On short commons
Max Egremont
HUNG PARLIAMENT by Julian Critchley Hutchinson, £13.99, pp. 208 he House of Commons may seem a place of glamour and excitement to some, but clearly not to Julian Critchley. He writes with inside knowledge, having been a member of parliament himself for 25 years. Those familiar with his journalism will know his agreeable tone of sophisticat- ed world weariness. He believes that MPs 'lead dullish and frustrating lives'.
Yet Hung Parliament is a jolly romp, not dull at all. It portrays Westminster as a cross between an open prison for sex offenders and the sort of boarding school where the head master is suddenly taken away by the police. There are women as well but they don't feature much, except as objects of desire or abuse, although it is understood that they should be allowed to become Prime Minister from time to time. After all, the chaps have quite a lot to do, with all that eating and drinking and sex. Eating is clearly important to the chaps, as it is in most boarding schools. The different gangs have different types of food, which is all to do with them being different sorts of people, if you see what I mean. The Labour lads like plaice and chips, the Tory chaps a decent cut off the joint. Oh, and they sit in different parts of the dining room as well, just to show that they are — well — different.
There are some civilised chaps in the old place, of course, just as there are decent types in open prisons or slightly dodgy boarding schools. One Joshua Morris, for instance, a lover of Staffordshire pottery, detective stories, the poetry of Housman and an absolute corker called Felicity. There are also some jolly indecent chaps as well, car dealers from Essex and the West Midlands; odd chaps, too, in the parlia- mentary tradition of the late Tom Driberg. Old Joshua is really too good for this riff- raff. He feels the weight of his years a bit at 50, 'the age when one starts to feel younger at lunch than at dinner': not surprising, really, with all that terrible Westminster food, pies that have 'one Cyclopian eye made from half an aged egg' and Muscadet as well, 'a wine with nothing to be said for it'. We really should see that these people are decently fed.
Into this gastronomic desert comes Felic- ity, her visits comparable to the arrival of red cross parcels at Colditz. Joshua and she have a cosy relationship (he sends her books, she brings him lunch) which unfolds over 'boned quail stuffed with prunes soaked in Armagnac, home-made pate, French bread and brie'. Felicity is writing a cook book; handy, really, because accord- ing to Critchley 'music is not so much the food of love as food itself'. They meet in his daughter's flat in Lewisham where 'the single bedroom had a depressing outlook', but (more important) 'the kitchen was of good size'.
Julian Critchley has had rather a good wheeze. You take some made-up people like good old Joshua (or not quite so made up perhaps) and some perfectly frightful oiks called Grunte, Catford and Worthing- ton Evans and you mix them up with real people like Edwina Currie and Michael Heseltine who actually talk to them as if they existed! Then there is this woman MP who is murdered: a ghastly woman, but devilish pretty when the chaps can find the time to take their eyes off their food to look at her. The Leader of the House, John MacGregor (he's one of the real ones), wants to keep the police out of it: much better to let Joshua solve the mystery in between gulps at his perfectly respectable Chenas or a stupendous Corton Charle- magne, Leflaive '86. The food may be bad but the chaps are quite sound on drink.
Joshua gets it right, of course, and the oiks are routed. One has the feeling that the triumph will be short-lived. But what fun it all is, better than Archer any day. Julian Critchley should lay off the Stras- bourg fish in cream sauce, the pork knuck- le, the underdone lamb cutlets, the 'cheap and cheerful' lunches at Heals, the blissful memories of House of Commons eggs in aspic before the oiks banished them from the menu, and give us another one or, in the words of Westminster argot, 'do it again'.
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