David Waddington Memoirs (14 page)

When next the British people saw Papasoiu he was on
television
yelling from a window at his Austrian refugee camp that he wanted to marry the girl who, while he had been in England, had been teaching him English. The English girl promptly announced that she had already rejected his advances. Then came the news which proved that the Home Office had been right all along. It was discovered that, far from being in prison in Romania, Mr Papasoiu had spent the previous ten years wandering around Europe, much of the time in Italy.

For nearly a month Gilly and I suffered appalling abuse from Toner and others, but when the Home Office was entirely
vindicated
only the
Daily Mail
wrote anything which could, by the
greatest stretch of imagination, be termed an apology. From Toner himself there was a deafening silence.

The whole episode taught me many lessons. I learned of the reluctance of the British press ever to admit they are wrong. I learned that it is not enough for a minister to make the right decision. He has got to take a great deal of time dressing up that decision in the right language so that the dumbest of journalists will understand why it had to be taken and the most astute lawyer cannot say that it has been taken without proper consideration of all the facts and without following the proper procedures. It also taught me that the first job of a Minister of State is to take the shot and shell which might otherwise rain on his Secretary of State. I certainly performed that task admirably.

Following the Papasoiu case it was decided to remove the distinction between asylum and refugee status – a distinction not recognised by anyone outside the Home Office. Far more
important
, it was decided that in any future case where an individual was claiming asylum but was unrepresented by lawyers, the Refugee Council would be told, so that it could make representations on the individual’s behalf. The decision turned out to have wide and not altogether satisfactory implications because when the flow of people seeking asylum later increased dramatically, long delays in processing applications were aggravated by delays on the part of the council.

Soon the 1983 election was upon us, the first in which I was given a fairly big speaking role outside my own constituency. It is easy to say now that the Falklands War and the reviving economy made success certain; but the advantage could all have been thrown away in a bad campaign. But thanks to Cecil Parkinson, the campaign was as slick and professional as any I have known. I only spent five days in Ribble Valley; the rest of the time I spent travelling round the country. Perhaps keeping out of the way accounted for
my substantial majority. The result in Ribble Valley (which had been created in the wake of boundary changes earlier in the year, but with Clitheroe town still its centre) was:

The government had increased its overall majority to 144. I went down to London as soon as it was clear that the government was safely back in office. I busied myself spring-cleaning the pantry in our house in Courtenay Street while I waited for a call from No. 10. Nothing happened and eventually I rang what I hoped was still my private office and asked the chap who I hoped was still my secretary to try and find out what was going on. A few minutes later I learned what I should have known all along. If ministers were staying put they would not hear anything. I was advised to come into the Home Office at once to see the new Secretary of State, Leon Brittan.

Leon was sitting on the same sofa as the one from which Willie had greeted me. He looked quite overcome and kept saying ‘I can’t believe it.’ Neither could several others, who told me that they thought promotion from Chief Secretary to Home Secretary far too big a step. Goodness knows what the same people thought when not all that long afterwards someone was promoted from Chief Whip to Home Secretary.

In September 1983 Gilly and I went on a visit to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Our travelling companions were Hayden Phillips, the under-secretary in the Home Office responsible for immigration and later Permanent Secretary in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, and Jim Acton, my Private Secretary. The purpose
of the trip was to see how immigration control operated in the subcontinent where all applications to come to Britain for settlement were processed. Visitor visas had not yet been
introduced
, but even so there was a considerable burden of work at our posts.

Arriving in Karachi we visited our small post there and then flew up to Islamabad. Pakistan was out of the Commonwealth at the time so our host was the Ambassador, Sir Oliver Forster. Anthony Goodenough, later a High Commissioner, first in Ghana and then in Canada, and after retirement a neighbour of ours in Somerset, was Head of Chancery. We went up to Murree, a hill station, and on to Nathi Gali where there was a pretty little church, locked but, as one could see through the windows, in perfect condition. On the way down we stopped in a square in the centre of
garrison
town called Abbottabad (the place where Bin Laden met his death). When Jim was not looking I strode across the road and into a shop. Minutes later Hayden realised I had gone, turned on Jim and grasping him by the collar shouted: ‘You’ve lost the minister!’ A frantic search followed which ended in an army surplus store where I was inspecting the ties on display. I picked the best-looking one which turned out to be the tie of the Pakistan Army Junior Catering Corps.

In those days there was an English-language newspaper in Pakistan called
The Leader
. One letter in the correspondence columns read thus: ‘On behalf of the Punjab Town Residents Association I seek the cooperation of your esteemed daily and request you to kindly highlight our grievances through your bold columns. The main problems of the residents are enumerated seriatim below.’ There then followed a catalogue of misfortunes of monstrous proportions.

In the same edition there was a headline
‘TRAIN SEAT SELLERS’ GANG ATTACK RAILWAY WORKER’
:

In Islamabad there was the second largest British Embassy in the world. This was largely because of the number of immigration officers and Foreign Office staff there to process applications by people hoping to come and live in Britain.

A member of the embassy staff was in trouble. He had been in the habit of visiting a local restaurant, always taking with him his own pot of tea. The owner of the establishment had accepted that he was a young man of eccentric tastes who liked only one particular blend of tea which was not obtainable in Islamabad. Unfortunately, a zealous priest interested in the strict enforcement of the laws prohibiting the consumption of alcohol began to take a close interest in the young man’s behaviour and one night he brought to the restaurant a policeman who insisted on inspecting the contents of the teapot. It contained whisky. The whole incident received much publicity in the Pakistani press and became known as ‘The Teapot Scandal’.

On the morning of our last day in Pakistan we set off for Mirpur in Azad Kashmir, the area from which very many people had come to settle in Britain. In Mirpur I was ushered into a suffocatingly hot schoolroom where I met many of the elders and people who were reckoned to have immigration problems. Throughout my
discussions
I was constantly interrupted by an argumentative individual
squatting on his haunches at the back of the throng. Shortly after returning to England I went to address a meeting in Rochdale. The hall was packed with Pakistanis and I began my address by explaining my responsibilities in the Home Office and telling them that I had only recently got back from Pakistan where I had gone to study immigration problems. As I spoke my eyes roamed round the room, and to my amazement I saw sitting in the front row the very man who had plagued me in Mirpur. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ I said. ‘The last time I saw you you were making a thorough nuisance of yourself in Mirpur.’ He was astonished to be recognised and the rest of the audience thought it a colossal joke that I had already encountered in their homeland a well-known local barrack-room lawyer and loud mouth. They gave me a very easy time for the rest of the evening, with members of the audience constantly pointing at the pest in the front row and giggling.

One girl I saw in Mirpur said that she had only recently arrived from England, having come to meet her fiancé for the first time. ‘What do you think of him?’ I said. In a broad Lancashire accent she replied, ‘He’s bloody smashing.’

In another interview I asked a young boy why, if he really wanted to marry the girl to whom he said he was engaged, he was not prepared to have her live with him in Pakistan. To my surprise he did not say that the girl did not want to leave England. His answer was that he could not stand the weather in Pakistan.

After Mirpur we were taken to see a dam which had recently been completed and then to a village and a school where we were supposed to be meeting a group of people described to me as local lawyers. I was escorted up onto a platform where a table was laid for lunch for ourselves and one or two nobs. We were, as usual, running behind time and I said that I had to get down into the body of the hall at once and mix with the lawyers. That was my undoing. Mix I did, and every now and then a tasty morsel was
popped into my mouth. Sat down on a sofa flanked by two voluble lawyers I allowed a pink custardy substance flecked with flies to be placed in my hands, and unthinkingly I dispatched it in the normal fashion.

In the afternoon we flew to Lahore and then on to Delhi. I was already beginning to feel distinctly odd, but the High Commissioner Robert Wade-Gery and Sally, his wife, had arranged a working supper and somehow or other I had to stay on my feet.

We were due to fly to Agra the following morning but by bedtime it was obvious that I would be in no fit state to make the journey. Sally Wade-Gery produced sundry multi-coloured pills and I fell in to a deep sleep. Gilly went to Agra, I slept on and at about noon I woke to the telephone ringing and the Wade-Gerys inviting me to join them for lunch. I did not feel at all bad. The onset of illness in India can be dramatically quick, but often so is the recovery, and I was very grateful to Sally for her pills.

After a busy day or two in Delhi we were entitled to a mid-tour rest. We flew up to Srinagar and spent two days on a houseboat on the Dal Lake. There were quite a few houseboats, each of them, I was told, separately owned. Rather confusingly, however, every one of the owners was called Mr Butt. Abdul, the assistant of our Mr Butt, said: ‘May the blessings of Almighty Allah be upon you and you’ll have a helluva good time.’ We then went up to a hill station called Pahalgam, 8,000 feet up in the Himalayas. As we arrived, in a torrential downpour, five or six young boys on ponies tore down the main street towards us. The shops flanking the street had quite impressive fronts but were built as if for a film set with no backs. We booked into our hotel and then in the afternoon we hired a taxi to take us further into the mountains, but when we reached the police post at the end of the town our driver refused to take us because, he said, of the danger of landslides. At the police post alongside the policeman in his box were two scruffy individuals
with two scruffy ponies. Gilly, who had earlier expressed a wish to go for a ride but had seen no ponies for hire in the town, asked the two men if we could have a ride on their ponies and eventually, after an initial show of reluctance and when, with assistance from our driver, a price had been agreed, the ponies were handed into our care.

We set off past the police post and the road wound its way up the mountain side via a series of hairpin bends. Soon, however, the ponies had the common sense to realise that a great deal of effort would be saved if they, as it were, ironed out the bends, and, having adopted this course they soon reached the summit. Going up was not too easy for the riders. Coming down was terrifying.

We returned to our hotel and were told that a rare treat was in store for us. We could watch
Gone with the Wind
on television. Gilly was delighted. I was nervous. On every previous occasion on which she had watched
Gone with the Wind
she had become pregnant. But I took the risk, and competing with the spectacle on the screen were Pahalgam’s golden eagles as they swooped down past our bedroom window to forage in the hotel’s rubbish bins.

We travelled on to Dhaka in Bangladesh. A day or two later we were due to fly up to Sylhet, but at the airport we were told that there was some delay because of the weather and we were two hours late for our planned meeting with Sylhet politicians. The fried eggs cooked for the nine o’clock meeting were waiting for us at eleven and we ate them with a smile. Sylhet is set in splendid countryside with tea gardens spread over the surrounding hills, and it was an important place for us to visit because it was from this part of Bangladesh that very large numbers of people had come to settle in Britain. The region which borders on Assam is a long way from the sea, but for decades men from there had travelled down to ports such as Chittagong and then spent their lives as seamen. This meant that long before air travel and mass immigration the citizens
of Sylhet knew a fair amount about the outside world, some of them even having relatives who, having found their way as seamen to British ports, had decided to stay there. So we were there to see our immigration staff up there at work and learn how they investigated doubtful claims to settle in Britain.