Puritanism is like sea water. When it meets resistance at one point, it promptly finds another route. I came to that conclusion during the Tory conference in Manchester. If you passed a couple of Tory representatives, they might well be discussing community. Every ‘community’, every diversity, that you could think of was in view, plus the ones which the Cameroons have invented. These days, the Tory tribe looks like the entrance queue to the Coliseum, under a late and decadent emperor.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, it does not signify the universal prevalence of permissiveness. Over the weekend, a photographer snatched a shot of the Prime Minister holding a wine glass, and the story immediately became a talking point. This is the Tories’ own fault. A couple of years ago, an edict was issued prohibiting the seniores from drinking champagne at party conferences: creates the wrong impression. Oh, for a shrewd cynic like Philip Hammond, to flatten the silliness by pointing out the fatuity of an instruction which no one would obey, and which turns Cabinet ministers into boys smoking behind the bike-shed.
I cast my mind back to the 1980s, when it was Labour who were prohibitionist over champagne, which was only served at Robert Maxwell’s receptions (he did have a pension fund at his disposal). In the early Nineties, there was a change. Suddenly, Labour politicians would drink champagne in public, without any shame. It must be admitted that this crucial development went unanalysed by the commentators. Perhaps we were too busy joining in. But it was a leading indicator. The Labour party was becoming electable.
Before that, in the triumphalist decade when Mrs Thatcher dragged Labour behind her chariot like captured Gauls in Caesar’s triumph, Alistair McAlpine would offer after-dinner refreshment to ministers and senior hacks at the party conference. If there had been an EU lobster mountain, or a champagne lake, those soirées would have solved the problem. Once, there was an especially glorious table: a Pelion piled on Ossa of crustaceans. It could have been a 17th-century still life. Alternatively, it only needed a Bacchus to be Gluttony in a tableau of the Deadly Sins. It was so beautiful that I made the fatal mistake of contemplating it before troughing in. Too late; the Bacchi beat me to it. Those heavenly twins, Alexander Hesketh and Nicholas Soames, wasted no time on aesthetics. Abreast, they obscured the banquet. They jostled and shouldered one another like a brace of rugger forwards about to scrum down. There followed a long noise which is hard to describe. Imagine a guttural but also liquid ‘thsssch’ sound continuing for several minutes: a cross between a slurp and the thwack of a killing shot hitting a stag.
By the time the Dioscuri were satiated, there was a wreckage of shells. Fragments of lemon looked as if they had been crushed by a giant fist. Hardly a sprig of parsley remained inviolate. Yet there was no need to despair. The table was instantly replenished. My Lord McAlpine was the only man in history who could get service in Blackpool.
Margaret Thatcher never attended his parties. She would have been too busy eating speech-writers. But Denis always came. Not that he wasted his time with anything as effeminate as champagne. He got stuck into the Scotch. While doing so, he would give his views on sporting links with South Africa and crime in south London. For some reason, the two topics seemed to conflate in his mind.
In those days, journalists could be trusted, even lefties such as Mike White of the Guardian (who can still be trusted). None of Denis’s insights were ever printed, which was just as well. It would have been so embarrassing for his wife. She would have agreed with every word.
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