A Fortunate Life (38 page)

In fact, though the newspaper reports were wrong in describing this speech as a bid for the Party leadership (the BBC Conference report at
the end of the week even going so far as to say that ‘perhaps the Liberals had identified their next Leader’), they were right in spotting that the horizons of my ambitions were beginning to widen, even if I was not yet fully conscious of this myself at the time.

When I was fighting Yeovil, I had only one ambition in life: to become an MP. That, I thought at the time, would be sufficient – I wanted nothing more. But now, as I began to feel my strength and observed others in the exercise of power, I felt my horizons start to expand and my ambition – never a quality I have been accused of lacking – start to grow. It was premature. They say pride comes before a fall (personally, I have always found that, when it comes to overestimating one’s powers, vanity is the greater seductress).

Towards the end of 1984 Sue O’Sullivan, by now expecting another baby, told me she intended to stop working, but assured me that she wouldn’t leave until a suitable replacement had been found. I was more than happy to leave the recruitment process to Sue, as she knew my whims and peculiarities as a ‘boss’ better than almost anyone, and was herself outstanding at the job. She advertised, conducted all the initial interviews and in due course presented me with a short list of recommended applicants, among whom was Tricia Howard. Tricia was clearly highly competent, had a relaxed and easy-to-get-on-with manner and was duly appointed.

Tricia started to work with me in 1985 and quickly justified Sue’s confidence in her by becoming an excellent colleague and a superb personal secretary. But soon the fatal disease of the House of Commons caught us both. There is something both unhealthy and captivating about the Westminster combination of late nights, the loneliness of weeks away from the family and the ever-present and intoxicating proximity of the dramas and excitements of power. Sometime in 1985 Tricia Howard and I started an affair.

Jane, who is no slouch when it comes to observing humanity, knew what had happened straight away and bearded me with it. I, of course, took the easy refuge of denying it, in order (I argued to myself) to protect her from the truth. Many of my colleagues knew, too, though theirs were whispered conversations I was not supposed to know about. Worse still, Tricia’s husband, from whom she had been estranged for some time, also knew. And he was seeking a divorce from her to marry again. I became obsessed with the danger that, even though long separated from his wife, he might cite me in divorcing her, and so I went to see my
friend, ex-fellow-candidate and now personal lawyer, Andrew Phillips, to ask for his advice. He took notes, put them in his safe and advised me to relax – and that, we thought, was that. In early 1986 Tricia left and was replaced as my secretary by Alison Nortcliffe, who looked after me as MP and Leader until in 1992 she married Adrian Sanders, who also worked in my Office and was later elected MP for Torbay in 1997.

The great political event overshadowing the political scene throughout 1984 and 1985 was the miners’ strike. This, being an industrial matter, should have been handled by Ian Wrigglesworth (for the SDP) and me (for the Liberals). But, since it was by far the major issue of the day, it was entirely taken over by the two Davids – and once again showed the yawning gap between them. David Owen, who had had an early reputation as a radical in the Labour Party, moved further and further to the right, seeking always to strike ‘hard’ attitudes (often indistinguishable from those of Mrs Thatcher), while David Steel adopted more modulated positions. The commentators picked up the differences between them immediately – and, worse, so did the writers of
Spitting Image
, the hugely popular satirical programme in which all the characters were played by latex puppets. From this time on they always caricatured Owen as a saturnine figure with a miniature David Steel poking out of his breast pocket. Normally politicians rather like their caricatures and even collect them (I have a large collection), for they are mostly fun and rarely seriously damaging. But there are some exceptions. Steve Bell’s representation of Prime Minster Major in his underpants was one. And the
Spiting Image
representation of David Steel as Owen’s poodle was another. It did real damage both to the public perception of David and, I think, even to his view of himself (I know it would have affected me). It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, when differences of tone and substance between the two men undermined the effectiveness of the Alliance.

By 1985, the issue of nuclear weapons, which seemed to run like a constant stream just under the surface of politics throughout this Parliament, suddenly broke into the open again. START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) had finally begun again in Geneva. This presented me with a very tricky problem, and one which every serious politician has to confront sooner later: how to conduct a U-turn with minimum loss of respect and maximum elegance. In asking, ‘When circumstances change, I change my views. What do you do, Sir?’ John Maynard Keynes was only expressing a rational truth. But since politics
is often concerned less with rationalities than with personalities, changing one’s views in public is neither easy nor comfortable. It did not count for a row of beans that I had carefully warned my erstwhile fellow disarmament campaigners that, if the disarmament talks did restart, I would be saying cruise should be put into them, not unilaterally withdrawn. Nor were any of my one-time friends in the least impressed by the carefully worded speech I constructed for delivery at the SDP Conference that year in Torquay, announcing that events had now overtaken the campaign for unilateral removal of cruise, and that the weapons should now become a subject for the talks in Geneva, not for marching on the streets of Britain. Both Liberal and the SDP Party hierarchies were delighted and just a little smug. But those who had cheered me loudest in the past were now the most furious in their denunciation, christening me (the precursor of a later, much more hurtful, nickname) ‘Paddy Backdown’. At the Eastbourne Liberal Assembly the following year Bruce Kent, the head of CND, mounted a highly personalised and acerbic attack on me, causing some newspapers to report that I had lost much grassroots support and damaged any ambitions I might have had for the Party leadership. Throughout these attacks I remained very confident that the position I had taken was the right one, but that did not diminish the hurt or discomfort, for I am rather thin-skinned in these matters. Perhaps this was why the Assembly speech I made, this time in support of the defence policy proposed by David Steel and the Party leadership, was one of the worst I have ever made. The vote at the end of the debate was very narrow but the amendment was declared carried by the chair, meaning another defeat for Steel (and this time, of course, for me, too). There should have been a recount, but in the chaos of the Liberal Assembly in those days there was no time for one, as the hall had to be vacated for the evening’s public entertainment in the Eastbourne theatre (a farce, as I recall).

In early 1986, the first great cabinet crisis of the Thatcher years broke over the Government. For the rest of Britain, the Westland affair was a scandal about the actions of Ministers and the propriety of the Government. For me it was about the survival of by far the most important employer and source of economic wealth in my constituency.

Westland was once again going through a very hard time, and its survival as a stand-alone helicopter-producer was seriously in question.
There were two options before the Company and the Government. The first was to accept a bid to team up with the US firm Sikorsky, which had been Westland’s trusted and long-term partner since well before the Vietnam War (the course favoured by Mrs Thatcher). And the second was to fold Westland into a European helicopter consortium (the course favoured by Michael Heseltine). Given my position on Europe, I should have supported Heseltine. But when I looked at the European plan it was obvious that it would have meant dismantling Westland and turning it into a mere components manufacturer, which would have led to the break-up of its design and technology teams and the end of its capacity to design and build helicopters from the drawing board up.

For Parliament, the Press and the country, however, the Westland crisis was not about Westland; it was about Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine. They were not interested in the bone – only in the dogs fighting over it. It is said that when Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street on her way to the Commons for the great Westland debate (in which John Smith first made his name as one of our generation’s great House of Commons performers), she turned to a friend and said she was not sure she would be coming back as Prime Minister. In the debate I told Michael Heseltine that his European Consortium’s approach to Westland was not so much that of a partner as of an undertaker and that, given his failure as Defence Secretary to support Westland in the past, his offer of help appeared to the people of Yeovil as though ‘they are being offered a poison cup from the hands of the poisoner himself’.
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Although my defence of the company did me no harm in my constituency, I fear it played little part in the final outcome (the Westland/Sikorsky deal went ahead), which was determined by the cannonade which went on far above my head. When Mrs Thatcher survived, so did Westland as an independent helicopter manufacturer.

Whilst it was, I suppose, inevitable that a great deal of my time should be taken up by Westminster matters in this Parliament, my Yeovil office team, under the stern guidance of Cathy Bakewell and Nick Speakman, made sure I did not forget my base in my Constituency. The Yeovil team had now been augmented by a new Constituency agent, Simon Thompson, and another key member, Sarah Frapple, who, like Cathy and Nick, had been there on that chilly night back in 1976 when I was first chosen by the Yeovil Liberals. They put in a huge amount of work
strengthening the Constituency organisation and driving the Tories out of their remaining electoral strongholds, and this culminated in the 1985 County Council Election, in which we won every County seat in the Yeovil constituency. They made sure that the pace of my work in the community increased too, not just with regular weekly ‘surgeries’ (now busier than ever), but also with a full programme of other community events, including a ‘roving surgery’ every autumn, which consisted of Jane and me driving a large van to almost every village in our very rural constituency, parking outside the Post Office and holding a mobile advice centre in the back of the vehicle. I am not at all sure of the constitutional propriety of MPs operating in this way as a sort of universal social worker, as this undermines the role of local Councillors. But I loved this ‘pastoral’ aspect of my work and, right to the end of my time as an MP, I used to feel my heart lift on the train home at the weekend with every clack of the rails which took me further away from London and closer to Somerset, my family and my beloved constituency.

One of the innovations we brought in (borrowed from fellow Liberal MPs) was a series of visits Jane and I made before Christmas to care homes, hospitals, post offices, the police, fire stations, etc., to wish them all Happy Christmas, take them a present (usually a box of House of Commons chocolate or a bottle of House of Commons whisky) and thank them for their work during the year. It was on one such visit to Yeovil Hospital, on the frosty morning of 22 December 1986, that one of the Hospital staff came up to me and whispered that my secretary wanted to speak to me urgently on the phone (these were the days before mobile phones). I picked up the receiver to hear her in tears. Between sobs she told me she had just heard that David Penhaligon had been killed when his car skidded on ice on the way to an early-morning pre-Christmas visit to his local post office. Jane and I were poleaxed, and it was all we could do to stumble through the rest of our visits as best we could. David’s funeral, on 10 January 1987 in the same church where he and his wife Annette had got married, was one of the most moving I have ever attended. The Party were there in full force and deep misery, of course. But so were the people of Truro, where he was loved with an intensity very few MPs or civic leaders could ever aspire to. Some MPs – though very few – not only represent their constituency but somehow personally embody its spirit too. David was one of these. But he was also a highly astute politician. By now I was pretty clear that, when David Steel stood down, I would
probably try for the Leadership, and I had reckoned that David Penhaligon would do so too. I thought then (and still do) that, if I had had to fight him, he would probably have won.

Indeed, shortly before David’s funeral I had been approached by a small group of supporters who said that, since it was now clear that David Steel would almost certainly stand down after the coming election, they would like to help me if I was intending to put my name forward for the Leadership. We started meeting regularly in January, and they helped to plan a programme of national visits to winnable seats which I would carry out in the forthcoming general election, which was now clearly in view. They also helped me write my speech for the pre-election Liberal–SDP Alliance rally in the Barbican on 31 January that year. (Max Atkinson, the author of the ground-breaking book
Our Masters’ Voices
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on how politicians make speeches, played a particularly important part at this time and later in helping to give my speeches greater impact.)