David Waddington Memoirs (32 page)

I was then also President of the Hertford Society which promotes the interests of Hertford College, Oxford. Many years earlier the college had refused my son James a place, but eventually I forgave them and was mollified when I was made an honorary fellow.

I was for a number of years a trustee of Natural Justice, a charity concerned, among other things, with the effect of diet on criminal behaviour, but eventually gave up when my ears packed up and I could not hear what was going on at meetings.

As to the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association (OSPA), of which I have for many years been President, it has among its members many former servants of the Crown who had worked in Southern Rhodesia and stayed on when it became Zimbabwe. It was a very serious matter for them when, first, run-away inflation reduced the value of Zimbabwean pensions to a pittance and, then, Mugabe and his government ceased making any pension payments at all in contravention of the terms of the independence
constitution
agreed at Lancaster House. At that juncture, the British government should have stepped in and assumed responsibility for payment of the pensions in the same way that they had done when the governments of other former colonies had defaulted. But, to its shame, the British government said it was under no
obligation
to help because Southern Rhodesia had been ‘an internally self-governing colony with its civil servants recruited by Rhodesia House in London rather than by the Colonial Office’. Those Crown servants were to be abandoned even though Rhodesia had been thought so much a British responsibility that Mr Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence had been resisted in every possible way. It seemed pretty daft and downright immoral to me, but I have got nowhere when I have raised the matter. That is not quite right. I did get somewhere with Lord Malloch-Brown who, having heard my pleas, seemed entirely persuaded and went away to tell the Foreign Office so. But after a month or two he came
back and said most apologetically that he had failed to persuade his superiors.

I have been President of OSPA for far too long, and have asked them to look for someone to take on the Presidency – a step I was reluctant to take because, with the days of Empire fading into history and the last of its servants trooping to the grave, the
winding
up of the organisation might not long be delayed. There is, however, still important work to be done by the organisation. It is surely our duty to see that the good name of the Service is not sullied and that the public understands that those who went out to the colonies were motivated by a sense of public service and were there to help prepare the people for independence, not (as left-wing propagandists pretend) to bully the people and profit at their expense.

A few years ago there was a service in Westminster Abbey attended by the Queen to celebrate the work done by the Colonial Service over the years, and I asked Richard Luce to give the address. I remember the Queen listening with rapt attention as he described how, as a young district officer in Kenya, he dispensed justice under a tree; and I like to think that when a short time later he was appointed Lord Chamberlain I might have had a small hand in it. OSPA is very lucky to have Lord Luce at hand, always prepared to take a keen interest in its affairs.

Lastly, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time supporting the National Council of Resistance of Iran which works tirelessly to hasten the day when Iran will be rid of the present tyrannical regime. Numerous articles under my name have appeared in American and other newspapers, and I was one of those who brought proceedings to have the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) removed from the list of organisations proscribed under powers in the Anti-Terrorism Act 2001. When Gilly and I went to Paris to meet Mrs Rajavi, the President of the NCRI, and
attend a rally I found myself addressing 70,000 people in a gigantic hangar-like building somewhere in the northern suburbs. For me that was a record.

So I find it quite difficult to be bored and rarely succeed.

In the general election of 2001 William Hague led the Conservative Party to defeat after a lacklustre campaign in which he said that there were only a few days left to save the pound. The claim was not convincing, the government having promised a referendum if they concluded that the time was ripe to join the euro. When the votes had been counted William resigned and the Party had to set about electing a new leader. The obvious candidate was the one with vast experience of government, Kenneth Clarke, but I could not support him because of his pig-headed refusal to compromise in the slightest over Europe. Various people begged him to say that he would not force-feed the Party with his views and would listen to the opinions of others, but he went down to defeat having steadfastly declined to say anything of the sort. So Iain Duncan Smith won, but there were soon doubts as to whether he was up to the job.

John Prescott was now busy cooking up plans for elected regional assemblies. In the debate on the Queen’s Speech I expressed surprise at the extraordinary interest being taken in these developments by the bishops. ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘unbeknown to me the synod has just slipped through an addendum to the creed: “I believe in the Balkanisation of England, another layer or two of local
government
, a multiplication of councillors and a Europe of the regions”.’ The Bishop of Bristol talked about bringing decision-making closer to the people, but that was not for one moment what the government’s plans meant. As I pointed out in the debate on the address, the plan was for powers devolved from Whitehall to go to regional bodies, not to existing local authorities which really were close to the people. Happily, the bishops did not get their wishes.

There could be no better reminder of our Christian heritage which some are trying to airbrush out of our island story than the fact that we have an established Church of which the Queen is Supreme Governor, with bishops of the Church sitting in Parliament. I do, however, confess that the bishops do sometimes try my patience – as I no doubt try theirs. They are very quick to talk of things like regional government where they have no special expertise, but in recent years they have been remarkably reluctant to speak out on matters of faith. It is ridiculous that it should have been for me, Detta and a few others like Rodney Elton
*
to defend the right of people to live by their Christian beliefs and practise their faith in the face of the rising tide of atheism, while the Bishops’ Bench has for most of the time stayed silent. The bishops, with one or two honourable exceptions, seemed to have become quite reconciled to ‘equal rights’ prevailing over the rights of people to practise their faith even when the result has been, as it was in the case of the Catholic adoption societies,
reducing
the chance of young children finding a good home and loving parents. Perhaps now after the spirited defence of the Church by the excellent Lord Carey and the intervention of the Queen, some of these bishops and other churchmen will at last wake up to the great danger the Church is now facing as a result of their not having faced up to the threat from secularism and atheism long ago.

In the early summer of 2003 when the government, grappling with the grizzly consequences of the invasion of Iraq, might have been thought to have something better to do, Blair decided to embark at home on a blatant and preposterous piece of
constitutional
vandalism. On 12 June 2003, there was an announcement on
television that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished and the Earl of Onslow interrupted a debate in the House of Lords to say that it was an outrage that this should have been decided without debate. Lord Cope of Berkeley, the Opposition Chief Whip, intervened to say that one of the things the government was doing was taking away from the Lords the services of the Lord Chancellor as their presiding officer, which led Lord Williams of Mostyn, Leader of the House, to rise and refer to what appeared to be a press release entitled ‘Reform of the Speakership of the Lords’ which talked, he said, of a new Speaker for the Lords being in place after the recess. Lord Onslow’s motion that the House adjourn was lost, but the cat was out of the bag.

Although the office of Lord Chancellor was older even than Parliament, Tony Blair had decided to abolish it and create instead a Ministry for Constitutional Affairs – and to do so without consulting Parliament or even the Queen. The Prime Minister seems to have thought that all that was involved was a change in the machinery of government and he had to be told that there were about 5,000 references to the Lord Chancellor in primary and secondary legislation and there would have to be a huge ‘transfer of functions order’ to allow others to exercise functions then exercised by the Lord Chancellor. Furthermore, those of his functions which were judicial could not be transferred to any old Secretary of State, but would have to go to a ‘residual’ Lord Chancellor until
legislation
was passed creating a new head of the judiciary. At the
eleventh
hour Lord Irvine had put forward a compromise plan under which he would stay in office until these necessary changes had been made, but this idea was not acceptable to the Prime Minister and Irvine’s services had been dispensed with. A more pliable Lord Falconer of Thoroton had then agreed to serve as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and was apparently under the impression that, there being no longer a Lord Chancellor, someone else would
be found to sit on the woolsack when the House of Lords met in the morning. He was in for a rude awakening.

The Opposition Chief Whip let it be known that the Lords’ Standing Orders required the Lord Chancellor to be present and made it plain that there would be a most almighty row if he was not there. ‘But,’ said Falconer’s private office, ‘he has not got the uniform.’ ‘He had better find one,’ said Cope: and he did. Furthermore, he found himself compelled to continue to sit on the woolsack for many, many months while legislation
creating
a Ministry of Justice and a Supreme Court ground its way through Parliament.

Altogether it was a shocking tale of constitutional meddling and the arrogance of power. It also cost the public a mint of money: the Lords had now to elect a Speaker to replace the Lord Chancellor, and the new Supreme Court had to be found a lavish building in which to perform functions, which up to the time of Blair’s brainstorm the Law Lords had had no difficulty in carrying out in a modest room on the committee corridor in the Palace of Westminster.

Meanwhile, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was presiding over a commission charged with drafting a constitution for the European Union and the excellent Gisela Stewart, Labour MP for Edgbaston and a member of the commission, was being told by the great man that she had better shape up and agree with what he proposed or she would not get an equestrian statue of herself in her village square. Eventually the constitution was published and was found to contain 67,000 words with another 60,000 words in the appendices. Critics were not slow to point out that the Lord’s Prayer contains sixty-six words, the Gettysburg address 179 and the Ten Commandments 179. I spoke out against this piece of constitutional vandalism.

In November 2003, the government reclassified cannabis as a Class ‘C’ drug. I spoke against the order making the change and
pointed out that downgrading cannabis and the decision to let off offenders with a caution sent out entirely the wrong signal to young people and made things almost impossible for parents. ‘Not only,’ I said, ‘does smoking cannabis all too often lead to the use of heroin and crack cocaine, traded by the very same dealers from whom the cannabis is obtained, it is a very dangerous drug itself. It is a mind-bending substance.’ And I then went on to quote what Professor John Henry, a toxicologist, had said at The Royal Society of Medicine conference in London: ‘Regular cannabis smokers develop mental illness. There is a four-fold increase in
schizophrenia
and a four-fold increase in major depression.’

I felt I had to explain why I felt so strongly about the matter, my son Matthew having had to leave Cambridge because of mental illness brought on by cannabis use. ‘I have to tell Your Lordships,’ I said, ‘that I know personally only too well that cannabis does ruin peoples’ lives. It has come close to ruining the life of someone very close to me who has suffered from schizophrenia as a result of cannabis use. That is the diagnosis so don’t tell me that cannabis is pretty harmless.’ The government got its order but in 2008 realised how foolish it had been and restored the original classification.

The beginning of 2004 saw the publication of the Report of the Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly. We on the Opposition benches in the Lords had prepared ourselves well before is publication. Clearly there was no way in which Alastair Campbell was going to wriggle out of this one, no chance of Geoff Hoon and officials in his Department having been able to persuade Lord Hutton that they had treated Dr Kelly
properly
, and Tony Blair was clearly in for a roasting for having remained silent when papers reported that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be used against us at forty-five minutes’ notice. Obviously it was going to be difficult for Michael Howard, Leader of the Opposition, who was not to see the report until the morning
of the day on which it was to be presented to Parliament, but as it was so obvious that the government had misbehaved he would have in his head already the arguments to be used in the House. When, however, Michael read the report he must have been
absolutely
astonished, and a weaker man might have had all the stuffing knocked out of him. For the report was a complete whitewash.

A few days later there was a debate in the Lords. It was opened by Lord Falconer, still Lord Chancellor, and I followed. The report’s conclusion was that there was nothing wrong in the way Dr Kelly was revealed as the source for what Andrew Gilligan said on the
Today
programme. But that seemed quite bizarre. I reminded the House of what was said in Alastair Campbell’s diary: ‘GH (Geoff Hoon) and I agreed it would f*** Gilligan if that was the source – the biggest thing needed was the source out – spent much of the weekend talking to TB and GH re the source.’ Campbell had, in fact, said at the inquiry that in government circles it was
recognised
that it would indeed assist them to get Kelly’s name out in the open. ‘How on earth, in the face of all that,’ I said, ‘can one take seriously Mr Hoon’s statement that he made great efforts to ensure Dr Kelly’s anonymity? Far from doing anything of the sort, he agreed to the issue of a press statement and a course of action which he knew would lead to the naming of Dr Kelly. He did not even tell Dr Kelly what he was going to do.’