HOUSE OF CARDS

Queen Mum hated EU Major made a colleague cry ++ Foul-tempered Prince Charles ++ Crazed Heseltine ++ Melvyn Bragg’s plot for peerage ++ Cherie intoxicated by power For 40 years Bernard Donoughue was at the heart of politics – and kept a secret diary. Wick

UNKNOWN to many, Lord Donoughue was a key source for the creators of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. From working-class origins, he became the ultimate political insider. He has been at the heart of Westminster for more than 40 years, as a senior adviser at No 10 to both Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan before being appointed by Tony Blair as an Agriculture Minister. A compulsive gossip, he kept a detailed journal of his meetings with the great and the good. In our first extract from his candid and wickedly mischievous diaries of the early Blair years, he charts the rise of New Labour with a somewhat jaundiced eye . . .

JANUARY 1996

HAD lunch at The Ivy with Melvyn Bragg and we had a good gossip about the [labour] party. He is having dinner with Blair soon, which is something most party colleagues don’t achieve. Media Matters Most. Melvyn would like to be chairman of the Arts Council.

FEBRUARY

LUNCH with [the Queen’s private secretary] robert Fellowes and his assistant robin Janvrin from the Palace. robert was pleased with our television victory yesterday, as Buckingham Palace loathes the Murdoch press. [The lords had voted against allowing independent broadcasters — including rupert Murdoch’s Sky — to take listed sporting events away from the BBC.]

MARCH

OFF early to epsom. I got very lost on the way looking for the A3, but there wasn’t a single sign to it. British road signposting is symptomatic of the management of the country as a whole. Very sloppy.

HAD a nostalgic tea with [financier] Harry kissin, who first introduced me into the [Harold] Wilson political ménage in 1973.

We reminisced a lot. He has contributed to a fund organised by Jim Callaghan to provide an income for Mary Wilson. All Harold’s money seems to have gone.

Harry also told me that as early as 1971, Harold and his doctor Joe Stone told him that Harold had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. Wilson considered retiring because of it, but Harry persuaded him to do one more stint.

It explains why in 1974–76 he was always so obsessed with having everything written out for him and was afraid of going blank in a speech.

APRIL

JIM CALLAGHAN [Former PM] told me that he had finally been for a chat with Tony Blair. They mainly discussed members of the Shadow Cabinet and forming a labour government. He told me that for tea they were served on a silver tray.

Angered by receiving a nasty letter from the Animal rights terrorists: just a sheet with a razor blade implanted. Fortunately I pulled the envelope open and saw the blade.

later, the police tell me that the animal rights lot have devised a way to place the blade so that it doesn’t show up when scanned. They also address the letters to ‘Mr X and family’ in the hope of catching a child. nice people.

And oafish labour MPs, like elliot Morley and Tony Banks, give comfort to these monsters! I immediately send off more money to the country sports lobby.

TODAY we labour frontbenchers go to school to learn how to be ministers. I drove up to Templeton College, oxford, where the consultants Arthur Andersen are organising two-day courses for the Shadow Cabinet teams.

It is ludicrous to pay consultants who have never been in Whitehall to teach people who have already been ministers, or, like me, worked for years in Whitehall, how to manage the machine. The evening session was apparently disastrous. I boycotted it in order to watch newcastle just beat leeds 1–0.

MAY

HAD an interesting talk with [labour peer] derek gladwyn. He said that relations between Tony and his deputy leader, the irascible John Prescott, are terrible. John is shut out of everything and has nothing to do.

I WAlked up to the garrick for lunch with [former Sunday Times editor] Harry evans, visiting from new york.

We discussed all our past deeds and misdeeds. We both agreed we made a mistake in 1982 in not joining Melvyn Bragg in taking over Tyne Tees television. We would all now be multi-millionaires. Melvyn is anyway.

drinks in the evening with Melvyn. Very keen to take over the Arts Council when we’re in government. He also would quite like a peerage.

LUNCHED with george Ward who was the maligned boss of grunwick when our unions besieged it in 1976–78. I am delighted that he saw the union hooligans off.

Ironically, Thatcher’s trade union reforms made it possible for labour to be elected again, because the union bogey was eliminated. Wecould never have done it otherwise.

JUNE

FIRST day of royal Ascot. dressed in a hurry; ancient morning suit and grubby topper. reached Ascot and found I had left behind my vouchers for the royal enclosure so I had to visit the special office to prove my identity.

Finally got our badges. Squeezed in for tea sitting close to the Queen Mum (incredibly sharp at 94 and very anti-european union).

HAD lunch at the Café royal with Jim Callaghan — he told me he is on the restaurant group Council and gets a 30 per cent discount. Callaghan’s like that!

We had a good chat. He said the thing he most regrets about the 1978–79 crisis was ‘not being tougher with the unions and having a state of emergency’.

He told me that Thatcher had assured him she would support him in a state of emergency. He has never published that.

Jim said he finds it impossible to identify with Blair: ‘He is simply not one of us.’

AT DINNER, I was next to Anne Heseltine. She said she considers herself quite non-political and constructs her life separately from Michael. Apart from his garden, only politics really interests him.

JULY

AS one [labour MP] said to me: ‘I wish sometimes Blair would be as nasty to the Tories as he is to us.’ But he wants those Tory votes and assumes he has the labour votes anyway.

GREAT day’s cricket: I played for the Houses of Parliament against Channel 4 at Vincent Square.

While waiting to bat I chatted with John redwood, Tory right-winger, who I’ve known since my City days when he was at rothschilds and I was at grievesons and we jointly managed the Cheshire county pension fund.

He was quite sharp about John Major. Said he is a formidable politician, but not at all as nice as his reputation. recalled how, as Treasury minister, Major had set out to destroy his colleague John

Moore’s reputation when he was at Health and the main young political competitor to Major.

He trapped him in Cabinet and then demolished him ruthlessly and with contempt before their colleagues, to the point where Moore was in tears afterwards.

His career was finished and Major was then the only contender for the leadership.

All this in front of Thatcher, who was probably impressed by the ruthlessness.

John said Major doesn’t believe in anything in policy terms. In Cabinet, he would never reveal a view of his own but would just go round the table until he established a majority and then join that side.

Dashed home to go to a great Labour gala dinner. Met Blair’s wife who seems to be over-intoxicated by the smell of power and the whole wave of success.

HAD dinner with [7th Earl and racing manager to the Queen] Henry and Jeannie Carnarvon.

Henry told me that all the talk about [adviser to Heath and Thatcher] Victor Rothschild being a double agent with the Russians was untrue and a code for the fact that his wife was very suspect and had a long affair with Anthony Blunt, the Soviet spy — and a homosexual. This was his only relationship with a woman.

A TERRIfIC time at Newbury races, but our horse Kings Witness played up terribly before its race.

I’ve never liked the look in his eye. A bit like Tony Benn, a look that suggests he isn’t to be trusted.

fASCINATINg lunch at [Tory peer] Marcus Kimball’s. Angus Ogilvy [husband of Princess Alexandra] wanted to meet me to discuss joining the Prince of Wales Trust, which helps unemployed young people. Afterwards Marcus told me he was also considering having me as one of the Prince Charles Trust advisers.

Not an easy job. Marcus said Charles loses his temper too easily and once did with him when Marcus, fishing with him, advised him on changing his fly.

Resenting experienced advice isn’t good for a future monarch. Maybe we should give my favourite Anne a chance — or even skip a generation.

AUGUST

fLEW to [our holiday home in] Ceret on Saturday. The french still haven’t had their Thatcherite revolution. Their economy is uncompetitive and their public services are bloated, yet they have 13 per cent unemployed. Living there, one sees how their national spirit has declined.

They are tied to the germans, restoring the European Reich that Hitler started to build in 1940–44, but this time willingly, peacefully and servilely.

SEPTEMBER

DREADED birthday: 62. Increasingly feel that what matters are family and old friends. The power and political stuff is just an ephemeral game.

Reminds me of the story about Clem Attlee told to me by one of his former secretaries. When Prime Minister in the forties, he was persuaded to have a Press Association news tickertape machine in No 10 on the basis that it would carry the cricket scores.

After a couple of weeks, he sent for the official to reprimand him: ‘You didn’t tell me it would carry all this political rubbish as well.’

OCTOBER

ROBIN BuTLER [Cabinet Secretary] told me a lovely story about Heseltine. When Michael became Deputy Prime Minister after last year’s Tory leadership election, he had to have a room at the centre of government and came to see Robin about it.

After a while he commented ominously on how nice Robin’s room was and indicated he might take it. Robin smelled serious danger to his own position and pointed out that the room had always been the Cabinet Secretary’s.

‘But things are changing in Whitehall’, said Michael, looking around covetously.

Robin nervously saw himself as the first Cabinet Secretary to lose his splendid office and so (with shades of Sir Humphrey), he said: ‘But, Deputy Prime Minister, we have already allocated you a room

bigger than this’ — knowing that, for Michael, bigger meant better.

However, there had in fact been no prior Whitehall discussion of which was to be the Deputy PM’s room. Michael asked to see it and Robin astutely delayed him for three hours while he sorted it out.

His staff informed him there was a big conference room upstairs, bigger even than Robin’s room — but it currently had a huge table filling it, which would have to be dismantled to get through the door. This would normally take the civil service a week to accomplish.

‘You have three hours’, said Robin. ‘Bring in the Royal Marine engineers if necessary.’

Heseltine returned a few hours later to inspect his new room, and when they went up to see it the great conference table was just disappearing down the corridor in the distance. The room now looked so enormous that Michael was very mpressed.

‘I think you have entered into the proper spirit of things’, he said, approvingly.

BLACKPOOL Labour Party Conference. Blair’s big speech was full of sound-bites and punchy jokes. His voice was stronger than last year, on a lower register — I wonder if he has had elocution lessons à la Thatcher.

There was a deafening ovation. But I was unhappy with the final triumphalism, with loud music and Tony marching off, which had troubling echoes of both Kinnock’s 1992 Sheffield disaster and Hitler’s 1936 Nuremberg rally.

MEETINg at the London Arts Board where we’re seeking a new chairman. They had done a good trawl and ended with three: Trevor Phillips (able and statutory coloured candidate) and two statutory women — civil rights lawyer Helena Kennedy and TV executive Liz forgan.

Predictably there is no white male, since the politically correct

discriminate against them. Politically Correct Claptrap (PCC) prevails.

So I fought to get a white male on the list and argued for Melvyn Bragg who, except for his racial, gender and colour disadvantages, is almost over-qualified. Actually I argued just to make mischief against the PC Claptrappers.

NOVEMBER

tO WhItehAll Court for a turner Broadcasting party, full of MPs. On the stairs going out, just ahead of us was a tall tory MP. A young blonde bimbo dashed past and told him she was sorry he was going and said that she had a room in the hotel for the night.

It was the most brazen proposition I had ever heard. understandably he declined. But one can see how MPs get into trouble with such modern floozies around. No doubt she would have sold her story afterwards to the Press.

IN the evening, [my wife] Sarah and I went to harry’s Bar. It was quite glitzy. At a large table were Princess Pushy and Prince Michael of Kent with celebrity Donatella Flick, recently divorced, getting £8 million and eyes already wandering everywhere as if hungry for another settlement.

WeNt to film premiere of true Blue, the story of the 1987 boat race when there was a rebellion in the Oxford crew.

My son Paul especially enjoyed sitting in the best seats, immediately behind the Queen and Prince Philip (who conducted a running commentary, with hoots and throaty chuckles, throughout the film).

It was amusing that I had the best seats and the tory minister was stuck on the outside. they must think we’re going to win the election.

WeNt to our front-bench [Shadow Arts] meeting which was, as always, completely futile and could have been dealt with on paper.

DINNer with a Washington friend. I sat with raine Spencer [Princess Diana’s stepmother]. I congratulated her on handling her divorce so discreetly.

She said Princess Di has been very supportive.

We drove raine home afterwards. When I let her out of the car in Mayfair she said: ‘Darling, please show me to the door, in case the footpads come to get me.’ She has style.

DECEMBER

I FINAlly had my meeting with [Blair’s adviser] Jonathan Powell discussing my paper on running No10 for nearly two hours. he said Blair had read the early draft and described it as ‘very, very helpful’.

Blair has no experience of government, he said, and needs advice on how to do it. Also said that they spend a huge amount of time preparing for Prime Minister’s Questions — sometimes all morning and over lunch as well.

MAJOr’S in a mess with his eurosceptics tearing the party apart. he doesn’t care whether they stay in europe or leave — a bit like Wilson in his final years.

tO A meeting at the london Arts Board, where we discussed the shortlist for the new chairman. the selection committee started off wanting trevor Phillips, who is nice, able, lively and above all black. they have fixed the rest so trevor must get it.

I made them include Melvyn Bragg on the list, and since he is more qualified than anyone they had the problem of how not to select him. they did it effectively.

the chairman waited till the last minute to phone Melvyn, who phoned me immediately afterwards. Melvyn said it was the oddest call he had ever had. Very oblique and making it clear they felt obliged to ask him but hoped he was too busy.

Melvyn felt they were just doing it for the record. Certainly he didn’t want to put his name forward and then be rejected. So he turned it down, as they hoped.

Out to a drinks party. Met the new tory candidate for Maidenhead, theresa May. Seemed bright, straight and strong though very unforthcoming and perhaps not very great on humour. AdApted by Corinna Honan from Westminster diary: A Reluctant Minister Under tony Blair by Bernard donoughue, published by I.B tauris priced £25. © Bernard donoughue 2016. Offer price £20 until June 21, 2016. to order a copy call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. p&p free on orders over £15.