AND ANOTHER THING
Jimmy restores a bit of life to a moribund conference season
PAUL JOHNSON
Last week I broke my new rule and went briefly to Jimmy Goldsmith's Refer- endum Party conference. My rule is not to attend these conferences at all, and for three reasons.
First, I went to my first lot in 1955 and for nearly 40 years covered four annually, Tory, Labour, Liberal and TUC. It was a story of gradual and then precipitous decline. Nothing of importance now hap- pens at a conference, which is invariably stage-managed down to the timing of each standing ovation. (The same is true, alas, of American nominating conventions, once the last word in fascinating and unpre- dictable skulduggery.) Second, all the fun of the conferences has been killed by security. It is the only damage the hobbledehoys of the IRA have been able to inflict on our national life. Conferences used to be genuinely egalitari- an, socially at least. Delegates and journal- ists could mix with and buttonhole Cabinet ministers and party bigshots in a week-long carnival. Now there are nothing but barri- ers and checks, and it is simpler to watch the debates on television, which is what most journalists do, staying in their hotel bedrooms, even if they actually go down to the conference towns.
My third reason for not going is personal. A few years ago my old friend George Gale died. We had always been to conferences together, on one hilarious occasion sharing the enormous royal suite at the Carlton Hotel in Bournemouth. I miss George dreadfully and to go to one of these grue- some affairs without his sustaining, sardonic presence would be more than I could bear.
All the same, I was glad to find myself in Brighton's Grand Hotel again. I had not stayed there since it was blown up by the Irish. My wife and I were next door at the Metropole when the alarm went off and we were told to get out quick — the police believed the Metropole would be attacked too. I learned a lesson from the occasion, which is to take your time unless mortal danger is obviously imminent. Marigold did as she was told and went straight down in her dressing-gown. I got properly dressed. This proved the right thing to do. There was no real danger but we were kept out on the chilly seafront for four hours before being allowed back into our hotel. My first sight of the Grand was a shock; there was noth- ing but a gaping black hole in the middle of it and I assumed that Mrs Thatcher and the entire Cabinet were dead. People wandered around in night-clothes — poor Robin Day blinking owlishly without his glasses. But soon the Blitz spirit reasserted itself, Alis- tair McAlpine phoned Lord Sieff of M&S, who got their local store open early to dish out free clothes, and by the time the morn- ing session began, on the dot, Mrs Thatcher was rallying the troops, just like Churchill in 1940. When will the Irish learn they will get nowhere with us?
Actually the rebuilt Grand is an enormous improvement on its rather dingy predeces- sor. I have no complaints, though the baths are a bit small — a hardship for someone as tall as me — and I miss the little spot just inside the entrance where Herbert Wilson used to sit when his son was prime minister. Sycophants would creep up: 'I say, Mr Wil- son, sir, allow me to buy you a drink."Ta, lad, bring me another and then.' The Old Dad, as he was known, was never seen to drink, but his glass was always empty. Goldsmith at least contrived to bring back some of the vanished party spirit. There was a touch of intellectual and glitzy class about his gathering: plenty of pretty girls, dishevelled academics, old-style aris- tos, eccentrics, men and women with mis- sions, wits, swordsmen, Regency bucks, Emma Hamiltons, Harriet Martineaus, a Byron or two, Hazlitts and Leigh Hunts. The party's Egeria, Lady Powell, has been well compared to Madame de Stael, the bitter personal enemy of Bonaparte, antecedent of Helmut Kohl, Bismarck of the European superstate. But Carla is much prettier, Germaine having to make do with gruesome characters like von Schlegel and Benjamin Constant. The chairman, Alistair McAlpine, that amazing boulevardier, collector and fund-raiser, is also the old conference style personified: kind, genial, jovial, invariably good-tem- pered, his mission in life is to cheer people up. He reminds me of what Sydney Smith said of Lord Holland: 'He comes down to breakfast every morning as if he had just received an astonishing stroke of good for- `There's nothing I can do, you've got M.T.V.' tune and wishes you to share it.' It was just the kind of occasion Margaret Thatcher likes best and I am not surprised to hear she was itching to be present. It is still very much on the cards that she will bolt from the Conservative Party before the election. She has always been stridently keen on a referendum (since she lost power, that is).
What would also have impressed Lady Thatcher were the rank and file, almost all of them salt-of-the-earth Tories, former Battle of Britain pilots and brigade-majors from the 51st Highland Division, people like her own father, Alderman Roberts, Women's Insti- tute presidents, colonial service officers, ex- land-girls and grandmothers who once worked in the Enigma room at Bletchley Park, but also a lot of young people, whizz- kid businessmen, the kind of grammar- school girl who now expects to get a half-mil- lion Christmas bonus before she is 30, and a host of youngsters whose careers, status and antecedents I could not quite fathom. The gathering confirmed my long- held view that Goldsmith is going to do fatal damage to John Major; accordingly the Tory dirty-tricks department is now working overtime to gath- er filth about everybody and anybody con- nected with the Refs, as they are known. I had the pleasure of ejecting one notorious gatecrasher from a private gathering: 'Now then, Brute*, no No. 10 narks here. You may have one drink, then out you go. If not, I'll summon the hotel heavies and you'll spend the night in the cells — no joke in Brighton, believe you me.'
There was evidence of Tory narkery in the press coverage, which was as frivolous, mendacious and malicious as one has come to expect these days. I am talking of course about the broadsheets, as I didn't bother to read the tabloids. The most accurate was Simon Sebag Montefiore in the Sunday Times, the least so — in the face of hot competition — was the Saturday Indepen- dent, the silliest that rancorous Welsh Left- ie Robert Harris, the most puerile (as was predictable) Hugo 'Editor-Sacker' Young in the Guardian, the nastiest the Sunday Telegraph's Adam Nicolson, wimpish grandson of that notorious bisexual comedy turn, Harold and Vita. But, mustn't grum- ble: Jimmy has certainly restored a bit of life to a moribund conference season.
*This is believed to be a reference to the political columnist of The Spectator, Bruce Anderson — Ed.
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