A Fortunate Life (29 page)

A decade or so later, when I was Leader of the Party, I was to discover that, it is not necessary for a Party to love its Leader (think Blair) – to respect him or her is enough. But it
is
necessary for a Leader to love his or her Party – otherwise why would you put up with all that hassle?

My love affair with the Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, began during these months. It was greatly reinforced by travelling to Llandudno in September to attend my first Party Conference (we knew them as Assemblies in the old Liberal Party). This was David Steel’s first Party Conference as Leader, too, and I still remember being electrified by his speech. He said that being a Liberal was not good enough if you rejected the possibility of influencing events by working with others. He had to fight against a very strong reaction from, among others, the Young Liberals. But his speech – in my view one of his very best: courageous, cogent, passionate – won the day and paved the way for the Lib–Lab Pact in the following year. Twenty years later, as his successor, I was to face the same choice between purity and power, and to face, too, the same opposition from those in the Party who believed we should only allow ourselves to be sullied by power when we had it on our terms, on the basis of an outright majority. It seems to me that every leader of Britain’s liberal third force, if they are successful, has to face this dilemma sooner or later, and has to find their own way of playing the cards dealt them by our political system. Jo Grimond understood that; Jeremy Thorpe had to deal with it; David Steel had to face it, and so did I. And so will, I believe (and hope), our present Leader, Nick Clegg. Precisely how the cards are played depends on what the circumstances and the choices are. And these will always be different. But in the end the consequences of success in growing the Party and its support are that this is a hand that must eventually be played and cannot be avoided.

Back in Llandudno in 1976, however, these thoughts were very far from my mind. I was completely consumed by the joy of being in a hall
with six hundred people who felt the same as I did and inspired by many of the speeches I heard. I remember listening to a speech from a young Peter Hain, then leader of the Young Liberals, and turning to a friend, saying that he was bound to be Leader of the Party one day. As for speaking myself, I never uttered a word. I was far too frightened to dare to stand up before all this political skill, wisdom and experience and expose my ignorance, inexperience and lack of ability.

Back in Yeovil, after my adoption, I began to draw up an audit of our assets and assess the strengths and weaknesses of our opposition.

The outcome was not encouraging. Yeovil had been a rock of West Country Liberalism in the nineteenth century, marked by the fact that a summer gathering of Liberals from across the West Country, which had on separate occasions been addressed by Gladstone and Lloyd George, used to take place annually in an old Roman earth amphitheatre called ‘the frying pans’ on Ham Hill just above Vane Cottage. Later on, when I was an MP and doing my pre-Christmas rounds of old people’s homes, I met an old man who told me that when Lloyd George attended these events he would always pop in to see a lady friend, the wife of a doctor, who lived close by. In the great Liberal landslide election of 1906 Yeovil had returned a thumping majority, with over sixty percent of the vote going to the Liberals. The Party in Yeovil even held on when the national Liberal vote crashed in the two 1910 elections. The Liberal MP for Yeovil (then known as South Somerset) at this time was Sir Edward Strachey, who had made something of a reputation for himself by being in favour of abolishing the House of Lords. He was then offered a peerage and took it, styling himself Lord Strachie (note the change in spelling) and causing a by-election, held on 21 November 1911, in which the Conservatives created a great national stir by winning with a majority of 374. I have a contemporary postcard celebrating the Tory win, which depicts an obviously Somerset chambermaid offering Lloyd George a full chamber pot with ‘374’ written on the side, saying, ‘Your Somerset cider, Sir.’

But it was not just the Tory 1911 victory in Yeovil which was remarkable. So, too, was the new Conservative MP. His name was Aubrey Herbert, and it was only by chance, and many years later, that I discovered that he had been the model for Sandy Arbuthnot, the hero
of
Greenmantle
, John Buchan’s famous tale of espionage and derring-do in the Balkans and the Middle East during the First World War. I also discovered that there were some intriguing parallels between our two careers, albeit, in my case at a much more prosaic level. Like me, he had been involved in the shadowy side of diplomacy, having been one of the British agents who helped organise and inspire the Young Turk movement that ultimately overthrew the Ottomans. And like me, he became passionately involved in the affairs of the Balkans.

An intrepid traveller and adventurer and a brilliant linguist, Herbert enthusiastically adopted the cause of Albanian independence, and, although a sitting MP, fought in that country’s war of independence in 1913. As a result he was twice offered the Albanian crown, which he politely declined (rather a shame, I think; being known in the House of Commons as ‘The Honourable Gentleman for Yeovil
*
and King of Albania’ would have had a certain ring to it, I have always thought). During the First World War Aubrey Herbert took leave of absence from the House of Commons to join the Irish Guards and served with distinction in both France and the Middle East. He was wounded, taken prisoner and escaped during the Battle of Mons. But he was so horrified by the waste of young lives on the Western Front that when he returned home in 1917 he joined the Liberal Leader Herbert Asquith’s anti-war campaign, for which he was reviled by his own Party and spat at in the streets of Yeovil.

Despite his unpopular opinions and somewhat eccentric actions (or maybe because of them?), Aubrey Herbert was re-elected as Conservative MP for Yeovil after the war, only to die (ironically of blood-poisoning as a result of dental surgery
†
) in 1923 at the age of 42, the same age as I was when I took his place as MP for Yeovil sixty years later. Aubrey Herbert was greatly admired and loved by his constituents, and the strong foundation he laid, together with the national decline of the Liberals, made Yeovil a rock-solid seat for the Tories, who held it with overwhelming majorities (with the single exception of 1966 when Labour ran them a close second), until 1983.

In her book
The Man Who Was Greenmantle
Aubrey Herbert’s granddaughter, Margaret Fitzherbert, writes: ‘The electors of South Somerset are an independent people, with a strong non-conformist streak.
Aubrey’s lack of convention appealed to their sturdy, and sometimes surly, individualism.’ This description of the voters of Yeovil remains as accurate today as it was in Herbert’s time, and in due course this tradition of contrariness was one of the assets I came to rely upon in trying to win the seat.

But there were very few other assets. Labour was strong in the constituency, having come quite close to winning in 1966. In recent years we Liberals had been pretty consistently in third place, though in the February 1974 general election we had briefly and narrowly overtaken Labour, only to fall back to third place again in that year’s second (October) election.

Meanwhile, since there had been a long interregnum when the Yeovil Constituency Liberals had been without a candidate, our funds were terribly depleted, our membership numbers were low, the membership itself rather elderly (with the exception of a few younger faces who had joined during the Liberal surge of the first 1974 election), and the organisation almost non-existent. It would all have to be rebuilt from scratch.

However, I did have one major asset to build on, apart from an ancient Liberal tradition which was still dimly remembered and what Margaret Fitzherbert called Yeovil’s tradition of ‘sturdy individualism’. That was my predecessor as Liberal candidate in recent elections up to February 1974, Dr Geoffrey Taylor. He was a devoted local GP who also made important contributions to public health, a lifelong Liberal, a unilateralist nuclear disarmer and a committed community activist. It was he who had built up the Liberal vote in the constituency, enabling the Party briefly to push Labour into third position in the first 1974 election. But, more than that, he had established a very wide and well-deserved reputation for community service and was much loved and admired, well beyond the circle of those who would naturally vote Liberal. It was on the foundation laid by Geoffrey and his wife Heather (the daughter of a Liberal Minister in the 1906 Liberal Government) that I built – and in large measure thanks to their work that I was, in due course, eventually elected.

There were two other relatively minor but useful factors I believed we could exploit. The first was that the Labour organisation, though much stronger than ours and with a substantial vote on the ground, was complacent. It took its support in the poorer areas of the Constituency for granted and was based too much on the trades unions
and too little on community activism. And it always fielded a parliamentary candidate who came from outside the Constituency and usually only visited it at election time. There was a reservoir of votes to be tapped into here, if we were prepared to work at it.

The second factor was that the Conservatives, too, though outwardly all-powerful and monolithic, had actually become rather tired politically. They overwhelmingly controlled all the local Councils, had a branch in almost every village, could outspend us many tens of times over, and the sitting MP, John Peyton, though a survivor from a different, more paternalistic age in politics, was highly regarded in Parliament and enjoyed respect in the Constituency. But they had become much more a social organisation than a political one, were used, at the Council level, to being elected without opposition, especially in rural seats and also generally took their vote very much for granted.

It was from these scraps that, in the weeks after my adoption, I assembled a strategy for action.

It was only now that I at last, fully and with some horror, realised the depth of the hole in which I had put my family and myself. I was clearly not going to be elected to Parliament at the next election, as I had naively thought. I discussed my very gloomy assessment with Jane and put it to her that one option for us was to make use of the Foreign Office’s promise of a ‘safety net’ and return to them. But she rejected this out of hand.

So what I needed now was a very clear long-term strategy based on the hard realities of the Liberals’ position in Yeovil. Here is what I came up with and put to the Yeovil Constituency Liberals at a meeting in late December.

I am not sure that many of the rather thin audience to which I presented this grand plan understood the implications of the strategy I put to them, and I suspect that they had heard enthusiastic new candidates put such utopian plans to them before. Nevertheless, the strategy was formally agreed.

It was a little before Christmas, after four months and many tens of applications, that I finally got a local job. I was taken on in the contract department of Normalair Garrett, a subsidiary at the time of Westland Helicopters, which made high-grade engineering parts for the aircraft industry. My job was to help calculate the costings of engineering work for tenders. My salary was less than half what I had been earning with the Foreign Office, but I was glad to be back in a job. I knew nothing whatsoever about the work and had to learn very fast about my new world of commerce, the aircraft industry and the complexities of an engineering machine shop. I even joined the local branch of the trades union TASS and became involved in some of its activities. I cannot pretend that it was work I enjoyed, not least because one of the senior managers was a strong Tory supporter and did all he could to make my life as difficult and uncomfortable as possible. But my immediate boss, Wilf Baker, was a kindly and decent man who did much to ease my early days in the firm. And my workplace colleagues, especially the
machine operators on the shop floor, for whose skills I developed a very high admiration, were in the main extremely generous and patient in protecting me from the consequences of my early ignorance. I owe them much and learned a great deal from them which was necessary for my survival and was to prove very useful later in my political career.