DIARY ANN WIDDECOMBE
The Parliamentary buckets and spades season is over and we are all back for at least three weeks. There is something about the fir§t day which reminds me irresistibly of going back to school after the summer holidays. We locate our pegs in the cloak- room, each one being neatly labelled with the name of the Member to whom it has been allocated, ask after each other's hols and comment approvingly on hair growth and weight loss while noting the reverse with smug satisfaction. Their Lordships have the air of scholarship boys who have already been back for weeks getting on with serious work before the lower school arrives to disturb it with high spirits and loud argu- ment. We talk about who will be made pre- fects this year. It would not entirely surprise me if the whips began to dole out fresh exercise books. I have always associated the crisp air of early autumn rather than the first warmth of spring with the excitement of new beginnings and there is a spring in my step as I approach my office. Alack, all is chaos. Over the summer we have been turned out of our offices in order that the entire building (only eight years old) be rewired and made ready for the Internet and the corridors are overflowing with crates which harassed secretaries are unpacking. I expect those same corridors soon to resound to the patter of tiny feet as Honourable Members enlist the help of their children in using the Internet.
Acolleague asks what I did in the holi- days. I went to Singapore to see my old arnah (a Chinese nanny) who looked after me out there in the mid-Fifties, in the heady days when Britain still ran a military presence east of Suez. She is now 86. I have been out there every few years since the early Eighties and each time her daughter and I go back to the old colonial house we lived in. This time it had gone, bulldozed to Provide land for high-rise flats. Only one of its kind was left in the road. I stood looking at it, a large black and white bungalow on concrete piles to raise it above any danger of floods, snakes and other hazards, and remembered the people who had filled its likes in my childhood: civil servants in white shirts, white shorts and long white socks, Women in sleeveless, flowery dresses, chil- dren who had no idea what television was, servants who had been through hell during the Japanese occupation. The Times would arrive several days late and printed on air- ail paper which rustled as my father read it. It was also an age in which older children remained at boarding schools in England, unable to see their parents for years at a tune, the nonconforming were treated as outcasts and the distinction between offi- cers' children and others rigorously made. I do not regret its passing but I do regret the bulldozing of my old house. At the same time I admire the practical approach of the Singaporeans who are blissfully unham- pered by the sort of draconian planning laws which in Britain insist on the preserva- tion of some of the ugliest dilapidated buildings ever to deface a landscape.
Early in the week the editor of a national newspaper rings up and asks if I will do a regular column and I say that I will. I have a moment's trepidation as I have not had to meet a weekly deadline since the days when I wrote for the Catholic Times. We all have secret ambitions and mine has always been to appear on Call My Bluff, so when after several decades of such yearning the call finally comes I am unre- ceptive to my secretary's warnings that I am booked up into the next century. Unruffled as ever, Harriet juggles the diary so that I can spend an evening guessing the etymolo- gy of improbable sounding words.
On Thursday I get up at 4.45 a.m. to prerecord for Today before catching the 6.30 train to Brighton where I am due to address the national social services confer- ence. By lunchtime I am back in London speaking to a congregation at Wesley's Chapel in the City about crime and punish- ment, after which I have a meeting with a minister of the Crown about an immigra- tion case, another with Moral Rearmament about a millennium initiative, and then I address a dinner in the House of Lords on the subject of the NHS. The following day I speak to Essex Conservatives at lunchtime and Exeter Conservatives in the evening, arriving back in London at 2 a.m. and leav- ing for the constituency five hours later for a lengthy surgery in which I deal one moment with a lady threatened by a schizophrenic ex-husband and the next with a man who believes he can embarrass the entire archaeological establishment by overturning current perceptions of man's early history if only he can get access to an electron microscope. Can I fix it please? On Saturday evening I find myself once more addressing Conservatives at dinner, this time in Runnymede where many years ago I cut my political teeth as a local coun- cillor. I am there at the request of the MP Philip Hammond, the junior member of the shadow health team. Not for long, I reckon. Were I given to betting I would wager a tidy sum that he will end up as chancellor of the exchequer in a future Conservative government. On Sunday morning I break- fast with him and his family while his small daughters tear around talking about Christ- mas. Christmas? It was summer only five minutes ago.
Everywhere I go I find Conservatives in good heart, winning or nearly winning council by-elections, talking excitedly about rising membership and the latest subscrip- tions, relaying disillusionment they have heard expressed by former Labour voters, counting the days till we can fight 'em at a general election. Their mood is a million light-years from the mood I encountered at similar events last year. If anything can dis- turb the arrogant complacency of this gov- ernment, its members should be feeling the odd twinge of apprehension.
Why is it that despite the lessons and plentiful precedents of history every Water- loo is magnified into an Armageddon by both participants and commentators? The aftermath of defeat is never congenial, but that is no reason for talking it into a termi- nal decline or even a ten-year wandering in the wilderness. When people tell me the Tory party needs charisma, I say, yes, but much more we need steady heads, steady nerves, unwavering resolution and a sense of proportion. We have ruled for most of this century, we won the agenda, we have a great deal to be proud of. It would be folly not to learn the lessons of defeat, but much 'greater folly to become so mesmerised by failure that we do not learn also the lessons of success and apply them to the future. One of my friends, a lifelong Tory, told me recently that she is quite glad we lost because all the ex-ministers look so much healthier and more relaxed. I was not whol- ly convinced until I ran into Harriet Har- man who looked a picture of radiant health and happiness. So time out of the govern- ment is good for your health, but only if it does not last long.
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