I knew I could never be a Tory, of course, and thought the Liberal Party too small, too zany and too incoherent to be worth looking at. From about 1970, therefore, I turned away from politics and joined the millions in Britain whose attitude towards politicians of whatever party was basically, ‘a plague on all your houses’. So, despite the fact that the 1974 election looked as though it would be an exciting one – with Labour and Tory neck-and-neck, and support for the Liberals, who had just won a stunning series of by-elections, on the rise – I felt neither excited nor engaged by the prospect of the imminent contest. My thoughts were on Geneva and what the next phase of my life would bring, and nothing else.
So the knock on my door, which came on a beautiful crisp cold day some time in the last week of January 1974, when I was digging in our back garden at Vane Cottage, was not at all welcome. I became even more grumpy, when I opened the door to discover that my caller was yet another canvasser, this time seeking my support for the local Liberals.
I am not much of a believer in Pauline conversions. With me, convictions grow slowly and take time to mature. But the actual event of my conversion to Liberalism is an exception. And the instrument of the epiphany, standing on my doorstep that sunny afternoon, took just about the most unlikely form it is possible to imagine.
I definitely remember that he wore an orange anorak, looked rather unprepossessing, and had a squeaky voice to match. But, for the rest, I suspect my memory may be playing tricks when it tells me he also had sandals and a wispy beard, since that sounds just too consistent with the then (and later) Liberal stereotype. I told him pretty roughly that I certainly would not vote Liberal, unless (which I considered highly unlikely) he could persuade me that I should. I don’t quite know what happened next. But two hours later, having discussed liberalism at length in our front room, I discovered that this was what I had really always been. That Liberalism was an old coat that had been hanging in my cupboard, overlooked all these years, just waiting to be taken down and put on.
This is not to say that my visitor that day (whom I have diligently tried to find since, but without success) turned me into a Liberal activist. He had merely turned me into a Liberal voter. This was no more than the first small step on a long journey that, over the next two years, would include many other events which would slowly but inexorably change the course of my life again.
I cast my first vote for the Liberals by proxy from Geneva, in the February general election of 1974.
Just before the election we set off on our new adventure with Kate, Simon, our dog Tina and our cat Boney in a brand new and very posh British racing green Rover.
The first part did not go well. We planned to have dinner with a friend, Michael Aaronson,* who had been posted to the British Embassy in Paris. The plan was then to load ourselves and our car onto the car-transporter train which, in those days, ran between Paris and Saint-Gervais-les-Bains at the foot of Mont Blanc. From here we would drive the thirty kilometres or so to Geneva. What I did not count on, however, was Paris during the rush hour.
Very soon after entering the city we got hopelessly lost. Jane has many gifts, but map-reading is not one of them – just as one of mine is not keeping an even temper in these circumstances. So the inside of our car quickly became a scene out of Bedlam, with Jane and I shouting at each other in the front, the kids adding to the noise in the back, and the dog and the cat, convinced this was all a game, joining in with gusto. Eventually, in despair, I stopped the car and asked a man on one of those little French motorised bicycles how to get to the address Mike Aaronson had given me. He said he knew it well and would lead us there. So we set off behind him, weaving our way through the rush-hour traffic. It was only when I passed the same landmark for the third time that I realised that he was just as lost as I had been. He then, in his turn, stopped a motorist, who said, yes, he knew the place well and would take us there. And so our convoy was now three. But soon we were lost again. Finally, a taxi driver was hailed, and the convoy became four. And so it was that we were finally delivered to Mike Aaronson’s house. Mike then led us to the station, where we loaded our car on the transporter, after which we joined him in a nearby restaurant for a splendid dinner. This was followed by a hair-raising return to the station, crammed (children, dog, cat and all) into Mike’s open-topped MG. The dog and cat travelled in our sleeper with us on the long overnight journey to the Alps. The following morning I woke early and pulled the carriage blind to one side to see the snow-covered Alps sparkling above us in the sunlight. We unloaded our car and drove down the valley into the freezing fog which, as we were later to discover, frequently covers the whole of the basin of Lake Geneva in fine, still weather. Jane was initially terribly shocked when she saw how dirty and unkempt our home was, the result of being unlived in for some time. But we made a start on cleaning the house after we had unpacked our cases, and by the time we finished for the day, the sun had broken through the fog, revealing the whole great expanse of Lake Geneva before us and the Alps sparkling in the distance.
So began what was, I think, our happiest two years as a family. Kate and Simon were six and eight, and thus able to come with us everywhere. In the winter we learned to ski, first on the Jura Mountains, near St Cergue, where my grandfather had taken his annual winter holidays, and my father had learned to ski before me. (They used to stay at the Hotel Auberson, where old M. Auberson still remembered them quite clearly, whispering to me in a conspiratorial aside that my grandfather ‘kept a mistress down on the lake’ at the time.) Then, as our skiing improved, we regularly joined with friends to hire chalets in some of Switzerland’s great Alpine resorts (Verbier was our favourite).
We joined forces with some new-found friends, Rosemary and Roy Billinge, and bought a small yacht, which we kept moored off our own jetty. It was just big enough for Jane and I and the children, at a squeeze, to sleep in overnight for summer weekend cruises on Lake Geneva. Our other summer passion was walking in the mountains, sometimes staying the night in high mountain huts with other friends from the UK Mission, Dorothy and David Hartridge, whose children became the closest of friends with ours.
For the first time in my life, I was regularly able to be home on weekdays early enough to eat with the children. This was invariably followed by half an hour or so in which I read them stories, especially from The Chronicles of Narnia, which they loved.
Maison Kundig, with its terrace lapped by the waves of the lake, was marvellous for parties, of which we had many. And its lawn was just big enough for a reasonable game of badminton, provided enthusiasm was sufficiently restrained to keep the shuttlecock out of the lake, or a game of croquet, with the same proviso.
My parents came over from Australia to visit us in 1975, the last time I saw them together. And my youngest brother Mark came too, climbing Mont Blanc with me in June of that year.
This was also a satisfying time from a professional point of view, as well. I found I enjoyed both facets of my work. The shadowy side of my professional life, in which Jane was also involved, took up a good deal of time, because at this time, with the Cold War still in full swing, the UN agencies in Geneva were something of a global hotbed for such activities.
The ‘day job’ was pretty full too. My area of responsibility in the British Mission was to look after Britain’s relations with a number of UN bodies based in Geneva, particularly UNCTAD (the UN Conference on Trade and Development), the WHO (the World Health Organisation) and WIPO (the World International Property Organisation). All of these organisations inhabited totally different worlds to the one I had lived in up to now, so I had to learn new skills and new techniques which were totally alien to me: something which I always enjoy doing.
I was not, however, a natural diplomat and found it difficult to conform convincingly to the Foreign Office’s bureaucratic routines, especially when it came to the FCO protocols for writing telegrams reporting events back to London. I have never thought it a particular sin to split an infinitive, especially wher
e you want to specially emphasise a particular point. If it was good enough for George Bernard Shaw, it ought to be good enough for me. But I soon discovered that split infinitives are cardinal sins in the FCO. We had an especially fearsome Head of Chancery,* Anne Warburton,† who could spot a split infinitive at a thousand yards and terrified us all, especially me, when it came to correct grammar in telegram-writing. I recall having to write a long draft telegram to London (on, I think, an event in the disarmament talks) and, after taking great care to expunge all trace of split infinitives, sending it to her for approval with a quietly confident heart – only to have it returned with a completely different grammatical error that she had spotted. According to legend, a draft that one of my colleagues submitted was returned with an offending paragraph circled in her characteristic red pencil and an angry scrawl in the margin: ‘ANOTHER BEASTLY HANGING GERUND!’ I soon decided that, all things considered, it was better to give up the struggle for grammatical correctness, concluding that suffering her lashes was, in the end, easier and less painful.†
I was also part responsible for keeping an eye on human-rights issues, and it was in this capacity that I accompanied Dr Sheila Cassidy when she gave evidence to the UN Human Rights Commission on the torture she had endured under Pinochet in Chile. This event had a profound effect on me and helped to solidify my fast-developing liberal and internationalist views.
My other job in the UK Mission was Press relations, and it was in this capacity that I was co-opted onto the negotiating team headed by the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, for the first and second Cyprus peace conferences, held in the Palais des Nations in Geneva in July and August 1974. On 20 July that year Turkish forces had invaded Cyprus, and this was swiftly followed by the first Geneva Peace Conference between Britain, Greece and Turkey, presided over by Jim Callaghan – probably the last time a British Foreign Secretary played this kind of pivotal role in a major peace conference. The first round of talks did not succeed, and a second conference was called, this time including not just the three nations, but also representatives of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. It was during these two events that I first met a young Tom McNally, then Callaghan’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, who was later to become a key ally when I was Leader of the Lib Dems and is now, as Lord McNally, my ‘boss’ as Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords. I spent long hours in the sun on the lawns of the Palais des Nations between conference sessions, discussing the world, and especially politics, with Tom and Jim Callaghan’s legendary Press chief, Tom McCaffrey.*
Tom McNally recollects that, even at this time, I was declaring myself a Liberal and expressing an ambition to go into politics. I do not remember this, but my discussions with him and McCaffrey certainly played a key role in my eventual decision to take the plunge and enter the field myself.
The Cyprus talks were also the context for a diplomatic gaffe that provided my friends and many Geneva dinner parties with much cruel amusement at my expense.
The second round of talks drew to a head on 13 August 1974, when Jim Callaghan, briefing us before the talks started, told us that he believed that Turan Günes, the Turkish Foreign Minister, was not negotiating in good faith. At this time, as throughout the talks, Callaghan was in very close contact with his US opposite number Henry Kissinger, who was using maximum US leverage (including repositioning the US Seventh Fleet) to put pressure on the Greeks and the Turks to come to an agreement.
The Foreign Secretary, who I thought played a weak hand with great skill, kept the Turks at the table as tensions rose and rose through the small hours of the following morning. At about 3 a.m. the phone rang in an adjacent room, and Callaghan motioned me to go and take the call. I lifted the receiver to hear a long American drawl over a very bad line, culminating in the words ‘White House’ and ‘Can I speak to Jim please?’ I asked who was calling and he said ‘It’s Henry’. To which I replied ‘Henry who?’ He said, ‘Just tell him it’s Henry’, and for some time afterwards in Geneva diplomatic circles I was known, rather unfairly I thought, as ‘Henry who?’
I cannot, at this distance remember the precise moment when Jane and I finally decided that I should leave my job and go into politics. It happened very slowly over the two-and-a-half years we were in Geneva. One contributory factor was certainly that I found it increasingly painful trying to represent my country during the political chaos of 1974, with its two elections and its three-day weeks, when the international standing of Britain, already widely regarded as ‘the sick man of Europe’, was at rock bottom. I increasingly came to feel that there was not much point living a life of diplomatic ease, if the country you were trying to represent was falling apart before your eyes.
But not all my home thoughts from abroad were so altruistic. I also found that, though I enjoyed my job, understood its importance and greatly respected my colleagues, I increasingly wanted to have my own ball at my own feet, rather than, as a civil servant, kicking around somebody else’s.
And so it was that, in February 1975, while on three weeks home leave from Geneva, I called in (on my birthday, as it happened) to see the then Chairman of the Yeovil Liberals, Brian Andrews, and told him that I was a supporter and, if ever I could be of assistance, I would like to help. I explained that, as a civil servant, I could take no active part in politics, but I could and would be happy to offer discreet advice on foreign-policy matters if ever it was needed. ‘What a pity,’ he replied. ‘We are due to select our new candidate tonight. If only we had known you were available!’ I responded rather sharply that he had completely misunderstood. I could not take an active part in politics. I had no interest whatsoever in being their candidate – just in helping behind the scenes, if they wanted it. And so our conversation ended.
That May the previous Yeovil Liberal Candidate, the much respected Dr Geoffrey Taylor, came to Geneva for a World Health Organisation conference and asked to see me. We invited him to lunch and, under a glorious May sky, sitting in our garden by the lake in Maison Kundig, he explained that the candidate the Yeovil Liberals had selected in February had also been selected (without their knowledge) for the Newbury seat and had decided that, Newbury being the better prospect, he would abandon Yeovil. So they were without a candidate again. Would I be interested? I cannot recall what answer I gave him, but it must have appeared to him to be at least mildly positive, for from then on he was in almost weekly contact trying to persuade me to put my name forward.
Slowly, over the summer of 1975, Jane and I took the decision that I would resign from the Foreign Office and go into politics. Most of our friends and colleagues, understanding the realities of the situation better than me, thought I was completely mad. Our closest friends were kind, but you could see even they thought we were mad, too. There were only three exceptions to this: George Steiner, a Geneva friend who was, at the time, Professor of English Literature at Geneva University; a close colleague in the UK Mission, Colin McColl (later to become a highly successful and much respected head of MI6); and the then Danish Ambassador to Geneva. The last told us he had wanted to do the same but had left it too late. ‘You have to do this before your children go away to boarding school. If you leave it later, and they are already at boarding school, then you have to be very rich to be able to pay for it.’ (Boarding school fees for both British and Danish diplomats were paid by their governments.) This latter argument weighed heavily with us, especially Jane, who was dreading the parting with our children that would have been necessary if I had stayed in the Foreign Service.
I have no doubt that, with responsibility for a wife and two young children, this decision to leave a well-paid career in which I believe I had a future for the insecurities of political life – especially as a Liberal candidate in a seat which had been Tory for half a century – was naive to the point of irresponsibility. It just happens also to be the best decision I have made in my life.
At the end of 1975 I formally gave in my notice. My employers fixed the time for our departure
from Geneva as July the following year, adding that they would welcome me back at any time up to my forty-third birthday (I was thirty-five at the time).
These last months of our time in Geneva were not uneventful. One of my duties in the shadows involved Jane and me paying a visit to Vienna just before Christmas 1975, travelling by night sleeper across snow-covered Switzerland and Austria. We were ostensibly there on a short holiday, which, to add verisimilitude, included a visit to the State Opera, where they were putting on a performance of Verdi’s Aida. For us this was not an onerous addition to our schedule, for we had by this time become keen opera fans, though with a strong preference for Mozart over Verdi (and no preference at all for Wagner, after seeing Tristan und Isolde on a boiling hot summer’s evening in Lausanne, when Jane slept through almost the whole three hours, then woke up, burst into tears over the ‘Liebestod’ and left after the final curtain – all in the space of twenty minutes). All opera requires from its audience a certain ability to suspend disbelief, which is no doubt why comic operas tend to work better than serious ones – and why even serious ones can swiftly descend into comedy if things go wrong. On this occasion, Aida, the Ethiopian slave girl, was played by a voluptuous American soprano of very ample proportions. Radames, her lover, however, was a diminutive Italian with a torso so emaciated he looked as if he had been starved and legs so well developed they appeared to belong to someone else. He also had the wobbliest thighs I have ever seen – and they wobbled a great deal when he was borne in, on what appeared to be a Chinese restaurant table top, through cheering crowds for the triumphal entry into Thebes. I made manful attempts to believe it all, up to the point when, in a moment of passion, he was clasped between the bosoms of Aida, which engulfed his whole body from the waist upwards and completely swallowed up his voice along with it. The former only reappeared when unclasped, while the latter re-emerged, after a short pause, as a thin squeak from above the proscenium arch. At this point we both got a fit of uncontrollable giggles and had to leave, amid sternly disapproving looks from the more serious-minded burghers of Vienna.
A Fortunate Life Page 21