A Fortunate Life (30 page)

But if Westland occupied my time from nine to five, it was community politics which occupied my brain for most of my waking day. I was out canvassing almost every night up to Christmas 1976. And it was dispiriting work. We had almost no support, and no one had the faintest idea who I was. The rest of my time in these early months was spent making initial contact with the journalists from the various newspapers and getting to know what interested them as news stories, paying calls on past Liberal activists and seeing if I could persuade them back into active support again, and helping our branches to raise money through jumble sales and local fetes. But I had to concede by the end of the year that we were making very little progress. I could attract no attention in the Press, the amounts of money we were raising were paltry, and the Constituency’s base of active members remained stubbornly few and mostly elderly.

Over Christmas I did a rethink and came to two conclusions. First, if I wanted to persuade people that I could be a good MP, I had better start acting like one – what I called ‘the MP over the water’ strategy. I would start holding weekly advice centres (which we called ‘surgeries’) on Saturday mornings in the Yeovil Liberal Club (which had become little more than a working men’s club at the time). Second, we needed to get our messages across on our terms and not rely on the Press. To do this we needed regular leaflets through people’s doors. Such an idea, though commonplace today, was completely radical at the time. Normally, the political parties only put out leaflets at election time. The idea of the year-round local leaflet, concentrating on local issues, had been pioneered by Liverpool Liberals with great success. I had seen a fellow candidate, Trevor Jones in neighbouring Dorchester, use this technique to win a string of local by-elections and learned how to implement it from him and two other Liberals, Richard and Phoebe Winch in Sherborne. But we did not have the money to have leaflets printed for us, so we would have to print them ourselves. This meant that I would have to get myself into the printing business.

Jane and I started our first ‘surgery’ in Yeovil on a bitterly cold Saturday in early January 1977, little realising that this would be the first of nearly a quarter of a century of Saturday mornings on which, from 9 a.m. to often 2.30 p.m., I would provide advice and help to people who came to see me, first as the Liberal PPC and then as Yeovil Constituency’s Member of Parliament. The form was that Jane would make coffee, which we would sell much cheaper than anywhere else in town, while I made myself available to provide advice if anyone needed it.

At first, of course, no one came. Why should they? They did not know me from Adam. We spent several weeks setting up our stall and waiting all morning for no one to arrive. In the end, it was actually Jane’s cheap coffee and biscuits which began to draw them in. Then we started getting regulars who came in every week. No one asked me for advice, but at least they knew who I was, and sometimes we even talked politics. And then one day a young couple came in and, in the course of our conversation, complained to me about the appalling state of their Council accommodation. I asked if they would like me to help. They said they would, and I paid them a visit a few days later, after which I wrote to the Council about the condition of their house and, with the agreement of the couple, invited the Press in to see it for themselves. There was a huge article in the local paper about it the following week, and the Council was forced to act. I had taken on my first ‘case’ and won it!

Gradually, over a period of about six months, more and more people came in to see me, and, in terms of custom, we were beginning to rival local MP John Peyton’s rather less frequent surgeries. After some errors I gradually became quite adept at taking up my customers’ cases with the various authorities, ranging from government ministries to the tax office and the local Councils. After we got home, I would dictate the letters on the cases which arose from the morning’s surgery, and Jane would type them up. I found myself really enjoying these mornings which often also provided excellent material for human-interest articles in the local Press. My name was beginning to get known, not only as someone who could get things done, but also as someone who cared about local affairs.

It was not long before the Tory-dominated local Council tried to put a stop to my activities by instructing the Council officers not to deal with me – I was not elected, they argued (not unreasonably), and therefore had neither the right nor the legal locus to take up people’s cases. I
was in a quandary and could not see a way round this obstacle until a local solicitor who was one of our few younger supporters told me that in English law a citizen was entirely free to choose anyone they wished to represent them in dealings with the authorities. The chosen representative needed neither to be qualified (like a lawyer), nor elected. They just needed proof that they were the person chosen by the citizen in question to act on his or her behalf. With my next case, I enclosed a consent form which my ‘constituent’ had signed nominating me as their representative and an explanation of the legal position. The Council, on the insistence of their Tory masters, took legal advice before conceding that they had indeed to deal with me as a
bona fide
representative of the person concerned, even though I was not elected.

By the middle of 1977 there were queues to see me at our regular Saturday morning surgeries. I was getting coverage in the local Press almost every week on some local issue or another and had launched or got myself involved in more community-politics-based campaigns than I could comfortably handle.

One of these involved a campaign on council house repairs on the western side of Yeovil, which I launched with an appeal in the Press for people to contact me if they had problems with getting repairs done to their houses. I had a flood of applications for help and decided that I would visit each of the complainants personally to take details of their problems. It was winter, bitterly cold, and the nights were very dark. I managed to do about six houses a night, and on this particular night was invited in for a cup of tea at almost every house I called on. It was not long before I was cross-legged for a pee. As luck would have it, the fifth house I called on had a problem with the bathroom sink, which was hanging off the wall. But, the tenant explained, the taps still worked alright, and ran them to prove the point. This did absolutely nothing to make my condition more bearable. However, I saw, in the corner of the room, exactly what I was looking for: one of those old-fashioned loos with an elevated cast-iron cistern with ‘Shanks’ embossed on the outside. My request to use it was swiftly agreed, and my host left the room closing the door behind him. Perhaps the cistern, too, was hanging off the wall, or perhaps it was that, in sheer relief, I pulled the chain too hard, but as I did so the whole lot came crashing to the floor! My host, hearing the noise, rushed in, took in the wreckage with a sweep of his eye and enquired drily, ‘I don’t suppose you want me to vote Liberal as well, do you?’ Covered in confusion and embarrassment I made a dash
for the front door and reached for the handle, promising to get someone round in the morning. But he was quicker and grabbed the door knob before I could do any more damage, saying, ‘I’ll do that if you don’t mind!’ I still see him in Yeovil from time to time, and we still laugh about it. And, as it happens, I am pretty sure he did vote for me!

On another occasion I was visiting a house in a row which was laid out with the back doors facing the main road and the front doors facing a small
cul de sac
. I knocked on the front door, but there was no reply. I knew there was someone in, however, because the lights were on and I could see movement inside. Thinking the householder had probably mistakenly gone to the back door, I walked round the house heading for the back entrance. As I rounded the corner, the back sitting room window flew open and an entirely naked man, carrying his clothes in one hand and his shoes in the other, leapt out and legged it across the main road into the residential estate opposite, his little white bottom winking in the lamplight as he ran. I decided it would be in the best interests of my constituent to visit this house on another occasion.

I found I really enjoyed this work – and was getting some good Press coverage from it while earning something of a reputation for problem-solving. But it was not always the Liberals who benefited from this. One of my early cases involved a family living in a precast reinforced-concrete council house suffering from what came to be known as ‘concrete cancer’, when in the mid 1980s such buildings were all condemned. The house was literally falling apart, and I spent a long time persuading the Council to rehouse the family, which they eventually agreed to do. I subsequently visited the family in their new house, and they were delighted. As I left, the father said, ‘Paddy, we are really grateful to you for what you have done for us – I can assure you we will never forget and we will never vote anything but Labour in future!’ I did not have the gall to correct them, so perhaps they always did!

It soon became clear to me that our progress was being held back by our inability to finance our occasional campaigning leaflets (at this stage our leaflets were all related to specific issues – regular community leaflets would come later). We needed to find a cheaper means of printing. To start with, I used the services of my Liberal colleague in Dorchester, Trevor Jones, who had recently bought a small photo-offset
litho machine which he ran in his spare back bedroom. It was from him that I learned the techniques of laying out a leaflet, how to photograph it with a plate-making camera and how to use the film to make a plate for the final printing process.

It was not long before I concluded that, if we were serious about winning in Yeovil, we too would have to obtain our own printing facilities. I first tried to persuade the constituency party that this was the way to go in May 1977. But the idea was rejected because we didn’t have the funds (I recall our Treasurer announcing at around this time that we had the grand total of
£
12.60 in the Constituency bank account) – and anyway we had a duplicator, so what was the need? A month later the duplicator broke down, and I tried once more, again without success. But it was agreed that I could try to find a cheap second-hand electric duplicator. I bought this in December 1977 for
£
120.50, and it was on this mulish machine that a Liberal colleague from Chard and I printed our first regular community leaflet,
Chard
Focus
, which had a run of 2,200 copies. It was murder to print, full of smudges and very primitive. But we were delighted with it. We produced two more issues of
Chard Focus
and some other leaflets on this machine before it, too, broke down. And just at the worst moment!

For I had by now launched a regular leaflet to be distributed in Yeovil every two months, called
Counter Point.
With our electric duplicator now broken, Jane and I decided that we would have to fund the first issue of
Counter Point
ourselves and have this properly printed on a friendly commercial printer’s photo-offset litho machine, hoping this would persuade the constituency party to buy one of our own. The advantages of photo-offset litho printing over duplicated leaflets was that it allowed us to use photographs, to adopt a much more sophisticated layout and to increase the size from A4 to A3.
*
Jane and I did the set-up for the first leaflet in our printer friend’s premises in February 1978.
Counter Point
was designed to be quite different from our other leaflets. It was intended as a community news sheet with attitude – a little like a local
Private Eye
– which would uncover local ‘scandals’ within the Tory-controlled Council, such as wasted money, undemocratic practices etc., while at the same time publicising the things which local Liberals were doing. By this time I had already concluded that, if they are to be effective, political messages have to have
both a ‘push’ and a ‘pull’ element: that is, your message has to give people a good reason
not
to vote for your opponent as well as a good reason
for
voting for you.
Counter Point
did both of these things. But it also took us into very dangerous territory, for it enraged the Tories by exposing things and people to the public in a way that made them feel very uncomfortable. Our very first issue produced the threat of an action for libel (which never materialised) from one of the Tory Council grandees. My friendly solicitor, Graham Hughes, who gave us his services at this time on a
pro bono
basis, gave me a tutorial on the laws of libel. He advised me that, on this occasion, I had nothing to worry about, but he also told me that, if I wished to keep
Counter Point
going on this basis, I had better take steps to protect my family. On his advice I transferred our house and our meagre bank account into Jane’s name and kept publishing.