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Authors: Gyles Brandreth
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Um.
WEDNESDAY 13 JANUARY 1993
We’re back and it’s business as usual. On Monday night we were still voting at midnight. Last night I got away at half past twelve, and today we’re resuming our line by line consideration of the European Communities (Amendment) Bill – and we all know what that means.
I have just dozed through the National Heritage Select Committee’s grilling (well, gentle toasting) of Peter Brooke (amiable, courteous, concerned and waffly) because I was up at 5.30 a.m. to offer my two cents’ worth on the breaking scandal from Down Under: tapes of an embarrassingly intimate telephone conversation between Prince Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Our papers have only hinted at the content. At GMTV they had faxed versions of the complete transcript, but because I’d been rather po-faced on air, condemning the monstrous invasion of privacy that these tapes represent, I didn’t then have the nerve to sneak off with a copy of the offending material. It was a mixture of the lurid and the juvenile: goonish nicknames and HRH fantasising about life as one of Camilla’s tampons…
Coming up with a workable framework of legislation that won’t infringe press freedom but will protect the privacy of the innocent isn’t going to be easy. Peter Brooke seems ready to back a privacy law, but No. 10 is sending out the signal that Mr Major is set to reject Sir David Calcutt’s proposal for a statutory press complaints tribunal, headed by a judge, with powers to impose hefty fines and impose full and proper corrections. Gerald [Kaufman] is determined that we come up with an answer that works and that everyone will accept. He wants his footnote in history – and who shall blame him?
THURSDAY 14 JANUARY 1993
Fiona Miller came to interview me for the
House
magazine and made me smile. She said, ‘They say you’re going to be the first of your intake to get a job.’ I want to say, ‘Wow! Who are “they”? And tell me more!’ Instead, I say, ‘Oh really, that’s nice,’ and burble on about the joys of the backbencher’s lot and how my predecessor but three (Sir Basil Nield) remained on the backbenches throughout his career but changed the lives of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens with his private member’s bill that became the 1950 Adoption Act.
I went to another of Jonathan Aitken’s ‘thinking people’s soirées’. He made me smile too, told me a story of how Hilaire Belloc, when he was an MP, was asked by an old boy at his club what he did for a living. ‘I’m a Member of Parliament,’ said Belloc. ‘Good God,’ spluttered the old boy, ‘is that still going on?’
MONDAY 18 JANUARY 1993
I returned from Chester (where the highlight of my weekend was a lengthy session with the Chester ME Group, all looking as listless as I felt) to find Simon [Cadell] in the Harley Street Clinic (which doesn’t sound good, but he was very airy about it) and George Bush using his last weekend in the White House to fire off forty Cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad’s nuclear weapons sites. The Chancellor is equally gung-ho: as employment nears three million, the outlook, apparently, has rarely been rosier. I must tell him, that’s not how it seems on the streets of Chester.
THURSDAY 21 JANUARY 1993
Audrey Hepburn has died. President Clinton has been inaugurated – and he looks good. And I have just come down from the committee corridor where, with colleagues fromthe National Heritage Select Committee, we have been taking evidence from Kelvin MacKenzie, bovver boy editor of
The Sun
– and we looked terrible. We
were
terrible. It was
The Sun
who won it. We may have thought we were going to give the terror of the tabloids a grilling. The truth is, from start to finish, Kelvin had us well and truly kebabed. It was very funny really.
This is the mother of parliaments. Gerald is one of Her Majesty’s Privy Counsellors. When witnesses appear before us we expect a touch of
WEDNESDAY 13 JANUARY 1993
We’re back and it’s business as usual. On Monday night we were still voting at midnight. Last night I got away at half past twelve, and today we’re resuming our line by line consideration of the European Communities (Amendment) Bill – and we all know what that means.
I have just dozed through the National Heritage Select Committee’s grilling (well, gentle toasting) of Peter Brooke (amiable, courteous, concerned and waffly) because I was up at 5.30 a.m. to offer my two cents’ worth on the breaking scandal from Down Under: tapes of an embarrassingly intimate telephone conversation between Prince Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Our papers have only hinted at the content. At GMTV they had faxed versions of the complete transcript, but because I’d been rather po-faced on air, condemning the monstrous invasion of privacy that these tapes represent, I didn’t then have the nerve to sneak off with a copy of the offending material. It was a mixture of the lurid and the juvenile: goonish nicknames and HRH fantasising about life as one of Camilla’s tampons…
Coming up with a workable framework of legislation that won’t infringe press freedom but will protect the privacy of the innocent isn’t going to be easy. Peter Brooke seems ready to back a privacy law, but No. 10 is sending out the signal that Mr Major is set to reject Sir David Calcutt’s proposal for a statutory press complaints tribunal, headed by a judge, with powers to impose hefty fines and impose full and proper corrections. Gerald [Kaufman] is determined that we come up with an answer that works and that everyone will accept. He wants his footnote in history – and who shall blame him?
THURSDAY 14 JANUARY 1993
Fiona Miller came to interview me for the
House
magazine and made me smile. She said, ‘They say you’re going to be the first of your intake to get a job.’ I want to say, ‘Wow! Who are “they”? And tell me more!’ Instead, I say, ‘Oh really, that’s nice,’ and burble on about the joys of the backbencher’s lot and how my predecessor but three (Sir Basil Nield) remained on the backbenches throughout his career but changed the lives of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens with his private member’s bill that became the 1950 Adoption Act.
I went to another of Jonathan Aitken’s ‘thinking people’s soirées’. He made me smile too, told me a story of how Hilaire Belloc, when he was an MP, was asked by an old boy at his club what he did for a living. ‘I’m a Member of Parliament,’ said Belloc. ‘Good God,’ spluttered the old boy, ‘is that still going on?’
MONDAY 18 JANUARY 1993
I returned from Chester (where the highlight of my weekend was a lengthy session with the Chester ME Group, all looking as listless as I felt) to find Simon [Cadell] in the Harley Street Clinic (which doesn’t sound good, but he was very airy about it) and George Bush using his last weekend in the White House to fire off forty Cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad’s nuclear weapons sites. The Chancellor is equally gung-ho: as employment nears three million, the outlook, apparently, has rarely been rosier. I must tell him, that’s not how it seems on the streets of Chester.
THURSDAY 21 JANUARY 1993
Audrey Hepburn has died. President Clinton has been inaugurated – and he looks good. And I have just come down from the committee corridor where, with colleagues fromthe National Heritage Select Committee, we have been taking evidence from Kelvin MacKenzie, bovver boy editor of
The Sun
– and we looked terrible. We
were
terrible. It was
The Sun
who won it. We may have thought we were going to give the terror of the tabloids a grilling. The truth is, from start to finish, Kelvin had us well and truly kebabed. It was very funny really.
This is the mother of parliaments. Gerald is one of Her Majesty’s Privy Counsellors. When witnesses appear before us we expect a touch of
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