and the bars. Once I was a minister I had a reasonable cubby hole of an office to which I could disappear and get on with my official boxes full of briefs, committee papers and letters. The bars were a menace for some. We used to have the opportunity of an annual health check by St Thomas’s Hospital on the understanding that the anonymized results could be used as part of a comparative epidemiological study. I once asked the doctor who was organizing the work how Westminster compared with St Thomas’s. He said that there was higher alcohol consumption in Parliament but less sexual activity than at the hospital.

  The Chamber was, and perhaps still is, the real centre of everything. I only raise a doubt about its centrality because clearly fewer people today attend debates. Speaking in a full house could be a terrifying experience. One verbal slip – a pause, say, in the wrong place – and you could be lost in a storm of laughing and bellowing, particularly late at night when the House was inevitably more rowdy, wine having been taken (as Ian Gow MP would have said). As a backbencher it was scary being called to speak after one of the crowd-pullers like Tony Benn or Enoch Powell. Unless you said something arresting, perhaps funny, right at the start, your speech would be given to the backs of MPs departing from the Chamber for tea, whisky or work. The speakers who made the greatest impression were those who (as on a public platform elsewhere) were speaking, or appeared to be speaking, without a text. (David Cameron managed this in a remarkable tour de force when he was running for the Conservative leadership and speaking at the party conference.) There is of course today a question of appearance and reality. So many public figures (think of American presidents) use glass plates onto which their text is reflected, so that their audience have the impression that they are spontaneously thinking of what they say in front of you. In fact they are reading the carefully drafted speech which is reflected onto the glass tablets that the TV cameras do not pick up. I used them once or twice and hated the experience. I went slower and slower and so the page turner somewhere under the lectern went slower and slower too, so these speeches degenerated into funereal processions of words and phrases. At that rate I could have turned the Gettysburg address into an oration of Castro-like length. The reason why a textless speech is so much more interesting is that the audience know that you are only certain in a general sort of way what is going to come out. The speech can respond to the mood and interjections of the audience, who know that the speaker is on a verbal high wire. It also helps to have something original to say, an interesting take on a familiar issue. The best speaker on these criteria among my young peers was Matthew Parris, who later became such a wise and funny commentator on others’ parliamentary performances. Overall, the best speaker in the Commons when I was there was the old-fashioned radical Michael Foot, whose swoops and pauses and mixture of the demotic and the literary made him funny, cutting and effective in every sense except one: many of his ideas on economic and social policy came straight out of the Ark. At the end of the day, as bishops say, it does matter to have something sensible to say as well as to say it well. But, for debating style, he is the person I would most like to have resembled.

  The main problem about Westminster, and indeed our whole system of government, is that we have forgotten why and how the system used to work so well and appear incapable of reforming it in order to restore its relevance and vitality. Parliament itself is far too large. There are too many MPs and too many ministers. There are far too many members of the second chamber, the House of Lords, which has only a rather hazy idea of what its purpose should be. For decades people have been predicting that Brazil would be the next emerging economy to become a superstar, but it never seems to progress beyond this ‘about-to-be’ status. Equally, reform of the House of Lords has been predicted for years. It will go on being predicted. The main reason for reforming it would be to make it more credible as a functioning part of our democracy. But why should the principal democratic chamber, the House of Commons, devote its energies to crea
ting a real rival? So the reform of the House of Lords will remain a subject for debating societies. For the time being we should at least do something about its Topsy-like growth, partly a consequence of muddling up appointments to it with the honours system. Modest state funding of political parties, and tougher limits on private benefactions, would also remove some of the rich entrepreneurs who have been sprung into this part of our legislature, primarily because they have dropped a few cheques into the collection tins of the political parties.

  Reducing the size of the Commons and of the number of government ministers should be accompanied by far more devolution of power to local government. This has started to happen but should go much further. We are still a horribly over-centralized democracy. When I was Environment Secretary a large proportion of the decisions I had to take should have been the preserve of local councillors. I was usually running on four or five hours’ sleep: boxes until after midnight; up again for more work at 5 or 6 a.m. Much of what I was doing should have been done far from Whitehall. Our flat in Victoria was in a block just behind the home of the Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume. I mentioned to him one day that when I got up in the early morning and pulled the curtains before getting down to work I frequently saw him walking up and down behind his house with his breviary saying his office. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I see you. I think you should put on your dressing gown before pulling the curtain.’