David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  My move was, however, quite well received by the national press. Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph wrote:

  Mr Waddington’s imaginative appointment as Leader of the Lords is a great bonus. As a minister of long and varied experience and as a former Chief Whip, he should be able to defuse some of the myriad difficulties the government faces in the Lords, where its natural majority all too often acts against it.

  One small consolation was the Leader of the Lords’ magnificent room directly over the peers’ entrance in Old Palace Yard; but my first job was not to get my feet under the desk, but my bottom on the red benches. This involved choosing a title and being introduced into the Lords as soon as possible. It did not take me long to settle on Waddington, of Read in the County of Lancashire; and Garter King of Arms did a fine job hastening on the formalities so that the introduction could take place before Christmas.

  This was how the scene was described in the Lancashire Evening Post:

  The 61-year-old Burnley-born Tory made none of the fuss that Baroness Castle caused when she was initiated as a life member of the aristocracy a year ago. There was no repeat of her objections to the red and ermine robes or her point blank refusal to wear and doff her hat.

  Mr Waddington, the typical Tory officer and gentleman, was the soul of obedience and respect for tradition. At just after 2.30 p.m. he was led in by Black Rod – Air Vice-Marshall Sir John Gyngell and Garter King of Arms, Sir Colin Cole. His prime supporter, government Chief Whip Lord (Bertie) Denham, and his secondary supporter, Lord Carlisle of Bucklow – former Education Secretary Mark Carlisle – followed three paces behind. With an audience which included Baroness Castle in an autumn print dress, former Prime Minister Lord Callaghan in a grey suit and ex-Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham with his inevitable stick, the three made their stately pace through the red and gold splendour of the Lords. The words that established the new Lord Waddington as a trusty counsellor of the Queen were read and he shook hands with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern. Nodding his head in the direction of the Queen’s chairman of the Lords, Baron Waddington and his supporters processed round the Chamber. They then took their seats at the side and respectfully put on their black hats, which date from the era when Wellington won Waterloo. With Garter King of Arms facing them, they doffed their archaic headgear three times to Lord Mackay, rose and, once more led by Black Rod, processed out of the Chamber. Mr Waddington – barrister and former Crown Court recorder of true Lancashire mill-owning stock – was now a peer of the realm for life.

  I then got a bill from Garter King of Arms for £1,630, the fee for a grant of armorial bearings with supporters. The covering letter read like double dutch: ‘You might care to suggest the tinctures which you would like to see employed and also such symbols and devices as are of appeal to you and would look well upon your shield or forming the crest.’

  I soon discovered that my new job was far from taxing. Most mornings there was virtually nothing to do. I would call my private secretary and ask her to bring in some work and after a while one letter would appear and a notice of a meeting of the Dorneywood Trust of which I was chairman. If I had remained Home Secretary, I would probably have been about to occupy Dorneywood. Instead I was told, as if a great prize was being bestowed on me, that I could stay in South Eaton Place which I heartily loathed. John Major had told me that, as Leader, I would be his right-hand man, but within a matter of weeks it was obvious that that was not going to be the case – through no fault of the Prime Minister. Ninety per cent of the business management problems of the government were House of Commons problems and what happened in the Lords was small beer. Furthermore, with a general election not all that far off the Party Chairman’s role was of great importance and time and again, when I saw the Prime Minister with John MacGregor (the new Leader of the House of Commons) on a Monday, our meeting lasted only a few minutes because the matters the Prime Minister thought important had already been covered in an earlier meeting with Chris Patten, the new Party Chairman.

  I had to make my maiden speech from the dispatch box. Lord Elton initiated a debate on sentencing policy which gave me the opportunity to talk of the Criminal Justice Bill which I had introduced in the Commons the previous month. The debate was like most of those I had to listen to as Leader – well informed but sleep-inducing – with the Tory peers as critical of the government as the Opposition. Six former Home Office ministers spoke after me and a former permanent secretary; and I soon discovered that even in those days, when the hereditary peers far outnumbered the lifers, nearly all who took part in important debates had had distinguished careers in industry, the academic world or public service and made really well-informed contributions. Peers did not queue up at the Whips Office asking for a one-page brief on a subject down for debate, as sometimes happens in the Commons. Whips did not go around the place asking people to speak in order to keep a debate going until the hour at which a division had been arranged, as also happens in the Commons. People who knew what they were talking about put their names down to speak and their records entitled them to be listened to with respect. When I opened a debate during the Gulf War I was followed by two Field Marshals and after that experience I did not think I knew all there was to know about warfare.

  Question Time I found a worry. It was not often that I had to answer any questions myself but I had to sit on the front bench worrying about the performance of others. There were few departmental ministers in the Lords, certainly not one in every department, so very often questions had to be answered by the Whips (entitled ‘Lords in Waiting’). They did their best to mug up on subjects raised but they were either not particularly well briefed by the government department concerned (departments attached little importance to what was going on in the Lords) or they were not skilled enough to know what extra briefing they needed. As a result, they were always at risk of being caught out. Andrew Davidson, the deputy Chief Whip, provided a briefing for new whips in biblical language, part of which read: ‘A Lord in waiting should stick to his brief. The further he strayeth from it, the deeper the pit he diggeth for himself to fall into; and if he knoweth not the answer, he should say so but not too often.’

  In February 1991 there was the mortar attack on Downing Street. My room in the Privy Council Office overlooked Downing Street and I could see from my desk the usual group of photographers outside No. 10. Suddenly there was a loud bang and a cloud of black smoke rose above the roof of No. 12. I rushed down the stairs and out into the street and hammered on the door of No. 10. When I got inside a number of people were coming through the connecting door from No. 11. Nobody seemed to be injured and as there was nothing useful I could do, I went back into Downing Street and had a somewhat inconsequential conversation with a chap carrying a television camera on his shoulder. I was mightily surprised when I saw the news that night and found the whole conversation had been filmed. No harm had been done but I should have taken more care. I repeated in the Lords the statement on the incident made by Kenneth Baker in the Commons.

  Gilly’s father died in February. He could have been a great poet and would, I think, have made a more successful poet than he was a politician. He was a very intelligent man but his plain speaking, his refusal to suffer fools and his determination to fight marginal seats in Lancashire rather than seek a safe haven further south ruined his chances of rising as high as he deserved in government. His death left us a load of trouble. Under his will Whins House, where we had lived since 1965, had been left to Gilly and her two sisters equally so we could only stay there if we bought out her sisters.

  We could not buy them out by selling our own house, The Stables, where the Greens had been living, because we would have had to pay a vast sum in capital gains tax as a result of The Stables not having been our residence. So a family arrangement made with the best will in the world twenty-five years earlier (the swapping of the two houses without transferring ownership) turned out to have been a monumental blunder. Eventually, we decided to do up
The Stables and go back there. Gilly made a marvellous job of the alterations and it turned out all right in the end.

  I was very worried as to what was going to happen in the by-election caused by my elevation. My advice to the Ribble Valley Association was that they should pick someone with previous parliamentary experience and local connections. There was only one person who fitted the bill, Derek Spencer, whose parents had a farm in Waddington, and he would have been excellent. The Association, however, thought nothing of my advice. They saw Derek and thought him boring, and chose a very worthy young Welshman, Nigel Evans. Nigel has, since 1992, served Ribble Valley extremely well, but he was a strange choice for a by-election in the middle of a parliament when even a local person was going to have an uphill struggle. The by-election came – and my 19,000 majority went down the chute. I had precipitated the by-election, I had lost it for the Party and what had I got in return? The leadership of a House in which one’s own side had little idea of party loyalty and no compunction about embarrassing the government they had pledged themselves to support. I felt like cutting my throat.

  There were some moments that brought me cheer. In the spring of 1991 Mikey Strathmore* asked me if I would give a cocktail party in my room in honour of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother who, being a relation of his, was coming to dine in the Lords’ Dining Room. Queen Elizabeth arrived with her private secretary, Sir Martyn Gilliatt. It was rather hot and I thought Sir Martyn looked a bit vacant. The next moment he fell as if poleaxed. I thought he was dead. A number of people gathered round, someone went out to find a doctor. Queen Elizabeth, looking down kindly on him, said: ‘He’s always doing that,’ and then carried on chatting with those around her.

  I mentioned earlier that when Home Secretary I reintroduced the War Crimes Bill and saw it carried through the House of Commons for a second time with little dissent. On 30 April 1991, I had to move the second reading in the Lords. The Bill was word for word the same as the one the Lords had rejected in 1990. This was intentional. If it had been different in any material respect then, on rejection by the Lords, the Parliament Act would not have applied and the Bill would not automatically have become law. But the fact that the Bill was in the same terms did not mean that the government had made up its mind in advance to reject any amendments. I made this abundantly plain in my opening speech,* and it was absolutely obvious to me, and ought to have been just as obvious to the House, that it was in the interests of opponents of the Bill to give it a second reading. If it was rejected at second reading, it would become law immediately – warts and all. If, on the other hand, it got a second reading, the House would then have endless opportunities to either improve it by amendment or harass the government throughout a long hot summer and hope that eventually it would feel it had better things to do with its time.

  Luckily for the government the noble lords or, rather, a majority of them did not grasp these obvious points and the Bill was rejected and duly became law. The tactics of the Bill’s opponents were plain stupid but their speeches were often brilliant. Douglas Houghton, who, having fought at Paschendale, must have known as much about the horrors of warfare as any man, and Hartley Shawcross, who prosecuted at Nuremberg, made truly magnificent contributions. Roy Jenkins mounted a most extraordinary argument – namely that it was perfectly proper for a Labour government to use the Parliament Act to bulldoze legislation through against the opposition of the Upper House but quite improper for the Parliament Act to be invoked in the case of a non-political measure like the War Crimes Bill. To me, the opposite view seemed much more attractive. It is surely very much more worrying to see the Upper House ignored when it is trying to put a brake on a dictatorial government bent on whipping its majority in the Commons to force-feed the public with unpopular legislation, than to see the Lords ignored when its opinion flies in the face of the views of the vast majority of members in the Commons expressed in a free vote. I put the point (tactfully) in my wind-up speech:

  There has been talk about abuse of power and of it being repugnant to bring the Bill back. However, most noble Lords will understand why the Bill was brought back. If one has a free vote in the other place, which supports the Bill so strongly, it would indeed be extraordinary if no opportunity was given to the other place to say once again, after the Bill had been rejected here, that it wanted this House to think again and bear in mind the strong endorsement that had been given to the Bill in another place … It is not a question of the Parliament Act being held as a threat over your Lordships tonight. We all know that it is a matter of fact that if this Bill is rejected by this House tonight, the Parliament Act comes into play by operation of law.

  And I went on to say that the only result of accepting Lord Houghton’s amendment (that the Bill be read a second time not now, but ‘this day six months’) would be that the House would lose its opportunity to improve the Bill. My words were, however, to no avail and the Houghton amendment, which under standing orders had to be treated as a rejection of the Bill, was carried by 131 votes to 109.

  Lord Mayhew (of Wimbledon) was not on good form in the debate. Perhaps he was still suffering from a splendid put-down administered by Viscount Tonypandy at Question Time a week earlier. Lord Mayhew had asserted that in 1946 the Labour government of the day, of which he was a member, had decided that there should be no more war crimes trials. In fact, the Labour government had decided nothing of the sort; and Tonypandy drew attention both to this inaccuracy and to the fact that at the time Lord Mayhew was ‘a very junior minister’.

  At the beginning of June 1991 Humphrey Colnbrook* who, if Margaret had had her way, would have become Speaker in 1983 instead of Jack Weatherill, told me he was going to introduce a debate on defence. In my innocence I thought his idea was to give a helping hand to the government. Defence was hardly the Opposition’s strong suit, and a speech strongly supportive of government policy coupled with a bit of knockabout fun at the Opposition’s expense would not go amiss. Not for the last time I was in for a nasty surprise. There was precious little support for the government in Humphrey’s speech or, for that matter, in any of the other speeches from the Tory benches and not a glove was laid on the Labour Party. But I do remember the debate for an exchange between Lord Mayhew and Lord Boyd-Carpenter. The latter, in his reply to a completely fatuous comment of Lord Mayhew’s (‘the Soviets were building hundreds of submarines for purely defensive purposes’) provided a perfect example of a particularly lordly debating style which can deflate the windbag in very quick time. ‘My Lords, because it is the noble Lord’s birthday today I shall wish him many happy returns. I hope that when he reflects on his intervention, it will not substantially diminish the pleasure of the occasion for him.’

  The rules of order in the Lords require ‘All personal, sharp or taxing speeches to be foreborn, and whosoever answereth another man’s speech shall apply his answer to the matter without wrong to the person: and as nothing offensive is to be spoken, so nothing is to be ill-taken.’ So if one wants to put down an opponent, a certain subtlety of approach is required.

  A new session of Parliament was opened by the Queen on 31 October 1991. I carried the Cap of Maintenance. Matthew Parris wrote of the occasion: ‘Not far from the throne stood a man I used to know as Mr Waddington, carrying a shower cap mounted on a broomstick.’

  Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian allowed his imagination to run riot:

  If Margaret Thatcher’s wildest nightmares about the Maastricht Summit come true, yesterday may have been our last opportunity to see Britain’s parliamentary traditions in all their richly historical pageantry and gloriously hysterical absurdity. A final chance to see two blokes calling themselves the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant and the Beaumont Herald Extraordinary prance around in stockings while animated playing cards blow trumpets at duchesses wearing diamond mines on their heads. A final chance to lay bets on whether the Lord Chamberlain will manage to walk backwards around the throne without falling down the Queen’s cleavage. Most of all, a final c
hance to watch Lord Waddington bearing aloft the Cap of Maintenance and speculate what that ludicrous velvet thing on a pole really is: Tudor night cap or Plantagenet condom?

  By November 1991 the Maastricht Summit was imminent and their Lordships wanted their say. Colin Welch in the Daily Mail reported: ‘Lord Waddington was his usual dry, semi-committed, cautious and circumspect self.’ What I said was that Britain’s view on the future of the Community did not tally with that of some other members of the community:

  A number of our European partners believe that the changes brought about by the Single European Act set us irrevocably on a predetermined path leading to political, economic and monetary integration within a federal Europe. That is not the case. Political union is an evolving process – not a goal – and the Community is a developing organism, the ultimate form of which none of us can confidently predict. We cannot set the final shape of Europe now. The most we can do is ensure that each step we take, each institutional change, is useful and workable in itself. We must consider the amendments proposed at Maastricht in this light; an end in themselves, not a means to a more distant goal.

  In February 1991 I became a deputy lieutenant for the County of Lancashire, which pleased me greatly. Also in February I was given the job of representing the government at the funeral of the King of Norway in Oslo. I boarded a plane of the Queen’s flight at Northolt and found myself in the company of various people who were connected with the Royal Family in some remote and minor way and had rung up Buckingham Palace asking if they could hitch a lift. A few minutes after take-off we seemed to be coming down again and I wondered whether we were in trouble; but we landed and the Princess Royal came aboard. We were somewhere near Sandringham. Up again and then Prince Charles appeared and asked if we were enjoying ourselves. He told us he was doing the flying. The funeral went off with many hitches. I had always thought the Norwegians were fairly efficient, but clearly ceremonial was not their strong point. After the service a lot of royals were left hanging around on the pavement. Their cars had been sent somewhere else.