David Waddington Memoirs (10 page)

Looking at the press cuttings I seem to have spent much of the February 1974 campaign attacking the Liberals. What infuriated me was that at a time of national crisis the only things they talked about were the local railway line and the need to change the
electoral
system to secure the return to Parliament of more Liberals to talk about the local railway line.

When I look back on the Heath years my recollection may be coloured to some extent by the poor health from which I suffered for much of that parliament and my poor spirits at that time. But they were very gloomy years – years when sometimes the country seemed on the verge of anarchy with the leaders of the TUC quite unconcerned about the welfare of the nation and prepared to play politics at every turn. The Tory leadership looked pitifully weak. We had lost a really big figure in Iain MacLeod within a few weeks of the 1970 election. Enoch Powell was never in the government because
of his ‘rivers of blood' speech, Reggie Maudling had soon to resign because of the Poulson affair; and although we had a fine Foreign Secretary in Alec Douglas-Home, the Home Secretary and the Chancellor never looked right in their respective jobs. Robert Carr and Tony Barber were both men of intellect and courage but neither of them looked strong and fully in control of events. Tony Barber in particular was frail physically and had a reedy voice which is a great disadvantage in politics. Ted prided himself on taking us into the EEC but the people accepted rather than applauded the
decision
, being persuaded it would be good for British trade. But as the years went by it became more and more apparent that what we had signed up to was something very different from a common market and power was being drained away from our own Parliament and handed to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels; as a result public support for the EEC steadily fell. In the Tory Party there was the beginning of a deep divide between those who believed that having joined the club we had no option but to go along with the majority, and those who felt that sooner or later we would have to leave if we wanted to remain a sovereign nation.

Ted Heath was a complex character and the following
reminiscence
may surprise many. In the autumn of 1973 he came to speak in Nelson & Colne. A rally was to be held in the Imperial Ballroom in Nelson, with all the local MPs and Conservative candidates from round about. Ted was to fly to Manchester but at lunchtime we were told that Manchester Airport was closed because of fog and he was flying to Weedon (Leeds/Bradford) instead. His arrival would be delayed by about an hour. I suggested that we should procure an organist and I would lead the singing of popular songs. The suggestion that I should sing was greeted with derision and rightly so, but someone else was enlisted to carry out the same task. As the moment for Ted's arrival drew near I went and stood out in the road and eventually the car drew up and out got Ted and Douglas
Hurd who was not then a Member of Parliament but Ted's political secretary. After Ted had made his speech I was called upon to give a vote of thanks, and we were just about to leave the platform when a little lady in the front row stood up and in a quavering voice said: ‘I say three cheers for Mr Heath. Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!' She then gave us the first line of ‘For he's a jolly good fellow' and we all joined in. The song over, we moved next door where the nobs were to gather for a private drink with the Prime Minister. And as we stood waiting for the reception to begin, Ted, to my astonishment, took a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed his eyes and said: ‘No one has ever sung “For he's a jolly good fellow” for me before.' He was genuinely touched by the reception he received that night and the one he got the following day when he went to a football match at Burnley's Turf Moor.

Early on in the 1970–74 parliament I was one of about twenty backbenchers invited to dinner at No. 10, and when I arrived I found that I was to sit on Ted's left and Jill Knight on his right. I begged Tim Kitson, Ted's PPS, to bestow the honour of sitting next to Ted on another but there was nothing doing: and I was quite relieved when, after we had sat down, Jill Knight decided to do the talking. This phase of the dinner, however, ended abruptly with Ted deciding that he had had enough of woman talk. In a gesture of calculated rudeness he turned his back on Jill, lifted his eyes to the ceiling as if in supplication and invited me to say something.

On another occasion I arrived at Downing Street for one of the usual summer receptions and, as Gilly and I climbed the stairs, we were dismayed to see that no one was following immediately behind. The consequence was appalling. We were stuck with Ted. ‘Good evening, Prime Minister.' ‘Good evening.' ‘It was a good afternoon in the House, Prime Minister.' ‘Yes.' ‘Lovely weather we're having, Prime Minister.' ‘Yes.' I was beginning to wonder whether ‘Yes' was the only word left in his vocabulary. I was in
despair. I had to do something drastic. ‘When are you next going sailing, Prime Minister?' I had struck oil. ‘Next month and I am taking
Morning Cloud.'
Then he spoiled it all. There was obviously no room for a woman in a conversation about sailing, so he turned to Gilly and with an imperious wave in the direction of the dining room said: ‘You'll find the Gainsboroughs next door.'

Once, at a conference in Blackpool, a group of us from Nelson & Colne were having a jolly time at a reception in the Winter Gardens when Ted bore down on us and froze my normally garrulous supporters into total silence. The hush was only broken when Bernard Rothwell, chairman of my Association, said: ‘Don't you sometimes feel, Ted, you'd rather be watching Th'orse of Year Show?' And Ted laughed.

I am sure that Ted was a very worthy man, but I never ceased to be astonished by his lack of elementary political skills. In the 1966 election the Conservative manifesto was entitled ‘Action not Words'. I do not know whether Ted chose the title himself, but he certainly must have approved it, and it provided a vivid example of his failure to understand that politics is not just about doing the right thing. It is about using words to win minds and persuade people of the rightness of what is being done in their name. ‘Action not words' in the world of politics is a recipe for disaster and Ted's short period as Prime Minister duly ended in disaster.

He then revealed a very petty streak in his frustration at being replaced as Leader of the Opposition by Margaret Thatcher. The bitterness he could not suppress spoiled him as a man, and Alec Douglas-Home got it entirely right when he said: ‘It's such a waste. I always liked him very much. He's capable of great kindness and sensitivity too. He mucked it all up. You must not allow yourself to have a vendetta, particularly with a woman.'

Anyhow, Wilson was back in office where he busied himself giving the trade union bosses, who were the ones who had really
beaten Ted, all they wanted. Parliament met and Michael Foot, the Secretary of State for Employment, introduced his first Trade Unions and Labour Relations Bill which repealed the Industrial Relations Act except the part which had increased the rights of trade unionists by giving them compensation for unfair dismissal and the right to longer periods of notice.

I was on the committee on the Bill along with a new member who was obviously a master of the intricacies of labour law and a rising star, Leon Brittan. In the chamber I had a difficult time. Whenever I rose to my feet at Prime Minister's Question Time the PM referred to me as ‘the honourable member soon to finish his time in this place'. I had the smallest majority in the House and no one expected me to survive the next general election which, thanks to Labour's tiny majority, could not be long delayed. The expected election came in October 1974. Each evening we finished up canvassing in the dark and I remember how sinister looked the hordes of complete strangers being bussed into the constituency by Douglas Hoyle, the Labour candidate. Members of his union, ASTMAS, were all dressed alike in black leather jackets. They did not do it to frighten, but frightening they certainly looked.

During our time at Nelson & Colne we had become friendly with a number of very unusual people, some of whom would not normally have been expected to socialise with Tories. Wilf Banks, a life-long socialist with a little goatee beard which he had grown out of sympathy with Sydney Silverman – who had sported a similar appendage – had become a real chum. So had Stan Iveson, the national chairman of the Independent Labour Party. He had spent so much time chatting to Gilly during the February count that there were a lot of tongues wagging in Nelson and eventually poor Stan felt moved to write to the papers. His attempt to stem the rumours only made him the butt of more jokes, his letter in the
Nelson Leader
being captioned in bold type: ‘They are just good friends'.

Things finally came to a head on the night of the October count. Just when my political future hung in the balance, Stan had a heart attack: and while not a single member of the Labour Party lifted a finger to help, the wife of the Tory candidate proceeded to give him the kiss of life. And, so effective was it that Stan recovered and went on to live for many more years.

When the result was declared I was out by 669 votes. Douglas Hoyle, who is now in the Lords and has become quite a pal of mine, held the seat until 1979 when he was defeated by John Lee. John lost the new seat of Pendle in 1992 and then went off and consoled himself by joining the Liberals. He is now also in the Lords.

Meanwhile, in the country Harold Wilson just achieved an
overall
majority – by three seats. By 1976 that majority had disappeared as a result of by-election defeats, but the government managed to soldier on, bolstered for a year by the Lib–Lab pact. Then, on 28 March 1979, it lost a vote of confidence by one vote.

A
t first after my defeat I felt rather sorry for myself, but the feeling did not last long. First thing on the Friday morning after polling day Elspeth Stuart Mills (now Elspeth Pennant Williams) rang up and suggested we went on a walk round Malham Tarn, and half way round I realised that, far from feeling sad, I felt as if a large block of concrete had been lifted off my cranium and I was a free man again. My health also soon recovered.

My secretary, Jean Davy, who had been staying with us for the closing stages of the campaign, spent hours on the telephone trying to get herself another job and eventually she was successful. I, on the other hand, was jobless and had to decide whether I was going to practise in London with all the added expense of
accommodation
down there, or whether I was going to stay in the north. Doing that of course meant putting into reverse all the plans of the last few years and trying to lure back some of my old clients in Manchester.

I felt that for years I had been lucky to enjoy job satisfaction. Of course there had been peaks and troughs and at times the troughs had seemed pretty deep; but the peaks had more than compensated for them. It was even exhilarating to stand on the edge of the
precipice
knowing there were plenty of people standing behind ready to
deliver a hefty shove to speed one’s passage back to the bottom; and I would not have missed it for the world. I thought my defeat was the end of the road for me and any sadness was tinged with deep thankfulness for a wonderful experience and the great privilege of having served as an MP.

I got a nice letter from Ted Heath. I have been very critical of him and it would be quite wrong if I did not make plain that he was most gracious and kind to me after my defeat.

In January 1975, at the annual general meeting of the Nelson & Colne Conservative Association, I announced that I did not wish to be readopted as their candidate. And there can be little doubt that at that time I did feel that my career in politics was at an end, because in the same month I also declined an invitation to go for interview at Skipton.

On 26 April 1975 my mother died. She suffered a lot of pain towards the end and it was a merciful release. But her death was another sad happening after a difficult year. She was a lovely person who throughout her life never thought of herself but lived for her family. A few months before the end she wrote to us all:

At the end of 1974 a case of murder at the Habib Bank Rochdale brought a little light relief. A father and son were in a café opposite the bank and when the manager came out of the front door the son got up from his seat, ran across the street and thrust a dagger into the back of the manager’s neck. Both father and son were charged
with murder, the Crown alleging that immediately before the son had set off across the street the father had shouted in Urdu: ‘Kill him.’ My equipment for the defence included an Urdu dictionary, with the aid of which I managed to persuade the incompetent interpreter that the words uttered could have meant ‘kill him’, ‘to hell with him’ or ‘fuck him’. The jury acquitted and the man’s family gave me the dictionary as a memento.

But one case in which I was involved was a tragedy for the accused and caused me much worry and unhappiness. Stefan Kiszko faced trial at Leeds Crown Court for the murder of an eleven-year-old girl called Lesley Molseed: and I was briefed for the defence with Philip Clegg (later His Honour Judge Clegg) as my junior. Peter Taylor (later Lord Chief Justice) appeared for Crown. The jury returned a verdict of murder and our appeal to the Court of Appeal was dismissed.

Many years later, after I had become Home Secretary, solicitors acting for Kiszko wrote to the Home Office alleging a miscarriage of justice, and the matter was referred to the section in the Home Office which in those days looked into such cases. I gave
instructions
that when they had looked in to the matter the case should not come to me but to one of the ministers of state. However, the section submitted its report after I had left the Home Office and it was my successor, Kenneth Baker, who decided that the case should be referred back to the Court of Appeal because of new evidence casting doubt on the correctness of the conviction.

In February 1991 the case came up for hearing with Stephen Sedley (later Lord Justice Justice Sedley) acting for Kiszko and he had an astonishing story to tell. Medical evidence, he said,
demonstrated
that sperm found on the girl’s clothing could not have come from Kiszko so he could not have been the killer. Furthermore, evidence to this effect had been available at the time of trial but had not been disclosed to either the defence or the prosecution. The
conviction was set aside and Kiszko, after sixteen years in prison, was a free man.

The following Sunday a leader appeared in the
Sunday Times
alleging quite falsely that in the trial I had run a defence without Kiszko’s authority. In making this assertion the leader writer was apparently relying on the fact that at an earlier hearing before the Court of Appeal Stephen Sedley had said there was a suggestion that I had acted without authority, but the leader writer failed to mention that at the full hearing when the conviction was overturned Sedley had told the court in plain terms that he was completely satisfied that advice had been given to Kiszko and his authority properly obtained.

The following day I issued a statement to the Press Association in these terms:

That should have been an end of the matter, but the upshot was that for years I received obscene, insulting and threatening letters from people influenced by what
The Times
and other papers had said. It was frequently alleged, among other things, that I had used my position as Secretary of State to delay the referral of the case to the Court of Appeal. None of my tormenters seemed prepared to accept the truth – that the whole appalling tragedy would not have happened had it been revealed to the Crown, let alone the defence, that there was evidence that Mr Kiszko could not have produced the sperm found on the dead girl.

In about 1977 Jenny went away to school. It was her own wish. She was not getting on very well at Westholme in Blackburn and she felt that with all her brothers away she must be missing
something
. When, however, she arrived at Queen Margaret’s in York she found the work very hard and at first was pretty miserable. In one letter home she described what happened when on one occasion she did pass an exam:

In 1978 I attended a Northern Circuit dinner in London and found myself sitting next to Mr Justice Kilner Brown who was then the presiding judge on the circuit. He said that he had been asked to find out whether I was trying to get back into the House of Commons or whether I had given up my political ambitions and wanted to go on the circuit bench. I said that at last I felt I had got politics out
of my system and I had given up all ideas of going back into the Commons. Three weeks later I was at home when the telephone rang and I learned that David Walder, our own well-liked member for Clitheroe, had died of a heart attack. I knew at once, in spite of all I had said to Kilner Brown, that fate was calling. I simply could not pass up the chance of inheriting a safe seat in Parliament – and not just a safe seat but the seat where I lived and had my roots. I had to throw my cap in the ring, but I also knew that I could not possibly leave matters to take their course and just wait and see how I got on in the constituency selection process. For all I knew the Lord Chancellor might write any day asking me to take an
appointment
. Worse, he might pick up the papers one morning and read that the person who had been saying he had given up politics and wanted to go on the bench was being considered for selection as the Conservative candidate for Clitheroe. I would never be able to look the man in the face again. So I wrote to Kilner Brown saying that I would well understand if he thought I had taken leave of my senses but I really had meant what I had said when I had spoken to him a few weeks earlier. I did not, however, mean it any longer and I was going to take my chance at Clitheroe. I knew I was burning my boats. It was the gamble of a lifetime but one I had to take, and it made the following months altogether too exciting.

Eventually there came the day when I went to the Crest Hotel in Preston for the first round of interviews and took with me Victoria our cheeky younger daughter, then aged seven. I sat waiting for my interview along with three other would-be candidates and after a little while noticed that Victoria was missing. I set off to find her, opened the door of what turned out to be the room in which the interviews were being conducted and there she was sitting on the knee of the Association chairman. When I came back and laughingly related the story to my fellow interviewees, one said that it was clear he was wasting his time and he was going home.

But all was not over. I was through to the last four but at least one of the other three was a powerful contender, Jock Bruce-Gardyne. Jock had one thing against him. Some years before, he had inherited a safe Scottish seat but over the years he had seen it transformed first into a marginal seat and then, in October 1974, into a gain for the SNP. Anyhow, the Tories in Clitheroe decided that I was the better bet and duly selected me. Jock went off to be selected for Knutsford and an even bigger Tory majority.

A deliciously cruel story went the rounds. One of Jock’s former constituents in South Angus happened to ask a member of the press visiting that part of Scotland: ‘What has happened to Master Jock?’ and got the reply, ‘He’s been selected for Knutsford with a 20,000 majority.’ ‘Oh!’ said the Scotsman, ‘it’ll nay be enough for Master Jock.’ Sadly the matter was never put to the test for Jock, having given distinguished service as a Treasury minister, contracted cancer and had to leave the Commons and ministerial office. He faced his misfortune with enormous courage and after a short time in the Lords died when still a comparatively young man. His death was a grievous loss to Parliament.

The Clitheroe by-election took place in the depths of winter – the ‘winter of discontent’. So there was no shortage of speech material for a Conservative candidate. It was a time when words were spoken which shamed us as a nation. Bill Dunn (an ambulance driver) was quoted as saying, ‘If it (industrial action) means lives lost, that’s how it should be.’ NUPE steward Stephen Eaton did not want to actually kill cancer patients but he seemed to think that delaying their
treatment
was quite okay. ‘The only effect we are having on the treatment of cancer patients,’ he said, ‘is perhaps to slow it down.’ Trade
unionism
seemed to have become a sick joke.

Margaret Thatcher came up to speak. I think she was the first Tory Leader of the Opposition who deigned to attend by-elections and she certainly entered into the spirit of mine.

Margaret arrived early one morning and our first port of call was Perseverance Mill, Padiham. The mill workers, male and female, wore ‘Vote Labour’ badges and when Margaret tried to engage a female cloth-looker in conversation she got nowhere, with the lady refusing to look up and answer her questions. Margaret would not give up. She did not move away as I might have done and look for a more comfortable customer. She stood her ground and made it plain that she was not for leaving until she got a reply, and eventually by sheer persistence she wrung out of the woman not only a reply but a smile. In these somewhat icy conditions we emerged into a mill yard packed with surly weavers; but our spirits soon revived for there across the road, hanging out of the upstairs windows of Progress Mills (our family firm) were smiling faces. Shouts of ‘Vote Maggie’ from a few were soon taken up by the rest, and the Labour
supporters
at Perseverance, while not put to flight, were put to shame. The difference between the two receptions was almost certainly due to the fact that Progress Mills was very much a family affair run almost single-handedly by my cousin John, where union wages were paid but the union itself had a minimal presence. I felt pretty smug about the whole business because I had told Margaret’s office that the right place to visit was Progress and that Perseverance should be left well alone. The know-alls in London, however, said that it was quite wrong for the Leader of the Opposition to visit a
nineteenth-century
-looking place like Progress. She had to be supporting the best of modern industry. Anyhow, Margaret thought that here was a lifeline to be grasped and linking her arm with mine she set off across the road, dashed through the front door of Progress and into the waiting arms of the workers. We never looked back. From that moment onwards her visit to the constituency was a triumphal progress. The streets of Great Harwood were so packed that our cavalcade ground to a halt. There were bigger and even more
enthusiastic
crowds in the town of Clitheroe and in Longridge.