Breaking the Code by Gyles Brandreth Read Free Book Online

know there were problems and that egos were bruised along the way … I trust there are not too many hard feelings about my earlier letter. It may have been a bit heavy handed, but there were a few worried people just prior to the event. Thank you for rallying round; I’m sure it made all the difference.’
    Now I feel guilty.
SUNDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 1991
    At 12 noon we gathered at Puddington for ‘Peter Morrison’s Annual Pimm’s Party’. This is a gala event in the Association’s calendar. Sir Peter provides the Pimm’s and the Conservative ladies provide ‘the bites’. Until I came to Chester I’d never heard of ‘bites’ – now I eat almost nothing else. You are what you eat and there are weekends at the end of which I think I’ve turned into a damp bit of bread and butter rolled round a limp inch of asparagus. The first – fleeting – moment of ‘tension’ between us and the activists came about because of the bites. Michèle got a message from Jill [Everett] saying she was expected to bring sixty ‘bites’ to an event and what would Michèle be bringing – sausages on sticks, celery filled with cream cheese, curried stuffed eggs? ‘Stuff yours’ was my darling wife’s reaction. That’s not what she said to Jill, of course. That’s what she said to me. She also made me phone the hotel and order three trays of canapés as our contribution. We’ve not been asked for ‘bites’ since.
    The party was fine. We worked the marquee and listened to (but didn’t join in) the gossip about our host. Peter’s workers fall into two distinct camps: a minority think he’s past his sell-by date, that he’s let himself go, that he’s out of touch, that he gives out all the wrong signals, that he’s ‘let the seat slide’. The majority simply love the grandeur of the man. ‘Have you seen inside the lavatory? The pictures of Peter at Eton. Aren’t they
wonderful
?’
WEDNESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 1991
    Lunch at the Old Bailey as a guest of the Sherriff. After we’d eaten we processed along the corridor back towards the courts. I walked at the front with the judge who’d been sitting next to me. We came to a door which was opened by a court flunkey. Thinking that, as a guest, it was appropriate that I should lead the way, I did – and suddenlyfound myself on the judge’s bench in Court No. 1 with the clerk instructing all to be upstanding for Mr Justice Whatever-he-was-called – who followed me in, apparently amused, and invited me to sit next to him on the bench. It was a gripping case – fellow dead in a police cell and the brilliant barrister (Mr Nasty and Mr Smooth all rolled into one) making us believe it wasn’t his ugly-looking client, it was the police wot done it. As I left I told one of the clerks how impressed I’d been by the barrister (I believed him completely) and he said: ‘He’s famous. He’s Mr Mansfield. 92 Looks after the IRA and all that sort.’
THURSDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 1991
    Last night’s Granada drama on the downfall of Mrs T. –
Thatcher: The Final Days
– was gripping stuff. Sylvia Syms was a bit unlikely as Mrs T. and they should certainly have had Martin [Jarvis] as Heseltine – but for us, of course, the fascination was in the characterisation/demonisation of poor Peter M. If it hadn’t been for his complacency, his ineffective campaign on her behalf, his somnolence on the watch etc., she might have survived. That was the gist of it – and in the papers the knives are out for him.
    This helps explain why he’s getting out. It may explain the drinking too. Of course, the programme didn’t portray him as either a lush or an old queen, though we can see he’s the one and we assume he’s the other. I think Jeremy Hanley takes credit for coming up with the line – at the time of Peter’s appointment as Mrs T.’s PPS – ‘Ah, at last Margaret’s got herself an aide who knows how to carry a handbag.’ At Sunday’s do at Peter’s place one or two were whispering behind