Between them, the Gang of Four represented great depth of government experience, even though at the time of the party’s launch only two of them (Owen and Rodgers) were actually sitting
MPs. Their initial stance was that rather than replicating a traditional hierarchy they were to be equal partners in a collective leadership, rather in the manner of a board of directors. Williams
defended this approach by claiming that it ought to be the case in politics that ‘the days of the paterfamilias are as dead as those of the autocratic employer’.
20
In reality, whatever the quality of the board members, few great companies get by for long without a chief executive and, in July 1982, Roy Jenkins was elected to take
the helm.
In the meantime, it was remarkable how little the Gang diverged from a common script, despite their differences in personality. Although the last to join the group, Jenkins was the most senior
both in terms of age (he was sixty-one in 1981) and offices held. Leaving Brussels with a generous pension and blessed with a considerable hinterland – friends, wine, books – he could
have agreeably spent his retirement writing his admired political biographies or moving into the master’s lodge of one of the grander Oxford colleges. Instead, as David Marquand has put it:
‘Having been a Westminster
parliamentarian to his fingertips, he suddenly found himself appealing, like a latter-day Wilkes or Bright, to a popular constituency,
disfranchised by the rules of the Westminster game.’
21
He was a far more popularly recognizable figure than Rodgers, who modestly accepted
that he was fourth among equals and was relatively content to be credited for his organizational skills. Owen’s happy home life with his American wife contrasted with a detachment from others
which was often interpreted as arrogance. His ability was not in doubt; besides being a qualified doctor and pursuing a hectic political career, he had found time to write several books. Owen, it
seemed, was the quintessential young man in a hurry, considered vain about his looks and not always quick to realize that his brusque manner gave offence to those he was talking at.
Temperamentally, he could scarcely have been more dissimilar from Shirley Williams. Untidy, unpunctual, unpretentious and generous-natured, since losing her seat in 1979 she had divided her time
between lecturing at Harvard and, as a divorced mother, bringing up her school-age daughter. Despite her popularity, she seemed indifferent about whether she carried the torch or merely kept it lit
for someone else. In the context of the Labour movement, she had always been considered a right-winger, even though many of her sentiments – on immigration and Third World aid, for instance
– were solidly part of the liberal-left outlook. As Callaghan’s education secretary she had stepped up the comprehensivization of Britain’s schools, killing off free selective
education in the direct-grant schools and all but succeeding in eliminating the few remaining grammar schools. In some respects, her appeal to the middle class was curious.
No single policy held the Gang of Four more closely together than their approach to Europe. No Labour politician had done more to empower the Common Market (as the EEC – later the European
Union – was still widely called) than Jenkins. Not only had Owen and Jenkins helped secure a cross-party Commons majority for Britain’s entry in 1972, but as president of the European
Commission Jenkins had been instrumental in reversing the creeping ‘Gaullism’ which protected national interests against Europe-wide measures. In Brussels, Jenkins reasserted the
Commission as a political rather than a purely bureaucratic entity, and laid the path for the creation of the European Monetary System, which would eventually lead to a single currency. Arguably,
Jenkins’s activities in Brussels would prove to have far greater implications for world politics than anything he achieved in British politics. At the time, he enjoyed the full support of
Owen, Rodgers and Williams, and it was the Labour Party’s lurch back into hostility towards Brussels that inspired the three of them to issue their first joint statement in June 1980,
dissociating themselves from party policy and stating that if forced to ‘accept a choice between socialism and Europe, we will choose both of them’.
22
Whatever their attitude to socialism, preserving British integration into Europe was a motivating force for some, though by no means all, of the Labour MPs who defected to
the SDP. The new party was launched with the support of thirteen Labour MPs, and by the end of 1982 that number had swelled to twenty-eight. It was understandably a source of annoyance to their
ex-comrades that, having been elected as Labour candidates, they did not feel obliged to resign and stand again in by-elections under their new colours. None of them, of course, saw any advantage
in taking that risk, preferring to wait until the next general election. Meanwhile, an SDP presence in the House of Lords was built up by the defection of eighteen Labour peers, including a former
Foreign Secretary, George Brown. More important were the moderate MPs who stayed put. In this category, Denis Healey was the key sticker. The motivation of those who shared the SDP’s
political outlook but did not resign the Labour whip varied. Many thought the battle for Labour’s soul could eventually be won, or that the SDP would prove a flash in the pan, especially if
it could not overcome the arithmetic of a first-past-the-post electoral system. Some simply felt defection would be a betrayal of a party that had been their life and a kick in the teeth to
constituency workers who had tirelessly tramped the streets and fed the letterboxes on their behalf. Among moderate-minded Labour MPs, it was generally the older ones with a long tradition of
personal involvement in the Labour movement, and who were sponsored by trade unions, who stayed loyal, while younger, more rootless MPs with weaker – or no – links to the unions were
more likely to defect.
23
Where the SDP failed utterly was in broadening its appeal by recruiting Tory ‘wets’. A Norfolk backbencher called Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler was the only Conservative MP to
defect to them. About a handful of other backbenchers got as far as discussing the circumstances in which they might be tempted to follow him, but none converted talking into walking. SDP
luminaries failed to exploit the doubts of these waverers because they lacked the personal links to make the approach – Tory ‘wets’ had few social connections with what was
essentially a platoon of ex-Labour politicians. Similarly, the SDP exuded minimal appeal to the Tory peerage, from which only the Duke of Devonshire eventually defected. In the Commons, none of the
Tory ‘grandees’ – Edward Heath, Sir Ian Gilmour or Jim Prior – was tempted, believing instead that their brand of Conservatism would outlive the brief experiment in
Thatcherism. Given that she was clearly doomed, what was the point of jumping ship just before a ‘wet’ leader replaced her? As Gilmour reassured a fellow ‘wet’, Julian
Critchley, the Tory Party ‘is as much ours’ as Thatcher’s, and ‘the Social Democrats can’t last – they are not interest-based’.
24
This would prove a shrewd observation and may be assumed to have coloured Gilmour’s attitude, despite his and his wife’s enduring friendship
with Roy Jenkins. Perhaps most importantly, there was no constituency activist movement making life miserable for ‘wet’ Tories to compare with that undermining Labour
moderates. The ‘wets’ enjoyed a greater sense of tenure in their party and saw less reason to risk their careers by joining a new group which, in any case, described itself as
‘left-of-centre’.
Rather than go to the trouble of forming their own party, with all the difficulties of setting up constituency associations, national organizers and fundraising, why did the Gang of Four not
just join the Liberal Party? After all, to get anywhere, they would first have to agree an electoral pact with the Liberals so that they did not merely split each other’s vote. Perhaps having
held many of the great offices of state, the Gang of Four were comfortable with being in power and did not see why they should throw themselves at the mercy of a Liberal Party that had lost every
general election since 1910 and which contained no politicians who had ever held office. What was more, Owen, Rodgers and Williams wanted to found a new party that would preserve the agenda and
outlook of the sort of Labour Party they had originally joined. They had no desire to be subsumed into an already-established party with its own philosophy, structure and way of doing things.
Indeed, it was not as if the philosophy was obviously compatible. The Liberals believed in localism and decentralization of power. The SDP was broadly happy with the current disbursement of
authority. Spending years addressing local concerns at council or parish-pump level might provide Liberals with a sense of purpose, but did not represent the big game for Owen, who had reached
Foreign Secretary while still in his thirties, or Jenkins, who, having presided over the European Commission, was on social terms with the senior politicians of half the continent. Neither man had
much in common with grass-roots Liberal activists, who were the lifeblood of the Liberal Party. On issues like Britain retaining a nuclear deterrent, the Gang of Four was as much at odds with
Liberal activists as with Labour ones.
It was in his attitude to the Liberals that Jenkins, nevertheless, stood slightly apart from Owen, Rodgers and Williams. As a sympathetic biographer of Sir Charles Dilke as well as Asquith,
Jenkins was the only one of the Gang of Four who had ever shown an interest in or empathy with the Liberal heritage. But Jenkins could not hope to lead the Liberal Party as he might a party of his
own. After all, the Liberals already had a youthful and energetic leader in David Steel, who was busy doing his best to restore the fortunes of a party that had courted disaster when its leader,
Jeremy Thorpe, was charged with conspiracy to murder his alleged homosexual lover turned blackmailer.
EN15
For his part, Steel – whose private
member’s bill to legalize abortion had become law in 1967 with Jenkins’s help – believed Jenkins
could be far more useful establishing a centre party allied
to the Liberals than merely defecting directly.
The Liberals and the SDP needed each other. A Gallup poll in April 1981 showed why an electoral alliance between them was their only hope of securing a decisive number of MPs at the next
election. If they fought it separately, the Liberals were on 18 per cent and the SDP on 19 per cent (against the Tories on 30 per cent and Labour on 30.5 per cent). But if they teamed up, a
Liberal–SDP alliance attracted 48.5 per cent support, completely overshadowing the Tories on 25.5 per cent and Labour on 24.5 per cent. Reaching agreement on which party should fight which
constituency was easier said than done. While many Liberals did not see why their years of carefully nurturing target seats should be cast aside so that some SDP hopeful, with no history of local
campaigning, should be offered the prize, their leader offered a less parochial perspective. Steel spoke openly in a party political broadcast of his hope that ‘the Social Democrats’
valuable experience of government’, combined with the Liberals’ ‘nationwide community campaigning experience’, would ‘break the mould of a failed political
system’.
25
He recognized that a deal with the SDP offered his party the only path out of the electoral doldrums and that if the two parties
ran candidates against each other the result would be disaster. Either there was an electoral pact, or a suicide pact. Despite some ill-feeling, Steel got his way and the ‘Alliance’ was
born.
The Donkey-Jacket Tendency
Did the SDP–Liberal Alliance or the Labour Party now offer the best hope of defeating Margaret Thatcher at the next general election? While the media scanned the
utterances, even the body language, of the Gang of Four and of David Steel for telltale signs of friction or affection, Labour’s destiny rested with Michael Foot and the two men about to slug
it out to be his deputy, Denis Healey and Tony Benn. The struggle for the deputy leadership was more than usually significant not just because it was the first to be decided by the new electoral
college but because, at the age of sixty-eight, Foot was widely seen as a caretaker leader who, if he did not win the general election, was unlikely to survive long in his post thereafter.
In being one of the greatest orators of his age, Michael Foot sounded like a great leader. But he did not look like one. He had a pinched face, framed by flying buttresses of shocks of white
hair. A serious car accident in 1963 had pierced his lungs and broken all his ribs and his left leg, forcing him thereafter to lean on a walking-stick. His eyesight was so poor – an attack of
shingles had claimed the sight of one eye in 1976 – that his thick-lensed spectacles came with blinkers attached. The impression of elderliness and
infirmity contrasted
visibly with the blushered cheeks, coiffured golden mane and primary-colour power suits of his Tory opposite number. Side by side, there was no question which of the two was dressed for business.
And it was side by side that a defining image caught them, lined up with wreaths at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday in 1981, Thatcher in a well-tailored dark and sombre coat and Foot in a tartan
tie, ill-fitting trousers, rubber-soled shoes and a green motoring coat widely mistaken for a labourer’s donkey-jacket. ‘That’s a smart, sensible coat for a day like this,’
reassured the Queen Mother, kindly.
26
Others were less charitable and assumed, incorrectly, that the noted peace campaigner was showing disrespect
for Britain’s war-dead. Such personal dishevelment made him a cartoonist’s dream. The satirical magazine
Private Eye
likened him to the scarecrow on children’s television,
Worzel Gummidge. Warming up the Tory faithful at a 1983 election rally, the comedian Kenny Everett elicited giggles by shouting into the microphone ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’, but got
the loudest belly-laugh for exhorting: ‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!’ Even with the support of the stick, Foot was hardly firmly rooted. Two days after his election
as Labour leader, he fell down a flight of stairs, and spent the ensuing weeks hobbling around on crutches with a leg encased in plaster.