SHARED OPINION

Over mugs of steaming cocoa, we cracked every code Mr Major threw at us

FRANK JOHNSON

To understand a Conservative confer- ence, it helps to have worked at Bletchley during the war. As a matter of fact, I did not; but when studying the Conservative party, I convince myself that I did.

At Bournemouth this week, as at all Tory conferences, politicians publicly speak ill only of their opponents: Labour and Liber- al Democrat. That leaves the matter of how they speak about their enemies. I do not wish to sound too worldly-wise, but it is true, as the adage has it, that their enemies are in their own party, not in the others. Labour politicians often speak ill of their Labour enemies too; Tories, never. Instead, Tories speak of their enemies in code.

I flatter myself that I am the Alan Turing of Tory code-breaking. As at Bletchley, they hand the raw material of a Tory speech to me and my fellow code-breakers in the press corps. We boffins weigh up the stuff with a practised hand. On the face of it, any Tory speech is incomprehensible. The words are a jumble. But a few of us have the kind of brains capable of putting them into some sort of order. That is why we were plucked from civilian life to do this work. Gradually, as a result of our skills, a meaning emerges.

While on duty at Bournemouth this week, I was handed Mr John Major's speech to a fringe meeting. To obtain the text, one of our agents in the field had endured some suffering. He had listened to it. My job was to work out what it meant. My findings would then be circulated to a restricted circle: Conservatives loyal to their leader.

`We must reach out to all,' the speech read. 'The people in slums, the people in need, the people outside the circle of rising prosperity, the black and brown and yellow Britons who are as much a part of our soci- ety as I am. Our policies and our party are for them as much as for anyone else.'

To the untutored eye, this is meaningless: an apparently random series of syllables. None of the blacks, browns and yellows whom Mr Major mentioned has anything to do with the Conservative party which he says is for them. Peering into the confer- ence hall, I could see hardly any blacks or browns, and no yellows. What, then, did Mr Major mean?

Well, the first thing we old Bletchley hands realised about this message was that Mr Major was trying to make contact with resistance groups deep inside the Conserva- tive party. Together, these groups constitute the Old Wets Network which argues that the Hague Occupation is as right-wing as the hated Thatcher regime. Mr Major and the Old Wets believe that the right-wingers allegedly in control of the Conservative party in general, and Mr Hague in particu- lar, do not want blacks, browns or yellows in the country, let alone the party.

It may be objected: why, then, does not Mr Major say that the party should be for blacks, browns and yellows, rather than `our policies and our party are for them as much as for anyone else', which they mani- festly are not? But for him to do that would be to break the code. The code only works if the speaker never speaks ill of the party, or the people running it — merely implies ill. For openly to speak ill would mean that one would be spoken ill of in retaliation by the person who was ill-spo- ken of in the first place. One would then be blamed for splitting the party. But various speakers split the party all the time? Yes. But, provided they keep to the code, no one can prove it.

Later in the same speech, Mr Major said, 'This week there are a range of inclu- sive policies to be announced.' It hardly needs saying that Mr Major's fear is that a range of exclusive policies would be announced but, it being too obvious, that is not the point I wish to make here. Mr Major continued, 'I hope they [that is, the inclusive policies] will prove attractive to people in every part of the country and from every background. We must not allow ourselves to be falsely labelled by our opponents. We are the party that stands for One Nation.'

The clue here is the, on the face of it, vacuous phrase 'One Nation'. That is the very Ultra and Enigma of the Old Wet communications system. In the remote hills, forests, cellars and attics of the Hague-occupied Conservative party, where the Wet maquis plots its bomb attacks on the occupation infrastructure, resistance morse-operators tap out the key words `One Nation' as they receive their orders from Mr Heseltine in Henley-on-Thames, Mr Kenneth Clarke in Notts and, most important of all, Mr Chris Patten at Brus- sels Control.

`Brussels calling. Are you receiving us Conservative Mainstream? We understand John Major's speaking on the conference fringe, and that you've turned him. Please confirm he's now one of our agents.'

`Receiving you loud and clear, Brussels. Yes, can confirm that agent Major has been turned. We've inserted "One Nation" into the speech we've written for him. We think you'll be happy with it. Better not say any more over this line.'

The aforementioned Major speech was his first coded criticism of Mr Hague in the environs of a Conservative conference, and he may have overdone the coding. On the whole, however, he showed himself to be a master cryptographer. It was an honour for us code-breakers to have to face the chal- lenge of deciphering him. But we cracked everything he threw at us. For example, there was an especially tough passage which began with his pointing out that there were `certainly some MPs in our party who did us much great harm' in the last Parliament. From the context, and surprisingly, this was not a reference to Mr Portillo and Mr Red- wood, but to Mr Neil Hamilton and others — to 'sleaze'. But he added that it was unfair 'to hang individual misdemeanours around the neck of the party' which con- tained such figures as 'Douglas Hurd, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke'. Those figures are of course distinguished Wets. We code-breakers worked it out that, by singling them out, he was excluding some- one with right-wing antecedents such as, say, Mr Portillo, who was also prominent in the last government.

Had he been wishing to praise the Right, Mr Major would have used a completely coded list of Tories upon whom to lavish praise — notably, of course, Mr Portillo or, indeed, Mr Redwood. He might even have emphasised the need to keep the party true to the ideals of Lord Tebbit, Sir Gerald Nabarro, the Duke of Wellington and Lt Col. Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport.

After a particular tough cipher had been turned into English at Bletchley, we used to relax over a mug of steaming cocoa with the upper-class female typists who brightened our lives in those otherwise dreary sheds. But at Bournemouth, as in the war, we were soon back on duty. Mr Hague and his defenders started replying to their enemies by themselves invoking One Nation. A complex double-bluff operation which I cannot go into here because I never talk about my work.