The Downing Street telephone operator was, as always, exquisitely polite: “Mr. O’Sullivan, may I ask if you are expecting a Mr. Hart?”
“No, I don’t think so. Doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid. Oh, hang on. Would that be one David Hart? It would. Oh, my goodness, is he actually here, I mean, in the building?”
“Yes, he is. He’s in the front hall in fact, and he says he’s here to discuss a speech for the Prime Minister with you.”
“Then I suppose I’m expecting him.”
Down in the hall, David Hart squirmed impatiently in an armchair with the detectives lurking nearby just to make sure. On that occasion he wasn’t wearing what Ferdy Mount in his wonderful memoir, “Cold Cream,” claims was the fashion he pioneered: namely a three-piece pinstripe suit worn with tennis shoes. Even conventionally clad, however, David made a vibrant and sometimes a clashing impression. He always came on blazing.
So it seemed odd to me that he was slightly furtive this time. He jumped up, pumped my hand, muttered something about coming “as quickly as he could” in a conspiratorial manner, and more or less escorted me forcibly to the lift. Once inside he explained that “they are trying to stop me seeing the PM, you know. Good of you to help me get through.”
This alarmed me more than somewhat. But I knew what he meant. “They” were the bureaucrats, the civil servants, the private office, and all the conventionally-minded people who stood in the way of the radical Thatcherite changes that David could help the PM to bring about. “They” had banned him from Downing Street, he confided, because he was able to supply the PM with the evidence to justify greater boldness. “They” were the grey consensus that had held Britain back for generations.
Ferdy describes one such intrusion: “He claimed to have a squad of West Indians on roller skates whom at a moment’s notice he could dispatch all over London to find out what the word on the street was. When the word on the street was relayed back to us from these Chester Street Irregulars, it often appeared to be indistinguishable from the views of the average Home Counties Tory, though dressed up in the patois: ‘Hey, man, we don’t dig those crazy taxes.’ ”
Perhaps Ferdy is imagining a reductio ad absurdum of the Hart method here; but perhaps not. Some of the things David reported about the world and his own activities were distinctly improbable. And some of the most improbable reports turned out to be true.
That improbability was one of the reasons that the Prime Minister liked David (as Ferdy concedes through gritted teeth.) She was nervous of being confined within an official bubble or a narrow circle of conventional opinion. She wanted news and comment from outside. Her famous question “Is he one of us?” sounds like an appeal for orthodox company. But Mrs. Thatcher liked people who, like herself, were combative, argumentative, and unorthodox. (There were always plenty of the other kind to hand.) So she welcomed the arrival of oddballs, eccentrics, and brilliant outsiders such as Alfred Sherman and David. She also insisted on checking their facts and logic; these did not always prove false or invalid.
Was David really an outsider, though? By some fairly orthodox tests, he was anything but: an old Etonian, the son of a merchant banker, a property developer, the owner (and restorer) of a fine country house who when in town lived in a suite at Claridges. But these tests omit the more crucial matter of personality. There was something wonderfully raffish about David. If Harold Macmillan was correct in dividing politicians into bishops and bookies, he was definitely a bookie. Photographs show him with the pencil moustache, slicked-back hair, and pin-striped suits of the traditional cad or lounge lizard. He looks the very antithesis of the discreet men of the respectable tendency who wanted to keep him out. But these photographs don’t tell the full truth either. In person he could turn on the grand manner at will. He was bold, energetic, lively, opinionated, decisive, and possessed of boundless self-confidence—someone who would make no concessions to get in but who would not be kept out either.
And he got into some remarkable places. My first meeting with him took place in Washington at the start of the Reagan administration. (A mutual friend introduced us.) He seemed to have an entry permit to the highest levels of the new administration. A few years afterwards he arranged for me to have a private lunch, one on one, with the Director of the CIA. Back in London in the mid-eighties he invited me to drinks with the editor of the Times who, on David’s recommendation, offered me a job. His dinner table and weekend parties were crowded with celebrities from every walk of life—Michael Portillo, Eric Clapton, Vladimir Bukovsky, Malcolm Rifkind, Richard Perle, Charles Douglas-Home—who seemed to be on intimate terms with him. David was trading quite successfully in the politics of influence, but for ideological rather than commercial motives. Inevitably, David’s influence declined as the Thatcher decade gave way to the Blair years and even his list of contacts grew old.
Influence is always an elusive substance, liable to scatter like mercury when you seek to grasp and use it. It is hard to estimate what David’s energetic politicking achieved over the years (quite a lot, I would guess) except in one case—the miners’ strike. On that occasion David financed and helped organize the Nottinghamshire working miners into an independent democratic union that represented their own interests and desire to work. That alone did not ensure the government’s victory—Nigel Lawson’s building up of the coal stocks, for instance, also contributed mightily to it. But it undercut the Scargillite attempt to engineer a national strike both practically and morally. Coal kept being produced and ordinary miners defied an undemocratic union leadership. If David had done nothing else, that bold intervention would elevate him to any conservative pantheon.
David died last week; his funeral was held yesterday in the Anglican church of St. Giles in Great Maplestead. He was the son of a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. Anglicanism may well have struck him as the sensible via media between two jealous faiths. But he always seemed to me to belong to a different “faith tradition” entirely. He was a believer in—and an (occasionally inconsistent) practitioner of—the pagan and warrior virtues: courage, loyalty, honour, standing by your word, defending your friends, caring for your dependants, and enjoying the “best revenge” on your enemies by living well and even lavishly. His personal life was famously “complex,” seemingly an expression of this pagan ethic. Surrounded by wife, ex-wife, former mistresses and girl-friends, and his various children on festive occasions, David could seem like a polygamous Pasha—and he rather liked to give this impression. But the truth was less exotic. He had one companion at a time and not too many over the years. Where he differed from most of us was that he sought hard to retain the affection of those he had loved and he succeeded to an astonishing extent.
That network of extended affection represented the truer David Hart than the almost insanely morally self-sufficient heroism celebrated in his novels and plays (and sometimes conversation.) Both the affection and the heroism were to be tested harshly but to emerge vindicated late in his life.
Some years ago he was diagnosed with an extraordinarily rare disease—only a handful of people in Britain have it—that was to deprive him of all muscular control and eventually to kill him. As his body betrayed him by degrees, his family and friends rallied around him to replace his own faculties with their help. When he could do little more than blink, his wife or a former girl-friend would sit next to him pointing to letters in the alphabet for him to signify assent. His helpers became so skilled and rapid at this task that in the midst of his physical isolation David was able to maintain something like a real conversation. He entertained old friends such as the redoubtable Simon Hetter to dinner and weekends until very late in the day. To the end he maintained a zest for life and a desire to go on living. Neither courage nor love failed him in this world’s final test.
Now he enters the undiscovered country. Getting into Heaven, I suppose, may prove even more difficult than getting into Downing Street. But I wouldn’t bet against him.
