When historians look back on David Cameron's premiership, they may choose from any number of moments when his campaign to detoxify the Tory brand came unstuck. They'll do well, though, to find one more revealing than Cameron's recent casual insults, fired across the chamber to the roar of Tory jeers, at a man who had just turned 80. The member for Bolsover grew up during the war, worked as a miner for more than 20 years, and has been in parliament for longer than George Osborne has been alive. Having survived both cancer and heart bypass surgery, he remains to this day one of the most assiduous members of the house, his voting record almost unrivalled. And this was the man Cameron chose to mock as a "dinosaur", so old and irrelevant that he should be encouraged to "collect his pension".
When I called Dennis Skinner up he wasn't sure he wanted to be interviewed. He was worried about doing anything that might smack of self-promotion, and once memorably denounced interviews as "elitist crap". Besides, he added: "My life hasn't been all about politics." On the phone he talked about cricket, music and his mother's dementia – and sang some of the wartime classics they used to sing together, long after she had ceased to recognise her own son. I'm not sure why he said yes in the end. But when we met at the Commons, he seemed keen to correct any misapprehension that Cameron's comments had wounded him.
"People said to me: 'Oh, it's terrible what he said, Dennis.' But I was thinking: 'Keep on doing it.' Because every now and then you see the arrogance of Cameron, and that comes through every so often. It is theBullingdon Club. When they were sat down – him and Gideon [Obsorne's birth name] – and he says: 'You know what we really want, Gideon? Every weekend, after we've roughed up one of those hotels, we need an army of volunteers to come in and clean it all up.' And Gideon says: 'Yeah, we could call it the Big Society.'" Skinner's wolfish grin widens into a mischievous chuckle. "I'd love to say that at Question Time, but it's too long."
It certainly requires a rare degree of arrogance to take on Skinner and imagine you'll win, for his heckles are the stuff of legend, and have earned him the nickname the Beast of Bolsover. But he isn't, he admits, always confident he'll come off best – "No, oh no" – and his heart's always racing. "Because it's dangerous; you don't always win. But you do remember," and he starts to smile again, "the ones that succeeded. Like the one recently," delivered when Jeremy Hunt's special adviser fell on his sword to save his master: "When posh boys are in trouble, they sack their servants."
Skinner with Tony Benn at the Labour party conference, 1982. Photograph: Don McPhee
Sometimes his jokes are pre-prepared, but often they come to him in the moment. He had wanted to put one to the prime minister only an hour before we meet –"You're preaching to the eurozone about growth. When are we going to have growth here in Britain? Or did you leave plan B in the pub?" – and mourns the loss of an undelivered line much as a footballer might a disallowed goal. He's had to train himself, though, to resist going too far. "My heart sometimes says, 'Do it, do it', but then, sometimes, the head says: 'Just a minute, kid.'"
Skinner learned the art of the well-judged quip as a union spokesman in the mines. "Because you have to be very sharp in the pit canteen. When they're buying their snuff and things, they don't want to be disturbed greatly, so you have to get the point across very quick." By contrast, Cameron began his public-speaking education at Eton, but has always rubbished the idea that his privileged background might inform his politics, let alone mitigate against empathy for the poor. I ask Skinner if such a claim could be true: can one's politics form by immaculate conception?
"No," he says, gruff and unequivocal. "I was formed in the pits and the war. Without a doubt, yeah, of course. I'm shaped that way."
One of nine children to a miner and a washer woman, Skinner grew up in a Derbyshire mining community. He was brilliant at maths, able to recite times tables backwards by the age of six, and won a scholarship to grammar school – which would have been a terrible culture shock, were it not for the war. "The war was a leveller. Everybody was on rations. It would have been totally different three or four years earlier." He wasn't nervous, because he knew he had the sort of memory that made exams easy. "And Latin was easy – you just had to conjugate the verbs." Yet, to his mother's dismay, at 16 he left school and followed his father down the pit.
"It must have been shattering for her," he says softly. "But you know, all my mates had got black fingernails, and I decided to join them."
He can still remember the sensation of running backwards through a tunnel, dragging a trolley, trying to carry an injured miner to safety. "It was hard work. It was slavery." It could also be terrifying. Plunging 800 metres down a mine shaft, the pit cage would occasionally judder to a halt and start to bounce. "And everybody looked at one another. And I'm sure that all of us were frightened. You know that they've all got that same feeling." But no one would let it show? He laughs drily. "No. With the bounce gradually subsiding, someone would say: 'Yeah. Nothing, really.'"
But the pit gave him what he calls his "second education", through a day-release scheme to college to study political theory, economics and industrial relations. "I'll never forget the first day. This fellow was talking about the Reform Act of 1832, and I thought: 'Well, I know every battle and everything else, of course I know this.' But you see, at grammar school I'd been taught about things like Waterloo. I'm thinking: '1832. What happened in 1832?' I was troubled, because I was thinking: 'I should know this.' And then I thought: 'This is a new beginning.'"
Colleagues nominated Skinner to teach a young miner called George to read and write. In those days the Daily Herald ran a little feature called the Temple Gates Double, where it published the first initials of two horses running that day. People would buy tickets – "like lottery tickets today"– and if their ticket matched the initials they would win. Before long, "George used to shout to people as they were coming in on the bike – proudly shouting out the letters and numbers. He must have got up earlier than everyone else in order to do that." It was, Skinner thinks, probably his greatest achievement. "Believe me, I never felt so proud as when George would stand there shouting out: 'Temple Gates Double!' Because I knew he had been able to read the paper."
When I ask for his proudest political achievement, Skinner doesn't need to think. "Here? Oh, without a doubt, it was when Enoch Powell was going to keep us here all weekend." Having been a local councillor, in 1970 Skinner was elected to parliament, and in 1986 pulled off one of the most audacious filibusters in living memory, to defeat Powell's bill against stem-cell research. Skinner recalls every detail as if it were yesterday – the parsing of Erskine May, the nervy subterfuge, the chief clerk's consternation – as well as Powell's grudging concession in defeat. "He came down afterwards and said: 'Well, we all learn lessons. I don't think anybody else could have slaughtered this.'"
Skinner helps to drag a disabled protester into the House of Commons, 1994. Photograph: John Minihan
That Skinner was a formidable parliamentarian had by then been obvious to everyone for years. But he had made some firm decisions early on, by which he still abides to this day, and one was a refusal to accept a ministerial position. "Well, I don't believe in patronage," he says simply. He wanted no part of an arrangement based on favour, and knew he would never be able to repay the favour by keeping his mouth shut and toeing the party line.
When radio broadcasts were introduced to the Commons, Jim Callaghansought Skinner's opinion on his performance at the dispatch box. Skinner told the prime minister he had to stop responding to backbenchers' barracks, because listeners at home couldn't hear them, and so didn't know what he was talking about. The image of Skinner as an early spin doctor is hard not to smile at, but Callaghan was sufficiently impressed to suggest a reward would be forthcoming in the next cabinet reshuffle.
"I said: 'Jim, you can hire me, but one day I'll open my mouth a little bit too wide, and under collective responsibility and everything, I'm out.' I've never been somebody that's looked at it purely from, 'I'm bigger and better than the others,'" he's quick to clarify. "Somebody has to do it." But he knew it could never be him. Under a different system, he would have liked to work in the treasury, but he consigned himself to the backbenches for good.
He had also decided that he would never pair with a Tory MP, never go on a parliamentary trip abroad at the taxpayer's expense, and never drink in the Commons' bars. "Not because I'm puritanical," he adds quickly. He just didn't fancy socialising with Tories. "It's a kind of sloppy embrace."
His disdain for the indulgences of Westminster has been taken for chippy sanctimony by some MPs, who consider it all a bit hairshirt and holier than thou. And in truth, I had been half expecting to meet a curmudgeon, grumpy about modern MPs' ways and heavy with lament for the demise of parliamentary politics. In fact, Skinner turns out to be one of the most magnanimous MPs I've ever met.
He doesn't like to talk about the expenses scandal, from which he emerged spotlessly clean: "Because it looks like I'm posing as a prima donna, and that's never been my scene." He doesn't agree that the calibre of parliamentary intake has declined over the years, and says people are quite wrong to imagine that working-class people like him are no longer elected. He sees the rise of extra-parliamentary activism, such as the Occupy movement, not as an indictment of party politics, let alone a threat, but an exciting ally. When the students protested against fees, he marched with them on crutches: "I was thinking, this is real, it's sort of like the old days!" Even the recent surge of public royalism can't dismay him. He spent the jubilee bank holidays at work, and says of the polls showing overwhelming support for the monarchy: "Well, that's momentary. It changes according to the mood, doesn't it? I remember not too long ago when they were struggling to get more than 50%. I always know that there will be something that will happen that will change it again."
When Skinner was still a local councillor in his home town of Clay Cross, back in the 60s, he received an invitation to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It came with a parking pass, and Skinner chucked the lot in the bin. But later he mentioned it to a colleague on the council, a big horse-racing fan called Joe. "You'll never believe it, Joe – they think we've all got a car!" Joe told Skinner to dig the package back out at once. "He said: 'We've not emptied Wheatcroft Close yet.' He knew everything," Skinner recalls with affectionate pride. "He knew the day the dustbins were emptied." Skinner retrieved the parking pass, handed it over, and Joe used it to sail into Royal Ascot for years to come. It's hard to tell which of the two was more delighted – but I've a feeling it might be Skinner.
In his youth he had been a gifted athlete, so I ask what he thinks of the plans for the Olympic opening ceremony, which had been revealed the night before. To me they had looked ominously like another Millennium Dome debacle, but Skinner is much more generous. "I'm not worried too much about that. It's just a breaking-news thing. Can you remember the sign for the Olympics?" And he is, of course, quite right; the Olympic logo generated about three days of hysterical media alarmism, after which the uproar was entirely forgotten.
The young Skinner had been very good at what would now be called power walking, an Olympic sport. One night his dad confronted him. "What tha' doing at night?" A friend of his had told him he'd seen Skinner walking along, "waggling his bloody arse", and his dad was panicking. "Straight out of Billy Elliot." But Skinner explained that he was training for the Sheffield Star Walk. When the race day came, off he went to Sheffield, and won a trophy.
"When I came back with my trophy, it was late – four o'clock, three buses. It was only 12 miles, but nobody had a car. And my mother said: 'Didn't you do well!' I said: 'How did you know?'" Skinner's father had concocted an excuse to leave the pit early that day, and go to Chesterfield to buy an early edition of the Sheffield Star with the race results, so he could tell everyone at work about his son's triumph the next morning. "So he'd never congratulate me. But in those moments? Yes."
Skinner will probably kill me for this – and might well turn them down anyway – but I have only one thought when we say goodbye: could somebody please send him tickets for the athletics at the Olympics? He and his family applied; he has two daughters and a son from his marriage, which ended amicably in 1989, and now lives with his parliamentary assistant. But another of his rules is never to talk about his family – so they only come up when he mentions the failure to get tickets. If Skinner doesn't deserve a seat at the games, I don't know who does, and if anyone would like to make amends for Cameron's contempt, I can't think of a better gesture.
The following day Skinner calls me. He's been worrying all night about something. Every time he talks to the press, he's always quoted as saying things such as: "I were in the garden."
"And that's not grammatical! It's grammatically incorrect." He's not saying, he explains: "I were." He's saying: "I wah" – which is Derbyshire dialect for "was". "It really irritates me. So I'm determined not to do it – and then I relax and forget, and I say 'I wah'. And then they write: 'I were.'"
20:11
JIM SALTY1
Meanwhile, A new photography exhibition called The Rolling Stones: 50 is set to open at London's Somerset House this summer.
