A Fortunate Life (35 page)

Shortly after I started my new job, Jane received a small legacy. We decided to use some of it to pay for a week’s skiing holiday with friends in Switzerland.

Our trip out has become something of a family legend, as the journey from hell. Our car at the time was a small second-hand red Renault Five that had definitely seen better days, and into this the four of us crammed, together with all the kit we needed for a week’s skiing and, unbeknown to all except Jane, an open apple tart – of which more later. The journey was cursed from the start. First the aerial broke just as we were leaving and had to be replaced by a bent piece of wire coat-hanger. Then, at the very moment we left Yeovil, it started to snow … and snow and snow and snow! That evening was spent battling through snowdrifts in Kent before arriving three hours late for the ferry at Dover. After a very rough crossing we were stopped at Calais by a French customs official, who had not unreasonably concluded that we were probably a family of illegal refugees on the move. He asked to see what was in the car and soon came across a bottle which was corked, labelled and full of a most suspicious-looking orange-coloured liquid. He asked me what it was that I was bringing into France. I replied that it was carrot wine. He looked at us with total incredulity.

‘Du vin de carotte?? En France? Mais comme ils sont fou, les Anglais!’

Then he waved us through with a Gallic shrug to end all Gallic shrugs.

We drove off into a blizzard and soon lost our way in the white-out on the motorway, wandering off into the winding back roads of northern France and ending up at two o’clock in the morning in the little town of Abbeville. Here the poor old Renault finally baulked at getting up the steep hill out of the town, which was inches deep in snow. I announced that we would have to sleep where we were and try again in the morning. But ten minutes crammed into the Renault, getting colder and colder, soon changed all our minds. Reasoning that the car was a front wheel drive and that we might therefore get up the hill better in reverse, I put Simon on the bonnet, turned the car round and we backed all the way up to the summit of the hill without a hitch. A grey and snowy dawn found us on the outskirts of Paris, where we promptly lost ourselves again trying to find the Boulevard Périphérique. After an hour or so we rediscovered our route and headed south on the A6, thinking the worst was now behind us. But fate had other ideas. Passing Besançon, the exhaust pipe fell off and had to be tied back on using one of Simon’s neck scarves (he was, at the time, following a pop group who were big on neck scarves). Then I left the petrol cap off at a filling station, and we had to plug the petrol tank with a plastic bag. Then, crossing the Jura in thick snow, we got a puncture, which meant unpacking the whole of the car. It was only at this stage that we discovered Jane’s apple tart had spent the last twenty-four hours slowly leaking all over our clothes and ski kit. Finally, and foolishly, I tried a joke with a Swiss border guard at which he took offence – apparently shared by his very large dog, which made a determined attempt to eat me.

We arrived with our friends after 28 hours cooped up in a Renault Five at the end of a journey which should have taken fourteen. But then we had a wonderful week, with bright sunshine and glorious snow as compensation.

When we got back, Jane and I decided to use the remainder of her legacy to buy our (or should I say ‘my’) first computer. These machines were just appearing on the scene in Britain, and I was immediately fascinated by them and how they could be used in politics for better communication with the voters. My first computer was a Sirius, which used as storage two disk drives, each able to take a half-megabyte floppy disk. I used it to start with for correspondence, keeping the records of my surgery cases and managing our by now very complex and large-scale
Counter Point
distribution lists. But even in
those early days I was very conscious of the potential of these new machines for communicating with the electorate and remember saying to a friend as early as 1982 that, alongside leaflets, computers would soon be used to send individually personalised letters through the post to each elector. I was subsequently the first MP to have a computer in the House of Commons. Later a friend, Gillian Gunner, and I wrote the first-ever election-fighting computer program: Polly. (To be precise, she did the programming, and I provided the political advice.) This software became widely used in the Party, gave us an early and important tactical advantage over the other parties in elections and was instrumental in our string of by-election victories in the early days of my Leadership of the Party.

We were now making steady progress in Yeovil. But we were not immune to the impact of political events on the national scene. The Labour Party was still catastrophically divided and floundering. Meanwhile the Liberal–SDP Alliance was enjoying a bubble of success. I was against the Alliance when it all started back in 1980, saying in a local TV interview that ‘we should not sell our [Liberal] birthright for this mess of pottage’. But I soon saw I was wrong. The Alliance’s popularity shot up at first, reaching a dizzying 50% in opinion polls at the end of 1981. But this hype could not be sustained, and soon we began to drift downwards again. Meanwhile the Falklands campaign burst upon us. I remember sitting on the Down above Weymouth, listening over my car radio to the debate in the House of Commons and wishing I was there. It is often believed that it was the Falklands campaign that turned things round for Mrs Thatcher. This is wrong. I remember very clearly feeling that the public mood was beginning to swing behind her several months before it began. The Falklands victory may not have created the Thatcher bounce-back, but it certainly consolidated and accelerated it.

It was clear to all of us that the general election would have to be called that year, and that Mrs Thatcher would wait to see the result of the 5 May District Council elections before deciding whether it would be a month later, in June, or whether she would wait for the autumn. In Yeovil we beat Conservatives and Labour alike in the local elections, winning a total of twenty-seven seats (twenty-four Liberal and three SDP) on the District Council and overturning decades of Conservative control. This gave us minority control of the Council, which soon became outright control, due to defections and by-election wins: a position never lost in the twenty-five years since.

But Mrs Thatcher was not looking at Yeovil. She was looking at the country at large, where the results confirmed that, in an early election, she would probably be returned with a handsome majority. The Alliance and Labour, meanwhile, were neck and neck in the national polls.

When, four days after the local poll, she called the general election for 9 June, and I said goodbye to my colleagues in Dorset Youth Service on temporary leave of absence to fight the campaign, I fully expected to see them again in a few weeks’ time. I knew, of course that our position in Yeovil was much stronger than it had been in 1979, and that we would probably widen the gap with Labour and narrow it with the Tories – putting us within striking distance, I hoped, of being able to beat them at the next election. But I did not think we could actually win.

And the start of our campaign in 1983 did very little to encourage me. Nick sent Jane and me alone to Buckland St Mary (at the time a Tory stronghold) at the western extremity of the Constituency. In a whole day’s canvassing we found no more than a tiny handful of supporters, and then, to top it all, at the first public meeting of the campaign in the village hall that evening, not a single person turned up. Dejected and cross, I rang Nick that evening complaining that it was a disaster and that no one had come out to help us. He calmed me down and got me back on the road the following day, saying that his plan was to leave our best areas to the last.

At first the Liberal–SDP Alliance did not do well. I remember being shocked by the discovery that Roy Jenkins (for whom I had, and retain, a very high regard) was so unpopular, especially in Labour areas. He was – most unfairly, in my view – seen by many, including potential supporters, as an upper-crust fat cat who had returned from Brussels (where he had been President of the Commission) and was completely out of touch with the realities of life in Britain. Our opinion poll ratings started to drift down dangerously. Halfway through the campaign, David Steel called a ‘summit’ at his house in Ettrick Bridge in Scotland and, in a move as deft as it was ruthless and necessary, sidelined Jenkins and took control of the national campaign. Our poll ratings began to recover immediately.

From this moment onwards our local campaign got better and better and more and more fun every day. Our daily and constant companion was Les Farris, then a relatively newly arrived activist, later a
most effective regional agent for the Party in the south-west when I was Leader, and ever since one of our closest friends. He drove us everywhere in a long-wheelbase Land Rover lent by a friend, to which we became so attached on our dawn to dusk daily outings that, for some reason I cannot remember, we conferred on it a Party membership card under the name Trevor Dark Green. It was on this campaign that Les also invented a new political rule, which we called the Jack Russell Protocol. This asserted that everyone who owned a Jack Russell was a Liberal voter. And so it apparently turned out to be. For we tried the Jack Russell Protocol out on every owner of a Jack Russell we saw during the campaign (and there seem to be many in this part of Somerset), and it never failed us. On election day itself, we were driving down an especially bumpy and isolated country lane and came across a Jack-Russell-cross hunting in the hedgerow. I insisted that Les should stop so that I could search out the owner, who I found a few moments later and, in the presence of his half-Jack Russell/half-dachshund, I asked him how he intended to vote? He told me that he had half-decided to vote Liberal, but hadn’t made up his mind yet!

A number of national newspapers visited Yeovil and did profiles on us, some saying (
The Times
in particular) that Yeovil was a possible Liberal gain from the Tories. We cut these out and put them in our last-minute leaflet to boost our momentum. On the eve of the poll, I met for an end-of-campaign pint or two with fellow campaigners in the Rose and Crown, a rural and very down to earth pub
*
we loved, right in the very centre of the Constituency. During our conversation one of our team complained that they did not have enough ‘Good Morning’ leaflets for the following day. I immediately went back to our headquarters, changed into the Turin Shroud, flashed up Clarissa and printed more for them before returning home at 2 a.m. I slept fitfully that night, worrying about what tomorrow would bring.

Despite the positive comments of the Press and the optimism of our campaigners, at the start of polling day I did not feel that victory was possible – though I did think we could come quite close. But during the day I was struck by a real sense of excitement on the streets. Children cheered us wherever we went, and so many people came up in the street asking for stickers that we soon ran out and had to call for more.

Nevertheless, driving into the count at 11 p.m. that night I wondered to Jane whether I could keep it going for another four years to the next election. She told me not to be so silly: we were going to win. As I walked in, Nick Speakman came over to me and said he thought we were ahead, but it was narrow. Kate and Simon and one of our female activists who said she couldn’t stand the suspense either, immediately retired with a packet of cigarettes to the ladies’ loo and refused to come out. Jane and I, meanwhile, took ourselves off to a room set aside for the candidates, where we spoke to the Press and tried to look unconcerned. At a few minutes past midnight, Nick came to me and whispered in my ear that we had won. It was only at this stage that Kate, on hearing the news, emerged from the loo to throw her arms around the nearest startled stranger and tried to dance round with him, shouting, ‘I can’t believe it – he’s won! He’s won!’, only to discover that her reluctant dance partner was the defeated Tory candidate, David Martin!