Parliamentary Gossip From Guido Fawkes... In The House 50 Years Ago
5 min read
Gossip has always been a key element of parliamentary life. Alan White looks through the archives at how the early magazine covered it
Any historian worth their salt knows that if you really want to understand British political history, you can’t simply research the words spoken in the Chamber or the documents that track the evolution of policy. Politics is an activity undertaken by people, and by people who gossip a lot.
Long before the popular right-wing blog of the same name, a different Guido Fawkes was supplying parliamentarians with their weekly quota of tittle-tattle. This Guido made his debut in the first issue of The House as its diarist, and there is no more joyous a way to step inside the Parliament of 50 years ago than to read his old columns.
After the 1979 election, Guido dedicated a few lines of his diary to describe himself to the new intake: “He is above politics, or beneath it, depending on who is venturing an opinion. In matters gastronomic he is a High Tory, is Liberal in dispensing Malmsey, and Socialist in his delight in the brotherhood of man in local hostelries. He usually can be found around Annie’s Bar, or close to the Horn of Snuff in the Press Gallery, which performs the dual function of being a receptacle of the drug and a most valuable support for aged and infirm journalists.”
Fawkes was fond of his fellow scribes, though like all good hacks was wont to take great pleasure in their screw-ups and keen to offer sympathies to editors: “The correction which appears in the current edition of that valuable little reference book, Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, is something of a collectors’ item. It reads ‘Reference to Lord Gibson on page 122. For National Front read National Trust.’”
And for all his mirth-making, he did not hold the politicians around him in low regard either. He describes being on TV with Warren Mitchell, who when out of character (House readers of a certain vintage will remember his comic creation, the West Ham fan Alf Garnett) proceeded to moan about how they only care for themselves. “It was more than Old Fawkes could endure, so he reminded the tiresome thespian that actors hold award ceremonies which are revolting in their sycophancy.”
Indeed, he was always quick to give kudos to moments of wit from the parliamentarians. One of his favourite stories (so good he actually ended up telling it twice, perhaps due to a slow gossip week) involved shadow Scotland secretary Teddy Taylor at a televised hustings, where the subject under discussion was censorship. Taylor was being heckled by a noisy group on this issue, while another individual in the crowd was shouting at him regarding his position on Rhodesia.
Fawkes described how he asked the censorship group whether they’d be happy for him to tell the man to be quiet. They assented. “‘Now you shut up’, said Master Teddy to the heckler, ‘and, as for the rest of you, you are in favour of censorship now and we’re only haggling about what we intend banning.’”
His happy place was clearly in the friction between the media and those they cover; he recorded with much joy how William Rees-Mogg’s Times had printed an attendance record of Members (time is something of a flat circle, you might conclude), prompting “the enterprising rascals in the Scottish National Party” to do the same thing to the press gallery “with dire results”.
The faltering workings of the Palace also provided a rich seam of material. In 1977, the lift to the press gallery broke down, which prompted a booze shortage, and a heart-rending ballad from Fawkes:
I know not whether unions be right
Or whether they tell a lie
I only know the liftmen stay out
And the gallery is very high
And 107 steps lead to the top
Where the bar has run quite dry
And every seat along its walls
Is lined with folk in pain
And Fawkes the Scribe looks in the Bar
Where men their brothers maim
He was even more horrified by the “new space age digital clocks which now loom over the Commons Chamber… What next! Will the Serjeant’s rapier be replaced by a laser-beam lamp?”
Fawkes’ bond with his readers clearly developed over the years, to the point where he was even sharing his romantic misfortunes. On one occasion, he was asked to conduct a beautiful Swedish woman around the House, a “task close to the aged villain’s heart”. She asked to be introduced to an MP and Fawkes, keen to avoid such “dashing plungers as Master Andrew Faults, Master Hugh Dykes, or worst of all the Foreign Secretary”, alighted on David James MP.
“Disaster. The unassuming Tory stood up and addressed her in faultless Swedish. She began to enquire about his Scandinavian experiences and soon he was, modestly, explaining that he had sailed around Cape Horn in a windjammer from a Finnish port with a Swedish crew... And yes, he knew Stockholm for he had been smuggled into the port when he ‘scaped from a prisoner of war camp.”
So, the question is: who was he? Well, The House can reveal, exclusively, that Guy Fawkes was in fact the pen name of the left-wing journalist Hugh Macpherson, who was the political editor of Tribune and, somewhat unexpectedly (a shame we don’t see more of this these days: look what the culture wars have taken from us), also wrote regularly for The Spectator.
Macpherson plied his trade in the days when writers’ bylines were unlikely to be preserved forever by the internet, but we do find mention of him in a Tribune piece about how the Labour left would frequently meet in the Gay Hussar, Soho, where he once castigated Mo Mowlam with such enthusiasm over Tony Blair’s policies that she “put her napkin over her head”. A proper hack, it feels safe to say.
