A Fortunate Life (47 page)

It is sometimes said that espionage is the Great Game, but politics has a better claim to the title. For in politics things are constantly changing, and you have to be constantly reviewing your choices, especially in a third party, in order both to avoid being squashed and to advance your aims. If you make a mistake you usually pay the price very quickly. It is this that makes it more exciting – and often more terrifying – than active service. For on active service nothing happens for ninety percent of the time. But in politics, things happen all the time, and the bullets can start flying just when you least expect them. In most things you can look at the momentum and direction of forces and predict reasonably accurately what the outcome will be when they collide. But in politics there is the ever-present, ever-changing variable of the human factor, which has a habit of altering everything just when you thought it was fixed. Who could have predicted Michael Heseltine’s sudden walk-out from the cabinet over Westland, which brought Mrs
Thatcher to the edge of the precipice? Or the precise moment when Geoffrey Howe’s patience with her would snap and cause her to be finally pushed over? Or that, in a few months’ time, quiet, long-suffering John Major would finally turn the tables on his tormentors by briefly resigning in the rose garden of No. 10 Downing Street, challenging them to ‘put up or shut up’?

John Smith’s death on 12 May 1994 was one of these events. It shocked everyone, of course, for he was much loved and respected, especially by rank-and-file members of Labour, who, in those times of turmoil and change, felt that socialism and the Party they loved were safe in his hands. But it changed almost everything else, too.

His death resulted – as I knew it would as soon as it happened – in the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader. And from this moment onwards the ground on which I had sought to position the Liberal Democrats was progressively undermined. It did not matter that we were there first, or that Blair’s vision of what had to be done was seriously deficient in some areas (for instance, civil liberties and constitutional reform). Such was the clamour for him in the Press, the clarity of his vision and his formidable powers of salesmanship that we were in severe danger of being run over by Blair and his New Labour bulldozer.

The Press knew it and goaded me with it. And I became grumpy and bad-tempered and showed it. I found this altogether one of the most difficult periods of my leadership. For the truth was, I did not know how to react to the fact that the ground had suddenly been cut out from under me by the arrival of the phenomenon of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. Indeed, I seriously thought about resigning. Here is what I wrote in my diary for 8 August 1994:

The effect of all this was not just theoretical. New Labour was beginning to challenge our dominance as the main opposition to the Tories in the south of England, too. Although our candidate David Chidgey won another by-election in Eastleigh in mid-1994, we had had to fight very hard to hold off a challenge from Labour, who beat the Tories into third position in this southern Conservative heartland.

What I was wrestling with was the unpleasant fact that this was another ‘ju-jitsu’ moment. I could not prevent New Labour’s surge in the polls or protect us against the fact that this could do great damage to both our policy positions and our electoral appeal. I would have to find a way to turn the Blair phenomenon into something from which we, too, could benefit. I concluded that, if he was to lead the wave of change that would unseat the Tories, we had to be part of that. Fortunately, the Chard speech back in May 1992, and the work I had done repositioning the Party since then, would help. But all would depend on whether Blair, now that he was actually Labour leader, was sincere about exploring the possibilities of a realignment of the Left along the lines we had spoken of at my flat before John Smith’s death.

I met Blair again just before our respective 1994 Party Conferences, when Jane and I went round to a family dinner at their house in Islington. It was then that we laid the foundations of the next five years of close and mostly secret co-ordination between the two of us and our parties. We agreed that we could not stop our parties fighting each other where they had always traditionally done so (i.e., where we challenged each other). But in the public comments we made we would each show respect for the other’s party. There would be no question of withdrawing candidates. However, in places where one of us was the principal challenger to the Tories it made no sense to ‘station tanks on each other’s lawns’ by putting resources into each others’ principal target seats. This agreement eventually culminated in the two parties secretly exchanging a list of Tory key seats in which the one that had little chance of winning would not invest resources in contesting the seat, so as to give the other
the best chance of beating the Tory. Chris Rennard subsequently (and secretly) met Peter Mandelson at a dinner and persuaded him that the most useful thing that the Labour Party could do to help us defeat the Tories in our key target seats was to arrange for a third party to publish a list of where Labour voters should back the Lib Dems in order to beat the Tories. Eventually, at Mandelson’s behest, the
Daily Mirror
published a list of twenty-two seats which had been secretly negotiated with us, and we won twenty of them in the subsequent general election.

Blair’s office and mine also regularly co-ordinated our key lines of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions and started to draw up a list of some policy areas, particularly constitutional reform, where we could work together – though even at this early stage Blair made it clear that he was ‘not yet convinced’ of the case for proportional representation. It was from this discussion on our joint constitutional agenda, elaborated at a dinner at Derry Irvine’s house a few months later, attended by teams of key advisers from both sides, that the Cook/MacLennan Commission was born. This would, in due course, produce a framework for co-operation between the two parties on the issue of constitutional reform and lay the basis for the constitutional reforms which formed the centrepiece of the first Blair Government’s legislative programme.

But creating the framework for a long-term partnership was only part of my task. I knew very well what Blair would do next. He would very ostentatiously pick a fight with the unions, abandon socialism and the Left and move his party onto the centre ground. My chief worry was that the Lib Dems would vacate this ground and move to the left. This was not because the Lib Dems are, at heart, socialists – far from it. It was just because the natural tendency of a third party, faced with a constant struggle for survival in a two-party system, is to look for the empty ground and occupy it. Blair was a master of the ‘cuckoo strategy’: occupying other people’s territory and forcing them to move to other, usually more extreme ground. In government he was to do this to the Tories, who made the fatal mistake of ceding the centre ground to him and moving to the right, until, after ten years and under David Cameron, they finally realised their mistake. I was determined that he should not do this with the Lib Dems in 1994, and so I once again turned to writing, producing a pamphlet, which I called
Making Change Our Ally.
The aim of this publication was to stake out
for the Party our own modernising agenda before Blair produced his, and to prevent a retreat to the easy grazing of the pastures of the Left. I published
Making Change Our Ally
just before the start of our Party Conference in Brighton that year and sent a copy to Blair.

The 1994 Brighton Conference, however, was not one of my finest. My worst fears seemed to be realised when the Party debated two motions: one, mildly controversial, on the monarchy, and the other proposing a more liberal approach to drugs. In normal times I would have regarded neither of these issues as anything to get too aerated about – but in the context of an ascendant New Labour I knew they would be misrepresented, especially by the Press, as a shift to the Left, and that would be deadly for us. In truth, I reacted to both grumpily, and this was compounded by the fact that it looked as though I stalked off the stage in disgust when the drugs motion passed, so making it more of a story
*
. My predecessor, David Steel, and my successor, Charles Kennedy, would have shrugged their shoulders and said it didn’t matter, which would have been infinitely the wiser policy. But I suppose I am just not that kind of person.

The rest of the autumn of 1994 was spent deepening the relationship with New Labour and carefully widening the circle of those in the know on both sides. As a result, by the end of the year, all Blair’s closest advisers and all mine were in the know and discreetly involved in some way or another in developing a part of the co-operation agenda.

A curious episode took place in October, when I received an approach from Mohamed Al Fayed, who, through my colleague Alex Carlile MP, passed us evidence of a Government minister, Neil Hamilton, accepting money. The ensuing scandal resulted in Hamilton’s resignation and unleashed the era of ‘sleaze’ which so damaged the Major Government. One upshot was that Al Fayed offered me a million pounds ‘for the Party, with no strings attached’. We were now beginning to prepare for the next election, and a million pounds amounted to around a half of our projected election costs – so it was a very great deal of money to us. This was, moreover, before Al Fayed had the reputation he has today. I consulted all my closest advisers and the senior MPs in the Party, saying that I did not believe we should accept the money, not least because, whatever was said, there always would be strings attached. With very few exceptions, they advised that, given what we could do with the money, I was mad not to accept. There was real anger amongst some when I turned the offer down.

On 6 May 1995, the Government held a great banquet lunch in the Guildhall to mark the fiftieth anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day in 1945. Some bright spark at the Foreign Office who had responsibility for the table plan concluded that, since I knew a bit about the Balkans, I should sit next to President Tudjman of Croatia. I had, in fact, met Tudjman before and concluded that he was one of the most unpleasant people I had ever come across. Slobodan Milošević, his contemporary as President of Serbia, was basically an opportunist, but Tudjman had a creed, and it was, as far as I was concerned, fascism in modern guise. So I decided to be a little mischievous. I made sure that his wine glass was never empty and then, towards the end of lunch, and after he had drunk a good deal, asked him as innocently as I could what he thought would be the future for the Balkans? He reached for the printed menu and on the back of it drew a rough outline of ex-Yugoslavia and then an S-shaped line dividing it in two, explaining that this would be the future. There would be no Yugoslavia. In its place there would be two countries, Croatia and Serbia. But what about Bosnia, I asked? Where is Bosnia? ‘No Bosnia,’ was his reply. What about the Bosnian Muslims? ‘They are welcome to live in Croatia, if they obey our laws. Otherwise they can go home to Turkey,’ was the response. But what about the enclave of Serbs who lived in the Krajina in south Croatia? Tudjman said that he would launch a war very soon and drive them all out. I said that could be very costly for his troops. He replied that he could do it with less than a thousand casualties, and I found myself betting a bottle of good Croatian white wine that it would cost him more.