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Part XVI:


♣ Roy Jenkins, Centre Ground, (Harper Collins, 1991):

"To my utter dismay, it was my one time closest colleague Bill Rodgers who first seriously floated the spurious notion of having the Prime Ministerial candidate for the Alliance be the man whose party had the most MPs in Parliament at the end of the election. The office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is much too important to be treated as a Lottery prize for the Alliance Party which had the most luck in picking their constituencies ahead of the election. It was essential for the voters to know who would be Prime Minister if we were to win the necessary seats, and to know it before heading to the polls."


♣ Dick Taverne, Vagabond, (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1988):

"I have the utmost respect for Roy Jenkins and think him to be the finest Home Secretary of our nation since Sir Robert Peel. He nobly chose to sacrifice his future with the Labour Party to vote for European integration in the face of hostility from the senior leadership of the Party in '72 and '75 while rank opportunists such as Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey alternated between reluctantly toeing the Party line in opposition to their own personal beliefs to grub for votes from their leftist comrades. He is in every meaning of the word a statesman, but statesmen rarely make good politicians. Roy chose not to understand we could not win the majority of House seats in a hypothetical Spring '87 election, barring a thermonuclear war or discovery of glossy photos of Kinnock and King frolicking together in a garden. We could, however, have everything come apart ahead of the general election by having David Owen and David Steel confront one another in a public spat, sharpening divisions between Liberals and Social Democrats. The Rodgers Leadership Proposal was sound and all of us breathed a sigh of relief when both Davids accepted it."


♣ Chris Patten, Roamer, (HarperCollins, 1995):

"At the time, the '87 Bill Rodgers Leadership Proposal was well received by many in the SDP anxious to avoid a fight with the Liberals. The Liberals response was more muted, but a sense of relief could be felt from those I met in the House as well. More than a few more civically minded progressive souls, however, wanted very much for Shirley Williams to be the unifying all-healing mother figure to lead the Alliance to the polls and into Downing Street. Given Baroness Williams is no longer an active politician I feel I can reveal an untidy open secret known to virtually all of her hand-in-glove working colleagues, Shirley was incapable of handling the day to day pressures of being a Leader of a Party, much less the Alliance, much less of the nation. She could be quite brilliant on the stump and in the committees, but each experience left her feeling drained and she would disappear for random periods of time to restore herself before returning once more upon the field. The first time I encountered this tendency to seek a 'water break' in the middle of a tough football match I was dismayed, but then grew to accept it. I doubt the electorate would have been as understanding, never mind the House."


♣ David Ian Marquand, Nomad, (HarperCollins, 1990):

"The '87 Bill Rodgers Leadership Proposal did not forestall divisions between Liberals and Social Democrats in the House and nation, it only heightened the sense of false differences between us. Instead of a unifying figure such as Roy Jenkins or Shirley Williams leading us into the fray against the Tories and Labour, we instead dithered and told the electorate, 'Vote for us and either David Steel or David Owen will become Leader.' It was a sign of weakness of the Alliance and was perceived as such by the voters."


❥ Peter Shore, Leading the Left, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993):

"In Spring of '87, Bill Rodgers had to keep in line an utter shit such as David Owen and a half-clever half-sneak such as David Steel, while also holding together a quilted patchwork of MPs divided on nuclear deterrent and the extent of their feelings towards the Thatcherite economic measures. I had much sympathy for him and wished our Party had as clear an ability to compromise effectively."


♡ Cherie Booth, Speaking for Myself, (Little, Brown, 1998):

"In '83, I was a unilateralist and was much amused by the verbal gymnastics performed by Denis Healey, who as a committed anti-unilateralist was deeply compromised by Michael Foot's unabashed pacifism. I was no longer amused in '87. My experience in Europe and with the electorate lead to my greater understanding of the issue and I adopted a line not entirely out of tune from that of the wings of the Liberal and Labour parties favoring a so-called 'Euro-bomb,' which would see us unite with France to free ourselves from an American nuclear deterrent. It was not an easy line to articulate, made even harder by seemingly near universal voter knowledge of Neil Kinnock's unilateralism in the Spring of '87. I regarded a carefully articulated nuclear stance as a much more vital than our stance on privatization."


♥ Bryan Gould, Hard Labour, (Penguin Books, 1989):

"There were more than a few creaky policy declarations in various Labour manifestos which called for the re-nationalization of all that which the Thatcher and now King government had privatized. The view was wholly ridiculous by 1987 in light of even Communist Bulgaria having a rent-to-buy scheme for the flats to encourage home ownership. East Germany, not a regime noted for its progressive views or capitalist practices, expanded its private agricultural effort and even syndicalist socialist Mexico had privatized 67 industrial concerns. One did not want to be call backward when compared to the privatization efforts in such places as Uganda, Ghana and Tanzania. Yet, there were powerful calls for clinging to the bitter end to the outdated and outmoded shibboleths. Giles Radice did what he could, and where he could, to ensure we were not beholden to the ultra-left, Bennites, or the far-left."


♥ Joe Ashton, My Labour, My Party, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993):

"Giles (Radice) authored a smart policy paper outlining our weakness in banging on about having the need for more council homes for the disposed and re-nationalization of the industries. By constantly reminding the voters we were for the 'have-nots' we were alienating the 'haves' and the 'have-not-got-enoughs.' By '87, the Thatcherite and King governments have identified 'succeeders' - men and women who benefited from the Conservative policies. The 'succeeders' were opposed to any policy by a Party talking as if they were from the depths of the '70s. But what was really damaging is those who were not succeeding but were trying to succeed also viewed us with suspicion. The aspirational working class and lower middle class voters tarred us with the brush of Bennite siege economy notions. A few pivots could bring home the message we were not all loons and make the voters believe we were not trying to take away their success. But to get those pivots through the National Executive Committee (NEC) and make them official planks in our manifesto required time and patience. Both were rapidly running out."


♥ Philip Gould, Confessions of an Adman, (HarperCollins, 1996):

"Four years of hard work yielded some positive results when it came to the Labour brand among the electorate, but there were still plenty of roadblocks. Less roadblocks were encountered with the Neil Kinnock brand. Neil, for all his potential negatives, had a much better personal rating than the Party. The natural course of action would therefore to make Neil the centerpiece of the campaign, but this could not quite be said out loud. We (campaign and ad team) were already being derided for our Americanisms and the use of Neil as a 'Presidential' figure would not have more detractors than fans within the NEC. They just had accepted the necessity of a notion of a sustained ad campaign. Now we would be asking them, in effect, to make the Party secondary to the focus put on Neil. As I struggled to formulate the most polite and oblique way of making my case, I could not get the image of Neil with his hands in his hands in the pits of despair declaiming he could never be elected. I would be putting even more burden on Neil with this campaign. I was overcome with a case of foreboding, of Neil cracking in public with the unmerciful eye of the TV lens upon him and millions watching and then re-watching on the news. I therefore made the decision to not make Neil the focus of our campaign. I would have to fight a battle without our best weapon out of fear it would blow up in our face. It was not a decision I made lightly. As more and more time passed from when the election should have been called, in my highly uninformed opinion, the more I began to second guess myself."


♤ Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical, (Bantam Press, 1990):

"It was clear to me the government had missed its best chance to call for an election in the Spring of '87 and it was becoming increasingly clear to the government as well."


♠ Mark Robinson, A Better Britain, (Pimlico, 2000):

"After the May local council elections, internal Party pressure to call for an early election before Fall of '87 became immense. MPs in the marginal seats felt we were dithering and giving SDP and Labour time to organize and squandering the fruits of our Greenwich gambit. Ted (Heath) ignored the calls, for being unpopular among the MPs was nothing new to him, while Norman (Tebbit) claimed we would win regardless of when we would run a campaign against the Alliance and Labour, but Mr. King felt quite besieged and the whispering campaign begun by the papers more loyal to Mrs. Thatcher than the Conservative Party were beginning to take its toll on him and his government as well."


♤ David Mellor, My Moment, (Fourth Estate, 2000):

"The downward spiral of Enoch Powell's tortured career taught any Tory MP what would happen if they should attempt to formally break off from the Conservative Party to try to get to the right of it. There was never a question of an SDP-style split from the more extreme-minded Conservative MPs, nor would Mrs. Thatcher even at her most obstinate consider such an official course, but there was definitely a 'no enemy of Tories, no friend to King and Heath' element to the backbench rebellion her surrogates were fomenting in the House and in the tabloids, with her implicit consent. Michael Portillo was in the thick of it, organizing propaganda tours for the Class of '83 MPs to see their Lady Scorned. The Thatcherite position in '87 was blood chillingly simple: have Mr. King lose the next general election, blame him and his Heathite overtures for the loss, step in and purge the Party of the King's men. Their ultimate nightmare was a Tory win. I regarded it as disloyal to the government, the Party and the nation. They were rooting for the pilot of their plane to fail because they did not like his football pin. I resolved to do all I could to ensure Mr. King would remain Prime Minister after the election and threw myself into the alchemy of when and how to best call the next general election."


♣ Bill Rodgers, Call Me What You Will, (Politico's, 2000):

"Having settled the uneasy question of the leadership of the Alliance, both David Steel and David Owen reiterated their stance on dealing with either the Conservative or the Labour minority government in the event of a hung Parliament collectively. Neither SDP nor the Liberal Party were to play kingmaker by themselves alone, only the Alliance could crown a winner if called upon to decide the fate of the nation. Those seemingly hard questions settled we returned to the topic of such sensitivity we dared not address it for over a year: nuclear policy. Watching Neil Kinnock struggle with his soft left unilateralist views, we wanted to avoid any 'slush and mush' to borrow a phrase from David Owen. We had to have a clear policy. In this all of SDP was united, we could not be tarred with the brush of unilateralism. The Liberals, however, were all over the place."


♧ David Owen, Into the Maelstrom, (Macmillan, 1991):

"I have levied much criticism against David Steel, and with good reason. But one thing of which he could not be accused is wavering on his views on the defense of the British Isles. David was not, nor has he ever been a unilateralist. His great weakness was in his inability to impose his view upon his MPs."


♦ Paddy Ashdown, Battlegrounds, (HarperCollins, 2001):

"The Liberal Party has always been a broad Church and it was no use to enforce a three line whip on us. Most of us got into politics because of our passionate beliefs and we could not, as Social Democrats did, suborn them in the name of Party unity. We were the descendants of Whigs and practiced whiggery. My views on nuclear deterrent were my own and I had no wish to impose them on fellow MPs or voters outside my constituency, nor could anyone else impose their views upon me."


♦ David Steel, Against Goliath: The David Steel Story, (Penguin Books, 1989):

"The best we could do for a common Defence statement was to abhor nuclear proliferation, negotiate with the Soviet Union on nuclear arsenal reduction and build closer ties with Europe with a goal of common protection. We dared not even whisper the word 'Polaris' for fear it would cause, much less mention the forbidden topic of Trident missiles."


♣ Roy Jenkins, Centre Ground, (Harper Collins, 1991):

"There is something perversely British in the leading lights of a given party feeling utterly compelled to discuss the most divisive issue facing their party. Thus at Labour, having waged a long and bloody war over the bomb, Nye Bevan felt the need to expound upon it at length all sanity to contrary. Immigration was a great taboo subject for the Tories in the '60s and thus Enoch Powell kept banging on about it and forced Ted Heath to state his case much more forcefully than he should. When Europe became the great forbidden word among Labour in the early '70s, Barbara Castle and I both decided to speak out about it at every opportunity instead of quietly trying to repair the rift in our Party. The self-destructive impulse to discuss Polaris in the '80s dragged two different political causes, that of Labour in '83, when Jim Callaghan delighted in contradicting his erstwhile ally Denis Healey and his black sheep successor Michael Foot, and in the run up to the election that was not yet even called in '87, when David Owen exhibited nuclear fetishism, discussing at length and breadth the precise mechanics of a nuclear missile leaving a submarine or silo and overwhelming his audience with facts and figures of the kiloton yields of various weapons. Enoch Powell tore open the scabs of Tories on immigration to highlight an issue he felt important and thereby force Heath's hand and destabilize his government to advance his own career. Nye Bevan wanted to ensure his complex views on nuclear deterrent were understood, with little to no evil intent behind it as regards to the stability of his Party. David Owen's motivations remain opaque to me, but seem to fall somewhere in between. He felt passionately about the bomb, but he could not have been unaware of the degree his passion was making an impact on the stability of the Alliance and the position of David Steel within his Party. There were far too many jibes thrown about David Steel being a Social Democrat leading a Liberal party when I was Leader of the SDP, but at least those were largely good natured and were mostly contrasted with me being a Liberal in charge of a Social Democratic Party. When those jibes were flung against David Steel in '87, there was no gentle counterpart in David Owen being ever considered a Liberal. David Owen's actions regarding nuclear policy were heavily damaging to David Steel's intra-Party prestige."


♠ Michael Mates, Where There’s a Will, (Hamish Hamilton, 1995):

"Michael Heseltine's prestige in the Party demanded we Heseltaniacs (as 'The Daily Mail' so lovingly labelled us) formulate an official stance on a variety of issues facing the electorate and the Party. The trouble was given the latitude shown by the King ministries, we simply had no idea what the manifesto would contain. Tom King started his reign as an arch Thatcherite then tacked moderate at the first sign of bad weather. We had no idea how much Heath and how much Thatcher would be in the document. There was a degree of uncertainty about the whole thing, which added to the anxiety."


☆ John Bercow, Thatcher, Thatcherism, and Thatcherites, (Faber, 1998):

"In the run up to the eagerly anticipated and equally dreaded general election, Michael Portillo took it upon himself to create a ginger group of Thatcherite MPs from the Class of '83 who were elected in the traditionally Labour seats and therefore faced the most immediate danger. Disappointed in the quality of the Saatchi and Saatchi campaign material for the '86 and '87 local and by-elections, Mr. Portillo reached out to Tim Bell, formerly of Saatchi and Saatchi, and the man largely credited with the '83 Saatchi materials. The decision was not cleared with the designated head of the Conservative Party campaign - Norman Tebbit. The move was seen by some as having the backing of Mrs. Thatcher and was accused by certain members of the Cabinet as running a campaign within a campaign and mixing messages with the electorate. It was then revealed Mr. Heseltine's grouping engaged in the services of their own firm to help run their campaign, and was quickly followed by a revelation of Norman Lamont leading a still another group of the dry non-Thatcher backed MPs in contributing to their own re-election campaign with a wholly separate ad company being solicited."


♤ Norman Lamont, Inside Westminster, (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1996):

"I did not trust Norman Tebbit to do what is right by those of us who were not in the good graces of the Cabinet. I certainly did not trust Portillo's Thatcherites and the less said about Michael Heseltine the better. I was not alone in this predicament and likeminded MPs and I chose to run our own re-election campaign in the looming general election of '87."


★ Alastair John Campbell, The Claret Revolution, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993):

"By June of '87 almost everyone in the Westminster bubble agreed the general election would have to take place sometime in October. The only question was when."