stumbled over a phrase, repeated it haltingly, groaned, then collapsed to the floor beside me. I was with him in moments, but he was beyond all help. He had suffered a massive coronary and must have died before he hit the floor. The sitting was suspended, and Michael Jopling, the Chief Whip, pleaded with the Press and the Public Galleries for privacy ‘at this difficult moment’. They left quietly and unprotesting, as shocked as we were. Gently, in an air of disbelief, Michael was taken out of the Chamber.
I remember driving home in the snow in the early hours of the morning and thinking of the tragedy of his death. Above all, it brought home to me the transitory nature of life and politics. Michael Roberts was not an old man – he was in his mid-fifties – but I knew that soon people would be talking about who would stand for his Cardiff seat in the by-election.
As I was given responsibility for managing the parliamentary business of first the Department of the Environment then the Northern Ireland Office, I became familiar with their policies and with the task of steering debates on the floor of the Chamber. I sat for weeks upon end, many hours at a time, on committees at which by tradition I was unable to speak, but was responsible for ensuring that the legislation progressed. I did deals with the opposition about when the committee sat, for how long, and when votes would be taken, and I sanctioned absence from the government side if the numbers present assured me that our majority was secure.
As an Environment whip I became involved in the abolition of the GLC, and in the annual fights over central government support for local authorities. These were often very bloody, as Members fought for cash for their political backyards. It was good preparation for the future. I also had a general responsibility for delivering the votes – and seeking the views – of Conservative MPs from East Anglia. They were a mixed bunch who were generally biddable and responsive to persuasion, but rarely to threats. Many of us coalesced into a group dubbed the ‘East Anglian Mafia’; it would come to my aid in the very different circumstances of November 1990.
With our huge parliamentary majority it was easier to send a colleague home early than to persuade him to change his mind over an issue about which he felt strongly. One evening a Conservative backbencher, the maverick right-winger Peter Bruinvels, droned on for far too long in an almost empty Chamber. He ignored my pointed expressions to sit down. Fed up, I sent him a note: ‘Do you have any children?’ Puzzled, Bruinvels shook his head and carried on speaking. I sent a second note: ‘Then why don’t you go home and do something useful?’
He sat down.
In Huntingdon, Norma and I were looking for a larger house. For months it had been a fruitless search, but one Saturday she came home and told me she had seen a house that might be possible, although it was too big and too expensive. We decided to look at it together. It was called Finings. We drove through the gate and up a gravelled drive fringed with mature lime trees which ended in a turning circle, in the centre of which was a fifty-foot cedar. Built in 1938, the house, with wisteria climbing up its back wall, stood in two and a half acres of garden with a large lawn and a wide variety of trees and shrubs. Much of it was heavily overgrown, with an old orchard of trees long past fruiting. The garden was open to farmland on two sides and undeveloped land on the third. Although it was ringed with trees there was no fence and it was a haven for whole families of rabbits, which we thought picturesque until we saw the damage they could do. In the winter, when they were hungry, they would literally tear the bark off the trees. As we made our presence felt they retreated, but our battle to expel them was to be a long one.
The house had potential. It felt right. It had charm and grace and gave an impression of being much older than it was. We couldn’t afford it, but we bought it. Selling the house in Hemingford Grey proved difficult, and for six months we took out a bridging loan which nearly crippled us financially. I’ve never regretted it.
On 3 October 1984, our fourteenth wedding anniversary, I became a senior whip with the grand title of ‘Lord Commissioner of the Treasury’. This simply arose through Buggins’s turn as whips left the Office and their juniors were automatically promoted, but I was delighted. I learned of my promotion as I returned from Latin America where, in the absence of a Foreign Office minister, I had been sent on a tour of Peru, Venezuela and Colombia. This was a fascinating visit with two highlights. The first was a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, which had been stumbled on by an American professor in 1911. I was riveted by it. The second was one morning when I was asked to have coffee with a Roman Catholic priest in a shanty town outside Lima. As the clock struck eight, out of the miserable hovels, young children emerged clean and scrubbed and carrying satchels or bags. I stopped one and talked to him, with the priest as interpreter. The boy told me he wanted to be a brain surgeon. That, I thought, is ambition: I only wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.
On the evening of 11 October 1984 I left the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where I had been staying for the Conservative Party Conference, to return early to Huntingdon. Five hours later, at 2.45 a.m., an IRA bomb ripped through the hotel. It was a calculated plan to murder the Prime Minister and her Cabinet, and five people were killed, including Tony Berry, and John Wakeham’s wife Roberta. John Wakeham and Norman Tebbit and his wife Margaret were severely injured. It was a miracle that the carnage was not far worse.
The first I heard of the tragedy was at 5 a.m., when my brother Terry telephoned me to see if I was at Finings or still in Brighton. I turned on the television and, like most of the country, saw the awful pictures of Norman Tebbit, in agony, being lifted out of the rubble. John Wakeham’s legs had been badly crushed, and during his long absence from Parliament his deputy John Cope took temporary charge of the Whips’ Office. I offered, as a fellow East Anglian MP, to care for John Wakeham’s Maldon constituency, which I did for many months until he was recovered.
As Treasury Whip, I was that bit closer to the chancellorship. The appointment turned out to be crucial to my future career – and, for reasons I will set out later, to Margaret Thatcher’s. I began to see at close quarters the immense influence of the Treasury on every aspect of government. I enjoyed working for Nigel Lawson, a radical chancellor, confident in his intellect and one of the main architects of the government’s policy.
Nigel’s morning meetings, known as ‘Prayer Meetings’, generally held in his study at Number 11, were a mixture of monologue and philosophical debate, but as a former whip he retained a fascination for Commons gossip. I was happy to keep him up to date. I rarely commented on his policies unless invited, although I had my views. Nigel would have listened, but done nothing. He knew what he wished to do, and his mind could not be changed.
My role as Treasury Whip led me into a serious row with the Prime Minister. Each summer, by tradition, the Whips’ Office entertained her to dinner, and in June 1985 we met at Number 10. Unusually, House of Lords whips were invited too. Margaret Thatcher was never noted for her small-talk with colleagues, and the first two courses passed with only desultory exchanges. It was evident that she wished to turn to some serious political discussion, and John Wakeham said, ‘The Treasury is at the heart of policy. I’ll ask the Treasury Whip to begin.’
I regarded it as my role to tell the Prime Minister what the backbenchers were saying, and I did so. ‘They don’t like some of our policies,’ I told her. ‘They’re worried that capital expenditure is being sacrificed to current spending.’ I set out in detail the grumbles that every whip present knew were the views of the vast majority of our backbench colleagues.
Margaret did not like the message at all, and began to chew up the messenger. I thought her behaviour was utterly unreasonable, and repeated the message. She became more shrill in her criticisms. ‘I’m astonished at what you’re saying,’ she snapped. I made it clear again that I was merely reporting the views of many Members, but she continued to attack me. I became increasingly annoyed, and said: ‘That’s what colleagues are saying, whether you like it or not – it’s my job to tell you, and that’s what I’m doing.’ Her tirade continued. By now I was past caring about tact, shaking with anger,
