The first signs of real trouble are brewing for the Government on the back benches. It is always when the weather warms up, towards the end of the parliamentary year, that political life gets more heated and the portents all point to an imminent spot of summer turbulence.
As has been well advertised, most new Labour MPs - and quite a lot of the old ones as well - have proved extraordinarily docile in the course of the past year. This is with the shining exception of Bob Marshall-Andrews, the new Member for Medway.
He has already been distinguished as a recipient of The Spectator magazine's ''Member to Watch'' award for his readiness to speak his mind. That was months ago. He has now earned it.
In an article in the new issue of the political magazine, Manifesto, he has contributed a searing essay on the need for MPs to rediscover their consciences and stop behaving as mindless auto-matons. He does not mince his words, but castigates the much-vaunted ''Third Way'' that new Labour has lately been advertising as the latest big idea.
In this respect, Marshall-Andrews demonstrates an understanding beyond that of many others, as the main complaint to date about the Third Way is that nobody really understands what it is.
But what his article amounts to is an analysis of the danger he sees that the Third Way represents for parliamentary democracy. He suggests that it represents a brutal decline from the historical and constitutional precepts of parliamentary government. It is dramatic stuff. Mr M-A may expect an early call from members of the Thought Police.
It appears that the former Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, may perhaps have misjudged the marketing of his new novel Shape of Ice. The
come-on for the launch party next week contains an outline of the plot and adds: ''And there's even a bit of steamy sex, too!'' Tory MP Sir Teddy Taylor, high-minded Glaswegian that he is, told me that he had sent the invitation back. I've never been able to look at Mr Hurd in quite the same way since his last novel, which also had its explicit aspects. At the time, he had a co-author and it used to be suggested that it was he who was responsible for the sex scenes. That is now effectively disproved. Douglas Hurd wrote this book entirely on his own. (Or perhaps with a little help from Mrs Hurd?)
To Simpson's in The Strand for a literary lunch given by The Oldie magazine, for which I occasionally pen a
paragraph. This is a lunch for which subscribers buy tickets in order to rubber-neck at a few celebs and listen to one or two short speeches from writers. It was a first for me and the major disappointment was that the audience was markedly
middle-aged, exhibiting precious few zimmer frames. There was almost a first - and a last - for The Oldie, however. In the
middle of the meal, Richard Ingrams, the editor, had to ask if there was a doctor present. He was needed to attend upon the 84-year-old mouth-organist and humour-ist, Larry Adler, who was apparently in a state of near collapse. But nothing stops Adler from telling his terrible jokes.
He was tenderly helped out of the dining room - but at the end of the meal there he was, back again, regaling his audience with dirty stories. My host, a friend who runs an art gallery but was once also a GP, stuck firmly in his seat when Ingrams made his appeal.
''Hey, you're a doctor!'' I hissed at him, in case he had forgotten. ''I always wait to see if someone else gets up first,'' he said. He's a sage, too.
The obituaries of the former Tory MP, Dr Sir Alan Glyn, who died this week, did not do him justice. He was a lawyer, as well as a doctor and a politician - ''on which subject would you rather seek his advice?'' people used to ask - but he was an example of the dangers of MPs staying in office for too long. He used to share a room with a number of other MPs in the Cloisters and slept every afternoon on a chaise longue there - so soundly that sometimes they wondered whether he would ever wake. They drew straws as to who would give him the kiss of life, if required. In an ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of a seat in the House of Lords, he resolutely refused to give up his safe seat in Windsor, despite all entreaties.
I still treasure the memory of one day in Blackpool when a gale was blowing and the wild seas were crashing over the promenade. The former Conservative Minister Gerry Malone was, as ever, seeking a seat. ''Do you think Sir Alan
Glyn would take it amiss,'' he
said, gazing out at this scene, ''if
I offered to lend him my
bathing trunks? ''
Things that one never expected to happen department: in Brussels, in pursuit, among other things, of more information on why tomatoes have to be individually numbered these days, I had the privilege of an interview with the Commissioner for Transport, Neil Kinnock. He introduced me to his chef - and, no, it wasn't his chef de cabinet and it wasn't Glenys either. How unlike, how very unlike, the home life of our old dear Labour Party.
And news from the front doorstep during the canvassing that preceded our local elections last week. One Conservative faithful reported that she had been invited into one house when she sought their support, only then to be almost savaged by the dog. ''Down Tebbit!'' commanded the owner of the house (and dog). ''This is Tebbit,'' he went on introducing the creature with slavering jaws. ''That's Thatcher over there. And we used to have Portillo, too, but he died.'' Is there some sort of political moral here perhaps?
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