Breaking the Code (17 page)

The PM has given Mellor his ‘full public support’. Mellor is rounding on the
Mirror
for dragging his wife’s health into the picture. It seems Judith has been in danger of going blind with retinitis pigmentosa and the
Mirror
takes the view that the stress of life with David could worsen the effects of the disease. Judith’s mum, 75-year-old Mrs Joan Hall, has also thrown in her helpful two-penny-worth: ‘He is spending the week trying to save his job. He should be trying to save his marriage.’

John Bratby has died. I’m not surprised, but it’ll be grim for poor Patti. They met (I think) through an ad in
Private Eye
, but it was a real love-match as well as a working partnership. Patti, whenever we saw her, dressed in tight-fitting leather (at John’s behest), his model and muse as well as homemaker and moral support. We have had some good times at the Cupola and Tower of the Winds. (Isn’t it a fantastic name for a house? John
was
fantastic – a true original – and I love the Venice pictures of his we have. He was a crafty bugger too: he lured the great and the good – and the odd minor celeb – to come and sit for him by writing them a beguiling letter saying he wanted to capture ‘the individual while we still have a few’ and tempting them with the promise of one of Patti’s ‘bacon sandwiches on the side’. Very few declined the invitation to sit for him and most, of course, then bought the picture.)

David Mellor seems to have got his in-laws back under control. He is pictured with them, and Judith, and the children, down at Thistle Cottage, somewhere in Enid Blyton country, a happy family, united and strong, grinning inanely at the cameras over the garden gate. Mr Major is determined the tabloids won’t drive him out and
The Times
is riding to the rescue: ‘Mellor should stay’.

I went to the Department of National Heritage this afternoon. No sign of the beleaguered Secretary of State, but cameramen at the door just in case. My destination was Room 67a on the second floor where I was meeting with Robert Key,
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amiable cove, MP for Salisbury, Mellor’s deputy, and Minister for Sport. I had gone, at his behest,
to brief him on playing fields issues and to learn about the government’s plans to save school sport. The meeting began quite well; we exchanged pleasantries, Mellor was not discussed (officials were present), tea was served, the minister settled back into his armchair, said ‘Fire away’ and then fell fast asleep! The note-taking official didn’t know what to do. Nor did I. So we both pretended the Minister had just closed his eyes the better to concentrate on my argument. I burbled away and several times the hapless, slumbering Minister rallied, threw in an observation, struggled to keep his eyes open and then gave up the unequal fight and slumped back. After half an hour or so of this charade, I got up to go. The Minister got to his feet, rubbing his eyes, and thanked me profusely. ‘That was very helpful. We must keep in touch.’ I trust I left him refreshed.

The Olympic Games have ended, having totally passed me by. Douglas Hurd has called for UN action to end the horror – ‘the intolerable abuses’ – of the camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The holidays are upon us. Mr Major is off to Spain, staying with Tristan Garel-Jones
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(who I can’t make out at all), and we’re off to France, staying with Colin and Rosie [Sanders] at La Dulcinea, St Paul de Vence.

We’re driving back from Verona to Nice.

La Boheme
was a wow, the Due Torri
comme il faut
(or Italian equivalent), but judging from the English papers we’ve just bought the world is in turmoil. The UN is halting aid to Sarajevo after one of our cargo planes was threatened. We’re sending 1,800 troops to Bosnia and imposing an air exclusion zone over southern Iraq to protect the Shia Muslims. The Cabinet’s defence and overseas policy committee has been summoned to Downing Street for emergency talks. Mr Major has returned from Spain, Mr Hurd has broken off his walking holiday in France, Malcolm Rifkind is down from Scotland. Norman Lamont has been left in peace in Italy (the Chancellor jetting back for crisis talks might unsettle the markets) and Michael Heseltine has been allowed to continue his South Pacific idyll: he is studying the flora and fauna of Fiji.

We’re back at La Dulcinea. Colin is down below in his temperature-controlled cellar looking out a suitable pink champagne. We are going to be raising our glasses to the hapless Duchess of York. She has been staying on the other side of our valley, enjoying a summer break with her friend and financial adviser John Bryan. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to them, lurking up in the hills, was an eagle-eyed jumbo-lensed freelance photographer who has taken a series of gobsmackingly lurid snaps of Fergie, topless, cavorting with her buck at the poolside, tickling his fancy and – wait for it – sucking his toes. (This is not something Michèle has ever thought of doing – at least, so far as I know…) Anyway, these candid holiday snaps have now been relayed right round the globe and (courtesy of the
Daily Mirror
) have even landed on the breakfast table at Balmoral. Poor Fergie. Poor Queen. (And to think it was only ten years ago that Princess Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting, Mona Mitchell CVO, told Michèle, so pompously, ‘I am afraid divorcees cannot be presented to Her Royal Highness.’)

Fergie has left Balmoral – probably for the last time. Terry Major, the Prime Minister’s brother, has been hit by the recession and can’t afford his annual holiday to Bognor. Bugger Bognor: the real news is that Europe’s banks are joining forces to defend sterling and the government is signalling its readiness to raise interest rates to maintain the pound’s value within the ERM. Ignoring the storm clouds, we set off on Colin and Rosie’s boat, the
Snow Queen
, for a very self-indulgent lobster lunch. In the harbour we passed Robert Maxwell’s yacht; it is smaller than I imagined, but I don’t think he could have toppled over the ship’s rail by accident. Either he jumped or he was pushed.

We flew into Heathrow to learn that Saddam Hussein has moved jet fighters to airfields just above the 32nd parallel and George Bush has declared a no-fly zone just below it. We learn too that Norman Lamont is standing firm: ‘There are going to be no devaluations, no leaving the ERM. We are absolutely committed to the ERM. It is at the centre of our policy.’ But what’s really got the nation’s juices going in our absence has been the revelation of an intimate telephone conversation between the Princess of Wales and a man called James. It was picked up by a radio ham (a retired bank manager from
Abingdon) on New Year’s Eve 1989 and is now available for all to hear, courtesy of
The Sun
’s ‘royal hotline’. More than 40,000 have tuned in already – and I met one of them tonight, at Chester Cathedral, at the Cheshire County Youth Theatre’s performance of
The Lark
. He said he hadn’t listened to it all, but he was convinced it was genuine.

I saw the Prime Minister last night. He came to Eaton
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to lend his support for Manchester’s Olympic bid. He looked pretty unkempt and wild-eyed. I’m not surprised. Lamont has announced that he’s planning to borrow about £7.25 billion (
billion
) to defend the pound and my maverick neighbour Nick Winterton
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is calling for ‘an urgent reappraisal of government policy’. ‘The economy’s on the brink of collapse, Britain’s industries are being sacrificed on the altar of Euro-dogma. Let’s forget Maastricht and leave the ERM.’ Could he be right? The PM was on automatic pilot: genial but a million miles away. He says he’s going to be giving a big speech next week, underlining our total commitment to Maastricht and the ERM.

The
Sun
’s serialisation of the de Sancha story has been a joy – if you like that sort of thing. We’ve had all the gory details: the mattress on the floor, the dressing-up, the toe-sucking … (What is this with the toe-sucking? Clearly, I’ve led a very sheltered life.) Mr Major is still standing by his man – by his men, indeed. At yesterday Cabinet meeting (the first since July) the PM paid tribute to the Chancellor’s ‘great skill’ and around the table they chorused ‘Hear! Hear!’

Last night the PM addressed the Scottish CBI and told industry to ‘bite the bullet’: ‘We will stay in the exchange-rate mechanism of the European monetary system, whatever happens.’

It’s strange, we’re living in these momentous times, I am a Member of Parliament and yet I have no impact on these events, no input, nothing to offer. If I don’t support the government’s line to the letter, I’m rocking the boat. If I relay the dismay felt by so many of the smaller businesses up here, I wouldn’t necessarily be reflecting the consensus of local opinion (opinion is divided) and I don’t believe it would make any difference anyway. The
policy is settled. The government is pursuing it. That’s that. To have shared my misgivings with poor exhausted Mr Major when he was up here last week would simply have served to depress the poor man further. So each to his own: Major and Lamont struggle to save the pound, while Brandreth looks forward to a typical backbencher’s constituency weekend: Saturday – the jumble sale at St Mary’s, lunch at Abbeyfield House, tea with the Civic Trust, supper with the agent; Sunday – the League of Friends charity walk (9.30 start), lunch with the Bangladeshi Community, the war widows’ service at Blacon cemetery. All worthwhile, some of it enjoyable, but I’m not sure it’s what I expected.

Last night we went to see Simon [Cadell] in
Travels with my Aunt
in Richmond. He’s wonderful, but it’s one of those pieces that’s an ‘entertainment’ rather than a play and it left us (Michèle and me) a little unsatisfied. We didn’t say any of this to Simon, who looks shattered but is happy with the way it’s going. He has high hopes for it. I doubt it will be commercial.
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Today we drove to Stratford, gripped all the way by the radio reports of chaos in the markets. Interest rates went from 10 to 12 to 15 per cent as poor old Badger [Lamont] struggled to save the pound. We’ve just been watching the humiliation on the box. Blanched, puffy-eyed, the poor bugger made as dignified a fist of it as he could. At least, he didn’t fluff his lines. The adventure has cost billions and the end result is that the pound in New York has fallen to DM 2.66, a post-war low. The PM has not surfaced, but filmed going in to see him were Geoffrey Johnson-Smith
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and Stephen Milligan. Why them?

On the front page of
The Times
Anatole Kaletsky
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lets rip: ‘With one bound we are free. After two years of pointless self-destruction, common sense has finally prevailed. A million people have lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands have been made homeless or bankrupt. The spirit of British enterprise, so agonisingly reborn in the ’80s after two generations of catatonic slumber, has been all but crushed by high interest rates
designed to punish initiative and risk and to reward idleness and caution. But finally the pound is out of the European exchange-rate mechanism and Britain is free to fashion its economic destiny.’

Stephen tells me he was summoned to see the PM simply because he was a backbencher who happened to be around and the boss wanted ‘to settle the troops’, show his steady hand at the tiller, prove to us other ranks that – though under fire – as ever he was cool, calm and collected. Stephen was excited, delighted to be in at the kill, but depressed by the outcome. He still believes in the principle of the ERM and says commentators like Kaletsky are way over the top.

‘Inflation
is
down and the recession was upon us in any event.’

‘But hasn’t our policy made it worse?’

‘Mmm.’

We’re off to a matinee of
The Merry Wives
which means I’ve not got time for a proper report on the latest twist in the Mellor saga. Mona Bauwens, thirty-one, daughter of some PLO hotshot, is suing
The People
for libel and the hearing of the case has revealed that Mellor and family holidayed with Bauwens in Marbella during the Gulf war – and Bauwens paid the Mellors’ air fares. What’s more, Mellor has been in the habit of calling on the fair Mona ‘on a social basis in the daytime without his wife – for a cup of tea or coffee.’ For the tabloids this is a lot more fun than poor old Badger and the ERM. ‘I had Mellor – for tea’; ‘Tea and sympathy with Mr Mellor’; and my favourite: ‘Mellor’s Mona Tea-ser’. Watch this space.

The lines are hot. Parliament has been recalled for next Thursday. And we’re getting a clearer picture of the week’s events. It seems the Treasury knew the game was up for sterling by Tuesday lunchtime. Because of the ERM rules there was no question of throwing in the towel before 4.00 p.m., the Bank of England’s official closing time. But we could have pulled out on Tuesday night. Instead Lamont and Major decided to go for broke – to travel the last mile – and pour £15/20 billion of our foreign currency reserves into their doomed defence of our position in the ERM. £15/20 billion down the drain!

What happens to Norman now? I like him. He’s amusing – but the truth is he’s expendable. There was always something a bit bruised about him: now he’s seriously damaged goods. The main plank of the government’s economic policy has turned to matchwood. If Norman goes now, he shoulders the blame, we draw a line and move on. But from all I hear he has no intention of going quietly – ‘Defiant Lamont intent on riding out the storm’ – and gallant Mr Major has saluted his Chancellor’s ‘courage and common sense’.
If Norman goes, Major can regroup and soldier on. If Norman stays, the stench of failure will stick to the government as a whole and the PM and the Chancellor in particular. We loyal footsoldiers won’t smell too sweet either.