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| Hartley Booth makes the front of the Eastern Daily Press, 15 February 1994 |
Last Sunday, 8 April, I was listening to
Open Book on Radio 4 when I heard novelist Emily Barr interviewed by Mariella
Frostrup on the ‘Book You Would Never Lend’, which in her case was The Book of Strange New Things, by
Michel Faber. This provides a
name-dropping opportunity to write about my afternoon with Emily (and her dad,
and my family).
Some time after I began a PhD at the
University of East Anglia, my supervisor Charles Barr, a senior lecturer in the
film studies department, kindly invited my then wife and me to come to his
house in Norwich for Sunday lunch. This
was in 1994. We drove over from our home
near King’s Lynn with our two children.
Charles’s wife was away, so I never met her, but Emily, his daughter
from a previous marriage, was there, along with Charles’s young son.
Charles cooked pasta, though Emily did
not eat with us. We all had a pleasant
time, marred only by Charles’s son making my 7-year old daughter cry by hitting
her over the head with an inflatable plastic hammer. In the afternoon, as conversation was
flagging, we went to the local park so that the kids could play on the
swings. Emily accompanied us and was
very good with the children. After tea at
the house, my family and I drove back along the A47.
Nowadays Emily is well known as a
novelist but back then her main claim to fame was involvement in a Westminster
sex scandal, at a time when every week seemed to bring a fresh revelation about
sleazy behaviour in the Conservative Party.
This had occurred at the beginning of the same year, though it was not
something we chatted about over the spaghetti.
Aged 22, Emily had been working as a
researcher for a married 47-year old Tory MP bearing the suitably
caddish-sounding name Hartley Booth, and he had had what he termed an
‘infatuation’ with her, though he unconvincingly denied it was a sexual
relationship; it did however involve him writing terrible poems to her..
Booth’s protestations were insufficient
to prevent papers calling it an affair, and in 2005 the New Statesman referred to Emily as Booth’s ‘former mistress’
without being sued by either of them.
Whatever Booth’s description, when it all came to light he was forced to
resign his post as a foreign affairs PPS.
What somehow made it worse was that he was the MP for Finchley, which he
had taken over from the morally upright Margaret Thatcher when she resigned in
1992, and he was a Methodist lay
preacher.
An unpleasant aspect was the tabloids
digging into Emily’s background. There
was coverage of Charles accompanied by a photograph of his Norwich house and
speculation on how much it was worth.
The ‘journalists’ even tracked down Emily’s mother in Bristol, intrusively
prying into the lives of people who had nothing to do with the business. A gleeful Piers Morgan later referred to Emily as a ‘nude model’, presumably to suggest she
was no better than she ought to be, though in fact she had studied art history
at the Courtauld Institute.
Perhaps the most surprising part of it
all was that Emily, who struck me as very nice, and whose father was certainly
left-of-centre, should be working for someone who held a significant post in
the detested Major government. The Prime
Minister’s decision to emphasise ‘Back to basics’ and ‘family values’ laid the
administration open to charges of hypocrisy (much of the Booth coverage noted
he had three children). Needless to say
the now-forgotten MP, despite claiming his constituency party was behind him,
was out at the end of the parliamentary term, having failed to be reselected
for Finchley and unable to find another constituency that would have him.
One thing I vividly recall from the
visit to Norwich is the shoes Emily was wearing when we went to the park. They were big clumpy things I had seen her
wearing in a photograph that had appeared in the Guardian in more favourable circumstances: as well as achieving
national fame because of her association with Booth, in 1994 she also won the Guardian ‘Student Journalist of the Year’
award.
In that capacity she was interviewed in
the paper, and the accompanying photograph showed her lying on a lawn, gazing
directly at the camera with her feet raised, wearing the same pair of
shoes. It occurred to me that she
probably wore them when meeting Hartley.
Rather oddly, I admit, recognising them felt like a piece of secret
knowledge linking me to the seedy goings-on at the heart of a dying government.
