A Fortunate Life (51 page)

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.

O
N 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?
*

I had always believed that the best relationship between parties in partnership was to be in government together – to form a coalition – because this made both sides subject to the disciplines of power. But would Blair pay the price of proportional representation, without which a coalition would mean the near certain decimation of the smaller party at a future election, when the Government started to get unpopular (as it inevitably would)?

The alternative, I mused, would be for us to co-operate with the Government from the opposition benches. This might work for a bit. But it could never last long; we Lib Dems would soon find it too difficult to resist the easy pickings of opposition and too frequently damaged by being blamed for the actions of a Government over which we had little influence and no control. This would also mean, as Blair himself had said in our last conversation, that we would forfeit the historic opportunity to heal the schism on the Centre Left which had made the Tories the natural party of government in Britain for three-quarters of a century. Furthermore, with a Commons force only a quarter the size of the Government’s majority, what bargaining power would we have? Why should Blair pay any attention to us, when he didn’t need us at all? A loose partnership in Opposition might be an option, but it would be one which it would require a lot more skill and a huge amount more leadership to handle.

By the time we reached London it was full daylight, and the Special Branch escort
†
had peeled off. The Lib Dem celebration at Pizza in the Park, however, was still in full swing. They gave me a great welcome, I made a short speech, drank a few glasses of champagne and then went off to catch an hour’s nap before what I knew was going to be a demanding and historic day. The last image I saw before falling into an exhausted sleep was of Tony and Cherie Blair being greeted by cheering crowds at Labour’s victory rally at the Royal Festival Hall.

By eleven o’clock I was back in my office for the phone call with Tony Blair that my advisers had arranged with his staff the previous day. He rang exactly on time, saying he was just off to see the Queen, but wanted a word before he left. He would spend the afternoon making his major Cabinet appointments and now had in mind a ‘framework of co-operation’ with us. There was no mention of a relationship with us in government.

The first thing that struck me was how his tone had changed since yesterday. Thinking about this afterwards, I have concluded that something happened overnight to change his view of the previous day that a coalition was a good option. Some months later a private conversation with Robin Cook confirmed this. He told me he had met Cherie just before they had gone to Downing Street on the morning of the election. She had said that, as Blair listened to the results roll in, he had been taken aback by the size of his majority. She had told him that he really must go ahead ‘with the thing with Paddy’, as he would never get another chance. According to Cook, he had agreed. But then, in the early hours of the morning, probably while I was travelling up from Somerset, he had either met or spoken with Prescott and Brown, and both had made clear their virulent opposition to this – leading him to conclude that, if his Government was to get off to a smooth start, he had to begin by taking the easier option of a loose relationship across the floor of the House of Commons, rather than the bigger gamble of a tighter one in government.

In my early-morning conversations with my advisers I had reached the same broad conclusion. A partnership in Opposition was probably marginally better for us. But I had decided that, if Blair had wanted to go for a coalition, I would take the risk, providing PR was in the package.

So it came as something of a relief to me when, during our phone call later that day, he said he wanted to take up my suggestion of using a ‘Cabinet Committee’ as the context for a relationship outside government, adding, however, ‘I am absolutely determined to change politics with you and heal the schism. If we allow ourselves to get into a position where we play conventional politics, the schism will just reopen.’
*

It is my experience that far more mistakes are made in life by being too careful, than by being too bold; the SAS motto, ‘Who dares wins’, is not just an exhortation to show courage, it is also a statement of wisdom. I have come deeply to regret the decisions both of us took that morning, and I suspect that Tony Blair has too. For what we lost in the very early hours of 2 May was, I think, a unique opportunity to do something really historic: to enter into a partnership government at the optimum moment – not because we had been forced to do so to command a majority in the House of Commons in the aftermath of a hung parliament, but on the high ground of principle and in the aftermath of a great victory. This could, in my view, have led to a complete realignment of the Centre Left in British politics, keeping the Tories out for the best part of a generation. It would, using the old language of the heyday of the Liberal–SDP Alliance which so captured the public imagination, have really ‘broken the mould’ of British politics, which is what I came into politics to do. And a partnership with the Lib Dems might, I also allow myself to believe, have prevented some of the worst aspects of the Blair government, not least some of its early follies, such as its egregious attacks on the fundamental civil liberties built into our democratic system – and maybe (but perhaps not under my leadership) even its later tendency to embark on military action without properly thinking through the complexities of peace-building afterwards.

Most of the fault for this failure to seize the moment lies, of course, with the two of us. But some also lies with that unique and much vaunted, but in my view overrated, British constitutional institution, the Downing Street removal van. In many countries there is a gap between an election and the new Government taking office. In the US a President is elected in November and doesn’t move into the White House until the following January. But in Britain the removal van turns up at the back door of No. 10 Downing Street as soon as the result of the election is known, usually around 9 o’clock on the morning after polling day. The outgoing Prime Minister is then bundled out, bag and baggage, so that the place is empty and ready for the next Prime Minister to take over as soon as he has ‘kissed hands’ with the Queen. From that moment the new Prime Minster, exhausted from four largely sleepless weeks and probably still awash with the adrenalin of the campaign, is instantaneously faced with all the key and complex decisions necessary to set up a new Government, while at the same time running the country. This is just not sensible. It
would be far better if there were an interregnum, as in the US, but briefer, while the old Government continues to govern and the new one has time to get a rest after the exertions of the campaign trail, before preparing itself for office.

I know that, from a purely personal point of view, I felt relieved when it became clear that I could go home to Somerset, my garden, some holiday with my children and a good rest. But, although I did not recognise it at the time, the truth was that this decision, so quickly taken, meant that over the next three years both Blair and I would spend huge amounts of time and energy, initially trying to recover the opportunity lost that morning and then, when it became clear this was impossible, trying to blow as much heat as we could into the dying embers of a partnership that had lost its fundamental purpose: to ‘change politics and heal the schism,’ as Blair himself had put it.

My first meeting with Blair as Prime Minster took place a fortnight after the election, just after the State Opening of the new Parliament. On my way in through the back entrance to Downing Street (which runs from the Cabinet Office through a passageway, one of whose walls is the edge of Henry VIII’s Royal Tennis Court, still constructed of the red brick of his time) I met the Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler. He told me that he was much impressed with the start made by the Blair government; but, he added in a confidential whisper, accompanied by a slightly perturbed Civil Service look, ‘Do you know, they don’t eat lunch!’ On balance, I thought this rather a good sign, though he seemed faintly offended by this break with Whitehall tradition.

Blair agreed that we should set up a Cabinet Committee along the lines of our discussion on polling day, and that this would have the primary function of overseeing the constitutional changes which were agreed in the Cook/MacLennan agreement. Though stressing he was still ‘unconvinced by the case for proportional representation’, he also undertook to set up a Commission to look at electoral reform for Westminster, which was, for us, the
sine qua non
for the kind of closer relationship in government to which he said he was still committed.