David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  To come across Sydney Silverman in a motor car was an unnerving experience. He was so short in the body that he could not see over the steering wheel of his Jaguar and oncoming motorists were confronted with what appeared to be a driverless vehicle. He was also a wily creature. There was a church service to herald the opening of the 1964 campaign. The vicar told me that I was to read the Old Testament lesson and Sydney the New, but he did not reveal that Sydney had insisted on choosing his own lesson. I read over the one that I had been given and was somewhat disappointed to discover that it was little more than a long genealogical table, beginning ‘Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob’ and thereafter down through the generations. But the day came, the service began and after singing a psalm I went up to the lectern and read the lesson with all the verve I could command, returning to my pew well satisfied. We then sang another psalm and it was Sydney’s turn. ‘Revelations Chapter 21’ he said and then, with a voice quivering with emotion, ‘I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth…’ When he was finished, I suspected that I was finished and that the campaign was lost before it had even begun. Sydney, however, had forgotten that Revelations Chapter 21 is part of the funeral service and some may think it poetic justice that a few years later he was under the sod and I was MP for Nelson & Colne.

  But back to 1964, and in a debate organised by the local churches, Sydney revealed how short could be his temper. He stormed off the platform because he disliked the way I answered a question about race relations. I pointed out the obvious – that we were hardly likely to have good race relations if we did not have firm immigration control – but it was not an answer to Sydney’s liking.

  In my election address I said that Labour’s slogan ‘Thirteen Wasted Years’ was patently untrue. In thirteen years of Conservative government the living standards of the British people had improved more than in the previous half-century. I did not claim that the government had bestowed all those benefits. I did say that what had been achieved could only have been achieved in a free enterprise system where individual effort, initiative and savings were encouraged, and that was the sort of system we would maintain.

  It all seemed very reasonable but I knew that I and all fighting under the Conservative banner were in difficulties – thirteen years was a long time and ‘Time for a Change’ was an attractive slogan for the unthinking. At the time I did not think it helped that the Tories were led by Alec Douglas-Home who looked like a figure from the past and did not appear a match for the nimble, quick-witted Wilson with all his talk of the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. I later came to see that Alec had done a fine job in almost impossible circumstances. For years the BBC in particular had seized every opportunity to portray the Conservative government and the Conservative Party as not just old-fashioned but degenerate and probably corrupt. In David Frost’s programme That Was the Week That Was individual MPs in Conservative marginals were picked upon as idle, incompetent, or both, with none of the evidence of wrongdoing – cash for questions and the like – which fuelled the ‘sleaze’ campaign against the Tories in the 1990s. So to have run Wilson so close was quite a triumph for Alec Douglas-Home. And, with a fall in the Labour majority to 2,644, I was quite pleased with my own result.

  Mark Carlisle was now in the House as member for Runcorn and I could not help feeling that, if I had arranged things better, I could have been in the House myself. But my restlessness and determination to get back into the fray clouded my judgement and I closed my mind to the fact that despite his thin majority Harold was in a very strong position. He could go back to the country at a moment of his own choosing claiming that he needed a bigger majority to carry out Labour’s programme.

  It was in this state of mind that I fell to the blandishments of Conservative Central Office and got myself adopted as prospective candidate for Heywood & Royton. It was a weary place, according to Gilly ‘curled around Rochdale like a sooty feather boa’, and next to it was grim Saddleworth Moor where at about that time Brady and Hindley were burying their victims. Until 1964 the constituency had been represented in Parliament by Tony Leavey (Conservative) but had then been won for Labour by Joel Barnett, who later became a Labour minister and in 1983 a peer. Joel’s 1964 majority was beguilingly small – 800 – but nobody told me before I threw my cap in the ring that a vast new overspill estate had just been completed at Darnhill – eight tower blocks which Joel later referred to as ‘his eight pillars of wisdom’.

  It was with great enthusiasm that I started working the constituency. I was described in the Daily Express as passionately provincial and quoted in the local paper as saying: ‘If you ask me for one reason why the Tories did worse here in the north-west than anywhere else, it was because we had too many MPs who dissociated themselves from the region as soon as they became MPs. They went to live in London.’

  The Conservative agent was a very elderly gentleman called Jim Somerville who had been in the job for longer than anybody could remember. The constituency Association provided him with a car, and one night I was coming out of a pub where I had been garnering votes and saw that Jim, having removed the back seat from the car, had packed it with sheep.

  Meanwhile, Gilly had fallen back on the maxim ‘when in doubt have a baby’. No one, however, had reminded her that it might be two, and it came as quite a shock to learn that twins were on the way. When the twins were born Jenny had dislocated hips and, on the advice of John Charnley, who pioneered artificial hips for elderly people, she was put in plaster from neck to toe. She had tremendous spirit and at children’s parties used to propel herself across the room by deft use of her powerful ankles. Alistair, her twin brother, with thumb in mouth, rode on her back as if astride an armoured warhorse. When in 1966 the general election campaign began, Gilly and I moved into a hotel outside Rochdale, taking Jenny with us but leaving Alistair with my parents-in-law. Late at night we lay in our beds with Jenny in a cot between us, trying without much success to rock her to sleep.

  It was a nightmare fortnight. There was little response on the doorstep to my plea that Harold Wilson was only having an election because he knew it was now or never, that there was bad news round the corner and Wilson wanted a bigger majority under his belt before the bad news broke. I listed Labour’s broken promises, principally their 1964 pledge that they would not need to increase the general level of taxation. That pledge looked pretty sick in 1966 after swingeing increases in income tax and hikes in the taxes on petrol, cigarettes and beer. So did their pledge to halt the rise in the cost of living, for costs had risen steeply and mortgage rates were at their highest level ever.

  In spite of many difficulties I managed to whip my supporters up into a frenzy of excitement and we had a magnificent rally on the last night when I shouted myself hoarse. But to no avail. The jovial Joel was returned to Westminster on April Fools’ Day 1966 with his majority greatly increased. And Harold Wilson set out to make complete fools of us all and bring down on Britain a financial crisis of massive proportions.

  In 1968 Enoch Powell made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Shortly afterward the Clitheroe Association asked him to speak at Padiham and as a former candidate I was invited along. There were queues of people trying to get into the hall and a sizable demonstration outside by banner-carrying Pakistanis. The atmosphere inside was electric and everyone waited with eager anticipation for the inflammatory rhetoric associated with the name of Powell. But he rose to his feet to deliver a dry as dust speech on the future of the ports industry which left people groaning with boredom. I do not know whether he did it as a prank or thought Padiham was on the seaside. But it taught the audience a good lesson.

  Late in 1967 Juby Lancaster, MP for South Fylde, announced his decision not to stand at the next general election and I was invited to put my name in for the seat. One of the front runners was Alan Green who had lost Preston South in 1964 and had failed to regain it in 1966, but he was quite happy for me to put my name forward as well in case the Association wanted a
younger man. At about the same time Nelson & Colne were in the process of adopting a candidate for a by-election following the death of Sydney Silverman, and Association chairman Derek Crabtree asked me to put my name forward. I had to tell him that I was awaiting interview at South Fylde and could not do so.

  At Easter 1968 we had arranged to take the children to Swanage for a short holiday, and on the day we were leaving home I received a letter from Richard Sharples, then vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, asking me to ring him as a matter of urgency. I did so from a call box on the journey south and he asked me to withdraw my name from South Fylde so that I could accept the invitation from Nelson & Colne. I told him I was not prepared to do so but asked him to get Nelson & Colne to postpone their selection for a week, i.e. until after the meeting at South Fylde. He said he could not possibly do so and the upshot was that Nelson & Colne selected a man called Penfold with bizarre consequences. I then attended the selection at South Fylde and together with Elaine Kellett-Bowman was eliminated, leaving Alan Green and Edward Gardner to fight it out in the final. No doubt I was very obstinate but at the time I thought it was right to stick to my guns.

  Derek Crabtree and the other Officers at Nelson & Colne were now landed with Penfold who, not being a local man, would not have been their first choice, and they soon began to seek a way out and pestered me with phone calls asking me to challenge Penfold even at that late stage. I could not see how I could possibly do so, but I was left in no doubt that on the night set for Penfold’s formal adoption there was going to be trouble.

  The night came and I was on the drawing room floor mending the vacuum when the telephone rang. It was Phil Somers, the treasurer of the Association. Would I come to the Nelson Club as quickly as possible? There had been a spot of bother. The general meeting of the Association had refused to adopt Penfold and wanted to adopt me. It sounded very strange and if I had had any sense I would have said so and stayed at home. But I got in my car and ten minutes later was parking outside the club. Phil Somers ran down the street towards me with a happy grin on is face which for the moment allayed my fears. In the secretary’s office I found a disconsolate Penfold and also Jean, the widow of John Crabtree who had for many years been a much respected Association chairman. Jean warned me that there would be big trouble if I went into the meeting but Phil Somers and Derek Crabtree, who by then had joined us, said they were in a terrible spot because of the rejection of Penfold. The by-election was almost on them, there simply was not time to start the selection procedure all over again, and they begged me to go in to the meeting and accept the candidature. So into the room I went and onto the platform. There was an uncanny stillness, a frosty, icy calm as Derek Crabtree asked me if I would be the candidate and I replied: ‘Yes.’ The motion that I should be adopted was then put to the vote and carried by a show of hands: but I could see from the disapproving and angry faces of some in the audience that there was a substantial minority who did not like what had happened and probably thought that there had been a carefully engineered conspiracy with me a co-conspirator.

  There was work to be done and I have never worked harder in my life. I rang up my clerk to tell him that I could not be in court for the next week and I set about visiting every single person who I was given to understand might have disapproved of my adoption, and eventually I persuaded each and everyone of them that there had been no jiggery pokery on my part and that I would be a worthy candidate in the by-election.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Becoming an MP

  Preparations for the by-election had to be made speedily and I set to work with a will. In the midst of it all I got a telephone call from a Paul Watson who said he was making a number of ‘year in the life’ films. He had recently completed a year in the life of a race horse and now wanted to do a year in the life of an MP. He had decided that I was going to win the by-election so wanted to follow me round before, during and after the campaign and throughout the coming year. I saw no harm in the idea but it turned out to be a gruelling experience. It caused great merriment among our friends when we started turning up at cocktail parties with a camera crew in tow. When eventually the film was shown on television Barney, our fell pony (true name Hades Hill Jupiter) was the star, tearing across the moors with Gilly on top. When Gilly was not on horseback she was seen and heard philosophising in a very plummy voice about the ills of the world and the beauty of Lancashire while driving a car at breakneck speed round twisting country lanes.

  My opponents in the by-election were Betty Boothroyd, Labour, later to become famous as a truly great Speaker of the House of Commons; a Liberal, David Chadwick; and an Independent, Brian Tattersall. Tattersall stood for tougher immigration control and the restoration of hanging. Capital punishment was much in the news with Sydney Silverman having introduced a Private Members’ Bill leading to its abolition, and Ian Brady and Myra Hindley having recently been tried for the Moors murders. I felt abolition had been a mistake but I did not make much of the issue. There were plenty of other things to talk about, particularly the dismal performance of the Labour government.

  An array of important people came to support me including Alec Douglas-Home (whose public meeting attracted 1,000 people), Quintin Hogg and Selwyn Lloyd. Betty Boothroyd was supported by Barbara Castle, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as he still called himself), Emanuel Shinwell and George Brown. None of their meetings were well attended and Betty herself made greater play of a telegram of support from Annie Walker of the Rover’s Return in Coronation Street. Selwyn Lloyd stayed with us at Whins House. When he came down to breakfast we asked him whether he had slept well. He said: ‘Yes, until about seven o’clock when I had two visitors in my bed. Once I had got Alistair to take his wet trousers off we became good friends.’

  Gilly worked unceasingly – attending meetings every evening and canvassing all day. We campaigned in beautiful weather and ran from door to door so that we would cover every street. I made much of the fact that I was the local man, I complained that Nelson & Colne had been neglected and its industry allowed to decline while the government lavished vast subsidies on Merseyside.

  The government had at about this time encouraged Courtaulds to set up in Skelmersdale. Courtaulds were naive enough to believe that outside the traditional textile areas they would be able to introduce efficient, new, labour-saving working practices. In fact, it was only a matter of months after the establishment of the factory that troublemakers moved in from Merseyside and after that it was downhill all the way. It turned out to be a major disaster for Courtaulds and a major disaster for north-east Lancashire which could well have used the new investment. All this was just around the corner when the by-election took place, but all my most pessimistic prognostications were borne out by events.

  A week before we polled there was a by-election in Oldham, and that safe Labour seat fell to the Tories. I began to relax. It seemed inconceivable that I could fail to win Nelson & Colne after that result and so it happened. At about 1 a.m. on 28 June the acting returning officer announced that I had won with a majority of 3,522. There had been an 11.4% swing from Labour to Conservative which, if reflected countrywide, would have given the Conservatives a massive 250 seat majority. The votes cast for each candidate were:

  Boothroyd (Labour) 12,944

  Chadwick (Liberal) 3,016

  Tattersall (English Nationalist) 1,255

  Waddington (Conservative) 16,466

  The next day was an anticlimax – a call from a newspaper at 8 a.m. asking for my comments and after that virtually the whole day with Paul Watson’s camera crew. But I did receive a call from the Chief Whip, Willie Whitelaw, to check that I would be reporting to his office at 2 p.m. the following Tuesday before taking my seat.

  On the Monday, Gilly and I plus Matthew and James set off for London and stayed overnight in my father-in-law’s flat in Whitehall Court. The camera crew said that they wanted film of my getting into a taxi at Whitehall Court and getting out at the Palace of Westminster and
that it would be impossible, for obvious reasons, for one crew to do both shots. Could we therefore be filmed getting into a cab on the Monday? ‘Yes,’ we said, but unfortunately when we hailed a taxi on the Tuesday it was a red one and the completed film showed that the cab we had got in to had turned red on the short journey down Whitehall.

  Matthew, then aged six, announced that he liked London and was going to stay until his teeth fell out. But his patience was exhausted long before the moment came for me to approach the Table flanked by Willie Whitelaw and Mark Carlisle. I then handed the returning officer’s writ to the clerk and took the oath to the loud baaing sound which is customary on such occasions. The whole thing went without a hitch, but only just. Minutes before I was due in the chamber I woke up to the fact that I had lost the writ, and a feverish hunt ensued. Eventually it was discovered in one of the many lavatories in the Palace. The experience led to a slight alteration in my perception of the Labour Party. How easy it would have been for some malicious fellow to have flushed the writ away, leaving me embarrassed and seatless!

  After taking the oath I shook hands with Mr Speaker King and then went to meet the Leader of the Opposition. Ted Heath had become leader three years before, it being thought that he was a great debater who would knock spots off Harold Wilson. But in office he never showed himself able to knock spots off anything or anybody. As an elder statesman he learned to make a good authoritative contribution from the front bench below the gangway but he had few debating skills and his stodginess of approach made him a sure loser in any tussle with the wily Wilson.