A Fortunate Life (36 page)

The rest of that night is a blur. I stumbled through my acceptance speech as best I could, after which my supporters took me outside and tossed me in the air (this was the picture which appeared on the TV, revealing that, in our hour of triumph, my enthusiastic friends very nearly bashed me to death on the overhanging concrete lintel of the counting hall).

When the news of our victory in Yeovil was announced on television that night it was misheard by someone in Liberal Headquarters who for some hours kept putting out statements saying the Liberals had won a stunning and wholly unexpected victory in ‘The Oval’. The following morning, I heard Mrs Thatcher being interviewed about her victory. She was asked if she had ever thought she would lose. She replied that she had doubted victory only once – when, early in the night, she heard that the Liberals had won Yeovil. In the late afternoon David Steel rang to congratulate me, and Kate answered the phone. She asked who it was who wanted to speak to me, to be told that it was David Steel. She replied, ‘Yeah! And if you’re David Steel, then I’m Margaret Thatcher!’ before I could grab the phone from her.

Looking back, I regard this night – the night of 9 June 1983 – as the night of my life and the achievement I am most proud of. Another new MP elected on the same night as me was Tony Blair. But the difference between us could not have been starker. He had walked into his constituency of Sedgefield and been selected as its candidate at
the start of the general election campaign three weeks before. I had taken seven years to win mine. It was a matter we would, in due course, joke about when he was leading his party and I was leading mine – but it marked a difference between us, in our approach to politics, which I am not sure he ever understood. Jane and I were to become friends with Tony Blair and Cherie, and I always recognised him as a politician of exceptional gifts and talents. But his was a smooth, golden ascent to the top, which never involved either enduring personal hardship or encountering setbacks for what he believed in. I believe this was a weakness which sometimes caused him to be less anchored and more easily blown off course by storms got up by the Press than he should have been. It was certainly an impediment to our partnership before and after the 1997 election. He simply couldn’t understand why I would never even contemplate a straight merger between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. I think he was never really able to comprehend why the Party existed at all, when its members could have taken the far easier option of joining one of the larger parties and taking an inevitable turn at power, instead of standing against the odds and putting up with so much for independence and what we believed in.

Shortly after our general election triumph the Yeovil Liberals repeated their success in the local Town Council elections, removing the Tories from power in all the politicised local Town Councils in the Constituency, and two years later, in May 1985, we took control of Somerset County Council as well, winning every County seat in my Constituency. In just over a decade we had swept the Tories away completely and ended the Conservative hold on Somerset which had endured for more than seventy years.

And these Council successes were not just technical victories. I believe they made a real difference to the quality of people’s lives in our area, too – perhaps even more than getting a Liberal MP in Westminster. South Somerset District Council went on to become one of the flagship Councils for innovation and good government in the country and one of the leaders in rural decentralisation of services, bringing the Council closer to the people it served. It was also the first Council in which there were more women than men in the ruling group (i.e., the Lib Dems), and the first in which women outnumbered men in the key leadership positions. It was awarded the Council of the Year in Britain and has won a number of environmental awards
as well. Somerset County Council has been similarly successful, winning Green Council of the Year in 2003, as well as receiving other recognition for the quality of its services, especially in environmental matters.

Nor was that the end. What we started in Yeovil spread throughout the south-west in what the Press later referred to as the ‘orange tide’. When I was elected in 1983 my nearest Liberal neighbour was David Penhaligon in far-away Truro. Now three of the five Somerset MPs are Lib MPs, as are two in Devon and every single MP in Cornwall. The team we built in Yeovil over these years was very much part of this revolution. Of those who helped us take control of politics at every level in Yeovil Constituency, one (apart from me) is now in the Lords, one became an MP for Taunton, five fought their own Parliamentary seats, two (including my one-time Constituency Secretary, Cathy Bakewell, who had been present on that night in 1976 when I was selected) became Chairs or Leaders of Somerset County Council, and we have provided every subsequent Chair and Leader of the District Council, and almost every Mayor of Yeovil and the other major towns in the Constituency ever since.

On that cold and foggy November day in 1976 when I was selected as Yeovil’s PPC I could have stood on Ham Hill, above the village in which I live, looking west over south Somerset, right into north Devon and north-west Dorset and not have seen a single seat controlled by Liberals, from parish and town level up. When I stood down as Yeovil MP in 2001 someone worked out that you could walk from Lands End to London without ever leaving territory held by a Liberal Democrat at some level or another.

But that was all still to come. My next stop, and our new adventure after 9 June 1983, was Westminster.

N
OT SINCE OUR NIGHTMARE
winter journey to Switzerland had our little Renault Five, now significantly more dilapidated, been so overloaded. Kate, Simon and some of our overnight suitcases were jammed in the back, along with our dog Traddles, who, as always, was hanging out of the rear window, coat flying, ears flapping wildly in the wind, fulfilling his duty to protect the car by barking enthusiastically at every passer-by (much more fun here in London – hundreds more to bark at than in Somerset). His job was made easier because the Renault’s back windows had become detached, and I had attempted to repair them with black tape, to keep Traddles in. But this minor impediment had long since been brushed aside, leaving a fringe of little flags of black tape fluttering in the wind, framing his barking head and giving the whole a faintly heraldic aspect.

For my part, I was doing my level best to pretend I was in no way connected with any of this, while trying to muster such as I could of the dignity befitting a newly elected MP on his way to the State Opening of Parliament. Jane, meanwhile, was trying to find her way through heavy traffic in London, with only a hazy idea of where she was going and pandemonium reigning around her. To be truthful – and to make matters worse – I had misjudged the time it would take us to get to Westminster, so we were not only lost, but also late. I could not banish from my mind the image of Her Majesty (who would have long ago left Buckingham Palace) turning up behind us – gilded coach, liveried footmen, Household Cavalry and all – and being forced to complete her Royal progress to Parliament behind our decrepit vehicle with Traddles hanging out the back window barking at the horses and having the time of his life.

Just as I was thinking that all was lost, and we should turn round and go home to Somerset, we burst onto the Embankment just short of Vauxhall Bridge. Shortly after that, we met our first police roadblock barring entrance to Parliament Square. We drove up, and I explained I was an MP (I think this was the first time I ever used the title) and
needed to get to the House for the State Opening. The policeman took one look at the car and seemed disinclined to believe me. But I produced my newly obtained House of Commons pass, and he let us through, narrowly avoiding a savaging from Traddles as we passed. Now we were on Millbank, and the roads were largely empty, save for an ambassadorial Rolls Royce or two sweeping majestically past us and a few spectators. There was much laughing as we sped through and quite a few cheers, which I knew were not intended to be helpful.

Then another road block, another disbelieving policeman and another flash of my pass and we were in Parliament Square. Now there were many more spectators and much more cheering, to which Traddles responded enthusiastically – I was now trying to look as invisible as the front seat of a Renault Five would allow. Jane floored the accelerator and cut the corners of Parliament Square practically on two wheels, while Traddles (now three-quarters out of the back window) yapped as though his life depended on it. Finally, and with great relief, we dived into the safety of the House of Commons underground car park.

But if this day, 22 June 1983 and my first full one as an MP, began as farce, it ended in something that, for the six newly elected Liberal MPs, seemed very close to tragedy. That night, after all the pomp and ceremony of the State Opening was over, I joined my five new colleagues
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at our first Liberal Parliamentary Party meeting, held in a windowless, airless underground room where the Liberal MPs, apparently by tradition, always held their meetings. We thought David Steel had fought a good campaign. He had certainly saved our bacon by deftly manoeuvring Roy Jenkins out of the limelight at the Ettrick Bridge summit. He had helped secure 26% of the vote for the Alliance, placing it only 2% behind Labour. And he had increased the number of Liberal MPs to 17, against the SDP’s 6. And now we newly elected MPs were enthusiastic to start taking advantage of the turmoil in the Labour Party after its disastrous showing and the resignation, immediately after the election, of its Leader, Michael Foot. It therefore came as a profound shock to all the newcomers when, instead of being congratulated, our Leader was viciously attacked by some of our more experienced MPs in one of the most unpleasant and dispiriting meetings between colleagues I have ever attended – and all for very minor personal things.

Cyril Smith rounded on him because David’s battle bus had got so held up by traffic that he turned up an hour late in Cyril’s Rochdale seat, discommoding the brass band Cyril had arranged. David Alton attacked him because Steel and Alton had rowed over Alton’s support for his neighbouring Liberal candidate. After choosing his own seat, Alton also backed the next-door Liberals, who did not want to cede their constituency (much of which had been in the constituency won by Alton’s Liberals in the 1979 by-election) to an SDP MP from the other side of the city. Steel, not wanting to be seen to go against the nationally agreed deal with the SDP, therefore made only a very brief visit to support David Alton’s campaign, which the latter seemed to regard as a personal slight. Others attacked David Steel because, as they put it, they were not deemed important enough to be asked to the Ettrick Bridge summit, and because, they alleged, his leadership style was too remote and high-handed. It was my first taste of what was to dog us for the rest of this Parliament and severely hamper our ability to capitalise on the historic opportunity of Labour’s disarray. With a few exceptions (such as David Penhaligon, Russell Johnston, Richard Wainwright and our new Chief Whip Alan Beith), most of the older MPs were self-centred individualists: outstanding personalities in their own constituencies, but unable or unwilling to play as members of the team. The truth was that the Party had changed since the majority of these longer-standing Liberal MPs had been elected. Most of the 1983 new intake had a close relationship with Liberal local government groups and the Association of Liberal Councillors and knew both the habits and the importance of discipline and teamwork in politics; most of those who were elected before us did not. The point was graphically illustrated, when, after the meeting, Clement Freud invited Archy Kirkwood, Alex Carlile and me to dine with him and took us off to a club (a casino as I remember), where he spent the entire evening telling us how awful all his colleagues were, one by one.

Tantrums over trivial personal things were very frequent among the pre-1983 Liberal MPs, and I sometimes wondered how on earth David Steel kept his cool in the face of these provocations. In the case of Cyril Smith and David Alton, these most often took place in the full glare of publicity at the Liberals’ Annual Assembly, presumably in order to achieve greater influence and attention. But others’ ructions occurred in private. Stephen Ross, MP for the Isle of Wight, used to make a habit of resigning every other week at the Parliamentary Party
meeting. Apparently on one occasion, when the weekly meeting was held in a new and unfamiliar room, Stephen stormed out with the usual display of drama, slamming behind him the door of what he took to be the exit, but which everyone else knew led into a broom cupboard. The rest of the meeting sat quietly waiting for him to emerge to a thunderous round of applause and much merriment from everyone (except, of course, him).

But it was not just tensions in the Liberal team that were depressing to newly elected MPs. Shortly after the election our partners in the SDP underwent a bout of squabbling, initiated by a visit David Owen paid to Roy Jenkins at which, in effect, he demanded his resignation as Party leader. Jenkins, not wanting the bloodletting of an internal election in the SDP, acquiesced and stood aside. Since both the other members of the Gang of Four, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, had lost their seats, this left the way open for Owen to claim the Leadership unopposed in what David Steel has described as a ‘bloodless coup’.
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Unfortunately, Owen, in so many other ways the outstanding politician of his age, had a number of personal weaknesses, chief among them a powerful ego. But the one which wrecked us at this crucial time was that he was viscerally and often irrationally hostile to the Liberals, and frequently openly dismissive of David Steel – whom he regarded, I think, as just not having the stuff of real leadership in him (in the end, though, Steel proved much the more successful leader of the two). So, although the two parties had fought the election side by side as a single team, David Owen resisted any idea of their forming a single team in the Commons. The two parliamentary parties had to meet separately, and each appointed their own parliamentary spokespersons. This, in my view, was as tragic as it was self-indulgent, for it caused confusion, duplication and division between us, just when Labour was at its most vulnerable. Looking back on this Parliament, I believe David Owen’s determination to be separate cost us the greatest historical opportunity we ever had to push Labour aside and become Britain’s premier Party of the centre left. It became an issue over which some of us newly arrived MPs would criticise the SDP Leader increasingly openly during our all-too-rare joint Liberal/SDP Parliamentary meetings – something he plainly regarded as pure impudence from such neophytes. (This, I think, contributed a good deal to
the personal tension between David Owen and myself when we had to fight a battle to the death in public after I became the Leader of the newly formed Liberal Democrats. But that was still a long way ahead.)

In 1983 our immediate problems of dissension and disarray were compounded by the fact that David Steel, exhausted by the election, fed up with the backbiting and still not over a very bad dose of flu, decided to throw in the towel and resign. We new MPs only heard about this afterwards, when our Chief Whip, Alan Beith, and other friends had persuaded him to withdraw his secret letter of resignation and announce, instead, that he was having a three-month ‘sabbatical’. All this left us somewhat leaderless at a critical moment. The five newly elected Liberal MPs were not to be put off by such matters, however, and, under the highly able (if sometimes, for my taste, a little too conventional) leadership of Alan Beith, we mounted a guerrilla campaign in the House of Commons designed to show up Labour’s weakness. This culminated on one occasion with my breaking the sacred conventions of the House and, during a debate on Trade and Industry, making my speech from the Official Opposition’s Despatch Box, left unoccupied because Labour had not bothered to put anyone forward in the debate. (Alan subsequently mildly upbraided me for taking things too far on this occasion.)

To be honest, I was, even at this early stage, finding the traditions and pomp of the Commons pretty irksome. I am not at all a clubbable person, so the fact that the Commons is said to be ‘the best club in London’ held no attractions for me. The silly uniforms and strange names (such as the Gentleman Usher of Black Rod) are supposed to be quaint – but I just found them ridiculous. For my first three months or so as an MP I recall feeling that there was some dark, unnamed fear lurking in my mind. I finally concluded that the atmosphere and culture of the House was so redolent of my public school that my subconscious was worrying whether my mother had sewn name tapes on my all underwear! The hours, too, I thought ridiculous, permitting neither a normal life outside the Commons nor a reasonable life in it. I have never liked or mastered the Chamber of the House, and it has never much liked me either. In part this is because I am not very good at wit and repartee, which the Commons loves; in part it is because I find the style of Parliamentary debate offensively (even childishly) confrontational. But also it is because the Chamber of the House of Commons somehow or other – perhaps because of fear – brings out the worst in me, making me sound shrill and often rather self-righteous.

But what chiefly annoyed me about the House in 1983 was that it was so out of date. It took me six weeks even to get an office – though I did have a coat-hanger from day one. This not only had my name on it – in gothic script, no less – but also came complete with a red ribbon hanging from one corner. I asked what this was for, to be informed (in tones implying I must be a country bumpkin not to know) that it was to hang my sword from! I seriously considered bringing in my Royal Marines sword and hanging it from the ribbon, making myself perhaps the first MP for two hundred years to use this piece of apparently essential Parliamentary equipment for the purpose for which it was originally designed.

For six weeks I had to do my work and look after the affairs of my seventy-five thousand Yeovil constituents from four square feet of floor space in one of the covered cloisters of the House. As for my computer, this confused everyone. No one, apparently, had ever had one of these things before, and I was initially informed by the authorities that the House did not recognise computers and could make no financial or technical allowances for them.

Eventually, I got an office, taking over the desk of Bill Pitt, whose by-election victory in Croydon North West in October 1981 I had worked for, but who had been one of the Liberal casualties of the recent election. This meant that I shared an office with David Penhaligon, from which I benefited greatly (though I suspect he probably did not).

David was a remarkable man from whom I learned a very great deal. He loved to hide behind the bluff exterior of a simple Cornishman. But behind this façade was a most acute mind, buttressed by a real genius for speaking in a way which made even complex issues understandable to ordinary people. He was a natural comic, with superb timing, as well as a very decent man and a most generous colleague who went out of his way to help me through my first year in Parliament. One thing he was not, however, was organised. Another thing he was not was tidy. And the third thing he definitely was not, was an early riser.

None of these drawbacks would have been too serious for someone sharing an office with him, but for the fact that David did not just work in his (our) office: he also slept there – usually until around eleven in the morning. It seemed, moreover, that he only had two shirts (drip-dry), one pair of underpants and one pair of socks, which he would wash nightly and hang out on the office radiator to dry. This presumably had not mattered with Bill Pitt, since he, too, was a late riser. But I
am an early riser and am invariably at my desk by eight at the latest and holding my first meetings shortly afterwards. Not that this disturbed David’s sleep patterns in the slightest (he would, I am sure, have been quite capable of sleeping through a full-scale bombing raid).