Mr Woodward should not question our democratic right to butler jokes
FRANK JOHNSON
Mr Shaun Woodward this week told the Daily Telegraph that Tory press 'vilification' of him has 'begun to backfire'. He added, 'Local people never did get the butler jokes.'
If that is true, my election campaign, like Mr Hague's, is in trouble. I spent the campaign's first week attempting in the Daily Telegraph almost nothing else but what Mr Woodward calls 'butler jokes'. Yet according to Mr Woodward I am just not getting across on the doorstep in St Helens South.
My strategy in this campaign has never been to win it, but to make enough butler jokes to see off a Portillo threat to my Daily Telegraph job after 7 June. It is too late in the campaign to change that strategy now. I am stuck with the butler jokes. When I started them more than a week ago, they seemed to be popular with the focus groups. We want more butler jokes, they said. No one told me that in St Helens South 'local people never did get the butler jokes'.
My butler jokes, however, were never really intended for St Helens South, but for an unsophisticated audience. We knew all along that in St Helens South they would `get' an R.A. Butler joke, but not any old butler joke. But my private polls say that my butler jokes are going down well with my core supporters in Mayfair, Westminster and Belgravia, where they know a butler when they see one, and indeed where Mr Woodward has one.
The butler-joke strategy was decided on when, just as Parliament was being dissolved, it became known that the engineers' union, as some sort of dark favour to No. 10, was fixing the St Helens South Labour selection for Mr Woodward, Every MP and apparatchik I spoke to about Mr Woodward, Conservative or Labour, mentioned that butler. They mentioned other aspects of his life and character, but they are broadly unprintable. Most Labour MPs are spiritually old Labour. They are against people who have butlers. Conservative MPs are not per se against people who have butlers. They are only against people who insinuate themselves into the confidence of Mr Chris Patten when he is Conservative chairman; are foisted on to Conservative Central Office as advisers; become multimillionaires by marrying Sainsbury heiresses; can afford a butler thereby; have the safe Tory seat of Witney arranged for them; defect to Labour over something to do with alleged Tory 'homophobia'; defect from the party without whose patronage they probably would not have acquired either the heiress or the butler; and are foisted on to St Helens South just as they were foisted on to Central Office and Witney. Perhaps all that is unfair to Mr Woodward. It is, however, a summary of his career as believed by both Labour and Conservative MPs. But nearly all politicians think such bald descriptions of their careers to be unfair. Mr. Woodward himself has pronounced equally unfair descriptions of the careers of other politicians, and indeed of journalists. I would not complain, and neither should he.
So, there was cross-party agreement that the butler was the issue. I therefore started writing about the butler. I am not saying that others would not have done so had I not done so, but I got in first. I was then overshadowed by a Daily Mail masterpiece of an idea. That newspaper actually hired a butler, and dispatched him with photographer and writer to wait upon Mr Woodward on the streets of St Helens, offering him champagne on a silver tray. How politicians behave in such crises tells us much about them. The unauthorised butler was to Mr Woodward what the Cuban missiles were to Kennedy.
It must be said that he did not meet the test. He did not remain calm. We should all understand his wish that St Helens South not know about his butler. But his reaction was not that of a man manifestly innocent of butlers. He fled the butler. What he should have done, of course, was to reject the champagne on the grounds that it was not the vintage Krug to which he was accustomed, adding for good measure, 'Doesn't the Daily Mail run to caviare? Now I know what is really meant by the cheap press.' Or at least something like that. But in St Helens South a man who runs away from a butler in the street immediately arouses suspicion. Admittedly, it is easy for me to offer such advice with the benefit of hindsight. I was not in the lonely position of leadership at the time of this crisis. Mr Woodward was.
His crisis management became even more deficient. He told the Telegraph, 'The whole thing about having a butler is a Tory invention.. . . 'How, then, did the misunderstanding about his having a butler arise? Various MPs, and journalists, who have been entertained by him, remember a butler. Some remember Mr Woodward's having boasted about having a butler. Perhaps, as someone of humble origins, he assumed that we all have butlers, and did not want us to know that he was butlerless. My heart went out to him. I do the same. I at first blamed Mr Woodward's
conduct on the Sainsbury heiress. It seemed cruel of her to deny her husband a butler. But on reflection that cannot be right. She is by all accounts a woman of surpassing kindness. She would not have denied him a butler.
But then the Mail on Sunday produced a picture with a story which began, 'This is the butler that defecting Tory MP Shaun Woodward told the voters of St Helens he never had.' His name was Duncan. He said he used to be Mr Woodward's butler, but was succeeded by a butler named Stephen who was in turn succeeded by 'a Portuguese chap'. That is, by my count, three butlers, though admittedly, and so far as we know, not all at the same time. The landlord of the pub near the Woodward, or Woodward wife's, country mansion said that a man used to arrive in striped trousers and black tails.
The man could have been an undertaker, or an orchestral conductor. But the landlord said that he once came into the pub to buy beer 'for Shaun and Chris Patten'. Presumably they were conspiring against Mr Hague over Europe. So the man could have been Lord Brittan.
But there now seemed to be overwhelming circumstantial evidence that Mr Woodward had perpetrated serial butlers. It was only a matter of time before he accused those of us who are interested in his butlers of trivialising his campaign. But are butlers so irrelevant? Only last Sunday the Observer rightly reported on an aspect of the meetings at which Mr Desmond, the soft pornographer who has bought Express Newspapers, abuses his executives. Mr Desmond only stops 'while a butler shimmers in bearing a banana on a plate. The press baron consumes the banana and then continues on the attack.'
The Observer realised that its readers would be amused by the idea of a soft pornographer with a butler. That is, a butler who is not portrayed by an actor in the soft pornography, as I gather butlers — like French maids — sometimes are. We can imagine Mr Desmond's butler being questioned by his fellow butlers over what line of work his master is in. 'Er, he is by way of being connected with photography.'
Mr Woodward does not understand, as the Observer does, and we of the Woodward Butler Watch do, the comic status of butlers in English life and letters. Or rather of some of the types who employ them. It explains the phrase: what the butler saw. Or in Mr Woodward's case: who saw the butler?
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