There was growing discomfort among the rank-and-file MPs with Lib Dem–Labour cooperation, sometimes vehemently expressed in parliamentary party meetings. I had never been particularly close to Paddy Ashdown and he had never shown any partiality to me. Nonetheless, I took the view that on balance he was right to try to maximize our party’s influence in a context where the alternative was simply to watch from the sidelines a display of Labour triumphalism. Temperamentally, and after three decades in jobs that were far removed from tribal, political fisticuffs, I favoured constructive criticism and, where possible, a consensual approach, and always spoke in these terms in Parliament and among colleagues. I probably took this approach to extremes when David Blunkett as Education Secretary proposed student tuition fees. This seemed to me sensible since the universities were strapped for cash and students enjoyed a graduate premium in later life. I provoked a discussion in the parliamentary party, and after a long and heated debate it was clear that I was the sole dissenter from the view that we should mount outright opposition to fees. For my part, I acknowledged that good policy was bad politics and accepted my colleagues’ overwhelming view.
The increasing disillusionment with ‘the project’ was in substantial part due to the failure to make any headway on electoral reform at Westminster. There were forty-six Lib Dem MPs, and had general election votes been reflected in the Commons we would have had over a hundred. The Jenkins Report produced an elegantly argued case for a PR system similar to that which now prevails in Scotland: a constituency-based vote system backed up by a list designed to achieve proportionality. The report was praised for its lucidity and prose style, but there was no way that the Labour government (let alone the Tories) would accept it. There was a simpler, less proportional version of electoral reform, the alternative vote, under which the constituency system would remain and voters would rank candidates in order of preference rather than with an X, and second-preference votes would be transferred from losing candidates. In this way, every winning candidate would have a majority of votes cast; tactical voting would be unnecessary and a vote for the third party in any constituency would no longer be wasted. Such a compromise was unattractive to PR fundamental-ists but it could have been an improvement on the status quo. It would have been acceptable, too, to key figures in the Labour government, as I established in a series of meetings with ministers which I undertook largely on my own initiative but supported by the leadership (the subject has recently resurfaced as a possible, late, option for the Brown government to offer in a referendum).
In the event, this intrigue and private diplomacy came to naught because Paddy abruptly announced his resignation in 1999. Those of us who were not part of his inner circle were taken aback. The interpretation I put on his decision was that his dalliance with Blair had reached its limits and he wished to go out on a high, having judged that we could only go backwards at the next election, after a decade of advance under his leadership. He was wrong on the latter point, but from his personal point of view the decision to quit at the height of his career made sense.
To replace him, there was substantial support for Charles Kennedy, whom Paddy clearly disapproved of and had banished to the obscure outpost of rural affairs spokesman. I decided to support him, having been greatly impressed by his performances on television: articulate, witty and clever. Simon Hughes had strong support among activists who were enthused by his radical oratory and his record as a brilliant MP, holding on to Bermondsey in very difficult circumstances. In the event, three other candidates joined the field, including Malcolm Bruce, but Charles won with a respectable if not overwhelming vote. In the reshuffle that followed I was offered trade and industry; together with Phil Willis, Steve Webb and Evan Harris, I was one of the few newcomers to join our shadow cabinet.
The leadership contest roughly coincided with another serious deterioration in Olympia’s health and thereafter, although I made, I think, a positive contribution in Parliament, I have little memory of it for my mind and heart were elsewhere. Olympia survived until a few days after the 2001 election, but for most of that time she was an invalid and reconciled to the inevitability of deteriorating health and a premature end to her life.
Shortly after I was elected, in the summer recess of 1997, news came from India that one of her brothers, Celso, had suffered a heart attack, and she resolved to go immediately to India to help out. Celso had defied his father to give Olympia away at her wedding and she had a soft spot for him, sharing the same highly strung and emotional temperament, including a fierce temper, but also gentleness and compassion. But her real motive for going to India was to say goodbye to her family, whom she did not expect to see again – while at the same time not disclosing to them the true nature of her own condition, for fear of causing distress. This mixture of love and deception was sustained with some difficulty, and her sister Amata, a consultant paediatrician in Bombay, could see that something was amiss and eventually coaxed the truth out of her.
This underlying tension apart, the visit was blissfully happy and Olympia and I had never been closer. We built each day around a long walk. Usually in the late afternoon, when the day was cooling, we walked along the road through the paddy fields the couple of miles to the sea. The monsoon rains had turned the landscape a bright green and the air was rich with the smell of damp earth and vegetation. Walking for pleasure is not an Indian habit and bemused villagers turned out to watch us pass until our eccentricity had become part of the daily routine. The sea was angry and dangerous and there were no tourists, so we could walk the vast, beautiful Goan beaches in solitude until sunset before returning to a family dinner.
Celso was recovering from the heart attack brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle and the stress of trying to run a brewery in India, with the endless hassle of government licensing and corruption, bloody-minded unions, and appalling transport and telecommunications infrastructure, not to mention ruthless competition. The heart attack was fortunately mild and the lifestyle adjustments had been successfully made; so there was some irony in Olympia, with irreversible cancer and a lung that barely functioned, acting as Florence Nightingale. But the visit brought brother and sister and the wider family closer together.
Throughout our thirty-five-year relationship Olympia was constantly struggling to balance the needs of the family and the expression of her own talents. She was too emancipated, talented and ambitious to accept the housewife role, like her mother and mine, but too emotionally entangled in the day-to-day distractions of family life to pursue a full-time career. The result, as for many women, was a messy and often frustrating combination of the two. But she achieved all the goals she set herself, even if not in a planned and orderly way.
She was a gifted teacher and wanted to teach. After the unqualified pleasure of teaching eager and appreciative African girls who understood the value of education, she was totally disillusioned by Scottish and London schools. The prospect of facing rows of bored adolescents yawning and burping their way through the school day filled her with dread. She switched between secondary and primary, full-time and supply teaching, without finding a role until embarking on private music teaching at home. This she did with flair and enthusiasm, and managed the business relationship with the parents as professionally as the teaching of scales and arpeggios. She took enormous pleasure in the achievements of her protégés, adults as well as children, and when she died many of them were genuinely distressed.
She also wanted to produce a major piece of academic research. Her PhD on the political history of the old republic of Brazil was a triumph over adversity: from a deeply hostile professor of Latin American studies in Glasgow, who did everything he could to discourage her, to the practical problems of writing amid the clamour of small children. I helped, baby-minding when she visited Brazil. But hers was the achievement. Unlike my own PhD, which was full of clever technical flourishes and equations designed to impress the external examiners but of no enduring interest, hers was a work of genuinely valua
ble scholarship. Hugo, our youngest son, has made it widely available on the Internet, where other scholars are hopefully making use of it.
Her greatest ambition was to be able to perform musically to a professional standard. When she returned to the UK she played the piano well and had a fine but untrained voice, but her understanding of music far outstripped her technical ability. She progressed from one teacher to another. But her ability to perform, even in exams, suffered from crippling attacks of nerves. Eventually she achieved contentment performing for her own pleasure, but at a very demanding level, and teaching, including our own three children. One of the decisions in my life of which I am most proud was overriding her objections and ignoring the parlous state of our finances to buy her a Blüthner grand piano.
Music became central to her existence. Rarely have Beethoven and Brahms been played with more genuine passion. But one of the consequences of breast cancer spreading into her lymph glands was that it gradually sapped the strength in her arms, and the collapse of a lung effectively terminated her singing. Her pleasures were increasingly vicarious and she was able to revel in her children’s musical achievements. When she approached the end of her life, she was able to draw comfort from their recordings and from her favourite music. My regret is that we never recorded her.
As a mother who had always put her family before her career, Olympia wanted to use her last few years to ensure that our three children were as successfully and happily launched into adult life as it was possible for her to achieve. Paul, our eldest, had been the third person in our early married life: a placid, uncomplaining and lovable child. He had responded early on to his mother’s enthusiasm for music rather than mine for conventional learning and sport. Too much time with books, he claimed, induced ‘brain ache’. By his early teens he was accomplished on the keyboard and the violin and spent hours practising his instruments, while Olympia and I, with the parental pride that accompanies gifted children, ferried him around endless music classes, rehearsals and concerts. This talent, and a flair for languages, earned him a place at Cambridge, where he also discovered his fine voice, singing in the St John’s choir (then under George Guest and arguably the finest of the Oxbridge chapel choirs), and developed wide-ranging, sensitive musicianship which led him into conducting. By his mid-twenties he had a range of musical talents and accomplishments and a potential for singing and conducting at the highest level, but no obvious way into a notoriously cliquey as well as ferociously competitive profession. He had also acquired a beautiful wife, a Slovakian of Hungarian extraction, Agnesa Tothova, who was a talented singer in her own right, having been a finalist in the Lucia Popp competition at a young age. Like other eastern Europeans of her generation, she was making the transition from the constraints, but also the privileges, of the communist system, having been a star of the communist youth movement and an Olympic-standard swimmer as well as a talented musician.
Olympia could see the creative potential as well as the love in the relationship, but also the enormous practical obstacles to realizing their musical potential. Paul had landed a lead role in an experimental relaunch of Mozart’s rather obscure unfinished opera, Zaide, at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, which gave Olympia and myself a pretext for a romantic break, staying in a nunnery on the hills overlooking the city. But the performance didn’t lead anywhere. Olympia resolved to help and organized a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank for Paul and Agi to sing together. The orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was hired for the occasion; our daughter Aida, now a commercial barrister, arranged corporate sponsorship; and Olympia filled the hall by selling tickets to everyone she knew, including the outer fringes of her huge extended family. The occasion was a great musical and social success and gave some impetus to Paul’s and Agi’s singing careers. Some time later they recorded a CD with a top Czech orchestra, but it was released too late for Olympia to have the pleasure of hearing it.
Olympia also insisted that they were properly married in a church. She had little truck with cohabitation or a prosaic register office ceremony. The Catholic Church was again pressed into service, reflecting Agi’s spiritual upbringing, and a wedding was organized in the fine chapel of St Mary’s University College, a Catholic university campus in the heart of my constituency, with a reception in the adjacent splendours of Horace Walpole’s remarkable Gothic house, Strawberry Hill. The guest list reflected our remarkably cosmopolitan family with the addition of a Slovakian branch. The fact that we hadn’t a single word, let alone language, in common with Agi’s parents, who spoke Hungarian, made little difference; body language and gestures got us through.
My politics only intruded once, when the very supportive priest, Father Devlin, had to withdraw at the last moment. His replacement turned out to be my nemesis from the Twickenham Labour Party, whose ideological journey from Trotsky to the Catholic priesthood had been even longer and more difficult than mine into Liberal Democrat politics. Olympia was exhausted but triumphant as impresario and organizer, having launched her eldest child into married life. Had she lived two years longer she would have seen her first grandchild.
Our daughter Aida was a very bright child, inheriting her father’s stamina and capacity for sustained hard work and her mother’s warmth, flair for organization and feisty temperament. Trying, I think, to please both of us, she became a very accomplished pianist and was the only one of our children to develop a serious interest in politics. She followed her brother to Cambridge, where she got a first in law in her final year. She was far from being a reclusive academic and discovered the social side of undergraduate life more than I had done a generation earlier: rowing, long-distance running, and singing blues in a student band. Parental pride was amply satisfied when she performed with great flair Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in a public concert, and I still recall the moment when tears of pride and pleasure started to roll down Olympia’s cheeks.
She subsequently sought to make her way as a barrister, but though she qualified, she found that while doors were beginning to open to clever, attractive women, there was still an assumption that they should stick to family and criminal law rather than the less familiar and more lucrative commercial bar. She eventually became a successful barrister-turned-solicitor in the City; but one by-product of her foray into the Inns of Court was that her pupil-master, Stephen Kenny, fell in love with her and she with him. Their marriage in Twickenham in the summer of 1999 was another great family occasion, the last before Olympia’s health finally gave way. This time, despite a Catholic groom, we celebrated the wedding in Twickenham’s parish church with a reception in the gardens of Marble Hill House nearby, a fine Georgian building overlooking the Thames, erected as a gift from George II to his mistress. While Paul’s marriage had extended our family into a new part of Europe, this one took in the English establishment, including Stephen’s uncle, the admirably independent law lord, Lord Lloyd. Olympia hadn’t been strong enough to do a great deal more than participate but enjoyed the moment, much like Vikram Seth’s matriarch, Mrs Rupa Mehra, seeing her daughter happily married to an eminently Suitable Boy. We celebrated with a wonderfully romantic holiday, alone together, in the Italian Alps near Lake Como. Family holidays had been the highlight of the year for the last three decades. We were able to savour this one, with Olympia feeling a sense of completeness.
Our youngest, Hugo, had carried with him since he was eight years old the knowledge that his mother had cancer and might well not outlive his childhood. He also laboured under the burden of high parental expectations, having shown exceptional potential at an early age, even in a bright family, along with considerable powers of concentration. As a result of prodigious hard work, and a lot of help at home, mainly from his mother, he won a scholarship to St Paul’s and flourished academically, one of the strongest mathematicians and scientists in a school at the top of the academic tree. Attending school events, I was torn between my pride as a parent and a growing discomfort at the vast gulf that
was opening up between the top independent schools like St Paul’s and what became known as ‘ bog-standard’ comprehensives. Every teacher at St Paul’s was highly qualified, often with a PhD; discipline problems were virtually non-existent; there were magnificently equipped facilities; and every boy was encouraged to pursue breadth as well as depth, in Hugo’s case music and running. I knew, as did Olympia from her occasional supply and music teaching at the local college, that even in educationally conscious and relatively affluent suburbs like Richmond, and even in the best-run and best-equipped of comprehensive schools, an altogether more modest set of expectations pertained. In our private world, Olympia had the satisfaction of seeing Hugo go to Trinity College, Cambridge, and collect a first in maths. She attended his degree ceremony in a wheelchair, unable to walk and in some pain. It was the last function outside home that she attended, apart from hospital visits, and was an event that encapsulated what she had lived for: putting her family before herself, and making a pilgrimage to the highest temple of this religion called education.
The final descent from illness to disability, from laboured mobility to frustrated immobility, had occurred the previous year on the last of our summer holidays together, when we had hoped to repeat the successful trip of the year before, this time staying at châteaux and hotels on the Loire. She began to experience spasms of extreme pain in her hip and an otherwise idyllic vacation acquired overtones of fear and foreboding. She refused, however, to accept that there was any link with her cancer and when we returned home insisted on physiotherapy for a ‘pulled muscle’. A few weeks later she collapsed in agony and when eventually she consented to go to hospital it transpired that the bone had simply rotted away, breaking in several places. Such are the miracles of modern medicine that surgeons were able to pin the good bits of the broken bones together again. She was operated on over the millennium New Year, rotated between three Chelsea hospitals which respectively repaired the bone, restored a second collapsed lung, and tried intensive radio-and chemotherapy. Whatever may be said in criticism of the NHS, and I hear a great deal, the capacity of the system to deliver high-quality, sophisticated treatment to the acutely sick is miraculous to those who receive it.
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