During the season to be merry those essential communicators between government and governed, the political correspondents, will have downed the occasional toast in the party rooms and ministers' offices and will even have broken bread with the Taoiseach.
Such innocent carousing is not unique to Dublin. When I was a member of the scribbling pack in the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster my favourite party-giver was Harold Macmillan, the Tory leader who won the 1959 British general election campaign on the back of the slogan, "You've never had it so good". He was a jovial and friendly man and every Christmas during his premiership he invited the members of the lobby to a party at No.10 Downing Street.
Officers and gentlemen
Membership of the lobby was confined to political correspondents who worked for daily newspapers and broadcasting organisations within the United Kingdom. It was presumed that, being British, they could be relied upon to behave like officers and gentlemen.
In Macmillan's case the presumption paid dividends. It was well known that his wife, Lady Dorothy, was engaged in a long-standing affair with one of the Prime Minister's backbenchers, Bob Boothby, but no one ever wrote about it. Such matters were treated as private tittle-tattle in the lobby and were not deemed fit to be shared with the paper-buying public.
It was in this environment of cloistered camaraderie that one of Macmillan's aides could confidently tell the story of the risqué exchange between the Prime Minister and President John F. Kennedy over dinner in Downing Street. The President confided in Macmillan that he got a headache if he did not have sex once a day. "Sex once a day!" retorted Macmillan. "My dear chap, the very thought of it would give me a headache."
Macmillan, who had observed at first hand the grinding hardship and mass unemployment of North-East England when he was elected MP for Stockton in 1924, liked to boast of his own humble origins. He was a scion of the Macmillan publishing house, founded in 1843 by the Scots Daniel and Alexander Macmillan.
At one Christmas party in Downing Street he was outlining (not for the first time) to a group of us the family's doughty progress from highland croft to international publishing. Emboldened by the prime minister's generous hospitality, a Welsh colleague and myself broke one of the lobby's unwritten rules (don't argue with your betters) and expressed some scepticism about the degree of the family's highland degradation so touchingly described by our host.
Not amused
The prime minister was not amused. He led us out of the reception and took us to his private study. Switching on the lights, he pointed triumphantly at a small, framed photograph on the wall. It showed a tiny, single-storey habitation standing on what appeared to be a bit of bedraggled bogland. "There," he shouted, "Look at it. That's my grandfather's croft."
I doubt if one of Macmillan's predecessors in Downing Street, Clement Attlee, gave Christmas parties for the lobby. He was in the Lords when I arrived at Westminster. A small, frail figure, he travelled to the House every day on the Underground. He was a genuinely modest man (his old antagonist, Winston Churchill, said he had a lot to be modest about). I had occasion to ring him at times. He retained no staff. The phone would be lifted and a chirpy voice would announce: "Attlee speaking." It was difficult to believe that this self-effacing man had defeated Churchill in the general election immediately after the second World War and had gone on to lead a ravaged country to some measure of prosperity, nationalising large sectors of industry and introducing the national health service.
Instrumental in helping Attlee establish the health service against fierce opposition from the medical profession was Nye Bevan, his Minister of Health. Bevan, a Welsh coal miner, and Attlee, public school and Oxford, did not always agree, but they shared a contempt for the Conservatives. There was uproar in the House when, during one debate, Bevan described them as "lower than vermin".
As the leader of the far left in the Labour Party, Bevan was rarely out of trouble. The present incumbent of Downing Street, Tony Blair, might do well to remember one of Nye's statements: "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down."
Ticker-tape machine
Attlee had little time for the press or, indeed, for public opinion. He was persuaded to hire Francis Williams, the brilliant editor of the Labour-orientated Daily Herald, as his press adviser. Williams found a Downing Street bereft of any means of communications apart from telephones. He wanted to install what was then the state-of-the-art news conveyor, a ticker-tape machine from the Press Association, which punched out the latest developments on a continuous paper tape. Attlee resisted. Williams knew that the prime minister was a fanatical cricket fan. "This machine will give us the latest scores," he advised. Attlee relented and the machine was installed.
A few days later a distraught Attlee burst into his press adviser's office,from which the political coorespondents had just departed after the briefing of the day. "Francis, Francis, come quickly," he pleaded. "The cricket machine is telling us what happened at this morning's Cabinet meeting."