The growing threat from the Liberals locally was not, however, allowed to intrude on an internal conflict over the future direction of the party. The easy-going sense of camaraderie was gradually eroded by ideological and sectarian strife. Discussions at party meetings, which had hitherto centred on the future of the local swimming pool or the unhealthy dominance of office blocks in the town centre, turned to the growing potential for working-class revolution in the leafy suburbs of Twickenham. There were passionate debates about which particular subset of the Labour movement would be in the vanguard of the local revolutionary struggle when it came. We spent one evening debating whether messages should be sent to the leaders of the USSR and China, whose border dispute was threatening to divide the forces of world socialism.
Somehow, otherwise intelligent and idealistic people led or joined the descent into collective madness. Those who led the Gadarene charge to the cliff were, as individuals, often delightful and reasonable. One, Elmo Eustace, had long been venerated for having met Trotsky in his youth, but his utterances gradually metamorphosed from amusing comedy into vitriolic rants, which set the local party line. Another militant, Duncan MacPherson, I came to know and like subsequently when he became a Catholic priest and officiated at the wedding of my son Paul. They acted as catalysts for a growing sense of anger and betrayal against the Labour government among many of the activists.
The more moderate people in the party found themselves increasingly isolated. The councillors, who were fighting a (doomed) struggle against the encroaching Liberals and the adverse demography that was breaking up working-class communities, would find themselves harangued at party meetings for their reactionary tendencies. A particular target was the council group leader, Geoffrey Samuel, the headmaster of a comprehensive school in a neighbouring borough, who, in due course, left the party for the SDP en route to the Conservatives, who elevated him to be one of their leading local figures. Another was the hapless party chairman who, despite his protestations of being a leftist and Tribunite, was made to stand and confess to the crime of having sent one of his children (on a scholarship) to a fee-paying school.
I watched these events with a mixture of alarm and bemusement, and a certain semi-detachment since I was, after I had left the Foreign Office, involved politically mainly at a national level. However, I stood for the council and came a bad third, to the rising Liberals, a fact that my Liberal Democrat friends locally have not allowed me to forget.
I was active in the Fabian Society and produced a pamphlet arguing the case against import controls and the Bennite ‘alternative economic strategy’. I also applied for the parliamentary nomination in a series of marginal seats, mainly in London, in the run-up to the 1979 election, and gradually began to appreciate the nature of the opposition. At Hampstead – then thought (wrongly) to be highly winnable – I got off to a flying start and at packed meetings of members won the nomination of four of the seven wards against competition that included Tessa Jowell, Ken Livingstone and Reg Race, the future MP for Wood Green. My supporters warned, however, that, while I might have the support of the grass-roots membership in the biggest wards, this meant very little. My four wards accounted for only a minority of votes on the general management committee, where support was piling up, from trade union branches and the main activists, for Ken Livingstone. His supporters identified me as the candidate of the right, which was an unfamiliar and uncomfortable position after Glasgow. It was pointed out that I had failed all the tests set by the left: an unequivocal commitment to troops out of Northern Ireland; uncompromising support for Clause 4; nationalization and unilateral nuclear disarmament; opposition to ‘wage controls’, incomes policy and all trade union reform. Ken Livingstone, in comparison, had emerged as the champion of the left, competing with Reg Race for the backing of the more extreme Trotskyite groups. Ken beat me, albeit narrowly, and his supporters included several from wards where I had received overwhelming backing from the members. When we meet now there is some mutual admiration and a lot of common ground, but then there was an unbridgeable ideological gulf. Although I was angry at the time, I acknowledged that I had been naive and had failed to learn the lesson from Maryhill that the ability to make a good speech and attract the support of the broad, if passive, membership was quite irrelevant. It was the activists who mattered and, across London, the activists were now firmly on the hard left. I was better organized a few weeks later in the Hornsey constituency, but the outcome was the same; the nomination went to Ted Knight, leader of Lambeth Council and a standard bearer of Militant. I tried a few more London seats, but it became clear that unless I was willing to adopt the agenda of the left I was wasting my time. I don’t claim any particular virtue in this respect. Like Tony Blair a few years later, I would probably have put on a CND badge if I had thought it would work. But my card had already been marked.
I started to disengage from the Labour Party, and since Olympia had become pregnant again, I effectively opted out of politics to spend more time with her and on my work at the Overseas Development Institute. Then, out of the blue, in 1978 I was approached by Tom Harris, the private secretary of John Smith, the newly promoted secretary of state for trade. He had heard me speak on trade and development issues and seen my Fabian pamphlet and thought I would be a good special adviser. Checks were made and I was recommended by mutual acquaintances from Scotland, including Judith Hart. The ODI generously agreed to let me go and to hold my job open for some time, should I have to return after the pending general election.
I was invited to a meeting with John in his room at the Commons, and he tried to establish where I stood on the political schisms in the party. He was clearly deeply troubled by the advance of the hard left and was himself strongly pro-Europe and pro-NATO. Asked if I saw myself as a ‘social democrat’ or a ‘socialist’, I replied the former, which was the answer he wanted. He himself was close to Callaghan, the prime minister, and saw the major political battleground in the party as the trade union movement, where he had strong allies in the moderate unions like the electricians, shopworkers, postmen, textile workers and the GMB. I sensed a disdain both for the left – embodied in Michael Meacher, then a Bennite, who had been appointed his minister of state – and for the some of the more dilettante characters on the right wing of the party, particularly David Owen. He approached every issue with great political astuteness, which brought him into conflict with the permanent secretary, Leo Pliatzky, a former Treasury mandarin who wanted a minister more attuned to the apolitical concerns of the department. It was to be my job to act as a corrective to the technocratic advice of the mandarins, and Pliatzky made it clear that I was unwelcome and a threat to his position.
I took up my post in the run-up to the Winter of Dis content, and throughout the winter it became clear that the moral authority and political credibility of the Callaghan government were melting away. There was that awful, and terminal, moment when Sunny Jim appeared on TV suntanned and full of cheer after a visit to the Caribbean, sheltered from the reality of uncleared rubbish and bodies piling up at the mortuaries. Yet John’s approach was positive and he clearly intended to make maximum use of his last few months in office to make an impact.
Among the more politically sensitive issues in the department were worker participation in industry, where John was keen to make progress following the publication of the Bullock Report; the design of sanctions against South Africa; and the conclusion to the Tokyo Round of world trade talks. On the last our views diverged substantially, since I was instinctively for liberalization. He was more worried about union reaction and the industry lobbies that were demanding a stop to tariff cuts, particularly for textiles and paper. Seeing the textile industry lobby in action – then led by the man-made fibre producer ICI – I recognized the seductive appeal to ministers of companies flying the flag and, standing alongside their workforce, demanding help to save jobs. A generation later, companies like BAe Systems have the same grip on government. In the event, Britain’s co
ncerns over these items did not prevent a multilateral agreement being reached through the EU, and John Smith was able to claim credit both for the successful negotiations and for putting up a fight for British industry.
In the last weeks of the government he made a serious effort, through his contacts in the union movement, to help me secure one of the parliamentary seats becoming available. But with Olympia seeking to manage a two-month-old baby and two other children, I was preoccupied and not able to follow up his offers of help. My political career in the Labour Party eventually ended in farce. After a lot of spadework had been done to help me secure a winning position at a selection meeting for a marginal Derbyshire seat, the family van gave up on the M1 ten miles from its destination and I eventually arrived too late to participate. After the crushing Labour defeat a few weeks later I parted from John Smith on good terms, but subsequently lost contact.
John Smith has, since his death, become a much-revered figure in Labour circles: the lost leader who would never have betrayed the soul of the party as Blair has done. Most of the compliments are, I think, merited. He was, indeed, very gifted politically and had a lawyer’s talent for quickly assimilating a complex brief. He was also a conviction politician who represented the best aspects of the Labour Party’s commitment to social justice. He was convivial and personally warm and approachable. What I have never understood, however, is his recent status as an icon of the left. In Labour Party terms he was firmly of the ‘old right’, patriotic (both in a Scottish and a British sense), respectful of law and tradition, and with a practical rather than ideological approach to policy. A misjudgement as shadow Chancellor in the 1992 election in not appreciating the unpopularity of higher direct taxes on middle-class voters is what he is now remembered for, by critics and admirers alike; but I sense that, given the chance to return to government, he would have been solidly centrist, albeit with less dependence on the slick, polished media-management skills of Blair’s New Labour.
I saw the next three years of mounting strife in the Labour Party from a distance, being immersed in fatherhood and the controversies of overseas development. Links with some of the local Labour activists were also strained by a personal decision over our children’s schooling, which was a subject that aroused the righteous indignation of party activists like no other (and still does). Our eldest son Paul had been at the local primary school and we planned to send him to one of the two local comprehensive schools, while encouraging his considerable musical talent, as a violinist and pianist, through one of the London colleges of music. As the decision time approached, we were alarmed to discover that Paul, who has his mother’s dark colouring, had been subjected to racial bullying by a gang that was heading for one of the two schools. Paul has an equable temperament and was not given to complaining, so when he did protest strongly we ruled out his going to that particular school. I attended the parents’ open day for the other on the assumption that it had become our choice by default. The headteacher gave a speech on what a happy place he presided over, but was extremely coy about its academic achievements. I discovered that the previous year not a single child in the school had managed an O level in a science subject or a modern language. When I asked to speak to a head of department about this deficiency I was confronted by a character modelled on Dave Spart from Private Eye who harangued me on the subject of pushy middle-class parents obsessed by ‘irrelevant’ exam results. I am normally too polite and non-confrontational in such situations, but on this occasion I lost my cool, walked out, and resolved on the spot to look at other options outside the state sector.
Olympia regarded comprehensive schools without enthusiasm, having taught in them in surrounding boroughs as an occasional supply teacher and been appalled by the poor standards of discipline and low aspirations. As the product of a racially segregated comprehensive in Kenya, she had no emotional investment in comprehensive schools. But she saw no way in which our parlous finances would extend to private education. Nonetheless, following my abrupt U-turn, our somewhat bewildered son was asked at short notice to sit entrance exams for a couple of local former direct-grant grammar schools, which had recently gone private following Anthony Crosland’s attempts to end selection. He passed comfortably and at Hampton School he was offered a music scholarship to cover half the fees. Any reservations I might have had on the issue of principle were dissipated by meeting the headmaster, a brilliant and inspirational educationalist called Gavin Alexander, who was later to become a leading figure and councillor for the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats. I took on extra consultancy work to pay the balance of the fees and we joined the middle-class exodus from the state system. Our daughter Aida was equally bright and, encouraged by her mother, was strongly feminist by the age of eleven and sought parity of treatment with her brother. A year later she won a competitive place at the Lady Eleanor Holles School, also in Hampton, whose headteacher made no bones about her wish to see what was then an obscure academic school eventually achieving parity with St Paul’s Girls, Roedean and Cheltenham Ladies’ College (as it now has).
Having become an unreconstructed class traitor in the eyes of some of the comrades in the local Labour Party, I then compounded the treachery in the convulsions that overtook the party in 1981. My initial reaction to the SDP breakaway was negative. The SDP seemed to me unlikely to succeed and would further weaken opposition to Mrs Thatcher’s government, which was becoming cordially hated in the wake of a recession. I felt more comfortable with mainstream Labour figures like John Smith and Denis Healey, who had elected to stay, than with Roy Jenkins and David Owen. But the SDP acquired a momentum of its own as moderate elements in the Labour Party departed and the hard left seemed more than ever to be exercising a stranglehold, causing a further wave of defections. It is quite possible that had I stayed in Glasgow I would have remained in the Labour Party, but in the more polarized and febrile environment of London Labour parties few moderate people stayed behind. People I knew and respected drifted away or were pushed out. George Cunningham, for example, an independent-minded Labour MP who lived locally but represented an Islington seat, was forced out by a militant faction around Mrs Margaret Hodge. Local SDP defectors repeatedly called round to our house to appeal to me to join them and in the autumn I took the plunge, though not without some regret.
Civil wars divide friends and create strange new bedfellows. This one was no exception. The local SDP was a mixture of disillusioned Labour activists, a handful of ex-Tories, and a group of previously apolitical people who had been stirred out of apathy and indifference by the excitement of a serious new party being launched. The latter group in particular were very hard work, often having little clue about the basics of campaigning and a touching faith in the ability of new slogans and new faces to open up a short cut to national power.
An early task was to work with the local Liberals, who had made spectacular advances in the borough with their own brand of grass-roots community campaigning. Their leaders, David (now Sir David) Williams and Tim (now Lord) Razzall, were tough political professionals who were running rings round the stuffy, complacent local Tories and the beleaguered, retreating Labour Party. I think they saw the SDP as an irritating distraction but were smart enough to appreciate the Steel–Jenkins argument that the SDP was bringing in a new batch of recruits. They agreed a seat-sharing arrangement for the forthcoming 1982 council elections, which involved allocating SDP candidates predominantly to wards held by Conservatives, which would be won in a landslide but not otherwise. I was co-opted into the SDP team to stand in Hampton, then a Conservative seat but with an outside chance for the new Alliance. The only memorable feature of the campaign, which grouped me with two Liberals, Maureen Woodriffe and John Ison, was an unfortunately designed orange poster reading ‘Cable Is on Woodriffe’, which became a source of mirth in the Hampton hostelries.
The expected election landslide never happened, thanks to General Galtieri. A patriotic mood swept Hampton and the Conservative vote held up despite a d
eluge of leaflets, although the Alliance made gains overall and took over the council a year later after a by-election.
I was much more interested in the national scene and started to look for a seat to fight for the expected 1983 election, when the strength of the new Alliance would be tested for the first time. The candidates’ circuit included future parliamentary colleagues, including Chris Huhne, but also some, like Polly Toynbee, Roger Liddle and Derek Scott, who later rejoined Blair’s Labour Party. What really grabbed my attention was the candidacy for York. York was spoken of (without any evidence, as it turned out) as a place where the Alliance could be expected to ‘come through the middle’ from third place and was designated as a target seat. It was allocated to the SDP, though with bitter opposition from the local Liberals, as I later found to my cost.
My reasons for applying for the York seat were personal and sentimental as much as political. My father had died the previous year (in 1981) and I felt the need to visit my widowed mother more frequently, alone and lonely in the detached house in White House Gardens that had been the scene of my break from my parents over a decade earlier. In an emotional way, which I could never properly analyse, I felt drawn back to the city. I had a romantic notion of returning in triumph as its MP and believed that, for all our differences, my father would have been proud of me. Olympia would rather I had chosen somewhere closer, but indulged me, suspecting that my chances of being elected, and the consequent danger of prolonged family disruption, were not high.
One major reservation was that Alex Lyon, the sitting MP, was someone I knew and liked. He was a very decent man with a strong moral purpose and was, politically, closer to Methodism than to Marx; indeed, he was a lay preacher. I had worked hard in his winning 1966 campaign in York. By coincidence, his London home with his wife Hilda was a couple of hundred yards from ours in Twickenham, and I was frequently dispatched by the local branch to collect his subs and donations to local fund-raisers. As minister of state at the Home Office from 1974 to 1976 he had fallen out badly with Callaghan over immigration policy, not sharing the Labour leader’s eagerness to placate the white working class, and over Northern Ireland, where he expressed sympathy for the nationalist movement. His rebellion coincided, and was linked in the public mind, with divorce from Hilda and remarriage to his former Home Office private secretary, Clare Short, who was later to become a major figure in her own right. His reputation in York took a battering and he was regarded as highly vulnerable in what was already a very marginal seat. I persuaded myself that I, not the Conservatives, would defeat him and maintain a progressive tradition in the city. My conceit was reinforced by assuming my superiority over the Conservative candidate, one Conal Gregory, a wine merchant who had no connection to the city at all, parroted party slogans like a speaking machine, and was regarded by friends and foes alike as dim – a judgement that was to prove seriously complacent.
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