A Fortunate Life (39 page)

Shortly before the Election was formally called, the two Davids held a joint morale-boosting meeting of all the Alliance candidates. I don’t think we were supposed to ask questions at this event, as it was primarily a rally. Nevertheless, I asked David Owen how he and David Steel had decided to answer the deadly, if hypothetical, question that was bound to come from the Press: which of the two of them would be Prime Minster, if we won? Owen said they had not decided on this and would sort it out after the election. To Owen’s evident annoyance, I said that I thought this was madness. Surely, it was obvious? The Leader whose Party had the most MPs should lead. Owen – who, of course, knew that there were bound to be more Liberal than SDP MPs elected – dismissed this out of hand, calling it, if I remember correctly, ‘immature’.

The 1987 Alliance election campaign began with television pictures of David Owen and David Steel jumping into their respective battle buses after their opening press conference and promptly driving off in completely opposite directions. As it began, so it continued, aided and abetted by the new technology of the day. The newest new technology quite often plays a key role in a general election. In 1987 the new thing was the mobile phone, and it did for the Alliance. ‘Hunt the split’ is the political journalist’s favourite game and the basis of ninety percent of all political reporting. In 1987 the two Davids gave them what they
wanted on a plate, all served up through the medium of the mobile phone – which every journalist had, but neither of the Leaders or any of their aides seemed to have heard of (or, if they had, they didn’t think of using them to communicate with each other). All a journalist had to do was ask one David on his battle bus at one end of the country for his response to a given issue (defence was a favourite topic; Steel was nervous of it, and Owen had such a passion for weapon systems that he always left you feeling that, secretly, he could scarcely wait to use them). A quick mobile phone call to a colleague on the other David’s battle bus suggesting that the same question be asked and, hey presto, five minutes later they had the Alliance split story of the day! For journalists this was money for old rope. For us it was deadly.

Added to all this was the fact that trying to co-ordinate two campaigns and project two leaders led to serious organisational and presentational problems. The two Davids each had to have equal space in every major interview, in which (if we were lucky) they both said exactly the same thing, only in different words. But even if the substance of what they said was usually the same, the style and body language was not. David Owen appeared much closer to Mrs Thatcher – and on one occasion (inevitably, the issue was again defence) in effect confirmed that, for him, Labour were less likely and less acceptable partners than the Tories. This generated almost immediate hostility on the doorstep, where our canvassers were asked what was the point of voting for the Alliance if the result was to let Mrs Thatcher back in?

The low point of the campaign came in what is generally accepted as the worst Party Political Broadcast in history, which gave star billing (at great length) to the then SDP MP for Greenwich, Rosie Barnes, and her pet rabbit.

And so we confirmed in the election what we had showed through the Parliament, that the Alliance was not a single force at all: just a framework for a squabble. That gave Labour the space to recover and begin to move forward again, and lost us our greatest chance since the early years of the twentieth century of becoming Britain’s most powerful party of the Left.

After all the bright hopes and golden opportunities of the morning of my first election as an MP, just four years before, I found the general election of 7 May 1987 terribly depressing. Although I almost doubled my majority in Yeovil, the Alliance fell back in both popular votes and number of its MPs. It was clear to me things could not go on like this. The Alliance was over. The two Parties would have to merge.

O
N THE DAY
after the Election, I was on the panel of BBC Radio 4’s
Any
Questions
, which was held, as I recall, in Northampton. Naturally, the election results dominated the programme, including the performance of the Alliance. Freed from the disciplines of the Election campaign, I let fly on the stupidities of separateness and the absolute necessity of the two parties merging without delay. I had not realised that, earlier in the day and, apparently, contrary to a tacit agreement with David Steel, David Owen had held a press conference in his seat in Plymouth, at which he fired what the
Independent
newspaper next day described as ‘the opening shots in his campaign against merger’. My pro-merger comments on
Any Questions
were immediately picked up by the BBC news that night and then by the rest of the media the following day, putting Owen and me head to head on the issue in all the Press coverage over the weekend. On Monday David Steel made a statement in favour of merger (and was immediately accused by David Owen of, ‘bouncing him’!).

There is a rather good novel by Nicholas Monsarrat called
The Tribe
That Lost Its Head
. I have always been struck by the capacity of political Parties to lose their heads from time to time and, with single-minded determination, ritually disembowel themselves in public. Labour did it after the defeat in 1979. The Tories did it after their defeat in 1997. And the Alliance spent a full year and more doing it in spectacular style after the 1987 election, launching itself into an orgy of self-indulgence, stupidity and internecine bloodletting, not just between Owen and most of the Liberal leaders, but also within the SDP: between those who supported Owen and those who wanted our two Parties to merge.

At an early meeting of the group which had gathered round me and started to prepare my leadership campaign, now known amongst us as
‘The Ming Group’,
*
we discussed all this. Someone quoted the old adage: ‘He who wields the knife, never gets to wear the crown,’ and recommended that, beyond placing myself firmly in the pro-merger camp, I should do my best to stay out of it altogether. I did not find this advice difficult to follow, as I have always believed that the best place for the ambitious to be when a coup is taking place, is somewhere else. Fortunately, I had good reason to follow this policy, too. The Government had just published ‘The Great Education Reform Bill’ as the centrepiece of its new programme, and David Steel had appointed me as the new ‘Alliance’ (that is the Liberals and the pro-merger SDP) spokesman on Education. This was a piece of real good fortune. The Great Education Reform Bill (or ‘Gerbil’ as it became known) was a strongly centralising measure which introduced crude measurement systems for schools and a test-centred regime for students and was deeply unpopular amongst teachers, educationalists and many middle-class parents who had voted for us. So, by taking the lead for the Party in opposing it, I placed myself centre stage in the main Parliamentary battle of the first year of the 1987 Parliament and gave myself a very good excuse to be too busy with politics to get involved in the blood-letting. And, by the way, it also provided a very good opportunity to build up my support amongst the Party’s powerful education and local government sector and to make contact with key members of the pro-merger wing of the SDP, such as Shirley Williams and Anne Sofer.

In August 1987 the SDP voted decisively in favour of a merger. After this, David Owen dramatically ditched his Party and went off to start a rump SDP in his own image, taking with him some of the SDP’s most gifted supporters, including a number of its key women activists, like Polly Toynbee and Sue Slipman (christened ‘The Brides of Dracula’ by anti-Owen SDP members, for their attachment to Owen and their penchant for wearing black).

Bob MacLennan, who had made clear his support for unification after the 1987 election, albeit on terms slightly different from those finally agreed, took over as leader of what remained of the mergerite SDP to oversee the merger negotiations.

While all this was going on, Jane and I decided that what we needed most was a good long break over the summer. So we booked a canal-boat holiday with our Yeovil friends Les and Joan Farris and Lesley and Greg Jefferies on the Canal de Nivernais in northern Burgundy. The weather was not good, and the holiday fell a little short of what we had hoped for. But we fell in love with this area of France, and, meeting beside the Yonne river, in the little Place St Nicolas in Auxerre, for a last drink before returning home, we confided to the Jefferies that we were thinking of buying a house in the area. They confessed that they had had exactly the same thought. So, once again completely by accident, we took a decision that was to change our lives and those of our children completely. The following February (when I was up to my ears in the ‘phoney war’ phase of the Leadership campaign) Jane and the Jefferies went back to the Auxerre area, where they found and we jointly bought, for a total
£
10,000, a small tumbledown house in Irancy, a small north Burgundian village only a little more famous for making good red wine than it is for consuming it in large quantities. Irancy has since become not only our second home and refuge but also the centre of our second circle of friends and an integral part of the web and warp of our lives. My daughter Kate in due course married the son of the Deputy Mayor of the neighbouring village, settled in the region and brought up our French grandchildren as ‘vrais Irancyquois’. And we have had some of our greatest pleasures from joining them every year, spending many roasting August days in the cool of our wine-making friends’
caves
and dining in our little courtyard under star-spangled skies and the canopy of our own Burgundian vine.

When we arrived back in the UK we found the blood-letting unabated and the merger debate raging away in both parties. In September we Liberals, in our turn, voted overwhelmingly for merger and entered into the protracted process of merger negotiations. Following this, in symmetry with Owen’s action, a group of apostate Liberals, led by my 1983-entry Parliamentary colleague, Michael Meadowcroft (who actually took part in the first part of the merger negotiations), then broke away to establish themselves as ‘true’ Liberals. So, the new politics which we had all heralded with such unity and fanfares five years ago finally ended up like this: two rival SDPs and two rival Liberal Parties, with one of each still involved in something we continued to call ‘The Alliance’.

I regarded myself as well out of all of this, and in November, with Alan Leaman, published a pamphlet called ‘Choice or Privilege: The alternative great education reform bill’. Following this, while others were enmeshed in the next stage of the merger process and were drawing up a joint policy prospectus for the new merged Party, I toured the country attending education rallies and building support for opposition to Gerbil.

The policy negotiations between the merging parties were difficult and protracted, but finally, early in 1988, produced a joint policy prospectus. Its contents were radical and contentious and very soon began to leak, causing much vociferous unhappiness, especially amongst Liberals. The draft soon found its way to the Press, amid suspicion from the Liberals that the SDP had deliberately leaked it in order to bounce them. It quickly became known as ‘the dead parrot’
*
(a soubriquet apparently invented by David Steel, in whose name it was supposed to speak!). Despite containing some lethal suicide pills (such as the proposition that VAT should be added to food and children’s clothing), ‘the parrot’ was not as awful as it was painted. Its mistakes were, first, that it was excessively ‘hair-shirt’ for a Party within an ace of self-obliteration; second, that it was out of touch with the mood among both Parties’ members; and, third, that it was just too far ahead of its time – though it proposed many items that were to become commonplace in the era of post-1997 Blairism.

The dénouement of the whole ‘dead parrot’ affair took place at a joint Parliamentary meeting in one of the Committee Rooms of the House of Commons on 13 January 1988, with a baying mob from the Press laying siege to the doors. There were tears and tantrums and revolts against the two Leaders (Steel and MacLennan), and even at one stage a near-physical incident, when Simon Hughes had to position his sizeable frame across one of the doors to physically prevent people leaving and falling prey to the baying mob of reporters outside. I was not there for the bulk of this meeting; I was visiting the Open University in Milton Keynes – clearly far and away a better place to be. But I did get back for the final half-hour, after things had calmed down somewhat, and the two Leaders had agreed to hold a joint press conference in the Liberal Club, rejecting ‘the dead parrot’ and promising to do better in future. My only contribution was to
suggest that we all ought to be there, standing behind them to show our support. It was not a good suggestion. In the subsequent pictures MacLennan and Steel, with twenty MPs looking either menacing or melancholy behind them, didn’t look much like two Leaders in charge of events – rather, they resembled hostages, dragged from some dark dungeon by a new group of radical terrorists in lounge suits and forced to read out a prepared text just before being subjected to something indescribably horrid.

At a meeting of the Ming Group in my flat that night, all agreed that David Steel would stand down almost immediately, in line with his earlier stated intention. But he seemed to waver for a bit; finally, in a speech to his Borders constituency on 12 May 1988, he announced that he would not be putting his name forward for the leadership of the ‘Social and Liberal Democrats’. Bob MacLennan followed suit, making it clear just as nominations for the Leadership contest were closing that he, too, would not be putting his name forward.

A week after the ‘dead parrot’ debacle the Liberals gathered in Blackpool’s Norbreck Hotel (which fully lived up its nickname ‘the Colditz of the North’) and agreed by a large majority to the merger, subject to a ballot of all members. The SDP followed suit in Sheffield a week later on 30 January, causing the final rupture with Owen, who purloined the old SDP name and used it for his breakaway party.

It now only remained to elect the new Party Leader, and then we could get back to business. Or so we hoped.

Everyone now knew there were going to be only two candidates in the race, Alan Beith and myself. But instead of getting on with it quickly, in order to minimise the damage, there was a protracted bureaucratic process which finally decided that the Leadership campaign would not start until June and would end on 28 July. The reason given was to try to avoid having an internal election at the same time as the local elections in May (in which we predictably lost over sixty council seats), but the consequence was a further period of rudderless drift for the Party. I felt the same frustration I had felt while waiting for Yeovil Liberals to adopt me back in 1976 – particularly since I could very plainly see that being without a leader was doing the same damage to the Party at large that it had done in Yeovil twelve years before. It was actually during this wasted six months that most of the real damage to
the new Party’s structures, finances, public standing and morale was done. We became the butt of every political joke, and we deserved it.