By 1985, the issue of nuclear weapons, which seemed to run like a constant stream just under the surface of politics throughout this Parliament, suddenly broke into the open again. START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) had finally begun again in Geneva. This presented me with a very tricky problem, and one which every serious politician has to confront sooner later: how to conduct a U-turn with minimum loss of respect and maximum elegance. In asking, ‘When circumstances change, I change my views. What do you do, Sir?’ John Maynard Keynes was only expressing a rational truth. But since politics is often concerned less with rationalities than with personalities, changing one’s views in public is neither easy nor comfortable. It did not count for a row of beans that I had carefully warned my erstwhile fellow disarmament campaigners that, if the disarmament talks did restart, I would be saying cruise should be put into them, not unilaterally withdrawn. Nor were any of my one-time friends in the least impressed by the carefully worded speech I constructed for delivery at the SDP Conference that year in Torquay, announcing that events had now overtaken the campaign for unilateral removal of cruise, and that the weapons should now become a subject for the talks in Geneva, not for marching on the streets of Britain. Both Liberal and the SDP Party hierarchies were delighted and just a little smug. But those who had cheered me loudest in the past were now the most furious in their denunciation, christening me (the precursor of a later, much more hurtful, nickname) ‘Paddy Backdown’. At the Eastbourne Liberal Assembly the following year Bruce Kent, the head of CND, mounted a highly personalised and acerbic attack on me, causing some newspapers to report that I had lost much grassroots support and damaged any ambitions I might have had for the Party leadership. Throughout these attacks I remained very confident that the position I had taken was the right one, but that did not diminish the hurt or discomfort, for I am rather thin-skinned in these matters. Perhaps this was why the Assembly speech I made, this time in support of the defence policy proposed by David Steel and the Party leadership, was one of the worst I have ever made. The vote at the end of the debate was very narrow but the amendment was declared carried by the chair, meaning another defeat for Steel (and this time, of course, for me, too). There should have been a recount, but in the chaos of the Liberal Assembly in those days there was no time for one, as the hall had to be vacated for the evening’s public entertainment in the Eastbourne theatre (a farce, as I recall).
In early 1986, the first great cabinet crisis of the Thatcher years broke over the Government. For the rest of Britain, the Westland affair was a scandal about the actions of Ministers and the propriety of the Government. For me it was about the survival of by far the most important employer and source of economic wealth in my constituency.
Westland was once again going through a very hard time, and its survival as a stand-alone helicopter-producer was seriously in question. There were two options before the Company and the Government. The first was to accept a bid to team up with the US firm Sikorsky, which had been Westland’s trusted and long-term partner since well before the Vietnam War (the course favoured by Mrs Thatcher). And the second was to fold Westland into a European helicopter consortium (the course favoured by Michael Heseltine). Given my position on Europe, I should have supported Heseltine. But when I looked at the European plan it was obvious that it would have meant dismantling Westland and turning it into a mere components manufacturer, which would have led to the break-up of its design and technology teams and the end of its capacity to design and build helicopters from the drawing board up.
For Parliament, the Press and the country, however, the Westland crisis was not about Westland; it was about Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine. They were not interested in the bone – only in the dogs fighting over it. It is said that when Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street on her way to the Commons for the great Westland debate (in which John Smith first made his name as one of our generation’s great House of Commons performers), she turned to a friend and said she was not sure she would be coming back as Prime Minister. In the debate I told Michael Heseltine that his European Consortium’s approach to Westland was not so much that of a partner as of an undertaker and that, given his failure as Defence Secretary to support Westland in the past, his offer of help appeared to the people of Yeovil as though ‘they are being offered a poison cup from the hands of the poisoner himself’.* Although my defence of the company did me no harm in my constituency, I fear it played little part in the final outcome (the Westland/Sikorsky deal went ahead), which was determined by the cannonade which went on far above my head. When Mrs Thatcher survived, so did Westland as an independent helicopter manufacturer.
Whilst it was, I suppose, inevitable that a great deal of my time should be taken up by Westminster matters in this Parliament, my Yeovil office team, under the stern guidance of Cathy Bakewell and Nick Speakman, made sure I did not forget my base in my Constituency. The Yeovil team had now been augmented by a new Constituency agent, Simon Thompson, and another key member, Sarah Frapple, who, like Cathy and Nick, had been there on that chilly night back in 1976 when I was first chosen by the Yeovil Liberals. They put in a huge amount of work strengthening the Constituency organisation and driving the Tories out of their remaining electoral strongholds, and this culminated in the 1985 County Council Election, in which we won every County seat in the Yeovil constituency. They made sure that the pace of my work in the community increased too, not just with regular weekly ‘surgeries’ (now busier than ever), but also with a full programme of other community events, including a ‘roving surgery’ every autumn, which consisted of Jane and me driving a large van to almost every village in our very rural constituency, parking outside the Post Office and holding a mobile advice centre in the back of the vehicle. I am not at all sure of the constitutional propriety of MPs operating in this way as a sort of universal social worker, as this undermines the role of local Councillors. But I loved this ‘pastoral’ aspect of my work and, right to the end of my time as an MP, I used to feel my heart lift on the train home at the weekend with every clack of the rails which took me further away from London and closer to Somerset, my family and my beloved constituency.
One of the innovations we brought in (borrowed from fellow Liberal MPs) was a series of visits Jane and I made before Christmas to care homes, hospitals, post offices, the police, fire stations, etc., to wish them all Happy Christmas, take them a present (usually a box of House of Commons chocolate or a bottle of House of Commons whisky) and thank them for their work during the year. It was on one such visit to Yeovil Hospital, on the frosty morning of 22 December 1986, that one of the Hospital staff came up to me and whispered that my secretary wanted to speak to me urgently on the phone (these were the days before mobile phones). I picked up the receiver to hear her in tears. Between sobs she told me she had just heard that David Penhaligon had been killed when his car skidded on ice on the way to an early-morning pre-Christmas visit to his local post office. Jane and I were poleaxed, and it was all we could do to stumble through the rest of our visits as best we could. David’s funeral, on 10 January 1987 in the same church where he and his wife Annette had got married, was one of the most moving I have ever attended. The Party were there in full force and deep misery, of course. But so were the people of Truro, where he was loved with an intensity very few MPs or civic leaders could ever aspire to. Some MPs – though very few – not only represent their constituency but somehow personally embody its spirit too. David was one of these. But he was also a highly astute politician. By now I was pretty clear that, when David Steel stood down, I would probably try for the Leadership, and I had reckoned that David Penhaligon would do so too. I thought then (and still do) that, if I had had to fight him, he would probably have won.
Indeed, shortly before David’s funeral I had been approached by a small group of supporters who said that, since it was now clear that David Steel would almost certainly stand down after the coming election, they would like to help me if I was intending to put my name
forward for the Leadership. We started meeting regularly in January, and they helped to plan a programme of national visits to winnable seats which I would carry out in the forthcoming general election, which was now clearly in view. They also helped me write my speech for the pre-election Liberal–SDP Alliance rally in the Barbican on 31 January that year. (Max Atkinson, the author of the ground-breaking book Our Masters’ Voices* on how politicians make speeches, played a particularly important part at this time and later in helping to give my speeches greater impact.)
Shortly before the Election was formally called, the two Davids held a joint morale-boosting meeting of all the Alliance candidates. I don’t think we were supposed to ask questions at this event, as it was primarily a rally. Nevertheless, I asked David Owen how he and David Steel had decided to answer the deadly, if hypothetical, question that was bound to come from the Press: which of the two of them would be Prime Minster, if we won? Owen said they had not decided on this and would sort it out after the election. To Owen’s evident annoyance, I said that I thought this was madness. Surely, it was obvious? The Leader whose Party had the most MPs should lead. Owen – who, of course, knew that there were bound to be more Liberal than SDP MPs elected – dismissed this out of hand, calling it, if I remember correctly, ‘immature’.
The 1987 Alliance election campaign began with television pictures of David Owen and David Steel jumping into their respective battle buses after their opening press conference and promptly driving off in completely opposite directions. As it began, so it continued, aided and abetted by the new technology of the day. The newest new technology quite often plays a key role in a general election. In 1987 the new thing was the mobile phone, and it did for the Alliance. ‘Hunt the split’ is the political journalist’s favourite game and the basis of ninety percent of all political reporting. In 1987 the two Davids gave them what they wanted on a plate, all served up through the medium of the mobile phone – which every journalist had, but neither of the Leaders or any of their aides seemed to have heard of (or, if they had, they didn’t think of using them to communicate with each other). All a journalist had to do was ask one David on his battle bus at one end of the country for his response to a given issue (defence was a favourite topic; Steel was nervous of it, and Owen had such a passion for weapon systems that he always left you feeling that, secretly, he could scarcely wait to use them). A quick mobile phone call to a colleague on the other David’s battle bus suggesting that the same question be asked and, hey presto, five minutes later they had the Alliance split story of the day! For journalists this was money for old rope. For us it was deadly.
Added to all this was the fact that trying to co-ordinate two campaigns and project two leaders led to serious organisational and presentational problems. The two Davids each had to have equal space in every major interview, in which (if we were lucky) they both said exactly the same thing, only in different words. But even if the substance of what they said was usually the same, the style and body language was not. David Owen appeared much closer to Mrs Thatcher – and on one occasion (inevitably, the issue was again defence) in effect confirmed that, for him, Labour were less likely and less acceptable partners than the Tories. This generated almost immediate hostility on the doorstep, where our canvassers were asked what was the point of voting for the Alliance if the result was to let Mrs Thatcher back in?
The low point of the campaign came in what is generally accepted as the worst Party Political Broadcast in history, which gave star billing (at great length) to the then SDP MP for Greenwich, Rosie Barnes, and her pet rabbit.
And so we confirmed in the election what we had showed through the Parliament, that the Alliance was not a single force at all: just a framework for a squabble. That gave Labour the space to recover and begin to move forward again, and lost us our greatest chance since the early years of the twentieth century of becoming Britain’s most powerful party of the Left.
After all the bright hopes and golden opportunities of the morning of my first election as an MP, just four years before, I found the general election of 7 May 1987 terribly depressing. Although I almost doubled my majority in Yeovil, the Alliance fell back in both popular votes and number of its MPs. It was clear to me things could not go on like this. The Alliance was over. The two Parties would have to merge.
* Michael Meadowcroft (Leeds West), Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire), Alex Carlile (Montgomeryshire), Jim Wallace (Orkney and Shetland) and Malcolm Bruce (Gordon).
* David Steel, Against Goliath: David Steel’s Story (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989), p. 249.
* Letter to me of 11 November 1988.
* Richard eventually went to the House of Lords as Lord Holme of Cheltenham and died on 4 May 2008.
* Glickman became the Secretary of Agriculture in Bill Clinton’s Administration.
* Hansard 15 January 1986, column 1134.
* Our Masters’ Voices: The language and body language of politics (London and New York: Methuen, 1984).
CHAPTER 12
Leader I: The Intensive Care Ward
ON THE DAY after the Election, I was on the panel of BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, which was held, as I recall, in Northampton. Naturally, the election results dominated the programme, including the performance of the Alliance. Freed from the disciplines of the Election campaign, I let fly on the stupidities of separateness and the absolute necessity of the two parties merging without delay. I had not realised that, earlier in the day and, apparently, contrary to a tacit agreement with David Steel, David Owen had held a press conference in his seat in Plymouth, at which he fired what the Independent newspaper next day described as ‘the opening shots in his campaign against merger’. My pro-merger comments on Any Questions were immediately picked up by the BBC news that night and then by the rest of the media the following day, putting Owen and me head to head on the issue in all the Press coverage over the weekend. On Monday David Steel made a statement in favour of merger (and was immediately accused by David Owen of, ‘bouncing him’!).
There is a rather good novel by Nicholas Monsarrat called The Tribe That Lost Its Head. I have always been struck by the capacity of political Parties to lose their heads from time to time and, with single-minded determination, ritually disembowel themselves in public. Labour did it after the defeat in 1979. The Tories did it after their defeat in 1997. And the Alliance spent a full year and more doing it in spectacular style after the 1987 election, launching itself into an orgy of self-indulgence, stupidity and internecine bloodletting, not just between Owen and most of the Liberal leaders, but also within the SDP: between those who supported Owen and those who wanted our two Parties to merge.
At an early meeting of the group which had gathered round me and started to prepare my leadership campaign, now known amongst us as ‘The Ming Group’,* we discussed all this. Someone quoted the old adage: ‘He who wields the knife, never gets to wear the crown,’ and recommended that, beyond placing myself firmly in the pro-merger camp, I should do my best to stay out of it altogether. I did not find this advice difficult to follow, as I have always believed that the best place for the ambitious to be when a coup is taking place, is somewhere else. Fortunately, I had good reason to follow this policy, too. The Government had just published ‘The Great Education Reform Bill’ as the centrepiece of its new programme, and David Steel had appointed me as the new ‘Alliance’ (that is the Liberals and the pro-merger SDP) spokesman on Education. This was a piece of real good fortune. The Great Education Reform Bill (or ‘Gerbil’ as it became known) was a strongly centralising measure which introduced crude measurement systems for schools and a test-centred regime for students and was deeply unpopular amongst teachers, educationalists and many middle-class parents who had voted for us. So, by taking the lead for the Party in opposing it, I placed myself centre stage in the main Parliamentary battle of the first year of the 1987 Parliament and gave myself a very good excuse to be too busy with politics to get involved in the blood-le
tting. And, by the way, it also provided a very good opportunity to build up my support amongst the Party’s powerful education and local government sector and to make contact with key members of the pro-merger wing of the SDP, such as Shirley Williams and Anne Sofer.
In August 1987 the SDP voted decisively in favour of a merger. After this, David Owen dramatically ditched his Party and went off to start a rump SDP in his own image, taking with him some of the SDP’s most gifted supporters, including a number of its key women activists, like Polly Toynbee and Sue Slipman (christened ‘The Brides of Dracula’ by anti-Owen SDP members, for their attachment to Owen and their penchant for wearing black).
A Fortunate Life Page 30