David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  My role prior to the debacle had been to keep in touch with all the interest groups, speak in the country and on television in favour of deregulation and try and keep the Party on side. I, like most Conservative MPs, had to put up with a lot of aggravation. I found the opponents of reform incredibly sanctimonious. One woman in Clitheroe told me at great length that she was able to organise her life in a way which avoided the need to go shopping on Sundays and she was surprised I could not organise mine. She looked at me pityingly when I said I often arrived back in London at nine o’clock or later on a Sunday evening and I did not think I was doing anything very wrong when I called at a shop in Tottenham Court Road and bought myself a loaf of bread and a sausage roll. The churches organised a meeting in Clitheroe and the vicar in charge told me that I was there to hear the views of ordinary people on the issue. The audience did not seem to me to be particularly ordinary. For a start it did not seem to include all those ordinary people in Clitheroe who bought a Sunday paper, who went to the car wash or to fill up with petrol on a Sunday, who took the family out for a ride in the car on a Sunday and stopped at a café or pub for lunch. But I listened patiently, comforted by the fact that the vicar had said that there would be no vote at the end. Unfortunately for me, in the closing minutes he suffered a rush of blood to the head, forgot his promise and decided to have a vote after all. The result was astonishing, beating all political records. Against Sunday trading 492: for Sunday trading 4: with four abstentions. Another Waddington record!

  Towards the end of my time as Minister of State there was a great fuss over our attempts to remove sixty-four Tamils who arrived with bogus credentials and then claimed asylum. There was also the notorious case of Viraj Mendis who, having come to England as a student and then abandoned his studies, had married in an attempt to stay in the country. The marriage only lasted a couple of months but when steps were taken to return him to Sri Lanka he claimed he was a communist and Tamil supporter. He would therefore be persecuted if sent home. Eventually he was given ‘sanctuary’ in a church in Manchester and a campaign started on his behalf.

  One day a crowd of demonstrators descended on Clitheroe and started baying outside the Conservative offices where I was holding my surgery. Gilly went out into the street and, without saying who she was, advised them to march round the town to rally support. She then tacked herself on to the back of the procession, singing lustily with the rest: ‘Viraj Mendis is a warrior. David Waddington is a bastard’. The people of Clitheroe had a really good day.

  At New Year 1987 we were kept awake by a series of phone calls about Viraj Mendis – some threatening, some obscene. When the phone rang for the umpteenth time, Gilly leaned across the bed, grabbed the receiver out of my hand and shouted: ‘We know where you are. My job is to keep you talking until the police come and get you.’ A rather pained voice replied: ‘Madam, I am the police. The Daily Mirror has just rung the police in Manchester to say that they have received a message from an anonymous caller saying that a bomb has been placed in your house and that you have three minutes to get out of the place. Well, you had three minutes but this call has taken so long, there’s probably now only thirty seconds.’ Gilly jumped out of bed. I said ‘What’s going on?’ She said ‘I’ll tell you in the garden.’

  One night in the middle of January we were in Denny Street when a mob assembled outside the front door and started bawling abuse about the Mendis case. I rang the police and a very senior officer with a lot of braid on his shoulders read out a long statement saying they had to disperse. One of the mob stepped forward and without a flicker of a smile said: ‘But our train for Manchester does not leave for another hour. Can’t we carry on shouting for just a few more minutes?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said the officer, at which the mob muttered and grumbled off down the road, and we went to bed in peace.

  After I had moved on to be Chief Whip, Viraj Mendis was eventually removed to Sri Lanka where our embassy monitored his progress. He went back to live with his well-to-do parents, showed no interest in the Tamils and was himself of no interest to the Sri Lankan authorities. Mr Stewart, who was British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka from 1984–7, wrote to the Daily Telegraph:

  I was intimately involved in the affair from the time that Mr Mendis first claimed that he would be in danger if he returned to his own country. Having now retired from the diplomatic service I have no particular axe to grind, but I would like to set the record straight. Mr Mendis first claimed that he would be arrested on return because he was a well-known supporter of the Tamil cause. In 1985 and 1986 none of the Tamil activists with whom I spoke had ever heard of him. Nor, although I and my staff monitored the British papers to gauge the extent of support in Britain for the Tamil separatist cause, had we encountered any mention of his name.

  When Mr Mendis made his claim, I made discreet inquiries with the Sri Lankan authorities to see whether he was wanted by them for any offence. I did this before there had been any publicity about him in the country. Neither the police nor the security authorities had any record of him. In fact, when publicity about his case became widespread, it took the authorities some weeks to identify Mr Mendis as there was no record of him in any of their files.

  When David Waddington, then a Home Office minister, visited Sri Lanka in 1987 he obtained from the President and from the Secretary of Internal Security, in my presence, categorical assurances that Mr Mendis was not wanted for any offences in Sri Lanka and that no action of any sort would be taken against him if he returned.

  He now claims that if he returns he will be in danger from one of the chauvinist Sinhalese groups. He has no stature in any of the political or terrorist groups either of the left or of the right; of the Tamil or of the Sinhalese sides. Neither the government nor the various terrorist groups have any interest in Mr Mendis or in his continued existence in or out of Sri Lanka.

  The truth is that Mr Mendis and his supporters have erected a cause célèbre here in Britain about nothing at all. He has succeeded in over-staying his leave to be here for some ten or more years. Mr Mendis is a young man who has managed to enlist sympathy here about his importance in his native country where no one seems to have any malign, or indeed any, interest at all in him.

  On 19 February 1987 a piece in the Daily Telegraph, headed ‘WHY DR NO CAN’T BE MR NICE GUY’, by Nicholas Comfort, summed up pretty well the difficulties of the job I had been doing for over four years:

  There are two ministerial posts even the most ambitious MP hopes to avoid: under-secretary at the DHSS dealing with social security cases, and minister of state at the Home Office responsible for immigration. The second job is the worse, as the blunt Lancastrian QC is now discovering.

  Given that his job has always been regarded as one of the classic ‘no-win’ positions in government, Waddington is now trusted to ride out storms like the current furore over his attempt to deport sixty-four Tamils who arrived with bogus credentials and claimed asylum.

  His handling of the introduction of visas from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana last year, and his whittling away of MPs’ right to defer expulsions while they look into the facts has infuriated the Opposition but left few scars. He even got away last month with announcing that police and immigration officers had detained twenty-six suspected illegal immigrants from West Africa who were working for contract cleaners at two Home Office buildings.

  And there is a strongly Dickensian aspect to him as he meets Labour anger at a new visa scheme or the deportation of Tamils with cries of ‘humbug’. Much of the job is psychology, telling the serious appeal from the hard luck story or detecting when the Opposition’s apparent fury is really just ritual. In the Commons Waddington has, for this government, an almost uniquely Victorian air, possibly because his stern yet rounded features and his tonsure of whitening hair come straight from the sketchbook of Charles Tenniel.

  One of the problems I had to deal with as Minister of State was that of polygamous wives, and it illustrates how puncti
lious is our civil service in affording to all what appear to be their full rights.

  There had come to my notice a large number of cases in which men settled in Britain had brought into the country second wives by polygamous marriages. In each case the entry clearance officer at our post abroad had concluded that although the man had lived in Britain for years he was not domiciled in Britain because he had not demonstrated a fixed intention to abandon his domicile of origin in Pakistan. As polygamy was lawful in Pakistan, the marriage contracted there was valid under our law. I took the view that we should certainly scrutinise most carefully every such case.

  As the general election drew near I made a speech on immigration, pointing out that every policy statement by Labour represented a weakening of the control. It provoked a letter of congratulation from the Prime Minister. Between 1983 and 1987 we made a lot of friends among the ethnic minority communities in spite of the difficult and often unpopular job I had to do. We were particularly friendly with Ashraf el-Doulah and his beautiful wife Jasmine – Ashraf being, I think, third in command at the Bangladesh High Commission in London. One Easter we had Ashraf and Jasmine to stay with us in Lancashire and on the first night gave a dinner party in their honour. Ashraf thoroughly enjoyed himself and at one stage a Lancashire friend of mine turned to him and said: ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, old boy, but I thought Muslims weren’t supposed to drink.’ ‘Quite so,’ said Ashraf, ‘but I look at it this way. I know there will be no port in the next life so I had better enjoy it now.’

  Then there was the strange case of Professor Bedi, his wife Kuldip and little Piti. The professor was a great Conservative supporter in, if I recall, Ealing and he decided to stand for the chairmanship of the Anglo-Asian Conservative Association, sure of the support of conservative-minded Sikhs. Little Piti came for tea with his mother Kuldip and all I can remember of that occasion is that Basil, our Norfolk terrier, rushed out of the kitchen and jumped on Kuldip’s lap, causing Kuldip to throw up her hands in terror and deposit her tea in the middle of the floor. Then Kuldip took off for India and went to visit in gaol a Sikh suspected of terrorism. For this heinous offence she was put in gaol herself. Terry Dicks, Kuldip’s MP, set off to India to rescue her. He returned empty-handed but gave everyone in the House of Commons a marvellous afternoon’s entertainment. He asked the minister, Lynda Chalker, whether she was aware that he had been to India to see the Indian authorities about his constituent Mrs Bedi and that on being shown into the Indian minister’s room the latter had said: ‘Now first, Mr Dicks, what is the present you have brought for me?’ I thought the minister would have the vapours. The Foreign Office then got into a terrible fret because the Indian government started hinting darkly that Mrs Bedi and terrorists like her had friends in high places. One such was, they believed, a minister in the Home Office. I don’t know whether a spy employed by the Indian government had reported that Kuldip had been to tea at the Waddingtons’ or poor Kuldip had been talking in gaol of our friendship in the hope that it would do her some good. But perhaps at the end it did stand her in good stead; for a month or two later she was released from detention and reunited with her family.

  * Sir Gordon Reece, adviser to Margaret Thatcher 1975–9, Director of Publicity, Conservative Central Office 1978–80, and public affairs consultant.

  * The oath I took on becoming QC is on page 84.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Chief Whip

  Much has been written about the 1987 general election campaign and conflicts between the Prime Minister and Central Office, but we never really looked like losing. I spent almost every day travelling from constituency to constituency in the north of the country. On one trip to Huddersfield some West Indians invited me into their home where they were watching cricket and drinking rum – more attention being paid to the latter activity than the former. On leaving I asked the detective who was keeping an eye on me, ‘What are those curious plants in the front garden?’ ‘Cannabis, sir,’ he replied.

  The result of the election in Ribble Valley was very satisfactory:

  D. Waddington (Conservative) 30,136

  M. Carr (SDP/Alliance) 10,608

  G. Pope (Labour) 8,781

  Conservative majority 19,528

  The Conservatives had won handsomely in the country, so the Friday after polling day, 12 June, was a day of anxious waiting. I had some idea of what might happen to me. I did not think for one moment that I would be sacked, but having been a Minister of State for so long I was bound to be moved. It seemed to me there were only two possibilities. I was going to be either Chief Whip or Solicitor-General. John Wakeham had told me that after the 1983 general election he had motored home from his constituency on the Friday and had just got into the house at 10 p.m. when he received a call from No. 10, so I was expecting a call at about that time; and at ten precisely the telephone rang and the Prime Minister invited me to be Chief Whip. She asked me to get to London as soon as possible so that we could discuss ministerial changes the following morning, and I threw a few things in to a bag, said goodbye to Gilly and set off in the car. I arrived in London at about 1.30 a.m. and went to bed a happy man.

  I later learned from Nigel Lawson that I was second choice for Chief Whip. The Prime Minister wanted John Major, but Nigel wanted him in his Treasury team as Chief Secretary and Nigel won the day. When I went in to No. 12 on the Saturday morning someone had forgotten to put away John Wakeham’s notes and in those my name appeared as a possible Solicitor-General. Whether John Major would have become Prime Minister had he spent a sizable part of the 1987 parliament as Chief Whip is extremely doubtful. If I had been made Solicitor-General I certainly would not have become Home Secretary.

  I saw the Prime Minister at 9 a.m. on the Saturday and then set to work with John Wakeham on the middle-rank and junior ministers. Later in the day we had another meeting with the Prime Minister. Willie Whitelaw was there and after a while he told the Prime Minister she looked tired out and should pack it in until Monday. She agreed, very reluctantly.

  Two good tales about the 1987 election should be recorded: the first concerned Ian Gilmour who failed to turn up for his own count at Amersham. When asked why, he said he had forgotten the way to the Town Hall. The other story is of a misfortune suffered by Dr Alan (later Sir Alan) Glyn at Windsor & Maidenhead. He asked a group of Young Conservatives to come to his hotel in the morning to go canvassing with him. They duly turned up but there was no Dr Glyn. Eventually a search party went up to his room. There was no immediate sign of him, but there was an old-fashioned wardrobe lying face down on the floor and the team set about restoring it to an upright position. Underneath it they discovered the good doctor. In the middle of the night he had set off to go to the lavatory but instead of going through the door in to the bathroom he had found his way in to the cupboard. The cupboard had fallen over trapping him inside and he had spent the rest of the night there.

  No. 12 Downing Street is at the far end of Downing Street from Whitehall at the top of the steps leading down to St James’s Park. It was once the Colonial Office and in the anteroom is a copy of Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Wellington in which she records that in that very anteroom took place the only meeting between Wellington and Nelson. Nelson was waiting to see the Secretary for War and for the Colonies, Lord Castlereagh, only a few days before he set out to join HMS Victory at Portsmouth and sail south for his last battle.

  As Chief Whip I was following some very illustrious predecessors. Ted Heath had helped the Tory Party to survive the Suez debacle of 1956 and Francis Pym had masterminded Britain’s entry in to the European Community in 1973. Disraeli had once remarked that the government Chief Whip required ‘consummate knowledge of human nature, the most amiable flexibility and complete self-control.’ I was not sure that that sounded like me.

  My secretary and right-hand-man was to be Murdo Maclean. Murdo had become secretary to the Chief Whip in 1978 and only two others had held the post before him. The first was appoin
ted in 1917 when Lloyd George was Prime Minister, and his salary was paid by Conservative Central Office. When, in 1923, a Labour government came along the Labour Party wanted to keep the same man on but could not afford to pay him. So by the stroke of a pen he was transformed into a civil servant.

  The job of a Chief Whip’s secretary is very unusual. He forms an important part of ‘the usual channels’ and has to spend much of his time frequenting the various bars in the Palace of Westminster trying to strike deals with the Opposition to facilitate the progress of parliamentary business. For two years before I arrived on the scene life had been complicated for Murdo because the Opposition Chief Whip with whom most of the negotiating had to take place was Derek Foster – a member of the Salvation Army who did not drink. Michael Cox, Derek Foster’s predecessor, had been a very different cup of tea (if I may use a somewhat inapposite metaphor) and the business had been transacted in a most convivial atmosphere.

  My team in the Office could not have been better. My deputy was David Hunt, very efficient and superb when it came to sorting out the detailed work of the office. After him came Bob Boscawen, the old soldier who hopefully could ensure the good behaviour of the old and bold on the back benches, and then Tristan Garel-Jones, known for his guile and subtle stratagems. There was not much subtlety about David Lightbown who came next in seniority. He was the heavyweight whom no troublemaker would willingly meet on a dark night.

  Mark Lennox-Boyd was skilled in the handling of the well-born, and Tony Durant of those who had had fewer advantages. Michael Neubert was utterly dependable in any circumstances. Stephen Dorrell, Richard Ryder and Alan Howarth were the intellectuals of the office and Kenneth Carlisle, Peter Lloyd and David Maclean the workers. Altogether a very balanced outfit.