"In Spring of 1984, after a year of tossing barbs at one another over nuclear policy, David Owen and David Steel agreed to create a committee to craft a unified policy on Defence for the next general election. Four MPs were chosen from each party to cobble an agreement. Given my opposition to American cruise missiles, my speaking out numerous times in demonstrations against the continued existence of a British nuclear submarine fleet (Polaris) and my belief UK did not need an independent nuclear deterrent so long as the already nuclear France was our ally, I was quite surprised to be named one of the four MPs to be sent by the Liberal Party. I do not think of myself as a unilateralist, but I can understand why others could describe me as such. My views put me instantly at odds with the four SDP MPs on the committee due to all four being anti-unilateralists, none more so than Mike Thomas. Over the course of the next 18 months, Mike Thomas ensured the SDP MPs were utterly intransigent in their views and I found my Liberal colleagues bend to their view. If the trend continued, it was my belief the Alliance defence policy would represent only the view of the SDP and be a betrayal of the unilateralist views shared by many in the Liberal Party. I therefore contacted my fellow Liberal MPs who were not on the committee to warn them, and some of them went to the press."
♣ Bill Rodgers, Call Me What You Will, (Politico's, 2000):
"One would hope, in the wake of Westland, we would not indulge in press leaks, but such was not the case. Mike Thomas went ballistic, as did I. He wanted to issue an immediate press release severing all ties with the Liberals on the defence, but I thought a wiser course would be to be what Roy Jenkins dubbed to be 'Polaris agnostic.' By early '86, the issue of American cruise missiles was quite settled. Those serious politicians who opposed their upcoming presence in '83 were no longer able to prognosticate doom and gloom, for the intervening two years they had not caused a nuclear disaster. The notion of any serious political party telling the British people they must rely on the French for their defence in case of Soviet aggression would have been as suicidal as the Labour manifesto in '83 and infinitely more comical, and I knew David Steel could gloss over it with his Party if he so chose. In my view, the sole issue upon which the majority of Liberal and SDP MPs could truly divide was Polaris. Some favored scrapping the Polaris because it was outdated and needed to be replaced by something better. Others favored scrapping them for the sole reason they were nuclear. Others still favored their continued existence. Polaris above all things could divide the Alliance on defence, so I advocated not talking about it. If pressed and pressed hard, my view, was to say we will talk about replacing Polaris when it is time to replace it. In 1983, to the dismay of the unilateralist wing of his own Party, Jim Callaghan had said he could see Polaris not being obsolete for another dozen years. Polaris did not have to become an issue if Liberals and SDP chose to make a meal of it. But the Liberals did."
♦ David Steel, Against Goliath: The David Steel Story, (Penguin Books, 1989):
"Bill Rodgers and Mike Thomas tend to disagree as much as they find themselves in agreement, but both are virulent anti-unilateralists. Bill's harsh statement regarding Polaris in 1986 indicated SDP regarded the continued existence of Polaris as an article of faith to which they wished Liberal MPs to subscribe. It was not an article of the faith of many in our party."
♣ Roy Jenkins, Centre Ground, (Harper Collins, 1991):
"One of the great pleasure of being on the international stage of politics for as long as I have been is one gets to people of all races, creeds and beliefs. Of all I met, the three most courteous people were Nelson Mandela, King Hussein of Jordan and Lord Home. All three are utterly at ease with who they are and thus are able to spend more time worrying about others than themselves. Neither Bill Rodgers nor Mike Thomas nor David Steel nor Paddy Ashdown fall into that category. For that matter neither can I honestly place myself into the exalted trinity of courtesy I listed above, but I have strived for peace. In '86, the most peaceful solution was to scrap the unified defence policy for Alliance and to hold off."
♧ David Owen, Into the Maelstrom, (Macmillan, 1991):
"In '86, seven out of eight members of the Alliance Committee on Defence Policy were it total agreement over the message the Alliance would deliver come next general election. A lone Liberal MP was then able to sink 18 months of hard fought work because his feelings were hurt and David Steel did nothing to stop him. The shambles of the Defence Policy in '86 taught me Liberals could not be relied upon to close ranks and be true allies, while Fulham taught me David Steel was no Leader."
☆ John Bercow, Thatcher, Thatcherism, and Thatcherites, (Faber, 1998):
"In the minds of the public and press, Mr. King's first test at being able to manage Mrs. Thatcher's inheritance was to be his Party's handling of the Fulham by-election of 1986."
★ Screaming Lord Sutch, Screaming Sutch II: Electric Boogaloo, (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1987):
"Run as it was in the aftermath of the Fall of Mrs. Thatcher and with the election taking place just south of London and easily accessible by the tube, the Fulham by-election brought out a lot of candidates. In addition to Tories, Labour, SDP and me, there were also four Nazis (two National Front candidates, an England Demand Repatriation candidate and a National Independence Party candidate), a candidate from the splinter of my own party who called themselves Social Democratic Loonies (much to the delight of the red rags), a Fellowship party candidate who ran on a 'ban the bomb' slogan, a British communist, an Irish communist, an British-Irish communist, an Anti-European Community communist, an Anti-NATO Trotskyist, a local wine shop owner who created the Fulham Wine Connoisseur Party, a former pro-wrestler who ran under the Bolshevik Fascist party ticket (his slogan was 'Don't Settle for the Lesser of Two Evils, Choose Both!'), a pirate and a Liberal."
★ Alastair John Campbell, The Claret Revolution, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993):
"In the 1983 General Election, the Hammersmith constituency was one of a handful where the local Alliance candidates could not make peace with the division of seats. Mr. Knott ran as a Liberal candidate with the backing of the SDP and Liberal parties, while Mr. Starks ran as an (almost independent) SDP candidate without any backing of the national party. The seat was won by Labour with 41% of the vote, but to the surprise of many, the official Alliance Liberal candidate captured only 5% of the vote while the rebel Social Democrat captured 15%. Hammersmith was therefore earmarked by SDP organizations in London as a seat to be renegotiated with the Liberals prior to the next general election. This earmarking dismayed many in the London Liberal groups, none more so than the Liberal candidate for Hammersmith, a constituency neighboring Fulham."
♧ Mike Thomas, Separate Ways, (Duckworth, 2000):
"The official so-called Alliance candidate for Fulham in the 1986 by-election was SDP candidate Roger Liddle. His candidacy was confirmed by both SDP and the Liberals. The appearance of another Liberal candidate at Fulham was a very public sign of dysfunction. It was a distraction we did not need."
♥ Philip Gould, Confessions of an Adman, (HarperCollins, 1996):
"I had just about secured the funds necessary for John Boorman to film an ad for us in Fulham when Bryan Gould phoned me with the news of Mr. Boorman making an off the cuff remark about wishing to abolish the House of Lords to some American paper. It was a distraction we could ill afford and so with a heavy heart I recommended we cut ties. There were no slick ads in Fulham.
My efforts over the previous year at making Labour non-toxic to the advertising firms in the City however bore a low hanging fruit. We were able to secure the services of a half dozen smaller firms. In one of these, Deborah Mattison directed me to her troublesome employee Trevor Beattie. Mr. Bettie was, and still is, a scruffy working class hardline Labour supporter and really out of sorts in the slicked back hair ad men culture. He stuck out like a sore thumb and he was brilliant. If his name does not ring a bell with you it is because he does not seek the limelight, but his work is familiar to you all. He was the brains behind the Wonderbra 'Hello Boys' ad. But that was in 1994. In 1986, he was a lager lout, which is why the secretaries at Walworth Road immediately took a liking to him. He was the 'bad boy' and they tried to reform him, much to my endless delight. He brought a fresh eye to Fulham, a suburban Tory seat we wanted to capture but frankly had no idea how. It was he who hit upon the idea of drawing attention to the fact the Tory candidate was not from Fulham while ours, Nick Raynsford, was a Fulham man by distributing posters that simply said 'Nick Raynsford lives here.' Those posters quickly mushroomed."
♤ David Mellor, My Moment, (Fourth Estate, 2000):
"Jeffrey Archer hit upon the idea of sending a Cabinet minister a day down to Fulham to campaign for our candidate in the by-election. I immediately suggested we instead concentrate on the heavy hitters or those with the charisma necessary to sway voters. Mr. Archer agreed, but then put me down on the list of those to be sent down to fight as well. "Jeff, I can't," I patiently explained, "I lack the stature and more importantly I am a Chelsea man." Mr. Archer mooted my arguments by saying he was a Spurs fan, but that meant nothing. I disagreed. Spurs and Arsenal was at that time the key fight, with Spurs and Fulham an afterthought, while Chelsea-Fuhalm is eternal. Politics is nothing if not tribal and I was from the wrong tribe. Plus whatever my pluses are as a candidate and spokesman for my Party, winning over those who disagreed with me on the doorstep was not one of them. Still I was sent. Far from being quizzed on my football loyalties I was instead harangued for the way the Tories got rid of Mrs. Thatcher. Time and time again I was attacked in quite vitriolic terms for the handling of her departure. 'Disgrace' and 'shame' were the two most common terms I can replicate in print. It was then that the enormity of the self-inflicted wound the Tories had perpetuated was laid bare to me."
♡ Cherie Booth, Speaking for Myself, (Little, Brown, 1998):
"I was flown in to help the fight for Fulham. By contrast to the previous campaign, I could feel the groundswell shift to Labour, except when defence issue would come up. Time and time again I found myself being quizzed on Labour's stance on Polaris. I did a clog dance, being at once against the bomb and against unilateralism. But it was all for naught, everyone seemed to have known Mr. Kinnock was a unilateralist. We did far better on local issues, but the penny finally dropped for me just how passionately voters felt about the need for a UK nuclear deterrent, independent of France and Europe."
♠ William Powell, My Party - Wet or Dry, (Hamish Hamilton, 1990):
"The penny finally dropped for those who backed Mr. King when the Tories lost clear water blue Fulham - Fulham! - to blood red Labour. It was shameful."
"If 'This is Labour' partially reconciled me to the new political culture of ads, 'Nick Raynsford lives here' brought the message to my heart for good. You can teach an old dog new tricks. I would grump about the use of ads in politics still, but I would never again oppose them, nor view admen with suspicion. Fulham changed a lot of (moderate) hearts and minds on the National Executive Committee (NEC)."
♥ Bryan Gould, Hard Labour, (Penguin Books, 1989):
"On the heels of Fulham came the 1986 local elections. All 32 London boroughs, all 36 metro boroughs and 123 of 296 English districts were up for grabs, along with all 12 Scottish regions. Reversing the trend of losing council seats, Labour gained 12 councilors for a total of 8,758 (37%) council seats. The Tories lost 975 seats, though still retained 34%, with the Alliance coming in a distant third with 26%."
★ Alastair John Campbell, The Claret Revolution, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993):
"The Alliance collectively gained 338 council seats in the May 1986 local elections. Further success followed at Ryedale, where the intervention of Dr. David Owen and Bill Rodgers assured there was to be no splinter SDP candidate. Elizabeth Shields was the only candidate on the slate endorsed by the SDP and the Liberal Party and duly won."
♤ Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical, (Bantam Press, 1990):
"In the '83 general election, the Tory candidate for Ryedale retained the seat with 60% of the vote. In the '86 by-election, we limped home with 41%. I do not blame the local candidate. I blame the pathetic leadership of the Party and their inept campaign. Worse was to come in West Derbyshire."
♦ David Steel, Against Goliath: The David Steel Story, (Penguin Books, 1989):
"West Derbyshire has existed as a constituency since 1885. It had not voted in a Liberal candidate since 1918. It did so in 1986."
☆ John Bercow, Thatcher, Thatcherism, and Thatcherites, (Faber, 1998):
"Amidst the backdrop of a spike in unemployment and the turbulence of Mrs. Thatcher's departure with its subsequent wholesale reshuffle of the Cabinet, the results were not wholly unexpected. But the loss of three Tory seats in a row produced a great sense of unease. Things were not helped by the very public actions of the Conservative student activists, of which this book's author was one, having been named Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) in 1986."
♤ Brian Monteith, The Rise and Fall of Thatcherite Tory Edinburgh, (Constable, 2009):
"In the 1970s, the left did not have a monopoly on youth radicalism. We of the right-wing persuasion were tired of the politics of consensus, the malaise and the country circling the drain as well. We too wanted to rebel, but were disgusted with the leftist and liberal world view and could never join them. We did, however, envy them their moral certainty and organization. Then Mrs. Thatcher came along and provided us with the stolid moral certainty we felt was lacking and our worlds changed, or at least mine did. She staked out a position right of centre and began talking like a radical and we loved her for it. We were tired of being outflanked and outmuscled by the leftist organizations on the campuses, so we rebelled against them. In England, the struggle took the form of demand for a conservative voice on the leftist dominated National Union of Students (NUS), in Edinburgh, we Tory rebels knew we would be merely swamped by the much more numerous leftists. Even in those days, blue pockets of resistance stood like isles in the sea of Labour blood red and splotches of Liberal tawny orange in Scotland. We did not have the numbers, so we simply disassociated ourselves from the NUS. Why should our money go to pay for leftists causes as deemed by the Committee of NUS? So while our Saxon neighbors slaved away down South and fought the good fight against the Militant Trot and rot, we used our liberated coin on cheap beer. It tasted like victory. Then we went further."
♤ Tim Linacre, Tory Boys, (Pimlico, 1999):
"The Tory student organizations in the mid to late '70s had been run by moderate men who had far more in common with Heath than Thatcher. We tried to overthrow them, by any means necessary. In some places we had more luck than others, but then came the Labour Wembley conference of '81, and quite a few of them ran like scalded dogs to SDP. We overwhelmed the rest and started infighting."
♤ Peter Young, Port, Plots and Politics (Penguin Books, 1993):
"There were three main factions:
Libertarians. They gave out stickers and buttons saying things such as 'All Taxes are Theft' and 'Nationalize Crime, Make Sure it Does not Pay.' I was part of this group and we were much seized in those heady days with the notion of being able to privatize everything, including the great sacred cow: National Health. We were the least organized of the three and the most numerous.
Authoritarians. They might have gone by a different name, but that is what we called them and so did their other opponents within the Tory student groups. They were the ones who would be as likely to invite Enoch Powell to speak and bang on about immigration as support Mrs. Thatcher. Given our ethos was open borders and free trade, we libs did not have much tuck with them.
Wets. They called themselves moderates, but wet they were. Heathites to a man (and girl) and terrified of Thatcherism. They mostly hid in plain sight, but when it came time to vote, you would be surprised by their sudden emergence and the numbers they could wield. They had no true leaders up in Scotland, but the English wets were more organized.
As Chairman of the FCS, I tried to keep a herd on all three, but it was hard. There were fundamental differences between a Keynesian Heathite talking about the need to reduce unemployment and us libertarians telling them their theories were rubbish, only to turn around and have to watch Powellites hold dinners to raise money to UNITA rebels in Angola because they were fighting Trots. UNITA rebels might have very well been fighting Trots, but it did not make them nice people worthy of support."
♤ Tim Linacre, Tory Boys, (Pimlico, 1999):
"There were incidents. We proved a mite embarrassing to Party Chairman John Gummer, who, as a hangover of the Heathite age, hated us on sight due to us purging wets from ranks of FCS leadership. He tried to find a way to disassociate us from the Party, but could not. Then stories began appearing in wet rags about us causing riots in the streets, giving out Nazi salutes, racially abusing staff from West Indies and selling 'Hang Nelson Mandela' posters. There were no witnesses to any of this, but plenty of stories. Peter (Young) and I steered the ship clear of icebergs and hanged on long enough to see Mr. Gummer off. We had hoped Mr. Tebbit would more tolerant of us, but it was no luck. Brian found him difficult."
♤ Brian Monteith, The Rise and Fall of Thatcherite Tory Edinburgh, (Constable, 2009):
"Tebbit hated us worse than Gummer. Gummer hated us on ideological grounds. Tebbit hated us on organizational lines. He was trying to ensure all Tories would win everywhere they ran, regardless of their political purity. He wanted us to be the shock troops of the Party. We would not play his game. We would support only those Tory candidates whose politics we supported. Simply putting on a blue rosette and standing against Labour and Liberals would not rouse our sympathy. Who knows where it all would have ended had Tebbit not been sacked in the King's Purge and Peter Brooke was not made Party Chairman in '86. At first we thought he was on our side and much welcomed his elevation, but then we realized he was merely trying to coax unity from all involved. Convinced as he was he had won our trust he tried to ram through some piece of paean to the mighty works of Tom King through paper. Our editors were not enthused and modified the article."
☆ John Bercow, Thatcher, Thatcherism, and Thatcherites, (Faber, 1998):
"'The FCS Manifesto' as it became known called on Mr. King to prove his Thatcherite mettle by privatizing the National Health Service and deregulating broking firms by allowing them to trade as well. It must be said that while Mrs. Thatcher disavowed the former, she did endorse the latter. Some of the Cabinet ministers supported her view, while others supported that of the FCS, still others disapproved of both measures. The rifts within the heretofore seemingly monolithic arch-dry Thatcherite Cabinet were suddenly made visible, less than three months into its existence. It caused much bad press and plenty ill will. Then came the Diaries."