200 years of free speech - and fun

Last night, the Oxford Union - the University of Oxford’s student debating society - celebrated its two hundredth birthday with a bicentenary dinner in Oxford Town Hall. It was a very happy occasion, beautifully organised and orchestrated by James Price (a former President of the Union) and a brilliant committee of other ex-Presidents and former officers of the Society. Michael Heseltine (President way back in 1954) spoke; Victoria Schofield (1977) spoke; Disha Hegde (the current President) spoke; I said a few words. The Archbishop of Birmingham (Treasurer, 1977) said Grace and the current President, two former Presidents and two former Prime Ministers (one of the UK and one of Australia: Theresa May and Tony Abbott) proposed the toasts. We had fun. It was good to be back, meeting up with friends and contemporaries, talking of old times, making new friends, saluting what the Union had done for us - and recognising the importance of the Union as a bastion of free speech.

If you don’t know the story of the Union and fancy knowing more, check out Wikipedia or get hold of the very handsome booklet illustrating the story of the Union across two centuries that was distributed to the guests last night. I contributed some recollections of my time at the Union. Here they are:

When I arrived at Oxford (Michaelmas Term, 1967), getting involved in the Union was my number one priority simply because the Union loomed so large in my father’s recollections of the Oxford he had known as an undergraduate back in the 1920s.

In my dad’s day, the Union was already a hundred years old and celebrated then because the heroes of my father’s generation – giants like Gladstone, Lord Curzon and F E Smith – had once been Union officers. The Union was still famous in my time because more recent politicians – from Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath on the right to Tony Benn and Michael Foot on left, with the likes of Roy Jenkins and Jeremy Thorpe in between – had all first made their mark at the Union. And these political luminaries came back, too, to speak at the Union, to have dinner with us beforehand and drinks in the Union bar afterwards.

As a Union officer – Secretary, Librarian and, eventually, President – I was lucky enough to meet these notable politicos and was regularly surprised that I was charmed most by the ones I expected to like least. Tony Benn, for example, became a friend and a mentor. His politics weren’t mine, but I was captivated by his decency and humanity. And energy. As Union Secretary, one of my duties was to collect guests from Oxford Station. Mr Wedgwood Benn (in the late sixties we were a generation away from ‘Call me Tony’) was Minister for Technology and spent our taxi ride talking at breakneck speed about the aerospace industry. I didn’t understand any of it, but I was bowled over by his enthusiasm.

Jeremy Thorpe, on the other hand . . . When we first met, in the Union debating chamber, he leapt over one bench and then another, as he bounded towards me. He greeted me as though I was the most important and exciting person he had ever set eyes on. But he had a foxy look and a glint in his eye. This was ten years before his fall from grace and his trial at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder. At the end of the evening, although flattered by his attention, I noted in my diary: ‘I didn’t entirely trust him; and he didn’t entirely trust me.’

My immediate contemporaries at the Union included four future Conservative government ministers (Robert Jackson, William Waldegrave, Ann Widdecombe, Edwina Currie) as well as Stephen Milligan who expected to be Foreign Secretary by around 2010 when I expected to be Home Secretary. In different ways, it didn’t quite work out for either of us.

I was a Conservative at Oxford, but I don’t think I took my politics very seriously. When I stood for office, I didn’t do so on a particular political ticket – and I never organised any sort of ‘campaign’. I just tried to make memorable and (what I thought were) amusing speeches and hoped for the best. I also tried to get ‘noticed’ – standing on my head on the despatch box, cooking up stories about myself to appear in Isis or Cherwell – so that when polling day came along people might recognise my name. Chris Hitchens (who I always picture in a combat jacket with bloodshot eyes) was a Union friend who did take his politics seriously. So was Tariq Ali, who was a bit older than us and viewed as a proper revolutionary. I remember Tariq and I had tea together at the Union shortly after he had joined the International Marxist Group in 1968 and I thought, ‘He can’t be that bad – he’s ordered tea and anchovy toast.’

How I loved tea and anchovy toast as they served it in the Union! I loved the Union’s High Victorian buildings, the oak panelling, the leather sofas, the high-ceilinged rooms, especially the galleried library, with its murals by Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. One night when I was Secretary I was charged with looking after one of the Union’s more challenging guests: Dominic Behan, Irish song-writer and Republican, younger brother of the more-famous-Brendan and son (so he told me) of one of the leading IRA men responsible for killing any number of British soldiers during the Irish ‘war of independence’.

When I met up with Dominic he was already wild with drink and impossible to control. He ranted, he rambled, he lurched around the President’s office, alternately breaking into song and demanding more drink. He asked me to show him where the lavatories were. I said I’d take him down to them. He stumbled down the stairs and – on the landing – proceeded to undo his flies and produce his member for me to admire. ‘I’m bursting!’ he declared and then turning towards the wall he walked quite sedately down the corridor peeing profusely against the wall as he went.

‘Don’t!’ I bleated, ‘That’s William Morris wallpaper! It’s original!’

‘Fuck William Morris!’ he cried, warming to his task and spraying the precious wall with ever greater gusto.

‘He was a Socialist like you!’ I called out desperately.

‘Fuck Socialism!’ he declared, turning to me triumphantly and shaking the final drips in my direction.

It was another Irishman of note who gave me my ‘break-out’ moment at the Union: the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley, Protestant firebrand and founding member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. In my first term, I was invited to give the last speech of the night, ‘telling for the Noes’, in a debate on the motion ‘that the Roman Catholic Church has no place in the twentieth century’ – with Paisley proposing and the Catholic Conservative MP, Norman St John Stevas, leading for the opposition. Normally, nobody would stay to hear the Tellers’ speeches, but this debate was being broadcast on BBC2 ‘live and in colour’ from 9.05 pm to its close. I had a captive audience and they stayed. And I had the last word – and it worked.

My speech went well. (Come on: it went wonderfully well.) Being last up helped. Having the hall full to bursting helped. The lights, the cameras, the sense of occasion – they all helped. Paisley’s performance was extraordinary. He produced a communion wafer from his pocket and snapped it in two saying, ‘They dare to call this busket the body of Christ – this busket!’ His manner was alarming, but his presence undeniable. St John-Stevas, by contrast, was silky, smooth, amusing. When he was hissed, he immediately responded, ‘Do I hear the sound of the rains of heaven landing on the fires of hell?’

Two years later, when I was President, the BBC broadcast Any Questions? ‘live’ from the Union and Norman was on the panel. Afterwards, in his cups, he took me to one side in the Union bar and murmured, ‘Gyles, you are far too amusing for your own good. Take care.’ By the time I reached the Commons myself (in 1992), Norman was in the Lords. On my first day in parliament I found three letters waiting for me in my cubby-hole in the Members’ Lobby: one was from the prime minister (John Major), one was from Michael Portillo (whom I had never met) and one, written in purple ink with a florid hand, was from Norman: ‘My dear Gyles, You will be a wonderful MP but practise a little economy of personality in the Commons. They don’t deserve to have too much too soon.’

At the Union I tried to have too much too soon. I stood to be President at the end of my first year – just as Boris Johnson would do a generation later. And just as Boris did, first time round I came a’cropper. I lost – by four votes.

It didn’t matter. There were more televised debates, more opportunities for clowning (more standing on my head on the despatch box), more serious moments too (I found myself appearing on Late Night Line-up on BBC2 – the media paid more attention to Oxbridge students in those days than they do now), and at the end of my second year when I stood for the presidency again I won, just as Boris did in his day.

A once-very-famous writer called Beverley Nichols was President of the Oxford Union in 1919, fifty years to the term before I was. I invited him back to speak in a special debate to mark the anniversary. The evening went well. He said to me afterwards, ‘I had forgotten what it was like to play the Union. It is a subtler instrument than you might imagine.’ He played it with extraordinary delicacy: he was nostalgic and reflective and yet he held them completely, disarming the crowd with understated charm. (I noted in my diary that night: ‘There is a lesson here!’) And for those requiring something more robust, at Beverley’s suggestion I invited his friend and contemporary Lord Boothby, former MP and media darling, to speak, too. Bob Boothby did not disappoint – either in the debate (when he growled and gurgled and the crowd cheered) or before and afterwards when he staggered about, wheezing, drinking, smoking, like an ancient debauchee enjoying one last night out on the town. He arrived with his young Sardinian bride on his arm and I was grateful for her presence: she was thirty-three years his junior and he needed looking after. I felt he might well die during the course of the evening. Beverley had told me such stories about him – scandals involving gangsters, mistresses in high places, love children, blackmail and worse – but said, ‘Don’t believe a word of it, Bob’s a dear, an absolute dear.’ In truth, Boothby was bi-sexual, twice married, for many years the lover of Harold Macmillan’s wife, Dorothy, the lover of the gangster Ronald Kray and the father of several illegitimate children. But he was amusing. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother described him as ‘a bounder but not a cad.’

For my final debate as President, I wanted guest speakers who were larger than life. When Fanny Cradock, doyenne of TV chefs, arrived and stepped out of her huge Rolls-Royce I was startled to find she had no eyebrows. They had been burnt off, she told me, in a freak fire. She had drawn-on eyebrows, absurdly arched, orange lipstick around her lips and a voice like a foghorn – but I loved her and so did the Union. Her husband, Johnnie, was with her, wearing his trademark monocle. He didn’t say much, but I noticed how he kept an eye on her at all times. She was quite nervous before she spoke, but once she stood up and heard the crowd roar she was away – and brilliant. Only an old pro like the character actor Robert Morley could have followed her – and he did, with considerable style. Over dinner Mr Morley told me, ‘It is a great help for a man to be in love with himself – for an actor it is absolutely essential.’ In the debate he warmed to his theme. ‘To fall in love with yourself is the first secret of happiness,’ he explained. ‘Then if you’re not a good mixer you can always fall back on your own company.’ It was a very funny, very happy evening. That’s what I remember, with infinite gratitude, from my time at the Union more than half a century ago: meeting so many remarkable people and having so many funny, happy, memorable evenings. Here’s to the next 200 years!