David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  In the general election campaign Ted Heath had sought a mandate to negotiate terms for Britain’s entry into the EEC and first Tony Barber then Geoffrey Rippon were given the job of negotiating. In July 1971 a White Paper was published setting out the terms agreed, and there then followed a most brilliant exercise in business management and whipping by Francis Pym. He persuaded the Prime Minister that in the six-day debate on the principle of entry the Conservative Party should have a free vote. Without a whip it was likely that more Conservatives would vote against the motion approving entry than would do so if there was a whip, but he believed, and he was proved right, that if the Tories were not whipped, far more pro-Europeans in the Labour ranks would vote for the motion. The motion was carried by 356 votes to 244 with thirty-nine Conservatives voting against the motion and two abstaining, and sixty-nine Labour members voting for the motion and twenty abstaining. Getting a second reading for the Bill proved far more difficult and it is doubtful whether it could have been done had the Prime Minister not made the division a vote of confidence, saying that if the vote went against the government he and the whole Cabinet would resign. The closing stages of the debate were a nerve-wracking business. With the Prime Minister declaring that if the vote went against the Bill ‘this Parliament cannot sensibly continue’, a second reading was obtained by just 309 votes to 301.

  In October the Conservative Party Conference had voted decisively for EEC entry. I was unhappy because of what seemed to me the betrayal of the Commonwealth, and New Zealand in particular, through our having to adopt the common agricultural policy; but I could see the importance of trade with Europe for British industry and although the Commission’s supranational ambitions were already evident, I thought we and other countries would together tame the beast. I certainly did not think that we would finish up with the undemocratic mess which is today’s EU.

  QC’s Oath

  At the beginning of the parliament, Attorney-General Peter Rawlinson had asked me to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary, and I accepted. There is nothing very glamorous in being a PPS, but it was considered the first step on the ladder. I also decided to apply for silk (to become a Queen’s Counsel) because travelling back to Manchester night after night after voting in the House and then, after a hard day in court, getting back to London for another vote was proving a great strain.

  My application was successful, and the declaration which one then had to make was truly extraordinary; reading it was a challenge because of the absence of punctuation marks.

  I had not been well since Christmas 1970 but soon after all this I began to feel really ill. I went to hospital, where it was at first thought I had a brain tumour, but then after a series of tests encephalitis was diagnosed. This then led to epileptic fits. On one occasion I passed out in the House of Commons and came to in Westminster Hospital. On another occasion I passed out in the Lyons snack bar on Bridge Street and again woke up in hospital, this time with a large cut on my forehead. It was an incident which had an odd sequel. Years later I received a letter from a man who said that he was disgusted at my discourtesy in never having written to him to thank him for coming to my rescue when I had been taken ill in Westminster. He had ruined his shirt in doing so and wanted £5 for a new one. I, of course, had no idea who had looked after me and certainly had no knowledge of a shirt ruined by my blood. But I had no reason to doubt his word and he got his money.

  One Friday morning when I arrived back in Manchester off the night sleeper I discovered that my car had been stolen from the car park. I walked to the bus station, caught a bus to Accrington and then another one to Whalley, getting off at a call box on the way from where I intended to phone Gilly. But having got in the box I could not remember our number and when I started looking in the phone book I could not remember what my name looked like in print. I walked to a shop and I asked the surprised man to look up my telephone number for me and ring my home, which he duly did and Gilly came to the rescue. All this was followed by another spell in hospital, but eventually things came right, and the only lesson to be learned is: don’t get encephalitis. It tends to lead to tasteless jokes about swollen headedness, but I found it a very unpleasant and terrifying condition. I must not, however, forget that it was at that bleak time that a very marvellous thing happened. Our youngest child Victoria was born.

  Back at Westminster I resigned as PPS, but tried to get back into my parliamentary work. It was a depressing time. I was one of a bunch of backbenchers who had been enrolled to travel the country and explain the Industrial Relations Bill. This was a measure of inordinate length and complexity which sought in numerous clauses to distinguish between fair industrial practices which would attract legal immunities, and unfair practices which would not.

  It is easy now with hindsight to see that this was entirely the wrong approach. There was no need to put the trade union movement into a legal straitjacket. All that was required was to remove their anachronistic privileges which was what eventually happened in the eighties. But at the time we could at least argue that, unlike the Labour government, we had not set out with the aim of fining strikers. This Bill, unlike the Labour one, was not about criminal penalties but civil remedies for those harmed by unfair action. What we wanted was to strengthen the arm of responsible trade unionists against the wildcats and set in place better procedures for dealing with disputes. And for all its complications, the Bill did give the trade unionist rights he had never had before such as longer periods of notice and compensation for unfair dismissal.

  Clearly something had to be done to deal with growing industrial anarchy and the violence being used in pursuit of so-called industrial disputes. During the 1972 building workers’ strike, coaches were hired to transport so-called ‘flying pickets’ to various building sites with the object of stopping work going on there. When some of the pickets eventually appeared to stand their trial at Shrewsbury Crown Court they were described as having swarmed onto a site ‘like a frenzied horde of Apache Indians, chanting “Kill, kill, kill, capitalist bastards”; this is not a strike, it’s a revolution.’ The trial judge, Mr Justice Mais, described it as ‘a terrifying display of force, with violence to persons and property putting people working on the sites and local residents in fear’. I gave short shrift to a trades council delegation urging me to raise in Parliament the plight of the men who had been sentenced.

  But when the Industrial Relations Bill became law it soon began to cause trouble. The National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) issued warrants for the arrest of three dockers who it was alleged had wilfully disobeyed a court order to stop blacking a container depot in east London. A shutdown of the docks was threatened and the Official Solicitor went to the Court of Appeal and got the order set aside.

  But what really caused morale on our side of the House to reach rock bottom was the government’s decision to introduce a price and incomes policy, thereby contradicting almost everything said by the Party at the general election. And, of course, it was this policy which led eventually to the miners’ strike and the government’s downfall.

  Along with all my colleagues I argued that we could not give in to the miners’ claim. Firstly, we would be saying there was no future in moderation and that extremism paid. Secondly, we would have moved one stage nearer the catastrophic inflation Germany experienced in the 1920s. Soon people would be bringing their money home in wheelbarrows and the pound note worth little more than waste paper. Like my colleagues, I pointed out that many trade union leaders had said that the communists were using the miners’ dispute for political ends and suggested that Wilson knew this and should come out and say so. After all, he himself, when Prime Minister, had recognised that ‘a tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ were behind the seamen’s strike in 1966. He had also talked in those days of ‘one man’s pay increase being another man’s price increase’. But when I went off to do a live television debate in Rawtenstall with Eric Heffer and Cyril Smith, I was not very successful in selling thes
e arguments and had a rough ride. I could, however, take some pleasure in the fact that I annoyed Eric Heffer so much that when the show was over but with the cameras still on us he took a swing at me. That is the sort of thing which makes good television.

  Meanwhile Gilly was beavering away in the constituency. She was a Samaritan and had also launched a project to help the homeless. We were soon proud owners of a house in Padiham for battered wives which was almost always occupied by someone in urgent need. Once, in breach of all the rules, she went on her own to see one of her Samaritan customers. She was in such a hurry to get to his rescue that she left her car in the street unlocked and with its headlights on. The police came along and concluded that she had been kidnapped. They knocked on the door of a nearby house and were rather aggressive with the occupant who seemed to think they were accusing him of secreting the MP’s wife on his premises. He protested that it was the last thing he would do. He was Len Dole, the Labour agent.

  When the House of Commons met in January 1974 the whips were busy canvassing opinion as to whether we should go to the country on a ‘Who rules Britain – the miners or Parliament?’ ticket. I felt then, and still feel, that we would have won if we had gone there and then, but while we stood ready for the off, no one fired the starting gun. Instead, the press was full of charge and countercharge as to what the offer for the miners meant and with rumours that the government and the National Coal Board were at logger-heads. By the time Parliament was dissolved the advantage had passed to the Opposition who used the simple slogan: ‘We’ll get Britain back to work’.

  It was a difficult campaign in Nelson & Colne, but I was reasonably confident that I would squeeze home because of all the spade work we had put in over the years. I did – by 179 votes. In the country Labour failed to get an overall majority but won the largest number of seats and after Ted failed in his attempt to form a coalition with the Liberals, Wilson accepted the Queen’s commission to form a government.

  Sadly, my father-in-law Alan Green lost in Preston South and never got back in the House. It was the end of a very disappointing political career which started with such promise, but was a perfect example of how dedication and loyalty to a particular area can be a person’s downfall.

  Looking at the press cuttings I seem to have spent much of the February 1974 campaign attacking the Liberals. What infuriated me was that at a time of national crisis the only things they talked about were the local railway line and the need to change the electoral system to secure the return to Parliament of more Liberals to talk about the local railway line.

  When I look back on the Heath years my recollection may be coloured to some extent by the poor health from which I suffered for much of that parliament and my poor spirits at that time. But they were very gloomy years – years when sometimes the country seemed on the verge of anarchy with the leaders of the TUC quite unconcerned about the welfare of the nation and prepared to play politics at every turn. The Tory leadership looked pitifully weak. We had lost a really big figure in Iain MacLeod within a few weeks of the 1970 election. Enoch Powell was never in the government because of his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Reggie Maudling had soon to resign because of the Poulson affair; and although we had a fine Foreign Secretary in Alec Douglas-Home, the Home Secretary and the Chancellor never looked right in their respective jobs. Robert Carr and Tony Barber were both men of intellect and courage but neither of them looked strong and fully in control of events. Tony Barber in particular was frail physically and had a reedy voice which is a great disadvantage in politics. Ted prided himself on taking us into the EEC but the people accepted rather than applauded the decision, being persuaded it would be good for British trade. But as the years went by it became more and more apparent that what we had signed up to was something very different from a common market and power was being drained away from our own Parliament and handed to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels; as a result public support for the EEC steadily fell. In the Tory Party there was the beginning of a deep divide between those who believed that having joined the club we had no option but to go along with the majority, and those who felt that sooner or later we would have to leave if we wanted to remain a sovereign nation.

  Ted Heath was a complex character and the following reminiscence may surprise many. In the autumn of 1973 he came to speak in Nelson & Colne. A rally was to be held in the Imperial Ballroom in Nelson, with all the local MPs and Conservative candidates from round about. Ted was to fly to Manchester but at lunchtime we were told that Manchester Airport was closed because of fog and he was flying to Weedon (Leeds/Bradford) instead. His arrival would be delayed by about an hour. I suggested that we should procure an organist and I would lead the singing of popular songs. The suggestion that I should sing was greeted with derision and rightly so, but someone else was enlisted to carry out the same task. As the moment for Ted’s arrival drew near I went and stood out in the road and eventually the car drew up and out got Ted and Douglas Hurd who was not then a Member of Parliament but Ted’s political secretary. After Ted had made his speech I was called upon to give a vote of thanks, and we were just about to leave the platform when a little lady in the front row stood up and in a quavering voice said: ‘I say three cheers for Mr Heath. Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!’ She then gave us the first line of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ and we all joined in. The song over, we moved next door where the nobs were to gather for a private drink with the Prime Minister. And as we stood waiting for the reception to begin, Ted, to my astonishment, took a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed his eyes and said: ‘No one has ever sung “For he’s a jolly good fellow” for me before.’ He was genuinely touched by the reception he received that night and the one he got the following day when he went to a football match at Burnley’s Turf Moor.

  Early on in the 1970–74 parliament I was one of about twenty backbenchers invited to dinner at No. 10, and when I arrived I found that I was to sit on Ted’s left and Jill Knight on his right. I begged Tim Kitson, Ted’s PPS, to bestow the honour of sitting next to Ted on another but there was nothing doing: and I was quite relieved when, after we had sat down, Jill Knight decided to do the talking. This phase of the dinner, however, ended abruptly with Ted deciding that he had had enough of woman talk. In a gesture of calculated rudeness he turned his back on Jill, lifted his eyes to the ceiling as if in supplication and invited me to say something.

  On another occasion I arrived at Downing Street for one of the usual summer receptions and, as Gilly and I climbed the stairs, we were dismayed to see that no one was following immediately behind. The consequence was appalling. We were stuck with Ted. ‘Good evening, Prime Minister.’ ‘Good evening.’ ‘It was a good afternoon in the House, Prime Minister.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Lovely weather we’re having, Prime Minister.’ ‘Yes.’ I was beginning to wonder whether ‘Yes’ was the only word left in his vocabulary. I was in despair. I had to do something drastic. ‘When are you next going sailing, Prime Minister?’ I had struck oil. ‘Next month and I am taking Morning Cloud.’ Then he spoiled it all. There was obviously no room for a woman in a conversation about sailing, so he turned to Gilly and with an imperious wave in the direction of the dining room said: ‘You’ll find the Gainsboroughs next door.’

  Once, at a conference in Blackpool, a group of us from Nelson & Colne were having a jolly time at a reception in the Winter Gardens when Ted bore down on us and froze my normally garrulous supporters into total silence. The hush was only broken when Bernard Rothwell, chairman of my Association, said: ‘Don’t you sometimes feel, Ted, you’d rather be watching Th’orse of Year Show?’ And Ted laughed.

  I am sure that Ted was a very worthy man, but I never ceased to be astonished by his lack of elementary political skills. In the 1966 election the Conservative manifesto was entitled ‘Action not Words’. I do not know whether Ted chose the title himself, but he certainly must have approved it, and it provided a vivid example of his failure to understand that politic
s is not just about doing the right thing. It is about using words to win minds and persuade people of the rightness of what is being done in their name. ‘Action not words’ in the world of politics is a recipe for disaster and Ted’s short period as Prime Minister duly ended in disaster.

  He then revealed a very petty streak in his frustration at being replaced as Leader of the Opposition by Margaret Thatcher. The bitterness he could not suppress spoiled him as a man, and Alec Douglas-Home got it entirely right when he said: ‘It’s such a waste. I always liked him very much. He’s capable of great kindness and sensitivity too. He mucked it all up. You must not allow yourself to have a vendetta, particularly with a woman.’

  Anyhow, Wilson was back in office where he busied himself giving the trade union bosses, who were the ones who had really beaten Ted, all they wanted. Parliament met and Michael Foot, the Secretary of State for Employment, introduced his first Trade Unions and Labour Relations Bill which repealed the Industrial Relations Act except the part which had increased the rights of trade unionists by giving them compensation for unfair dismissal and the right to longer periods of notice.

  I was on the committee on the Bill along with a new member who was obviously a master of the intricacies of labour law and a rising star, Leon Brittan. In the chamber I had a difficult time. Whenever I rose to my feet at Prime Minister’s Question Time the PM referred to me as ‘the honourable member soon to finish his time in this place’. I had the smallest majority in the House and no one expected me to survive the next general election which, thanks to Labour’s tiny majority, could not be long delayed. The expected election came in October 1974. Each evening we finished up canvassing in the dark and I remember how sinister looked the hordes of complete strangers being bussed into the constituency by Douglas Hoyle, the Labour candidate. Members of his union, ASTMAS, were all dressed alike in black leather jackets. They did not do it to frighten, but frightening they certainly looked.