The Senecans Read online

  PETER STOTHARD

  THE

  SENECANS

  Four Men and Margaret Thatcher

  with 40 b/w photos and illustrations

  A year after the death of Margaret Thatcher, a young historian arrives to ask Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and former Editor of The Times, some sharp questions about his memories of the Thatcher era. During the interview the offices from where he long observed British politics are being systematically flattened by wrecking balls. From the dust and destruction of a collapsing newspaper plant emerge portraits of the Senecans, four of the men who made the Thatcher court so different from that of her successors. As well as love of Britain’s first female Prime Minister they shared strange Latin lessons in a crumbling riverside bar. They took their name from their taste for the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a pioneer writer from Cordoba in Roman Spain, a philosopher, courtier and acquirer of massive wealth from the age of the Emperor Nero.

  Blending memoir with ancient and modern politics in the manner of his acclaimed diaries, On the Spartacus Road and Alexandria, Peter Stothard sheds a sideways light on Margaret Thatcher’s “believing age”, a personal picture of our recent history. In finally identifying his interviewer he also answers questions about his own literary and political journey.

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  30 Days

  Spartacus Road

  Alexandria

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2016 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address

  LONDON

  30 Calvin Street

  London E1 6NW

  [email protected]

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  Copyright © 2016 by Asp Words

  PICTURE CREDITS: Page ix and 221 © News UK & © Press Association; p1 © Tarker/Bridgeman Art Library; p4 © Peter Stothard; p7 © Peter Brookes/News UK; p9 © Matthew Richardson/Alamy; p15 © Press Association; p29 © The Spectator; p37 © Marcus Cyron/Creative Commons; p41 © Peter Stothard; p45 and 269 © The Estate of Beryl Bainbridge; p47 © Rex Features; p49 © Hazel O’Leary; p63 © Peter Stothard; p73 © Sally Soames; p79 © Peter Stothard; p89 © Sue Foll; p93 © News UK; p99 © News UK; p115 © Sue Foll; p125 © News UK; p131 © Peter Stothard; p139 © Peter Stothard; p155 © Richard Willson/News UK; p167 © Peter Stothard; p177 © News UK; p189 © Wellcome Collection; p197 © Peter Stothard; p248 © Peter Brookes/News UK; p255 © Hazel O’Leary; p265 © Shutterstock; p269 © The Estate of Beryl Bainbridge; p272 © Peter Stothard; p274 © Alamy; p277 © Estate of Zsuzsi Roboz/Messum’s

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1343-7

  To Cordoba

  Contents

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  SEPTEMBER, 2014:

  Escape to Cordoba – Thatcher and other broken promises – Memoirs, dogs and lampposts – A Believing Age

  APRIL, 2014:

  Miss R comes to Wapping – Margaret sideways – A tomb by the Thames – Ronnie, Woodrow, Frank and David Hart

  MAY:

  Doomed walls – Ronnie Millar’s piano – Remains of Molotovs – Seaside balsa palaces – In the Falklands War – Gotcha!

  JUNE:

  Falling glass – D.H. Lawrence in the Miners’ Strike – How I was Woodrowed – Frank Johnson and the penis on the roof

  JULY:

  Four ghosts return – Frank finds the skip – Latin at The Old Rose – Gorbachev and the Gunpowder Plot – Maggie, Out, Out, Out!

  AUGUST:

  When Wapping dies – Woodrow Wyatt in the Locarno Room – Poems by a Prime Minister – Cool Britannia – Seneca’s last bath

  SEPTEMBER:

  Cordoba, three weeks on – Deaths and letters – Who Miss R was – The Senecans’ farewells – Escaped parrots

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOUR MEN AND MARGARET THATCHER

  David Hart (1944-2011): educated at Eton College; film-producer; property developer; political adviser; arms industry lobbyist; farmer; playwright; novelist

  Frank Johnson (1943-2006): educated at Shoreditch Secondary Modern; journalist for the Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph and The Times; parliamentary sketch-writer; editor of The Spectator (1995-99)

  Sir Ronald Millar (1919-98): educated at Charterhouse and King’s College, Cambridge; actor; playwright; writer of musicals; Hollywood screenwriter; speechwriter

  Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013): educated at Kesteven and Grantham Girls School and Somerville College, Oxford; research chemist; barrister; politician; British Prime Minister (1979-90)

  Lord (Woodrow) Wyatt (1918-97): educated at Eastbourne College and Worcester College, Oxford; Labour politician; Conservative newspaper commentator; businessman; playwright; political adviser; diarist

  September 2014

  Quintus Metellus Pius was so anxious for his deeds to be praised that he consulted poets from Cordoba – even though their Latin came with a foreign accent

  —CICERO In defence of Archias, 62 BC

  Puente Romano, Cordoba

  5.9.14

  Believe me. I was serious twelve years ago when I said that I was going to stop writing about politicians, stop forever the laptop key in my head that predicts a T into Thatcher, an M into Major, a B into Blair. I made a promise to myself when I stopped being the Editor of The Times. I promised to go back to what I did before I was a journalist at all, back two thousand years to books and cities of books, to Naples, Alexandria and here, beside a Roman bridge over slow, brown water, in Roman Spain. There seemed no reason that Margaret T, her heirs and successors, would ever trouble me again. Twenty-five years with them was enough.

  I meant it too when I said I was never going to write one of those ‘memoirs of the print trade’ that I have occasionally enjoyed. Last week by the River Thames, when I left Thomas More Square for the last time and came here to Cordoba, there were lives like mine all over my floor. Turn right out of the lifts on Tower Three, Level Six: turn ten yards along the carpet tiles, and there you would have found them, pages and pages of Born, Learnt, First Break, First onto Fleet Street, scoops, scrapes, prizes, always more success than failure, often successes that would have been even greater if some greater betrayal had not occurred.

  Last week all these books, the kind I always said I would not write, were waiting for packers to take them to the Oxfam shop nearest to London Bridge. This week Dogs and Lampposts, by my fellow editor, Richard Stott, and dozens of others, by friends and the not so friendly, are safely under charitable supervision, looking for good new homes.

  So no, my life is now different. I edit the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS, a very different kind of paper. Over four decades I have been a critic, reporter, a writer of opinions, an editor, and now I am almost a student again. When I arrived yesterday at this café table by the Guadalquivir river, my aim was to finish a book which stars an ancient Roman, a writer who was born in Cordoba around the time when BC turned to AD. Lucius Annaeus Seneca was his name, sometimes Seneca the Younger b
ecause his father too lived and wrote here and lived off the profits of olives as everyone here always has.

  Why Seneca? He wrote books which were important to me both when I was a journalist and before. He was a politician who wrote plays, or a playwright who played politics (people still argue which came first), or maybe he was even more important as a philosopher. Cordoba has been a city of words and power for longer than anywhere west of Rome, one of the earliest homes for poets paid to make virtues more renowned, a first base for flatterers with foreign accents.

  Seneca was the heir to a family business of writing and politics here, the writing of speeches for farmers and financiers in this hottest, driest part of Spain and also in Rome where the younger Seneca grew up to be himself one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. He became a prime minister (not yet in capitals) at the court of the Emperor Nero, possibly the richest great writer ever to have earned a fee.

  So Seneca is much on my mind, his arguments, Stoic arguments as they are known, small questions about cold water, travel and alcohol as well as the big questions, how to survive in dangerous times, how to live a good life in even the worst of times. I found him first when I was young in the 1960s and secondly when Margaret Thatcher was in power almost 2,000 years after his death.

  I have brought to his birthplace a story which also stars four courtiers of the Thatcher age. That is my aim, a portrait of lesser characters who can sometimes shed light on the greater. Their names are enough for now: David Hart, Ronald Millar, Woodrow Wyatt and Frank Johnson. All served Margaret Thatcher in different ways.

  This is an account of plotting and principles. It comes from an age which in Downing Street and surrounding streets was both a Reading and a Believing Age. So much was different then.

  What I need to do here in Cordoba is to read again what I have written and see what I want anyone else to read. This is a book that has come into being in a curious way. Five months ago I had no fixed plan for The Senecans, not for this year, maybe for next year, as I’ve said in many past years. What made me begin was a strange encounter with my own past.

  But in order to write this book I had to break some of those earlier promises about putting politics behind me. Accept, please, that I did not break them lightly. Five months ago I did not set out to recall stories of these men around Margaret Thatcher. Remembering is hard work. Answering someone else’s questions is not what I wanted to do.

  Even less did I intend anything like that other kind of memoir, the Editor’s career, the ideal obituary, the apologia pro sua vita as Seneca would have seen it. There is much in The Senecans that a writer of his own newspaper life, anxious to grasp some twig of posterity, might sensibly have omitted. Editing is my profession but it seems too late for much self-censorship now.

  What I did was to answer the questions of a peculiarly persistent interviewer, a woman who I would at most times have seen briefly or not at all, a writer herself, a diligent researcher at what was for her a fortuitous time, months when my mood was to remember rather than forget.

  Miss R was not my first interviewer with research in mind. This was not the first time that a writer about Margaret Thatcher asked me to help. I saw things that others did not. Newspaper editors see many things. But this year, this time, was different. Miss R disturbed me from the start and somehow I was ready to be disturbed.

  Each night, I wrote down what she said and what I said in return. It is she who set the terms in April, posed the questions till August, waited for the answers and, only last week, did I understand why.

  April 2014

  Almost nothing is more disgraceful than not knowing how to give or to receive benefits. If benefits are badly placed, they are badly acknowledged, and, when we complain of their not being reciprocated, it is too late. When we are about to lend money, we are careful to inquire into our debtor; but our benefits we give, or rather throw, away

  —SENECA On Giving and Getting

  Thomas More Square, London, E1

  2.4.14

  ‘When did you first see Mrs Thatcher?’

  Miss Robbins is the speaker’s name. She holds the letter that I sent her. She screws it into a ball in her hand. She snaps out her question and seems set to snap again, unsettled, perhaps, by the wreckage around her feet, the tottering boxes and tumbling paper piles.

  There is unsettlement all around. I am about to be moved from the north bank to the south bank of the River Thames. Only for another five months will I be here.

  She stops, unscrews my letter, flattens it between her hands and stares down at the address.

  ‘Thomas More Square?’

  She voices the question mark as taxi drivers do. A square? This is East London where there are no squares of the shape you see in Euclid or the West End. TMS (as we call it) is a tall glass tower, with concrete slabs and a sandwich shop on one side, a road to a housing estate on another and two lower towers completing a shape I cannot name.

  We are together looking down at Wapping, the north bank of the Thames that was so notorious a battleground of the Thatcher years. If we push out the boundaries until we find some sort of imaginable square there is first the Highway, the Ratcliff Highway as it used to be called in the days of Jack the Ripper, the press gangs for Nelson’s navy and the marches against Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts. Opposite the crawling Highway of lorries runs the empty, broader river, slow brown in a briefly straight line from Tower Bridge.

  In the view through the window in front of me is a press gang of a different kind, a former home of four great newspapers, red brick and glass, fiercely fought for when I arrived there in 1986. Beyond and further in front, if our minds travel far enough, are Essex and the North Sea. Behind me is the slab of stone that gives our address its name, the place where England’s once greatest writer and reader of Latin was executed by an axe-man in the summer of 1535.

  ‘Thomas More Square?’ Miss R has a list and a chart and asks the question again.

  ‘I have not been up here long’, I say. For much, much longer I was down there.’ I point to the abandoned offices of The Times, the newspaper through which I first met Margaret Thatcher and which I edited for more than a decade.

  ‘Who was Thomas More?’ She juts out her jaw as though to say that she has just temporarily forgotten.

  ‘He hardly matters if you are interested in Margaret Thatcher’, I reply.

  ‘Tell me anyway’, she says, kicking aside a pile of old books as though clearing a seat in a bar. I offer to find her a chair. She chooses a pile of modern political novels instead.

  ‘Thomas More’, I respond, ‘was a great man of Latin. He used many of the texts you are trampling on now. But he got his gong in history for being bloody-minded, for burning people who disagreed with him and failing to recognise Henry VIII’s second wife. He lost his head for that.’

  She stares straight at me, then down again at my letter to her and beneath it her own letter to me.

  ‘I know where you are. I know why you are here and where you are going. You know what I want to talk about. When did you first see Margaret Thatcher?’

  I wonder if I should ask her to leave. I have other things to do. She is irritating me already. The office seems suddenly hot behind its sixth-floor sheets of glass. Temperature controls, like other controls, are failing as our last months here pass by.

  It was last June when she wrote to me first, with questions for her thesis on ‘The Thatcher Court’, questions about the lesser courtiers whom she knew I knew, the ‘Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns’, as she put it, not the Hamlets. Although she wrote a persuasive letter, I was not persuaded at first, only when she wrote again last week. By then I was surrounded by so many relics of her chosen time, so many boxes for the removal men. I was staring for the last time at so many places where those courtiers once came. It seemed wrong to say no.

  That may have been a misjudgement. She has cropped hair, a bit of a bolshie look, as we used to say, white shoes and a small recording machine.
>
  ‘When did I first see Mrs Thatcher?’ Her eyes are a protest: does he have to repeat every question? Her hands crush our letters back into a ball. She leans forward and looks hard.

  ‘It was February 1985’, I reply, ‘a few weeks before my 34th birthday. I was a junior editor on the staff of The Times. We had an Editor’s lunch, one of those occasions where politicians can be questioned in conditions of fake friendliness.’

  Despite her manner I am trying to be helpful and friendly myself. I don’t know how much she understands.

  ‘An Editor’s lunch is a chance for quiet exchanges of favours, a story on a rival, a request for understanding about an upcoming problem, deals so quiet that many of those present may not even know they are being made.’

  She nods. That is something she thinks she does understand.

  ‘Margaret did not behave well. It was one of her “remembering the Brighton Bomb” days, or so one of my knowing colleagues said. Or she had just “spoken to poor Cecil Parkinson”: that was another explanation.’

  I point outwards, to the ground outside, to the gatehouse that was once a fort.

  ‘We had not quite arrived at Wapping then but we were on our way. The battles down below between police and strikers, men and horses, newspaper unions and managers, had not yet happened. We soon won’t even be able to see the battlefield. We are leaving soon’, I add unnecessarily.

  Miss R stands up from her literary perch and shifts her small weight from left foot to right. She waves me to go on.

  ‘Margaret was certainly not at her kindest that day. No, we did not discuss murder or adultery, nothing as embarrassing as that. We did not mention the IRA attempt to assassinate her during the Tory Party Conference at Brighton five months before, nor “Cecil’s lovechild resignation” during the same conference the previous year. But a lunching journalist in those days could prosper mightily by pretending to understand the Prime Minister’s moods. Maybe my knowing colleague was right.’