David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  At about this time I had a protracted battle with Cecil Parkinson who wanted to introduce random breath tests for motorists. I pointed out that the police already had the power to stop any vehicle at any time without any reason and if, having stopped a vehicle, an officer formed a reasonable suspicion that alcohol had been taken, the breathalyser could be used. What more did the Department of Transport want? It seemed they had set their hearts on the police being able to set up road blocks at four o’clock in the afternoon in order to breathalyse every granny coming back with her shopping, and I was delighted to put a stop to what, at best, was mere window dressing and, at worst, would do great damage to relations between the police and law-abiding members of the public. I have to say that in a long life in the law and politics I have learned that there is one temptation to which the police find it easy to succumb – they would rather book for minor offences polite members of the middle classes not addicted to giving them lip than deal with crime among less salubrious members of society. We should help them to resist this temptation not give way to it.

  In that summer my private secretary announced that the Prime Minister wanted what was called a ‘bilateral’ – a meeting with a minister on his own to sort out something worrying her. My officials seemed to be in a highly anxious state about the request, with one saying, ‘You don’t think she wishes to discuss the BBC licence fee? You will do your best, Secretary of State, to keep her off that.’ Arriving at No. 10 I was surprised at the perspicacity of the official who had last spoken to me because the Prime Minister’s opening shot was: ‘I want to talk about getting rid of the licence fee.’ I said that there should be plenty of time to talk about that but first I had to have her consent to a number of official appointments, and I made sure that took a fair amount of time. ‘Now,’ she said with relish, ‘let’s get to the licence fee. I am sure we discussed abolition in one of the committee meetings last session on the Broadcasting Bill.’ I said I had no recollection of that but the Prime Minister’s response was to call for the production of the minutes of the various meetings so that she could prove how faulty was my memory. After a little while a man staggered in with an enormous pile of paper in his arms. Margaret grabbed a fair amount of it and then, having flicked through a number of pages while sitting in her chair, flung herself on the floor to complete her search, bidding me to follow her. Her search proved, as I knew it would, fruitless, and when we had got to our feet someone came to the door and said: ‘Prime Minister, the Israeli Ambassador has already been waiting for twenty minutes.’ ‘Infuriating,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘the licence fee will have to wait for another meeting.’ Back I went to the Home Office and when I got there my private secretary said: ‘Did she get to discussing the licence fee?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well done,’ said my private secretary.

  Whenever there is a dearth of news, the press find a child which has been bitten by a dog. As all the dog biting stories occur in June and July I think you can take it that there is less news in June and July than in other months of the year. When the press start reporting that children are being bitten, the wise Home Secretary tries not to think about it. The dogs will stop biting in August, or rather the press will be on holiday in August and will stop writing about it. The unwise Home Secretary will introduce legislation when the press say dogs have started biting. The wise Home Secretary will do precisely nothing.

  It does become slightly more complicated when it is the Home Secretary’s dog which is doing some of the biting, and Basil let us down badly. On 23 July, Gilly tied Basil up outside a shop in Pimlico Road and then a little later, as she was paying her bill, she saw through the shop window a little boy about to put his nose close to Basil’s teeth in a gesture of affection. Basil was a bit standoffish with young people to whom he had not been properly introduced and before you could say teeth he snapped at and narrowly missed the little lad’s nose. A brutish type who might have been the boy’s father then commenced to beat Basil about the head with a bag loaded, Gilly suspected, with burglary tools, and then, having meted out a great deal of punishment, picked the boy up, saying he was going to take him to hospital.

  Gilly reported all this to me when I returned home in the evening and I was not confident that we had heard the last of the matter. We had not. On 30 July we got a letter from the police saying that what had happened had been reported but because it was an isolated matter they were taking no action. We thanked our lucky stars but our luck did not last long. In the middle of August the Mail on Sunday rang and the next day a banner headline covering the two centre pages read: ‘basil’s day of shame’. Happily the story underneath was in fact not too shaming. The writer appeared to have accepted Gilly’s side of the story and treated the man with the bag which may or may not have contained burglary tools as the villain of the piece, but it was not the sort of publicity my press office would have sought.

  On 23 July came reshuffle day. The Prime Minister rang at nine in the morning and asked me if I would let John Patten go to be Minister for the Civil Service and the Arts. Reluctantly I said ‘Yes’ – reluctantly because John had done much work on the Criminal Justice Bill and I had been assuming that he would pilot it through the House after its introduction at the very beginning of the next session in October.

  When I told John Patten what was afoot he protested that he knew little about the arts and hated what he did know. If given the job he would soon be found out to be the philistine he was. For instance, if asked when he had last been to the opera his reply would be: ‘Never’. I rang Charles Powell at No. 10 and told him the difficulty. His reply was not unreasonable: ‘If Patten won’t do, who do you suggest?’ I said that I wanted to keep my present team, but if I had to lose one or other of my ministers of state it was far better that David Mellor should go because he rather liked the arts. Charles said he would ask the Prime Minister and a little while later he phoned back and said she agreed.

  I then had the unenviable task of telling David Mellor, who became quite apoplectic. It was an insult to offer him such a dead-end job. I went into a meeting and half way through I was passed a message that David Mellor wanted to speak to me urgently. I went outside and he was still waxing indignant and saying he was not prepared to take the job. I got cross and went back in to my meeting. Half an hour later when it ended I turned on the television and there was David before the cameras saying what a great honour had been bestowed on him – that Minister for the Arts was the job he had always wanted and he was the happiest man alive. I thought it very sporting of him in the circumstances and proved what a grand trooper he was.

  That was not the end of my reshuffle difficulties. A moment or two later the Prime Minister was on the line saying she was glad I had been prepared to spare David but that she had now decided that I would have to part with John Patten as well. She wanted him as Paymaster General and offered me Douglas Hogg instead. I certainly had nothing against Douglas who was immensely able but I felt it was unfair to ask me to see my team completely broken up. Eventually she agreed to leave John Patten with me.

  A week later on the morning of 30 July I had just got in to my office when I was told that a bomb had gone off outside Ian Gow’s home near Eastbourne. In a further call a minute or two later I learned that he was dead. I had an appointment with the Prime Minister, and when I got to No. 10 she already knew about Ian and was very upset. She had always been very fond of Ian as he had been of her. ‘Give me work,’ she said to her private secretary, ‘and I don’t want any engagements cancelled. I have got to keep myself busy.’ I went out into Downing Street and was caught by the press. I said that there were times when it was difficult not to hate. Ian was a good man and he had been blown to bits by the scum of the earth.

  Gilly and I had planned a week’s holiday in St Mawes and we travelled down to Cornwall with our policemen to find that the Devon and Cornwall Police were determined not to be left out of the show and had more or less taken over the hotel. They had also found someone with a boat who w
as detailed to guard us on the water. We went sailing on a yacht chartered by Gerry Neale, then MP for North Cornwall, and helped by a strong wind we zipped along in fine style with five policemen in a tiny motor boat bouncing along on the top of the waves beside us. Our chaps from the Met looked decidedly queasy.

  After three days we came back to London and travelled down to Eastbourne for Ian’s funeral. It was a very high church affair ending with a superb address by the Bishop of Lewes. We then had tea at the Dog House (Ian and Jane’s home) before flying back to Cornwall.

  Jenny, my elder daughter, was in Australia on a so-called working holiday and she had left a message at the hotel asking us to ring her the following Monday. When I got in touch she sounded rather quiet and pensive and the best I hoped for was that she wanted a thousand pounds to restore her finances. I asked her if anything was wrong and she said, ‘You had better speak to Robbie.’ Daughters really should not do that sort of thing to fathers, and I expected the worst. When, therefore, I heard what this Robbie had to say I was amazed but relieved. ‘You will think this very odd, sir,’ said a very Australian voice, ‘but Jenny insists on my doing things properly. May I have your daughter’s hand in marriage?’ ‘What a damn silly question,’ said I. ‘I haven’t even clapped eyes on you.’ Robbie’s reaction was, however, so mournful that I immediately took pity on him. ‘There there,’ said I, ‘if Jenny thinks you a nice lad I suppose it will be all right.’ Thus was parental consent sought and sort of given.

  It happened that in September we were due to go to Australia on a ministerial visit and these extraordinary family happenings proved to be of great interest to the Australian police and secret service, and to our own High Commissioner, Sir John Coles. The police and secret service wanted to check out Robbie to make sure he did not make bombs. Sir John said he thought it would be nice for Robbie and Jenny to be with him at Sydney Airport when we flew in and he would make arrangements accordingly. When we landed, however, only Sir John, looking rather bleak, was waiting at the bottom of the steps. I asked him where the lovebirds were and he explained that his driver had been sent to Jenny’s address but as no one had answered the door, he had returned empty-handed. We went to our hotel harbouring murderous thoughts. An hour later there was a knock on our bedroom door and there they were; and pretty cocky too, in the circumstances. ‘Oh, what a fuss, Dad. We went to a party in the mess last night and I overslept.’ I told them in no uncertain terms that they had got themselves in deep trouble, and that as we were going on a trip round Sydney Harbour that afternoon with the top brass including the Premier and Chief of Police of New South Wales they had better use it as an opportunity to redeem themselves. They did. As soon as Robbie got on the boat, John Coles asked him what he did for a living. Robbie replied that he was in the army but had spent most of his life playing cricket. John Coles declared his addiction to the game and Robbie and Jenny were both forgiven.

  After that near-disastrous start the Australian visit went very well. There were one or two scrummages in hotel lifts when the Australian police battled for ascendancy over our own detectives; but apart from that it was all sweetness and light. I visited various police forces, two police training establishments, at one of which I had to deliver a lecture, and a privatised prison run by a bluff Yorkshireman with an army background. The place seemed to be very well run but the key to its success might have been its size. Although there were a lot serving life sentences there were only 250 prisoners in all; the place looked manageable.

  We stayed with John Coles in Canberra before going on to Melbourne and there we dined at the Melbourne Club as guests of Sir John Young, Chief Justice of Victoria. In those days I was still smoking small cigars and when I lit up over cocktails my host cried, ‘Waiter, bring an ashtray.’ Nothing happened for a few minutes and then the waiter returned and in a stage whisper said: ‘Sir, there are no ashtrays in the club.’ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Sir John, ‘bring a saucer.’

  At the dinner table the Chief Justice let loose on Gilly a woman called Lady Derham. I could see from the other side that a furious altercation was in progress and when we rose Gilly told me that the woman had said: ‘Every Britisher in Northern Ireland should be thrown out.’ I thought that Gilly must have misunderstood and that what was being advocated was the usual ‘troops out’; and I went up to Lady Derham and told her politely that our troops had gone to Northern Ireland in the first place to defend the Catholics and there would be mayhem in Northern Ireland if our troops were just to quit the scene. She said that she was not only advocating that our troops should leave but that every Protestant in Northern Ireland should be expelled and sent back to Scotland. At that stage Gilly intervened and told her that by that logic everyone in Australia who was not an Aboriginal should clear off and she should set a good example by booking her own passage the next day. All in all it was quite a lively evening.

  Before going off to Australia I had decided to refer back to the Court of Appeal the case of the Birmingham Six. This was after receiving advice from the unit in the Home Office which then dealt with allegations of miscarriages of justice. Subsequently the Court concluded that the verdicts were unsafe and the convictions were overturned.

  In October came the Party Conference. On the eve of the home affairs debate Robin Oakley wrote in The Times that I should survive the ordeal. ‘Facing a conference audience Mr Waddington becomes generally heated. The Lancastrian growl and the “nowt for owt” style will come through.’ He was kind enough to add: ‘His short record as Home Secretary is in fact a respectable one for a man blinking in the light after a spell in the engine room murk of the Whips Office.’ I was pleased with the way things went and afterwards the Prime Minister was embarrassingly kind about it.

  I got a good write-up in the Daily Telegraph and could not complain about John Carvel’s piece in The Guardian which read:

  David Waddington, the Home Secretary, yesterday woke the Conservative Conference from its mood of acquiescent lethargy by appealing to its atavistic instincts for retribution against violent offenders, including the death penalty for the worst types of murder. Mrs Thatcher applauded as he asserted the deterrent value of restoring capital punishment. And the first Conservative Home Secretary in a generation from the traditional Tory right was rewarded with the first standing ovation of the week which owed more to real passion than politeness.

  The paradoxical result is that the Home Office will be able to proceed in the next session of Parliament with an essentially liberal Criminal Justice Bill to keep thieves and vandals out of prison.

  Mr Waddington persuaded the Tories he shared their values and he is now free to pursue his policy for punishing petty criminals in the community.

  Mr Waddington’s friends had feared he might get a critical reception because of the delay in ending the Strangeways riot in April and recent sharp increases in recorded crime, but he recovered his no-nonsense reputation with a well-crafted speech which touched all the buttons of Tory concern for law and order.

  Robin Oakley wrote: ‘Mr Waddington brought the conference to life with a well-judged performance in which he pressed all the right buttons to please the representatives, winning the most enthusiastic standing ovation so far.’

  Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph said:

  Within moments of beginning his address it was clear that this was not the type of Home Secretarial imitation toughness we were used to. This was the real thing, though hardly anybody alive had been to a Tory conference when it had been displayed, so long ago did real old-fashioned Tory Home Secretaries cease to exist. Lord Whitelaw or Mr Douglas Hurd would never have referred scornfully to ‘the mealy-mouthed claptrap of the left’ that attributes every crime to unfortunate social circumstances.

  As for Matthew Parris, I did not know whether to be pleased or sorry about his effort:

  With the body language of an outraged greengrocer, the instincts of a cautious pragmatist and rhetoric of an angry headmaster, Waddington was the first Home
Secretary I can remember who brought a Tory conference spontaneously to its feet. Standing by the backstage door as he and a delighted Mrs Thatcher exited together, I caught just the first half of her sentence: ‘David, you’re the first Home Secretary I can remember who…

  Later in October there was a Council of Ministers meeting in Naples. My main task was to make it plain that although in favour of a convention to reinforce and harmonise entry and visa procedures at the Community’s external frontiers, we intended to maintain checks at our national frontiers for the purpose of controlling immigration from third countries. We knew that some governments, prepared as usual to sign anything, had not the slightest intention of taking any steps to make the external frontier of the community secure, although the whole idea of the convention was that better immigration control at the Community’s external borders made safe the scrapping of controls between member states. Our partners told us that we had to abolish our controls on entry into Britain from the Continent. It was, they said, an obligation we had undertaken when we had signed the Single European Act. We, however, continued to argue that the free movement provisions of the Single European Act did not apply to nationals of third countries and we were entitled to have controls at, for instance, the Channel ports to prevent entry by such people. This was the advice the Prime Minister had been given by the Foreign Office before she agreed to go along with the Single European Act, and she was not best pleased when, subsequently, the law officers advised that in advancing this argument we were on extremely shaky ground. But on that ground, shaky though it was, we were determined to stand for as long as possible.