Fine Wines and high living behind closed doors: Cardinal Wolsey's palace
If Jacqui Smith outraged public opinion over her claims for expenses for a second home in Westminster, she could take lessons from Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor. He used income from his high office in the state and the Church to enrich his lifestyle and pay for his ecclesiastical palace, York Place, where he lived by the Thames (it was later seized in 1529 by Henry VIII and became the royal Palace of White Hall). It now lies beneath the monstrous post-war Ministry of Defence building, but there are relics of the Tudor palace behind the bland facades of Whitehall.
Wolsey was the Peter Mandelson of his day. He was the power behind the throne, the fixer and the sage, whose cunning and statecraft Henry VIII relied on for years. Wolsey's home, York Place, was on King Street, the main thoroughfare between Westminster and Charing Cross, where he frequently entertained Henry and his retinue of lusty young male friends to banquets, including one used by Shakespeare as the setting for the play in which Anne Boleyn first catches the king's eye.
To run the mansion, Wolsey had a small army of 500 servants in uniforms of crimson to match his status as a cardinal. Even his head cook wore a chain of solid gold. Each day, Wolsey rode the half mile to Westminster to preside over the courts at the head of an impressive procession. Wolsey was a master showman, who understood the importance of public opinion. He rode on a humble mule as a mark of his piety, but it was covered in a coat of scarlet and its stirrups were gilded.
Astonishingly, the wine cellar from which his servants carried pitchers of drink to Wolsey's banqueting tables has survived. It was threatened with demolition when the construction of the MOD building, after the Second World War, revealed the foundations of Wolsey's former mansion. However, there was a public outcry to save it, and the entire crypt, slimmed down to 800 tons, was painstakingly lowered on screw jacks into the basement of the MOD building, where it is used for VIP defence receptions.
Despite all his guile, Wolsey's 'filed tongue' failed him in 1527 when the 'great matter' of the king's divorce exploded into the court of King Henry VIII.
As the Pope's representative in England, Henry expected Wolsey to deliver a divorce from Katherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. But Wolsey's efforts proved in vain. Anne had old scores to settle against Wolsey, and followed the saying frequently heard today around Westminster: don't get mad, get even. She proved Wolsey's nemesis.
Wolsey's loyal gentleman-usher and biographer, George Cavendish, described how thousands turned out to enjoy the spectacle of the great man being forced out after being stripped of his office in 1529.
Thinking he would be beheaded, they took to boats on the Thames to see Wolsey make his final exit by barge from the Thames-side wharf of his palace, now buried under the east wall of the MOD in Whitehall. "At the taking of his barge, there were no less than a thousand boats full of men and women of the City of London, waffeting up and down the Thames, expecting my lord's departing supposing that he should have gone directly from thence to the Tower. Thereat they rejoiced..."
Over 450 years later, Margaret Thatcher made her own tearful exit from Downing Street, barely 200 yards from where Wolsey boarded his gilded barge. In words that echo down the centuries, Cavendish railed against the perfidy of public opinion: "O wavering and new fangled multitude! Is it not a wonder to consider the inconstant mutability of this uncertain world!"
Cavendish's words on Wolsey's fate and the others, including on two occasions Peter Mandelson, who have fallen from high office, prove the wisdom of Enoch Powell's law, that all political careers end in tears.
Royal spin and bloody error at the Banqueting House
Still in the first flush of Labour's election victory in 1997, Tony Blair had a royal duty to perform: a toast to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on their Golden Wedding anniversary.
Three months earlier, on Sunday 31 August, the youthful Prime Minister had spoken movingly about the death of their daughter-in-law, Diana, Princess of Wales, describing her as the 'People's Princess'. It was a phrase that appeared to bear the imprint of former Daily Mirror journalist Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's head of communications and chief 'spin doctor', although he denied it, but Blair was judged to have 'spoken for the nation'. England, for a nation that prided itself on its stiff upper lip, was in the grip of an extraordinary emotional outpouring of grief for the pop-star princess who had been, by popular opinion, wronged by the Royal Family. It resulted in a dangerous public backlash against the House of Windsor. Campbell's Downing Street spin machine had found the Palace hopelessly outdated and wooden in its response to Diana's death, and took on the role of saving the Royal Family from itself by populist touches, such as flying the flag of Buckingham Palace at half-mast, to show to the public it 'cared'. Blair's support for the monarchy at the Banqueting House was part of the 'fightback' strategy.
In a soundbite that was designed to catch the headlines the next day, Blair told the Queen: "I am proud as proud can be to be your Prime Minister today offering this tribute on behalf of the country. You are our Queen. We respect and cherish you. You are, simply, the Best of British.'
Here was a Labour prime minister at the flood of his popularity defending the House of Windsor from the murmurings of the people. And yet, only a Prime Minister with a view of history that started on his own election day could have ignored the historical importance of the venue - Inigo Jones's brilliant Palladian building, the Banqueting House in Whitehall - for the defence of monarchy as an institution.
Sources at the Palace have confirmed to me that the venue was chosen by Downing Street. "It wasn't us," I was told. For it was outside the windows that lit the Queen's luncheon, on 30 January, 1649, that King Charles I was executed and England's Republic was born.
Cramped, antiquated and unfit for purpose: Behind the Downing St facade
Downing Street has borne witness to most of the momentous events in British history. But behind the famous black door, questions are still being asked: is Number 10 fit for purpose? The facade of the terraced houses that make up Downing Street is the same, but between 1958 and 1963 the 350-year-old rooms inside Number 10 were gutted in a major £1m renovation to stop it falling down.
It is quite unlike the West Wing at the White House or the Kremlin, which were designed as Government headquarters. Some Number 10 insiders told me it was like running a modern government from a National Trust property. Lance Price, a former Number 10 aide, said: "It is an extraordinary anachronism that the British prime minister in the 21st century should work from this building simply out of tradition."
Tony Blair hinted at the limitations of Number 10, shortly before he left office: "The trouble is that Downing Street at the moment is perched a little uneasily between being the formal, state, visible outward expression of Britain and the place where you receive people, and a functioning workplace."
Officials have told me Gordon Brown would have liked to decamp, using Number 10 solely for ceremonial purposes and using an office elsewhere for the business of being Prime Minister. The Cabinet Office on Whitehall - attached to Number 10 by a secret passage - has become more of a department for the Prime Minister. Staff have been moved in from Number 10, forcing others to be 'bumped' along the Whitehall as far as Admiralty Arch.
The Prime Minister has also commandeered Number 12 at the end of Downing Street as a 'war room' run by Liam Byrne, the Cabinet Office minister, Tom Watson, who coordinates the internet campaigns, and key aides who tackle the daily crises of modern government. The impression that it resembles as scene from the TV series, The Thick of It, was increased by the disclosure of e-mails from Damian McBride to Derek Draper suggesting the planting of smear stories against the Tories on a Labour-supporting website, Red Rag. McBride was instantly sacked and disowned by Brown, although he had been trusted by him at the Treasury for years. The recession has ruled out any prospect of any Prime Minister doing away with Number 10 Downing Street as the official residence of the First Lord of Treasury. The most famous front door in the world is here to stay, whether the new incumbent likes it or not.
200 years of sex and scandal at the Scotland Office
The Scotland Office is the prim building that sits squatly between the Cabinet Office and Horse Guards, ignored by the tourists, but it was once the most notorious address in London, when it was the home of Lord and Lady Melbourne, their son, William Lamb, and his impish, 'wild-child' wife, Lady Caroline.
Lady Melbourne had turned Melbourne House into one of the three leading Whig salons in London, to rival those of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Holland, where Fox and Sheridan were regular house guests, and the princes, Frederick, Duke of York, and George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) presided over a royal court in 'opposition' to that of the ailing and sometimes mad king, George III.
In keeping with the liberal attitudes of the Regency aristocracy, Lady Melbourne had climbed the social ladder on her back. Only one of her six children - her first son - was fathered by Lord Melbourne. She had sons by both princes. There were so many children with different fathers they were called 'the children of the mist'. But it was Caroline who brought scandal on Melbourne House. She fell passionately and publicly in love with Lord Byron in 1812 after the publication of his heroic tale Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
It was a brief, tempestuous affair - on 9 August, tormented by fears of rejection, she sent him a love letter with cuttings of her pubic hairs - but for Caroline, it was the drama of her life. As Byron tried to extricate himself, she made a scene at a ball, and became despised by her Regency set.
Caroline never completely recovered after Byron's death from fever in Greece in 1826, but William went on to be Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister.
The upper floors where the Lambs lived are now offices, but Caro's wild spirit may live on. There is a room with a walk-in wardrobe where she surely had her bed, overlooking St James's Park. A civil servant told me she was working there late at night when she heard a rustling noise like a lady's dress. "It was so loud that I stepped out into the corridor. I thought someone had a lady's dress on and it was rustling but there was no sign of anyone."
John Prescott briefly occupied the basement garden rooms, where the Melbournes had lived when he was Deputy Prime Minister and he was waiting for the completion of his offices running from the Cabinet Office to Admiralty Arch. He conducted Cabinet committee meetings there, and, it is said, first met his diary secretary, Tracey Temple, who was later to become involved in their own kiss-and-tell saga. Photographs of Temple in Prescott's arms, which were published when their affair became public, were taken at a Christmas party in Admiralty House, where he had a grace and favour apartment. In that photo, they were in the doorway to the ground floor dining room where Nelson had an embarrassing dinner with his wife Fanny in November 1800, when he, too, was involved in a scandalous love affair with Lady Emma Hamilton.
Spies and dodgy dossiers at the Foreign Office
A display case in one of the long corridors of the Foreign Office holds an Enigma machine, the device that helped Britain break the Ultra code and keep ahead of the Germans during the Second World War. The Foreign Secretary sits at the centre of Britain's international intelligence web, receiving reports from GCHQ, intelligence agents and ambassadors across the world, but the Prime Minister remains firmly charge of the intelligence services.
The use of intelligence to support Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, including claims that Downing Street had 'sexed up' the threat of weapons of mass destruction, caused the greatest controversy surrounding intelligence in modern history - and raised questions about the conflict of interests between the Foreign Office and Number 10.
Alastair Campbell, Blair's head of communications, denied 'sexing up' the WMD claims, but had a unit inside the Foreign Office answerable to Number 10 - the Coalition Information Centre (CIC) - that was responsible for producing a dossier by cutting and pasting allegations off the internet. I was one of the journalists who received the so-called 'dodgy dossier' under my hotel door while covering a Blair trip to Washington in the run-up to the war.
Spying is as old as Whitehall itself. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's enterprising spymaster intercepted encrypted letters in 1586 from the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, imprisoned in Fotheringay Castle, that led Elizabeth reluctantly to sign Mary's death warrant. Walsingham had a good 'decypherer' but he also relied on a double-agent, Gifford, who had acted as the plotters' double agent.
The Secret and Intelligence Service - MI6 - was created as a response to the German espionage threat in 1909 and its first chief was Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming, a 50-year-old Royal Navy officer who moved into an office in the War Office in Whitehall and rented flat 54 at No 2 Whitehall Court. Cumming became known as 'C' because he always signed memos with his initial in green ink.
MI6 has its headquarters in the flesh-coloured building south of the Thames at Vauxhall Cross, but the 'in-house' intelligence officers - 'spooks' - occupy the top floor of the Foreign Office, and an intelligence desk is manned 24-hours a day to keep the Foreign Secretary informed of developments around the world.
Researching my book, I discovered that the intelligence services have continued to expand. I was unable to gain entrance to the former Admiralty Building on the north side of Horse Guards Parade where I wanted to see the sea maps that Churchill had used when he was twice First Lord of the Admiralty (both in the First World War and the Second) because, I was told, the building is now occupied by intelligence staff attached to the Foreign Office.
The same applied to the adjoining creeper-clad fortress, codenamed HMS St Vincent, built in 1940-41 and described by Churchill as a 'vast monstrosity'. I was told it conceals a secret communications tunnel that runs south, under the QE Centre to Marsham Street and a wartime bunker under the new Home Office, one of the many citadels and tunnels across Whitehall. The main nuclear bunker is under the MOD, known as PINDAR, built in the early 1990s. Rumours abound that the tunnels are linked to the Tube system for evacuation, but they have been denied.
The architect of the Foreign Office, George Gilbert Scott, had won a competition in the mid-19th century for a Gothic design, but Prime Minister Lord Palmerston rejected his drawings as "the barbarism of the Dark Ages", and a subsequent plan for a Byzantine building as "a regular mongrel affair".
Palmerston was famous for 'gunboat' diplomacy and during Blair's period of office, the Downing Street website described Palmerston's foreign policy as 'jingoistic'. But it was echoed by Blair's Chicago speech in 1999 in support of 'liberal interventionism'. One Labour rebel, Andrew MacKinlay, a member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which investigated the intelligence blunders, told me: "The Foreign Office has a reputation for being a Rolls-Royce. I think it's more a Ford saloon."
Adapted from 'Whitehall: The Street That Shaped a Nation' by Colin Brown (£17.99), which is published by Simon & Schuster on 5 May. To order a copy for the special price of £16.19 (with free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
The flaw in the business model is that CVC / BE should really pay the track owners not be paid by them which is why BE likes governments to fund them instead as he can raise the prices way above what the race gate money would normally allow. The tracks keep on signing the contracts though...
paul j. weighell, purley, uk
Since when was f1 about the public at venues? F1 is the money TV and promotors pay to Bernie and friends. After that the promotors have to worry about the crowds, hence Bernie only concerned with how the teams, sponsors and their guests and media get into and out of the track.
pat, London,
Long live Monza its a great circuit. Having been to many GP's around the world (sitting in the Grandstands), Silverstone is hard to beat. The food isn't bad (Monza - poor choice & Sepang - awful), the toilets are actually the best and its a proper track. Bernie needs to get out and sit with the fans
Tom, Manila, Philippines