I was, however, fortunate in two respects. Shortly after I was selected, the party nationally, now under Paddy Ashdown, started to show signs of life. There was a morale-boosting by-election victory in Eastbourne. Mrs Thatcher’s reign was coming acrimoniously to an end and there were growing numbers of disillusioned Conservatives looking for a home, provided it wasn’t Labour. Paddy’s military background and bearing were beginning to have an appeal to this group. And, locally, I began to assemble an enthusiastic group of helpers, led by my future agent, Dee Doocey, a local councillor with formidable organizing ability and a steely determination to succeed. She brought to bear a professionalism that contrasted painfully with the easy-going amateurism the party was used to and led to not a little friction. We had our differences, but our political partnership, more than any other single factor, took Twickenham from the category of also-rans to the front rank of Lib Dem seats. Malinda gave massive and unstinting support. Olympia organized two highly successful fund-raising events – a curry supper and a classical music concert – which helped to galvanize our activists and put her at the centre of a network of volunteers. Aida managed to get a youth branch organized. There was a palpable sense of optimism and purpose and the once remote possibility of winning now seemed less distant.
When the 1992 election came, the expected collapse in Conservative support failed to materialize, despite a sharp recession, growing home repossessions and negative equity. There was a mood to give John Major a chance and a lot of worry about Labour’s high-tax alternative which swamped the impact of all our local work. We cut the Conservative majority from 7127 to 4901, which seemed scant reward for an upbeat and extremely well-marshalled campaign. The following day, however, the full significance sank in: we had advanced, while in Richmond and other target seats around London the party had gone backwards. It became clear that Twickenham was now the prime target seat in London and could expect maximum help. A boundary change would also assist us. When the Conservative tide finally went out, we were well placed to benefit.
After the years of toil and frustration, it now seemed, in the run-up to my fiftieth birthday, that there was finally a realistic prospect of a breakthrough and that I merely needed to plug away steadily over the next few years. Would that it had been so simple. Twickenham became a honeypot for other ambitious Lib Dem politicians and I had to fight to remain as candidate, while at the same time Olympia’s health began to deteriorate in an alarming way. That long interlude before winning the 1997 election proved as difficult as any I had previously experienced.
After several years of tamoxifen, Olympia had been pronounced clear of breast cancer and she was advised to stop taking further doses. I am not sure if this advice was inspired by medical science or by cost-consciousness in the NHS, but she felt she should act on the advice. In any event, a couple of years later the symptoms returned and after a further operation and radio-therapy, Olympia was told that the cancer had spread and had reached her bones. Any hope that the illness was curable evaporated and we recognized that it was now only a matter of time. The corridors and smells of the Royal Marsden became increasingly familiar. She had increased breathing difficulties and it was eventually realized that a lung had collapsed. A further operation reattached the lung to the chest wall, and for the rest of her life I had to assist her twice a day to pump fluid from the lung with the help of a device inserted in the side of her body.
She insisted on giving priority to our children, particularly Hugo, who was now at St Paul’s. She feared she would not survive to see him beyond school. And she kept up her music as far as possible, although the collapsed lung meant she could no longer sing and her piano-playing was hampered by the damage done by the excision of lymph glands. She needed practical and psychological support, which I tried to provide as best I could while holding down a demanding job, now as chief economist, at Shell.
Politics took third place, to the mounting alarm of my friends and allies in the local party. I realized too late that growing numbers of aspiring Liberal Democrat MPs were eyeing up the seat and reports were circulating that the incumbent candidate was not serious or no good. The presumed formality of confirming my name on the list of approved candidates proved anything but a formality and I spent a year fighting appeals in party committees. At one point I was removed from the list of candidates, having supposedly failed a test on how to write a press release (it transpired that I had ‘failed’ for having forgotten to put a date on it). I developed a strong belief in conspiracy theories, but in my serious moments I realized that my job with Shell and my Labour background jarred badly with the grass-roots activists who controlled the process.
As an approved candidate my readoption by the local party should have been a formality; but a shoal of impressive competitors emerged, including Dick (now Lord) Newby, Sarah Ludford (now an MEP), Neil Sherlock, a rising star of the party and close to Paddy Ashdown, and Ed Davey, another rising star. The intense competition revealed personal hostilities and fault-lines in the local party which had lain dormant in the 1992 campaign. It became clear that I was in considerable danger of losing until a belated rescue operation was organized by Dee and Malinda. I won the selection by a handful of votes over Ed Davey and was saved from extinction by a battalion of elderly ladies brought in by a close ally and friend, Lisette Narain. Her remarkable personal history merits a book in itself. She had been a political and Christian refugee in Kemalist Turkey, where her father, a politician, had been murdered; then a nurse in the Gaza Strip; and latterly a local councillor; and, like us, she was part of a happy mixed marriage. It was deeply humbling to discover that friends and allies were willing to fight my corner for me, the more so as I was unable to explain the reason for my dependence on them.
One of the continuing awkwardnesses was that Olympia was determined not to disclose her illness. She was an immensely proud, as well as courageous, woman and could not accept being patronized or treated as sick. Not only the party activists but her own brothers and sisters were not to be told. I was obliged, therefore, to spin innumerable white lies to explain her prolonged disappearances and my own sudden absences and below-par performances. There were fearful rows with Dee and Malinda, who felt they were giving their all for a candidate who seemed less than fully committed and whose wife was only spasmodically involved. Whether they and others guessed the truth, I do not know, but the years leading up to the 1997 election weighed heavily on all of us. I came close to giving up on several occasions, but like a marathon runner approaching the finishing tape, I found it easier to stagger on than collapse.
When the election came, it was clear that nationally as well as locally a massive sea-change was under way. Dee’s campaign was meticulously organized; Twickenham became the focal point for Lib Dem campaigns across London; and well before election day Toby Jessel was looking forlorn and defeated. The electoral avalanche swept away not just Toby Jessel but also the Conservatives in Richmond and Kingston, where Ed Davey won by fifty-six votes, and the two Sutton seats.
Olympia and I returned home in the early hours after the count, elated but exhausted. We were painfully conscious that I had finally achieved, at no little cost, both emotionally and financially, what I had set out to do over a quarter of a century earlier, but that her own life was now ebbing away.
Chapter 11
Political Triumph and Personal Tragedy
The first of May 1997 is remembered by everyone with even a passing interest in politics as the end of an era and the dawn of a new government laden with high expectations. Across the country there were minor excitements within the bigger drama, including the twenty or so Lib Dem gains: some beyond any reasonable expectation, in Kingston, Torbay and Carshalton; others, like the defeat of Norman Lamont in Harrogate, emblematic of the peaceful revolution of the night.
Set against these tumultuous events, the result in Twickenham was a little anticlimactic. Well before the end it was clear that we were going to win. There was a growing groundswell of suppo
rt on the doorsteps and in the streets. The only rancour came from local Labour party activists, former comrades of fifteen years earlier, who had wanted to share in the New Labour triumph and bitterly resented a successful local application of the third-party squeeze which had long been inflicted on the Lib Dems in most parts of Britain. Tactical voting had been a key part of our campaign. I was the ‘anybody but Conservative’ candidate. When the results were in there was a convincing majority of over four thousand, which was a relief and a source of great pride to my team but it was dwarfed in significance by events elsewhere.
To have become an MP at the fifth attempt, twenty-seven years after my first attempt, was just a little too much to take in at first. I was convinced of the reality of it by the delight and pride of my family, which had shared the long years of frustration and disappointment. Becoming an MP by defeating an opponent is not, however, like taking on an ordinary job. There is no training, no handover, no infrastructure, no office, no staff; yet there are a thousand thank-you letters to write and a deluge of requests for help, advice, jobs or opinions. Exhaustion was made worse by abusive anonymous late-night phone calls from people who thought that I had committed an act worse than murder by removing their Tory MP.
Olympia and I tackled this new challenge as a joint project. She was by now considerably weakened. She realized that her time was limited and decided to use the last few years of her life assisting me and the three children. She helped me hire staff and premises, and organize surveys of local businesses and young people, as much as time would allow. But we also wanted time together and every day for a couple of years we tried to manage a walk in Twickenham by the river, or in Richmond or Bushy Park. This took precedence over other commitments, and my frequent disappearances from meetings and other parliamentary activities became a source of some disquiet to my staff and colleagues, who were not allowed to know the reason why.
Gradually some sort of order and system emerged, despite the handicap of working from an improvised office in Twickenham with a leaking roof and extremes of hot and cold. I came to appreciate that the key to being a good MP is good staff. After several false starts, I acquired superb staff for my Twickenham office, who have been with me ever since led by Joan Bennett, my PA and Sandra Foyle, my case-worker. Together with Malinda McLean, my main party helper and supporter, and Dee Doocey, my agent, I had a rich, solid base, without which I believe no MP can function effectively.
The public perception of MPs and politicians in general was low, even before the recent expenses scandal rocked Parliament, though I have never found that the generality is applied to the particular. The problem is not so much one of hostility and disapproval as of ignorance and confusion. Even those who are well informed find it difficult to see the demarcation lines between local councillors and MPs (let alone MEPs and regional assembly members). As a Lib Dem MP in a borough with a Lib Dem council I have been widely assumed to be the Godfather who controls the parking wardens, approves house extensions, and ensures that the bins are emptied. MPs of all parties are assumed to be ‘part of the government’ and to have great ‘power’. Because Parliament passes laws, MPs must have responsibility for the rulings of every judge or magistrate and have the ability to overturn court rulings. Our expenses to pay staff are assumed to inflate our salaries to fat-cat proportions. Elections are a particular mystery: I have spent hours in expensive houses, whose walls are lined with the world’s great literature, trying without success to explain that general election votes do not go into a giant pot to choose the prime minister, but merely choose the local MP.
MPs are partly responsible for the fact that they are misunderstood. They rarely take the trouble to explain what they do; they claim credit for what others do; they blame others for things they are responsible for and compound the confusion by apologizing for things they are not responsible for. The categorization of MPs as ‘good (or bad) constituency members’ or ‘good (or bad) parliamentarians’ doesn’t clarify anything very much. I would break the job down into a variety of distinct roles: representing and helping individual constituents through casework; being a ‘local champion’; holding government to account through questioning in Parliament and select committees or by contributions to debate; legislating; issue-based campaigning; and being a party spokesman or member of the government. No MP can sensibly aim to do all of these, certainly not simultaneously, though some try. Some specialize completely. Some are lazy and do very little of anything beyond turning up to vote when required by the party whips. Those with small majorities, like mine initially, subsume all these various tasks under a constant preoccupation with being re-elected.
Within a week or so of becoming an MP I had my first queue at a constituency surgery. Most of my visitors really needed help or advice from a lawyer, the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, a social worker, a local councillor or a police officer, but had been advised to see the local MP or else were curious to see the new man. My first customers (Mr and Mrs A) gave me a lengthy and indignant account of the insults, abuse and threats of their neighbours (Mr and Mrs B). I was sufficiently concerned to mobilize the police, the council and anyone else I could think of. A few weeks later Mr B came with a long and indignant account of the insults, abuse and threats inflicted on his family by Mr and Mrs A. I soon discovered that hundreds of hours of police, council officials’ and MP’s time had been absorbed by this dispute, which defied mediation and court injunctions and only ended years later when the B family finally gave up and left. A few weeks later I was drawn into another epic dispute between neighbours, this time with anti-Semitic overtones, between two families who claimed to be lifelong supporters of my party and were both incredulous that I should want to know the other side of the story. In quiet suburban streets there are often such murderous, all-absorbing, quarrels which have outlasted many wars. One that remains with me is a twenty-five-year-old dispute about an overhanging tree which pits one of my elderly party members against another equally elderly supporter. As an MP I am cast in the role of King Solomon.
My second client was an intense man who brought his files in a suitcase and told me ominously that my predecessor had failed to solve his problems over twenty years and he expected me to do better. After several months of correspondence concerning his unbelievably complicated claim for compensation from the MoD over a patent, I discovered that his patent was for ‘an invisible battleship’. Following a lurid account of an MI5 plot to kill him, I realized, more slowly than I should have done, that he suffered from delusions.
The third in line was a Chinese man in exotic clothes and so camp and perfumed that his gender was in some doubt. He turned out to be the former gay lover of a local celebrity whose will was subject to a ferocious dispute with a local charity, which believed that the substantial inheritance was intended for a museum rather than for the Chinese lover. Responding to his requests for assistance I managed to alienate, in my first week as an MP, the whole cultural establishment of Twickenham. The relationship took a long time to rebuild.
Then there was a trader involved in a legal dispute with a leading bank which was pursuing him for an outstanding debt. It was clear to him, and to me, that the bank had made a mistake, and that a clerk had forged a signature to cover it up. He went from court to court, piling up unpayable legal costs. Bankruptcy and business failure loomed, but he insisted on fighting. Week after week he came, tears in his eyes, to plead with me to petition judges and legislate to change the law in his favour and rectify British injustice. Many such cases have come my way, and since my constituents can rarely afford legal fees I have perforce become an unqualified amateur lawyer, like most MPs.
There have been thousands of people over the years with genuine problems, many of them heartbreaking, some of whom I have been able to help. The biggest number are the immigration cases, mostly people whose papers have been stuck for years in a queue in the Home Office and who hope the MP can get an answer. There are undoubtedly some illegal immigrants cynically using every l
egal dodge and contact they can identify to regularize their status. But from my experience most are decent, honest people trapped somewhere in a Kafkaesque world between a country that they have long since abandoned or fled from and another that has lost their papers, or kept them in enforced idleness without permission to work, or passed them from one appeal or queue to another. And there are hundreds of long-standing Asian residents whose relatives back home are anxious to visit for a wedding or a funeral or to see their grandchildren, but who cannot complete the obstacle course created for them by British entry-clearance procedures.
The next biggest category are the young, mostly white, couples with young children in desperately overcrowded social housing, or else facing homelessness because their parents or friends can no longer cope with them sleeping on the settee, or because they are falling behind with their rent due to some muddle in housing benefit. There is often little that can be done to help because there is no housing available, they have insufficient ‘points’, or because of some procedural error they have made themselves ‘intentionally homeless’. They will leave me angry and frustrated, and themselves blaming the council or ‘the immigrants’, as they head for family break-up or worse.
The constituency caseload is one of the core elements of MPs’ work, and the best way to understand how central government legislation, local bureaucracy and markets impact on the public. I do not share the view that MPs should not be involved in ‘social work’, the inference being that this is a waste of time that should be spent on the benches in Parliament. I have become a firm convert to the view that electoral reform, when it happens, must retain this constituency link with individual voters.
Free Radical Page 22