The Book Of Matthew; He was a Tory MP, a parliamentary sketch writer,

AT the time arranged for our talk, Matthew Parris is stuck on a train, in a tunnel. There is a tube strike in London and when he comes on his mobile he sounds like a hostage in a terrorist hijack whispering details of his whereabouts to the SAS.

As the hours creep by he edges ever closer to his pied a terre in the East End, travelling, one imagines, by way of Queer Street, Grub Street and Lonely Street, eventually arriving at Narrow Street where he lives when in town.

Even once he gets there, however, he is not quite ready to talk. He will be soon, he promises, with the scarcely credible authority of a health minister offering free Viagra for everyone over the age of consent. "Can you give me half an hour?" His accent is creamy, pukka, friendly, ever so slightly nervy. He has to tidy up a piece for The Times then he must send it to the subs. He says "subs" as if it were a word from an alien tongue, as if he is familiar with the term but isn't quite sure what it means. When finally we do connect he is as remorseful as a schoolboy caught red-handed raiding the tuckshop.

He has been writing about "John and Edwina", both friends, both beleaguered. At first, he says, he was reluctant to tackle the subject, but then realised with his journalist's hat on that he had a duty. These days his first loyalty is no longer to the Conservative Party, which he served for seven underwhelming years as an MP, but to The Times, where he was parliamentary sketch writer for 13 years, and for whom he now writes a weekly column. So compulsive were his sketches, in which he mercilessly took the mickey out of his erstwhile colleagues, that at the age of 53 his public profile is higher than that of almost anyone in the shadow cabinet. Hence the opportunity to write his autobiography.

By way of a defence for foisting 500 pages on the reading public, he is, he insists, the "unparalleled authority" on one thing - his own life. In contrast, in consideration of the hot story of the day, he cannot claim to know either Currie or Major very well. Of the latter, he says: "John didn't have any close friends or confidants." In his Times piece, he is left, like so many others, to pose questions, the answers to which he can only speculate on: "Of Edwina we had heard whispers. But John and Edwina? If anyone else had claimed this I would not have believed it. Surely he saw the risk? She was risk made flesh."

Parris's autobiography is subtitled An Outsider's Life In Politics. He was never cut out to be a politician, he now realises, even though he had managed to find a seat in Derbyshire with a thumping Tory majority. After long days opening Mrs Thatcher's mail and jumping when the Whips cracked, he could see the future and it spelled failure. Having told his constituency selection committee that his ultimate aim was to be Home Secretary ("because Prime Minister would have sounded pretentious"), he had learned to scale down his ambitions. Visiting a parliamentary website, he found a synopsis of his Westminster career, from which emerged a picture of "a backbencher who lived and breathed bus deregulation, lorry weights and railway services, roads and public transport, the arrest of gay men for importuning and whirling disease in trout".

It was a sobering moment, not least, presumably, because there must be a limit to how passionate you can be about trout. But for Parris it proved epiphanic. So when an offer came from London Weekend Television to become Brian Walden's replacement on Weekend World, he paused only briefly before saying yes, though he had little time for television and he was badly in need of speech therapy and a change of wardrobe. The chapter in his autobiography dealing with his two years at Weekend World is called A Star Is Not Born, in which Parris sums up his experience of the box in one sad sentence: "Nigerian night- school students loved it." Having latterly spent a career "judging and occasionally mocking people", Parris is likewise adept when reviewing himself: "I observe myself very critically," he says.

But as he had hoped from the outset, appearing on television did what politics had failed to do: it made him marketable to the print media. With the demise of Weekend World imminent, he began to contribute more to newspapers, which brought him to attention of the editor of The Times, Charlie "Gorbals" Wilson, who asked him if he would like to become the paper's parliamentary sketchwriter. Among his first journalistic assignments, he recalls, was a Liberal Party conference. On the second day he listened to the debates but since there was none of interest he went back to his hotel. At seven o'clock, his deadline, he received a call from The Times's newsdesk enquiring after the whereabouts of his piece. "There wasn't anything worth writing about," said Parris. Patiently, it was explained to him that there was bound to be nothing worth writing about. After all, it was a Liberal conference. Nevertheless a piece was required every day, come what may. Thereafter he filed daily and never looked back.

Parris likes to portray himself, as he does his erstwhile colleagues, in a tone of gentle mockery. In return Norman Tebbit, whom he admires, once described him as "swivel-bottomed", which Parris thinks "fair enough". Throughout his autobiography, he plays Wooster to a variety of Jeeveses, whose job, it seems, is to stop him from making a complete ass of himself. They rarely succeed. Sometimes it works to his advantage (as on the occasion when he jumped into the Thames to save a dog, which he credits for getting him his seat in the Commons); at others it backfires and lands him in trouble. Once, he recalls, he replied to a letter on the prime minister's behalf, berating the correspondent for moaning about her council house, telling her she should think herself lucky to be living in subsidised accommodation. Come the next election the Labour Party printed three million leaflets featuring a facsimile of the front page from the Daily Mirror, which had been tipped off about the story. "Why, Matthew? Why? Why? Why?" asked Mrs Thatcher. "It was the question I had asked myself repeatedly," he reflects, "and still failed to get a sensible reply."

Writing the book, he says, forced him to confront many memories, the most painful of which was when, in Africa, he was forced to stand helplessly by while a friend was raped. The feeling of shame lingers still, though he knows he did not behave badly. "Yet I am unreconciled. My head says he was a big man with a knife, I could not run, Trish would not fight and I, though I would have tried, am a poor fighter I know the arguments. I've comforted myself with them so many times. But at the end of the arguments a simple sum keeps coming back. There was only one of him and there were two of us. A primitive truth also taunts me: I may only have been 18 but I was the man and Trish was the woman and she was in some ways my responsibility, and she was raped, and I was unhurt. I said to her afterwards I wish it had been me, and I meant it, and not in any stupid camp way."

That incident, so long past yet ever present, is an extreme example of Parris's soul-searching. Hyper-sensitive, he seems continually to be examining himself and putting himself in situations which are apt to land him in trouble. "I take risks," he says. "I'm always taking risks. I always believe that it will never happen to me." Yet it does, time and time again. "Only the future is certain," he says, "the past is always changing." That past includes a boyhood spent largely abroad, particularly in Africa where was born, Yale and Cambridge universities and the Foreign Office. Approached to become a spy, he applied instead for a job as a diesel fitter with London Transport, only to be rejected. It is a blank on his CV he shares with John Major, who had his heart set on becoming a bus conductor.

In a table-turning interview, Michael Portillo said that Parris's autobiography dwelt overly on sex. But Parris, while acknowledging he could not have written the same book 10 years ago, and that he has "an overdeveloped sense of my own dignity", is unapologetic. The man who famously outed Peter Mandelson on Newsnight to a mouth-dropping response from Jeremy Paxman is remarkably candid about his own adventures in the gay underworld where, as an MP, he was a disaster waiting to happen. Indeed, he was badly beaten while cruising on Clapham Common but the story never made it into the papers. "It was crazy. Why do we - why do they - do it? Why do MPs, JPs, DPPs, and VIPs of every type why do public figures, of all people, take such risks?" It is a question Parris has often asked himself.

The answer, he suggests, is a combination of the type of people selected to become MPs and the nature of the job. MPs desperately want to be liked and loved but too often find themselves lampooned and lonely, whitebait among whales in the enormous vat of fat that is Westminster. It was Parris's good fortune to escape before he was found out.

Would that others of his ilk were so brutally honest.

Chance Witness: An Outsider's Life In Politics is published by Viking ((pounds) 18.99)

MINI PROFILE:

Name: Matthew Francis Parris Born: August 7, 1949 Parris was elected as a Conservative MP for West Derbyshire in 1979 but since leaving parliament he has become a high-profile columnist for The Times (for which he wrote a parliamentary sketch until recently) and The Spectator.

Much of his childhood was spent overseas, instilling a passion for travel. After Cambridge and Yale he was a diplomat before becoming Margaret Thatcher's assistant - until she famously fired him.

Openly gay, he was sacked as a columnist on The Sun when he outed Peter Mandelson on Newsnight.

Copyright 2002
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