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I came back from New Zealand fit, tanned and raring to go. Now I’m ’flu-ridden, flabby (again) and things are turning sour. Mid-term grumbles, slightly late, but nonetheless indicating some annoying shifts. We told them at the last election we weren’t promising anything, and wouldn’t do much so as to prove ourselves safe, conservative and orthodox. We’ve followed that agenda exactly. Yet now they’re grumbling that we’ve done nothing for them.
I’m beginning to think the British people aren’t worth our government. Watch it or we’ll take action against grumbling. Always on the basis of a self-regulating voluntary code, of course. We’re not coercive.
***
Saturday 12 February
My turn to be match ball sponsor at Grimsby Town. I take Linda, who disgraces me by complaining of boredom in a loud voice, then leaves at half time. Sykes, my grandson (7), loves it. The crowd is friendly but the usual good-natured, MP joshing is turning sour. "Why don’t you do something about all these asylum seekers?" "Do something about the bloody Grimsby hospital" "Why does Labour do everything for poofters and nothing for us?" It’s all well meant, presumably for me to relay back to Tony.
Sykes is delighted to be presented with the match ball signed by all the players. On the train to London, dressed in full Grimsby strip, he looks round anxiously and asks "Why are all those funny people wearing Newcastle kit?" Turns out to be Alistair Campbell and the Downing Street works outing.
Wednesday 16 February
To Andrew Smith in the Treasury to put the case (still undecided after two years) for compensation for the redundant trawler men who lost their jobs in 1976. Treasury makes ministers enigmatic. Andrew duly is. When my press statement announces a "sympathetic" hearing it comes back with a Treasury request to change this to a "fair" hearing. Sounds ominous to me.
Monday 21 February
Due to interview Barbara Castle for the House Magazine at Hell Corner Farm but awake coughing, spluttering and so riddled with ’flu that I ring and cancel so as not to infect Barbara. This bloody country.
Thursday 24 February
These days I’m so out of fashion I no longer get invited to speak to local Labour parties but to accountants and insolvency practitioners, usually for an after lunch lynching. Since the publication of Parliament in Pictures invitations are pouring in from photographic clubs. Tonight it’s Keele University to open an exhibition. I have selected the exhibits including a dozen of my own. Set off from Halifax at three o’clock in plenty of time to get there by six. One and a half hours later I’m still stuck in an enormous traffic jam, two junctions on, on the M62. Clearly can’t now reach Keele in time so I get off the motorway and return home to break the news "I’m not coming". "Oh. Then we’ll have to take your photographs out of the exhibition. Can you collect them?"
Friday 25 February
The Annual General Meeting of the Grimsby Labour Party. Normally there’s no role for the MP except to carry the ballot box round and count votes. Tonight both Linda and I are there to discuss the financial problems of Crosland House, our rambling offices which are in urgent need of rebuilding and renovation. Gloom deepens as the cost and the tragic state of our party finances emerge as worse than anyone could possibly envisage.
Rumour says Sean Woodward may well be applying for Grimsby but it’s not taken seriously. Until tonight when a sobbing member says "With this mess we’d better get rid of you and select that millionaire bloke to bail us out". New Labour should auction safe seats for party funds. Or make local parties apply for a Private Finance Initiative on their premises. Don’t dismiss it. A lot of equally daft ideas have finished up as party policy.
Sunday 27 February
Report at the new offices of Talk Radio, now Talk Sport, for my phone-in with Peter Hitchens who rants on about Labour’s crimes against humanity while I try to get an occasional word in for freedom, truth and justice; not necessarily in that order. We’ve been off for several weeks because of cricket from God knows where. So I’m dreading the prospects for the programme in the summer. "See you next week then" I say cheerily to the producer. She replies "Well-yes-er-um-gulp" and asks me if I’d mind paying my own taxi fare home. This is worrying.
For some reason my invitation to the Old Vic for the hundredth birthday of a party our leadership has been telling us is dead didn’t arrive. So I wasn’t there to hear Tony’s insistence that we should stop fighting each other and concentrate on fighting Rhodri Morgan, Ken Livingstone and Dennis Canavan instead.
Take my grandchildren out for a cycle ride in Dulwich Park but am exhausted after one turn round. Grandchildren should be a photographic inspiration and opportunity but mine are getting too smart. Every time my camera appears they hide, do gargoyle faces or pretend to fall down dead until I promise them something: sweets, a piggy-back, a ticket to Chelsea. Does this happen to Cartier Bresson? "C’est le moment crucial" "Peut etre monsieur. Mais d’abord il faut payer". The little bastards will regret this when I show them my photos in forty years time.
Monday 28 February
Back to the Fun Factory for a disastrous day beginning with the news that my car repairs will cost a small fortune, then the discovery that the new burglar alarm has gone off to the great annoyance of the neighbours, building through the rumour of new job losses in Grimsby, and ending in a phone call from the programme controller at Talk Sport that Hitchens and Mitchell - the best radio programme in the land - no longer fits in with the sports format of the new station. "Couldn’t I talk about Grimsby Town?" Apparently not.
Sobbing to the Agriculture Committee where all my amendments to our GMO report, praising GMOs, demanding that they be force fed to schools, and attacking Friends of the Earth as vandals in white coats, are all rejected. Apparently, Tony has now changed his mind on GMOs. All this time learning to love them and buying Zennecca tomato paste to put on my chips, and now they’re not party policy any more.
Evening
Having seen a TV report by Robin Oakley that people are avoiding Ken Livingstone in the lobby, when I find him wandering lonely as a cloud and looking dazed coming down from John Prescott’s room, I rush to embrace him. Having first checked that no-one is watching. Shaken but not stirred, he doesn’t seem to recognise me. Outside every exit is staked out by the media but going out and coming back eighteen times wearing my "Ken for Mayor" badge doesn’t get a camera to turn. Must write to Saga to see if they are applying for a television or radio licence.
Tuesday 29 February
Old Testament Prophets’ lunch to celebrate our hundredth birthday. The event is now so popular that we’re having to turn people away and the traditional chair left empty in honour of Roy Hattersley, or Frodo Baggins, the freedom fighting dog which so much resembles him, has to be filled by Peter Kilfoyle. The confusion about who ordered what makes me worry about our ability to plan the revolution.
These aren’t events for long speeches but we get unanimous agreement on a three point programme. First. We won’t create unnecessary fights. We’ll leave that to the leader. Second. The revolution will not be postponed, merely transferred to the London Eye where there are now enough of us to fill two capsules and give the Old Testament Prophets closest view we’ll ever have of power, while smiling and waving for the press. Like Princess Ferguson. The prospect is so exciting we decide not just to have one revolution but two. Or three. Third. Since the government is running into difficulties we’re certain to be called in as its Night Soil Team. The Chris Mullin precedent shows what will happen as the left are brought in to pull government’s irons out of the fire. I’ll be called to Downing Street and made Minister of Fisheries with instructions to cut the fishing fleet by half. Bob Marshall Andrews will become Lord Chancellor to stop jury trial and legal aid. Lynne Jones will go to Social Security to force single parents out to work and children back up chimneys. Such a Blair master stroke sounds so likely I’m starting to wear quiet ties and trying to start up conversations with Peter Mandelson by asking whether his dog, Bobby, is Protestant or Catholic, male, female, or Third Way?
We eat only dishes Nye Bevan liked and drink his favourite wines, Valpolicelli and Soave. My aim in life is now to emulate Bob Marshall-Andrews so I match his abstemiousness drinking glass for glass with him but ending up too incoherent to give the speech the other Prophets are calling for.
Adjourn to the Agriculture Committee where everything seems a bit odd. Struggling against sleep and unable to ask any questions because I can’t hear a word Nick Brown is saying, I leave and go to sleep in the library. Wake up feeling awful. Should I report to Howard Stoat and ask for an Aegrotat with my Viagra prescription? Is he empowered to give out sick notes? Decide to throw myself on the mercy of Tommy MacAvoy. "I feel awful. Can I go home?" Mechanically he reaches for his rubber gloves and rectal thermometer and I begin to undo my trousers, the last resort of the desperate in the Whips’ Office. Suddenly, Tommy looks closely at me and a light of sympathy, even affection, enters his eyes. "You do look a bit white. Go on home". Gibbering my gratitude I go. My wife’s diagnosis is more brutal. "It’s drink. You’ve been with that Bob Marshall-Andrews". I’d never thought of that. Don’t tell Teddy Taylor. Fortunately, at that moment my nose bursts, blood spurts everywhere, and she, too, begins to look sympathetic. Not as much as Tommy.
Wednesday 1 March
Feeling fine and not the least big hung over. So it must have been the ’flu. I have to speak in Oxford at St. John’s, perhaps the annual Blair Lecture to commemorate its most distinguished alumnus, apart from the Don who had such an affection for swans. No-one to meet me. Find the lecture is to be in the North Lecture Theatre at one o’clock. It’s locked. One o’clock comes. Lecture theatre still locked. I’ve asked every girl I see if she’s Sonya Oswaldtwistle, the organiser, but all have edged nervously away. Finally, I see someone waiting at the car park entrance. He explains that the meeting is at two and it’s for the Reform Club, a body of Conservatives formed to put the case for reform which then lost interest in it. Sounds very New Labour to me.
Unfortunately my nose bleed resumes over lunch. They don’t like to say anything until a reluctant "Is there something wrong with your nose?" makes me realise that my hand and sleeve are now covered in blood. Wash, scrub and bung up my nose, then give the Blair Lecture to a tumultuous audience of eight.
***
Life is getting like scrap book for 1989. The economy is bouncing along on loose credit and rising house prices but heading for the cliff because the Bank of England controls inflation by putting the Pound up every month to make imports cheap and force British firms to cut costs and shed jobs. Nemesis will come now as it did then: swift and unannounced. At this exchange rate there’s no way to avoid it.
The first signs are there in the car industry and in the warnings that we will have to join the Euro if they’re to stay here. I know the Japanese. They don’t say what they mean. Only the chronically insane and the Liberal Democrats want to join the Euro at this exchange rate or anything like it because it sets overvaluation in concrete. So what they really mean is that at this exchange rate it’s just not profitable to produce here. They’re asking us to do something. Since we won’t or can’t that means a gloomy scenario for May 2001. We might even have to say "We’re only half way to our objective of ending boom and bust. At least we’ve stopped the first." |
