David Waddington Memoirs (25 page)

Luckily for the government the noble lords or, rather, a
majority
of them did not grasp these obvious points and the Bill was rejected and duly became law. The tactics of the Bill’s
opponents
were plain stupid but their speeches were often brilliant. Douglas Houghton, who, having fought at Paschendale, must have known as much about the horrors of warfare as any man, and Hartley Shawcross, who prosecuted at Nuremberg, made truly magnificent contributions. Roy Jenkins mounted a most extraordinary argument – namely that it was perfectly proper for a Labour government to use the Parliament Act to bulldoze legislation through against the opposition of the Upper House but quite improper for the Parliament Act to be invoked in the case of a non-political measure like the War Crimes Bill. To me, the opposite view seemed much more attractive. It is surely very much more worrying to see the Upper House ignored when it is trying to put a brake on a dictatorial government bent on whipping its majority in the Commons to force-feed the public with unpopular legislation, than to see the Lords ignored when its opinion flies in the face of the views of the vast majority of members in the Commons expressed in a free vote. I put the point (tactfully) in my wind-up speech:

And I went on to say that the only result of accepting Lord Houghton’s amendment (that the Bill be read a second time not now, but ‘this day six months’) would be that the House would lose its opportunity to improve the Bill. My words were, however, to no avail and the Houghton amendment, which under standing orders had to be treated as a rejection of the Bill, was carried by 131 votes to 109.

Lord Mayhew (of Wimbledon) was not on good form in the debate. Perhaps he was still suffering from a splendid put-down administered by Viscount Tonypandy at Question Time a week earlier. Lord Mayhew had asserted that in 1946 the Labour
government
of the day, of which he was a member, had decided that there should be no more war crimes trials. In fact, the Labour government had decided nothing of the sort; and Tonypandy drew attention both to this inaccuracy and to the fact that at the time Lord Mayhew was ‘a very junior minister’.

At the beginning of June 1991 Humphrey Colnbrook
*
who, if Margaret had had her way, would have become Speaker in 1983 instead of Jack Weatherill, told me he was going to introduce a debate on defence. In my innocence I thought his idea was to give a helping hand to the government. Defence was hardly the Opposition’s strong suit, and a speech strongly supportive of government policy coupled with a bit of knockabout fun at the Opposition’s expense would not go amiss. Not for the last time I was in for a nasty surprise. There was precious little support for the government in Humphrey’s speech or, for that matter, in any of the
other speeches from the Tory benches and not a glove was laid on the Labour Party. But I do remember the debate for an exchange between Lord Mayhew and Lord Boyd-Carpenter. The latter, in his reply to a completely fatuous comment of Lord Mayhew’s (‘the Soviets were building hundreds of submarines for purely
defensive
purposes’) provided a perfect example of a particularly lordly debating style which can deflate the windbag in very quick time. ‘My Lords, because it is the noble Lord’s birthday today I shall wish him many happy returns. I hope that when he reflects on his intervention, it will not substantially diminish the pleasure of the occasion for him.’

The rules of order in the Lords require ‘All personal, sharp or taxing speeches to be foreborn, and whosoever answereth another man’s speech shall apply his answer to the matter without wrong to the person: and as nothing offensive is to be spoken, so nothing is to be ill-taken.’ So if one wants to put down an opponent, a certain subtlety of approach is required.

A new session of Parliament was opened by the Queen on 31 October 1991. I carried the Cap of Maintenance. Matthew Parris wrote of the occasion: ‘Not far from the throne stood a man I used to know as Mr Waddington, carrying a shower cap mounted on a broomstick.’

Andrew Rawnsley in
The Guardian
allowed his imagination to run riot:

By November 1991 the Maastricht Summit was imminent and their Lordships wanted their say. Colin Welch in the
Daily Mail
reported: ‘Lord Waddington was his usual dry, semi-committed, cautious and circumspect self.’ What I said was that Britain’s view on the future of the Community did not tally with that of some other members of the community:

In February 1991 I became a deputy lieutenant for the County of Lancashire, which pleased me greatly. Also in February I was given the job of representing the government at the funeral of the King of Norway in Oslo. I boarded a plane of the Queen’s flight at Northolt and found myself in the company of various people who were connected with the Royal Family in some remote and minor
way and had rung up Buckingham Palace asking if they could hitch a lift. A few minutes after take-off we seemed to be coming down again and I wondered whether we were in trouble; but we landed and the Princess Royal came aboard. We were somewhere near Sandringham. Up again and then Prince Charles appeared and asked if we were enjoying ourselves. He told us he was doing the flying. The funeral went off with many hitches. I had always thought the Norwegians were fairly efficient, but clearly
ceremonial
was not their strong point. After the service a lot of royals were left hanging around on the pavement. Their cars had been sent somewhere else.

There then came the enthronement of George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a splendid occasion; but I felt the Cabinet rather let the side down. There were well-rehearsed processions of the clergy and civic dignitaries, and then, without any attempt to marshal us into some semblance of order, the Prime Minister and the rest of us shambled along. As we hunted for our seats we were not a pretty sight.

On 4 May I attended the Gulf service of remembrance and thanksgiving in St Mungo’s Cathedral, Glasgow. The royal train broke down so the Queen was late.

In the same month Jenny was married. We had intended the ceremony to take place in the crypt of the House of Commons – more correctly the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft – but after all the invitations had gone out we were told that the maximum number of people allowed in the place had been drastically reduced on the introduction of new fire regulations. We waited for a few days hoping that the mail would bring masses of letters from people saying they could not come. Instead nearly everyone accepted so we decided to move to St Margaret’s and notified everyone
accordingly
. All went well on the day. Walking from the church to the House of Lords for the reception we came across some morris
dancers in Old Palace Yard. A man-horse descended on the bride and wished her fertility.

Back to work, and the task of getting through the government’s legislative programme. Divisions I found pretty unnerving because rarely could a result favourable to the government be guaranteed. Whips worked hard to deliver the votes but the Conservative peers did not think twice about voting against the government. Some did not even think it their duty to tell us when they were unhappy with government policy and were minded to vote the ‘wrong’ way.

And I soon discovered that the built-in majority the Tories were supposed to have in the House simply did not exist. In 1991 there were, in fact, fewer peers who took the Conservative Party whip than there were members of the Opposition parties and the
non-aligned
peers together; but even the pure arithmetic exaggerated the strength of the Conservatives because a very high proportion of the peers on the other side of the House were life peers and
dedicated
party politicians, whereas the Conservative ranks contained many hereditary peers who called themselves Conservatives but did not feel under any obligation to be regular attenders and turn up for divisions.

Facing these difficulties I was bound to ask myself now and again whether the House of Lords as then constituted was worth preserving; but I always finished up answering the question with a resounding ‘yes’. No one in his right mind, charged with the job of devising a constitution, would have proposed a second
chamber
remotely like the one we had got. But we were not devising a new constitution, and the question was whether anyone had come up with proposals for reform of the Lords which would result in anything better. A wholly nominated chamber? We had gone through all that in 1968, and it was a non-starter. An elected chamber? If it were elected on the same basis as the Commons it would be a mere carbon copy of the Commons and serve no
useful purpose at all. If it were elected on a different basis it would have the same democratic validity as, and be a challenge to, the Commons. So my conclusion was that for all its faults, the House worked pretty well and no changes which up to then had been mooted would make it any better.

On 18 April 1991 the government suffered a defeat when peers voted by a large majority (177 to 79) for an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill abolishing the mandatory life sentence for murder and allowing judges in murder cases to pass any sentence they wanted – from life to five years, to two years or, for that matter, to a fine or an absolute discharge.

In the debate I had pointed out that when the death penalty was abolished it had been decided that the sentence to be put in its place had to be one which continued to mark the unique
wickedness
of the crime of murder. The life sentence, the public were told, would not mean that every murderer would spend the rest of his days in prison, but that he would sacrifice his life to the State in the sense that he would only be released when the Home Secretary thought it appropriate. The Home Secretary would be responsible to Parliament if things went wrong; and, because the sentence was for life, the murderer would only be released on licence and for the rest of his life would be liable to recall to prison if he did not behave or appeared once again to have become a danger to the public. I also reminded the House that only a month earlier the House of Commons had once again voted not to restore capital punishment, that the vote had been taken against the background of there being the mandatory life sentence and, for that reason alone, it could not possibly be right to scrap it now.

Lastly, I made the point that it was highly unlikely that if the mandatory sentence was abolished, judges would pass determinate sentences which reflected the views of ordinary people. When some years before a proposal had come before the House for the
abolition 
of the mandatory life sentence in Scotland, the Scottish law lords had made it quite clear that in certain well-publicised murder cases they would have passed sentences which in view of their
leniency
the general public would have thought quite inappropriate.

The Earl of Longford argued that the public reaction to sentences was irrelevant and should be ignored, but I thought it
extraordinarily
arrogant to assert that we knew better than everyone else what was and was not justice.