what happened with Margaret Thatcher…you were ushered into a small room, and she would talk to you very informally…closer than we are now…it was always very personal; and it was like that when you got the sack as well. Anyway, I found myself not in this small room, but in this large drawing room, the White Drawing Room, on a sofa opposite two men on another sofa…one was the Prime Minister, and one was Andrew Turnbull, the PM’s Private Secretary. I looked at this man Turn-bull and thought, ‘What the blazes are you doing here?’ It meant John and I couldn’t have a proper conversation for a start. The Prime Minister said ‘Edwina, I’d like you to join the Government, and I’d like to offer you the job of Minister of State in the Home Office.’ I said, ‘What does it involve?’ Andrew Turnbull said, ‘We want you to be Minister for Prisons.’ I said ‘I’ve got a couple of prisons in my constituency. I know what a terrible state they’re in.’
Prisons…of all the jobs on offer it was going to be the poisoned chalice, and whoever drank from that cup was soon going to be sacrificed in a blaze of publicity so the rest of them could carry on. I said, ‘Thank you but no thank you. Isn’t there anything else?’ John Major said, ‘You were not around when we tried to phone you’ and I said, ‘When was that?’ and he said, ‘Earlier today’ and I thought, ‘That’s a lie’ and then he said, ‘You can’t say ‘no’, I’ve put it out in a press release.’ I thought, ‘You prat.’ I said, ‘Can I ask you something? Why couldn’t you put me in office when you were first made Prime Minister?’ And John Major said, ‘I’d forgotten about you.’ And I thought, ‘You double prat.’ There I was on that sofa looking at someone I’d been so close to so recently, thinking it was reasonable to expect a modicum of special consideration…and there he was blandly smiling and saying, ‘I’d forgotten about you.’ And I thought to myself, ‘One day you will remember.’ Turnbull was smoking…he was smoking and smiling…he thought the interview was quite funny.
I walked out of Number Ten. I was wearing a black coat, a rather smart black coat I bought in a second-hand shop in Paris…I was wearing this black cashmere coat, and all the photographers were there, and I’m sure my ministerial car and driver were waiting to whisk me off to the Home Office, and I walked back down the pavement looking like the black widow in the advert for Scottish Widows. I re-ran the scene in my mind as it should have gone. We would have met in a small private room, just the two of us. He would have kissed me and then said, ‘There are three or four jobs still vacant, these and this and this, Edwina…do you have a preference?’…looking deep into my eyes…I would have said, ‘The one which is for the country’s good…and you know I’m particularly good with inner cities’ and we would have had a serious conversation.
I must have walked home…like the Queen I walk quite a lot…but you don’t remember the walk when your brain is thinking, ‘What’s going on?’ There had been no personal contact between us. He hadn’t a clue…hadn’t a clue that I was hurt; he couldn’t see it was the be-all and end-all of my life to join the government and be put in a position where I could make a good job of something. The only feeling I was left with was betrayal… a feeling of something totally irreversible. A Rubicon had been crossed; that was the damage done then…at that moment…it sowed the seed for something that would happen many years later…I thought ‘One day when it won’t damage the party, I’m going to put the record straight in as simple and unadorned fashion as possible, from notes I made at the time. The truth will out, and I will be the architect of that truth.’ I think it’s important to pass on history as accurately as possible. Minister for Prisons. He might as well have handed me the dagger there and then.
4
JONATHAN AITKEN
Talking of prisons, I went to see Jonathan Aitken. He invited me for Sunday night supper… ‘It’ll be something very simple… smoked salmon and scrambled eggs.’ We sat in a room which my parents would have called a study…two of the walls lined with books…a large fireplace…armchairs, one of which Jonathan sat in. We drank quite a lot of red wine, him more than me as I was scratching away with my rapid flow pen in the red book. He was wearing a blue shirt, a blue sleeveless sweater, and blue jeans. He sat with his legs crossed and very often with his hands together in a clerical manner, as if I was a novice learning from a man of wisdom…which I was…I try not to presume that I know more about the subject than the person I’ve gone to talk to about it. Indeed I’ve often been in situations where the person in the room who knows least about a subject talks about it the most volubly and, as far as they are concerned, with the greatest authority.
I found in Jonathan Aitken as with many people who have been involved in the tumultuous events I’ve written about… drug addiction (A State Affair), war in the Middle East (The Arab-Israeli Cookbook), scandal (Life After Scandal), terrorist activity (Talking to Terrorists), growing up in an economic void amid racial tension (Mixed Up North)…I found that curious enigma that although they look back and say ‘That was the low point’ there is this curious feeling that, however desperate, they were alive in a way that they aren’t now…now that they have sailed into calmer waters. Take this speech from Aitken… ‘I wanted to keep my head down. I fled to New York. Yes…I suppose…yes… somewhere I could be anonymous. When I phoned home my daughter said, “Daddy, you’re not just the news, you’re the only news.” Of course I thought she was exaggerating, but then I was faxed a copy of the Evening Standard. The banner headline was “THE RUIN OF AITKEN” in that magnified type-size used for great crises or the death of royalty; further down in pretty large letters it said, “DOWNFALL OF A FORMER CABINET MINISTER”, and underneath it said, “AITKEN, THE MARRIAGE, PAGE 3; AITKEN, THE TRIAL, PAGE 4; AITKEN, THE LIES, PAGE 5; AITKEN, THE MAN, PAGES 12 AND 13; LEADER COMMENT, PAGE 9”. It was a low point, very low, very low yeah. I definitely thought about suicide. I had this moment…I went out for a run one morning in Northern California, in this huge wilderness on the edge of the Pacific, and there was a place where the cliff rose sharply…I looked down, and the fall was far deeper than I had imagined. I was…um…it took me by surprise. It would have been very easy to er…to er…leap off that cliff and be dead in ten seconds. The thought tempted me for a few seconds, but then I came back to my senses. I thought of my sixteen-year-old son sleeping in the log cabin, his tousled hair on the pillow. I thought, “Even if I’d like to end it all now, I couldn’t possibly do it because of how tremendously selfish and cruel it would be to him and my other children.” Looking back that was the low point.’
You see what I mean. These were disastrous events, but looking back from times when things are relatively bland, there is a sort of nostalgia for times when life was raw and passions swirled in primary colours.
ESCAPE
Jonathan Aitken (60) sits in a large armchair. He has a bottle of red wine and a glass on the table next to him.
JONATHAN: When I was living in Lord North Street, it was not odd to find photographers on the pavement at 6.30, or waiting in their cars. What they were after was today’s picture of the ‘beleaguered minister’. I would come out of the house, and there would be a sort of convergence…a score of flashbulbs kicking off; they were after a grimace, looking gloomy… ‘Gloomy Aitken’…something like that. They would shout…the shouts would be straight out, and they would be a snippet of something they’d got from the Guardian or The Independent that morning, which I didn’t know about… ‘What about the BMARC meeting on June 15th?’ ‘Did you approve guns for Singapore?’ ‘Did you procure girls for the Saudis?’ Sometimes the Press Officer from Number Ten would phone to say, ‘There’s a story on the front page, it says such and such. I thought you should know before you go out and face the barrage.’
I did escape by a back entrance very early one day. It was five o’clock, a lovely sunny June morning. In the night I had had a dream about my father…everything very disturbed… and suddenly, after waking, I had the idea that I might go to the Suffolk churchyard where he’s buried. I looked out the window and saw these two bulky guys,