The next few weeks only served to remind me how boring could be the life of a backbencher, but I did not have to endure it for long; for on 28 March came the ‘no confidence’ vote which brought about the fall of the Labour government.
That night the catering staff in the House of Commons were on strike and the dining room and tea room were closed. In those days there was an open-fronted coffee bar on Bridge Street and there, on the evening of 28 March, MPs and other vagrants stood eating bacon sandwiches and sipping hot drinks from chipped mugs while waiting for the ten o’clock division. When it came and the government lost, Jim Callaghan rose to say that he would recommend to the Queen that Parliament be dissolved; and shortly thereafter I was back home preparing for yet another election.
It was an election which set me something of a problem. So hard had we worked during the by-election only a few weeks before that we had hardly left a door un-knocked. I decided, therefore, to ignore the towns and villages and visit the isolated farms. I had a splendid reception from people who assured me that a visit from a politician was like a visit from outer space. In the event I was back with a majority of 11,579, the Conservatives had a majority of forty-four seats, and Britain had her first female Prime Minister.
On the day the new Parliament met I was sitting in the dining room when I was told that the Chief Whip wanted to see me. I went along to Michael Jopling’s room and he asked me if I would like to be a whip; not, he stressed, a junior whip but a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury with the chance of promotion into a department sometime in the future. I fell for the story and joined the Office.
The next night I was again in the House of Commons dining room when the Prime Minister, who was at the next table, called over to me: ‘What’s that new member doing in the dining room without his jacket on? Go and have a word with him.’ And I got up and gave Tony Marlow appropriate advice. The new Prime Minister also made it very plain that she did not like ministers on the front bench putting their feet up on the Table, even though it was an old custom of the House. ‘You would not treat the furniture in your own home like that.’ But tradition proved a lot stronger than her objections and this was one battle the PM lost.
The Whips Office was then, I think, of a very high standard. We had a lot of fun but took our responsibilities very seriously. ‘Parties,’ said Enoch Powell ‘need whips as civilisation needs sewerage.’ And we carried out our sometimes unpopular duties with the relish of well-paid sanitary inspectors. In the top office next to that of the Chief Whip sat Michael’s deputy, John Stradling Thomas, Spencer Le Marchant, Tony Berry, Carol Mather, John MacGregor, James Douglas-Hamilton, Peter Morrison (the pairing whip) and myself. Downstairs in another office were the junior whips, Tony Newton, Bob Boscawen and Peter Brooke.
Spencer, with the grand title of Comptroller of Her Majesty’s Household, gave us racing tips, sometimes putting money on horses for us and only confessing what he had done when he handed over the winnings. Tony Berry was Vice-Chamberlain of Her Majesty’s Household and as such had on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays to send to the Queen a telegram of not less than 300 and no more than 750 words telling her of the goings-on in the House. Another of his duties was to stay behind at Buckingham Palace during the State Opening of Parliament as a hostage for the Queen’s safe return.
James Douglas-Hamilton (then Lord James Douglas-Hamilton and now in the House of Lords as Lord Selkirk of Douglas) was a worrier. One Monday morning he reported that a friend of his who was a candidate for a Scottish seat had got himself into terrible trouble with his prospective constituents. Excessive zeal had led him to attend funerals to which he had not been invited.
James was a man of impeccable manners and when, later, he was translated to the Scottish Office those same good manners got him in to trouble. The driver of his official car was a rather elderly lady and the other drivers in the department complained that whenever his car stopped on arriving at its destination James, instead of waiting for the driver to open the door for him, jumped out and opened the door for the driver. They thought this was not in accordance with precedent and should be discouraged. Back in the Whips Office and when not writing a book about his uncle, a spitfire pilot, James drove himself and us insane with his tales of woe about the Scottish Conservatives backbench committee. Albert McQuarrie MP complained that the election for the officers of this committee of ten members had not been conducted properly. He knew this because before the election he had canvassed all the other nine members and each one had promised him their vote for chairman. How, therefore, could he not have been elected? The ballot papers were recounted with new scrutineers. There was only one vote for McQuarrie – presumably his own.
Bob Boscawen had during the War suffered terrible injuries which he bore with great fortitude, and he was a great companion. He and Carol Mather who, like Bob, had won an MC in France in 1944 and had been on Monty’s staff, were the old soldiers who did their best to keep the rest of the office and junior MPs in order and properly dressed. On one occasion Carol reprimanded Tristan Garel-Jones for wearing a particularly bilious long, green Loden overcoat. ‘The last time I saw anyone wearing a coat like that,’ he said, ‘I shot him.’
Michael Jopling, the Chief, took himself very seriously, and with good reason. A new government formed from a party which has been out of office for some years has a lot of tricks to learn, and a lot of things can go wrong when it comes to the management of business in the House. New ministers did not always turn up in the chamber at the right time and when they did turn up did not realise that what they said was not of the slightest importance. What was important was that they should keep talking until close to but not a second later than ten o’clock. Whips in their turn had to be ready to move the closure when the minister did sit down to prevent the business being talked out, or a member of the Opposition getting the last word. One awful night in the summer of 1980 a minister was not in the chamber when his business was reached. Spencer Le Marchant, the whip on duty, jumped up and down at the dispatch box bawling ‘I beg to move’ while the Opposition yelled ‘Resign’ and Michael Foot asked the Speaker to adjourn the House. Eventually Jim Prior, who had been in the corridor behind the Speaker’s Chair, rushed into the chamber and began to make a speech in place of his missing junior minister. Unfortunately, he picked the wrong speech on the wrong subject and uproar continued unabated.
There was another occasion when things went very wrong. I reported to the Chief that there was much muttering in the Smoking Room about some business on the Order Paper. There were rumours of a rebellion and the possibility of a government defeat. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Michael, ‘Get all those people into the chamber to hear the minister winding up’; and at half past nine I flushed the mutterers out of the Smoking Room and pushed them into the chamber. They listened to the minister’s winding-up speech and then, to a man, marched into the lobby and voted against the government. The next morning there was an emergency meeting in the Whips Office. A new edict was issued: ‘Do all you can to keep our backbenchers out of the chamber. When a minister is replying to a debate encourage no one to listen.’ Perhaps the strict enforcement of this command accounts for the many years of Conservative government which followed.
During the 1979–80 session I was the whip attached to the Department of the Environment and as such was responsible for the Housing Bill of that year. Monica Ferman wrote of the committee stage of the Bill in the New Statesman of 21 November 1980:
Kaufman led the eight Opposition members of the committee against John Stanley’s eleven Conservatives. Plaid Cymru had one member – Dafydd Elis-Thomas, who saw fit to vote with Labour on all issues except one.
Kaufman was of course the wit and jester of the committee. He flirted outrageously with the chairman. On 14 February he opened proceedings by wishing Miss Fookes ‘a happy St Valentine’s Day from all your bashful admirers’. A few sittings later, when an amendment was described as ‘a Trojan horse in the Bill’ he winked, a
nd she dimpled delightfully as he turned to the Chair and asked ‘but who is Helen of Troy?’
David Waddington, the government whip, seldom spoke except in Greek, spending more time searching for his supporters in the corridors just before a vote was taken in a division. He usually returned with an Hon. Member – such as John Major – only slightly mauled.
One day the Chief said that as a great privilege the whips had been invited to go along to No. 10 for tea – a golden opportunity for us as business managers to tell the Prime Minister how we felt things were going on the political front. We trooped in to the drawing room and for a while there was desultory conversation. Suddenly, Tony Newton (who after a very distinguished career went to the Lords as Lord Newton of Braintree and, sadly, died in March 2012) had a rush of blood to the head. ‘Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘my wife is a school teacher and you have no idea what is happening in our schools these days. My wife says that in the mid-morning break the pupils are copulating in the bushes.’ You could have heard a pin drop. It is the only time I can remember the PM being rendered speechless. Afterwards we made poor Tony’s life a misery, constantly questioning what had made him commit this act of political suicide and assure a dramatic end to his career when it had barely begun. In fact of course, Tony went on to great things and we will never know whether the Prime Minister misheard what he said or was greatly impressed by his frank exposition of a matter of great social significance.
Spencer Le Marchant and I were early risers, always in the office by about 8.30 a.m. He used to spend his time ringing the stock-broking firm in which he was a partner. I used to see my secretary and get on with the constituency correspondence. One morning I rang my secretary and she said she was very busy and could not possibly come to do my work. Spencer overheard and passed me a note – ‘sack her’ it said. ‘Can’t,’ I scribbled back, ‘who am I going to get to replace her?’ ‘Keep her on the line’ whispered Spencer and started dialling furiously. ‘Got one!’ he cried. ‘Well, Mrs -----,’ I said, ‘I think the time has come for us to part.’ Half an hour later, thanks to Spencer, a secretary with impeccable credentials stood at my desk and many of my problems were solved.
In September 1980 I went on a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) visit to Malawi – my travelling companions being David Ennals, Bill Whitlock, John Wilkinson and James Kilfedder. David Ennals was well-meaning but sometimes something of an embarrassment. President Banda was much given to dancing with the ladies of the country at great rallies staged so that they could demonstrate their love for him. Once, in the middle of the bush we came up behind a lorry in the back of which were forty or so women. We were told that they were on their way back from National Day where they had been dancing for the President. ‘Signal to the lorry driver to stop,’ said Ennals, ‘I want to dance with them.’ And in the middle of nowhere forty or so exhausted women were asked to disembark so that D. Ennals MP could caper and cavort around them, doing what he imagined was a Banda-like leap, skip, hop and glide, with fly-whisk raised to heaven.
The Malawian MP who was looking after us said that in his view mice were far more tasty than sausage when they were fried with their fur burnt off. Custom had it, he said, that you start with the tail and finish with the head. Perhaps he was pulling our legs. In Blantyre a poster in a school classroom explained the nutritional value of and best way to cook caterpillars and ants. At one village David Ennals asked the headman if he had to go far to get his water. He replied: ‘No, I’ve got eight wives’; and he looked very well on it. So, in fairness, did the wives.
Later in the trip we visited a hospital out in the wilds and a woman needed a blood transfusion. John Wilkinson very courageously offered to provide blood but, much to our amusement, half an hour after doing so he fainted.
I decided that it would be a great pity not to visit Rhodesia in the dying moments of UDI. There were no direct flights from Malawi because of sanctions, so I flew via Johannesburg. As the plane approached Salisbury Airport the cabin staff insisted on the blinds being drawn because, they said, of the risk of a missile attack, and when we entered Meikles Hotel other guests were leaving their rifles with the hall porter.
By the end of 1980 I was the whip for the Department of Trade and Industry, Keith Joseph being Secretary of State, and each morning had to attend the minister’s meeting. Keith’s right-hand man was Viscount Trenchard who, I imagine, was recruited to the government because of his expertise in the City, but who had the quaintest ideas as to how to perform as a minister. Keith himself had some odd habits. On taking the chair at a morning meeting he would cry ‘Agenda!’ which was the cue for everyone to shout out what he wanted to have discussed that morning. Every morning Tom Trenchard shouted out ‘Private sector!’ and every morning Keith responded in a pained voice, ‘Not the private sector again.’ Michael Marshall, the junior minister, had a room with a leaky roof and on entering one had to avoid tripping over one of the many buckets on the floor.
In January 1981 I was sitting in the Whips Office when Michael Jopling phoned from No. 10 and asked me to get round as soon as possible. When I got there he was standing outside the PM’s room with his face wreathed in smiles. ‘I reckon I’ve done pretty well for the office. Three of you are to be promoted – Peter Morrison, John MacGregor and you; you because I have persuaded the PM that it is necessary to have a lawyer in the Department of Employment to look after trade union reform and they are losing their lawyer as a result of Paddy Mayhew going off to the Home Office. Leon Brittan whom he is replacing is to be Chief Secretary.’
Jim Prior had been Secretary of State for Employment since the general election and had been much criticised for his so-called softly softly approach to the trade unions. Reform of industrial relations law was urgently required but Jim had taken the view that there would be big trouble with the unions if reform came in other than small doses. The result had been a very tame first Trade Union Bill, which made some small inroads in to the closed shop and outlawed some more blatant types of secondary action i.e. industrial action against employers not directly involved in an industrial dispute.
None of this was to the liking of Margaret Thatcher and when I went to see her on my appointment she made it clear that she wanted a metaphorical bomb put under Jim. The horrors of the closed shop were much in the public eye at that time because of the case of the Sandwell dinner ladies who had been sacked by the Sandwell local authority for refusing to join a union; and the Prime Minister was determined to see that abuse of union power of this or, for that matter, any other sort was stopped.
Jim was a delight to work with and very well liked by his officials. They, however, seemed to think that the Department of Employment’s role was to see that the interests of the trade union movement were properly represented in government. That, to put it mildly, was not how the Prime Minister saw things, and I had come back into Parliament heartily fed up with the irresponsibility of the trade unions and their pretensions to be almost a partner in government. In my view, the Conservative government was there to bring about radical reform in the field of industrial relations, to get rid of, not condone, abuse of power by the trade union barons and to look after the interests of ordinary working people.
Jim knew he had to prepare for the next step in trade union reform, but he was not inclined to say how big he thought that step should be and was in no great haste to make the next move. One thing in particular was absolutely clear. He had shut his mind entirely to the most obvious way forward which was to remove from trade unions the immunity from actions for damages for the wrongs of their servants or agents which they had won in 1911.
Peter Morrison and I had joined the DE on the same day and being the most junior of all the departmental ministers had to share a driver named Trevor; and I, like he, lived south of the river. That meant that Trevor called for me first in the morning, and then went on to collect Peter from Cambridge Street. Usually, however, Trevor was late, putting forward as an excuse the fact that the hamste
r had got out.
I was the minister responsible for health and safety, and one of my first tasks was to try and sort out a problem concerning an ICI site in western Scotland. There was a dock at which explosives were loaded and unloaded, and someone had woken up to the fact that the local authority had built an enormous sports complex, dance hall and recreation centre across the water from the dock. Surely, if there was a massive explosion on the dock at a time when the centre was full many lives would be lost. An expert on safety worked out what was called the societal risk, not the risk of one person being killed but the chances of a lot of people being killed, and he advised that the risk was unacceptable. A careful measurement had been made of the distance from the dock to the sports complex, a careful survey had been carried out of the quantities of explosives being handled and a meticulous note had been taken of the number of people frequenting the local authority’s establishment at times when the dock was being used. After that, the whole lot were multiplied together and divided by the square root of the town clerk, and the answer was that something had to be done. Up to Scotland I went and talked over the problem with the local authority, then with ICI and then with the HSE (Health and Safety Executive) experts, but no reasonable solution to the problem could be found. But a solution was found. The man who had measured the distance from the dock to the sports hall was asked to get out his measure again and have another go. Off he went and soon returned triumphant. The sports hall was 200 yards further away than he had originally thought and the experts, having made another of their elaborate calculations, delivered their verdict: ‘On the new evidence now available there is no need to do anything’. Business could continue as usual; and I could return to London to claim that another knotty problem had been resolved.
David Waddington Memoirs Page 11
