|
|
 |
| |
Lord Donoughue |
Heath jogger runs through a long list of his enemies
Lord Donoughue’s Downing Street diaries reveal a Machiavelli jostling to manoeuvre his way to the front, writes Illtyd Harrington
Downing Street Diary Volume Two:
With James Callaghan in No10.
By Bernard Donoughue.
Cape £30
Bernard Donoughue was once domiciled in Kentish Town, but, in spirit, he seems to have lived in Downing Street.
Lord Donoughue is not a modest man if you judge him by his diaries of when he sat at the right hand of two prime ministers: Harold Wilson 1973-76, and James Callaghan 1976-79.
He was one of their leading policy advisers, pitching his ego against the Bank of England, the Treasury and a handful of top Whitehall mandarins.
In truth, he wanted to be The Good Witch of the North. His sworn and persistent enemy was Harold Wilson’s chief retainer, Marcia Falkender, who he saw as the Wicked Witch of the West. Bernard wanted to wear Dorothy’s ruby slippers.
Bernard has a list of those he holds in contempt. And another of those who have his uncompromising love. He is cold towards his former workplace, the London School of Economics, Marxists, Trots, interfering trade union leaders, lazy council workers, dissident voices of people such as Tony Benn, and the St Pancras constituency Labour party, his own ward party, whom he stigmatises as “wankers”.
He tells of his love of the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho, and the lovely, enchanting intelligent women he meets on the drinks circuit. Other things which meet with his approval are hi-fi equipment, the opera, the City, but most of all, Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s acid-tongued master of vituperation and invective.
Bernard’s rich fantasy life races when he bumps into the spooks of MI5 and MI6. They chance upon each other in the staircase or dark corners with tit-bits of gossip and information. These were the years of Callaghan’s minority government, retained in power by the Liberals, all held together by deputy prime minister Michael Foot’s diplomatic skills.
Bernard, even after a night of generous free drinking, would shoot off for an early morning run across Hampstead Heath. In the autumnal mists, he would encounter Michael Foot and his dog Dizzy on their walk. John le Carré could not have written a better scenario.
When he is not acting as Callaghan’s conciliary, Lord Bernard turns on his neighbourhood comrades – “they are middle-class. left-wing neurotics – the Labour party is full of lunatics”. He even describes me as a “lapdog to Marcia Falkender”. I share that honour with other more notable men. As a dog lover I will refrain from castigating the breed that springs to mind when I think of Bernard.
Of course, bright-eyed Tessa Jowell and zealous Tessa Blackstone are “brilliance”.
Commendably, on his £8,000-a-year salary, he had homes in Kentish Town, Suffolk or France. But spare your tears, as help was at hand. He discovered Charlie’s Café in Covent Garden where you could lunch handsomely for 90p. Our man was at home there as much as he was in the ambassadorial swirl of diplomatic receptions, where the Ferrero Rocher is dished out.
These were the days of whispering “private is better than public”, before that mantra had such disastrous consequences. Tom Sharpe could have scripted it. There was the day when Sir William Armstrong, head of the “home civil services” burst into a room in No 10, flung himself on the floor, smoked constantly and foretold Armageddon.
He was whisked away to a secure facility, and, after his stay in the happy box, he was quickly installed as chairman of Midland Bank. Those naughty left-wingers who advocated the nationalisation of the banks might have been right.
One revelation has Judith Hart, a member of Wilson’s Cabinet, ringing the heavily bugged offices of the Communist Party apologising for not attending a treacherous meeting. “I can serve our cause better here,” she whispers.
So, in all charity, Bernard was honest when he wrote all he wanted was job satisfaction. An honest testament, others might cruelly suggest, was that the job he would have been satisfied by was Lord of the Rings. A Machiavelli, who made it to a bargain-basement Svengali. Doomed, like the Flying Dutchman, to run over Hampstead Heath forever with no one to grovel to or hold in haughty contempt, past Jack Straw’s Castle into the Twilight Zone.
•
 |
| |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
