David Waddington Memoirs (23 page)

Gilly and I had planned a week’s holiday in St Mawes and we travelled down to Cornwall with our policemen to find that the Devon and Cornwall Police were determined not to be left out of the show and had more or less taken over the hotel. They had also found someone with a boat who was detailed to guard us on the
water. We went sailing on a yacht chartered by Gerry Neale, then MP for North Cornwall, and helped by a strong wind we zipped along in fine style with five policemen in a tiny motor boat bouncing along on the top of the waves beside us. Our chaps from the Met looked decidedly queasy.

After three days we came back to London and travelled down to Eastbourne for Ian’s funeral. It was a very high church affair ending with a superb address by the Bishop of Lewes. We then had tea at the Dog House (Ian and Jane’s home) before flying back to Cornwall.

Jenny, my elder daughter, was in Australia on a so-called
working
holiday and she had left a message at the hotel asking us to ring her the following Monday. When I got in touch she sounded rather quiet and pensive and the best I hoped for was that she wanted a thousand pounds to restore her finances. I asked her if anything was wrong and she said, ‘You had better speak to Robbie.’ Daughters really should not do that sort of thing to fathers, and I expected the worst. When, therefore, I heard what this Robbie had to say I was amazed but relieved. ‘You will think this very odd, sir,’ said a very Australian voice, ‘but Jenny insists on my doing things properly. May I have your daughter’s hand in marriage?’ ‘What a damn silly question,’ said I. ‘I haven’t even clapped eyes on you.’ Robbie’s reaction was, however, so mournful that I immediately took pity on him. ‘There there,’ said I, ‘if Jenny thinks you a nice lad I suppose it will be all right.’ Thus was parental consent sought and sort of given.

It happened that in September we were due to go to Australia on a ministerial visit and these extraordinary family happenings proved to be of great interest to the Australian police and secret service, and to our own High Commissioner, Sir John Coles. The police and secret service wanted to check out Robbie to make sure he did not make bombs. Sir John said he thought it would be nice
for Robbie and Jenny to be with him at Sydney Airport when we flew in and he would make arrangements accordingly. When we landed, however, only Sir John, looking rather bleak, was waiting at the bottom of the steps. I asked him where the lovebirds were and he explained that his driver had been sent to Jenny’s address but as no one had answered the door, he had returned empty-handed. We went to our hotel harbouring murderous thoughts. An hour later there was a knock on our bedroom door and there they were; and pretty cocky too, in the circumstances. ‘Oh, what a fuss, Dad. We went to a party in the mess last night and I overslept.’ I told them in no uncertain terms that they had got themselves in deep trouble, and that as we were going on a trip round Sydney Harbour that afternoon with the top brass including the Premier and Chief of Police of New South Wales they had better use it as an opportunity to redeem themselves. They did. As soon as Robbie got on the boat, John Coles asked him what he did for a living. Robbie replied that he was in the army but had spent most of his life playing cricket. John Coles declared his addiction to the game and Robbie and Jenny were both forgiven.

After that near-disastrous start the Australian visit went very well. There were one or two scrummages in hotel lifts when the Australian police battled for ascendancy over our own detectives; but apart from that it was all sweetness and light. I visited various police forces, two police training establishments, at one of which I had to deliver a lecture, and a privatised prison run by a bluff Yorkshireman with an army background. The place seemed to be very well run but the key to its success might have been its size. Although there were a lot serving life sentences there were only 250 prisoners in all; the place looked manageable.

We stayed with John Coles in Canberra before going on to Melbourne and there we dined at the Melbourne Club as guests of Sir John Young, Chief Justice of Victoria. In those days I was still
smoking small cigars and when I lit up over cocktails my host cried, ‘Waiter, bring an ashtray.’ Nothing happened for a few minutes and then the waiter returned and in a stage whisper said: ‘Sir, there are no ashtrays in the club.’ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Sir John, ‘bring a saucer.’

At the dinner table the Chief Justice let loose on Gilly a woman called Lady Derham. I could see from the other side that a furious altercation was in progress and when we rose Gilly told me that the woman had said: ‘Every Britisher in Northern Ireland should be thrown out.’ I thought that Gilly must have misunderstood and that what was being advocated was the usual ‘troops out’; and I went up to Lady Derham and told her politely that our troops had gone to Northern Ireland in the first place to defend the Catholics and there would be mayhem in Northern Ireland if our troops were just to quit the scene. She said that she was not only
advocating
that our troops should leave but that every Protestant in Northern Ireland should be expelled and sent back to Scotland. At that stage Gilly intervened and told her that by that logic everyone in Australia who was not an Aboriginal should clear off and she should set a good example by booking her own passage the next day. All in all it was quite a lively evening.

Before going off to Australia I had decided to refer back to the Court of Appeal the case of the Birmingham Six. This was after receiving advice from the unit in the Home Office which then dealt with allegations of miscarriages of justice. Subsequently the Court concluded that the verdicts were unsafe and the convictions were overturned.

In October came the Party Conference. On the eve of the home affairs debate Robin Oakley wrote in
The Times
that I should survive the ordeal. ‘Facing a conference audience Mr Waddington becomes generally heated. The Lancastrian growl and the “nowt for owt” style will come through.’ He was kind enough to add:
‘His short record as Home Secretary is in fact a respectable one for a man blinking in the light after a spell in the engine room murk of the Whips Office.’ I was pleased with the way things went and afterwards the Prime Minister was embarrassingly kind about it.

I got a good write-up in the
Daily Telegraph
and could not complain about John Carvel’s piece in
The Guardian
which read:

Robin Oakley wrote: ‘Mr Waddington brought the conference to life with a well-judged performance in which he pressed all the right buttons to please the representatives, winning the most enthusiastic standing ovation so far.’

Simon Heffer in the
Daily Telegraph
said:

As for Matthew Parris, I did not know whether to be pleased or sorry about his effort:

Later in October there was a Council of Ministers meeting in Naples. My main task was to make it plain that although in favour of a convention to reinforce and harmonise entry and visa
procedures
at the Community’s external frontiers, we intended to
maintain
checks at our national frontiers for the purpose of controlling immigration from third countries. We knew that some
governments
, prepared as usual to sign anything, had not the slightest intention of taking any steps to make the external frontier of the community secure, although the whole idea of the convention was that better immigration control at the Community’s external
borders made safe the scrapping of controls between member states. Our partners told us that we had to abolish our controls on entry into Britain from the Continent. It was, they said, an obligation we had undertaken when we had signed the Single European Act. We, however, continued to argue that the free movement
provisions
of the Single European Act did not apply to nationals of third countries and we were entitled to have controls at, for instance, the Channel ports to prevent entry by such people. This was the advice the Prime Minister had been given by the Foreign Office before she agreed to go along with the Single European Act, and she was not best pleased when, subsequently, the law officers advised that in advancing this argument we were on extremely shaky ground. But on that ground, shaky though it was, we were determined to stand for as long as possible.

When we came out of our hotel the first night, the Naples Police decided to take the cavalcade of ministers’ cars up a one-way street in the wrong direction. That meant forcing approaching cars into the ditch or onto the pavement. One car was slow to move and a policeman leapt out into the road and began to hammer on the windscreen with the butt of his revolver. The driver opened his window and got the pistol shoved in his face which so demoralised him that he was then quite incapable of moving his car at all and the police had to do the job for him.

A magnificent fireworks display was laid on for us after dinner. The frumpish Dutch Minister for the Interior said she did not like firework displays, particularly when they were as noisy as the one that night, and she told me why. As a girl she had lived in Arnhem and one day paratroopers began to drop out of the sky. The
teachers
at her school told her that Arnhem was about to be liberated and the war was soon to end, but first she and her classmates had to put on their coats and go off into the woods to wait until the fighting had stopped and it was safe to go home. They set off into
the woods and for days, while the noise of battle rolled about them, they waited to be told they could return. Eventually, someone came to tell them what had happened and they walked back to their hometown to find it in ruins and the ruins still occupied by the Germans. That is why the minister hated fireworks.

I then had to go to a one-day conference in Rome. This was to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights. In his opening speech the President of the commission said that there would be no cases brought to the commission or the court if all member countries of the Council of Europe observed the convention. He did not seem to realise that it was somewhat difficult to guarantee observance of the
convention
when its vague terms and generalities were constantly being reinterpreted by the court and it was difficult to know one day what was going to be the law the next. My comments to this effect were not well received. The proceedings groaned on and eventually I had had enough and set off down the grand staircase towards my waiting car. But my exit had been spotted and five delegates had set off in hot pursuit. When they caught me up they assured me that I was not going to be forced to listen to any more speeches. I was wanted for the group photograph.

Our Ambassador’s wife, who was a Catholic, asked us whether we would like to go with her to mass in the Pope’s private chapel at six the following morning, and there we went and met the Pope. I found him very much more spiritual and concerned with the saving of souls than any Church of England archbishop or bishop I had met, with the exception of the then Bishop of London, Dr Ellison. Dr Ellison left the Church of England a few years later.

Then came Geoffrey Howe’s resignation from the government. In the statement he made to the Commons explaining why he had done what he had, he invited others to come forward prepared lead the Party in Margaret Thatcher’s stead. It did not take long
after that for Michael Heseltine to throw his cap into the ring, saying that he had a better prospect than the Prime Minister of leading the Conservatives to victory at the next general election. Sixty Conservative members had refused to support the Prime Minister in 1989 when Sir Anthony Meyer had stood against her, and now with a serious and very formidable opponent already campaigning hard to displace her, one might have thought it was time for supporters of the Prime Minister to get to work and launch a vigorous campaign on her behalf; but nothing of the sort happened. There was a feeling in No. 10 that the unthinkable could not happen, that the Party really would have gone mad if it sacked a leader just off to Paris to celebrate something she had done so much to achieve – an end to the Cold War. And Peter Morrison, the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, sat in his little den close to the Cabinet Room ready to offer visitors a hefty drink and tell them that all would be well on the night. He was going to busy himself flushing out of the clubs in St James’s the very many members of the Parliamentary Party who, according to Peter, spent their time in such establishments.