David Waddington Memoirs (26 page)

The House was not persuaded, but the amendment was reversed in the Commons and that reversal was eventually accepted by their Lordships.
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In January 1992 I led a Lords’ delegation on a visit to the Pakistan Senate. We came back in poor shape and one of our number, Stanley Clinton-Davis, nearly expired. The trouble was a trip up the Khyber Pass. We had spent the night at Peshawar and the next day was brilliant with a cloudless sky. I did, however, detect a slight nip in the air and came down stairs carrying my overcoat over my arm. ‘You won’t need that,’ said my host, snatched it off me and threw it to the hall porter. By the time we reached the top of the Pass it was perishing. A general stood by a sand model and as the wind howled off the snow-covered Hindu Kush he lectured us for an hour on the goings on in Afghanistan and we slowly froze. We then had to endure a flight home on Pakistan Airways via Moscow.

Shortly after I got back from Pakistan, Gilly and I had another chilly experience. I had been invited to speak in Perth in support of Nicky Fairbairn, a highly eccentric former law officer, and we went to stay with him and his wife at their home, Fordell Castle. On the first day, having been offered a somewhat liquid lunch, we had to repair upstairs to our tower bedroom and breathe hard under the bedclothes in order to thaw out. On the Sunday our host invited members of his Association to drinks in the middle of the day and was moved to address the gathering wielding a broadsword which I thought at any moment might free itself from his somewhat shaky grasp and shoot across the room to impale his chairman.

The general election could not now be long delayed. I told the Prime Minister that I thought there would be advantages in waiting until May, but it was clear he had almost decided on 9 April and in due course the date was announced and Parliament prorogued. Prorogation involved five peers, appointed commissioners for the purpose, sitting on a bench in front of the throne and taking off their hats as the Royal Assent to Bills was signified. The five on this occasion were the Lord Chancellor, myself, Lord Cledwyn (Leader
of the Opposition peers), Lord Aberdare (chairman of committees) and Lord Jenkins (representing the Liberals).

The general election came and, in my view, was won (a) because Chris Patten never stopped hammering away at Neil Kinnock’s obvious inadequacies and (b) because John Major used his soap box to great effect to show his courage, tenacity and ability to relate to ordinary people. But the press conferences held at Central Office each morning were a disaster. Each was supposed to begin with a Cabinet minister making a presentation about some aspect of policy for which he was responsible, and that was supposed to give the press something to chew on and set the tone for the day. Virtually all the presentations were appalling and the press showed no interest in them. Chris Patten seemed to go out of his way to invite the most troublesome journalists present to put questions to him. This had two disadvantages. One, he could not answer their questions. Two, friendly journalists who wanted to help got thoroughly fed up.

After each press conference my committee sat to answer
questions
from candidates, and only after that did I set off to campaign. I wasted a lot of time trailing round safe seats, but I did get up to Scotland to support James Douglas-Hamilton
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and also to north Wales, Anglesey and the West Country, travelling in great style in a helicopter which had been lent to the Party by a wealthy industrialist. On 1 April I woke to hear Labour were between four and seven points ahead in the polls. Two days later I was in Bristol and was told by Michael Stern how badly things were going, but I myself could not detect a very sour atmosphere. On the Tuesday before polling day I was in Edinburgh and was well satisfied with what I saw in James Douglas-Hamilton’s seat. I was most amused
by the respectful, indeed deferential, attitude of those attending the meeting I addressed. It was something I had never previously experienced. Perhaps the Scots reserve it for the sons of dukes. On the Wednesday morning I flew down to Manchester and then on to the East Midlands. That day I really did feel that things were coming back to us with John and his soap box having gone down well; and on the Tuesday Woodrow Wyatt, a wise old bird, said he thought we would win. On the Thursday, however, the exit polls were discouraging and Gilly and I sat at home expecting the worst. Then we heard the result at Basildon and soon after that it was clear Labour would not make it.

I was told that all Cabinet ministers should be available to see the Prime Minister on the Saturday, and on Saturday morning I was back in my office waiting for a call. It came just before 11 a.m. and, after I had congratulated John on his victory and we had had a short chat about the campaign, he said: ‘I have something unusual to say. I am having to ask a number of people to leave the Cabinet for a big reconstruction. This is no criticism of the way you have led the Lords. You have done very well. But I need your place and I am offering you the Governorship of Bermuda. As far as I am concerned you can have it for the whole of the parliament.’ I said I would like to talk to Gilly about that and after wishing him all the luck in the world I left. I rang Gilly and she said at once that I ought to accept the offer. And that was that. I had just become a grandfather and now was to become a governor as well. I felt very old.

I
was disappointed to leave the government, but I had known it was bound to happen sooner or later and I was grateful that I was going to have something useful to do instead. I got some nice letters which encouraged me to believe that I had played a useful part in the election campaign and had not been a failure as Leader of the Lords. I particularly appreciated a letter from Emily Blatch in which she referred to the ‘sharpness and political edge’ I had brought to the job of leader; one from Lord Simon of Glaisdale who had liked my speeches because they were ‘wonderfully economical’ and another from Roy Jenkins in which he said: ‘I thought you were a good leader, crisp, quick to take a point and totally dependable.’ One of the nicest was from Lord Jakobovits, the Chief Rabbi, who referred to the battle over the War Crimes Bill.

During the next few weeks I spent many hours wandering round the Foreign and Commonwealth Office attending briefings about Bermuda. I already knew a little, probably more than the Foreign Office which could not even run to earth a copy of the Bermuda constitution and sent me off on a number of wild goose chases. One thing I knew for certain: I had no responsibilities in the field of labour relations. But meetings with the TUC featured large in the Foreign Office’s programme for me.

Bermuda was one of Britain’s few remaining dependent
territories
and its recent history had not been trouble free. In 1973 the
Governor, Sir Richard Sharples, had been murdered and there had been serious rioting when the man responsible was hanged. I got useful advice from Viscount Dunrossil, who as plain John Morrison had been a friend at Oxford and had been Governor in the eighties. I discovered that the government of Bermuda, not Her Majesty’s Government, was responsible for my salary and that once the British taxpayers had provided me with my uniform I was no longer to be a burden on them. I did not want to have to wait too long before taking up the appointment because it was not easy being without a salary; but I fully understood that Desmond Langley had to be given a reasonable amount of time to pack up and bow out. I did, however, begin to get anxious when the Foreign Office passed to me a message from Bermuda suggesting that I should delay my arrival until October as the Premier was going away on holiday in September and did not think there was any point in my coming until his return. I concluded that it was about time I asserted myself and a reply winged its way to the Premier saying that as he was going on holiday in September I would be arriving in August before his departure.

It was strange, after so many years as a minister, to have no official car in London; but I swiftly became an expert on the bus routes and got sore feet tramping hot pavements. I paid numerous informative visits to important personages like the governor of the Bank of England. I went to see various enterprises with a stake in Bermuda such as Cable & Wireless. I was to be chief scout in Bermuda so had to mug up on scouting. I was to be president of the Council of St John on the Island, so I went off to the
headquarters
of the Order of St John in Clerkenwell to be knighted. And at the behest of the Foreign Office I made a completely pointless visit to Brussels to speak to EU officials who might have wished to meddle in things Bermudian but, luckily for Bermuda, had not been given the chance.

I paid numerous visits to Mr Alan Bennett, tailor of Savile Row, and eventually took delivery of a blue uniform with black cocked hat for winter wear and a white uniform with pith helmet for the summer. Both hats were designed to sport a feather plume and Mr Bennett told the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Finding swans’ feathers for these hats gets harder. The swan is a protected species, so we used to import them from Holland. That is now illegal. We eventually obtained about sixty from a swan factory in Norfolk. They follow the swans about, waiting for them to shed feathers.’

The press took a great interest in all this, asking why I was going to wear uniform when Chris Patten was not. I explained that there was no similarity between the situation in Hong Kong, where Britain was preparing to surrender sovereignty to China, and the situation in Bermuda, where Britain would remain the sovereign power as long as the people of Bermuda wished it. Presumably, at the present time the people valued the British connection and the traditions which went with it and many might look askance if I acted differently from my predecessors. Another matter in which the press took a great interest was the death penalty. In 1991 the British government had by Order in Council abolished the death penalty in the Caribbean dependent territories, but had not been able to do so in Bermuda, which in 1968 had been granted a
constitution
giving it complete control of its own internal affairs. The death penalty had been suffered by the man who had murdered Sir Richard Sharples and when the Island had had a referendum on capital punishment in 1990 there had been a four to one majority in favour of retention.

Under the 1968 constitution the Governor had the power, after consultation with an advisory committee on the Prerogative of Mercy, to substitute ‘a less severe form of punishment’ and my predecessor had used this power to substitute life imprisonment for the death sentence in the two murder cases which had come before
him. Now another murder trial was pending following the brutal killing of a German tourist in Dockyard, and the question which kept on being asked was whether I would act as had the previous Governor or allow the law to take its course. I could only answer that I would carry out my duty in accordance with the
constitution
, which required consultation with the Mercy Committee and an examination of each case on its merits; and that my own views on capital punishment were irrelevant. I did not say, although I knew it well enough, that I could not ignore the fact that the death penalty had not been imposed for many years and when it had last been used civil disturbances had followed.

On 24 July Gilly and I went to Buckingham Palace for an
audience
with the Queen, and on the next day we flew to Singapore and on to Australia to stay with Robbie and Jenny. Back in England we had exactly one week to move out of our London house which we had decided to sell, do our final packing and leave for Bermuda, which for the next few years was to be our home.

I was to be sworn in on the morning after our arrival, so had to have with me in the plane both my uniform and my ceremonial sword. The carrying of swords on planes was, however, strictly forbidden, so arrangements had to be made for me to hand over the sword to the captain of the aircraft for safe keeping during the journey. Another problem was our dog Basil: somehow or other it was arranged that at Gatwick he could have a bit of exercise on the tarmac between two parked planes before he was put back in his cage and handed over to the chief steward on the aircraft bound for Bermuda.

Arriving at Bermuda, the plane landed on the American base which, along with other land on the Island, had in 1940 been leased to America but was available for use by civilian aircraft. Then, after being greeted by the Premier and members of his Cabinet, the Chief Justice, the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops and
sundry other dignitaries, we set out for Government House. Across the causeway which links the base and St George’s to the main island there was a little knot of people holding a banner calling for independence. The children in the group had not been properly trained in the technique of protest and waved merrily. On we went for a few more miles and up the drive to Government House – a mansion in the Italianate style built of Normandy stone in the last decade of the nineteenth century. According to Jan Morris, author of three volumes describing the rise and decline of the British Empire, the explanation for there being such a magnificent Governor’s residence in such a tiny place lies in a foreign office memorandum of the 1890s which reads: ‘The keeping up of an outward appearance of power will in many instances save the necessity of resort to the actual exercise of it.’ And the outward appearance of power certainly humbled us as we went up the drive and onto the forecourt, past the four cannons lined up opposite the front door. We were not too dismayed by the sight of the Governor’s standard and the Union Jack bearing the Bermuda coat of arms flying upside down, and we knew as soon as we were inside that we would come to love the place. After a quick dinner we went upstairs to our magnificent bedroom with a balcony overlooking the sea and soon fell asleep in the four-poster bed. The next day I got into my uniform, and we set off down Langton Hill and into Hamilton, riding in the landau kept for such occasions. In Front Street there came a cry from one of the balconies: ‘Hello, David, we are from Clitheroe,’ and no longer did I feel a stranger in a strange land. On we went to the Senate House where, after I had inspected a guard of honour to the accompaniment of a seventeen-gun salute and music from the band of the Bermuda Regiment, I was sworn in as Governor by the Chief Justice.

Larry Mussenden, who had been the previous Governor’s
aide-de
-camp, was to stay on with us for a month or two before going to
the University of Buckingham to read law
*
. And after the
swearing-in
he took us on a tour of the seven islands linked together by bridges and causeways which make up Bermuda.

First we went to St George’s Island and the town of St George, Bermuda’s capital until the mid-nineteenth century, and from there along the coast to St Catherine’s Bay where, on 28 July 1609, the
Sea Venture
was wrecked and the 150 on board struggled ashore. In St George’s we saw a replica of the
Deliverance
, which in 1610 carried those who had been on the
Sea Venture
over to Virginia. We also visited the beautiful church in which, after the Island was formally settled, Bermuda’s first Parliament met.

Close by in Tobacco Bay we met for the first time Jennifer Smith – later to hold a painting exhibition with Gilly and then, after the 1998 general election, to become Premier. Then it was on to Tucker’s Town where, after the First World War, land was compulsorily purchased to build two hotels and golf courses and houses for rich Americans. A road built by the military in the
nineteenth
century then took us along the south shore to beautiful bays where the coral comes almost to the shore. And eventually as the islands curve back towards the north we came to Dockyard, built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as part of a chain of fortifications from Canada to the Caribbean to meet the threats posed by newly independent America and Napoleon.

We then had the chance to explore the Government House garden, thirty-two acres of it – big by any standards but
particularly
by the standards of Bermuda. A flight of steps took us from the top lawn to the first terrace and to the cedar planted by Winston Churchill in 1942 after he had travelled to America to meet President Roosevelt. This tree survived the blight which at
the end of the 1940s killed off most of the cedars on the Island – a blight brought to Bermuda by an American who bore the
curious
name Carbon Petroleum Dubbs. Next to the Churchill cedar stood a princess palm planted by Haile Selassie in his last days as Emperor of Ethiopia. People in Bermuda will tell you that when the then Governor, General Gascoygne, who was a very tall man, was escorting the Emperor down the steps he had to bend low to converse with him. The result was that he tripped over his sword and shot down the remaining steps on his bottom. The general was one of Bermuda’s most popular Governors which makes it hard to believe that this tale was told out of malice, but sadly I have to report that his daughter, Merida Drysdale, a neighbour of ours, says that there is not a scrap of truth in it.

At the bottom of the third terrace was the royal poinciana planted by the Duke of Windsor in 1940 when on his way to take up his appointment as Governor of the Bahamas. On the way down to the planting ceremony a member of the press asked the Duchess what she thought of her husband’s appointment, and she replied: ‘It is not so much an appointment as a disappointment.’ There was then a royal palm planted by the Duke of Kent when honeymooning in Bermuda in 1934; and on the left of the drive on the way back to the house a grove of trees planted by American Presidents and British Prime Ministers when summit meetings had taken place in Bermuda. There had been a Bush/Thatcher meeting in 1990 and a Bush/Major one in 1991.

The drive from Langton Hill up to the house runs through a cutting in the rock and above and across the cutting bougainvillea grew in great abundance until the dreadful day when a dead rat fell from the foliage onto the lap of a Governor’s wife riding in the landau on her way to the opening of Parliament.

In our day the garden was in the hands of Manuel and a team of five fellow members of the Portuguese community. When Gilly
had the temerity to suggest to Manuel how a plant might be better tended, he replied: ‘Lady, we know what we are doing,’ and, for the next five years, she had to find other pastimes than gardening.

A barrier manned by the police stood across the drive as it turned towards the front entrance and, one morning after we had been in Government House for some time, there were found painted on the gate post on the house side of the police barrier a number of doom-laden messages. I remember in particular ‘prepare to meet your doom’ and ‘the end of the world is nigh’. An investigation was launched. Clearly some villain had crept up through the garden, and without doubt, said my aide-de-camp, the messages were threatening and there was a real risk of my going the way of Richard Sharples if something was not done and done swiftly. It was some days before the investigators got round to questioning the policeman in the box that night, but he eventually declared with more pride than remorse that he had had a summons from heaven during the night and in accordance with a divine command had gone off to find a paint pot.

But now we were in the house, which proved far more
comfortable
and far less forbidding than we expected; and beyond the drawing room and dining room there was a swimming pool which was certainly well used in our time – not least by Basil who on particularly hot days would sit on the top step at the shallow end with water up to his neck. For the pool we were indebted to Lord Martonmere, a former Governor who was inordinately rich, having had the good sense to marry an American heiress.