Back in Llandudno in 1976, however, these thoughts were very far from my mind. I was completely consumed by the joy of being in a hall with six hundred people who felt the same as I did and inspired by many of the speeches I heard. I remember listening to a speech from a young Peter Hain, then leader of the Young Liberals, and turning to a friend, saying that he was bound to be Leader of the Party one day. As for speaking myself, I never uttered a word. I was far too frightened to dare to stand up before all this political skill, wisdom and experience and expose my ignorance, inexperience and lack of ability.
Back in Yeovil, after my adoption, I began to draw up an audit of our assets and assess the strengths and weaknesses of our opposition.
The outcome was not encouraging. Yeovil had been a rock of West Country Liberalism in the nineteenth century, marked by the fact that a summer gathering of Liberals from across the West Country, which had on separate occasions been addressed by Gladstone and Lloyd George, used to take place annually in an old Roman earth amphitheatre called ‘the frying pans’ on Ham Hill just above Vane Cottage. Later on, when I was an MP and doing my pre-Christmas rounds of old people’s homes, I met an old man who told me that when Lloyd George attended these events he would always pop in to see a lady friend, the wife of a doctor, who lived close by. In the great Liberal landslide election of 1906 Yeovil had returned a thumping majority, with over sixty percent of the vote going to the Liberals. The Party in Yeovil even held on when the national Liberal vote crashed in the two 1910 elections. The Liberal MP for Yeovil (then known as South Somerset) at this time was Sir Edward Strachey, who had made something of a reputation for himself by being in favour of abolishing the House of Lords. He was then offered a peerage and took it, styling himself Lord Strachie (note the change in spelling) and causing a by-election, held on 21 November 1911, in which the Conservatives created a great national stir by winning with a majority of 374. I have a contemporary postcard celebrating the Tory win, which depicts an obviously Somerset chambermaid offering Lloyd George a full chamber pot with ‘374’ written on the side, saying, ‘Your Somerset cider, Sir.’
But it was not just the Tory 1911 victory in Yeovil which was remarkable. So, too, was the new Conservative MP. His name was Aubrey Herbert, and it was only by chance, and many years later, that I discovered that he had been the model for Sandy Arbuthnot, the hero of Greenmantle, John Buchan’s famous tale of espionage and derring-do in the Balkans and the Middle East during the First World War. I also discovered that there were some intriguing parallels between our two careers, albeit, in my case at a much more prosaic level. Like me, he had been involved in the shadowy side of diplomacy, having been one of the British agents who helped organise and inspire the Young Turk movement that ultimately overthrew the Ottomans. And like me, he became passionately involved in the affairs of the Balkans.
An intrepid traveller and adventurer and a brilliant linguist, Herbert enthusiastically adopted the cause of Albanian independence, and, although a sitting MP, fought in that country’s war of independence in 1913. As a result he was twice offered the Albanian crown, which he politely declined (rather a shame, I think; being known in the House of Commons as ‘The Honourable Gentleman for Yeovil* and King of Albania’ would have had a certain ring to it, I have always thought). During the First World War Aubrey Herbert took leave of absence from the House of Commons to join the Irish Guards and served with distinction in both France and the Middle East. He was wounded, taken prisoner and escaped during the Battle of Mons. But he was so horrified by the waste of young lives on the Western Front that when he returned home in 1917 he joined the Liberal Leader Herbert Asquith’s anti-war campaign, for which he was reviled by his own Party and spat at in the streets of Yeovil.
Despite his unpopular opinions and somewhat eccentric actions (or maybe because of them?), Aubrey Herbert was re-elected as Conservative MP for Yeovil after the war, only to die (ironically of blood-poisoning as a result of dental surgery†) in 1923 at the age of 42, the same age as I was when I took his place as MP for Yeovil sixty years later. Aubrey Herbert was greatly admired and loved by his constituents, and the strong foundation he laid, together with the national decline of the Liberals, made Yeovil a rock-solid seat for the Tories, who held it with overwhelming majorities (with the single exception of 1966 when Labour ran them a close second), until 1983.
In her book The Man Who Was Greenmantle Aubrey Herbert’s granddaughter, Margaret Fitzherbert, writes: ‘The electors of South Somerset are an independent people, with a strong non-conformist streak. Aubrey’s lack of convention appealed to their sturdy, and sometimes surly, individualism.’ This description of the voters of Yeovil remains as accurate today as it was in Herbert’s time, and in due course this tradition of contrariness was one of the assets I came to rely upon in trying to win the seat.
But there were very few other assets. Labour was strong in the constituency, having come quite close to winning in 1966. In recent years we Liberals had been pretty consistently in third place, though in the February 1974 general election we had briefly and narrowly overtaken Labour, only to fall back to third place again in that year’s second (October) election.
Meanwhile, since there had been a long interregnum when the Yeovil Constituency Liberals had been without a candidate, our funds were terribly depleted, our membership numbers were low, the membership itself rather elderly (with the exception of a few younger faces who had joined during the Liberal surge of the first 1974 election), and the organisation almost non-existent. It would all have to be rebuilt from scratch.
However, I did have one major asset to build on, apart from an ancient Liberal tradition which was still dimly remembered and what Margaret Fitzherbert called Yeovil’s tradition of ‘sturdy individualism’. That was my predecessor as Liberal candidate in recent elections up to February 1974, Dr Geoffrey Taylor. He was a devoted local GP who also made important contributions to public health, a lifelong Liberal, a unilateralist nuclear disarmer and a committed community activist. It was he who had built up the Liberal vote in the constituency, enabling the Party briefly to push Labour into third position in the first 1974 election. But, more than that, he had established a very wide and well-deserved reputation for community service and was much loved and admired, well beyond the circle of those who would naturally vote Liberal. It was on the foundation laid by Geoffrey and his wife Heather (the daughter of a Liberal Minister in the 1906 Liberal Government) that I built – and in large measure thanks to their work that I was, in due course, eventually elected.
There were two other relatively minor but useful factors I believed we could exploit. The first was that the Labour organisation, though much stronger than ours and with a substantial vote on the ground, was complacent. It took its support in the poorer areas of the Constituency for granted and was based too much on the trades unions and too little on community activism. And it always fielded a parliamentary candidate who came from outside the Constituency and usually only visited it at election time. There was a reservoir of votes to be tapped into here, if we were prepared to work at it.
The second factor was that the Conservatives, too, though outwardly all-powerful and monolithic, had actually become rather tired politically. They overwhelmingly controlled all the local Councils, had a branch in almost every village, could outspend us many tens of times over, and the sitting MP, John Peyton, though a survivor from a different, more paternalistic age in politics, was highly regarded in Parliament and enjoyed respect in the Constituency. But they had become much more a social organisation than a political one, were used, at the Council level, to being elected without opposition, especially in rural seats and also generally took their vote very much for granted.
It was from these scraps that, in the weeks after my adoption, I assembled a strategy for action.
It was only now that I at last, fully and with some horror, realised the depth of the hole in which I had put my family and myself. I was clearly not going to be elected to Par
liament at the next election, as I had naively thought. I discussed my very gloomy assessment with Jane and put it to her that one option for us was to make use of the Foreign Office’s promise of a ‘safety net’ and return to them. But she rejected this out of hand.
So what I needed now was a very clear long-term strategy based on the hard realities of the Liberals’ position in Yeovil. Here is what I came up with and put to the Yeovil Constituency Liberals at a meeting in late December.
1. We should adopt a three-election strategy and should plan on the basis that I would probably not be in a position to mount a genuine challenge for the seat until my third attempt.
2. I would need to stay full-time in the constituency. So I had to get a job locally and could not afford to get distracted by anything other than the single task of winning Yeovil (i.e. I could not afford to allow myself to get interested in national Liberal Party affairs).
3. Our immediate aim at the next election was not to beat the Tories, but to beat Labour. Once we were the clear challengers for the seat, we would be able to squeeze the Labour vote in subsequent elections.
4. Our effort, therefore, should now be not in the rural areas, where we had traditionally concentrated, but in the towns – and especially in the Yeovil Council estates, where Labour’s traditional vote was based.
5. We needed to build up our base from the bottom, concentrating first on local government elections.
6. We could not rely on any newspapers, either locally or nationally. So we would have to find other means to communicate directly with our electorate if we were to succeed in getting our messages across.
7. We would nevertheless need a strong Press effort – we should aim to get at least one story, with genuine news appeal and about a local issue, into the local Press every week.
8. The national Party’s standing was not very high, so our key messages should be about local service not national politics. What was subsequently to be known as ‘community politics’ would be our battleground.
I am not sure that many of the rather thin audience to which I presented this grand plan understood the implications of the strategy I put to them, and I suspect that they had heard enthusiastic new candidates put such utopian plans to them before. Nevertheless, the strategy was formally agreed.
It was a little before Christmas, after four months and many tens of applications, that I finally got a local job. I was taken on in the contract department of Normalair Garrett, a subsidiary at the time of Westland Helicopters, which made high-grade engineering parts for the aircraft industry. My job was to help calculate the costings of engineering work for tenders. My salary was less than half what I had been earning with the Foreign Office, but I was glad to be back in a job. I knew nothing whatsoever about the work and had to learn very fast about my new world of commerce, the aircraft industry and the complexities of an engineering machine shop. I even joined the local branch of the trades union TASS and became involved in some of its activities. I cannot pretend that it was work I enjoyed, not least because one of the senior managers was a strong Tory supporter and did all he could to make my life as difficult and uncomfortable as possible. But my immediate boss, Wilf Baker, was a kindly and decent man who did much to ease my early days in the firm. And my workplace colleagues, especially the machine operators on the shop floor, for whose skills I developed a very high admiration, were in the main extremely generous and patient in protecting me from the consequences of my early ignorance. I owe them much and learned a great deal from them which was necessary for my survival and was to prove very useful later in my political career.
But if Westland occupied my time from nine to five, it was community politics which occupied my brain for most of my waking day. I was out canvassing almost every night up to Christmas 1976. And it was dispiriting work. We had almost no support, and no one had the faintest idea who I was. The rest of my time in these early months was spent making initial contact with the journalists from the various newspapers and getting to know what interested them as news stories, paying calls on past Liberal activists and seeing if I could persuade them back into active support again, and helping our branches to raise money through jumble sales and local fetes. But I had to concede by the end of the year that we were making very little progress. I could attract no attention in the Press, the amounts of money we were raising were paltry, and the Constituency’s base of active members remained stubbornly few and mostly elderly.
Over Christmas I did a rethink and came to two conclusions. First, if I wanted to persuade people that I could be a good MP, I had better start acting like one – what I called ‘the MP over the water’ strategy. I would start holding weekly advice centres (which we called ‘surgeries’) on Saturday mornings in the Yeovil Liberal Club (which had become little more than a working men’s club at the time). Second, we needed to get our messages across on our terms and not rely on the Press. To do this we needed regular leaflets through people’s doors. Such an idea, though commonplace today, was completely radical at the time. Normally, the political parties only put out leaflets at election time. The idea of the year-round local leaflet, concentrating on local issues, had been pioneered by Liverpool Liberals with great success. I had seen a fellow candidate, Trevor Jones in neighbouring Dorchester, use this technique to win a string of local by-elections and learned how to implement it from him and two other Liberals, Richard and Phoebe Winch in Sherborne. But we did not have the money to have leaflets printed for us, so we would have to print them ourselves. This meant that I would have to get myself into the printing business.
Jane and I started our first ‘surgery’ in Yeovil on a bitterly cold Saturday in early January 1977, little realising that this would be the first of nearly a quarter of a century of Saturday mornings on which, from 9 a.m. to often 2.30 p.m., I would provide advice and help to people who came to see me, first as the Liberal PPC and then as Yeovil Constituency’s Member of Parliament. The form was that Jane would make coffee, which we would sell much cheaper than anywhere else in town, while I made myself available to provide advice if anyone needed it.
At first, of course, no one came. Why should they? They did not know me from Adam. We spent several weeks setting up our stall and waiting all morning for no one to arrive. In the end, it was actually Jane’s cheap coffee and biscuits which began to draw them in. Then we started getting regulars who came in every week. No one asked me for advice, but at least they knew who I was, and sometimes we even talked politics. And then one day a young couple came in and, in the course of our conversation, complained to me about the appalling state of their Council accommodation. I asked if they would like me to help. They said they would, and I paid them a visit a few days later, after which I wrote to the Council about the condition of their house and, with the agreement of the couple, invited the Press in to see it for themselves. There was a huge article in the local paper about it the following week, and the Council was forced to act. I had taken on my first ‘case’ and won it!
Gradually, over a period of about six months, more and more people came in to see me, and, in terms of custom, we were beginning to rival local MP John Peyton’s rather less frequent surgeries. After some errors I gradually became quite adept at taking up my customers’ cases with the various authorities, ranging from government ministries to the tax office and the local Councils. After we got home, I would dictate the letters on the cases which arose from the morning’s surgery, and Jane would type them up. I found myself really enjoying these mornings which often also provided excellent material for human-interest articles in the local Press. My name was beginning to get known, not only as someone who could get things done, but also as someone who cared about local affairs.
It was not long before the Tory-dominated local Council tried to put a stop to my activities by instructing the Council officers not to deal with me – I was not elected, they argued (not unreasonably), and therefore had neither the right nor the legal locus to take up people’s cases. I was in a quan
dary and could not see a way round this obstacle until a local solicitor who was one of our few younger supporters told me that in English law a citizen was entirely free to choose anyone they wished to represent them in dealings with the authorities. The chosen representative needed neither to be qualified (like a lawyer), nor elected. They just needed proof that they were the person chosen by the citizen in question to act on his or her behalf. With my next case, I enclosed a consent form which my ‘constituent’ had signed nominating me as their representative and an explanation of the legal position. The Council, on the insistence of their Tory masters, took legal advice before conceding that they had indeed to deal with me as a bona fide representative of the person concerned, even though I was not elected.
By the middle of 1977 there were queues to see me at our regular Saturday morning surgeries. I was getting coverage in the local Press almost every week on some local issue or another and had launched or got myself involved in more community-politics-based campaigns than I could comfortably handle.
One of these involved a campaign on council house repairs on the western side of Yeovil, which I launched with an appeal in the Press for people to contact me if they had problems with getting repairs done to their houses. I had a flood of applications for help and decided that I would visit each of the complainants personally to take details of their problems. It was winter, bitterly cold, and the nights were very dark. I managed to do about six houses a night, and on this particular night was invited in for a cup of tea at almost every house I called on. It was not long before I was cross-legged for a pee. As luck would have it, the fifth house I called on had a problem with the bathroom sink, which was hanging off the wall. But, the tenant explained, the taps still worked alright, and ran them to prove the point. This did absolutely nothing to make my condition more bearable. However, I saw, in the corner of the room, exactly what I was looking for: one of those old-fashioned loos with an elevated cast-iron cistern with ‘Shanks’ embossed on the outside. My request to use it was swiftly agreed, and my host left the room closing the door behind him. Perhaps the cistern, too, was hanging off the wall, or perhaps it was that, in sheer relief, I pulled the chain too hard, but as I did so the whole lot came crashing to the floor! My host, hearing the noise, rushed in, took in the wreckage with a sweep of his eye and enquired drily, ‘I don’t suppose you want me to vote Liberal as well, do you?’ Covered in confusion and embarrassment I made a dash for the front door and reached for the handle, promising to get someone round in the morning. But he was quicker and grabbed the door knob before I could do any more damage, saying, ‘I’ll do that if you don’t mind!’ I still see him in Yeovil from time to time, and we still laugh about it. And, as it happens, I am pretty sure he did vote for me!
A Fortunate Life Page 23