But by then we had even bigger problems to deal with.
I had two abortive secret meetings with Owen to see if we could resolve the warfare between the two Parties. The first, on 16 March 1989, was at the house of his friend and financial backer David Sainsbury. This meeting, like the one which followed, foundered on the fact that Owen could not accept a process whereby local constituencies would decide their own local candidates, and I could not accept a nationally negotiated deal in which local constituencies played no part.
But by this stage the moment of danger was over and things were much easier, for the Owenites had done disastrously badly in the local elections (in which we had done surprisingly well, limiting our losses to a hundred). They then got a mere 2% of the vote in the Vale of Glamorgan, and in a later by-election in Glasgow Central came fifth behind the Greens. The coup de grâce came at a third by-election in Bootle, where they ignominiously trailed home behind Screaming Lord Sutch. They were now becoming the butt of all the jokes we had suffered from earlier in the year, and this, I think, David Owen found impossible to stomach. They finally packed up their tents and melted away on 14 May 1990,* to my great relief.
But, even before the Owenites departed the political scene, a greater and more deadly threat to us emerged. For the first time – and very suddenly – environmental issues started to become important on the national political agenda, causing even Mrs Thatcher to make pro-environment speeches (in one of which, to the great joy of the satirists, she promised single-handedly to ‘save the world’). As traditionally Britain’s most environmentally aware mainstream Party, we rather complacently believed we had a monopoly on this agenda. But it was the Greens who suddenly caught the public’s attention by launching a most imaginative campaign for the 1989 European Elections, in which they fielded an almost full slate of candidates across the country. Just before polling day I started getting reports of a strong Green surge and, indeed, could even feel it in my own Somerset constituency. But none of this prepared me for the shock of the morning of 18 June, when the Euro-election count revealed that the Greens had beaten us into fourth position in every single seat in Britain, except Cornwall (including in my own Somerset), getting nearly two-and-a-half times our national share of the vote. I went to bed that night tormented by the thought that the Party that had started with Gladstone would end with Ashdown.
The opinion-polling organisations run regular polls on how the party leaders are doing – measured by the public’s answer to the question, ‘In your opinion is Party Leader X doing a good or a bad job?’ and then giving a figure based on the difference between those answering ‘good’ and those who say ‘bad’. My rating at this time was a catastrophic minus 23%! This, I think, was the lowest moment of my entire Leadership.
I have always thought that the battle between the two major parties is like a heavyweight boxing match in which the two contestants slug it out, and the last one to remain standing wins. But third-party politics is much more like ju-jitsu: you have to take the momentum of forces you are given and turn them to your advantage. When faced with a political crisis, my first instinct, since I cannot alter the forces involved, has always been to try to find the means to turn them, or else find a way to ride with the punch. But on this occasion I could do nothing. It was a sudden and unforeseen disaster, and we just had to have the strength to hang on and sit it out.
The papers were full of the fact that this disaster was all the result of my leadership, and when I stood up at the next Prime Minister’s Question Time, there were shouts from all around of ‘Mr Six Percent!’ (our poll share in the Euros) and ‘Bite the cyanide capsule, Paddy’. To make matters worse, my postbag was now full of letters from members of the Party saying they were resigning and going to join the Greens, and the Observer published a report at the weekend that Simon Hughes was threatening to do the same, if things didn’t improve.*
And they didn’t improve, for we were now facing another financial crisis. In early July Tim Clement Jones, a long-time supporter and close friend who had taken over the Finance Committee, told me that we were facing a £200,000 liquidity shortfall by the end of September and could not pay salaries after that date. Shortly afterwards, the bank threatened to foreclose on our loan, and the auditors announced that they were intending to qualify our accounts, in effect making us bankrupt. We would have to cut our costs – and that meant staff – again. Only this time, having recognised that we had been too timid previously, Tim and I were determined to cut deep enough to get ourselves back into the black, even if it meant reducing the Party’s central staff to a mere skeleton and getting rid of our entire network of regional agents. I even asked my friend Archy Kirkwood to double up and combine his job as Deputy Whip and spokesman for Scotland with that of General Secretary of the Party in Cowley Street, in order to save costs. There was much opposition to this, with dire predictions about destroying the whole Party, but eventually we got the package through the Party’s key committees. Even then, the bank would not agree not to foreclose unless the Officers of the Party signed a formal undertaking that our personal assets were, in the last event, on call if the bank could not recover the loan by any other means. One of the most moving experiences of my life was watching as each of my closest colleagues on the Executive Committee of the Party signed a form which, in effect, bet their personal assets on the Party’s survival.
Our opinion-poll standing was around 4%,* and sometimes even lower. Indeed I think I am the only modern party leader who has had the distinction of presiding over an opinion-poll rating of an asterisk: indicating that the pollsters could find no detectable level of support!
There were, however, two tiny shafts of light amidst all this gloom. The first was the issue of Hong Kong passports. The Tiananmen Square massacre had taken place in June, and I had got immediately involved, visiting Hong Kong with Bob MacLennan and joining in some of the demonstrations.† On our return we persuaded the Party that we should adopt the highly risky policy of insisting that all the 3.5 million ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong who were British subjects should be given right of abode in Britain if they wished to take it up in an emergency after the Chinese took over in 1997. The Government had withdrawn this right, and the Labour Party had cravenly supported them. Needless to say, agreeing to allow 3.5 million Chinese to come and live in Britain was not a popular position, even with some of my MPs. But it was right and would, in my view, have greatly assisted with inward investment to Britain just when the country needed it most (instead, much of this investment went to the west coast of the United States and to Canada). Moreover, it was a policy supported by most of the left-leaning Press. But, most important of all, it was a clear and distinguishing radical position that was consistent with our Liberal Democrat internationalist traditions, gave us a raison d’être for our existence and some much needed pride in ourselves. Later we were to discover that our strong position on Hong Kong passports also had the unintended benefit of helping us raise funds for the Party from the expatriate Chinese community.
Secondly, though the benefits from this were to come much later, I had decided that I needed to put down on paper a clear policy prospectus outlining what it was that I believed the Party should stand for. In June, just after our devastating defeat by the Greens, I started to write my first book, subsequently titled Citizen’s Britain and published in time for the Party Conference in September that year.
This was my first book, and the one that, in many ways, I am most proud of – for it sought to map a coherent new agenda for the liberal left in Britain based on shifting power from the state producer to the citizen consumer. It proposed that the delivery of public services, such as education and health, should be based on choice, and that the money should follow the citizen, not the citizen the money. It asserted that liberalism was different from socialism, because what it was ruled by was not equality of outcome but equality of opportunity, and that the job of the liberal state should be to provide this. And it thus established, long
before Blair’s famous ‘education, education, education’ slogan, that education was the key investment the nation had to make, paving the way for our later 1p on income tax for education, arguably the most successful policy the Party had in my time. In all these ways, it long predated the Blairite revolution. But it was different from Blairism in one crucial way. It was committed to deep constitutional change and the establishment of a strong bulwark of individual civil liberties, in order to create a Britain based around the powerful citizen, not the powerful state.
Having resolved the name issue, I was now determined to replace our old Party symbol, a dreadful diamond-shaped thing that was easily confused with the ‘Baby on Board’ sign that new parents put in the back of their car. In May the following year, after a very long process of consultation and against the background of some low-key criticism and a few rather good jokes at our expense from the newspaper cartoonists, the Party overwhelmingly adopted the yellow ‘Lib Dem Bird of Liberty’, which has remained our symbol ever since.*
The main national political issue of 1990 was the Poll Tax. On 8 March that year I was almost engulfed in one of the most violent of the anti-poll tax rallies when I went to speak at a protest meeting in Hackney, managing to escape through the back door of the Hall just before the Militant Left took over and the whole scene descended into violence. However, the really effective action that stopped the Poll Tax did not take place on the streets of London, but in a key by-election which had now been called.
On 30 July Ian Gow, the MP for Eastbourne and a close associate of Mrs Thatcher, was killed by an IRA bomb. Although we were second in Eastbourne, my initial instinct was not to fight the by-election, because I believed the IRA should not have the satisfaction of causing a potential defeat for the Government. We should therefore stand aside and let the Conservatives have a free run. Chris Rennard, now our director of campaigns, who was to prove himself a genius, much feared by the other parties when it came to by-elections, persuaded me otherwise, promising that we could win. I replied that I thought he was a hopeless optimist but agreed to back his hunch with every penny we could scrape together (most of it raised by Chris himself). At the Conservative Conference that year the Tories made sure that Ian Gow’s widow was on the platform during a leader’s speech, in which Mrs Thatcher dismissed the Lib Dems with the line that ‘the soufflé never rises twice’ and declared we were ‘as dead as John Cleese’s parrot’.* We concentrated our campaign on the hated Poll Tax and promised that, if we were to win, Mrs Thatcher would have to go. The election was held on 18 October and at 12.50 the following morning, Chris Rennard rang me to say that our candidate David Belotti had won a great victory, with more than 51% of the vote, turning a Tory majority of 16,000 into a Liberal Democrat one of 4,500. The Evening Standard headline that evening, over a harassed picture of Mrs Thatcher, shouted ‘The parrot has twitched!’†
Our opinion poll ratings showed a marked jump after Eastbourne, and my personal ratings as Lib Dem Leader moved for the first time from the negative to a positive 9%. In March 1991 there followed another by-election victory in the safe Tory seat of Ribble Valley. These two by-elections had a huge effect on Party morale. For the first time since the merger our members began to believe that we could survive and perhaps even prosper again.
Less than a month later Geoffrey Howe resigned and, on his way out, gave one of the most effective House of Commons speeches I have ever heard. Wags said it took him half an hour to deliver the speech, but his wife (who, it was said, hated Mrs Thatcher) half a lifetime to write it. It was all the more deadly because it was delivered in Howe’s usual flat, quiet monotone (he was nicknamed ‘Mogadon Man’ for his ability to send the Chamber to sleep). I sat opposite Mrs Thatcher and almost felt sorry for her as, one after another, Howe’s sentences thudded into her like poison arrows. At one time I even saw her bite her lip in pain. A week after the Howe speech I was walking through Glasgow airport when it was announced over the public-address system that Mrs Thatcher had resigned, and the whole airport erupted into spontaneous applause.
A week after that, at a ceremony in the Savoy, the Spectator magazine voted me Party Leader of the year. We were back in business!
For me, the Major era in Downing Street began in January the following year, when, fulfilling one of my ‘wallpaper of State’ duties, Jane and I went there for an official dinner. The change from Mrs Thatcher and all that hyperventilating energy could not have been starker. I recorded my impressions of the new incumbents in Downing Street in my diary that night as follows:
Major is quite different from Thatcher (she was also there, very regal and gener ally dominating the performance). He looks just like the man next door, who became Prime Minister to both his surprise and ours. Whenever I see him I think of those rows and rows of pre-war houses which line the South Circular on the way into London – he could emerge from any one of them, and you would think it absolutely normal. But he is effective in his own quiet way – a sort of suburban Baldwin of our times. Gentle, pleasant, courteous. Probably the most plainly decent man we have had in Downing Street this century. And I love Norma. She has a wonderful face, full of grace and poise. I hope they make a success of it.
The new Prime Minster, however, didn’t have long to get his feet under the table, for a mere six days later he was leading the country to war in the Gulf.
I have a theory about successful politicians, and especially political leaders: they start to make progress nationally when some event occurs that crystallises, in almost caricature form, the public’s view of them. And, once he or she has been allotted this space in the public consciousness, the politician quite often starts to play up to it. Thus, after the Russians (foolishly) dubbed Mrs Thatcher the ‘Iron Lady’, that is what she became in the public’s eyes – and she loved it.
For me the corresponding event was the Gulf War.
I formed a little team of war advisers made up of a friendly ambassador or two and my old Royal Marine Company Commander (then General) Sir Jeremy Moore (of Limbang fame) and his colleague, my near-contemporary (also General) Julian Thompson, both of whom had been the key architects of the victory in the Falklands. Thanks to them, we always had a clear and usually correct line to take on most of the key events of the war. I also asked our press department to arrange a rota, so that somebody would be on duty round the clock, with instructions to get me first onto the air after every key incident, no matter what time of day or night. As a result, over the whole period of the war I was almost constantly on the airwaves as a commentator who appeared to know what he was talking about and seemed to make sense.
The crisis taught me three key lessons. First, that in opposition politics the important thing is to have a position. (In Government, of course, it is essential to have the right position; in opposition it is more important to have a position than necessarily to have the right one.) Second, generally speaking, the more difficult the issue, the clearer the line, the more you will carry others with you. And, third, it is much easier to perform well with a clear position, and much more difficult to do so with an ill-defined one.
My unequivocal position supporting the Coalition and the Government in the Gulf War contrasted with the more nuanced line taken by Neil Kinnock for Labour. But it also caused a good deal of unhappiness in the Party (including a few resignations) and even some concern amongst my most natural supporters, David Steel and Ming Campbell, in the Parliamentary Party.
It all came to a head on 13 February, when a US air strike killed a large number of civilians in a Baghdad air-raid shelter. At Prime Minister’s Questions the following day there was real sense of shock, peppered with statements from some MPs that dripped with crocodile tears. Even Major seemed somehow uncertain and equivocal, evidently finding it difficult to show resolve for the war, as well as regret for the deaths. I struck a very different, almost bellicose note, saying that, however regrettable it was that innocent civilians had been killed, should we not remember that they were killed by acc
ident, whereas Saddam Hussein had killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens deliberately and as a matter of policy?* This became the line subsequently used by all at this crucial moment in the War.
When the War ended on 27 February, my fiftieth birthday, I suddenly found my personal poll figures as Leader rising sharply to +37%, putting me ahead of both Major (+11%) and Kinnock (–12%), a position I largely maintained until the 1992 election, which I entered with a rating of +40%.
In the local elections shortly after the end of the Gulf War, we made 520 gains and took control of 19 new Councils (which, in terms of gains, remains our best-ever local election result). We were now very well placed for the general election, which we all believed would come in late 1991 (but in the event did not occur until the following spring).
Some time previously I had asked my old friend and supporter Des Wilson to design and run our election campaign. Des, a New Zealander with a prickly personality and a strong ego, was probably the greatest single-issue campaigner of his age, having been responsible, amongst other things, for putting Shelter on the map after the seminal 1960s film Cathy Come Home, and for the campaign to remove lead from petrol. He had also run Friends of the Earth, been a key campaigner for freedom of information and had proved himself loyal to the Party in difficult circumstances. His style was not welcomed by my more delicate Parliamentary colleagues, but he designed a formidable campaign and prepared the Party to fight it better than we had ever been prepared before.
A Fortunate Life Page 33