I returned from holiday with a clear set of priorities and a detailed plan of what we needed to do – which was almost immediately overtaken by events. First, our financial situation was much worse than I had been told. I discovered that we would now be technically bankrupt by November, could no longer pay our bills, and even salaries were doubtful. Second, the Owenites were now making real progress. Owen had a very good Conference and was being treated seriously by the Press, while we were still the butt of jokes and derision (our opinion-poll rating at the time was 8%*). And third, the Tory Trade and Industry Secretary and former Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, a casualty of the Westland affair, had resigned to become a European Commissioner (where one of his leading staff members would be a young Nick Clegg), meaning there would be a by-election in Richmond, Yorkshire. This would bring us into head-to-head conflict with the Owenite SDP in one of the few areas in the country where they were strong. However much we may not have wanted to fight them yet, we were going to have to – and on ground that favoured them.
In September I had my first Party Conference to get through, at Blackpool. I get very nervous before all speeches, but my first Leader’s speech was sheer purgatory. A Party Leader’s Conference Speech is like no other speech a modern politician has to deliver. It is longer (forty-five minutes to an hour was my usual), minutely scrutinised, emotionally supercharged, critically important at the time and hugely nerve-wracking (or at least I found it so). I am not a natural speaker, like, for instance, Charles Kennedy. I tend to speak too fast, my voice has a habit of rising in register when I am nervous, I have a poor sense of timing for jokes, and I tend to lose all light and shade in my delivery when under pressure. Later, in order to correct these faults, I went to a wonderful speech trainer who also happened to be an ardent Lib Dem. Margaret Lang taught me how to breathe properly, relax before a big speech and use the full register of my voice. Some senior politicians I know are embarrassed to admit that they have to have their voices trained like this. I don’t know why. However good you are at the other aspects of politics, your voice is the essential tool you have to use to communicate your message – so learning to use it properly is no more strange or embarrassing than learning to use a saw in order to be a carpenter.
On this occasion, mercifully, my audience was so willing me to succeed that it was prepared to overlook a less than perfect performance. My aim was to try to provide a rallying cry for a demoralised Party, and I chose the environment as my central theme. The speech, entitled ‘Starting the Journey’, was not a great one but it seemed to do the job, and everyone left Blackpool a little more cheerful than they had been when they arrived.
Now it was time for the tough work to start.
Having discussed our dire position with the Chair of the Party’s Finance Committee, Clive Lindley, I announced to the staff that we were cutting six posts; at the same time I put in place a secret financial package, borrowing enough money to keep the cash flow going against the security of the Party’s buildings. These cuts were painful. But before long we would discover they were not nearly painful enough – I should have gone deeper.
At the time, though, I was concentrating on the crucial electoral struggle with the SDP that was looming in Richmond, which I knew we had to win. Chris Rennard had warned me that we desperately needed the financial resources to fight this by-election effectively if we were to have any hope against the Owenites, who were being heavily funded by the millionaire (and later Labour Government Minister) David Sainsbury.
Shortly after Parliament returned in October I had to get through the first weekly Prime Minster’s Questions (PMQs) of my Leadership. This I found even more terrifying than giving the Conference Speech, partly because it is much more difficult for the third party leader in the House of Commons than for the other two. Labour and Tory leaders have the Despatch Box to put their notes on, but Parliamentary convention accords this facility only to front-bench spokespersons of the two major parties. So the third party leader has to speak from his normal seat in the Commons pews, which means he is not allowed to use notes at all and must memorise his question. Secondly, and crucially, although the Labour and Tory leaders have around three hundred opposition MPs on the other side of the House to contend with, they also have three hundred or so on their own side to help them. The third party leader has the full six hundred against him and (in my early days) only twenty or so in support. What this means is that, when you stand up (especially if the House does not much like you) there is a roar of hostility that quite literally drives all thought out of your brain. What that means is that, in memorising your question, you have to etch it so deep into your brain that nothing can drive it out – for one mistake or one falter in delivery, and the six hundred opposing MPs will eat you alive. (Actually, to be precise, you have to perfectly memorise two questions, because you always ask your question after the leader of the Official Opposition, who may well have covered the subject so effectively that the third party leader cannot ask another question on the same topic, and so must have something different up his sleeve.)
My other problem was that Mrs Thatcher was very good at PMQs, whereas I, at least until I got the hang of it, was not – as the papers pointed out at great length and with some glee. To make matters worse, though Parliament was not yet televised, it had just started to be broadcast on the radio, which faithfully reproduced my painful efforts for the whole country to enjoy. Of all the trials of that early period of leading the Party, the misery of being broadcast to the nation while being ritually handbagged by Mrs Thatcher was one of the most painful.
Meanwhile, there were other rituals to get accustomed to as well, including the duty of Britain’s three main party leaders to act, when called upon, as part of the ‘wallpaper of state’, which provides the necessary backdrop to all great state (and especially Royal) occasions.*
The first of these occurred on Remembrance Sunday, when I had to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph. Beforehand Neil Kinnock (as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition) and I (as leader of the third party in Parliament) were formed up alongside Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet, ready to be led out to join the Queen for the Remembrance Service. Before we left, I watched with amusement as Mrs Thatcher went up and down her Cabinet like a mother inspecting her children before Sunday School, straightening the Foreign Secretary’s tie here and tut-tutting over the state of the Minister of Defence’s shoes there, etc.
Shortly afterwards Jane and I had to go to Downing Street for a formal lunch for the President of Senegal, after which Jane commented on the dead chrysanthemums, the worn carpets and Mrs Thatcher’s strange handshake. She has a habit not so much of shaking a visitor’s hand, as grabbing it and passing the unfortunate captive across her and away, much as one might a partner in a Scottish country dance.
Our next state event was the royal diplomatic reception at Buckingham Palace, which was attended by all foreign Ambassadors and their senior staff, held on 17 November 1990. While Jane was delighted to have an excuse for a new dress, I was shocked when I received the embossed invitation to find that I had to wear a white tie and tails, which of course I did not have. My Yeovil Constituency Chairman at the time* came to my aid, lending me his tails for the occasion. Unfortunately, although his waist and legs were roughly the same size as mine, his torso was significantly shorter, with the result that the waistcoat finished half way up my stomach, leaving a large expanse of exposed white shirt. To make matters worse I only discovered this deficiency when the taxi to take us to Buckingham Palace was ticking away outside. Jane, however, coolly solved the crisis by cutting the waistcoat in half at the back and then lowering the buttoned front halves down to the right position on a fragile halter of green gardening string looped around the back of my neck. She warned me that any intemperate movement would result in the whole fragile contraption ending up round my ankles, adding that, given my luck, this would be almost certain to happen just in front of the Queen. In the event, all passed off without incident until, at
the end, we asked the Buckingham Palace attendants if we could now ring for a taxi to take us home. We were firmly told that you did not ring for taxis from Buckingham Palace, leaving us with no option but to walk out of the front gates. This we did with the maximum aplomb we could muster, holding ourselves very erect as we sauntered nonchalantly through the great iron gates while Ambassadorial limousines swept past us. We then walked to the taxi rank in Victoria Station, where, as luck would have it, we arrived at the same time as a well-oiled group of Cockney sports fans. They, of course, thought my white tie and tails great fun, until one of them recognised me and shouted to his mates, ‘’ere, it’s that Steve Davis – yer know – the snooker player!’ After which they treated me with more respect.
In early February 1989 I had to go to Buckingham Palace again, this time to be sworn in as member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council. Being a Privy Councillor actually means very little, except that you are entitled to receive privileged information of a secret nature from the Government of the day, can put PC after your name if you wish, are referred to as ‘Right Honourable’ in the House of Commons, will be consulted when the heir to the throne gets married, and when kissing the Queen’s hand are permitted to actually touch it with your lips. Otherwise a Privy Councillor does not really do very much. But the ceremony is rather fun. It includes a good deal of kneeling on red cushions, holding special bibles, swearing a special Privy Council oath and, of course, giving the Royal hand your first, up-close-and-personal, genuine Privy Councillor’s smacker. Meanwhile, at least when I did it, Her Majesty spent her time throughout this quaint and faintly preposterous ceremony shuffling rather impatiently from foot to foot like any bored housewife in a slow-moving queue at a Tesco checkout.
But these fairyland diversions into the kingdom of pomp were mere minor distractions from the immediate task at hand, which was to beat the SDP in Richmond and, if possible, beat the Tories, too. We had quite a good launch pad for the campaign, for a few weeks earlier in December the Party had come a respectable second, beating Labour, in the Epping Forest by-election (in which the Owenites won only 12%, which was, however, still enough to deny us victory over the Tories). We also had a good candidate in Richmond: Barbara Pearce (though, significantly, she was not from the area, whereas the Owenites had a local farmer). And the financial restructuring we had done earlier gave us enough money for me to tell the campaign team that we would bet our shirt on Richmond and they could fight a full-fledged campaign. It all seemed to go well until two days before the poll, when I was out campaigning with our candidate. At lunchtime our agent came up to me and whispered that he had just seen the latest opinion polls for Richmond, which would be published on the evening regional TV news and in tomorrow’s eve-of-poll newspapers. These showed the SDP five points ahead of us and in second place, just behind the Tories. I knew exactly what would happen next, and I knew there was nothing we could do to stop it – voters who wanted to beat the Tories (who had a bright young candidate called William Hague), would now pile in behind the Owenites. And that is what happened. When the result of the count was announced at midday, William Hague narrowly squeaked in with a majority of 2,600, with the Owenites second and us third, 5,000 votes behind them. Now we were in real trouble! Owen was triumphant on every news outlet, and I knew that if I did not do something quickly we could be done for. I sensed that there was just a possibility I could change the story from Owen’s triumph to the fact that, but for the divisions between our two parties, the Tory would easily have been beaten and that our joint self-indulgence had therefore enabled an unpopular Government to win where they should not have done. So I decided that, in that afternoon’s interviews, I would be magnanimous to Owen and, without any wider consultation with the Party’s members, call for the two Parties to immediately adopt a process of Joint Open Selection: by this method, candidates would be selected by a ballot of all members of the two local parties (in essence merging the Parties), resulting, I explained, in the fact that we would never again end up fighting each other and letting the Tories in.
This was a big risk and provoked a strong backlash from the Party, not least amongst some of our defeated workers in Richmond, who were very publicly infuriated that I would consider getting into bed with their hated rivals. But my calculation was that the risk was not as big as it looked, because Owen would never accept such a deal and that, if it was put to him, he would reject it outright, which would wrong-foot him and shift the story. And so it worked out. On my way north to a Councillors’ meeting (where I got a very hard time about the line I had just taken), I turned on the five o’clock news to hear Owen being interviewed. The first question asked was not about his triumph, but about my call for a merger … there was a long silence, then the sound of him throwing the microphone down and stalking out of the studio, with the interviewer crying after him ‘Dr Owen, Dr Owen …’. All subsequent news reports that night started off not with his triumph but with a question about why he was rejecting my offer. And the following morning’s papers followed suit, concentrating more on the fact that our divisions had enabled the Tories to win, than on the Owenites’ ‘victory’ over us. Fast footwork had saved us from disaster this time, but I knew we were still standing on the last tuft of grass at the very edge of the precipice.
Some of my colleagues were, meanwhile, doing everything they could to propel us over the edge. My first problem had been to persuade Alan Beith to play a part in the parliamentary team, which he initially resisted. However, after a lot of persuasion, not least from David Steel, he finally agreed to come on board and take up the post of Treasury Spokesman for the Party (and in due course did an outstanding job, winning respect from all sides of politics and becoming a key ally in helping to establish a strongly free-market-based economic policy for the new Party). In January Labour, seeing our weakness, started to make overtures to some of our MPs (most notably Simon Hughes) and sending out messages to me that they were interested in some kind of a pact. I knew that, in our present weak state, this was a chalice of the most deadly poison, which would result in our losing first our identity and then our purpose. I told the Parliamentary Party that perhaps the time would come for this, but not until we were much, much stronger. This caused real annoyance to some of my MPs, who thought the offer should be pursued, and the opinion-formers in the progressive Press (the Guardian and the Independent in particular) expressed much the same view, criticising me for being unrealistic.
But the biggest issue, which threatened to destroy us altogether at the time, was the Party’s name. The one thing which united everyone was that the name Social and Liberal Democrats (we were now regularly referred to by the Press as ‘The Salads’) had to be replaced. But there was deep division about what should replace it. The older Liberal MPs, especially those from Wales and Scotland, insisted that they should go on using Liberal and were prepared to do this unilaterally if necessary. At the Blackpool Conference I had said that my preference was for ‘Democrats’, which was also the preferred position of most of the ex-SDP. There was thus a real danger that we would all break off in different directions. The Parliamentary Party was especially deeply split on the issue, and the Press was full of reports of these divisions. On the night before the Richmond by-election Alan Beith got to hear of a letter the new Truro MP Mathew Taylor was going to publish in the Independent the next day, calling for unity behind my leadership. Alan immediately threatened that, if the Taylor letter went ahead, he would publish a counter-letter in the Guardian criticising me and our strategy. In a later conversation with our Chief Whip, Jim Wallace, he added, for good measure, that he was being put in an intolerable position and would resign the parliamentary Party whip over the name issue if he had to. I asked David Steel to see if he could persuade Alan to step back from the brink, which is what happened.
I was now dealing with four concurrent issues, any one of which could have swamped us: the Owenite resurgence; rebellion on all sides as a result of my fast footwork after Richmond; the name
issue; and now, to add to all these, the fast-approaching local elections and European elections, followed by yet another by-election that had just been called in the Vale of Glamorgan, a place which, to put it mildly, was a desert for us.
I managed to persuade the rebellious Scottish and Welsh MPs to put the name issue to one side while we fought the coming elections – though it flared up from time to time, including in June when three of the Welsh MPs, backed by some of their Scottish colleagues, repeated publicly to the BBC that they were prepared to take unilateral action by calling themselves Liberal Democrats. Again, I managed to persuade them to withdraw, but it was clear that the boil had to be lanced, and quickly. The crunch came at a very bad-tempered meeting of all MPs in July (I should never have let it go on that long), at which Roy Jenkins and David Steel proposed we should let the name evolve naturally, and everyone could call themselves what they wanted in the meantime. I went home that night, poured myself a large whisky and quite quickly came to the conclusion that the problem was me – I was wrong and had to change course if I was not to destroy the Party completely. Being a relative outsider compared to the older MPs (something I later found I shared with Blair), I had, in my rush to create the new party, failed to understand that a political party is about more than plans and priorities and policies and a chromium-plated organisation. It also has a heart and a history and a soul – especially a very old party like the Liberals. Alan Beith and the other ‘Name’ rebels understood this better than me. They were right, and I had nearly wrecked the Party by becoming too attached to my own vision and ignoring the fact that political parties are, at root, human organisations and not machines. It was not difficult then to decide that the Jenkins/Steel proposition would only cause even more confusion when what we needed was clarity. I concluded that I should announce a referendum of all Party members, dare any MP to say that they would go against the democratic voice of the Party and announce at the same time that I would be voting for ‘Liberal Democrat’. The row quickly subsided, a ballot of all members was arranged and, in the autumn, the Party agreed to ‘Liberal Democrat’ by an overwhelming vote.
A Fortunate Life Page 32