The Senecans by Peter Stothard

Author:Peter Stothard [STOTHARD, PETER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 HISTORY / General
ISBN: 9781468313437
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

21.7.14

Miss R turns a new page in her SENECA notepad. She also has a red-and-black-squared calendar for 1987 on her knee and a slim edition of ‘On Gifts’ in English from an American university.

‘How much gratitude should parents expect for gifts to their children?’

It is like a test. She stops before I can give Seneca’s best reply. She points to her list of dates and names, all of them still from the 1987 election. ‘What was all that about heaven, or not heaven? Who was young? Go back to The Old Rose. Go slowly.’

‘Fine. I will. Concentrate. We will be talking about forgotten politicians.’

‘When Ronnie arrived and sang out to the bar that “it was not very heaven to be David Young”, he was referring to a court favourite of the time, a tall telecommunications tycoon, one of the flat-faced men, then famous for his reputation as “the man who brought Mrs Thatcher solutions” when other ministers “brought her only problems”.’

Miss R makes two vertical lines to form what could be a chart.

‘Young’s unheavenly battle at this time was with the party chairman, Norman Tebbit, nominally in charge of the election campaign, still blasted by pain from the IRA attack on the Tory conference hotel in 1984, bitter in personality and appearance, and considered by Young to be Margaret’s current biggest problem.’

‘There were writers fighting on all Tory sides. Tebbit had a novelist assistant called Michael Dobbs who later became Baron Dobbs of Wylye. “Why lie?’ by name; Why not lie?” That was David Hart’s response when he heard the news of the honour he would have loved for himself. Dobbs had the doctorate in nuclear deterrence strategy that David did not, and his enviable bestsellers starred a machinating minister, Francis Urquhart, (“you might very well think that: I couldn’t possibly comment”) whose plots owed much to the Tory politics of his time. Dobbs was another survivor of the Brighton bomb and Ronnie deemed him a dangerous opponent for anyone.’

‘The party’s most successful writer was Jeffrey Archer, later Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare but at this time no longer even Conservative Deputy Chairman because of an imminent libel case about a prostitute at a railway station. He was still available to the Tebbit side and on offer to the Young side or to any other that would have him. I remember how Frank always defended Archer to me, suspecting that I had some kind of jealousy towards him, while invariably abusing him to anyone else.’

‘Young, said Ronnie, complained of every day walking on eggshells, watching his ankles for wild animals. The draft Election Manifesto had three different covers from which Margaret Thatcher had to choose, each with supporters for whom variations in cream and blue card were versions of holy writ.’

‘A core reason for the election date, which few agreed was the right election date, was the fear that, with further delay, the would-be-winning team would have turned its razors on itself. Already there were stories of one man’s cocaine habit

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