The Euro Royals are to town
e when she went to the first Aids ward, because the public knew the minister had shaken hands already. So she could hardly say no.”
He is almost 80, and now holds a role as impartial House of Lords’ Speaker that, in theory, puts him above such things – hence his unwillingness to comment on the current Conservative Party crisis, save to say that, as one who served in the Commons, on the shadow front benches during the Labour governments of 1974-79 with their fragile majorities, he thinks Theresa May could last longer than many seem to think. But he is still sufficiently skilled in the dark arts of the politician’s trade to know that what he has just said about Diana risks sounding a little ungracious.
“What was tremendous about her shaking hands,” he adds, “was that having a beautiful princess doing it, rather than a middle-aged minister, was really good news.”
If it is a slip-up, then he must surely be forgiven because his work in making the campaign happen – “I was flat out on it at its peak in 1986 and early 1987 every day, so much so I was accused, pretty widely, by colleagues of becoming obsessed by it” – was undertaken despite staunch opposition from Mrs Thatcher.
“When I took the CMO to 10 Downing Street to brief her, Margaret asked him very sensible questions and understood the – if you like – mechanics of it all, but the trouble was that she was not convinced on the policy implications of the campaign. Family values were much more important to her than the objective advice we were giving.”
Was she at all persuadable? He smiles at the very idea. “One of her more eccentric beliefs was that if you warned people in straightforward terms about contracting HIV, you
‘Mrs Thatcher told me: you mustn’t be known only as the Minister for Aids’
would teach youngsters lots of things about sex that they knew nothing about, and they would then go off and experiment. With great respect, she was talking nonsense.”
And, indeed, the “Don’t Die of Ignorance” campaign proved he was right. It resulted not only in a drop in rates of HIV infections, but also in all the other STDs. With the support of Mrs Thatcher’s trusted deputy, Willie Whitelaw, however, Lord Fowler was able to divert the whole question of the Aids campaign into a Cabinet sub-committee that didn’t include the Prime Minister, and therefore got it the green light.
There was one more battle that he lost. He believed so passionately in the cause of public education about HIV/Aids that he proposed a ministerial broadcast – a free five-minute slot on the main TV channels on the subject. But Mrs Thatcher absolutely refused his request, pointing out she had not had one for the Falklands. His final effort to change her mind came when he was summoned to see her in Downing Street on New Year’s Eve 1986. In what he recalls as “two minutes flat”, she stood her ground on the ministerial broadcast. “And then she said this wonderful thing to me. ‘Norman, you mustn’t be known only as the Minister for Aids.’ It made me wonder if I had a great future. Actually, what she meant was, ‘Norman, why don’t you go and do something else?’”
He refused to take the hint. The advertisements were broadcast and the leaflets went out, their unusually candid language maintained despite the remark made to him: “Do we need this section on risky sex?”
There was a story that has gone down in Parliamentary folklore that, when checking the draft text, Lord Fowler had on occasion to refer to his civil servants for guidance on what exactly certain words were referring to. In its cruellest version, making mischief with his slight lisp, it had him ask an assistant what a “vibrator” was. When I touch lightly on the provenance of such tales, he waves my request away. “I can’t remember the details!” he protests. “It was 30 years ago”. His defiance didn’t go unnoticed by No10. At the next reshuffle, he was moved to Employment. It was a demotion. In 1990, he resigned.
So was it worth it?
“What I didn’t want, above all, was for people in 30 years time to say, ‘You didn’t do enough’. That, in my book, would have been the worst criticism of all.”