A Fortunate Life (42 page)

I was now dealing with four concurrent issues, any one of which could have swamped us: the Owenite resurgence; rebellion on all sides as a result of my fast footwork after Richmond; the name issue; and now, to add to all these, the fast-approaching local elections and European elections, followed by yet another by-election that had just been called in the Vale of Glamorgan, a place which, to put it mildly, was a desert for us.

I managed to persuade the rebellious Scottish and Welsh MPs to put the name issue to one side while we fought the coming elections – though it flared up from time to time, including in June when three of the Welsh MPs, backed by some of their Scottish colleagues, repeated publicly to the BBC that they were prepared to take unilateral action by calling themselves Liberal Democrats. Again, I managed to persuade them to withdraw, but it was clear that the boil had to be lanced, and quickly. The crunch came at a very bad-tempered meeting of all MPs in July (I should never have let it go on that long), at which Roy Jenkins and David Steel proposed we should let the name evolve naturally, and everyone could call themselves what they wanted in the meantime. I went home that night, poured myself a large whisky and quite quickly came to the conclusion that the problem was me – I was wrong and had to change course if I was not to destroy the Party completely. Being a relative outsider compared to the older MPs (something I later found I shared with Blair), I had, in my rush to create the new party, failed to understand that a political party is about more than plans and priorities and policies and a chromium-plated organisation. It also has a heart and a history and a soul – especially a very old party like the Liberals. Alan Beith and the other ‘Name’ rebels understood this better than me. They were right, and I had nearly wrecked the Party by becoming too attached to my own vision and ignoring the fact that political parties are, at root, human organisations
and not machines. It was not difficult then to decide that the Jenkins/Steel proposition would only cause even more confusion when what we needed was clarity. I concluded that I should announce a referendum of all Party members, dare any MP to say that they would go against the democratic voice of the Party and announce at the same time that I would be voting for ‘Liberal Democrat’. The row quickly subsided, a ballot of all members was arranged and, in the autumn, the Party agreed to ‘Liberal Democrat’ by an overwhelming vote.

But by then we had even bigger problems to deal with.

I had two abortive secret meetings with Owen to see if we could resolve the warfare between the two Parties. The first, on 16 March 1989, was at the house of his friend and financial backer David Sainsbury. This meeting, like the one which followed, foundered on the fact that Owen could not accept a process whereby local constituencies would decide their own local candidates, and I could not accept a nationally negotiated deal in which local constituencies played no part.

But by this stage the moment of danger was over and things were much easier, for the Owenites had done disastrously badly in the local elections (in which we had done surprisingly well, limiting our losses to a hundred). They then got a mere 2% of the vote in the Vale of Glamorgan, and in a later by-election in Glasgow Central came fifth behind the Greens. The
coup de grâce
came at a third by-election in Bootle, where they ignominiously trailed home behind Screaming Lord Sutch. They were now becoming the butt of all the jokes we had suffered from earlier in the year, and this, I think, David Owen found impossible to stomach. They finally packed up their tents and melted away on 14 May 1990,
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to my great relief.

But, even before the Owenites departed the political scene, a greater and more deadly threat to us emerged. For the first time – and very suddenly – environmental issues started to become important on the national political agenda, causing even Mrs Thatcher to make pro-environment speeches (in one of which, to the great joy of the satirists, she promised single-handedly to ‘save the world’). As traditionally Britain’s most environmentally aware mainstream Party, we rather complacently believed we had a monopoly on this agenda. But
it was the Greens who suddenly caught the public’s attention by launching a most imaginative campaign for the 1989 European Elections, in which they fielded an almost full slate of candidates across the country. Just before polling day I started getting reports of a strong Green surge and, indeed, could even feel it in my own Somerset constituency. But none of this prepared me for the shock of the morning of 18 June, when the Euro-election count revealed that the Greens had beaten us into fourth position in every single seat in Britain, except Cornwall (including in my own Somerset), getting nearly two-and-a-half times our national share of the vote. I went to bed that night tormented by the thought that the Party that had started with Gladstone would end with Ashdown.

The opinion-polling organisations run regular polls on how the party leaders are doing – measured by the public’s answer to the question, ‘In your opinion is Party Leader X doing a good or a bad job?’ and then giving a figure based on the difference between those answering ‘good’ and those who say ‘bad’. My rating at this time was a catastrophic minus 23%! This, I think, was the lowest moment of my entire Leadership.

I have always thought that the battle between the two major parties is like a heavyweight boxing match in which the two contestants slug it out, and the last one to remain standing wins. But third-party politics is much more like ju-jitsu: you have to take the momentum of forces you are given and turn them to your advantage. When faced with a political crisis, my first instinct, since I cannot alter the forces involved, has always been to try to find the means to turn them, or else find a way to ride with the punch. But on this occasion I could do nothing. It was a sudden and unforeseen disaster, and we just had to have the strength to hang on and sit it out.

The papers were full of the fact that this disaster was all the result of my leadership, and when I stood up at the next Prime Minister’s Question Time, there were shouts from all around of ‘Mr Six Percent!’ (our poll share in the Euros) and ‘Bite the cyanide capsule, Paddy’. To make matters worse, my postbag was now full of letters from members of the Party saying they were resigning and going to join the Greens, and the
Observer
published a report at the weekend that Simon Hughes was threatening to do the same, if things didn’t improve.
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And they didn’t improve, for we were now facing another financial crisis. In early July Tim Clement Jones, a long-time supporter and close friend who had taken over the Finance Committee, told me that we were facing a
£
200,000 liquidity shortfall by the end of September and could not pay salaries after that date. Shortly afterwards, the bank threatened to foreclose on our loan, and the auditors announced that they were intending to qualify our accounts, in effect making us bankrupt. We would have to cut our costs – and that meant staff – again. Only this time, having recognised that we had been too timid previously, Tim and I were determined to cut deep enough to get ourselves back into the black, even if it meant reducing the Party’s central staff to a mere skeleton and getting rid of our entire network of regional agents. I even asked my friend Archy Kirkwood to double up and combine his job as Deputy Whip and spokesman for Scotland with that of General Secretary of the Party in Cowley Street, in order to save costs. There was much opposition to this, with dire predictions about destroying the whole Party, but eventually we got the package through the Party’s key committees. Even then, the bank would not agree not to foreclose unless the Officers of the Party signed a formal undertaking that our personal assets were, in the last event, on call if the bank could not recover the loan by any other means. One of the most moving experiences of my life was watching as each of my closest colleagues on the Executive Committee of the Party signed a form which, in effect, bet their personal assets on the Party’s survival.

Our opinion-poll standing was around 4%,
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and sometimes even lower. Indeed I think I am the only modern party leader who has had the distinction of presiding over an opinion-poll rating of an asterisk: indicating that the pollsters could find no detectable level of support!

There were, however, two tiny shafts of light amidst all this gloom. The first was the issue of Hong Kong passports. The Tiananmen Square massacre had taken place in June, and I had got immediately involved, visiting Hong Kong with Bob MacLennan and joining in some of the demonstrations.
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On our return we persuaded the Party
that we should adopt the highly risky policy of insisting that all the 3.5 million ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong who were British subjects should be given right of abode in Britain if they wished to take it up in an emergency after the Chinese took over in 1997. The Government had withdrawn this right, and the Labour Party had cravenly supported them. Needless to say, agreeing to allow 3.5 million Chinese to come and live in Britain was not a popular position, even with some of my MPs. But it was right and would, in my view, have greatly assisted with inward investment to Britain just when the country needed it most (instead, much of this investment went to the west coast of the United States and to Canada). Moreover, it was a policy supported by most of the left-leaning Press. But, most important of all, it was a clear and distinguishing radical position that was consistent with our Liberal Democrat internationalist traditions, gave us a
raison d’être
for our existence and some much needed pride in ourselves. Later we were to discover that our strong position on Hong Kong passports also had the unintended benefit of helping us raise funds for the Party from the expatriate Chinese community.

Secondly, though the benefits from this were to come much later, I had decided that I needed to put down on paper a clear policy prospectus outlining what it was that I believed the Party should stand for. In June, just after our devastating defeat by the Greens, I started to write my first book, subsequently titled
Citizen’s Britain
and published in time for the Party Conference in September that year.

This was my first book, and the one that, in many ways, I am most proud of – for it sought to map a coherent new agenda for the liberal left in Britain based on shifting power from the state producer to the citizen consumer. It proposed that the delivery of public services, such as education and health, should be based on choice, and that the money should follow the citizen, not the citizen the money. It asserted that liberalism was different from socialism, because what it was ruled by was not equality of outcome but equality of opportunity, and that the job of the liberal state should be to provide this. And it thus established, long before Blair’s famous ‘education, education, education’ slogan, that education was the key investment the nation had to make, paving the way for our later 1p on income tax for education, arguably the most successful policy the Party had in my time. In all these ways, it long predated the Blairite revolution. But it was different
from Blairism in one crucial way. It was committed to deep constitutional change and the establishment of a strong bulwark of individual civil liberties, in order to create a Britain based around the powerful citizen, not the powerful state.

Having resolved the name issue, I was now determined to replace our old Party symbol, a dreadful diamond-shaped thing that was easily confused with the ‘Baby on Board’ sign that new parents put in the back of their car. In May the following year, after a very long process of consultation and against the background of some low-key criticism and a few rather good jokes at our expense from the newspaper cartoonists, the Party overwhelmingly adopted the yellow ‘Lib Dem Bird of Liberty’, which has remained our symbol ever since.
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The main national political issue of 1990 was the Poll Tax. On 8 March that year I was almost engulfed in one of the most violent of the anti-poll tax rallies when I went to speak at a protest meeting in Hackney, managing to escape through the back door of the Hall just before the Militant Left took over and the whole scene descended into violence. However, the really effective action that stopped the Poll Tax did not take place on the streets of London, but in a key by-election which had now been called.