A Fortunate Life (43 page)

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:

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 accident, 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.

My concern was not just to do well in the campaign, though, but also to be prepared for what might follow: a hung parliament. I set up a small and secret team – Alan Beith, Bob MacLennan and myself – to begin to prepare for how we would handle this eventuality. We drew up papers on our bargaining positions, rehearsed who would play what role, and undertook training in negotiating techniques. Our bottom line was that we could not enter into any coalition unless proportional representation (PR) was part of the deal. Our reason for this was not just because we believed that PR would revitalise elections and lead to a more citizen-based politics; it was also – and perhaps chiefly – because we knew that when eventually a coalition government falls (as it must) it is always the junior party that suffers most. By accurately relating the number of seats in Parliament to votes won across the country, PR would have reduced the unfair share of the seats the big parties enjoy under Britain’s present voting system and increased the number of seats allocated to the other, smaller parties (including the Lib Dems, of course). We saw PR, therefore, as the essential ‘lifeboat’ that would provide us, as the third party, with the insurance policy necessary to survive the end of a coalition.

But I was also beginning to think about what would happen if, unexpectedly, the Tories won. Privately, I viewed this as perhaps the most beneficial outcome for us. I judged that a coalition with Neil Kinnock and Labour in its current form would have been very difficult to handle and almost impossible to make a success of. On the
other hand, a fourth Labour defeat could open up the road to a historic realignment of the Left, which would heal the rift that had occurred when Labour broke away from the Liberals in the early years of the twentieth century. In early July 1991 I asked a very close and trusted friend, William Wallace, to start thinking about what we could do to push this forward as soon after the election as possible, if the Tories won again. I asked him, in particular, to look at the wisdom of my giving a speech, perhaps as early as the week after the election, which would propose a deal between us and Labour, based on a broad programme of constitutional reform, beginning with a joint Lib/Lab convention on a Scottish Parliament.

It was also about this time that some newspapers started to report trouble in Yugoslavia. I asked for a briefing and had to be shown where the various ‘countries’ of Yugoslavia were, after which I dismissed it all as too complex and, anyway, not something for me to bother about, because it wasn’t going to amount to anything important.

Reviewing progress at the end of the year, I felt rather self-satisfied. We had made real advances, taking a third Tory seat (Kincardine and Deeside) in November of that year. The reckoning was that I had had a ‘good’ Gulf War. The Parliamentary Party was united and purposeful. And my personal ratings in the polls were consistently higher than either of the other two party leaders. I thought us well placed for what everyone recognised would be a very tight election in a few months.

It was in just this upbeat mood that I was enjoying a late-night glass of whisky with Des Wilson in my flat after a long but successful day, when the phone rang. It was Tricia Howard saying the
News of the
World
had been round to her house. I made an excuse to bid Des goodnight and rang her back. Apparently a woman reporter had called on her and related the full story of our relationship when she was my secretary back in 1985. I felt my stomach sink into a black pit. I asked her if the reporter had given any indication where they had got the information from? None. I promised her all the support I could provide and said I would ring her again in the morning after I had time to think. I then rang my solicitor and old friend, Andrew Phillips, to tell him what had happened. So began the worst week of my life.