In My Own Time

by Jeremy Thorpe

  The position is quite clear: on the Friday evening following polling day – 1 March 1971 – No. 10 rang me at my home in North Devon. I was still in Barnstaple leading a torchlight victory procession. It was suggested to No. 10 that I would be back in my cottage by 10.30 p.m. and they indicated that they would call back. I arrived back in time, but by midnight no call had come through, so I decided to ring No. 10 myself to be told by the Prime Minister that they had been unable to get through. Once again the local Chittlehamholt exchange had broken down at a crucial moment!

  The Prime Minister indicated that our two parties appeared to have similar views on Europe and the statutory incomes policy – when would I be able to meet him? I agreed to come up to London the next morning.

  The Prime Minister suggested that we keep the fact that we were meeting private. I agreed, and in so doing, recognise now that I made a mistake. When the news broke that a meeting was to take place, many Liberals panicked and thought that I, as Leader of the Liberal Party, was about to sacrifice the very independence of the party which I had spent the last twenty-five years working to preserve. However, I felt that if the Prime Minister of the day requested a meeting, one had an obligation to go.

  Although I had always been opposed to joining a Tory coalition, at least I had a duty to find out what was proposed so that, with my colleagues, we could make an informed judgement.

  The meeting consisted of the Prime Minister, myself and Robert Armstrong, Secretary to the Cabinet. The Prime Minister opened by saying that the Conservative Party had obtained the largest national vote at the general election and therefore had a right to try to form an administration. His offer was a complete coalition with the Liberal Party and a seat in the Cabinet. I can state with utter conviction that no specific ministry was mentioned or suggested. Mr Heath suggests in his book that I expressed the preference for the job of Home Secretary on two occasions.

  The statement he made to the Press Association of 3 October 1996 said: ‘I had absolutely no intention of offering Jeremy Thorpe the Home Office in a coalition government, nor did I ever mention it to him’. If in fact I had raised the matter twice, it is odd that I should have drawn no response from him at all. I later learnt from a reliable source that what he had in mind was a Foreign Office job with specific responsibility for Europe.

  I conceded his constitutional right to form an administration but pointed out that as we sat there I had the equivalent of almost half his popular vote behind me – six million people had obtained fourteen MPs. Or to express it in another way, four million extra votes had yielded three more MPs. ‘Does this mean that you are asking for electoral reform?’ the Prime Minister asked, to which I replied: ‘Yes’. He went on to say: ‘We have no set policy on this’. I remember reflecting at that moment that it was high time they did! In fact insofar as they did have views, the Conservative Party had favoured the status quo or first-past-the-post. The term proportional representation was never used, as is wrongly suggested in his book.

  Apart from general considerations I made two specific points. First, we did not know who had won the election, but we did know who had lost it. Secondly, apart from the likely views of my colleagues, who were frankly hostile to the idea of a coalition, we had many grave reservations about him leading a coalition. I had been highly critical of his handling of the miners’ dispute before the election.

  Another important point was the mathematics of the situation: 296 Conservative MPs plus 14 Liberal MPs, making a total of 310, which was a figure of less than half the total of the House of Commons. The Prime Minister confirmed that he had not approached the Scottish or Welsh Nationalists, nor the Ulster MPs. I predicted that his suggested coalition government would be brought down on the first critical vote on the Queen’s Speech. With this he disagreed.

  I said I would, however, report our discussion to my parliamentary colleagues. I don’t think I left him very sanguine about the chances of success.

  Our meeting took place on the following day (the Sunday). At that meeting the Prime Minister opened the discussion by saying that he had discussed the matters raised by me with his Cabinet colleagues and they were adamant that they wished to continue to serve under his leadership. There was therefore no question of a change being made. On the question of electoral reform he would offer a Speaker’s Conference. (This is an established procedure, presided over by the Speaker, for dealing with such electoral matters.) The Prime Minister said that there would be a free vote on the recommendations made. I made it clear that unless the Cabinet took a collective view in favour of reform and made it a vote of confidence in the government, no reform would have any chance of going through Parliament whilst the Conservative Party continued to favour the present first-past-the-post system.

  In the meantime I sounded out my colleagues informally on the Sunday, and arranged a meeting of the Parliamentary Party for Monday morning, by which time I would know the outcome of my second meeting with the Prime Minister on the Sunday evening.

  In my letter of Monday 4 March to the Prime Minister I referred to the second meeting, to which his letter to me of the same date, strangely enough, did not allude. I continued: ‘I made it clear that in my view, after preliminary soundings, there was no possibility of a Liberal-Conservative coalition proving acceptable, but that we might give consideration to offering support from the opposition benches to any minority government on an agreed but limited programme. This you have now explicitly rejected.’

  My Parliamentary Party met on Monday and confirmed my reservations on the question of coalition and the following statement was issued:

  The outcome of the election clearly shows that the electorate is not prepared to give either a Conservative or Labour administration a mandate to pursue their conventional policies, The six million people whom we represent voted for policies of moderation. In the present situation we are convinced that such policies can only be carried out effectively by a government of national unity consisting of members of all parties, committed to a limited programme for an agreed period. This would give overriding priority to those policies required to be implemented in the national interest. The gravity of the country’s economic plight is such that party conflict must be subordinated to the country’s need.

  It is now the duty of the other parties to enter into immediate discussion with a view to achieving this. To this end we have urged the Prime Minister to convene an immediate meeting of the party leaders.

  Mr Heath’s book makes the extraordinary claim that I (JT) ‘was very keen to enter a coalition, as were many of his colleagues’. As the Duke of Wellington replied to the lady who said: ‘Mr Smith, I believe’ – ‘Madam if you believe that you’ll believe anything!’ The suggested arrangement for general support for the government from the opposition benches for agreed measures in the national interest, short of coalition, was taken up by Jim Callaghan, when he was Prime Minister, and David Steel, and was the basis of the Lib–Lab Pact some years later. Mr Heath, for his part, felt unable to accept such an arrangement.

  Hovercraft

  By June 1974 it became clear that there was a real possibility of an autumn election. I was determined to get the Liberal campaign off the ground before the other two parties. This again was a question of timing. I was told, however, that it was no good, as everyone would be on the beaches. ‘Very well’, I said. ‘Let’s go to the beaches and do a beach-storming campaign by hovercraft’. On Wednesday 28 August at 9 a.m. we set off from North Devon in perfect weather. The hovercraft jumped some twenty feet off the RAF Chivenor runway on to the mud flats of the Taw River below, spattering us with mud! This was rapidly washed off by the spray. My real concern in making the leap had been that we might turn a somersault, with the hovercraft landing upside down in the mud. We crossed the bar where the rivers Taw and Torridge meet and flow out to sea, arriving at Ilfracombe at 9.15 for an open-air meeting by the quay, which was attended by 1,500 people.

  The next two days were spent travelling arou
nd the Devon and Cornish coastline, accompanied by two West Country neighbouring MPs, John Pardoe (North Cornwall) and Paul Tyler (Bodmin). We called on sixteen different seaside places. Wherever we landed, a large, enthusiastic crowd turned out. One or two scenes have particularly stuck in my mind: the picturesque harbour at St Ives was filled at the quayside with a mass of people, dressed in bright holiday colours; the stretch of the Barbican in Plymouth, lined with some 10,000 people; and perhaps the most memorable of all – our arrival at Kingsbridge, as we came up the river Dart, accompanied by a flotilla of small boats.

  The only human casualty was a lady Journalist who was given a brandy to steel her for the journey; at this point the hovercraft bucked and the brandy went up her nose, an experience which, I am told, is very painful!

  Our last stop for this part of the tour was Sidmouth, after which we were to resume on the Monday, calling at Bournemouth, Brighton and Eastbourne along the south coast. However, no sooner had we all disembarked on to the beach than a rogue wave hit a window of the hovercraft and pushed it in, rapidly filling it with water. Subsequently it transpired that that particular hovercraft had been on duty in the desert in the Middle East and had been involved in several sandstorms. The effect of this was that sand had settled in the rubber sealing around the window, causing the rubber to perish. In fact I now know that this could have happened at any time while we were at sea. We must be thankful it didn’t.

  I arranged a further hovercraft to be made available to us from the Isle of Wight on the Monday. Unfortunately the weather had turned and there were gale warnings. It would have been too dangerous to put to sea. As we learnt later, it was in fact also the day of the Fastnet Race during which Ted Heath’s boat, Morning Cloud, sank. Our cancellation was an inevitable decision, though a disappointing one. I am certain that had we gone to the remaining seaside resorts, people would have turned out in even greater numbers, not only to hear the word, but to see whether we were likely to sink! In spite of these setbacks, we carried on by car and reckoned to have addressed over 60,000 people during the course of the tour. It was well worth the effort.

  Hellcopters

  ‘Have we scalped a woman?’ – general election 1970

  Although Jo Grimond made the occasional hop by helicopter, I believe I was the first party leader to use the helicopter on prolonged regional tours. During the 1970 election and the two 1974 elections, I travelled thousands of miles, which enabled me to visit scores of targeted seats. One major disaster was averted in 1970. Caroline and I had left North Devon and had called on five Welsh constituencies in South, Mid and North Wales, proceeding to Liverpool for a meeting with candidates of the region, and thereafter on to Cheadle in support of Michael Winstanley, before going on to Yorkshire. At Cheadle we landed in a field which was surrounded by a housing estate. A large crowd of people were waiting and dangerously some of them lunged towards the machine, whose rotor blade was still turning. One of these was an over-enthusiastic Tory lady, who held aloft a banner which was sliced in two by the blade. At that moment Caroline shouted: ‘Look!’ and there on the ground was unmistakably a tuft of hair which looked as though it belonged to a woman. ‘My God’, I thought, ‘We’ve scalped a woman!’ My mind shot back to Wild West films, when Native Americans scalped palefaces – was this always fatal? I concluded that it was. A series of thoughts flooded through my mind: should I cancel electioneering for the rest of the day as a mark of respect to the deceased? Should I call on the next of kin? Would the inquest take place during the election campaign? Presumably the press, to whom bad news is often good news, will carry banner headlines: ‘Thorpe kills woman!’

  Caroline and I climbed out of the helicopter looking ashen, only to discover to our immense relief that a young lady had indeed lost her hair, but it was a wig which had blown off in the whirlwind of the rotor blade, and was trampled underfoot! I met the young lady months later at a Liberal meeting and was relieved to hear that she was none the worse for wear, though not wearing a wig.

  To give another example of the amount of ground one was able to cover in a short space of time, I recall particularly a two-day tour during one of the 1974 elections. Starting in North Devon where I took the 10 a.m. national press conference by a special TV link between Barnstaple and the National Liberal Club in London, I set off by helicopter for an open-air meeting in Hereford, followed by North Hereford and four other constituencies, ending in Birmingham, and returning to London that night.

  Day two: I took the daily press conference in London, before flying to Chelmsford, Orpington, Richmond, the Isle of Wight, North Dorset and back to North Devon for four meetings in the constituency. Not surprisingly, we were running late, and as it was getting dark, the pilot insisted that we should land at Exeter, where there would be appropriate lighting for the landing. He reckoned that it would be impracticable to land in my neighbour’s field in North Devon, which was the usual landing and take-off place during the campaign. From Exeter, I could not have got to the meetings in time and therefore I suggested that four tractors should be positioned in the four corners of the field, with headlights full on. This was successfully requested by radio from the helicopter and we duly landed in a blaze of lights to fulfil the evening engagements. My neighbour had already started the first meeting and was surprised and relieved to see me.

  Electoral reform

  I have been fully committed to the cause of electoral reform for many years. One of my earliest recollections is of taking part of a deputation to die then Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, led by the Independent MP for Oxford University, humorist and writer Sir Alan Herbert, in 1955. We urged the case for a Royal Commission on voting systems. At that time HMG was drafting constitutions for colonial territories about to receive independence. Quite apart from the distortions which our present system of first-past-the-post produces, nothing could be more dangerous than giving our own electoral system to a colonial territory where a group, either ethnic or religious, might be under-or over-represented in the ensuing election. We have been very careful to avoid this danger. I was Honorary Secretary of the committee seeking the Royal Commission, and our support covered a widespread cross-section of political opinion from Tony Benn and Michael Foot on the left to Douglas Savory, the MP for the university seat of Belfast University.

  The Orme Square meeting

  Reference should be made to the Orme Square meeting which took place on 24 March 1974. I had decided to invite the leaders of the business community for a meeting in my home. I organised six of my parliamentary colleagues to deliver the invitations personally. Each was to be assured that we were not going to ask them for money, but might raise matters which would be of possible interest to their shareholders. Almost every invitee accepted and turned up, twenty-four in number. A further four indicated that they were unable to be there but expressed interest. They included: Sir Marcus Sieff (Marks & Spencer); Sir Val Duncan (Rio Tinto); John King (Babcock & Wilcox); Sir Mark Turner (British Home Stores); Jim Slater (Slater Walker Securities); Ralph Bateman (Turner & Newall); Sir John Clark (Plessey Company); Viscount Caldecote (Delta Metal Co.); The Earl of Inchcape (P & O); Sir Kenneth Keith (Hill Samuel Group); Maxwell Joseph (Grand Metropolitan Hotels); Hon. David Montagu (Orion Bank); Ronald Grierson (GEC); John Hargreaves (IBM); Maldwyn Thomas (Rank Xerox); Edmund de Rothschild (N. M. Rothschild & Sons); Sir Ian Morrow (Hambros Industrial Management Ltd); Nigel Broackes (Trafalgar House Investments); Lord Stokes (British Leyland Motor Corporation); Sir John Partridge (Imperial Group); Mr John Pile (Imperial Group); Mr R. A. Garrett (Imperial Tobacco); Sir Alex Alexander (Imperial Foods); Mr Bruno Schroder (Schroder Wagg J. Henry Co.); Mr A. Macdonald (General Accident); J. R. M. Whitehorn (CBI); and Anthony Wigram (CAER).

  The Hon. John Sainsbury, Sir Paul Chambers, Sir Arnold Weinstock and Professor Sir Ronald Edwards expressed interest, but were unable to be present.

  In thanking them for their presence I said that the one thing they all had in common was that in one way or
another they subscribed to Conservative Party funds. Whilst I was able to recommend a wider scattering of bread upon the waters, this was not the purpose of the meeting. I wanted to make it perfectly clear that I applauded the fact that their companies were contributing financially to the cost of keeping democracy alive, but I suggested that their motive was not because Mr Heath was the soul of flexibility nor Mr Anthony Barber the greatest Chancellor of our time. I suggested that what they wanted was a degree of continuity without bouts of nationalisation, denationalisation and re-nationalisation. What they needed was the strengthening of the middle ground in politics.

  As far as the recent election was concerned (February 1974) they had not had very good value for money. With a turnout of 78.8 per cent, which was high, a Labour government had been returned with only 37.2 per cent of the electorate voting for them – 222,000 votes less than the Conservatives. In fact Labour with fewer votes was returned with five more MPs than the Conservatives. The Labour Party had formed a government with no less than 60 per cent of the votes opposed to them. The Liberal Party vote had gone up by four million to a total of six million which resulted in an increase of three MPs. One may ask why the Liberal Party declined the invitation to join a coalition with Edward Heath in February 1974. Although I did not wish to embroil them in a party political discussion, I would like to make two points which I had raised with the Prime Minister:

  First – simple arithmetic: 296 Conservative MPs plus 14 Liberal MPs makes a total of 310 out of a House of 635. A coalition, in the absence of a majority, would have fallen on the first vote – probably on the Queen’s Speech.