A Fortunate Life

by Paddy Ashdown

  Bob MacLennan, who had made clear his support for unification after the 1987 election, albeit on terms slightly different from those finally agreed, took over as leader of what remained of the mergerite SDP to oversee the merger negotiations.

  While all this was going on, Jane and I decided that what we needed most was a good long break over the summer. So we booked a canal-boat holiday with our Yeovil friends Les and Joan Farris and Lesley and Greg Jefferies on the Canal de Nivernais in northern Burgundy. The weather was not good, and the holiday fell a little short of what we had hoped for. But we fell in love with this area of France, and, meeting beside the Yonne river, in the little Place St Nicolas in Auxerre, for a last drink before returning home, we confided to the Jefferies that we were thinking of buying a house in the area. They confessed that they had had exactly the same thought. So, once again completely by accident, we took a decision that was to change our lives and those of our children completely. The following February (when I was up to my ears in the ‘phoney war’ phase of the Leadership campaign) Jane and the Jefferies went back to the Auxerre area, where they found and we jointly bought, for a total £10,000, a small tumbledown house in Irancy, a small north Burgundian village only a little more famous for making good red wine than it is for consuming it in large quantities. Irancy has since become not only our second home and refuge but also the centre of our second circle of friends and an integral part of the web and warp of our lives. My daughter Kate in due course married the son of the Deputy Mayor of the neighbouring village, settled in the region and brought up our French grandchildren as ‘vrais Irancyquois’. And we have had some of our greatest pleasures from joining them every year, spending many roasting August days in the cool of our wine-making friends’ caves and dining in our little courtyard under star-spangled skies and the canopy of our own Burgundian vine.

  When we arrived back in the UK we found the blood-letting unabated and the merger debate raging away in both parties. In September we Liberals, in our turn, voted overwhelmingly for merger and entered into the protracted process of merger negotiations. Following this, in symmetry with Owen’s action, a group of apostate Liberals, led by my 1983-entry Parliamentary colleague, Michael Meadowcroft (who actually took part in the first part of the merger negotiations), then broke away to establish themselves as ‘true’ Liberals. So, the new politics which we had all heralded with such unity and fanfares five years ago finally ended up like this: two rival SDPs and two rival Liberal Parties, with one of each still involved in something we continued to call ‘The Alliance’.

  I regarded myself as well out of all of this, and in November, with Alan Leaman, published a pamphlet called ‘Choice or Privilege: The alternative great education reform bill’. Following this, while others were enmeshed in the next stage of the merger process and were drawing up a joint policy prospectus for the new merged Party, I toured the country attending education rallies and building support for opposition to Gerbil.

  The policy negotiations between the merging parties were difficult and protracted, but finally, early in 1988, produced a joint policy prospectus. Its contents were radical and contentious and very soon began to leak, causing much vociferous unhappiness, especially amongst Liberals. The draft soon found its way to the Press, amid suspicion from the Liberals that the SDP had deliberately leaked it in order to bounce them. It quickly became known as ‘the dead parrot’* (a soubriquet apparently invented by David Steel, in whose name it was supposed to speak!). Despite containing some lethal suicide pills (such as the proposition that VAT should be added to food and children’s clothing), ‘the parrot’ was not as awful as it was painted. Its mistakes were, first, that it was excessively ‘hair-shirt’ for a Party within an ace of self-obliteration; second, that it was out of touch with the mood among both Parties’ members; and, third, that it was just too far ahead of its time – though it proposed many items that were to become commonplace in the era of post-1997 Blairism.

  The dénouement of the whole ‘dead parrot’ affair took place at a joint Parliamentary meeting in one of the Committee Rooms of the House of Commons on 13 January 1988, with a baying mob from the Press laying siege to the doors. There were tears and tantrums and revolts against the two Leaders (Steel and MacLennan), and even at one stage a near-physical incident, when Simon Hughes had to position his sizeable frame across one of the doors to physically prevent people leaving and falling prey to the baying mob of reporters outside. I was not there for the bulk of this meeting; I was visiting the Open University in Milton Keynes – clearly far and away a better place to be. But I did get back for the final half-hour, after things had calmed down somewhat, and the two Leaders had agreed to hold a joint press conference in the Liberal Club, rejecting ‘the dead parrot’ and promising to do better in future. My only contribution was to suggest that we all ought to be there, standing behind them to show our support. It was not a good suggestion. In the subsequent pictures MacLennan and Steel, with twenty MPs looking either menacing or melancholy behind them, didn’t look much like two Leaders in charge of events – rather, they resembled hostages, dragged from some dark dungeon by a new group of radical terrorists in lounge suits and forced to read out a prepared text just before being subjected to something indescribably horrid.

  At a meeting of the Ming Group in my flat that night, all agreed that David Steel would stand down almost immediately, in line with his earlier stated intention. But he seemed to waver for a bit; finally, in a speech to his Borders constituency on 12 May 1988, he announced that he would not be putting his name forward for the leadership of the ‘Social and Liberal Democrats’. Bob MacLennan followed suit, making it clear just as nominations for the Leadership contest were closing that he, too, would not be putting his name forward.

  A week after the ‘dead parrot’ debacle the Liberals gathered in Blackpool’s Norbreck Hotel (which fully lived up its nickname ‘the Colditz of the North’) and agreed by a large majority to the merger, subject to a ballot of all members. The SDP followed suit in Sheffield a week later on 30 January, causing the final rupture with Owen, who purloined the old SDP name and used it for his breakaway party.

  It now only remained to elect the new Party Leader, and then we could get back to business. Or so we hoped.

  Everyone now knew there were going to be only two candidates in the race, Alan Beith and myself. But instead of getting on with it quickly, in order to minimise the damage, there was a protracted bureaucratic process which finally decided that the Leadership campaign would not start until June and would end on 28 July. The reason given was to try to avoid having an internal election at the same time as the local elections in May (in which we predictably lost over sixty council seats), but the consequence was a further period of rudderless drift for the Party. I felt the same frustration I had felt while waiting for Yeovil Liberals to adopt me back in 1976 – particularly since I could very plainly see that being without a leader was doing the same damage to the Party at large that it had done in Yeovil twelve years before. It was actually during this wasted six months that most of the real damage to the new Party’s structures, finances, public standing and morale was done. We became the butt of every political joke, and we deserved it.

  The result was that Alan Beith and I had, in effect, an exhausting six-month Leadership campaign. Most of the early part of it was spent scurrying round securing support from key figures; this often involved a kind of informal ‘beauty contest’, with each of us being ‘looked over’ by the grandees and institutions of both the old Parties.

  It was in this spirit that, on 20 March 1988, the day after the new Party’s launch rally in Westminster, Jane and I were invited to lunch with the grandee of all grandees (later a key pillar of my Leadership years) Roy Jenkins, at his house in East Hendred, Oxfordshire. We both realised that this was a job interview, even if it took the form of an elegant and amusing lunch preceded by some very good champagne and accompanied by some of Roy’s outstanding claret. The assembled might of th
e SDP was there, including Dick Taverne, whose wife asked Jane where we lived in London. Jane said we didn’t live in London, we lived in Somerset. But we did have a small flat in London. ‘Whereabouts?’ ‘Kennington,’ Jane replied, attracting a sharp intake of breath and the comment, ‘Oh, south of the river’. Driving home afterwards she said that she didn’t even know there was a ‘wrong side’ of the river.

  However the occasion cannot have gone too badly, as, from that moment onwards, Roy and Jennifer, who hardly knew me before, gave me their unstinting and unfailing backing, not only in the subsequent campaign, but also throughout my Leadership years, and especially when I needed it most, at the darkest and most difficult times.

  I launched my campaign for the Leadership at midday on 1 June 1988 in the Yeovil Liberal Club, after which Jane and I began an extended country-wide tour, taking in every corner of Britain and ending back in London on the day of the count, 28 July. The Ming Group’s preparations paid off handsomely. Thanks to them, we were able to assemble a superb team and mounted a most effective campaign under the slogan ‘The Ability to WIN – the VISION to Lead’.

  The campaign itself was, by and large, a positive one, barring only a ten-point anonymous document, leaked to the Press just before the campaign proper began, which incorporated a series of pretty vicious attacks on me personally and professionally, including criticism that I was a loner, a poor communicator, a poor debater in the Commons, lacked a sense of humour and was short on real political and party experience, etc., etc. David Steel immediately criticised the tactic and called for a clean campaign, and Alan Beith immediately wrote to me saying, ‘This action was not in any way authorized by me or by any organized group known to me, and I would have been wholly opposed to the circulation or publication of any document of this kind.’ I issued a response, saying that I admired Alan Beith’s personal qualities and was grateful for his ‘clear repudiation of both the style and content of the … document. For my part, I think we should now consider this rather unsavoury episode as closed.’

  On the morning of the count I was walking through the House of Commons on my way to a farewell lunch for David Steel when I bumped into the veteran Labour MP, Tam Dalyell. He stopped me and wished me luck, adding, ‘You will be elected today, Paddy. Here’s a piece of advice. Keep a diary; you will find in a few years time it will be invaluable to you.’ I took his advice and from that moment on kept a diary every day until I returned from Bosnia in 2006, since when my diary-keeping has been more sporadic, recording only events that seem to me of significance.

  Afterwards we all went off to the rather dingy offices of the Electoral Reform Society, where the result of the election was announced: I received 72% of the votes cast, and Alan Beith, 28%. Alan was most generous in his comments, but I could see he was hurt – and understandably so, for he was much the more experienced of the two of us and had served the Party as an MP long before I had even joined. I asked him privately if he would be prepared to become the Deputy Leader to help me out, but added that there was no reason to make a quick decision, as the first thing we both needed was a rest.

  And then to the Headquarters of the newly merged Social and Liberal Democrats (as we were then called) at No. 4 Cowley Street, where, after my acceptance speech as the just-elected founding Leader of the new Party predicting the certainty of a bright new dawn, there were photographs.

  What neither the Press nor I knew at the time was that the event very nearly never took place at all. For, about half an hour previously, two men from the Inland Revenue had turned up at the front door of 4 Cowley Street with a writ to close the Party down for unpaid National Insurance contributions. Fortunately, they had been hustled into the building before the Press, the cameras and the accompanying circus arrived. Of all this, however, I and my Leadership campaign team celebrating that night, were blissfully ignorant.

  Not for long, though. The following morning at a Cowley Street briefing I was told just what a catastrophic state the Party was in. We were heavily in debt, the Headquarters staff demoralised and leaving in droves, the Party in the country was in the midst of an identity crisis, and we were all punch-drunk from the succession of blows we had inflicted on ourselves over the last eighteen months. To make matters worse, we had saddled ourselves with a most ridiculous name, the Social and Liberal Democrats, or SLD – soon converted to ‘the Slids’, or just ‘the Salads’, by the Press and our opponents, who were, by now, accustomed to having wonderful fun at our expense. In a meeting three days after my election I told the staff that nothing mattered now but stabilising and unifying the Party and making sure that we won the battle with the Owenites for control of the centre ground; fighting the Tories and Labour would come later.

  By now it was August, and everyone was ready for a break. Besides which, I needed time to rest and think. So I told them all to take a good holiday and come back refreshed, and then went off to Irancy with Jane, where I washed away my concerns and depression in some very hard physical work on our new house and a good deal of excellent red Burgundy. I am in fact a disaster at all things DIY-related. Jane says that, just as you can tell a piece of Chippendale by the standard of craftsmanship, so you can tell my handiwork by its complete absence: nothing is ever straight, and everything will have my blood on it somewhere. So I left the delicate work to others and immersed myself in some good hard navvying, pulling down ceilings and shifting tons of rubbish and earth from the garden. One day, covered in sweat and grime, I was called in to the cave of a neighbouring vigneron, whose dog had bitten an English lady visitor, and asked to act as interpreter. Afterwards the visitor and her husband, who I could see somehow recognised me, came back to our house for a cup of tea. Eventually the husband, who came from Bradford, could contain himself no longer. ‘I know you’, he said in a thick Yorkshire accent. ‘You’re a teacher from Bradford aren’t you?’ I said I was not. And then he clicked, ‘Oh no you’re not! I know ’oo you are! You’re t’leader o’ that party nobody knows t’name of!’ I did not correct him, for it seemed a fair description and rather better than anything I could think of myself at the time.

  But the holiday was not all work. I had time to think as well.

  Since I was the first leader of the new Party, it now fell to me to take the lead in creating its shape, organisation and character. And I knew exactly what I wanted these to be. I wanted it to be a genuine synthesis between the Liberals and the SDP, incorporating the best of the two old parent Parties. We needed to keep the radicalism, community-based approach, campaigning spirit and dogged, bloody-minded determination against the odds, of the old Liberal party. But I wanted to ensure that we also incorporated the modernity, professionalism and intellectual rigour of the SDP (I recall saying many times, ‘Just because we are radical does not mean we cannot be efficient’). I have always held the view that there are two competing strands in Liberalism. The first is social liberalism, which understands the importance of what we hold in common, seeks to heal the divisions in society and is dedicated to setting people free from the intrusions of an overweening state. The second is economic liberalism, which understands the importance of individual liberty, the free market and free trade. The two are often in conflict, and so the essence of the liberal debate is to find the appropriate balance between the two for the time and context in which we live. In my view, the old British Liberal Party had allowed social liberalism to become too dominant, and our policies had become far too aligned towards the producer interest, rather than the consumer or ‘citizen’ interest in society. The SDP, on the other hand, was much more avowedly a free-market Party, which put more weight on the interests of the consumer. I wanted to preserve that, so as to move the balance back towards a more free-market economic position than the old Liberal Party normally felt comfortable with.

  I realised the name Social and Liberal Democrats would be an issue we would have to tackle, but I thought (wrongly, I soon discovered) that this could be delayed. I made it publicly known that I favoured ‘
Democrat’, as I thought it gave the best indication that we were genuinely something new, and it would help knit in the SDP (I was wrong here, too).

  I knew my first big task was to unite the two elements of the new Party into a unified whole and, if possible, draw back some of those very good people who had left for the Owenites or the apostate Liberals. So, in setting up my Leader’s office, I was careful not only to draw an equal number of my key staff from both the parent Parties, but also to include amongst my closest advisers some of those who had opposed merger. Indeed, in the end, half my office was made up of people who had actually voted against the formation of the new Party.

  Finally, I was very aware of just how limited were the time, resources and political capital that we had to put things right, and concluded that we had to ruthlessly prioritise what we did. The first task was to stabilise the Party’s finances (we were heading for a deficit of half a million by the end of the year). This would mean staff cuts. Then we had to restructure the headquarters and start getting out our messages about why we existed and what we were for to a Party membership that was now deserting in droves. Only when we had done these two things could we begin to think about re-entering the wider political battle. Even then, our first battles were not going to be with Labour and the Tories, but with the Owenites for control of the centre ground. If we could not beat them, we could not survive.