A Fortunate Life (45 page)

When I arrived back in UK after the Sarajevo trip, I wrote an article for the
Guardian
, a letter to the Prime Minster and a speech which I delivered to a meeting in London – all with the same message. This was definitely a war crime, probably the beginnings of genocide, would certainly lead to greater instability, could be stopped and should be.

A week later, while Jane and I were visiting Monet’s garden in Giverny outside Paris, Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb Leader, contacted me with a message: ‘You have seen the Muslim side, I invite you now to and come and see ours.’ I could not, of course, refuse and on 8 August caught a plane to Budapest, where I met my Lib Dem colleague Russell Johnston, and we took a car for the long journey
across the flat, fertile plains of Hungary to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia proper. All the way our driver listened to a radio station blasting Serb turbo-folk, interspersed with news. At one stage, just after we had crossed the border into Serbia, our interpreter burst out laughing. I asked him why, and he replied that the radio news had just announced that the successor to Gladstone (me) had entered the country on his way to see the Government! The Serbian President, Milošević, was apparently out of town, so the following day I was taken to see the Yugoslavian President, Dobrica Čosić,
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in the Soviet-style government buildings in Belgrade. I had not the first idea what he looked like, so was somewhat flummoxed when the great doors on the reception room were opened and I was confronted with a long line of men, all with seemingly identical granite Slav faces, all in identical suits. Fortunately, I chose the right hand to shake. (On a later occasion, in Montenegro, when meeting a Government minister, I enthusiastically shook the hand of his astonished driver instead!) After what was not a very illuminating meeting, we were bundled off to a nearby helicopter pad, loaded onto an armoured Russian helicopter flown by a Russian (who told me the helicopter was made in a factory outside Moscow that also made tractors: ‘Helicopters one end, tractors the other’) and took off on the most frightening helicopter flight of my life over the mountains of Bosnia to Karadžić’s headquarters in Pale, from where he was directing the siege of Sarajevo. The events of the following two days, when we visited the prison camps at Manjaca and Trnopolje, have already been described in the Prologue.

Shortly after I returned, with the images of these two visits still freshly burning in my mind, I sat at the dinner table next to an extremely elegant and distinguished man in his mid-sixties who spoke in that languorous, easy manner of upper-class Britons born in the early years of the last century. He courteously asked me what I thought of Bosnia and what should happen there. I told him that I had just been there and seen things for myself, so I knew
exactly
what should happen – we should intervene. He said gently that he didn’t altogether agree. But I would have none of it and told him that I had been there and seen
things for myself, so I knew what I was talking about, etc., etc. After I had spent a good fifteen minutes digging this massive hole for myself, someone across the table sought to attract my dinner companion’s attention by calling out ‘Fitzroy!’ Only then did I realise I was sitting next to Fitzroy MacLean, one of my all-time heroes, who had parachuted into Yugoslavia and fought alongside Tito throughout his great guerrilla campaign against the Germans across the mountains of Bosnia in World War Two. Needless to say, he brushed aside with infinite politeness my stumbling apologies and pathetic expressions of admiration.
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As a result of these two trips Bosnia became, even some of my friends would say, something of an obsession. What happened there, I saw – and still see – as the greatest crime on European soil since the Second World War. And Europe’s failure to intervene I saw – and still see – as the greatest act of moral failure and deliberate, culpable blindness of our time. I also saw the Bosnia war as, in some way, our generation’s Spanish Civil War: a time when ordinary people understood better than their leaders what was happening, and what needed to be done, in a conflict that was not a hangover from the past but a predictor of things to come.

During the almost four years of the siege of Sarajevo I visited the city twice a year – once in the summer and once in the winter – making a point of staying for several days with Bosnian friends, and not just dropping in for an hour or two, as most visiting dignitaries did. During these visits I smuggled in aid and medicine for the relatives of Bosnian refugees in Britain, carried letters in and out between distraught relatives and arranged for the secret transport of detonators to enable the blasting of coal from an open-cast mine in nearby Kakanj to continue, so as to keep a local power station going and the city’s lights on, albeit intermittently.

In the House of Commons I asked so many Prime Minster’s Questions on Bosnia that they used to shout ‘The Honourable Member for Sarajevo’ when I stood up. My party (including some of its MPs, I have
to admit) grumbled that I spent too much time on the subject; many of my constituents seemed to agree, judging from my postbag, and Labour MPs, though they prefer not to remember it now, used to shout ‘warmonger’ when I repeatedly called for the West to intervene and stop the carnage.

Looking back, I think there is probably some substance in these criticisms. As Leader of the Liberal Democrats I should not, perhaps, have allowed myself to get so obsessed by a single issue. But I still regard this as the best work I ever did in the House of Commons and a cause in which I was privileged to be involved.

Nevertheless, although Bosnia was a constant backdrop to all five years of the 1992 parliament, there were other big things happening too, as Britain moved towards the twilight of the Conservative years, and the Left began to reshape itself for government.

In my first meeting with Party officials after the 1992 election I told them that the Party’s survival phase was now over. We were now no longer spectators. I was determined that, in this Parliament, we would prove that we were back on the field as players.

On 9 May, exactly a month after polling day, I gave what I believe was my most important speech as Lib Dem Leader, and one I had been thinking about for almost a year. It became known as the Chard speech, after the little town in my Constituency where it was made. It proposed, in essence, a new coming together of the Left to form a progressive alliance dedicated to ending the Tory hegemony and bringing in radical reforms to the British Constitution, beginning with a Scottish Parliament.

This speech was received with hostility by some of my MPs and by a large swathe of the Party at large, although it had actually been watered down during successive consultations with parliamentary colleagues. It proposed that we formally start to align ourselves with opposition to the Tories and end what had become a pretence – the Party’s traditional policy of being equally opposed to both Labour and Tories. This paved the way for the long, slow process of shifting our position and ended, three years later, with the Lib Dems’ historic decision to abandon the Party’s traditional ‘equidistance’ from the other two main parties, so enabling us to be an integral part of the tidal wave of change which was to sweep the Tories from power in 1997.

To start with, however, there was no response from Labour, who were at the time in complete disarray after their general election defeat and preoccupied with electing John Smith as their new Leader. My first meeting with Smith was not until October, when we met over a whisky (actually several) in his Commons office. He made it very plain that he would continue to pursue a ‘go-it-alone’ strategy for Labour, didn’t think that creating a broad coalition for constitutional change (which he was genuinely committed to, far more than Blair) was necessary, didn’t want to upset the equilibrium of Labour, and didn’t believe there was room for anyone else in the battle to beat the Tories. We might work together if he needed us, he told me, but not if he didn’t. ‘Let’s develop the habit of friendship, even if this is not the time for formal co-operation,’ he said as I left. I was depressed that his vision was so narrow but well satisfied that this now left the space for the Lib Dems to lead in the process of creating a wider consensus for radical constitutional change, which I knew many of Labour’s natural supporters agreed with.

Our relations with John Smith’s Labour Party were, moreover, not improved by our position on the biggest political issue of the day, the passage of the Maastricht Treaty through the House of Commons in early November. This came just six weeks after the fiasco of ‘Black Wednesday’: Britain’s humiliating exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the devaluation of the pound (which occurred in the middle of our Party Conference in Harrogate in September). Both these events terribly weakened Major’s Government and presented the Opposition parties with a most tempting opportunity to vote with Major’s Euro-rebels and defeat him in the Commons. But if we did this we would destroy Britain’s future in Europe at the same time. After much debate and some arm twisting, especially with Charles Kennedy, who was very uncertain on the issue
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(I wheeled out Roy Jenkins to help me here), the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party finally agreed we would stand by our European principles and support the Government. Labour, on the other hand, though in favour of the Bill in principle, said they would join the Tories’ Euro-rebels in order to damage Major and perhaps even, as they saw it, bring his Government down.

When it comes to deciding what you should and should not do in Opposition, I have always believed in the policy of George Lansbury,
Labour’s forgotten leader before the Second World War, who said it is usually wisest for opposition parties to reject the temptations of easy opportunism and act as they would do in government. For that is the best way to show the electorate that they can be trusted with power.

There was some further wobbling amongst Lib Dem MPs (Charles Kennedy and Simon Hughes were especially worried), accompanied by anger and even resignations amongst Party members at large, who fell for Labour’s line. (Our Cowley Street headquarters was receiving some 150 phone calls and about as many letters a day from Party members opposed to our line, about half of whom said they were resigning over this.) As the Maastricht vote approached, hostility towards us from Labour and the left-wing Press for ‘supporting the Government’ grew sharply. But in the end we voted together according to our European beliefs, with the result that both the Government and Britain’s future in Europe survived. This was the vote I am proudest of having cast in my time in the Commons. There was huge, but largely synthetic, anger from Labour afterwards. But sticking to our principles, while Labour abandoned theirs, did us very little harm in the end and may even have done some good.

For John Major, however, this was only just the beginning of his torture on the rack of Europe at the hands of his Euro-rebels – later in the Parliament he would famously refer to them as ‘the Bastards’ – and in the end this issue would cripple his Government and bring him to the point of resignation. At his request, I met with Major secretly on several occasions to co-ordinate our actions in order to save Maastricht from the treachery of his rebels and the cynicism of Labour. This had to be carefully and discreetly done, for by early 1993 we had, in Newbury, the first of two key by-elections in seats the Tories held by huge majorities, and I could not afford to be seen to be too close to the Government.