The Senecans Read online

  In fact, I am genuinely pleased to see her. Normally I try to avoid the phrase ‘in fact’, even to think it. In matters of English usage I prefer to follow Frank Johnson’s advice, the example of a master stylist, a poor politician but a masterly satirist of politicians, my Latin pupil, the quietest of those four men whom Miss R has mentioned without saying why.

  All of them were writers, Sir Ronald of speeches and West End musicals, Lord Wyatt of newspaper columns and diaries, Mr Hart of novels and pamphlets, opinions in The Times if he got the chance, and ‘plays of ideas’ performed at his own expense. That much they most certainly had in common. Sir Ronald was the most successful of them, made famous and rich by Robert and Elizabeth, Abelard and Heloise, and adaptations of political novels by C.P. Snow. The most frustrated was Mr Hart.

  Frank Johnson was the strictest of critics. Inter alia (Frank came to love his Latin) he advised all newspaper writers against ‘in fact’, also against ‘genuinely’, ‘recently’ and ‘famous’. This time I am ignoring him.

  In fact, Miss R and I become a bit more familiar as we talk, like pet and new pet-owner, not sure of our roles but already sensing something of each other’s insecurities, businesslike but well beyond the smiles of mere business. This time we do not talk for long. We don’t go back to her questions. In fact, she leaves almost as soon as she arrives. We do not kiss cheeks but we do shake hands, only a little awkwardly, as men who know each other do, those of us who are not sure whether we should be shaking hands or smiling on regardless, smiling as though an old conversation has never ceased.

  To shake or not to shake? That is a choice I often pondered in my younger days. I hardly ever used to make it correctly. My parents were from the anxious East Midlands, Nottingham lace and Nottingham coal. They brought me up in an Essex community of engineers, of controlled politeness, constrained, without any general confidence, with rules but without a rule for every situation I would later meet.

  It is hard to lose the manners of youth. All four of Miss R’s men, the ones she has chosen, used occasionally to chastise me for failures in etiquette, the massively wealthy Mr Hart most of all. Sir Ronald, the would-be wealthy Lord Wyatt and the literary Mr Johnson saw Mr Hart’s own manners as often lacking too.

  This evening the crowded office floor does not help. To say goodbye we stretch towards each other like children using stepping-stones to cross a pond. Her thumb is a hook in my hand.

  So I am left to myself. I see already that this is going to be a story about me and four men and Margaret Thatcher. Maybe we will go a bit beyond her and into the times of her successors, to John Major and to Tony Blair. She was like a bright sun, hard to see directly, and she cast a long shadow. Throughout her public life her courtiers were like mirrors, each reflecting different aspects of her character, each one worth looking into by those who would understand her.

  My story will be of how she exchanged and sometimes failed to exchange her favours. Or, at least, I am happy to make that the story. Miss R will be the one asking the questions. I am merely the interviewee, ready to start in August, 1979, if she wants to start that far back, my last month of ignorance of courtly life.

  In that humid summer, five years after ceasing to be an Oxford student, I still wanted to be a classicist of some kind, a writer about Greece and Rome. I knew about the ancient Senecans, colonial lords of Roman Cordoba. I knew nothing much of modern power. I knew a little about Thomas More. I knew only one character even remotely like David Hart – and he was a fictional tycoon called Trimalchio, a creation of satire by one of Seneca’s own fellow courtiers in the age of Nero, a generous host who terrorised his guests with the theatre of food.

  Sir Ronald, who was a classicist himself before he sailed to Hollywood, also knew about the billionaire butt of Petronius’s Satyricon, the arriviste who serves fish swimming in sauce like the sea, birds flying from the body of roast beasts, offal that looks like shit. Ronnie thought the comparison to David Hart somewhat unkind. He had never seen David piss into a silver pot and wipe his hands on the hair of the nearest servant. I needed greater experience of modern life.

  David was not like Petronius’s monster. Nor, however, Sir Ronald had to admit, was he quite unlike him either. I was keen on Latin novels then. There are not many of them to read. Gaius Petronius was one of the first comic novelists (his grander fans included D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot) and he wrote about food, drink, flattery, death and defecation. He was Nero’s ‘arbiter of taste’, pet prose-master and eventual victim. Or, at least, some scholars think that he was. Some think that there was more than one Petronius. Gaius may not have been the name of either. There is always uncertainty in distant history, almost always too in the kind that is close.

  As for Sir Ronald, I saw him as more like Lucius Annaeus Seneca himself. Cordoba’s greatest son much occupied my head at this time. He was less crazy than Petronius, less playful, long-winded but more useful. Thomas More was one of many who prized the practical advice of Nero’s speechwriter and tutor, the playwright paid to put the best words forward at all times, to make his master as little hated as was possible. Ronnie’s speeches (let me name him as she did, ‘dear Ronnie’) were invaluable to Margaret Thatcher.

  If these memories seem a little detached, that would be a very fair comment about me at the end of the 1970s. I much preferred the first centuries BC and AD to all other centuries particularly my own. Ronnie was right. There was much of the now that I did not know and had not seen. I afterwards became more a part of modernity but am slipping back again now.

  By 1979, when Margaret Thatcher and I coincided after The Undertaking, I had tried various jobs, from BBC Radio in Leeds to advertising chocolate. I spent as much of my time as possible in front of a stage. I wrote theatre reviews for a magazine that no longer exists. I was twenty-eight years old. I had a new job at the Sunday Times and a part-time role, at £5 per script, reading plays for the National Theatre, newly opened on the South Bank of the Thames amid a pious promise that every text submitted by the public would be considered for glory.

  Alongside the politics and the Latin, spilling out today from a soon-to-be-sealed box on my floor, are some of the play-titles from that time, invoice letters with NT in red capitals, Stations Upon The Pilgrimage Of The Werewolf (by Dai Vaughan), On The Knowledge (by Dai Vaughan), Krieg Ist Ein Traum or A Waltz (by someone who may not be Dai Vaughan but whose name has faded over the years).

  Each £5 fee is accompanied by a cross note from a woman in the script department deploring what a waste of effort this all was. Princess Ascending? We think not. The Alternative? If only. Go Down, Mr Pugh? Bete Noire? The Fuhrer Is Coming? Not if he had to read stuff like this.

  The Undertaking, a new play by a man better known for acting in the television series, Doctor Who, was one of many I reviewed that year. The Lenin-and-Leopold-like undertaker notes that all investigation is stopped into a ‘national scandal’ when ‘unstoppable procedures’ reveal ‘just who is involved’. If Miss R were a newspaper interviewer looking for cheap points, she could say that I already had the next phase of my life in mind, the search for corruption and cover-up, the things that journalists like to find. But Miss R is not writing for a newspaper.

  In the Autumn of 1979 that ‘next phase’ had barely begun. I had just spent eighteen months as a restless young man working lazily in an oil company office and with time to spend on writing short pieces about politics and poking them anonymously through the doors of magazines. Crossing the Thames at night to offices like this one where I am sitting now, waiting to see if an editor might bite on my morsel: that was my weekly thrill.

  One of these offerings, on some now incomprehensible controversy of the day, had attracted enough attention to get me offers of full-time jobs in journalism. That was how I joined the Sunday Times as a business and political reporter – at the much-improved salary of £7,500 per year.

  A printed contract for my first ‘proper job’, carbon-copied in the manner of the time, is on
my floor too, beside my ‘scoop’ about Industrial Democracy in the now defunct New Society. Miss R can see both if she wants to. She can check the numbers from before the time that she was born. I can never remember numbers. This is maybe the only joy of moving, the easy reminders of lost details.

  So August 27th, the date clear from a clipping here from Plays and Players, was, in fact, one of the last days of my old life. I was at a theatre in faraway Greenwich, with a brief to see a two-act play that began, as I recall it, with a European symphony and ended with a woman famed most for her part in a vermouth commercial being raped by a skeleton. And that was certainly the night that I first saw Margaret Thatcher. I am sure that she did not see me.

  8.4.14

  On this day last year Lady Thatcher died, aged eighty seven, mildly demented, demeaned, in my view and the views of many, by a title that she did not need and need never have taken. I was in hospital at the time. I hardly noticed that death elsewhere. I did not mourn it.

  To judge from the flickering grey images on a high-mounted TV the only thing she had ever done in her three transforming terms as Prime Minister was to take back the Falkland Islands in 1982, the year before her second election victory. There were sailors and soldiers everywhere. To hear the news commentaries she might have been being buried with two crossed batons and a wreath of oak leaves. The funeral would have perfectly suited any Field Marshal anywhere. Argentine or British? It would hardly have made a difference.

  So instead I am mourning her here now. Most of those with whom I watched her rise and fall are dead too. Miss R’s four chosen men are all gone. So much that reminds me of them is also about to die, directly in front of my eyes, brick by brick, pane by broken pane, a demolition in which more than matter will descend as dust. Not only are the newspapers now leaving Thomas More Square, but the original ‘Wapping’ that is down below me, the one that only the oldest among us knew, is about to be destroyed. And only a few now will mourn that.

  The first time that I saw this Wapping was a month before the street battles of 1986, the year before her third election victory, the days of the greatest secrecy I had ever known, days of enforced silence, the stress of everyone. Charles Douglas-Home, the Editor at the melon-balls lunch, was dead. His successor, Charles Wilson, and a driver called Jo brought me down here in a black-windowed car.

  The distance was short. At 1 pm I was at the Gray’s Inn Road offices where my job as a Thatcher-watcher had begun. At 1.15 pm I was shown the future and how it would work, computers without print-workers, print machinery with ten men instead of a hundred, the ramps down which lorries played the part of trains, the gatehouse and walls that would protect us until the enemies of change became used to it.

  As a man of new hopes for employment I hoped very much that the future was going to work. My first job after the security of Shell UK had lasted only three months. By January 1979 the Sunday Times and its daily sister were ‘shut down’ in one of the many so-called, sweetly called, ‘industrial disputes’ that propelled Mrs Thatcher to power. It had felt quite possible that they would never open up again.

  The papers did reopen and struggled on. The new Conservative Prime Minister promised to cure the British sickness without killing the British patient but the treatment was slow. All power to her – or so it seemed to me, and to most of those who managed the newspapers, including the new editor of The Times in 1986, a Scot like his predecessor but less ideological, an ex-marine, a giver and demander of fierce loyalty, irascible and well suited to an almost military campaign.

  All battles between trade unions and employers were political then. Strikes were the subject about which political writers wrote. There are hundreds of newspaper cuttings on this floor to remind me, once pasted in order, now yellow and free.

  Almost no one keeps cuttings any more. They have websites. The only record is electronic. But in the 1980s we all had ‘cuttings books’, marbled ledgers of our productivity, stiff pages which the editor could count if our value for money was in doubt. The requirement for stories was not high. Newspapers were small and staffs were huge until the ‘Wapping Revolution’. But even in the early 1980s it was useful to have one’s name in the paper from time to time. The order to visit the managing editor and bring your cuttings book was a headmasterly summons demanding attention and sticky paste.

  I have never thrown mine away. They are all here now, filled with gaps but still a record of what I used to do. For several weeks in 1980, from Doncaster to Dagenham, I seem to have done nothing but count the days ‘lost to strike action’. The results cover four full pages, a blurring record from a time when newspaper offices too were just small parts of factories and not, like Thomas More Square, suitable for a City bank.

  In another week I interviewed ‘the man who puts the words in Mrs Thatcher’s mouth’. That was how I first met Ronald Millar, not yet Ronnie or Sir Ronald, playwright, speechwriter, soon to be my closest friend among the courtiers on Miss R’s list.

  Miss R is right to want to understand the role of these lesser men. Yes, all Mrs Thatcher’s courtiers were men. Each gave her a different form of comfort. Thus they were means of seeing her when other means were closed, their minds flexible when hers had to be fixed. Sometimes eccentric, always expendable, they gave as well as took. When I was first writing about her I needed these exchanges. I saw her in person, ‘in the flesh’, hardly at all.

  That very first ‘editorial lunch’, after I had moved from the Sunday Times to The Times in 1981, was a rarity. That was why the level of sycophancy was so high. There was less close association between Prime Minister and journalists than became common later. A lunch was an ‘event’. For her it was almost a stage performance. In one of the paper piles on the floor there is a detailed note of it that I can use if Miss R wants a detailed answer. I am beginning to hope that she does.

  There will be records here (and elsewhere?) of when the Senecans met and what we learnt, how we laughed together about the knifing of friends, of enemies too, how we rejoiced in falls and failures. We loved undue expectations and unjust deserts. We loved the whole business of newspapers, a love that remains.

  We had so many rows – beginning with why the Argentines were able to invade the Falklands, arguments less reprised at her death than the Goose Green glory of the Islands’ recapture. We had harsh words about the sinking of an enemy ship called the Belgrano, about the ‘disgraceful’ Times role in the affair of Cecil Parkinson’s mistress, the transmigration of footballer’s souls, and the struggles about whether a helicopter company called Westland should be sold to Europeans whom no one had ever heard of or to Americans who were equally obscure. But little anger lasted beyond a day, the unit of time that on a newspaper is everything.

  It was during that so-called ‘Westland crisis’ (everyone knew the phrase in 1986) that The Times and its sisters moved down below to the place that became ‘Fortress Wapping’ or simply ‘Wapping’, taking the name of a whole riverside address to itself, to a new print plant of brick and steel where no member of a print union would ever tread. It was a brutal process of change, all of it happening within the view from this window. There was violence, there was a death. The roads shook with the rage of lorry-drivers and those attempting to stop them. The result was to be a new newspaper era.

  Wapping, like Westland, was both an industrial dispute within a single company and a conflict of visions, Europeans or Americans, Thatcher or the paternalism that had predominated before. My notebooks of the time are mostly of minutiae, some of it hard now even to understand, reports of acts by unremembered names. But some names remain, some acts by Miss R’s chosen names. I will answer her as best I can. I saw some things here that others did not see. I have stayed much longer than most. I have looked at events through more lenses. Perhaps I can claim some sense of proportion – or, if merely another distortion, at least one that is different.

  When I first drove through that gatehouse down below, seven years after that theatrical night out in Greenw
ich, six years after the ‘shut-down’ and sullen reopening, my job was still to write about the Thatcher court, Margaret, her enemies and friends. I acquired other positions too, writing rhetoric and opinions, editing the rhetoric and opinions of others. In 1992, after John Major won his only election as Prime Minister, I became Editor of The Times with new ties to Miss R’s four men, ties that lasted till they died.

  I dealt with some mad men of my time. Many are not on Miss R’s list but easily might have been. David was neither the maddest nor the most important but he fascinated me from the start. He was also the first to identify that I might be as useful to him as he was to me. Classics is a good training for understanding a court, a constant reminder of madness and mutual dependency. It was useful that I always kept some part of my mind in antiquity just as I had done as an Essex boy, as an adolescent at Oxford, and as and whenever I could. Latin became a shared language at Wapping for a while.

  Today, as I’m getting ready to leave here, not quite thirty years on, I am lucky. I can be an open classicist again. I have ‘come out’, as it were. Much of my ‘day job‘ at the TLS is to read and write about Greeks and Romans and those, like the Thomas More of our square, who brought classical languages to England.

  For more than a decade I have been back in the books where I began. When I wrote in 2010 about my near-death from a rare form of cancer it was in a book about the Spartacus slave war. When I wrote in 2012 about the fatal cancer of my oldest Essex friend it was in a book about Cleopatra. The approach of any death intensifies memory.

  Every day I edit the TLS. I concentrate on the classics as much as I can. I spend time with Romans, politicians, philosophers and poets, with the men and women who study them, with those who are sometimes like them now. It has been an easy adjustment of emphasis, hardly more than that. Wondering what to say to Miss R at first made remembering harder, her restlessness, her petulance, what seems to be a peculiar sense of entitlement. I am now beginning to remember much more. In its final weeks this place is becoming more of a spur than any person alone could be.