" I could have been a contender......"
I have been wearing out shoe-leather on behalf of the Conservative Party since the age of eleven. (Yes, I know..... Tory Boy.....I've heard it all before). At seventeen I was elected Hon. Secretary of the Coulsdon South Branch, and was told that I must
be the youngest branch officer in the country. Indeed, I was introduced as such to Margaret Thatcher at the 1975 Party Conference Young Conservatives' Ball; not that I was ever a YC myself, I hasten to add -- I wasn't looking for a wife and couldn't play table
tennis (apologies to Galton & Simpson).
I didn't wash my right hand for a week.......
By then I had been noticed by, and taken under the wing of, Croydon South's then MP, Sir William (later Lord) Clark, and given every advantage......which I duly squandered. Such is youth. In my fifty-five
years on this benighted speck of dust, few people have shown me greater kindness than he and his wife, Lady Irene. It was from that kindness that this anecdote arose.
Realizing
that I was at a loose end on the Wednesday evening of that Blackpool Conference, he invited me to a private dinner that he was hosting at the Imperial Hotel. (I was staying at a grotty B&B, farther along the seafront, sharing a room with our Agent, who
snored all night). Of the eight others present, the only one, apart from William and Irene, whom I can remember by name (forgive me -- it was thirty-eight years ago) was Maurice Macmillan.
Naturally, I was keen to contribute to the conversation. When it turned to the Tory Reform Group, to which I knew that William was not sympathetic, I seized my chance. "Isn't it funny how the
word "reform" has become a euphemism for moving to the left", I piped up, no doubt thinking this a profound and insightful observation.
Little
did I know that the gentleman seated two places from me was the Chairman of the Tory Reform Group.
Sir William chortled (he was an inveterate chortler,
was Willie Clark) and Lady Irene giggled, but to judge by the expressions on the other diners' faces, I had just cast myself as the central character in an H.M. Bateman cartoon.
"The
man who........"
15/8/2013