The Great Cat Massacre (26 page)

Authors: Gareth Rubin

Macmillan must therefore have had mixed feelings when he was informed by his doctors that they had made a mistake and there was nothing wrong with him. Rather than dying in a matter of months, he lived until 1986. In the General Election, Wilson gained the most wafery of wafer-thin majorities – just four MPs.

Had his doctors not misdiagnosed his condition, it would have been the trusted incumbent Macmillan fighting Wilson rather than the untried Douglas-Home, and the election result might well have delivered another Conservative government.

‘THIS IS OFF THE RECORD, ISN’T IT?’ – MICHAEL FOOT’S WIFE STABS HIM IN THE BACK, 1983

As the choice to lead the Labour Party, Michael Foot should have been slightly less popular than Mussolini. Coming across as a befuddled academic with misty-eyed views of Soviet politics, he contrasted sharply with Margaret Thatcher, who could orate in language understood by one and all, and seemed to quite like Britain, instead of wanting to phase it out. That even his own party didn’t want to be members if he was in charge was proved when six Labour MPs broke away to form the Social Democratic Party, led by David Owen.

In the run-up to the 1983 General Election, Foot wasn’t going down well with the electorate. Having just won the Falklands War, Britain was in no mood for a pacifist who wanted to voluntarily give up the nation’s nuclear deterrent – a policy then a central plank of the election manifesto that was famously described by one of the Labour Party’s MPs as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.

In addition, Labour had a much more plausible potential leader in the form of Denis Healey. He was witty, as deputy leader he was already halfway there, and he could perform on television without coming across as some sort of biological experiment. The dark mutterings against Foot led to an extraordinary announcement during the election campaign when Labour’s campaign manager held a press briefing to announce: ‘At the campaign committee this morning we were all insistent that Michael Foot is the leader of the Labour Party and speaks for the party. The unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the leader.’ He might as well have come out and said: ‘Michael Foot? Yeah, I suppose so.’

And all that was before Foot’s wife got involved.

Just as the British public were about to go to the polls, Jill Foot was speaking to a group of people she didn’t really know. Not for one moment imagining that they might tell anyone, she informed them that her husband would resign if Labour lost, but, even if they won, he wouldn’t stay very long: he would resign to make room for a younger man.

She believed that she was talking exclusively to loyal party members but one was a reporter for the local
newspaper, who broke the news that even Foot’s own wife thought he was too old and frail to be Prime Minister.

On 9 June the Tories were elected with a majority substantially increased from their last. It led to
soul-searching
and a repositioning of the Labour Party – from then on, the left wing was on the run and the centrists under Neil Kinnock, then John Smith, were on the rise – culminating in Tony Blair’s descent upon the party to lead it to the promised land of Downing Street.

ALWAYS CHECK YOUR MIKE – GORDON BROWN AND BIGOTGATE, 2010

In 2010 one of the least charismatic men ever to hold the office of Prime Minister left Number 10 Downing Street. Had Gordon Brown remembered to take his radio microphone off after an interview during the election campaign, he might just have remained there for another five years.

According to people who have met him, Brown can be charming, witty and good company. If this is true, he has always managed to hide it brilliantly from newspaper and broadcast interviewers alike.

His people skills were on particular display during the 2010 General Election when Brown, a man not noted for his common touch, was on a painful-to-watch walkabout in Greater Manchester to ‘connect’ with ordinary voters. One of those to whom he was presented was Gillian Duffy, a harmless, grey-haired grandmother and widow from Rochdale, whom Brown called ‘a bigoted woman’ live on national television without meaning to, or even realising it.

Mrs Duffy, a Labour voter, had asked the PM about state benefits not being available to those who needed them because they were going to people who weren’t in real need. She added: ‘You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re … but all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in – where are they all flocking from?’

In front of the cameras, Brown replied with his trademark uncomfortable smile and a few bland words designed to sound like an answer without actually being one. He then waved goodbye and got into his car. As he drove away, he failed to notice that he hadn’t removed the radio mike that Sky News had placed on him earlier. It picked up the conversation in the car with his aide, Justin Forsyth, and faithfully relayed it back to the Sky newsroom. It ran thus:

Brown: That was a disaster. Sue [Brown’s adviser] should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Forsyth: I don’t know – I didn’t see her.

Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous!

Forsyth: What did she say?

Brown: Everything! She was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour. I mean, it’s just ridiculous!

In the blink of an eye, Brown’s comments were broadcast on every television and radio channel. Duffy was asked for a response. She gave one: ‘He’s an educated person,
why has he come out with words like that? He’s supposed to lead this country and he’s calling an ordinary woman who’s just come up and asked questions what most people would ask him – he’s not doing anything about the national debt and it’s going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess – and he’s calling me a bigot. I thought he was understanding – but he wasn’t, was he? The way he’s come out with the comments.’

In a cringingly desperate attempt at damage-limitation, Brown’s car immediately spun around and took the
ashen-faced
PM right back to Duffy’s door, where he apologised profusely and asked if he could come in to apologise some more. She allowed him to do so, although she didn’t look overjoyed at the prospect of taking tea with someone fond of insulting her on national television.

For the electorate, the incident was easily the most memorable moment of the campaign. They had never warmed to Brown, and now they had good reason to hate him. Ageing, dyed-in-the-wool Labour voters saw that he secretly treated them with contempt whenever he thought he could get away with it and many no doubt put their cross against the name of the nice, smiley young Tory leader David Cameron, who had never been unpleasant about them on Sky News. The election delivered a hung parliament – with just a few of the voters Brown personally alienated, Labour might have clung on to power by their fingertips.

*
It’s hard to know what other nations think when they see the home of British PMs – the Americans have the marvellous neo-classical White House; the French have the elegantly imposing Elysée Palace. British leaders have a terraced house that suffers the occasional mouse infestation. In fact, Number 10 is actually three houses joined together – a sixteenth-century mansion, a cottage (occupied by a Mr Chicken when Walpole took possession) and the normal terraced house that is usually seen. Between them there are more than a hundred rooms – it’s just the façade that looks dull and unimposing. Downing, by the way, was a spy for Oliver Cromwell.

*
Although Westminster Hall had been built as a throne room, its use was somewhat multi-functional on an ad hoc basis. The Chancery of the Exchequer used a room above the entrance hall for its meetings. The Court of the King’s Bench met at the southeast corner of the great hall; the Court of Chancery occupied the southwest; and the Court of Common Pleas, which was presided over by Lord Chief Justice Pratt, sat at the middle of the south wall. Their plots were divided up by nothing more than removable screens, and were connected by a gangway filled with stalls hawking books, clothes and anything else people wanted to buy.

**
When the
Dublin
Post
of 2 May 1811 wrongly reported Luttrell had died, he demanded a retraction, which the paper printed under the headline ‘PUBLIC DISAPPOINTMENT’.

*
The Reform Act was a jolly affair, although ‘Great’ is up for debate. Only increasing the franchise from 400,000 to 650,000 men – around one in six of the adult male population – it was really just a clear-out of all the dross that had built up in the parliamentary system over the previous 500 years. Top of the list for reform were the rotten boroughs. These were constituencies that had once possibly justified having an MP, but over the centuries had become ghost towns. The most famous was Old Sarum, a muddy field in Wiltshire, which had been the original settlement that became Salisbury, but by the nineteenth century was occupied only by goats.

Those goats returned not one but two MPs to Parliament, including William Pitt the Elder. And he only got the job because his family had bought two constituencies for his elder brother, Thomas, and his brother had been ‘elected’ to both, so he gave Old Sarum to William. At least you could stand in Old Sarum – the parliamentary seat of Dunwich in Suffolk was largely underwater.

*
Jix was an anti-semite, a great opponent of people enjoying themselves in nightclubs and spent a good deal of energy on banning Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel
The Well of Loneliness.

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