David Waddington Memoirs (21 page)
Read David Waddington Memoirs Online
Authors: David Waddington
Matthew Parris described the scene for readers of
The Times
with the headline:
‘STRIKER DAVE PLAYS THEM OFF THE PARK’
On a football pitch tilted against the government by Lord Justice Taylor, and leading a team whose bootlaces had been tied together
by their own Prime Minister, Home Secretary David (‘Dave’) Waddington yesterday snatched victory from the jaws of – well, not quite defeat – but Roy Hattersley. Labour’s manager, Neil Kinnock, must have been as sick as a parrot.
Waddington has only just been put in Cabinet United’s first team. New to the top division, this player’s strike-rate was unknown. He had (before Christmas) been not so much talent-spotted as dragged on as a substitute at half time when ‘bully’ Lawson stormed off the pitch in protest at the appointment of a new physio, Alan Walters.
And now here he was, on a rainy Monday afternoon, kicking Labour viciously in the goolies whenever the ref. wasn’t looking – and scoring time and again. Waddington was proving that, just occasionally, this country can still produce great strikers on the wrong side of sixty.
In the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery Taylor’s demeanour was wholly un-partisan. Waddington’s was anything but. Those who expect magisterial detachment from a Home Secretary will be disappointed in this magnificent old shin-kicker.
Mr Waddington speaks in the manner of an angry school master interspersing strokes of the cane with a point-by-point recital of the crimes of the errant boy.
Lord Justice Taylor, he said, had pointed the finger of blame at ‘poor facilities’ (thwack), ‘hooliganism’ (thwack), ‘excessive drinking’ (thwack) ‘and poor leadership’ (thwack). Furthermore, ‘squalid conditions’ (thwack) ‘encouraging squalid’ (thwack) ‘behaviour’. In short, the real hooligans were the clubs.
It was shamelessly effective. By the time the Home Secretary sat down, we had quite forgotten that he had come to the House to announce that the government was abandoning the
centrepiece
of its Football Supporters Bill, the ‘membership scheme’, because an independent judge had said that the whole thing was a nonsense.
Curiously, Hattersley made little of this. After a few ritual insults hurled like soggy sprouts at the absent Mrs Thatcher, he endorsed the Taylor Report, which could be ‘the basis of
much-needed
improvement to football grounds’.
Then he rejected the cornerstone of the whole thing. Labour could not, he said, support all-seater stadiums. After all, what if people wanted to stand up in their seats? Those MPs who do not expect the Princess of Wales to be dragged by police out of her box at Covent Garden next time she feels moved to give a standing ovation, felt that Hattersley exaggerated the problem here.
A most extraordinary incident occurred about this time which showed how utterly useless the football authorities were and explained why the game was in such an appalling mess. A near-riot had taken place at Bournemouth after the police had warned the football authorities that there was going to be trouble and had begged them to either move or cancel the match. They had refused. I summoned the chairman and gave him an
imperial
rocket after which cooperation with the police did improve a little.
If I had my time again I would organise my life a lot better, and certainly I should have arranged my life in the Home Office a lot better. For some reason civil servants are good at drawing up submissions and identifying courses of action available in a particular situation but quite hopeless at writing speeches,
presumably
because they themselves rarely make them and they cannot imagine how their words will sound when spoken. I wasted hours rewriting the most dreadful offerings when I should have (a) refused to go to half the events in the diary for which the offerings were intended and (b) made a few off the cuff remarks at the events which I did attend. One reform I did introduce which should be of lasting benefit: I flatly refused to motor across London in heavy
traffic to have lunch with journalists. Those who wanted to see me could choose between a sandwich in my room or a quick meal in the nearest hotel to Queen Anne’s Gate.
We stayed in Denny Street until the New Year, by which time the Hurds had left South Eaton Place for Carlton House Gardens. South Eaton Place had its advantages, principally a decent-sized dining room in which one could entertain. There was also ample room for visiting members of the family. But it was a dismally dark house with the basement occupied by the police, whom I was supposed to inform if I ever wished to venture out.
I was not sleeping well and one Sunday morning I got up at four o’clock to walk to Victoria bus station to buy the papers. There was a camera above the front door and I had to be very stealthy leaving the house, creeping along the wall to keep out of the camera’s view. I made good my escape, bought the papers and prepared to re-enter the house in the same manner. Pressed against the wall and with latch key in hand I moved slowly towards the door-step. I then tripped over it and the papers went flying in all directions. The door was flung open from the inside. ‘Hello, hello,’ said a burly constable. ‘And what might you be up to, sir?’
I got on well with the Metropolitan Police. The only trouble was their eating habits. I have never known people put away so much food at the multiplicity of lunches and dinners I was required to attend at Christmas time. Every rank in turn invited me to stuff myself – literally, I mean.
Douglas Hurd had introduced a War Crimes Bill to confer on the British courts jurisdiction to try people for war crimes
committed
in the 1939–45 war even though they were not British citizens or otherwise subject to the jurisdiction of the British courts at the time the crimes alleged were committed. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had come up with evidence that a number of people who had found their way into Britain after the War as ‘refugees’ or
displaced persons had been party to the most horrible massacres in Eastern Europe after the German attack on Russia in 1941, and we could not sit by and do nothing. We had either to send these people back to face trial in the places where the crimes were committed or give the British courts power to try them, and trying them here seemed the better choice. The Baltic states and Belorussia where the incidents had taken place were still a part of the Soviet Union and few had much confidence in the ‘justice’ meted out by the courts of those benighted lands. Furthermore most, if not all, the people under suspicion were now, by naturalisation, British citizens and legislation to deprive them of their citizenship and deport them would be at least as controversial as giving the British courts jurisdiction to try them.
The Bill got a huge majority on second reading and passed through the rest of its stages in the Commons at breakneck speed. The Lords took one look at the measure and threw it out; and now that I had taken over at the Home Office we had to decide whether to introduce the Bill again. I was sure we should. One could not just forget about a Bill which had received such a ringing endorsement from the elected House; and the Parliament Act, passed to resolve differences between the two Houses in favour of the Commons, was tailor-made to deal with the situation. If, after the Commons had approved the Bill a second time, the Lords again rejected the
measure
, it would proceed to Royal Assent and become law without any further debate. In Cabinet I was surprised to find Douglas Hurd and Geoffrey Howe against reintroduction, but their objections were overruled and the Bill then went through the Commons again – as easily as it had the first time. What happened in the Lords the second time round I will describe later, because when I left the Home Office and went to the Lords, the Bill followed me there.
At Easter 1990 I was due to chair the World Summit on Drugs in London; I thought it a good idea to fit in a trip to America
before the summit to educate myself a little about the drugs
problem
in the States.
In Washington a police anti-drugs squad took us out late at night to see the extent of drug trading on the streets and the way the police were trying to cope with it. The police station from which we started was austere in the extreme, a concrete floor, an army-style trestle table and a few upright chairs. The police in England would not have put up with it for a moment and it did not suggest that Washington, the capital city of the richest country in the world, was awash with money to maintain law and order. Out on the streets a number of young people – some very young – were searched, the method adopted being to spread-eagle the suspect over the bonnet of the car and train a shotgun on him. Some arrests followed.
It was interesting to talk to both the police and the politicians in Washington. They all insisted that public attitudes towards the use of drugs were changing and they were winning the war against the casual or recreational user. But they were disturbingly unwilling to face up to or at any rate voice the conclusion that the drug problem in the States was now largely an inner-city problem afflicting a black underclass and associated with urban decline and poverty. What was very encouraging was the close working relationship between the American agencies and our own drugs liaison officer, Superintendent Trevor Cutts, who was attached to the British Embassy.
We went to Quantico and saw members of the FBI in training and then on to St Louis. We were entertained by an austere and puritanical mayor at a river boat restaurant which served
overcooked
beef, and gravy with the consistency of porridge. Across the river was East St Louis, almost a wasteland with only government buildings looking habitable. We spoke to the US Federal Prosecutor who said he liked to get his staff home early in the evening and
certainly before dark because in the evening the locals took pot shots at them from the roof tops. An FBI agent had been shot dead the day before when he had entered a house to execute a search warrant and had come face to face with a man high on crack. The house was full of weapons.
In St Louis the courts had been overwhelmed by a horrifying escalation in juvenile crime. In 1987, fifty juveniles had been arrested for drug offences. Since then there had been a tenfold increase. Ninety per cent of all crimes were drug related, with ninety per cent of drug offenders high at the time of arrest. Sixty-five per cent of other offenders were also high. It was not just a case of violence being used to feed the drug habit. Crack cocaine actually induced aggressive and violent behaviour. It was being sold for only five dollars a smoke.
We went to a school where children of only seven and eight were taught a WAR (We Are Responsible) programme. The
teaching
was jargon-riddled with much talk of resisting ‘peer group pressure’ when performing one’s ‘job functions’ and all the teachers coupled alcohol and the smoking of tobacco with the use of hard drugs. I suggested that they were hardly likely to get the
enthusiastic
support of parents in the fight against drugs if they preached the message that perfectly lawful habits in which probably ninety per cent of the parents indulged were just as bad as the use of illegal substances. I got nowhere.
I also got pretty exasperated with the many criticisms of ‘
interdiction
’, the word the Americans used to cover prohibition. The Mayor of St Louis went so far as to say that interdiction forced up the price which led to the commission of more crime to feed the habit. More and cheaper drugs were apparently his answer to the ills of society.
We went on to New York and saw Mayor Dinkins who, unlike the Mayor of Washington, had not been arrested on drugs
charges. The next day we visited an impressive drugs rehabilitation programme – Daytop. At the end of the trip I had learned some unpleasant lessons. (1) There was something especially destructive about crack cocaine. (2) The tougher the Americans got in the fight against drugs the greater the likelihood that Britain would face a flood of imports. (3) Jamaican gangs had a hold on the American trade and their links with gangs in Britain increased this likelihood. (4) There was a need for ever closer international cooperation in the fight against drugs. (5) Children in Britain should be taught about the danger of drugs, but the American approach would not do.
Things would have to get a lot worse before parents in Britain would put up with children chanting for hours on end ‘Say “no” to drugs, say “no” to drugs’; and it was simply wrong to lump together in one’s teaching legal and illegal substances, as if whether a thing is legal or illegal is neither here nor there. Things were serious enough in Britain but we could take some comfort in the fact that we had not yet the same lethal mixture of gang crime, urban dereliction, inner-city deprivation and freely available firearms. In Britain street dealers were still a rarity – in America commonplace. But there was nothing for us to be complacent about.
I made another interesting journey in the early part of 1990. I went to Brussels for a series of meetings and then on to Zeebrugge to see some of the key people there who did such a marvellous job when MS
Herald of Free Enterprise
sank. I then went on to the Menin Gate in Ypres to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Nearby there was a beautiful cemetery in which were buried many members of the East Lancashire Regiment in which my father had served.
N
orman Harrison, a great Sabdener and the husband of our daily help Mary, decided that it was about time we took up fishing and on the afternoon of Saturday 31 March 1990 Gilly and I went with Norman to Churn Clough reservoir above Sabden to try and catch some trout. We had a lovely afternoon although it must have been pretty boring for our detective and our police driver who had to sit on the bank twiddling their thumbs.
When we got back home at quarter to five the telephone was ringing and moments later I learned that that afternoon there had been a riot in Whitehall and Trafalgar Square which had been
instigated
by demonstrators against the poll tax. I set off at once for London and the next morning saw many of the police officers who had been on duty. I also saw the considerable damage caused by the rioters in Trafalgar Square and the surrounding streets. There were a number of unpleasant characters still loitering about the place and at one point we got into difficulty when a gang of young men rushed at me, spitting and screaming and then attacked the car. The police moved with enormous speed and almost before I knew what was happening I had been bundled into the car and we were on our way. It was in the midst of all this excitement that I was told that a riot had broken out at Strangeways Prison.
The riot, I was told, had started during the Sunday morning service in the chapel and the number of men actively involved or caught up in the disturbances – in the region of 1,500 – had meant that all prison officers had been able to do so far was contain the men in the gaol and prevent a mass breakout. Rioters had at first taken almost complete control of the place but the staff were now being moderately successful in extricating prisoners who did not want to be involved and plans were already being made to move these prisoners to other gaols in the north-west.
The next morning I had a series of briefings to prepare myself for the two separate statements I would have to make to the House that afternoon – one about Trafalgar Square and the other about Strangeways. There was no detailed discussion of the tactics to be employed at Strangeways. So far as I was concerned the deputy director-general of the prison service, Brian Emes, had as his chief responsibility the handling of a situation like this and his first
priority
was to ensure that none of the 133 prisoners still on the loose escaped; his second was to transfer to other accommodation the rest of the inmates. They could hardly stay where they were because the rioters had already done enormous damage to every wing.
At that time I had no idea of tension, let alone disagreement, between the deputy director-general of the prison service and the governor of Strangeways. I assumed that Emes and the governor were in agreement that it was not practical to regain control of the prison at that time, that it would be too hazardous a venture and that the chances were that in the next day or so the number of rioters would be drastically reduced, making retaking the prison not too difficult.
The statements, before a sympathetic House, went quite well. On the Trafalgar Square riot I told the House that a team of a hundred officers had been set up to take charge of a major
criminal
investigation into the incident. There was plenty of evidence available in the form of photographs and film to identify those
responsible. What had happened had nothing whatsoever to do with the right of peaceful demonstration. A large number of people had set out bent on violence and there could be no justification whatsoever for the savage and barbaric acts which millions had seen on their television screens. I infuriated the Labour Party by saying in answer to questions:
It really doesn’t help if MPs exhort people to break the law. Do they really expect those they seek to influence to draw a neat distinction between one sort of law breaking and another? Do they really expect the people they seek to influence to stop at trying to break the tax and abstain from breaking policemen’s heads? Any member, and it has been said there are up to thirty of them, who has been exhorting people to break the law ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
The statement on Strangeways was a calmer affair, but unwittingly I made one mistake. I said in reply to a question that there was nothing to suggest that there was a connection between the poll tax riot and the happenings at Strangeways. In fact, some weeks, not days, later I was told that on the Sunday when the riot broke out the ringleaders on the roof unfurled a makeshift banner which referred to poll tax. Why I was not told this on the Monday I really do not know.
In the next few days I was told over and over again by Brian Emes that the view of those on the spot was that it was far too dangerous to retake the prison. Landings had been made unsafe, booby traps laid and barricades built. The remaining rioters were in the rafters armed with scaffold poles and anyone who approached them from below would be horribly exposed. And surely, with the number of rioters falling each day as the lesser fry thought it politic to surrender, it was better to sit tight. On the Wednesday after the trouble started the rioters were still sixty-four strong, but the next day the number had
fallen to forty-seven. On Wednesday 11 April there remained only sixteen. In these circumstances it was not just Emes who thought that the remaining rioters would not hold out very much longer and as all the Rule 43 inmates (segregated for their own protection) had been rescued we were not justified in risking the lives of prison
officers
retaking the place. The fact that nobody inside was in danger, that nobody had been taken hostage, also meant that there was no justification for asking the police to sort things out, let alone for bringing in the SAS.
The unsung hero of those early days was David Mellor, then the Minister of State in the Home Office responsible for prisons. Copycat disturbances were breaking out in other prisons, but he wasted not a moment in getting over to the governors the simple message that enough was enough and that he and I would back them up to the hilt if they took whatever measures were necessary to snuff out the disturbances and would be on them like a ton of bricks if they didn’t. David’s political career came to a
premature
end when John Major was Prime Minister and I had left the government for Bermuda, but I was immensely lucky to have him as a colleague, particularly during the prison riots.
For the first few days after the start of the trouble at Strangeways the press gave me a very easy time.
A Daily Mail
leader read:
David Waddington is the first genuinely right-wing Home Secretary we have had for years. He has no need to pay obeisance to anyone in the law and order lobby. Everything he has ever said and done shows that he is prepared to be as tough on criminals and law-breakers as any potential critic of the Tory right.
Because of this he has been able to take a cool and pragmatic view of the Strangeways and copycat riots which followed.
A so-called ‘progressive’ would have sent in the SAS days ago and probably ended up with a good deal of blood on his hands.
David Waddington has taken the eminently sane view that though prisoners on the rooftops of British jails may be very embarrassing to the government and galling to the prison service, these men are not endangering life.
Only if they were doing that, would there be justification to use force to bring them down. No doubt they will be punished when it is all over and they deserve to be.
David Waddington, by campaigning for years on issues of law and order, is at last someone at the Home Office who understands that if we are really to have law and order in this country we must have law and order for everyone and that sometimes includes the criminal.
While the
Mail
applauded our restraint the
Guardian
brigade, sharpening their pencils for the day, which they could not believe could be long delayed, when they could accuse me of being a murderous fascist, had for the time being nothing at all to say. The same was not true of the Prime Minister. She had plenty to say across the table in the Cabinet Room and said it. In this instance, as in so many others, she showed an uncanny understanding of what the British people were prepared to put up with and what they would not stomach. She had seen on television the film of the rioters capering around on the prison roof. She had seen, as the public had seen, the millions of pounds of damage done. She could see that the rioters were making fools of us all and she knew that the British people did not like to be treated as fools. At the same time we in the Home Office could see that the mood of the press was changing. Some of the papers were beginning to murmur ‘enough is enough’ and were no longer prepared to give us credit for the fact that the copycat riots at Dartmoor, Bristol and Pucklechurch had been dealt with robustly.
From day one I had been anxious to go up to Manchester, but
others argued strongly that I should stay away. The chief constable of Manchester did not want me to go because he felt he had enough on his plate and could ill-afford to take men off the jobs they were doing in order to guard me. He felt that my arrival could spark off trouble on the streets and Manchester could finish up with its own poll tax riot. My office did not want me to go because they feared that they and I would be accused of acting improperly by trying to take control of the situation, as Churchill was before the First World War when he went to see the Sydney Street siege. The deputy director-general of the prison service, Emes, was the man with operational
responsibility
, they said, and he should be left to get on with it.
Eventually I had had enough. I had been fobbed off with story after story as to why matters could not be brought to a conclusion. I was determined to see for myself what was going on. I got up early on Sunday 22 April and told my detective and driver that we were off to Manchester.
Brendan O’Friel, the governor, welcomed me warmly and was obviously delighted to see me. But he looked at me strangely when I congratulated him on the way he had handled things and
eventually
he told me that right at the start he had had a serious
disagreement
with Emes on the tactics to be employed. He said that he had wanted to go in and retake the prison on the first day and had assembled the necessary people to do this, but over the telephone Emes had vetoed the plan. Once that opportunity had been thrown away and the rioters had had time to fortify themselves in the
rafters
they had had little option but to sit it out. There were now only seven rioters left in the prison but they had built formidable defences and would be difficult to remove.
Back in the Home Office on the Monday I told the Permanent Secretary what I had discovered and that I was not at all happy at the way things had been handled. I think I convinced Clive Whitmore that he had got to get a grip on the situation himself and
before long a plan was devised to retake the prison. A few days later a hundred prison officers in riot gear stormed in and nine hours later the last five prisoners surrendered. I flew up to Manchester by army helicopter to thank those who had carried out the good work.
From the outset, the matter was not handled well and I had to take responsibility for that. If I had known of the disagreement between Emes and O’Friel I would have stepped in and resolved the matter in favour of the man on the spot who was far better able to assess the situation than Emes sitting in London, and I am pretty sure that O’Friel would have snuffed out the riot. But I could take comfort from the fact that only one person had died (a remand prisoner) and he only indirectly as a result of the incident. Lives are more important than bricks and mortar and it would have been far worse if an early storming of the prison had resulted in a blood bath.
There is no doubt that the affair did great damage to my own reputation within the Parliamentary Party, and after it was all over Woodrow Wyatt was the only person to write in the press in supportive terms. Without, of course, knowing the whole story he said this in his
News of the World
column:
Home Secretary David Waddington is not a sissy. The press and the media were full of lurid stories of mutilations and murders at Strangeways.
The greatly exaggerated reports led to demands for the army to move in. That would really have caused a lot of deaths. It took courage on the part of the Home Secretary to stay calm. The ringleaders were desperate, evil men.
Egged on by the TV coverage, they saw themselves as wild west heroes fighting to the last. But some good may come of it.
The public will realise that more money has to be spent on prisons to stop overcrowding. And to make them fit for human beings, however wicked some may be.
John Carvel in
The Guardian
took a very different and damaging line:
The man is neither particularly hard, nor naturally wimpish. Mr Waddington is an early victim of Home Secretary’s disease – acute damage to reputation caused by inflammation of the media. Strangeways’s wider political significance is that it may have stripped the Tories of an image on which they relied to cover their lack of a real law and order strategy. It would be unfair to blame Mr Waddington for the Strangeways eruption or the handling of the siege. It would have been outrageous had he overruled the professional experience of his deputy director-general of prisons and sent in the SAS on the crucial second day.
In six months, Mr Waddington has got most of his decisions right by his own lights and ideology. There is no hard evidence yet that he was to blame for botching anything at Strangeways. His danger is that none of that matters any longer. If he is to be classed as a wimp by the right, his value as a front man covering for an inadequate Tory law and order policy may have been eroded.
A minister in the Home Office and the Home Secretary in
particular
often has to perform like a juggler. A number of balls are always up in the air at the same time and he can afford to drop none of them. While trying to cope with Strangeways I was also
responsible
for the World Summit on Drugs which had opened at the exhibition centre in Parliament Square; but it was very difficult to concentrate on this secondary task. The conference was useful but like so many of these international meetings it was somewhat spoiled by the determination of virtually all the delegates to read out lengthy statements completely unrelated to earlier
contributions
. At the beginning of one session I divided the time available by the number of those wishing to speak and told the assembled company that speeches had to be limited to seven minutes. The
first person I called spoke for fourteen minutes and the second for eleven. I called for cooperation and self-control and the next person to rise spoke for seventeen minutes. I was fast losing my patience and when a Japanese delegate was still going strong after eleven minutes I rose and asked him to stop. His fury knew no bounds. He strode towards the podium and made as if to climb the two steps in order to upbraid or assault me. He tripped on the second step and fell on his neck. There was loud applause.