For John Major, however, this was only just the beginning of his torture on the rack of Europe at the hands of his Euro-rebels – later in the Parliament he would famously refer to them as ‘the Bastards’ – and in the end this issue would cripple his Government and bring him to the point of resignation. At his request, I met with Major secretly on several occasions to co-ordinate our actions in order to save Maastricht from the treachery of his rebels and the cynicism of Labour. This had to be carefully and discreetly done, for by early 1993 we had, in Newbury, the first of two key by-elections in seats the Tories held by huge majorities, and I could not afford to be seen to be too close to the Government.
We had an excellent candidate in Newbury, David Rendel, and fought a very strong campaign, once again under the direction of Chris Rennard. At 4.20 a.m. on Friday 8 May, the day after the Newbury Poll, the Party General Secretary rang to tell me that David Rendel had won by 22,000 votes. I said that I didn’t want to know how many votes he had got, I wanted to know what his majority was. ‘Paddy, that is the majority!’ he said. Newbury, which saw a 28% swing to the Liberal Democrats, did much to help us recover from the disappointment and lost momentum after the 1992 general election.
However, for me, 1993 was about more than Europe and by-election campaigning. I was by now deeply involved in writing another book: Beyond Westminster. After the 1992 election I had decided I needed to get out of the fug of Westminster and start refreshing my knowledge of the way ordinary people across Britain were living their lives. To be honest, it was something of a relief, for I never much liked Westminster, and the feeling was, I think, mutual. Some MPs take the view that politics is a purely Westminster affair. For me politics is what happens in people’s lives, and Westminster was just the place where I had to work. In 1983, when I was elected, I discovered that the things I had done in my previous ‘real jobs’, from soldier, to ‘diplomat’, to businessman, to youth worker – even to being unemployed – had greatly helped me with the job I now had to do in Parliament. Indeed, though my trajectory through these jobs had been entirely accidental, they all combined to form a very useful apprenticeship to being an MP. But, after ten years in Parliament, I felt jaded and increasingly caught up in the Westminster game. I needed to refresh the reservoir of my enthusiasm and personal experience, and Beyond Westminster was the way I hoped to do this.
I spent much of the early months of 1993 in a series of visits, living and working with people across the country. The format we hit on was for me to work for maybe two or three days with individuals in their workplace, spending the evenings with them and their families. The Press were not invited and only informed of my visits afterwards. My first visit was in January, to Britain’s deepest coalmine at Monktonhall in Scotland, where I worked a shift with the miners. Other visits included two days fishing with Cornish trawlermen in the Irish Sea; working with a businessman in Omagh, Northern Ireland; spending Ramadan with a Muslim family in Peckham and living with a black family in Moss Side, Manchester, which at the time was so under the control of drug gangs that it had become practically a no-go area for police. It was during my Moss Side visit that Jane got an early-morning phone call from Manchester police saying that they had just carried out a drugs raid, in the course of which they had stopped someone observing from the sidelines who claimed to be me and, indeed, looked very like me. But they couldn’t believe it was me. ‘Can you tell me if it is your husband?’ the caller asked. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jane replied, ‘that’s him!’
I made copious notes on each of these visits and then wrote Beyond Westminster in my courtyard in France, getting up at 5 a.m. every morning so as to be able to do four hours of writing in the cool of the day. The book was published in paperback in time for the Party’s Spring Conference in 1994 and, even if only briefly, reached the Sunday Times top ten paperback list – thanks, I think, to the loyal Party members purchasing it en masse during Conference week.
The central message of the book was that the Government was becoming dangerously out of touch with the lives of ordinary citizens in Britain and was fast losing their confidence. Unless we tackled this democratic deficit, I concluded, the gap between government and governed would only widen and perhaps even, in time, threaten the democratic process itself.
At the end of July 1993 we overturned a 23,000 Conservative majority in the Christchurch by-election, where our candidate, Diana Maddock, won by more than 16,000 votes. My press release after the result said that this was ‘a shout of anger from the heart of Britain’. At 35%, this was the biggest swing against the Tories in a by-election in more than fifty years and temporarily catapulted us above the Conservatives in national opinion polls. The day after the by-election I left for my fifth visit to Bosnia.
Having made the previous three trips through Croatia and across the Dinaric Alps into Bosnia with the help of British troops serving in the UN force, I decided that this time I would again go in through Belgrade. I crossed the Drina River, which marks the border between Serbia and Bosnia, at Zvornik, where my car was stopped by a Serb frontier guard sporting a fearsome beard and an even more fearsome machine-gun. He wanted to know who I was, where I was going and why, and seemed to be on the point of refusing to let me pass when another fearsomely bearded Serb stuck his head out of the machine-gun bunker he was manning and shouted, according to my interpreter, ‘Let him pass. His lot has just smashed Major in some British election!’
It was on this trip that I met General Mladić for the second time, when he attended a dinner for me given by Karadžić on the night of my arrival. Mladić spent much of the time boasting about his army. But I knew that, shortly before my arrival, a Bosnian Serb assault on Sarajevo from the East had been bloodily repulsed by the Bosniaks, with heavy losses. So I asked Mladić, somewhat mischievously, why, if his army was so superior, he had not taken Sarajevo already? His reply was chilling:
I can take Sarajevo any time I like. But I was Russian-trained. And we were always taught that, if you have a choice between shooting an enemy in the head or shooting him in the balls, always shoot him in the balls. It takes only two people half an hour to bury a dead man. But it takes many tens of people many tens of weeks to keep a wounded man alive. I am very happy to leave Sarajevo as it is. The West is now spending so much of its time and energy keeping Sarajevo alive, that you have none left to deal with me. While you have to go on doing that, I can go on doing what I want.
Its frontal assault having been driven back, the Bosnian Serb army was, however, now in the middle of a major offensive in the mountains above Sarajevo whose aim was to extend the Serb ring around the city by capturing Mount Igman, which dominates and protects the west end of the city. The day after our dinner I went to the area and met Mladić again, this time directing fire from a battery of 130mm howitzers high in the mountains above Sarajevo. His guns were parked, openly visible, on the side of the mountain and without either camouflage or concealment. I said to him, ‘You have never experienced air attacks or counter-battery fire, have you?’ He asked me why I had asked the question. I replied that, if he had, he would never have placed his guns in such an exposed position, with their ammunition piled alongside them. He replied that if NATO aircraft ever dared to attack he would knock them out of the sky long before they got to his guns. He was to get a very nasty surprise when, in the end, NATO did intervene two years later.
Just a few minutes after we left the gun site, a stick of Bosniak mortar bombs landed just where we had been standing, killing an Associated Press cameraman who had stayed behind to take pictures and terribly wounding his reporter colleague.
In mid-1993, following our by-election victories, our opinion poll ratings were beginning to rise quite sharply, reaching 28% in July and August, while Labour’s were languishing at a level insufficient to guarantee a Tory defeat at the next election. Indeed, John Smith was proving a much less decisive Leader than Neil Kinnock. He was taking Labour back to its old, socialist positions and was widely criticised for failing
to carry through some of the reforms that Neil Kinnock had initiated, especially in modernising the Party and reducing the influence of the trades unions. There was, I knew, quite a lot of unhappiness about this amongst newer Labour MPs.
On 14 July 1993, just before the Christchurch by-election, Jane and I were invited to dinner by my colleague Anthony Lester, who had just joined the Lib Dem team in the Lords, having been one of those who had left Labour to found the SDP. He and his wife Katya had also invited a young Labour MP called Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, whom I had never met socially before. Blair had been elected at the same time as me in 1983 and had been making quite a name for himself as Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary. We spent much of the evening talking privately in a corner, while the Lesters kept the others away in order to give us space. We discussed the need to realign the Left and the necessity for root-and-branch reform of the Labour Party. He said, however, that he was very concerned not to get himself too far out in front. He was especially worried about getting into a head-to-head with either the unions or Labour’s Left too soon – it would have to be done carefully, at the right time and step by step. ‘The history of the Labour Party is littered with nice people who get beaten, and I don’t intend to be one of them,’ he said. Before the evening ended, I suggested that he and his wife might like to come to dinner with us sometime before the end of the year, and he agreed. Commenting on our meeting afterwards Anthony Lester said that he thought Blair was very good – but doubted he was brave enough to do what needed to be done.
Our next meeting with the Blairs was on 1 December 1993, when they came round to dinner at our flat. We agreed on much, including the need for a new attempt at a realignment of the Left in order to beat the Tories and keep them out of power, perhaps for a generation; the belief that this should be based on a new relationship between the citizen and the state, and the fact that the modernisation of Labour had to go much further than Smith had so far committed himself to. The most revealing comment of the dinner came from Cherie, who confided that her husband was rather low at the moment, worrying that, if Labour under Smith didn’t change more, then they wouldn’t beat the Tories, and he didn’t intend to waste his life in permanent opposition. My diary for that night records that he appeared to have arrived at the same view of the new politics of the Left as I had, but from a different direction.
My assessment of our position at the end of 1993 was, therefore, an optimistic one. The Lib Dems were getting stronger and stronger. Our membership was rising, as were our poll ratings, and our funds were as secure as they could be for a third party. Moreover, the by-elections of the last year had proved that we were able to beat the Tories in places Labour could not reach. Most important of all, John Smith was proving a very conventional Labour leader, retreating to old socialist positions and failing to institute the internal reforms which were essential if they were going to win. Meanwhile, I had a very clear view of where the open ground was on the Left of politics, and it was empty and waiting for us to occupy it. And, moreover, in Blair I had made a very useful contact amongst the new forward-looking Labour MPs with whom, I felt certain, we could do real business when the time came.
At the end of each year I wrote a ‘position paper’ for my MPs over the Christmas holidays, describing where I thought we were and what the challenges for the year ahead would be. Here is what I wrote in 1993:
We have real opportunities ahead of us, not just from the early unpopularity of the Government, but also, and perhaps more significantly, from the perceived failures of Labour and their new Leader.
We must do everything we can to capitalize on this opportunity.
This means winning when we have the chance.
It means re-establishing a sense of impetus within the Party and clarifying the message we give outside it.
It means showing Labour up where we can and capturing territory from them where this is possible.
It is sometimes said that espionage is the Great Game, but politics has a better claim to the title. For in politics things are constantly changing, and you have to be constantly reviewing your choices, especially in a third party, in order both to avoid being squashed and to advance your aims. If you make a mistake you usually pay the price very quickly. It is this that makes it more exciting – and often more terrifying – than active service. For on active service nothing happens for ninety percent of the time. But in politics, things happen all the time, and the bullets can start flying just when you least expect them. In most things you can look at the momentum and direction of forces and predict reasonably accurately what the outcome will be when they collide. But in politics there is the ever-present, ever-changing variable of the human factor, which has a habit of altering everything just when you thought it was fixed. Who could have predicted Michael Heseltine’s sudden walk-out from the cabinet over Westland, which brought Mrs Thatcher to the edge of the precipice? Or the precise moment when Geoffrey Howe’s patience with her would snap and cause her to be finally pushed over? Or that, in a few months’ time, quiet, long-suffering John Major would finally turn the tables on his tormentors by briefly resigning in the rose garden of No. 10 Downing Street, challenging them to ‘put up or shut up’?
John Smith’s death on 12 May 1994 was one of these events. It shocked everyone, of course, for he was much loved and respected, especially by rank-and-file members of Labour, who, in those times of turmoil and change, felt that socialism and the Party they loved were safe in his hands. But it changed almost everything else, too.
His death resulted – as I knew it would as soon as it happened – in the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader. And from this moment onwards the ground on which I had sought to position the Liberal Democrats was progressively undermined. It did not matter that we were there first, or that Blair’s vision of what had to be done was seriously deficient in some areas (for instance, civil liberties and constitutional reform). Such was the clamour for him in the Press, the clarity of his vision and his formidable powers of salesmanship that we were in severe danger of being run over by Blair and his New Labour bulldozer.
The Press knew it and goaded me with it. And I became grumpy and bad-tempered and showed it. I found this altogether one of the most difficult periods of my leadership. For the truth was, I did not know how to react to the fact that the ground had suddenly been cut out from under me by the arrival of the phenomenon of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. Indeed, I seriously thought about resigning. Here is what I wrote in my diary for 8 August 1994:
Richard Holme arrived at Vane Cottage at 3.00. We set off over the hills…. I led off, saying that I had been very depressed. I seem to have completely lost direction. I have been building the Party to fill a certain gap in politics, which I know is there and which would give us real electoral pull. But then along comes Blair with all the power of Labour behind him, and fills exactly the space I have been aiming at for the last seven years!
I was seriously wondering whether I wanted to continue in this job; whether I had the energy and the ideas; and whether I was the right person to take the Party forward. He said that of all the leaders he had known, I was the one who he really felt could get us somewhere; kind flattery, of course, but it cheered me up for a couple of days.
He tried to persuade me to make the break from equidistance* now. But my instincts are against this, since I think it’s still too early. It will look like a panic move, responding to Blair, without knowing what he will do.
I would much prefer to prepare the ground with the Party in September and move in the spring.
The effect of all this was not just theoretical. New Labour was beginning to challenge our dominance as the main opposition to the Tories in the south of England, too. Although our candidate David Chidgey won another by-election in Eastleigh in mid-1994, we had had to fight very hard to hold off a challenge from Labour, who beat the Tories into third position in this southern Conservative heartland.
What I was wrestling with was the unpleasant fact
that this was another ‘ju-jitsu’ moment. I could not prevent New Labour’s surge in the polls or protect us against the fact that this could do great damage to both our policy positions and our electoral appeal. I would have to find a way to turn the Blair phenomenon into something from which we, too, could benefit. I concluded that, if he was to lead the wave of change that would unseat the Tories, we had to be part of that. Fortunately, the Chard speech back in May 1992, and the work I had done repositioning the Party since then, would help. But all would depend on whether Blair, now that he was actually Labour leader, was sincere about exploring the possibilities of a realignment of the Left along the lines we had spoken of at my flat before John Smith’s death.
I met Blair again just before our respective 1994 Party Conferences, when Jane and I went round to a family dinner at their house in Islington. It was then that we laid the foundations of the next five years of close and mostly secret co-ordination between the two of us and our parties. We agreed that we could not stop our parties fighting each other where they had always traditionally done so (i.e., where we challenged each other). But in the public comments we made we would each show respect for the other’s party. There would be no question of withdrawing candidates. However, in places where one of us was the principal challenger to the Tories it made no sense to ‘station tanks on each other’s lawns’ by putting resources into each others’ principal target seats. This agreement eventually culminated in the two parties secretly exchanging a list of Tory key seats in which the one that had little chance of winning would not invest resources in contesting the seat, so as to give the other the best chance of beating the Tory. Chris Rennard subsequently (and secretly) met Peter Mandelson at a dinner and persuaded him that the most useful thing that the Labour Party could do to help us defeat the Tories in our key target seats was to arrange for a third party to publish a list of where Labour voters should back the Lib Dems in order to beat the Tories. Eventually, at Mandelson’s behest, the Daily Mirror published a list of twenty-two seats which had been secretly negotiated with us, and we won twenty of them in the subsequent general election.
A Fortunate Life Page 36