CITY AND SUBURBAN
`Now look here, Bruce-Gardyne, there's something you need to know . .
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ilast saw Jock when he wanted to know which commander had liked his generals to be lucky. He was by then tired in body and mind, and for the first and last time he physically leant on me. He was writing (he explained) about the Prime Minister, and whether her luck had run out — but who had this preference for luck? Was it Grant, in the American civil war? We agreed that Grant's preference was for hooch, and that the commander who liked luck was Napo- leon. He moved slowly away, and I was left to think about luck and Jock. We had first met a quarter of a century earlier, working on The Spectator under Nigel Lawson. Jock was then foreign editor, a Wykeham- ist who had stepped from the Diplomatic Service to a safe seat in Parliament and surely had the world at his feet. A brisk, tweed-suited figure, he would bound into the hall wheeling a bicycle built neither for speed nor for comfort. This was not the conveyance of a smooth careerist advanc- ing down life's inside track. A more conventional man might have had better luck. It was bad luck to lose that formerly safe seat to a Scot Nat — to be stranded outside Parliament when the post-war eco- nomic consensus was coming apart and the economics of the marketplace were coming through. Outside, Jock so distinguished himself by force of argument and polemic that Mrs Thatcher had him parachuted into true-blue Knutsford as the candidate of her choice. So he had a safe seat again, and (by implication, surely) office to come in a Thatcher government. Jock called on Col- onel Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport, Knutsford's stentorian MP for 25 years, and claimed to have found him a closet monetarist too. The colonel, so Jock told me, telephoned to give advice: 'Now, look here, Bruce-Gardyne, there's something jolly important you need to know about, and that's the PSBR. [Public Sector Bor- rowing Requirement.] Got that? The PSBR. Now, I don't follow it myself, but I've got a very clever fellow here who can tell you all about it. Hang on a moment, I'll just get him. . . . Bruce-Gardyne, are you still there? I'm so sorry, he's asleep.' As the election approached, Jock accurately forecast the hard decisions which the in- coming government would have to take. Result: a political flutter and, for Jock, two years' probation on the back benches. There, he caused more annoyance by telling the truth about John De Lorean. Wishful thinking had led governments to pour money at this con-man and his plans for building gull-winged cars in Northern Ireland. Jock had a short way with wishful thinking. That was the right temperament for the Treasury and there, at last, he was appointed, as a minister and then as Economic Secretary. He was happy, dis- tinctive, effective. Years of Conservative government were to stretch ahead, and with them high office?
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