I then went into my daughter Kate’s bedroom (my son Simon was away at a scout camp), broke the news to her and asked if she would like to see her grandfather. She said she would, and I took her in to see his body.*
Although he had only been with us for eighteen months or so, my father had become something of a personality with our neighbours and amongst our friends, so there was quite a crowd at his cremation, after which we sent his ashes out to be scattered on the graves of my mother and their two children, Robert and Melanie, in Castlemaine in Australia.
Even if a death is expected, it does not diminish the impact, and I felt my father’s death most painfully – as did Jane and our children. That we were able to nurse him to the end, and so prevent him having to endure the indignities of this kind of death in the company of strangers, gave us pride – and in some way enabled us all to be much more enriched by the process of his leaving us than we would have been if he had been cared for by others. But the fact that neither he nor my mother lived long enough to see me elected to Parliament has been a source of deep and still-felt sadness in my life.
Throughout the period of my father’s last illness, the political pace, both nationally and locally, quickened. Normally there is something of a political hiatus after an election, especially one in which a new government is elected. During this period the opposition parties stand back for a bit and leave the new Government to find its feet during its early, honeymoon days. But the Thatcher revolution got under way almost immediately, with the brutal application of her monetarist doctrine. This soon produced a spate of closures and layoffs, with a sharp increase in unemployment and an equally sharp decrease in her popularity. It is often forgotten how swiftly she moved in these early days from the triumphant liberator who had freed the country from a hated Labour Government to the most unpopular Prime Minster since polling records began.
Meanwhile Labour, under the leadership of Michael Foot, was going through convulsions which looked at one time as though they might be terminal. The radicalisation of the Party and the rise of the militants had begun immediately after the 1979 defeat, leading in January 1981 to the ‘Gang of Four’ breaking away to form the SDP. The difficulties the other two parties were going through created fertile territory for me in the Yeovil constituency. The task now was to expand our base from Yeovil town to the other main centres of population in the Constituency, Chard, Crewkerne and Ilminster, and to begin to rebuild our campaigning structures in the countryside, which we had allowed to decay somewhat while we concentrated on Yeovil. Chard, where we had launched our first-ever community leaflet back in the electric duplicator days, was already a strong base. So I spent much of 1980 recruiting new teams of young activists in the other areas where we now needed to grow.
We were lucky with local government by-elections. There were seven of these in all corners of the Constituency between 1979 and 1983, and we won all of them, taking seats from Labour and the Tories in roughly equal measure. We were now clearly the coming force in the Constituency, and this brought us defectors, too. We gained two Tories on the local Council and one key Labour activist, Greg Jefferies, who would later prove a most gifted Chairman of Schools on Somerset County Council.
It was at this time that we unleashed an explosion of local community leaflets across the Constituency, most of them called Focus, but some with more imaginative names like The Merriot Ferret and The Martock Bean. Clarissa was busier than ever, and our dining room table was ever more frequently occupied by teams of activists setting leaflets for printing.
This caused us a problem.
Shortly before the 1979 election, I had been ‘headhunted’ (if that is not too grand a word) by Morlands Sheepskin Coats of Glastonbury to help them set up a subsidiary called Tescan in Yeovil. This was the brainchild of one of the Morland family, Richard Morland, who was a neighbour and friend in Norton and a Liberal supporter. The plan was to set up a separate arms-length subsidiary of the long-established Glastonbury firm, which would buy, process and sell ‘raw’ sheepskins (that is sheepskin purchased straight from the abattoir). We would be the main supplier of these products to the parent firm, but could also sell them on the open market to any customer. Richard wanted me to look after Personnel and Marketing for the new firm. This meant learning entirely new skills but I leapt at the opportunity, in part because it meant a higher salary, in part because it meant leaving what was essentially a clerical job at Normalair Garrett and taking on a management one – and in part because Richard believed in worker participation, a key tenet of Liberal policy at the time and asked me to create the systems and structures to put this into operation. After eighteen months he then asked me to take on a more senior job, managing the production department, which was at the heart of our business and which dealt with the treatment and grading of all our raw sheepskins.
What all this meant was that our family finances received a much-needed boost from the salary which came with the new job – just as well, as the financial cushion we had accumulated was now exhausted. But we still had to be very careful about money. So providing hospitality to all the hungry and thirsty activists who descended on our house put a lot of strain on our very meagre resources. To alleviate this we took on one of the village allotments, where we grew all our own vegetables, and I took up home brewing. I brewed all my own beer, which was kept in a large plastic pressurised barrel in a corner cupboard in our kitchen, from which everyone knew they could help themselves. This led to disaster one evening when one of our activists tried to inject more gas into the container, without knowing how to stop it, causing the barrel to explode with a large bang and distributing five gallons of beer all over the room and everyone in it.
I also brewed my own wine from almost any fruit, or even vegetable, I could lay my hands on. I have to confess that the results were of variable quality. My apple wine was, I thought, excellent. But I could not, in good conscience, recommend the carrot or the parsnip. The flower wines, too, could be good, though the sight of me tripping home from the fields in the spring with baskets of primroses led to much ribald comment and an occasional lifted eyebrow on the part of my village neighbours – who clearly wondered what such behaviour said about the nature of Liberalism.
Good, bad or indifferent, however, the one thing all my wines had in common was their alcoholic content. We used to have an annual summer party for all our activists in our garden, and more than once this resulted in people wandering off into the dark, to be found insensible in some field or hedgerow the following morning.
But my home-made wines were more than just fun. They were also a deadly weapon when it came to persuading reluctant candidates to stand for us in a forthcoming local election. I tried the technique out first on one of my closest friends, Dick Budd, who, thanks to the best part of a bottle of apple wine, was persuaded to fight and eventually win our first country by-election in a strongly Tory rural ward in 1981. Thereafter there was no stopping me, and there are today many people high up in the ranks of South Somerset District Council (as it is now known) and Somerset County Council, whose political careers were launched on a tide of apple or rhubarb wine in my sitting room.
The team we assembled over these years was an extraordinary one. They were all about the same age as me, came from all sections of society, were utterly committed, and remain to this day some of our closest friends. They were also exceptional campaigners and pretty ruthless when it came to winning a by-election. I remember seeing two of them leap out of a vehicle in which they were making a last-minute dash to get a voter to the polling station before it closed, in order to help a farmer herd his sheep into a neighbour’s field because they were obstructing the road. On another occasion one of our activists called five times at a house to persuade a supporter to get to the polls, only to find the would-be voter absent. On the final, sixth call, with fifteen minutes to go before the polls closed, he met the voter coming down his own front path. ‘Have you voted yet?’ the activist asked. ‘No. I have just got bac
k from hospital. I am very ill,’ came the reply. ‘Well you had better hurry, then,’ was the response. ‘It could be your last time!’
Despite the fact that our battles with the Tories were strenuous, our disagreements did not carry over into personal animosity, and there was very little bad blood between the two parties locally. Indeed, my next-door neighbour in Norton was an elderly lady who had some difficulty erecting the Tory posters on stakes in her front garden, which was immediately adjacent to mine with its generous crop of Liberal ones – so I always used to do it for her. Perhaps it was because of this that I adopted a policy of never voting for myself, which has always puzzled my colleagues and observers. To me, it somehow seems improper to vote for oneself – so I have always cast my vote for whichever of my opponents I believed on personal (i.e., not political) grounds would make the best MP.
Two other factors also helped our political battle for Yeovil in those years. The first was that in 1981 the Boundary Commission altered the boundaries of the Constituency, removing two strongly Tory areas which had previously been in Yeovil and placing them into neighbouring Somerton and Frome. The Times estimated that the effect of this would have been to reduce John Peyton’s Tory majority at the last election from 11,0000 to around 8,000 at the next – still a hefty majority to overcome in a general election, but at least things were moving in the right direction. The second factor was the announcement, also in 1981, that John Peyton would not stand at the next election. The Tories pretty quickly got themselves a new candidate, David Martin, but I had a six-year start on him in terms of getting myself known locally.
By now my strategy of behaving like an MP, even though I wasn’t one, was beginning to bear fruit. More and more people were coming to see me with their problems at my Saturday morning surgeries and now I was getting invitations, which would normally have gone to the sitting MP, to open village fetes and community centres. The Tories were furious about this, but there was nothing they could do about it, especially since their own MP was standing down.
I soon found, though, that behaving like an MP meant I had to take positions on local issues, and this meant risking losing support as well as gaining it. In 1980, shortly after the general election, there was much unhappiness in one part of Yeovil over a decision to locate a care home for youngsters with learning difficulties in the area; the residents said it would reduce the value of their properties. I visited the area, spoke to the residents, and quickly concluded that this was pure prejudice. So I published a leaflet referring to local opposition to the plan as ‘Yeovil’s shame’. Needless to say, there was a furious reaction from the affected area, but this did not appear to affect our overall support in the town at all.
In the same year I learned that Westland Helicopters, by far the largest employer in the Constituency and then going through a very difficult period for orders, was about to sell helicopters to Chile. One of the Chileans sent over to clinch the deal had, it was reported, been involved in torture during the Pinochet years – including the torture of women such as Sheila Cassidy, who, back in my Foreign Office days, I had accompanied when she gave evidence to the UN in Geneva on the abuses she had suffered. To the considerable anger of Westland workers and the trades unions, whose jobs were at risk if Westland did not get the order, I made a series of public statements and speeches, saying that we should not sell helicopters to this kind of tyrant or ‘buy jobs with the blood of innocents’. There was quite a row about it for a couple of weeks. But, interestingly enough, when the election came round three years later I got overwhelming support from Westland workers, and one or two even came up to me and said that, though they were very unhappy with me at the time, they understood and respected the reasons why I had taken this line, as that was my job.
I learned an important lesson over these incidents. The dangers of putting your conscience and judgement before your popularity are often far less than we politicians realise. The loss of votes in the short term is often compensated for in the long term by the gain in respect. Many voters want their MP to do what is right and often respect those who do, even while disagreeing with them. The scope for a bit of courage in politics is far greater than we think it is, even in this age of spin and the dark arts of ‘triangulation’.
I was beginning to get a wider reputation in the Party, too. I refused all requests to play a role in the National Party, believing that my job was to win Yeovil; the rest could come later. Nevertheless, at the 1981 Liberal Assembly in Llandudno I led the debate on a successful motion to oppose the deployment of cruise missiles, causing acute embarrassment to David Steel and the Party leadership. I still regard this speech as one of the best I have ever made, and it got me my first mentions in the national Press.* It also made me popular with the Party’s radical element (though I remember warning them at the time that, not being a unilateralist or a member of CND, I would probably soon part with them on this issue when the situation changed). But it did not make me popular with the Party hierarchy, and I remember overhearing one of our senior peers asking, ‘Who is this bloody boy scout, Paddy Ashdown?’
Llandudno was also the Assembly in which David Steel won support for the Party to join with the SDP in creating the Liberal–SDP Alliance. This enabled him to end his leader’s speech with his famous exhortation: ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government!’
Increasingly, Yeovil was by now being picked out as an example of effective campaigning and a rising prospect and, together with other candidates from potentially winnable seats, I spoke on our successes so far to a crowded meeting at the annual Assembly at Bournemouth in 1982. Earlier that year David Penhaligon did a tour of potential target seats in the region and reported back that, in his view, the best prospect for a Liberal gain in the south-west was Yeovil. After this we started getting visits from VIPs and MPs, including Clement Freud, David Penhaligon himself, John Pardoe and, in late 1982, with the election coming into view, David Steel, who opened our newly refurbished (i.e., repainted by Jane, myself and some volunteers) offices in the Yeovil Liberal Club.
But, just as things were beginning to move forward strongly for us politically, they began to deteriorate sharply for us from a personal point of view. By 1981 the first Thatcher recession was beginning to bite sharply and was affecting Morlands, like many other small businesses. The pound was rising, causing the exports, which formed a major portion of Morlands’ business, to become more expensive and our foreign competitors’ imports to become cheaper. In early 1981 I had to begin laying off workers, which I hated. But worse was to come. Later that year it finally became clear that the whole of Morlands was collapsing, and a few months after this I had to call all my workers together to tell them that Tescan would close and we would all lose our jobs. It was, needless to say, a terrible and painful day.
It also left our family with a real crisis. We now had no financial cushion left. I would have to live off unemployment benefit until I got a job. And getting a job during the recession of 1981–2 was going to be very difficult. I put in perhaps two-hundred-and-fifty applications for local jobs over the following months. All were rejected. I even looked into the possibility of training as a heavy goods vehicle driver (because the money was so good), but soon found I had absolutely no aptitude for the work. (In retrospect this was probably a good thing, for I am, by universal acknowledgement, a shocking driver and would have been, I am certain, lethal at the wheel of a large truck.)
I had by now persuaded the Constituency to sell one of its old Liberal Halls and buy a small town-centre property in Yeovil at 5 Waterloo Lane. In this we now housed Clarissa and another second-hand photo-offset litho to keep her company and share the work. I spent much of my unemployed time growing the printing business, which was now taking on work from constituencies all over the south-west and even commercial work from local community organisations. All the profits from this, however, were ploughed back into the Constituency party, so this was just a time-filler for me and not a money-earner.
A Fortunate Life Page 26