The last great luncher
Robin Oakley mourns the passing of the political lunch, at which great men were bibulous and indiscreet The saddest five words in the English language, the Guardian's Ian Aitken once declared as we awaited a lunch guest, are, 'Shall we go straight in?' I recalled them as the political world headed away from Westminster Abbey on Thursday after the service to celebrate the life and work of Roy Jenkins, appropriately timed to let everyone get away afterwards to a good restaurant.
Jenkins was not only the finest platform orator of my lifetime, a formative influence on two major parties and an outstanding biographer; he was also one of the last great politicians who found time for life. Lunch was probably the most frequently recurring word in the Jenkins obituaries, and Roy would never have wanted to go straight in.
Everybody has one Jenkins lunch they remember. In my case it was in Blackpool. We had been scheduled for the Louis Quatorze restaurant at the Imperial, which turned out to have been closed by an industrial dispute. We had to make do with a prehistorically congealed self-serve buffet, and I compensated by buying the most expensive claret ever charged to BBC expenses. After one fastidious wrinkle of the Jenkins nostrils, the Gruaud-Larose passed muster and I was then treated to two hours of bonhomous reflection including word pictures of the young Major Denis Healey still in uniform at Labour's first postwar conference, sharp apercus about the in-fighting of the Wilson Cabinet, a handy guide to the Liberal Democrats' current fortunes, and a clinically witty dissection of David Owen. It was everything such an occasion should be: elegant, informative, wicked and fun. But alas, such political lunches have died with Roy Jenkins.
Take chancellors alone. When I was writing 'Crossbencher" in the Sunday Express, Reggie Maudling used to pick his own restaurant, the Capital Hotel being a favourite. He was always good for Cabinet gossip, though sadly this was not reflected in his memoirs. He had, he once told me, written his diary in pencil and much had faded.
When Tony Barber was in the job he told me over lunch that he would quit when he ceased being chancellor. I wrote this, and he did. Barber always had an anecdote, like when he was Harold Macmillan's PPS on a trip to Russia and the grand old man wanted to know what he could say to make contact with the people. Noting that the Russian for good morning sounded much like Macmillan's favourite tipple, Barber had him going all round Moscow shouting 'Double Gin', cheered by Russians who reckoned he'd made a pretty good stab at Dobra Jen' .
When I asked Denis Healey how many languages he spoke, he explained that he could get by in, I think, French. German and Italian. He added, 'And then in various Central European tongues like Romanian, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croat I have essentially two phrases. One is, "Darling, you and I could make the most wonderful music together" and the other is, "Gentlemen, I bring you fraternal greetings from the British Labour party and I wish you a successful congress." The only trouble, he declared, was when you mixed up the two of them. How many modem politicians would risk that story doing the rounds?
Gordon Brown, by contrast, is almost impossible to lure to lunch. The best political editors can hope for is a half-hour breakfast with a chancellor still pink from the gym, so lasered into his brief that he will spend 20 minutes rehashing his last three economic speeches before relaxing briefly into the normal political discourse he does so well when he tries.
Several of today's Cabinet are so scared of upsetting the Alastair Campbell thought-police that they say nothing you have not read in yesterday's newspaper, while some modern Tories are so gauche that they bleat as they sit down, `I'm afraid I haven't really got anything to tell you,' as if you expect them to hand over there and then in a brown envelope the names of lain Duncan Smith's 25 assassins-to-be.
The best political lunches are conversational board games with a sense of give and take. Information is delicately bartered as journalist and politician trade pieces in each other's jigsaws. There is an expectation that both sides will spice up the occasion with anecdote. The whole point of lunch is to reflect a little longer on the issues, and especially the personalities, of the day. But with most of today's politicians there is no civilised getting-to-know-you process to make the next weekend phone-call a more relaxed and informative affair. Nor is there any sense of excitement about what they are doing.
John Nott bounced into lunch with Tiggerish enthusiasm one day in Thatcher's time to tell me, 'After today, Labour will never come to power again.' When I asked why, he explained that that morning's Cabinet had agreed to abolish exchange controls. As a result, he explained, there would be such a run on the pound if Labour ever looked like being elected again that the country would take fright and return to the Tory fold. Bum theory, as it turned out, but an interesting insight into Cabinet government.
Many of today's self-obsessed politicians treat lunch as an invitation to lie down on a psychiatrist's couch. 'How do you think I did in Tuesday's debate? Tell me, what do I need to do to improve on TV?' Above all, there is little sense of style, as I realised when Mo Mowlam cried off a lunch on a day she had departmental questions. She asked me up to her ministerial office instead where we ate lasagne and chips off a stained coffee table.
When I was pressing Lord Hailsham once to take another drink, he waved away the bottle, declaring, 'The House of Lords is sitting in its judicial capacity this afternoon, and while I may be drunk as a lord I must be sober as a judge.' You would not find a chief whip reflecting now, as Richard Ryder did, 'Politicians should only have affairs with people who have more to lose by their disclosure than they do.' Even a little elegant bitchiness would be nice, although, to be fair, one of Robin Cook's colleagues while he was still in the Cabinet did tell me, 'The trouble with Robin is that he's a student union politician, not a trades union politician.'
The rot set in, I think, in Thatcher's day as the spinners began to assert control. I was once sent, on account of some delightful civil service blunder, the pre-lunch briefing prepared for the then employment minister John Cope by his department. Stapled together in a bundle that included at least six sets of initials in the margin were my original lunch invitation, the department's assessment of whether the minister should accept, a copy of his reply and a rather flattering bundle of notes on my perceived status, on the Times's degree of reliability and on possible story interests. Lunch had become just another 'line to take'.
Change has come, too, in the shape of drinkdriving laws, greater attention to healthy diets and a stepped-up work-rate for MPs and ministers. In the 1970s my political lunch guests had a couple of stiff ones before the meal, the best part of a bottle of wine with, and a port or brandy afterwards. They should not have been crossing the street afterwards, let alone conducting the nation's business, although I would see some on their feet two hours later making capable speeches. But early in the 1980s the post-prandials went, followed, over the course of a decade, by the aperitifs. Few now take more than a glass of wine with lunch. And in days when the only inquiry from the sommelier is, 'Sparkling or still water, sir?' it seems that we are well and truly stuck with a boring Age of Discretion,
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