Nice ‘n’ sleazy

In this extract from A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s, Alwyn Turner remembers the scandals that engulfed the government of John Major…

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And so it went on, an endless litany of affairs, mistresses and Commons researchers. ‘They run off with these silly girls,’ bemoaned a character in the sitcom Dinnerladies. ‘We never had any of that with dear old Ted Heath.’ The list of miscreants was extended on what felt at times like a weekly basis, so that the details of each case blurred with those of the last, and it became difficult to remember which of the obscure figures propelled into the headlines had done what.

Nor did it seem particularly important; if one case were missed, then another was bound to come along shortly, so that The Day Today’s invention of a Conservative Party post, the Vice Chairman for Resignation Issues, seemed all too appropriate. Each weekend would inevitably produce, in the words of a Sunday Mirror headline, ‘Another back to basics bombshell’.

That particular headline related to the man who had inherited Margaret Thatcher’s old seat in Finchley. Hartley Booth, a 47-year-old married man who was also a Methodist lay preacher, had become infatuated with a 22-year-old art student. The fun here lay in the details that the affair had quite possibly not been consummated, that he had written love poems to her, and that she was discovered to have previously worked for Peter Mandelson.

Elsewhere Richard Spring, the MP for Bury St Edmunds, was said to have enjoyed ‘a three-in-a-bed romp with a woman and a man’, though since all three of the alleged participants were unmarried, it was hard to know what business this was of the newspapers.

And although John Major himself had seen off the rumours about his own conduct (the story of his relationship the previous decade with Edwina Currie had yet to enter the public domain), his son, James, was caught up in the media storm, when news broke that he had been having an affair with a woman who was not only married but thirteen years older than himself. Few newspapers could resist the detail that ‘her husband found them cuddling in the kitchen at their home in Cambridgeshire, with James in drag’, though it was hard not to feel slightly disappointed when this turned out to refer to an incident at a fancy-dress party for which he had turned up in ‘a frilly garter, bra and silky knickers’.

Currie herself was in no doubt where the fault for all these stories lay: ‘the bloody “Back to Basics” campaign is to blame, for it outlawed the one protective factor the Tory Party has always relied on – hypocrisy.’ As Sarah Keays, who had been Cecil Parkinson’s lover in the 1980s, put it: ‘They apply one standard to themselves and another to the rest of the country.’

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Through it all ran the saga of former MP Alan Clark, who published the first volume of his diaries in 1993, complete with accounts of his philandering, in both his real and fantasy lives. ‘I will be a figure of fun, like [David] Mellor,’ he worried as publication approached, though in his case the public were simply entranced. He was seen as an old-fashioned bounder, a rogue who operated on a scale so much more impressive than that of his erstwhile colleagues. Even better was the response of his wife Jane, who stood by her husband: ‘I still think he’s super,’ she told the press. ‘I know he’s an S-H-one-T, but that’s it.’ She also exhibited heroic levels of aristocratic disdain: ‘Quite frankly, if you bed people that I call “below-stairs class”, they go to the papers, don’t they?’

This latter comment was occasioned by the story that Clark had seduced a married woman as well as both of her daughters, which gave him enormous lad credentials. It got even better when the whole family arrived in Britain from South Africa (‘a sad old cuckold with a couple of hard-faced slappers’, in Ian Hislop’s words), and the woman’s husband, Judge James Harkess, threatened to seek out Clark and horsewhip him. Sadly, Harkess backed out of this nineteenth-century course of action, and instead resorted to employing the publicist Max Clifford to make his case.

Even Clark’s airing of his dirty linen, however, was as nothing compared to David Ashby, a Leicestershire MP, who was alleged by the Sunday Times to have left his wife of twenty-eight years because of his ‘friendship with another man’. It was claimed in subsequent reports that he had shared a bed with a man whilst on holiday in France, which he agreed was true but only for reasons of economy, adding pointedly: ‘I have got to keep my wife in the style to which she is accustomed.’

Rather than keeping his head down and waiting for the storm to blow over, Ashby sued the Sunday Times for libel over a related story – that he had also shared a bed with a man on holiday in Goa – and thus launched a court case that provided more information than anyone could truly be said to need. His wife, he said,  called him ‘queenie’ and ‘poofter’; she physically assaulted him and taunted him about his impotence (he called a doctor to give evidence that he was indeed impotent). She then gave evidence against him, claiming that he had told her of his homosexuality when he moved out of the marital home. At one point in the trial Ashby also burst into tears in the witness box, and proceedings were further enlivened when he gave a demonstration of the bizarre contraption he wore in bed to prevent his snoring.

After twenty days of this, the jury found against Ashby, leaving him with huge legal costs to meet and a wrecked political career that never recovered. In 1996 he was deselected by his constituency party as their candidate in the forthcoming general election. ‘It is the usual blind prejudice,’ he explained: ‘love the Queen Mum, hate queers, hate foreigners, get out of the Common Market, keep the Queen’s head on the coins.’ He later expanded on this in a live radio interview, saying of the local Tories: ‘They’re a bunch of shits, aren’t they, and we know they are.’

Ashby went on to denounce ‘the press who wildly throw phrases like “public right to know” and “exposing hypocrisy” around as if that is a valid reason for destroying a person’s family and career’. It was also true, though, that newspaper readers happily colluded with the media, revelling in the discomfort of men who – with the occasional exception of David Mellor or Norman Lamont – could scarcely be called household names.

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Mixed up in this farrago of moralising indignation were a couple of genuine tragedies. In January 1994 the wife of Lord Caithness, a transport minister, killed herself with a shotgun after learning that her husband was leaving her for another woman. He resigned his post immediately and the story made very few waves, suggesting that perhaps personal loss still had the power to instil a sense of proportion.

Such a theory, however, was exploded the following month when the death was announced of Stephen Milligan, the MP for Eastleigh.

The circumstances of Milligan’s demise could hardly fail to escape notice. His body was found at his home, dressed in women’s underwear, with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head. He had died from strangulation with a length of flex, the apparent victim of a session of autoerotic asphyxiation that had gone wrong.

Again his was hardly a name instantly recognisable to the public, though at Westminster he was popular and highly regarded. A former journalist with the BBC and the Sunday Times, he had been elected in 1992 and was the first of the new intake to get a government job, making his presence felt with his loyal contributions to the Maastricht debate. At the age of forty-five, he was a rising star in the party and he had high aspirations. ‘I would like to be foreign secretary,’ he told his friends the day before he died.

His death represented a real blow to the Tories, beyond even the loss of his seat to the Liberal Democrats in the ensuing by-election. ‘Bad not just for the Tories, but for the whole political class,’ was Giles Radice’s conclusion, though there was no doubt who took the brunt of the scorn. ‘Would the last decent person in the Tory Party shut the closet door,’ trumpeted a less than sympathetic Daily Mirror headline.

The details were too much for John Major to comprehend; he was out of his depth when it came to such arcane sexual practices as breath-play. It was, said the prime minister, ‘a desperate personal tragedy’, concluding that ‘he must have been pretty unhappy and pretty miserable’. That verdict drew instant criticism. Judge Tim Milligan, a cousin of the dead man, insisted: ‘Stephen was neither miserable nor unhappy. On the contrary, he was thoroughly fulfilled in his work at Westminster and his Eastleigh constituency.’

Gyles Brandreth, one of his closest friends in the Commons was equally unimpressed. ‘Stephen was gloriously happy,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He’d had another good week in parliament. He was looking forward to promotion. I imagine he went for his round of golf and came home and thought he’d play his little sex game as a weekend celebration – as a treat.’

It was left to Ian Jack, a former journalist colleague of Milligan, to point out a truth largely ignored – that, despite the regrets of unfulfilled potential and the embarrassment caused to the bereaved family and friends, none of this was of much consequence to the dead man himself: ‘Personally, I hope Stephen Milligan died a happy man. There seems every possibility that he did.’

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