Edwina Edwina Currie is very much an acquired taste and I am very happy that I acquired it in 1983 when we were both first elected to Parliament. Sassy, saucy, fiendishly bright, burning with drive and ambition, yet with a heart, she was head and shoulders above most of her male contemporaries and they hated her for it. People forget just how far Cameron has detoxified the Conservative party. Women, gays (only tolerated in the research department), blacks and Asians had a very steep if not impossible mountain to climb just to get on the candidates list, let alone have a chance of obtaining a winnable seat. Currie tells one tale that should shock any reader to the core:
‘Worse was the appalling story told by Geeta Sidhu, a wealthy and beautiful Indian recently selected for Blackburn...But when CCO heard she was pregnant, officials spent over four hours with her, she said, trying to persuade her to have an abortion.’
Edwina's second volume of diaries (1992-1997) are required reading for anyone wishing to sit in the Commons. The book is a candid warning to the bright and the able, to those who have actually done something with their lives, that being an MP does not guarantee a magic carpet ride of red boxes and mid-range family saloons. It reveals the sad little truth about Westminster life: it can be dreary, routine, unfulfilling and lonely. No wonder there are so many bitter men and women who skulk on the backbenches, horribly disfigured by failure and determined for revenge. Perhaps Louise Mensch saw the writing on the wall.
The real sadness in this book is Edwina’s yearning for John Major. I had the impression that everything was viewed through the prism of their doomed relationship - a relationship, that as friends of them both, I sincerely wish we had never been told about. In many ways this is a book about her loneliness. Her marriage to Ray had broken down and she learned some really shocking news from her brother when having a birthday lunch at the River Café:
‘It transpired that when I left home to get engaged my father held a funeral service for me. He actually sat a shiva, as if I was dead.......wicked man, wicked religion.’
There are lighter moments. I particularly love the wickedly waspish character assassinations. On Virginia Bottomley:
‘It's such a pity that I can't stand her, or to be more kindly or accurate, can't warm to her at all. She has developed a style of trying to talk to everyone in the voting lobby, offering a kind word from on high here and there, which I find insufferably patronising: and yet she never meet's one's eye.’
And Norman Lamont:
‘He is such an arrogant man, so offhand, so unpleasant, with little sly eyes and a small wet mobile mouth like a predatory but lazy fish. His whole manner seems so self-indulgent. How could a fat jowly man like that understand people who are having to pull in their belts?’
On John Gummer and Ann Widdecombe resigning from the Church of England Synod over the ordination of women priests:
‘Grotty people, misogynists all. May they all wake up and find themselves in bed with a black monk: though that might do both some good.’
Currie took this sense of mischief into the Chamber with her:
‘I sat behind Cash (Bill) and Taylor (Teddy), wearing brightly coloured outfits and muttered into their microphones, which is very off putting, or laughed at them or interjected 'poppycock' and the like; and pulled faces including at one dramatic point when Taylor was calling the wrath of heaven on all and sundry, doing my witch's hex act right behind him to the delight of all TV watchers.’
Her account of this civil war over Europe, which destroyed the Conservative Party and the Major government, is particularly interesting. It turns the diaries from being a graphic and sometimes moving account of the frustrations of Westminster life into an object lesson in how an obsession with the EU will destroy a government:
‘Suddenly I am really scared. If we get hammered and say [lose] 200 MPs after the election (1997); if the party goes nastily right wing, so we lose the middle ground; if this infiltration is a fact, then the Conservative Party could fall apart. .... It's our party; we mustn't let this gang take over. And if they do someday sooner or later a bunch of sensible Tories will meet and seize the party back, restore it to its rightful electoral position ( i.e. electable) and enable it to choose candidates of a more suitable tendency. In particular more women. If you care about the Party, if you care about your country, you have to be ready. But I fear it could take a long, long time.'
These words, written on the 19th June 1996, proved to be prophetic. And until some sections of the Conservative Party begin to appreciate the significance of them they will be just as relevant in 2015.
‘Worse was the appalling story told by Geeta Sidhu, a wealthy and beautiful Indian recently selected for Blackburn...But when CCO heard she was pregnant, officials spent over four hours with her, she said, trying to persuade her to have an abortion.’
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