and an invitation to give an after-dinner speech in Sydney next September. Do they know something I don’t?
8.00 pm
An officer drops in from his night rounds for a coffee. He tells me an alarming story about an event that took place at his last prison.
It’s universally accepted among prisoners that if one particular officer has got it in for you, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can go through the complaints procedure, but even if you’re in the right, officers will always back each other up if a colleague is in trouble. I could fill a book with such instances. I have experienced this myself at such a petty level that I have not considered the incident worth recording. On that occasion, the governor personally apologized, but still advised me not to put in a complaint.
However, back to a prisoner from the north block who did have the temerity to put in a written complaint about a particular officer. On this occasion, I can only agree with the prisoner that the officer concerned is a bully. Nevertheless, after a lengthy enquiry (everything in prison is lengthy) the officer was cleared of any misdemeanour, but that didn’t stop him seeking revenge.
The inmate in question was serving a five-year sentence, and at the time he entered prison was having an affair that his wife didn’t know about, and to add to the complication, the affair was with another man. The prisoner would have a visit from one of them each fortnight, while writing to both of them during the week. The rule in closed prisons is that you leave your letters unsealed in the unit office, so they can be read by the duty officer to check if you’re still involved in any criminal activity, or asking for drugs to be sent in. When the prisoner left his two letters in the unit office, the officer on duty was the same man he had made a complaint about to the governor. The officer read both the love letters, and yes, you’ve guessed it, switched them and sealed the envelopes and with it, the fate of the prisoner.
How do I know this to be true? Because the officer involved has just told me, and is happy to tell anyone he considers a threat.
DAY 189 WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2002
9.00 am
Mary is on
12.15 pm
I call Mary. She’s off to lunch with Ken Howard RA and other artistic luminaries.
2.00 pm
My visitors today are Michael Portillo and Alan Jones (Australia’s John Humphreys). I must first make my position clear on Michael’s leadership bid. I would have wanted him to follow John Major as leader of the party. I would also have voted for him to follow William Hague, though I would have been torn if Malcolm Rifkind had won back his Edinburgh seat.
It is a robust visit, and it serves to remind me how much I miss the cut and thrust of Westminster, stuck as I am in the coldest and most remote corner of Lincolnshire. Michael tells us about one or two changes he would have made had he been elected leader. We need our own ‘Clause 4’ he suggests, which Tony Blair so brilliantly turned into an important issue, despite it being of no real significance. Michael also feels that the party’s parliamentary candidates should be selected from the centre, taking power away from the constituencies. It also worries him how few women and member of minority groups end up on the Conservative benches. He points out that at the last election, the party only added one new woman to its ranks, at a time when the Labour party have over fifty.
‘Not much of an advertisement for the new, all-inclusive, modern party,’ he adds.
‘But how would you have handled the European issue?’ ask Alan.
Michael is about to reply when that red-hot socialist (local Labour councillor) Officer Hart tells us that our time is up.
Politics is not so overburdened with talent that the Conservatives can survive without Portillo, Rifkind, Hague, Clarke and Redwood, all playing important roles, especially while we’re in opposition.
When the two men left I was buzzing. An hour later I wanted to abscond.
5.00 pm
I call Mary. She has just left the chambers of Julian Malins QC, and is going to dinner with Leo Rothschild.
DAY 191 FRIDAY 25 JANUARY 2002
8.15 am
I’m called out of breakfast over the tannoy and instructed to return to the hospital immediately. Five new prisoners came in last night after Gail had gone home. She needs all the preliminaries carried out (heart rate, weight, height) before Dr Walling arrives at nine. One of the new intake announces with considerable pride that although this is his fifth offence, it’s his first visit to NSC.
10.30 am
Once surgery is over, Dr Walling joins me for a coffee on the ward. ‘One of them was a nightmare,’ he says, as if I wasn’t ‘one of them’. He doesn’t tell me which of the twenty patients he was referring to, and I don’t enquire. However, his next sentence did take me by surprise. ‘I needed to take a blood sample and couldn’t find a vein in his arms or legs, so I ended up injecting his penis. He’s not even half your age, Jeffrey, but you’ll outlive him.’
2.00 pm
The new vacuum cleaner has arrived. This is a big event in my life.
4.00 pm
I call Mary at Grantchester. She has several pieces of news; Brian Mawhinney has received a reply to his letter to Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, asking why I lost my D-cat and was sent to Wayland. A report on the circumstances surrounding that decision has been requested, and will be forwarded to Brian as soon as the commissioner receives it.
Mary’s next piece of news is devastating.
Back in 1999, Julian Mallins had kindly sent a note he had retained in his files (see overleaf), sent to him by Geoffrey Shaw, junior to Michael Hill for the defence in the libel trial. In the note, Shaw asks Julian for my two diaries for 1986 (an A4 diary and an Economist diary) ‘in case Michael asks to look at them’. Julian passed the diaries to Shaw and Hill for inspection, and told Mary he is pretty sure that they would have gone through them thoroughly – and clearly found nothing worthy of comment in them, since they were not an issue in the libel trial. Julian added that it would be ‘absolute rubbish’ to suggest that the Star’s lawyers could not have examined these two diaries (which Angela Peppiatt had claimed in the criminal trial were almost entirely blank) in court for other entries.
Later Julian wrote to Mary: ‘English law in 1986 was not an ass. If it had been Michael Hill’s suggestion that the alibi evidence was all true, except for the date, neither Lord Archer in the witness box nor the judge, still less Lord Alexander nor I, could have objected to Michael Hill going through the rest of the diary to find the same dinner date with the same companion at the same restaurant but on another date.’
None of us had known anything of Peppiatt’s pocket diary for 1986, in which she noted both her own and my engagements, kept as her own property for over ten years, but produced in court as my ‘true’ diary for that year.
Mary also tells me that she has written to Godfrey Barker about his earlier reference to dining with Mr Justice Potts some time before the trial, when the judge might have made disparaging remarks about me. She now fears Godfrey will disappear the moment the date of the appeal is announced.
DAY 192 SATURDAY 26 JANUARY 2002
