A Fortunate Life (37 page)

It did disturb me, though, for I was acting as Liberal Parliamentary spokesman on Trade and Industry (David Steel asked me to do it because, he said, I was the only Liberal MP with any experience of running a business), and in this capacity had regular morning meetings with bankers and industrialists who wanted to be helpful. What these captains of British industry thought of meetings conducted to the accompaniment of David’s stertorous snores from the other side of the office bookcase, while his shirts, socks and underpants hung in festoons around us, they were far too polite to say. I soon learned from bitter experience to avoid fixing meetings before 11.30. Before this, David could at any moment emerge, bleary-eyed, stubble-chinned and usually naked, but for a very skimpy towel round his midriff, and thread his way wordlessly through the assembly on my side of the office, heading for the adjacent Gents lavatory and his morning ablutions.

I found my first year in Parliament by turns dispiriting and frustrating, and also sometimes irksome. It proved quite exhausting, as well. In those days we received no training to be an MP and were more or less left to our own devices, to sink or swim with little help from the Party and none from the House of Commons authorities. Meanwhile, I had two complete offices to set up (one in London and one in Yeovil), together with staff to recruit and equipment to purchase for both. I was exceptionally fortunate on both fronts. My old Geneva Foreign Office Secretary, Sue Hedderwick (by then Sue O’Sullivan, married and with three children) agreed to come and set up my London office for me (in fact it was with her and her husband Rod, that we had all spent the night before the State Opening). And back in my constituency I managed to persuade the then Yeovil Constituency Secretary, Cathy Bakewell, to work for me. Both did an outstanding job. Sue O’Sullivan, who ultimately became a teacher, worked for me until expecting her fourth child, returning briefly to run my personal office during my campaign for the Party Leadership in 1988. Cathy Bakewell spent twenty long years working for me, first in the Constituency and then, after the 1997 election, running my Leader’s Office in London. She later went on be elected a County Councillor, become a highly effective Leader of Somerset County Council and be awarded a MBE for her public work.
A person of fiery temperament, strong character and decided views, she and I fought regularly about many things, but never fell out for long over anything. I have discovered that secretaries to the ‘important’ generally come in two categories. There are the charming ones who present an ever-smiling face and dispense sweetness to all as they pass through the ‘shining portals of power’. And then there are the ‘dragons’, who see it as their duty to lie across the front of the cave and give all, irrespective of rank or status, a sharp nip on the ankles as they pass. The formidable Cathy Bakewell (though no dragon in the conventional sense of the word, I hasten to add) definitely fell into the second category, and I knew several senior Parliamentarians who were so in awe of her that they would go to great lengths to make sure their visits to see me were at times when she was out of the office.

Even with the help of Sue and Cathy, though, it still took a good year to establish my two offices and get them working effectively. One of the causes of the system overload was, of course, me. I was like Billy Bunter in a tuck shop – I simply could not believe the number of things people suddenly wanted me to get involved in, and could refuse none of them. The result was that I took up speaking engagements from one end of the country to the other almost every weekend. By the time the summer Parliamentary recess came, what with the nervous energy of the election campaign and the hectic programme afterwards, I was exhausted. Jane and I decided to take three weeks in Switzerland, where we went to visit Kate, then working as an au pair in a village above Lake Geneva. After that we took two weeks with our son Simon and Les Farris and his wife Joan on a walking holiday in the Canton of Apenzell, using as our base a chalet belonging to some Swiss friends from our Geneva days. After one especially long walk I banged my shin, which, probably because of my run-down state, almost immediately went bad, spreading poison right up my leg and, after a couple of days, making me delirious with fever. We were a long way from a town and a doctor, but fortunately Joan Farris is a nurse, and she, with the help of a local pharmacist, managed to get me back on my feet again. The pharmacist said that I was lucky not to lose the leg.

In every other job I had done, I had found my energy had far outrun the needs of the job. But the job of an MP can be as big or as small as you wish to make it, and, being an enthusiast, I wanted to make it as big as possible. However, the lesson of my poisoned leg was clear: for the first time in my life I was going to have to limit myself to
what I could do properly, rather than taking on everything that came my way. I swiftly decided that the first thing was to consolidate my base in Yeovil. With a majority of 3,600, it was anything but secure, so building it up into a safe seat was priority number one.

I discussed my frustrations with David Penhaligon, who pointed me in the right direction in Westminster: ‘You want my advice? Specialise, boy,’ he said. ‘Choose something, preferably something eye-catching, and make yourself the acknowledged expert on it in the House.’

As it happened, just at this time I was being contacted by the newly emerging British computer industry about a rather obscure issue called ‘extraterritoriality’. Though complex in its application, the issue was simple. Almost all British-manufactured new-technology goods at the time (and no doubt still) contained US-made components. The US had, however, passed a law saying that, where another country manufactured goods containing any US component, however small or insignificant, those goods could not be sold to a third country without a US licence. On the face of it this was a perfectly sensible precaution to prevent US technology falling into the hands of America’s enemies (e.g., at the time, Russia and China), but the regulation was being used in a manner which was blatantly discriminatory: British firms’ ‘licenses’ were held up by the US authorities while US competitors moved in and captured the market.

It was a great issue. It was of real importance, attracted a good deal of interest from the Press, was consistent with my position as Trade and Industry spokesman, incorporated my enthusiasm for the new technologies, and contained just a tiny hint of a fluttering Union Jack, which for a Liberal was always an added bonus. I was soon doing television programmes and writing newspaper articles on the scandal (which it was) of ‘extraterritoriality’ and the secretive and shadowy Co-ordinating Committee (COCOM) in Paris which ran the whole policy. I even got Mrs Thatcher to admit to me in a letter that, ‘US claims to extraterritorial jurisdiction are offensive’,
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but she added that she could do nothing about it!

The expansion of my horizons had a human dimension as well as a political one. In the early years of the 1983 parliament I started to work in earnest with two people who were to become close friends and be crucial to me later, both as an MP and as the Party leader. The
first was Richard Holme, a fellow candidate (in his case, fighting Cheltenham). Richard, a man of outstanding gifts and extraordinary range,
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was David Steel’s principal adviser and would later play the same role for me. He was also one of the chief architects of the Liberal–SDP Alliance, of our eventual merger into one Party, and of the 1997 partnership between the Liberal Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour that turned a Tory defeat into a Tory rout and was instrumental in leading to the greatest programme of constitutional reform in Britain since the early years of the twentieth century.
The second person was Alan Leaman, whom I had first met when he was a student at Bristol University and the
rapporteur
for a commission looking into youth policy that I chaired at the 1982 Liberal Assembly in Bournemouth. He would later play key roles, first in the merger between the Liberals and the SDP and then in my campaign to become the Liberal Democrats’ first leader, before heading the policy unit in my Leader’s office, writing many of my speeches and persuading me to take an interest in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It was also at this time that I started writing pamphlets and articles for the newspapers, especially the
Guardian
and, later, the
Independent
– something I really enjoy and still love to do when I get the chance. I find great satisfaction in taking a complex idea and squeezing it into a thousand carefully considered words for a newspaper, or into something a little longer for a pamphlet. In June 1983, only a couple of weeks after my election, Richard Holme and I wrote ‘First Steps Back From the Brink’, which proposed a multilateral freeze on all further deployments of nuclear weapons as the prelude to step-by-step, multilateral and verifiable reductions leading on to minimum deterrent holdings by both sides in the Cold War.

Perhaps as result of all this and other pamphlets, in mid-1984 I suddenly found I was often being invited to lunch by senior members of the Westminster Press Lobby and asked my opinion on the future of my Party and the Alliance. I long ago discovered my metabolism is just too weak to permit me to be more than a very occasional member of Westminster’s lunching classes. Eating and (especially) drinking at midday inevitably sends me to sleep or gives me a ferociously bad temper –sometimes both – in the afternoon. My favourite lunch at this
time was an hour in the gym and an apple at my desk, which must have made me quite insufferable to more normal inhabitants of the Westminster village. I also started to get invitations to appear on programmes like
Question Time
and its radio equivalent
Any Questions
.

In early 1985 I was on
Any Questions
with David Blunkett (then not an MP but still Leader of Sheffield City Council), who brought his guide dog Ted onto the set and settled him down under the cloth-covered table at our feet. Here he was invisible to the audience. But we knew he was there alright, for he farted heartily throughout the whole hour of the broadcast. Along with others on the panel, I found it nearly impossible to get through the programme because of a combination of near-asphyxiation and irrepressible laughter. The audience, who of course were oblivious of our suffering, must have been deeply perplexed. Jane told me when I got home that she could quite clearly hear suppressed giggling from the panel on the airwaves.

Shortly after this the US Government invited me to spend a month in the United States on their Foreign Visitor Programme to see the country as a guest of the US Government. I chose to go to Silicon Valley, near San Francisco, to look at their new-technology industry and then to visit some US defence establishments and finally to join a Congressman (Democrat Dan Glickman
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) on his re-election campaign. The official part of the tour took three weeks, but I was allowed to bring Jane out for the last week, which we took as a holiday. We had a wonderful seven days touring New England, at the time dressed overall in the spectacular colours of the Fall, and visiting Boston (where I gave a lecture) and, on a moody day with drifts of sea fog, Hyannisport, to pay homage at the home of the Kennedys. It was good investment on the part of the US Government, for I have remained a great fan of the United States (even if not always of all its Governments) ever since.

Jane and I went more or less straight from our US trip to the 1984 Liberal Assembly in Bournemouth, where the key debate was on defence and nuclear disarmament. The US had just unilaterally deployed cruise missiles in Britain, with the consequence that the USSR had walked out of the disarmament talks. This was totally contrary to what Richard Holme and I had written in ‘First Steps Back From the Brink’ a year earlier, so I decided I would, once again, have to oppose the leadership and support an amendment to the Party’s defence policy,
calling for a withdrawal of the missiles ‘forthwith’. This caused very considerable annoyance to most of my Parliamentary colleagues. David Steel himself took to the floor to argue in favour of a freeze on all nuclear deployments at present levels (i.e., with cruise missiles
in situ
) and then a negotiated withdrawal, adding that the amendment I supported would destroy the credibility of the Party’s defence policy. But I responded by saying that you couldn’t negotiate removal when there were no negotiations going on: the deployment of the missiles had stalled them! If we wanted to get negotiations going we would have to remove the block – and the block was cruise missiles. The issue was in danger of becoming a vote on David’s leadership, and I recall saying in my speech that this was a motion about cruise, not our Leader and, turning from the podium in order to address him directly, since he was sitting on the platform behind me, and saying something like, ‘David, this is not about you, it is about unnecessary nuclear weapons. We want to get rid of them. But we do not want to get rid of you.’ This received tumultuous applause from the audience but a (wholly justified) look from him which was clearly intended to turn me to stone on the spot. It was, of course, the height of cheek from a new MP, and the newspapers next day reported it as a blatant attempt to mark out the fact that I wanted his job. Actually it was intended as no such thing. I was genuinely, if ham-fistedly, trying to diminish the damage I was doing to a Leader whom I respected. But then, in politics, more than in almost any other profession, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, especially if clumsiness and naivety are thrown into the mix. Steel, in his end-of-Conference speech skilfully dismissed the defeat, but added in an interview afterwards that he would step down as Leader after the next election unless he had some role in government, which did nothing to calm speculation about a possible Leadership election and likely candidates.

Though this incident generated a good deal of bad feeling towards me amongst my fellow MPs, I was once again lionised by the radical elements of the Party. Once again I warned them, though probably too feebly, that I was not a unilateralist, and if the disarmament talks did start I would be arguing that cruise should be put in the negotiating package, not unilaterally withdrawn. But, amidst the celebrations over the defeat of the Leadership (always a favourite Liberal pastime), no one heard these protestations – or, if they did, they paid them no heed.