But it wasn’t. On the Monday after the fire-bombing of our car, the Western Daily Press, our regional newspaper, which should have known better, published the whole farrago of lies on their front page, without having even approached me for comment or denial first. Normally, I believe politicians should avoid taking legal action except as a very last resort. But this newspaper must have known exactly what sort of people Mason’s associates were. They had not even tried to check these completely false claims, which were made, as they must have known, with the specific intent of getting me to back down so that one of this fraternity could escape justice. The tale Mason’s associates had been retailing to the Press, and which was at the centre of the Western Daily Press story, was that I had been a customer at the Yeovil massage parlour/brothel. They even supplied the name of the prostitute whose client I had allegedly been, adding considerable verisimilitude to their story. As it happened, this brave lady had left the area some time previously, having been threatened with extreme violence. She read the newspaper stories and, despite the risk to herself, asked her solicitor to contact Andrew Phillips and confirm that the story was a complete fabrication. Jane and I were very touched by her courage.
We took legal action that night which forced the Western Daily Press to print a full, front-page retraction the next day and an apology the following one, as well as facing other substantial penalties for what I still regard as one of the most egregious breaches of decency and professionalism I have ever come across in the profession of journalism.
The car-burning incident also produced a sackful of very kind letters of support, but also others much less salubrious.
We also received a number of phone calls threatening to burn our house if I went ahead and gave evidence at the trial, shortly after which the local Chief Superintendent asked us to go into the police station to see him. He had some information he wanted to talk to us about and did not wish to do this over the phone. When we got there we found two or three other officers in the room, including one from the CID. They told us that they now had reliable information that there was a contract out to fire-bomb our cottage over the coming Easter holidays, when it was known that we would be away in France. The police proposed a plan for installing a series of covert alarms round the house and asked us if they could secretly move in while we were away for Easter.
On 8 February I went to Yeovil crown court to give evidence at Mason’s trial. The Press gallery was packed with reporters from the national Press and broadcasters, all hoping for some dramatic revelation. But they went away disappointed, and Mason was duly found guilty and imprisoned.
The police alarms caused us some problems to start with. They kept on being set off by everything from the cat to branches waving in the wind – and sometimes, it seemed, by nothing at all. This resulted in the whole village being disturbed by screaming sirens and armed police being scrambled to our house at all hours of the day and night. On one occasion Jane returned from walking the dog to find the house and garden full of armed police, one of whom was yelling ‘Freeze or we fire’ at her and a bewildered, but angry, dog. On another I had friends round, and turned off the electricity in order to repair a lamp. About a minute later, there was a screech of police tyres outside the house, all the roads in the village had been sealed off, and, we were told, a helicopter had launched to the area. The police patiently explained that their alarms were run off our electricity and were triggered if it was turned off. All in all, Jane and I decided that we were not very good at being the subject of close protection.
When we left for our Easter holidays, Jane shed some tears at the prospect of our house being reduced to a burnt-out shell. But she is extraordinarily resilient and while we were away planned out the changes she would make to our rather small cottage if we had to rebuild it.
In the event, nothing happened, and in due course the police decided that the threat had passed and left us alone again. But we carried out Jane’s redesign plans anyway, and they have given us a lot more space and greatly improved the way the house works. I, meanwhile, managed to persuade some wealthy Indian supporters to invest in my Bangladeshi constituent who ran the restaurant that had been at the centre of all this drama. He now runs a chain of outstanding Indian restaurants in the West Country, and the one in Yeovil was recently voted among the best one hundred Indian restaurants in Britain. So at least we all got something positive out of the whole wretched business.
Meanwhile, the pace of politics continued unabated. In late February Major was saved by a single vote at the end of a debate on the Scott Report on the selling of arms to Iraq. A month later the BSE crisis broke and was catastrophically mishandled by the Government.
Blair’s rise and rise, however, continued unchecked, and our secret talks on co-operation quickened both in frequency and substance. In March we agreed to launch a joint Commission on constitutional change under the joint Chairmanship of Robin Cook and Bob MacLennan, and this was formally announced later in the year.
Thanks in large part to the growing public perception of a partnership between the Lib Dems and New Labour, we were now, to my relief, no longer being seen by Press and public as irrelevant to the coming wave of change in Britain, but as part of it. And this showed both in our opinion-poll ratings and in votes cast in the May local elections, when we increased our national share of the vote and, with 150 gains, our number of councillors, too. These advances gave us an excellent springboard for the general election, which everyone now knew would be in the spring of 1997.
At the end of August, my daughter Kate got married in Cravant, the next-door village to Irancy. She had met her French husband, Sébastien, while working in the area, so the wedding was a very bibulous, Burgundian affair which went on until the very small hours of the morning. Sébastien’s mother was the Deputy Mayor of Cravant and therefore able, under French law, to conduct the civil ceremony. Afterwards, as is the local custom, I walked with my daughter on my arm at the head of a procession of all our guests through the village from the mairie to the church – one of the proudest moments of my life. My first grandson, Matthias, was born, after a terrible 72-hour labour, right in the middle of the general election campaign in April the following year.
By the end of 1996 Blair and I had a clear plan about how the relationship would develop after the election, which everyone now knew would result in a Blair government (though Blair would never allow himself to admit it). Our preferred option was for the two of us to form a partnership government, even if there was a Labour majority. And we agreed that one of the first elements of its programme would be to bring in a series of constitutional changes, including providing Wales and Scotland with an element of self-government based on the Cook/MacLennan proposals, which were published on 4 March 1997. We also discussed how we might work together on our agreed constitutional agenda.
John Major finally called the general election two weeks after the Cook/MacLennan report was published, and fixed the date for 1 May. Throughout the ensuing campaign there were secret contacts between Richard Holme and Peter Mandelson to ensure that we limited the damage we did to each other, concentrated our fire on the Tories and prepared the way for the partnership between our two parties after the election was over.
On polling day I had a phone conversation with Blair from the Headmaster’s study of a local school I was visiting:
PA: I hope you now recognise that you are going to win.
TB: Yeah. I suppose I accept that I will, now. How many (seats) are you guys going to get?
PA: Thirty at the low end; thirty-eight tops.
TB: Look, I have more or less decided what to do. However, I want to speak to John Prescott and Robin Cook first. Then I will come back to you later. I am sorry I cannot speak to you in more detail now, but I do want you to know that I am absolutely determined to mend the schism that occurred in the progressive forces in British politics at the start of this century. It is just a question of finding a workable framework. But we are now in a positi
on of strength, and I intend to use that.
PA: Well, that is what we have always agreed. But I want to make three points to you. Firstly, please do not bounce me in the press. Don’t put me in a position where you make me an offer in public which I have to refuse. I am perfectly happy to sit on the opposition benches. Under those circumstances I would want to see if we can open up a new salient of co-operative opposition, so we could support you when you needed it. And in my view, with a large majority, this may be your best opportunity.
TB (interrupting): No, curiously, with a large majority I can do things I couldn’t otherwise have done. If you sit on opposite benches of the House, then the natural process of politics will mean that the parties will move apart rather than together.
PA: I agree. But then you must understand my second point. We could not accept simply having Liberal Democrats administering a Labour programme. With a large majority you will want to implement your programme in full. But if we are to do something that is really a combination of both parties’ ideas, then you must be prepared to amend that. We don’t need anything big; something relatively small and symbolic will do. Otherwise it simply will not work. When you make me the offer you intend, please remember that. Lastly, please ensure that this is kept secret until you and I want to bring it out. I may have to put my whole political career on the line here. So it mustn’t become public until after we have agreed a common position. We must not be seen to negotiate in public. And we mustn’t be seen to disagree in public, either.
He said that was all fine and that after he had talked to Robin and John he would come back to me, perhaps that afternoon, perhaps the following morning.
PA: Finally, I want you to consider one other option. On the basis that I still think is the most likely – that we sit on the opposition benches – there is a position we can adopt based on Parliamentary precedent. Perhaps Jonathan* would look it up for you? It comes from Baldwin’s Premiership. Then, opposition parties worked with the Government on a Cabinet Committee. If we were on the other side of the House there is no reason why we should not progress constitutional reform through such a committee. This would allow us, on the one hand, to stay on different sides of the House of Commons, but on the other to institutionalise the relationship, which, if it worked, could bring the two parties closer together in a gradualist way.
TB: That is very interesting, and I will get someone to look it up for me.
PA: Good luck tomorrow.
TB: You, too.*
* I had a guide and an interpreter with me that day. The guide was Gurkha Col. Mark Cook. Later that day Mark, who was just about to retire from the Army, showed me an abandoned orphanage in the little Croatian town of Lipik, which he said he was going to open after he retired as the first venture of a new charity he and his wife intended to launch for orphans of war. He was as good as his word. The charity, Hope and Homes for Children, now operates worldwide, and I am one of its patrons. Our interpreter that day was Lidija Topić, who would later become Deputy Foreign Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina and then its Ambassador to the EU, when I was High Representative in the country from 2002–2006.
* It has subsequently been claimed that John Major did a deal with German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, exchanging German acquiescence in Britain’s EU Social Opt Out, for Croatian recognition.
* Yugoslavia made something of a speciality of having lots of presidents. There was one for each of the component states (e.g. Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) as well as a Federal President, the post that Čosić held at this point.
* I seem to have made rather a habit of this kind of thing in my life. Once, on a train to Poole one very cold January day during my SBS days, a fellow traveller, seeing my Royal Marines uniform, asked me if I was in the SBS, and what was it like nowadays? I told him, perhaps rather brusquely, I couldn’t tell him anything because of security. It was only at the end of the journey that I realised that my companion was none other than Blondie Haslar, the leader and one of the only two survivors of the great ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ raid on Bordeaux in the Second World War – the event which, in effect, founded the SBS.
* Charles Kennedy, The Future of Politics (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 6–11.
* Which I had been planning since before John Smith’s death.
* In fact I had to leave to attend a previously arranged engagement.
* It was known as the ‘Karadjordjević agreement’, after the royal family who had originally owned the lodge.
* This map became quite famous as ‘Mappa na servjetu’ (literally ‘the map on the napkin’) in the Balkans.
* Lib Dem: 16,231 (38.5%); Lab 14,238 (33.8%); Con 9,934 (23.6%).
* Including Bill Newton Dunn and James Moorhouse, both MEPs.
*Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff.
* Paddy Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries, vol. 1, 1988–1997 (London: Allen Lane, 2000), pages 555–6.
CHAPTER 14
Leader III: The End Game
ON POLLING NIGHT we left my count in Yeovil almost as soon as the results were announced and were driven to London, accompanied by the Special Branch escort that had been with me throughout the four weeks of the general election. No doubt it was their presence, blue lights flashing in front and behind, which justified us driving so fast across the early-morning, empty roads.
Out of the car window I could see the great stones of Stonehenge and the graceful sweep of Salisbury Plain sharply etched against a dull, red-ember glow spreading across the eastern horizon. Slowly colour was seeping, by half-tints, back into the greys of night. It was going to be a peerless May day of blue sky and hot sunshine.
Jane, was asleep, her head on my shoulder, exhausted from the campaign and the nervous energy of the count. But though my body cried out for sleep, my mind, swirling with what would happen next and my conversation with Blair the day before, would not let me nod off.
Despite my earlier fears, my majority had increased to 11,400 votes, nearly three times what it was when I was first elected. Yeovil was now a safe seat which I could hand over to my successor, just as, some months earlier, I had promised Jane I would. In truth, she did not need to persuade me to make this decision. We had both agreed when I was elected that doing the job of MP for Yeovil properly required the energy of a young man. From the start I had told close friends (though I don’t think they believed me) that I did not want to be an MP beyond my sixtieth birthday – now only four years away. I had, moreover, been Leader of the Lib Dems for nearly ten years and judged that I had done my best work for them, and it would soon be time for someone else to take over. Most importantly, I had always planned to stand down on my terms and at a time of my choosing, so that I could plan a smooth handover to my successor, both in Yeovil and in the Lib Dems. Too often political careers, even for the greatest, end in tears. One of the skills of life is to know when it is time to go. And I was determined that I would finish when people would still ask, ‘Why is he going?’ rather than ‘Why isn’t he?’
But the question was – when? I was now engaged in a new kind of partnership with the man who would shortly be Prime Minister, and this had great potential to deliver things which I had stood for all my political life and which I believed were not only right for the country but also good for my Party. Finally, all this was built on a very personal relationship – Blair and I had learned to trust each other. I had no alternative but to see this through to its natural conclusion before standing down.
The problem was, I could not yet see what form that end point would now take.
Blair had talked of forming a coalition government, something he had very clearly alluded to in our last conversation – even going so far as to say that the bigger his majority, the easier this would be for him. Listening to the car radio as we sped down the M3 on the last leg to London, it was already clear that his majority was going to be huge. We were going to do well, too. Richard Holme had just called on the car phone to say that, though our share
of the national vote would be largely unchanged from 1992, we were probably going to nearly double our number of seats in Parliament. Far from being squeezed, as I had originally feared when Blair arrived on the scene, our relationship with New Labour had delivered huge dividends for us. We had helped turn a Tory defeat into a Tory rout, and we could now establish the Lib Dems as the strongest liberal force in Parliament for more than half a century, giving us a voice and vote that could no longer be ignored.
But ours was a minor sub-plot in the drama of the night. The main story was New Labour’s landslide, which had exceeded everyone’s expectations. It was already very clear, even this early in the day, that the new Labour government was going to completely dominate the new Parliament – and would probably have a majority over all other parties some three or four times bigger than the total number of Lib Dem MPs. Could Blair still go for a coalition government? Would he? Would it not now, somehow, be an affront to democracy to add perhaps forty Lib Dem MPs to his maybe four hundred, creating something close to a one-party system and leaving the Tory Official Opposition as a mere rump, with neither the power to challenge the Government nor a significant influence on events?*
A Fortunate Life Page 39