A Tory through and through

THE central lobby of the House of Commons is tall and tiled, like a church, and high up under its arched ceiling a series of large and indifferent mosaics depicts the constituent parts of the British Empire in its prime. "Banba," is the name picked out in gold above the figure of St Patrick, who is flanked by subservient females, and stands above a panel of the Red Hand of Ulster, sham rocks and a harp.

The small, vivid figure of Edwina Currie materialises under the mosaic, treading her way through the tourists and petitioners with that flourish of the parliamentary insider - the person for whom this is the mere workplace. How the relationship has changed between Westminster and "Banba"!

This life long Tory, MP for South Derbyshire (the former Belper, which George Brown held in the distant Labour administration of the 19605) former PPS - parliamentary private secretary - to Sir Keith Joseph, government minister under John Major, member of the Conservative party's National Union Executive Committee and chairman of the Conservative Group for Europe, has a strictly modern experience of the Republic of Ireland.

"How is Gay Byrne?" she inquires, warmly. She has the happiest memories of plugging her last blockbuster, a year or so ago, on The Late Late Show.

She was struck by the youthful, energetic air of the streets of Dublin. "They're so very intelligent, the Irish," she says, leading The Irish Times into the tea room. Give them an education and they can do anything. I remember the first time I met an Irish accountant. I laughed because I just couldn't believe it. An Irish accountant! But now - well, Dublin just looked so lively and so confident!"

She briskly orders tea and gestures around the room. "This room is called the Pugin room," she says. "That's P-U-G-I-N," she adds, in case, presumably, she has met an untypically unintelligent Irish person.

But it is not just the Irish who come in for a rather sweeping maternalism. From the beginning of the interview it is clear, though she never uses the exact words, that she believes the Tories will lose the next general election in Britain and that she will lose her seat.

They will lose, she indicates, not because they in any way whatsoever deserve to lose, but because they are badly led. Take the issue of women candidates, for instance. She has just come from a Conservative Ladies' fund raising lunch, where she has pointed out to her audience that there were 18 women MPs when she got in to parliament in 1983. Now there are 60 plus.

"And after the election there will be more than 100 and I have to say, not on our side. On their side." But couldn't she have pointed out this obvious planning defect to John Major? "Oh, I did, I did. But I'm afraid John is rather like the Asian people who I know so well from my own constituency. They're darlings and they're wonderful people but they do rather say what they think you want to hear. They're inclined to agree with whoever they're talking to."

The Tory party has become complacent, is Mrs Currie's message. "Did you know that the average age of a member of the Tory party is 64? Sixty four! Where are the young people? Don't forget that you have to be at least 40 to have voted in Labour in this country." And later - "The young have no memory of a Labour administration," she says crossly, implying that a properly led Tory party would have made it crystal clear to the young what a very bad thing such an administration is, and would have got them to sign up in droves with the Tories.

But why were there no initiatives to recruit women and young people in preparation for the general election? Who actually runs the Tory party?

"Ha!" she exclaims. "That is precisely the question. When Margaret was running the show, Margaret ran the show. But now? Who knows who's running it?"

The problems, it seems, are all internal. If the Tories lose the election it will be the Tories' fault. Nothing at all to do with the state of Britain. As to that, Mrs Currie can make almost shockingly positive claims by basing her statements on her own constituency, South Derbyshire, which, according to her, did nothing but benefit from the Thatcherite revolution.

"There has been a huge change, of course. It used to be `pits and pots' - now Toyota is the big name. Back at the beginning of the 1980s, business sorted itself out. The bad businesses went. They were cleaned right out. And there's been a steady, upward rise since then. Unemployment was never bad in our area and, it is only about 4 per cent now... But - excuse me, excuse me - was there not an enormously divisive miners' strike?

"Oh, my people never believed in strikes as a means of settling a dispute," Mrs Curde says airily. Someone else, apparently, some other miners, wanted a strike. But in any case, that's all history now. "Those miners are at real retirement age now. They're drawing their pensions."

"Her own daughter," she remarks, has just walked into a job in a midlands television station. Rang them one morning, started that afternoon. Okay, it's a short term job, "and I can only hope she's insured", and it may not exactly suit her qualifications, and if she is to think of a pension at all it will be a personal one she pays into herself. This is exactly the employment scene Mrs Currie is proud and happy to see, and worked to bring about.

SHE's self made, herself. She sits in the window embrasure of the Pugin room, the grey Thames behind her, like a bright little bird in her lime green suit and hint of lacy slip and big earrings, and looks understandably pleased with herself.

She got to university at Oxford from a Liverpool Jewish background which was favoured as a warm community but was not at all moneyed. Last year, in her house in France, she wrote the bulk of her forthcoming novel, and there was a lucrative auction among publishers to buy the rights to this and to the book after next.

She's making serious money in her particular part of the book market. Her writing is a talent she can exercise by herself without the co operation of other people.

The house in France, together with the really big house in Derbyshire, and the big flat in London and the small flat in London and the flat in Liverpool that she rents to her mother ("Rent - £1 a week and a good chicken dinner!") are a solid investment she and her husband have carefully built up since they deliberately, as a young married couple, asked his accountancy firm to base them somewhere outside London, so that she could start the political career she had always wanted from scratch, at the grass roots. Something like this is what she wants for people in general.

"Opportunity. Encouragement. Improved education." But not everything can be done by herself and for herself. She has felt the need to draw lessons ford everybody from her own experience and to spread her personal vision.

But there are problems associated with being a Tory. One, the ideology can be harsh. Two, she can only implement the ideology through a political party - the Tory party. And the party needs managing, in itself and by her. She can't lick it into shape as she would a plot line or a new residence. And it has failed her.

The anti Europeans, she implies allowed to run amok, have wrecked its chances of re election. "Take the AB vote," she says. "It used to be 10-1 in favour of us. Now it's evenly split between Blair's lot and us. Right down the middle."

She is in the prime of life. Fifty years old, a devotee of the gym, radiating energy and self belief. But when she talks about her life in politics she's like an old person, looking back in nostalgia. "We were right to sell off the family silver to use that phrase," she says. "We were absolutely right. It has proved enormously successful, the privatisation of water and electricity and gas and so on. They're multi million pound enterprises now. They're poised to do global business.

Thoughts of the jobs lost in downsizing, or the loss to the country of collectively owned assets, do not appear to occur to her. But then, while personally compassionate - "Some part of me could not stand at that despatch box and explain why we chain pregnant women to beds" - her instinct does not lead her to mention first the human implications of her political policies.

When pressed to think of something - anything - which was on the agenda of herself and the other young Tory Turks of the 1980s, and Which they have failed to implement, or anything they have done wrong, she mentions, of all things, the BBC.

"We should not own the BBC. It's, ridiculous, forcing people to pay a licence fee for a television service they may or may not wish to have. And do you know what it costs to administer that lunacy? Tens of millions of pounds!"

This is an ideological point, pure and simple, and reminds the interviewer that she might have gone far at ministerial level if it were not for ill judged remarks about salmonella in eggs. She is a Tory through and through.

I remind her that in her novel, A Woman's Place, the heroine - a Tory woman minister - says that too many mental hospitals have been closed.

"Yes," the real Edwina Currie says. "Care in the community has turned out to be very expensive, and not just costly but very difficult to administer.

She does eventually come to some of the human implications, especially for the mentally ill themselves, of the closure of the old hospitals. But her first response was about money and efficiency.

OUTSIDE the Commons, the question marks over the new England she has helped to make might be symbolised by the litter of wrappers and tin cans caught among the spring flowers in the beds around Westminster Cathedral. Or the blue with cold but impassioned people, protesting against the huge powers proposed in the current Police Bill, corralled behind a barrier and barracking MPs as they enter the House.

But Mrs Currie is serene. What she and her fellow ideologues achieved, she believes, is what the people wanted when they voted the Tories in in four consecutive elections. "They were looking for a way forward. They were sick of the old Labour way of doing things."

She seems, herself, to have been almost personally wounded by the world she conjures up of old style, labourforce protectiveness and work done to rule. "We hear a lot of the Old Labour stuff still in Derbyshire," she says disdainfully. "We have Dennis Skinner. Tony Benn."

She says that under a superficial "unity, the New Labour party harbours the old demarcationist, anti enterprise, emotions, and that they will break out again as soon as the Blairites get into office. But in their time, she believes, she and the Thatcher led Tory party broke the power of Old Labour, she believes. And she instances other achievements.

"We didn't talk about privatisation the first election, in 1979. But that's what we were doing all the same. And eventually we could use the word."

They privatised so successfully, she believes that she can ask: "Where has the working class gone? Okay, a small proportion have gone down into an under class. But the great majority of it they've taken advantage of what we offered them. They've bought their council houses or whatever. And they can walk into a job, if they just go out and look for one.

She was going to call her next book of which the heroine is a sensitive Jewish girl growing up in Liverpool in the Beatles era - The Leaving of Liverpool. But the phrase didn't really suit what she wants to convey, she says vaguely. Perhaps the hint of regret, and the reference to a real, specific place, rather than; a smiling United Kingdom of the imagination, is what she shied away from.

In any case, she's going to call it, Close Your Eyes And I'll Kiss You... She's perfectly ready to bow out from the self appointed task of shaping Britain. Fiction is easier to manipulate than a world full of Tory Eurosceptics and confident Labour people.

"I want to use my time and talents well," she says. She sees herself sitting in France and being a self sufficient writer. Returning, perhaps, to something like the bookish and solitary person she once was, before the activity of politics grabbed her. But, "I wasn't an attention seeker in those days," she laughs.

Maybe that need for the limelight that animates politicians no less than actors will drive her back into policy making, perhaps at the European level. Or perhaps social Thatcherites like herself were once off revolutionaries and the patient long haul was never for them. She taps off down the tiled corridor on her heels, a little woman but compact with energy.

She passes by the frock coated statues of the dour statesmen who made the nation and the political culture she flitted across. It is hard to think of her politics as developing new depths in opposition. Her kind of anti traditional Toryism came and mounted - in her view - a successful coup against the old fogies.

And went.