A Fortunate Life (50 page)

There was almost no technique I had learned in my ‘Foreign Office’ days which Emma and I did not use over the following three weeks to clinch the deal, except secret writing and the use of dead-letter boxes. It all culminated in a meeting at a ‘safe house’ just before Christmas
at which we agreed that we would announce her defection on 29 December in order to dominate the news over the New Year period, when the three Party Leaders traditionally publish a political New Year’s message. The actual day of the defection was planned down to the last detail and went like clockwork, giving us complete domination of the news agenda for nearly a week, putting the Party back in the news and getting 1996 off to a flying start.

Emma stood aside for a Liberal Democrat, John Burnett, who was elected in Torridge and West Devon at the next general election. She then went on to fight and win a seat in the European Parliament and subsequently joined the Lib Dem team in the House of Lords, where she has been a doughty and courageous voice for liberal and internationalist causes, especially on the suffering of Iraq’s Marsh Arabs and on matters of human rights and international justice. In due course she was followed by other Tory defectors, chiefly on the issue of Europe, including Hugh Dykes (whom I persuaded to join us in the course of a very bibulous evening drinking Burgundy at our house in Irancy) and John Lee, both also now playing very active roles in the House of Lords as respected members of the Lib Dem team there. Others also followed.
*

Though we entered 1996 on a higher note politically, ominous clouds were beginning to gather as a result of the police action prompted by the knife attack in Yeovil in November. The police informed me that Mason, my attacker, was claiming to the local Press (which, of course, duly passed it on to the nationals) that I had been a ‘customer’ of a local ‘massage parlour’ with which he and his associates were connected, and suggesting that this would come out if the trial went ahead. I suppose Mason thought I could be frightened into dropping the charges. Just before Christmas, the
Mail on Sunday
correspondent in the Commons approached me saying that he had heard that I was withdrawing my charges against Mason, was this true? I said it was certainly not true, adding that I was utterly determined to see this man, whose associates had held our friends in the Indian restaurant (and so many others in the town) to ransom using violence and threats, was brought to justice.

I thought that was where the attempts at intimidation would end, although the police said they thought there was more to come. On 2 February, just before 4 a.m., the phone rang by my bed. It was my next door neighbour Steph Bailey, saying that our car, which, on police advice, had been parked in one of her outside sheds, was on fire. The local fire brigade arrived swiftly, followed by the police equally swiftly, followed by the national Press, which published blaring headlines on the incident the following day.
The Times
article was accompanied by a hilarious Nick Newman cartoon showing two Somerset yokels chewing straw, one of them was saying to the other, ‘Red sky at night, Paddy’s Vauxhall’s alight.’

Over the following weekend Yeovil was flooded with national journalists, which gave Mason’s associates an even greater opportunity to spread their lies. Once again, some elements of the national Press seemed all too eager to believe their words and published a number of articles full of innuendo. In the end this proved more painful to Jane and me than the fire-bombing of our car. We were both deeply upset that the Press would allow itself to be used by people who they must have known were trying to intimidate me into withdrawing charges. But we decided that, whatever happened, we were going to see this thing through. So we sat tight, believing that the worst was over.

But it wasn’t. On the Monday after the fire-bombing of our car, the
Western Daily Press
, our regional newspaper, which should have known better, published the whole farrago of lies on their front page, without having even approached me for comment or denial first. Normally, I believe politicians should avoid taking legal action except as a very last resort. But this newspaper must have known exactly what sort of people Mason’s associates were. They had not even tried to check these completely false claims, which were made, as they must have known, with the specific intent of getting me to back down so that one of this fraternity could escape justice. The tale Mason’s associates had been retailing to the Press, and which was at the centre of the
Western Daily Press
story, was that I had been a customer at the Yeovil massage parlour/brothel. They even supplied the name of the prostitute whose client I had allegedly been, adding considerable verisimilitude to their story. As it happened, this brave lady had left the area some time previously, having been threatened with extreme violence. She read the newspaper stories and, despite the risk to herself, asked her solicitor to contact Andrew Phillips and confirm that the story was a complete fabrication. Jane and I were very touched by her courage.

We took legal action that night which forced the
Western Daily Press
to print a full, front-page retraction the next day and an apology the following one, as well as facing other substantial penalties for what I still regard as one of the most egregious breaches of decency and professionalism I have ever come across in the profession of journalism.

The car-burning incident also produced a sackful of very kind letters of support, but also others much less salubrious.

We also received a number of phone calls threatening to burn our house if I went ahead and gave evidence at the trial, shortly after which the local Chief Superintendent asked us to go into the police station to see him. He had some information he wanted to talk to us about and did not wish to do this over the phone. When we got there we found two or three other officers in the room, including one from the CID. They told us that they now had reliable information that there was a contract out to fire-bomb our cottage over the coming Easter holidays, when it was known that we would be away in France. The police proposed a plan for installing a series of covert alarms round the house and asked us if they could secretly move in while we were away for Easter.

On 8 February I went to Yeovil crown court to give evidence at Mason’s trial. The Press gallery was packed with reporters from the national Press and broadcasters, all hoping for some dramatic revelation. But they went away disappointed, and Mason was duly found guilty and imprisoned.

The police alarms caused us some problems to start with. They kept on being set off by everything from the cat to branches waving in the wind – and sometimes, it seemed, by nothing at all. This resulted in the whole village being disturbed by screaming sirens and armed police being scrambled to our house at all hours of the day and night. On one occasion Jane returned from walking the dog to find the house and garden full of armed police, one of whom was yelling ‘Freeze or we fire’ at her and a bewildered, but angry, dog. On another I had friends round, and turned off the electricity in order to repair a lamp. About a minute later, there was a screech of police tyres outside the house, all the roads in the village had been sealed off, and, we were told, a helicopter had launched to the area. The police patiently explained that their alarms were run off our electricity and were triggered if it was turned off. All in all, Jane and I decided that we were not very good at being the subject of close protection.

When we left for our Easter holidays, Jane shed some tears at the prospect of our house being reduced to a burnt-out shell. But she is extraordinarily resilient and while we were away planned out the changes she would make to our rather small cottage if we had to rebuild it.

In the event, nothing happened, and in due course the police decided that the threat had passed and left us alone again. But we carried out Jane’s redesign plans anyway, and they have given us a lot more space and greatly improved the way the house works. I, meanwhile, managed to persuade some wealthy Indian supporters to invest in my Bangladeshi constituent who ran the restaurant that had been at the centre of all this drama. He now runs a chain of outstanding Indian restaurants in the West Country, and the one in Yeovil was recently voted among the best one hundred Indian restaurants in Britain. So at least we all got something positive out of the whole wretched business.

Meanwhile, the pace of politics continued unabated. In late February Major was saved by a single vote at the end of a debate on the Scott Report on the selling of arms to Iraq. A month later the BSE crisis broke and was catastrophically mishandled by the Government.

Blair’s rise and rise, however, continued unchecked, and our secret talks on co-operation quickened both in frequency and substance. In March we agreed to launch a joint Commission on constitutional change under the joint Chairmanship of Robin Cook and Bob MacLennan, and this was formally announced later in the year.

Thanks in large part to the growing public perception of a partnership between the Lib Dems and New Labour, we were now, to my relief, no longer being seen by Press and public as irrelevant to the coming wave of change in Britain, but as part of it. And this showed both in our opinion-poll ratings and in votes cast in the May local elections, when we increased our national share of the vote and, with 150 gains, our number of councillors, too. These advances gave us an excellent springboard for the general election, which everyone now knew would be in the spring of 1997.

At the end of August, my daughter Kate got married in Cravant, the next-door village to Irancy. She had met her French husband, Sébastien, while working in the area, so the wedding was a very bibulous,
Burgundian affair which went on until the very small hours of the morning. Sébastien’s mother was the Deputy Mayor of Cravant and therefore able, under French law, to conduct the civil ceremony. Afterwards, as is the local custom, I walked with my daughter on my arm at the head of a procession of all our guests through the village from the
mairie
to the church – one of the proudest moments of my life. My first grandson, Matthias, was born, after a terrible 72-hour labour, right in the middle of the general election campaign in April the following year.

By the end of 1996 Blair and I had a clear plan about how the relationship would develop after the election, which everyone now knew would result in a Blair government (though Blair would never allow himself to admit it). Our preferred option was for the two of us to form a partnership government, even if there was a Labour majority. And we agreed that one of the first elements of its programme would be to bring in a series of constitutional changes, including providing Wales and Scotland with an element of self-government based on the Cook/MacLennan proposals, which were published on 4 March 1997. We also discussed how we might work together on our agreed constitutional agenda.

John Major finally called the general election two weeks after the Cook/MacLennan report was published, and fixed the date for 1 May. Throughout the ensuing campaign there were secret contacts between Richard Holme and Peter Mandelson to ensure that we limited the damage we did to each other, concentrated our fire on the Tories and prepared the way for the partnership between our two parties after the election was over.

On polling day I had a phone conversation with Blair from the Headmaster’s study of a local school I was visiting: