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I remember it well. You could cut the despair like one of those maggot-filled cheeses they serve you in northern Spain. Downing Street is not a nice place to be in the death-throes of a regime.
Gordon Brown's predicament is an action replay of the last days of John Major, and then some. If it felt bad when I was Major's press secretary in 1994-96, heaven knows what it's like to work in No 10 today.
Major had his mean moments. He would wake you up at 7am on a Sunday morning about something on page 96 in one of the papers. That was usually the start of a day when you never got out of your pyjamas.
But even John Major in his blackest moments wouldn't resort to phone-hurling or abusing the ladies of the switchboard, one of the few islands of sanity in the building.
Downing Street is a claustrophobic bunker at the best of times. Sixteen-hour working days cut you off from all reality and common sense. Every morning when I walked through the famous front door, I thought of myself as Dr Who entering his telephone box.
It's a cramped place, with the Prime Minister and his closest staff working cheek-by-jowl. That's fine when the going is good and spirits are high. But when demoralisation sets in, it's more contagious than swine flu.
The portents of doom accumulate remorselessly. The very great Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's press secretary, told me that my authority over the Whitehall information machine would be directly proportionate to the Prime Minister's authority in Cabinet.
In 1995, I began to notice that my Monday afternoon meetings with Whitehall press officers were getting ever more sparsely attended. I felt like Samson with a slow haircut.
As bunker disease takes hold, you do daft, laughable things to curry favour with the public. John Major had his Traffic Cones Hotline; Brown offers a policeman to escort us home after visiting the cashpoint. Then there is the frenetic displacement activity.
In 1995 a great grid of policy announcements was created for the dog days of August. This was meant to show that there were still vital life signs in the government. But who, on the beaches of the Mediterranean or Margate, gave a flying fig?
You know it's terminal when former adversaries are brought in to find the elixir of political revival. Major had Michael Heseltine, Brown has Peter Mandelson. Heseltine would conduct daily strategy meetings in a vast office, where, seated like the Sun King on a throne, he would rule on the humble offerings of courtiers like myself.
But here's the big difference between Major and Brown. Major had a tiny Commons majority, which gave him little room for manoeuvre.
Brown has hit the rocks with a majority of 63. Now that's what I call bunker madness.
France's other big star bows out
The other night at a party I found perhaps the only Frenchman in London who didn't want to gossip about President Sarkozy and his wife (of whom, as my French relatives report, matrimonial rumour is rife).
He was too cast down by the impending retirement of the French national treasure, Johnny Hallyday, a 66-year-old rocker.
Hallyday has been performing the same francophone pastiche of rock since 1960. He is actually half-Belgian (you will recall, of course, that it was Belgium that gave the world the Eighties punk rocker Plastic Bertrand) and glories in the birth-name of Jean-Philippe Smet.
This lacks a certain je ne sais quoi in the recording studios of Nashville, Tennessee, in the same way that Reg Dwight had to become Elton John and Bernard Jewry, under the wise tutelage of his manager Michael, now Lord, Levy, converted to Alvin Stardust.
Hallyday is still phenomenally popular. It's as if Cliff Richard had never moved on from Move It and Marty Wilde was filling the O2 Arena nightly.
And Hallyday is a friend of the diminutive French President.
Still no sign of the Ferrero Rocher
There is a fair bit of twitching among the apostles of the Special Relationship about President Obama's failure to announce a new American Ambassador to London.
Some noses have been put out of joint by the naming in March of Dan Rooney for Dublin — but the Irish have always had more pull in Washington than the Brits.
The name that continues to waft in on westerly breezes for Winfield House is Lou Susman, a Chicago banker and Obama fundraiser.
I am told the White House wants to announce Susman with several other "Tier 1" ambassadors before Obama comes to Europe for the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings early next month. But the division of the ambassadorial spoils has always been a tortured business in DC.
• I have a dream. As chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, I was hauled up three times in six years before the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport to defend press self-regulation.
In my dream the tables are turned and Select Committee chairmen are summoned before me to account for the Commons' system of self-regulation, certainly the worst in the UK and probably in the solar system.
Sadly, this is as unlikely to happen in real life as MPs going before a committee of bankers to say "sorry".
Or, even more farfetched, Speaker Martin grasping the difference between private gain and the public interest.
Sir Christopher Meyer is former press secretary to John Major and former British Ambassador to both Washington and Bonn.
Reader views (1)
It cannot be very pleasant in the Bunker, Number 10 Downing Street. What with expletives, flying lazer-printers and Cell Phones, the atomosphere must be like a Dentists waiting room. Maybe being cut off from the real world will be good training for Gordon McRuin when he is gurneyed away to a Funny Farm by the Men in White Coats.
At least he will have peace and quiet to reflect on the 'Glory Days' of New Labour, Mr Bliar's dream of a Mickey Mouse United Kingdom, and the Pythonesque ramblings of New Labour's philosopy of 'One Size Fits All'.
Oh Dear! How the mighty will soon fall.
- Uncle Vanya, East Anglia Area UK, 15/05/2009 17:24
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