Breaking the Code by Gyles Brandreth Read Free Book Online Page B

waiting, by 11.45 at the latest). Our guest of honour was William Hague, 94 PPS to Norman Lamont, and excellent value: good jokes and a clear message. He also had energy and I’m coming to think that may be the secret of success in this game: controlling, maintaining, sustaining energy. We think we know one another because I was President of the Union about ten years before he was and he seems to recall several of my older jokes. The activists know him because he wowed the party conference as a boy orator aged fifteen. He doesn’t look much older now.
    From three to seven I was out door-knocking in Christleton and Littleton. The Prime Minister has publicly ruled out a November poll and there doesn’t have to be an election before 17 July next, but Jill and Vanessa are insisting we keep hard at it. I suppose they’re right.
FRIDAY 11 OCTOBER 1991
    What an extraordinary week. The party conference is an extraordinary phenomenon. Last time I was in Blackpool I came to interview John Inman, who was appearing in a summer season spin-off of
Are You Being Served?
Even if there aren’t too many of John’s kind overtly in evidence among the conference delegates at the Winter Gardens, there’s a healthy sprinkling of Captain Peacocks and Mollie Sugdens on parade.
    It’s only the activists who sit through the debates. Everyone else is junketing, non-stop. MPs, ministers, candidates, party professionals, hacks, broadcasters, lobbyists, hangers-on by the hundreds – moving ceaselessly from one indifferent reception to another. There’s a nice freemasonry among the prospective candidates. I was queuing up to have my photograph taken by the BBC for their election night coverage and fell into conversation with the fellow standing in line behind me – gingerish hair, glasses, red braces, prospective candidate standing in some godforsaken northern backwater.
    ‘Do you live in the constituency?’ I asked.
    ‘Good God no,’ he spluttered, ‘Happiness is the constituency in the rear-view mirror.’
    Speech of the week: on Tuesday, chairman Patten’s opening address, unscripted,informal, unexpected, modern. Moment of the week: on Wednesday, when Mrs T. arrived on the platform and pandemonium broke out. She didn’t say anything: she just
was
and for five minutes we stood and clapped and stamped our feet and roared. Even Michèle was cheering. There were tears in the eyes. You couldn’t not be moved. It was wonderful.
    Equally wondrous to behold (in a wholly different way) was the astonishing curly-topped MP for Harlow called Jerry Hayes 95 who bounded up to the podium on Thursday morning to give an apparently unscripted address on the wonders of the NHS and completely and utterly and absolutely lost his way! ‘Mr madam chairman’ he burbled as he fumbled as he stumbled, concluding (with the rest of us), ‘this must be the after-effect of a very bad night.’ It made me feel my speech had been quite statesmanlike. I was appallingly nervous, but it was fine – I got a bit of an ovation in the hall, but wasn’t much noticed beyond: as I began we hit ten o’clock and the BBC TV conference coverage was interrupted for
Watch with Mother
.
    Last night I had my first close encounter with the Prime Minister. It was not an unqualified success. I had been asked to conduct the auction at the Conference Ball (and asked too to donate one of my ‘famous jumpers’ as an extra auction offering) and consequently Michèle and I were invited to come to the VIP reception and join the line-up for presentation to the Majors. We arrived on time and stood for about an hour, in our gladrags, in the dim and narrow gallery overlooking the Empress Ballroom, sipping our orange juice, shifting from foot to foot, making desultory small talk with the party bigwigs who understandably weren’t listening to us because they were anxiously listening out for word that the PM was on his way. It was exactly like waiting for royalty – and when eventually they