Don't make jokes with the tabloids

IT is a disgrace. We think it would be in the best interests of your family and of the party if you resigned quickly and quietly," said the chairman of the party.

The director of the party nodded his agreement. "What is the allegation?

What have I done?"

I asked lamely.

The Conservative Party in a panic can be a dangerous beast.

Sixteen years ago, somebody decided - for reasons I still am not able to understand - they had it in for me, and wanted to have me deselected as Conservative candidate for East Lothian.

A handful of poison pen letters to my constituency chairman - which included totally unfounded allegations that I was campaigning for the legalisation of sex with children and that I was having an affair with no fewer than four Tory women - and they found me guilty in absentia. For 16 years I had been something less than a footnote in the history of the Tories. I was too obscure to register on the sleaze scale. Less than a tremor.

Until this week. Edwina Currie exploded her remarkably conserved John Major time bomb. A couple of days ago, the shrapnel ripped into me. The party had decided, on the basis of the poison pen letters and without any other justification, that I was having an affair. It is plain the Party of Original Sin cannot put up with that sort of thing.

Suddenly the text of the pen letters laying dormant for all those years was hot property. Mrs Currie admitted an affair with a "Slob". Wasn't Peter Clarke a bit of a slob? It was obviously him, they thought, even if the Daily Mirror seems to have thought slightly differently. In its story yesterday, it decided I was not the Slob but a "third" lover. (Pre-Slob or post-Slob, we don't know.) What happened was that a Daily Mirror reporter called me looking for another of Currie's lovers. I made the mistake of indulging in a jokey conversation with the reporter. (I confess to having a weakness for elliptical humour.) We concocted some fictitious lines, as if from one of her novels, that might have been uttered had I had a fling with Mrs Currie. Lo and behold, I find myself named, in all seriousness, as one of her lovers.

This, I can only conclude, was an honest mistake. It does teach me, though, not to make jokes with the tabloids.

I do remember a fairly reticent girl called Edwina Cohen as a nearly silent member of the Oxford University Conservative Association. I barely recognised her as the accomplished media manipulator who squeezed into Parliament for a corner of Derbyshire 10 years later.

The tip-off that I was enjoying Mrs Currie's body, and she mine, was sent anonymously to a councillor, David Thomson, and much outrage followed throughout the party. Had anybody ever shown me the letters? No. Had they named my partner? No.

I was putrefying quite placidly in my political grave as Peter the Pervert from Peebles when it was leaked that I must be Mrs Currie's elusive "Slob".

My skill as a lover was less than I had supposed.

I've heard about media feeding frenzies but never been at the centre of one.

The scrum outside my house yesterday after the Daily Mirror's story was cheery and boisterous and fairly easily mollified with coffee and buns. The phone, fax and email are more penetrating, if that is an acceptable term.

Luckily, like most of the few remaining Scottish Conservatives, I live in a castle, so we pulled up the heavy gates and switched off the modern technology.

THE Conservative Party moves brutally when it chooses to. With no evidence marshalled or accusation detailed, they moved on successive employers to have me dismissed. They told them I was a scandal about to explode.

Meanwhile, young John Major, Whip and then junior Social Security Minister, was canoodling with the lady from the Peak District. Was that an outrage/disgrace/scandal?

Er, no, because nobody told them until the serialisation rights had been agreed at The Times.

The notion of friendship in the Conservative Party is as threadbare as their kindness. One party employee, thinking I was being treated roughly, gifted me some internal party memos explaining how despite my "charm" and "ability", I had to be blocked from constituency selections. My whistleblower chum got his reward. He was summarily dismissed from his job.

Every politician or apprentice politician has his fantasies to keep him warm. Mine was to accelerate the processes short-handed to privatisation and deregulation. These seemed bold and even perhaps impractical 20 years ago.

Now that the Labour Party has pretty well adopted them, there is only the great tussle against the Belgian Empire, the EU left to fight.

It would be unmannerly not to acknowledge some faithful friends.

Enoch Powell proved wise and prescient. He wrote to me saying I was naive if I thought the Tories would offer justice. Two others have been loyal when their own torments had been too much to endure. Neil and Christine Hamilton have kept up a steady trickle of signals of solidarity and sympathy.

I doubt if Edwina Currie can remember my face, let alone my loins.

Yesterday she denied any link to me. I concur. But if it's untrue, why has the Tory party been punishing me for 16 years?

Inadvertently, anyone who slept with her was a prime media resource. I didn't, but this week I have been the object of great fascination. I'm singed but still fighting for an acquittal.

Who wrote the unkind letters?

The party knew in 1986 but they have now developed an impressively synchronised amnesia. In London, my files have been destroyed. In Edinburgh, they have been mislaid.

In the mid 1980s, a young Tory was the object of a parallel hit of identical insinuations. He sued for libel, won and was exonerated by the Tory party.

That man is John Bercow, MP for Buckingham, and is a shadow cabinet minister.

I have sued twice, won both cases, but still the party will not yield.

One of my hobbies is to collect and swop oxymorons. May I recommend Tory friendship? All I have left is my vanity. That is all politicians ever start with.

Copyright 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.