Read David Waddington Memoirs Online
Authors: David Waddington
In the autumn of 1986 Gilly and I went to Hong Kong to see the Vietnamese refugee camps. I also had to meet a number of people,
particularly leaders of the Indian community in Hong Kong, about the Hong Kong Nationality Order which I had recently helped take through the House of Commons. This provided that those who ceased to be British Dependent Territories citizens on the Chinese takeover in 1997 would have the right to acquire British National (overseas) status; but there was genuine concern among those who were not ethnically Chinese and had, therefore, no expectation of acquiring Chinese citizenship, that they might be left stateless. Members of the Indian community pointed to the fact that when the East African Asians were expelled from Kenya and Uganda the Indian government made clear that those expelled were Britain’s responsibility not India’s, and these Indians in Hong Kong wanted to know what would happen to them if at some time in the future they were forced to leave what had become their homeland. I pointed out that there was no question of their finding themselves stateless, that they were being offered a form of British nationality and under the Joint Declaration they were guaranteed the right of abode in Hong Kong. I was, however, authorised to give an undertaking that we would look sympathetically at the case of any British national who, in spite of the Joint Declaration, came under pressure to leave.
On our arrival at one of the refugee camps a guard of honour of scouts and guides was formed to greet us. The movement had been introduced by one of the refugee organisations and had proved immensely popular among the Vietnamese. The scout and guide movements had every reason to be proud of what was being done in their name.
At the end of 1986 I got a letter from the Prime Minister in these terms:
I have it in mind on the occasion of the forthcoming list of New Year honours to submit your name to the Queen with a
recommendation that she may be graciously pleased to approve that you be sworn of Her Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council. I should be glad to know if this would be agreeable to you. I shall take no steps until I have your reply.
I replied without delay and on 1 January 1987 became a ‘Rt Hon.’ I received a very nice letter from Willie Whitelaw, appreciated because he knew better than most the difficulties of the job I had been trying to do. On 10 February I reported at the Privy Council Office to be rehearsed by Mr (later Sir Geoffrey) de Deney, Clerk of the Privy Council, in the art of kneeling and kissing the Queen’s hand and was then whisked off to Buckingham Palace for the ceremony. In the words of the official announcement: ‘This day David Charles Waddington Esquire, was, by Her Majesty’s Command, sworn of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and took his place at the Board accordingly.’ The oath of a privy councillor as
administered
by the clerk may seem archaic but it is modern and crystal clear compared with the oath, now abandoned, which I took when I became a QC.
*
A nice cartoon appeared in
The Times
on Friday 6 February 1987 arising out of demands in Parliament for a relaxation of the
licensing
laws. I was portrayed as Nelson putting a bottle of brown ale to my blind eye. I had forgotten about my involvement in all this until I went through my papers, so I don’t think it can have loomed large in my workload. We were not, however, ducking the issue as the cartoon tended to suggest. Indeed, not very long afterwards a reform measure went through the House.
What greatly increased my workload at this time was the
decision
to introduce legislation to deregulate Sunday trading on the lines of the Auld Report. Eventually, the Bill was lost on second
reading, but that was not my fault. It was decided that Douglas Hurd should open the debate because it was a Home Office
measure
and the winding-up should be left to Kenneth Clarke, then the DTI minister in the Commons, because of the provisions in the Bill concerning the rights of employees. Douglas’s opening was a disaster. When answering an intervention he gave the impression that there would be no Party whip during the committee stage. I whispered to the Chief Whip (John Wakeham): ‘did you know anything about that?’ ‘Certainly not,’ he said. The measure was done for before we had hardly got started because the backbenchers could see what we could see – that if the Bill ever got into
committee
, without a whip it would never get out. As a result, our side decided that there was no point in prolonging the agony and threw out the Bill there and then.
My role prior to the debacle had been to keep in touch with all the interest groups, speak in the country and on television in favour of deregulation and try and keep the Party on side. I, like most Conservative MPs, had to put up with a lot of aggravation. I found the opponents of reform incredibly sanctimonious. One woman in Clitheroe told me at great length that she was able to organise her life in a way which avoided the need to go shopping on Sundays and she was surprised I could not organise mine. She looked at me pityingly when I said I often arrived back in London at nine o’clock or later on a Sunday evening and I did not think I was doing anything very wrong when I called at a shop in Tottenham Court Road and bought myself a loaf of bread and a sausage roll. The churches organised a meeting in Clitheroe and the vicar in charge told me that I was there to hear the views of ordinary people on the issue. The audience did not seem to me to be particularly ordinary. For a start it did not seem to include all those ordinary people in Clitheroe who bought a Sunday paper, who went to the car wash or to fill up with petrol on a Sunday, who took the family
out for a ride in the car on a Sunday and stopped at a café or pub for lunch. But I listened patiently, comforted by the fact that the vicar had said that there would be no vote at the end. Unfortunately for me, in the closing minutes he suffered a rush of blood to the head, forgot his promise and decided to have a vote after all. The result was astonishing, beating all political records. Against Sunday trading 492: for Sunday trading 4: with four abstentions. Another Waddington record!
Towards the end of my time as Minister of State there was a great fuss over our attempts to remove sixty-four Tamils who arrived with bogus credentials and then claimed asylum. There was also the notorious case of Viraj Mendis who, having come to England as a student and then abandoned his studies, had married in an attempt to stay in the country. The marriage only lasted a couple of months but when steps were taken to return him to Sri Lanka he claimed he was a communist and Tamil supporter. He would therefore be persecuted if sent home. Eventually he was given ‘sanctuary’ in a church in Manchester and a campaign started on his behalf.
One day a crowd of demonstrators descended on Clitheroe and started baying outside the Conservative offices where I was holding my surgery. Gilly went out into the street and, without saying who she was, advised them to march round the town to rally support. She then tacked herself on to the back of the procession, singing lustily with the rest: ‘Viraj Mendis is a warrior. David Waddington is a bastard’. The people of Clitheroe had a really good day.
At New Year 1987 we were kept awake by a series of phone calls about Viraj Mendis – some threatening, some obscene. When the phone rang for the umpteenth time, Gilly leaned across the bed, grabbed the receiver out of my hand and shouted: ‘We know where you are. My job is to keep you talking until the police come and get you.’ A rather pained voice replied: ‘Madam, I am the police. The
Daily Mirror
has just rung the police in Manchester
to say that they have received a message from an anonymous caller saying that a bomb has been placed in your house and that you have three minutes to get out of the place. Well, you had three minutes but this call has taken so long, there’s probably now only thirty seconds.’ Gilly jumped out of bed. I said ‘What’s going on?’ She said ‘I’ll tell you in the garden.’
One night in the middle of January we were in Denny Street when a mob assembled outside the front door and started bawling abuse about the Mendis case. I rang the police and a very senior officer with a lot of braid on his shoulders read out a long statement saying they had to disperse. One of the mob stepped forward and without a flicker of a smile said: ‘But our train for Manchester does not leave for another hour. Can’t we carry on shouting for just a few more minutes?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said the officer, at which the mob muttered and grumbled off down the road, and we went to bed in peace.
After I had moved on to be Chief Whip, Viraj Mendis was eventually removed to Sri Lanka where our embassy monitored his progress. He went back to live with his well-to-do parents, showed no interest in the Tamils and was himself of no
interest
to the Sri Lankan authorities. Mr Stewart, who was British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka from 1984–7, wrote to the
Daily Telegraph:
I was intimately involved in the affair from the time that Mr Mendis first claimed that he would be in danger if he returned to his own country. Having now retired from the diplomatic service I have no particular axe to grind, but I would like to set the record straight. Mr Mendis first claimed that he would be arrested on return because he was a well-known supporter of the Tamil cause. In 1985 and 1986 none of the Tamil activists with whom I spoke had ever heard of him. Nor, although I and my staff monitored
the British papers to gauge the extent of support in Britain for the Tamil separatist cause, had we encountered any mention of his name.
When Mr Mendis made his claim, I made discreet inquiries with the Sri Lankan authorities to see whether he was wanted by them for any offence. I did this before there had been any publicity about him in the country. Neither the police nor the security authorities had any record of him. In fact, when publicity about his case became widespread, it took the authorities some weeks to identify Mr Mendis as there was no record of him in any of their files.
When David Waddington, then a Home Office minister, visited Sri Lanka in 1987 he obtained from the President and from the Secretary of Internal Security, in my presence, categorical assurances that Mr Mendis was not wanted for any offences in Sri Lanka and that no action of any sort would be taken against him if he returned.
He now claims that if he returns he will be in danger from one of the chauvinist Sinhalese groups. He has no stature in any of the
political
or terrorist groups either of the left or of the right; of the Tamil or of the Sinhalese sides. Neither the government nor the various terrorist groups have any interest in Mr Mendis or in his
continued
existence in or out of Sri Lanka.
The truth is that Mr Mendis and his supporters have erected a cause célèbre here in Britain about nothing at all. He has succeeded in over-staying his leave to be here for some ten or more years. Mr Mendis is a young man who has managed to enlist sympathy here about his importance in his native country where no one seems to have any malign, or indeed any, interest at all in him.
On 19 February 1987 a piece in the
Daily Telegraph
, headed
‘WHY DR NO CAN’T BE MR NICE GUY’,
by Nicholas Comfort, summed up
pretty well the difficulties of the job I had been doing for over four years:
There are two ministerial posts even the most ambitious MP hopes to avoid: under-secretary at the DHSS dealing with social security cases, and minister of state at the Home Office responsible for immigration. The second job is the worse, as the blunt Lancastrian QC is now discovering.
Given that his job has always been regarded as one of the classic ‘no-win’ positions in government, Waddington is now trusted to ride out storms like the current furore over his attempt to deport sixty-four Tamils who arrived with bogus credentials and claimed asylum.
His handling of the introduction of visas from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana last year, and his whittling away of MPs’ right to defer expulsions while they look into the facts has
infuriated
the Opposition but left few scars. He even got away last month with announcing that police and immigration officers had detained twenty-six suspected illegal immigrants from West Africa who were working for contract cleaners at two Home Office buildings.
And there is a strongly Dickensian aspect to him as he meets Labour anger at a new visa scheme or the deportation of Tamils with cries of ‘humbug’. Much of the job is psychology, telling the serious appeal from the hard luck story or detecting when the Opposition’s apparent fury is really just ritual. In the Commons Waddington has, for this government, an almost uniquely Victorian air, possibly because his stern yet rounded features and his tonsure of whitening hair come straight from the sketchbook of Charles Tenniel.
One of the problems I had to deal with as Minister of State was that of polygamous wives, and it illustrates how punctilious is our civil service in affording to all what appear to be their full rights.
There had come to my notice a large number of cases in which men settled in Britain had brought into the country second wives by polygamous marriages. In each case the entry clearance officer at our post abroad had concluded that although the man had lived in Britain for years he was not domiciled in Britain because he had not demonstrated a fixed intention to abandon his domicile of origin in Pakistan. As polygamy was lawful in Pakistan, the marriage contracted there was valid under our law. I took the view that we should certainly scrutinise most carefully every such case.
As the general election drew near I made a speech on
immigration
, pointing out that every policy statement by Labour represented a weakening of the control. It provoked a letter of congratulation from the Prime Minister. Between 1983 and 1987 we made a lot of friends among the ethnic minority communities in spite of the difficult and often unpopular job I had to do. We were particularly friendly with Ashraf el-Doulah and his beautiful wife Jasmine – Ashraf being, I think, third in command at the Bangladesh High Commission in London. One Easter we had Ashraf and Jasmine to stay with us in Lancashire and on the first night gave a dinner party in their honour. Ashraf thoroughly enjoyed himself and at one stage a Lancashire friend of mine turned to him and said: ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, old boy, but I thought Muslims weren’t supposed to drink.’ ‘Quite so,’ said Ashraf, ‘but I look at it this way. I know there will be no port in the next life so I had better enjoy it now.’