to pension and social security benefits. The aim was to simplify the system and to ensure that benefits went to the people who actually needed them. A Bill had already been drafted before my promotion, but when Tony and I began to take the legislation through the Commons we very quickly realised that its later clauses, which dealt with social security, were deficient, and would not achieve their objectives. They could not be passed as they stood.
We hit on a solution. I would take the first twenty clauses, on pensions, through Commons committee stage on my own, while Tony and Norman rewrote the latter half of the Bill. The pension clauses were ferociously complex, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the committee met, I was up by five in the morning to brief myself properly. The Bill undertook the liberalisation of the private pension market. This would make it easier for people to take their pension with them from one job to another without being penalised, and it also offered help to people to build up a personal pension plan of their own. Millions of individuals were to benefit, with the help of government support and generous tax relief. Over six million people were to take out personal pensions, with well over £200 billion held in them. The Bill was a tough baptism for a junior minister, but it enabled me to form an excellent working relationship with Tony and Norman, and speedily settled me into the department.
On social security, the Conservative government was viewed with suspicion by a Labour Party confident in its attacks on us. This confidence was not always matched by the ability of the party’s front bench team, but nonetheless, the political battleground gave me a lot of experience at the dispatch box.
After late-night votes Tony Newton and I would often linger to chat over a drink. Like me, he was a politics addict who had learned his trade in the Whips’ Office, and from the outset our relationship was easy. Tony was a habitual smoker – something of an embarrassment when he became Health Minister – and was forever harassed, because he took on more commitments than any mortal could easily handle. He offered help to others, but rarely asked for it himself, even when his need was evident. Once he lost two front teeth in an accident shortly before he was due to appear both in committee and on television. I offered to do the television interview for him. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Are you sure? I could do it.’ But his gap-toothed grin suggested he knew it would not be wise.
Norman Fowler believed in giving his junior ministers every opportunity to improve their profile in the media, especially if the interviews were very early in the morning or very late at night, and he was unfailingly supportive if things went wrong. Each Monday all the department’s ministers were expected to join him for lunch at a nearby pizza restaurant where, free of the office and officials, we could discuss the pure politics of what we were about. Since I saw a good deal of Norman and Tony I knew how their conversations would go, and since I loathe pizza I usually found a reason to miss the meal. It was some weeks before Norman realised why I was a permanent absentee, and the pizzas were replaced by salad lunches in the office. The lack of ministerial garlic in the afternoon was much welcomed by civil servants.
I was well served by my officials, in particular by my Private Secretary Norman Cockett. Norman was bespectacled, with a full beard and a gentle good humour that took the sting out of every difficulty. He was never ruffled, the first of the many civil servants with whom I worked who were dedicated to public service. He put in the same killing hours as me. At his desk to brief me when I came into the office before breakfast, he was often still on hand when the House voted at 10 p.m., and sometimes did not leave for home until 2 a.m.
It was Norman Cockett who showed me the effects of our decisions at the sharp end. Our first visit was to a benefits office in my constituency, a gentle introduction. Our next trip was shocking. We arrived at an inner-London social security centre just before midday, and did not leave until 3.30. For all of that time there were never fewer than a hundred unhappy people queuing to see the handful of stressed clerks dealing with their enquiries, and there were only thirty seats in the room. The office, I learned, had a staff turnover of more than 100 per cent a year. It was a grim place.
The experience sowed some of the seeds in my mind of what would become the Citizen’s Charter. I saw no reason why people should suffer such scandalously poor service, and the following afternoon I sat down with Norman Cockett and produced a note on my visit for Norman Fowler, proposing that we sorted out the London benefits system. It led to a scheme which greatly improved the distribution of benefits in the capital.
The post of parliamentary under secretary is really an apprenticeship: more senior positions beckon if the test is not flunked. Parliamentary under secretaries have the influence of access to more senior ministers, and take day-to-day decisions on how things are done, but policy is the prerogative of their more elevated colleagues. I was lucky at Social Security because very early on I appeared a lot in the Commons and helped to take through a significant piece of legislation. This gave me a profile I would not otherwise have received so early on, and is perhaps one reason my political career accelerated.
I began to receive invitations to political events all over the country. One in particular sticks in my mind. In spring 1986 Robert Cranborne, a fellow Blue Chip and the Member for Dorset South, asked me to join a handful of other MPs on a panel of speakers at a Conservative Party event in a small village in his constituency. With me were Tristan Garel-Jones, still in the Whips’ Office; Virginia Bottomley, recently elected to the Commons and already Chris Patten’s Parliamentary Private Secretary; and Matthew Parris, who at an impending by-election would leave politics for journalism. We drove down to Dorset, and to pass the journey talked about the issues that might come up that night. Our conversation became light-hearted, and someone – I don’t remember which of us – suggested that we each write down a ‘frivolous fact’, and attempt to introduce it in our replies later that evening. The idea began as a joke, but by the time we arrived at the village hall we had dared each other to go ahead.
Matthew spoke first, and crisply dropped his point – that Upper Volta had recently been renamed Burkina Faso, ‘the country of wise men’, into his reply to a question on women’s rights. Virginia was convincing in bringing out the fact that ‘frogs swallow with their eyes shut’ into her answer. My turn came next – and, suppressing my mirth, I succeeded in including the point that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand in my piece. But Tristan failed dismally. Almost in stitches, he just about managed to keep a straight face, but dared not bring in his silly fact – I think it was that 18 per cent of the British population regularly share a bath. The following morning at breakfast, we put a white feather on his plate.
Peter Bottomley, Virginia’s husband, also an MP, and a Transport minister, joined us for dinner at Cranborne Lodge. We told him what we had been up to, and he was sorry to have missed the fun. He made up for it when answering Transport questions in the Commons a few days later. One MP raised the matter of traffic congestion in Mayfair. ‘I have been down Park Lane on a bus,’ Peter informed the House. ‘I took a sandwich with me, and it was unfinished when I reached the other end. Unlike frogs, which eat with their eyes closed, I had mine open. Neither the bus nor the traffic was held up.’
He was asked another question. ‘Like the first inhabitants of Burkina Faso,’ he began his reply, ‘the land of the wise men, otherwise known as Upper Volta, I might wonder whether it is right to take all those powers into my department’s hands.’
His answer to a third question completed the set. ‘We can do many things with statistics. We can say that Anne Boleyn had six fingers or that 18 per cent of people share their baths. However, it is more important to consider each bus lane to see whether it is worthwhile.’
Impressed by Peter’s bravura performance, when I bumped into Tristan I teased him, ‘Go and tell the Prime Minister.’ He did, though he was concerned that she might not see the joke. We need not have worried. ‘It’s the only good thing I’ve ever heard about Peter,’ she replied.
As the summer of 1986 advanced, rumour hinted that I might be promoted again in the forthcoming reshuffle. I realised this
