Pushing through the ruck in the Members’ lobby on the way to a vote, I heard a richly fruity voice, that sounded as though it had been marinated in claret, boom out: “Just time for one more vote against this ghastly Government and then I want a fucking good dinner.” I turned to my companion and just as I said: “Bloody Nicholas Soames”, he said: “Bloody Marshall-Andrews” – as the voices (and attitudes) were all but indistinguishable.
Herein lies the source of the great problem of definition that applies in the case of the first person since Admiral van Tromp to use the Medway as a route towards the destruction of Westminster.
Bob may have been defined by serial rebellion, but he first impressed the class of 1997 as the star of the all-night sittings when he held court on the House of Commons terrace dispensing champagne and scandalous anecdotes with great generosity in both cases.He had not, at that stage, refined his rebellions into the stiletto they later became and it almost appeared as though he voted against the government on a point of principle. That he infuriated many cannot be denied, but he was – and is – a true original. And many of my colleagues are grateful for this singularity.
Bob was known to some of us as a former top rocker from the Ace Cafe and he had even, it was whispered in Neasden, been born on the North Circular. He once raced a Triton and that alone gave him some credibility among us north-west Londoners. His career in the House of Commons is accurately reflected in Off Message which has the implicit sub-title “How I saved the world from that shower of Blairites and did my bit to deliver Labour to the undiluted purity of opposition.”
The book, and Bob, start cheerfully and with many a merry anecdote.Tommy McAvoy emerges in a better light than Bob intended, as it must have been hell indeed to have been the pairing whip when Marshall-Andrews was on the prowl and there was fun to be had at the Hong Kong Bar. Bob had seized on an impromptu jest by Tony Blair and formed a cave of Adullamites known as the Old Testament Prophets. As I recall, I was Ezra and one of our colleagues was always described as “Ruth – statutory female”.
Most of us elected in 1997 had never heard of dining clubs or were even vaguely aware of such a tradition. For Bob, however, this was how you got through the day.Although he describes himself in this book as a “working-class Irish” man, he seems to have done so in much the same way as Eva Peron began her speeches by crying out “We, the shirtless ones”, or, as Harold Macmillan would say: “As one crofter to another…”
The OTP were a hard core of serial rebels who lunched but the political wing also featured serious socialists who considered posh lunches as one form of class struggle too far. We also embraced those who were cursed by an instinctive and inconvenient loyalty but who were wholly disrespectful of the nonsense attendant on the smooth passage of the great ship of state. If Rowan Pelling was our most popular guest and Simon Hoggart the most regular, we really were satellites around the occasionally malign but often mirthful Marshall-A.
The inside cover endpaper has a sketch of the OTP in November 2004 and if one can look away from the chain-smoking, heavily tattooed and massively hootered thug (Labour, Ealing North) in the centre you will see a pretty good cross section of the lighter hearted rebel ranks.OTP lunches were much like the first chapters of Bob’s book – discursive, gossipy, slightly smug but never dull. The lunches all but disappeared when things got serious and Bob elected to become the standard bearer of civil liberty. If the first nine chapters are as good to listen to as to read – and their tone is set by chapter descriptions in the style of Henry Fielding – then the next 11 stand as a book in their own right. Indeed, many of us thought Bob could never actually decide what he wanted to be so this book matches that indecision and veers from excellent war stories to an increasingly angry defence of liberty in the company of some strange companions, and David Davis.
The latter chapters become rather obsessive and, while the matters are of great moment, there is an element of the good-natured conceit of Kenneth Grahame’s Toad in the oft-repeated revelations of the centrality of BM-A in the great war on the war on terror. He gives credit to Helena Kennedy, George Galloway and Barbara Follett and, of course, his oppo from Haltemprice and Howden (Davis), and few of us who were there would argue overlong about this. His selection of Brian Sedgemore as one of the great orators of the Blair era is not one that would have automatically suggested itself to many but the author writes as he sees and hears.
Bob is a fine writer and he was one of the pre-eminent characters of the Parliaments between 1997 and 2010, but he always seemed too fond of the vain ardour of the Tory crowd for some of our tastes, and if his amazing performance for the Macmillan nurses’ fundraiser, in which he became the judge summing up in the case of Dome (also known as Millennium) was comic genius, delivered faultlessly and with brilliance, those who loved it most were all High Tories and the targets of the satire were not.There are (at least) two good books here. One a memoir of a pretty extraordinary time in British politics and the other a history of the impact of terrorism on legislation after September 11 and the manifest failings of proponents and opponents alike. He may need a better proof reader, as it will come as a considerable shock to the admirers of Jorge Luis Borges that it was Madeleine Albright who referred to the Falklands conflict as “two bald men fighting over a comb”.
He quotes Roy Hattersley’s book Who Goes Home? and, just as he thought of Marlowe as the Twin Towers burned, so I cannot help remembering the words of a great 20th century thinker whose poem Who Goes Home? ends: “And a voice valedictory… Who is for Victory? Who is for Liberty? Who goes home?” I think Bob was always for liberty and it saddens me that he has now gone to one of his many homes – sure to return though he is.
