David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  I went round to see Andrew Turnbull, then Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, and we agreed that as the Prime Minister was about to have her first Question Time after the summer recess and also had to make a statement about the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in Kuala Lumpur, we would not interrupt her briefing. That afternoon in the House of Commons she was in top form. I could hardly believe it when told later that only minutes before leaving No. 10 to come across to the House, Nigel’s letter of resignation had been handed to her. She must have been in some turmoil but appeared in complete command of herself and, as usual, of the House.

  In mid-afternoon news of the resignation appeared on the tape. The business of the House was interrupted by points of order and then by requests for a statement from the Leader of the House. I was running between the chamber, the Leader’s room and the Opposition Whips Office trying to get the Opposition to agree to make progress with the business on our undertaking that there would be a statement on the floor of the House as soon as possible. In the middle of all this I was told to get over to No. 10 to see the PM. As soon as I got into her room she said she wanted me to join the Cabinet but at that stage did not say in what office. She wanted my advice as to who should succeed me and who should be Chancellor. The second question was a lot easier than the first. John Major had not had a happy time in his few months as Foreign Secretary and would be a lot happier back in the Treasury.

  I had a short conversation with the Prime Minister about who should be Chief Whip and, expecting to return to the matter in due course, I went back again to the Commons. I had not been there long, trying to cope with major trouble, when I was called back to No. 10 and the PM asked me to be Home Secretary. She then went on to say that Tim Renton was to be Chief Whip. I was surprised that she had made the appointment without further consulting me, and I thought that it was a mistake, made by someone who never did seem to have much of a clue about the workings of the office and had not the slightest idea as to how the Whips Office could watch the back of a Prime Minister in trouble.

  I knew Tim to be a very decent, nice and honourable man but it was odd to make Chief Whip someone who had never served in the Whips Office and had no knowledge of how it operated. It did cross my mind that the Prime Minister had appointed Tim at Geoffrey’s suggestion, to placate him, but on second thoughts that looked improbable in view of the way in which they were getting on, or rather not getting on, with each other. I only learned the truth a few years later when, again to my surprise, Kenneth Baker told me that it was on his advice that the appointment had been made.

  Anyhow, I went back to the House to discuss with Geoffrey the statement he would have to make from the dispatch box about the changes. He was not in a happy mood, voicing outrage that he had not been properly consulted about them. Elspeth was with him just as she had been in the Foreign Office on the day he had ceased to be Foreign Secretary. I was not in the Commons to hear his statement, but this is how the Daily Telegraph described the scene:

  There was a huge Conservative cheer for Mr Major when his appointment was read out, a smaller one for Mr Hurd the new Foreign Secretary, and a roar for Mr Waddington, the new Home Secretary. ‘He’s a hanger’ came a loud observation from the Labour benches, as if to explain why the ex-Chief Whip’s promotion had caused such joy opposite. ‘There will be no change in our successful economic policies,’ continued Sir Geoffrey, having had enough of the non-fiction. He did not specify whether these would be the successful economic policies of the Prime Minister or of the man we must now learn to call the Rt Hon. Member for Blaby.

  My son James, his fiancée and her parents were due to come to the House of Commons for dinner. I met them in the Central Lobby, dragged them into my room, told them the news and then rushed again to No. 10 where we settled a few changes in the lower ranks. After dinner I went down into Speaker’s Court to find my car. It had vanished and in its place was a shiny black armour-plated Jaguar complete with police driver and detective. Also standing outside waiting for me were Clive Whitmore, Permanent Secretary, and Brian Mower, press officer at the Home Office. They greeted me warmly and I arranged to meet them at the front door of the Home Office the following morning. I went home shell-shocked and slept like a log.

  The next day Gilly set off for home in our own car while I was subjected to an enormous press conference and torture by camera. Eventually at 5 p.m. I set off in the Jaguar for Lancashire. The traffic, as usual on a Friday evening, was appalling and before long my exasperated police driver began to show his prowess. Siren wailing he used the hard shoulder as much as the road and by about eleven we were going up the drive to Whins House. To my surprise, the house was full of policemen including the chief constable. Someone had concluded that the appointment of a local lad as Home Secretary called for a party, preferably at the local lad’s expense, and a party was in full swing.

  The next morning I went to the back door to take Basil out for a walk and standing on the doorstep outside was an oversize and overweight policeman. ‘May I ask what you are planning to do, sir?’ he said. ‘Take my dog for a walk,’ I replied. ‘I’d rather you didn’t, sir,’ he said. ‘I have strict orders that you have not to leave the premises without a detective and the detectives are staying in a hotel, and they are not here yet.’ ‘Very well,’ said I docilely, ‘I’ll just let the dog out on his own.’ ‘I’d rather not, sir,’ replied the constable. I was beginning to think that things were getting out of hand. Orders were orders but I was not at all sure that Gilly would wish the beginning of my term as Home Secretary to be marked on the carpet by Basil; so Basil and I took the law in to our own hands. The rest of the day was spent watching the police drive large nails into the walls of the ironing room. There they set up a radio station command post which stayed there until a week or two later a rather smart hut was placed outside the backyard. This was my suggestion, a command post which could be moved as soon as a Home Secretary was replaced, and carted off to the home of the next one. In the past many days had been spent improving ministers’ houses in order to accommodate the police.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Home Secretary

  My appointment got a reasonably favourable reception from the press. There was a nice piece by Robin Oakley and Woodrow Wyatt – generous and thoughtful:

  The Tory party has held its nerve better than may have been expected over the Lawson affair. The irony of the reshuffle forced on Mrs Thatcher by Lawson’s resignation is that it may in the end actually strengthen her government. It has given her team greater coherence by fixing in the top jobs a group of people eminently suited to occupy them. The key to the whole affair was experience. Mrs. Thatcher installed in the three top offices of state men who had held the number two job in the same department. David Waddington enters the Cabinet probably more in tune with the instincts of rank and file Tories than anyone there already. A barrister whose days as a workaholic immigration minister gave him a keen insight into the workings of the Home Office and the human nature of his parliamentary colleagues (since put to good use as Chief Whip), he is an ‘art of the possible’ politician. He has one advantage over Hurd. As a natural right-winger on law and order, Waddington will be able to use the code words and to make those little growls in the back of the throat which assure the hangers and floggers at the Tory Party Conference that he is on their wavelength and that he understands their instincts even if he can never give them back the rope.

  Gilly also got a very good and well-deserved write-up for all the support she had given me over the years, in good times and bad. One journalist quoted her as saying: ‘I could gossip for Britain in the Olympics.’ Another asked whether she was surprised at her husband’s appointment? ‘Not at all,’ she said, ‘if they made him Pope he would want to be God.’

  There was no time to sit back and enjoy my good fortune. On the Sunday evening I was back in London and on Monday morning at my desk. There were some matters which had to be dealt with without delay. Not s
urprisingly the events in Tiananmen Square had had a very unsettling effect in Hong Kong and it was important to take steps to maintain confidence in the future of the place and stem the rising tide of emigration. To this end the Foreign Office had proposed a scheme to give a large number of key people British passports. Far from this being to encourage them to leave Hong Kong it was to give them confidence to stay, for they would know that if things went terribly wrong they would have somewhere to go. The Home Office could see the arguments in favour of the scheme but did not want to be accused of undermining the tough immigration policy which had been so successful in taking immigration right out of the centre of political debate. I looked at the list of so-called key jobs which the government of Hong Kong was suggesting should come within the scheme and soon concluded that it would leave us wide open to attack in the House. In essence Hong Kong wanted a scheme which, while heavily weighted against the unskilled, would still have given every category of worker, including the unskilled, some chance of success. But this seemed entirely inconsistent with the statements we had made in Parliament to the effect that highly-skilled people in Hong Kong would be selected. One would find it pretty hard to argue, I thought, that minor posts in the social services were key posts which, if left vacant, would undermine the stability of the territory; and I told the Prime Minister that in my view the list had to be revised and there had to be a strict limit – 50,000 – on the number of heads of families who could benefit.

  The Bill was a short enabling measure to provide a framework for the operation of the selection scheme, with the scheme itself to be set out in an Order in Council. Norman Tebbit threatened to cause mayhem when the Bill was introduced, but he was not able to muster much support and I was greatly helped, not for the last time, by Roy Hattersley who did not find it easy to explain Labour policy, if any, on the matter. Perhaps I misunderstood him but at one stage he seemed to be saying that the government’s scheme was ‘wicked’ because it involved ‘a denial of basic justice’ to the great majority of citizens of Hong Kong. All 5 million of them, or at any rate the 3.2 million British Dependent Territory citizens there, should have been given a passport and the right to settle in Britain. At another stage he seemed to be saying he would give the right to come here to some, not all, but he would not say to how many.

  This was one exchange on BBC Radio:

  Q: How many should have passports?

  A: I don’t know what the number is and I don’t think about the number. I certainly think our figure will turn out to be less than the government’s. But I don’t know and I’ve not calculated our procedure on holding a figure down.

  Nobody could be expected to make much sense of that.

  When I got back into the Home Office, planning for a Criminal Justice Bill for the 1990–91 session was fairly well advanced. By an earlier Criminal Justice Act the powers of the courts to impose custodial sentences on young offenders had been strictly limited and it was thought it was now time to take the next step, and impose similar restrictions on the sentencing of adults. Many in the Home Office who were on the criminal justice side of the shop genuinely felt that judges and magistrates were still sending to prison offenders who could be better dealt with in the community, but many others wanted limits on sentencing powers for an entirely different reason. The Home Office had for years been faced with intractable problems on the prison side of the business. The government had, in 1979, embarked on a great new prison-building programme but the prison population had gone up and up and there was constant sniping at the government because of overcrowding. What better way could there be of tackling the problem than to make it more difficult for the courts to send people to prison? My own view was that there was no point in sending people to prison if there were other ways of dealing with them. There was not the slightest evidence that prisons taught people the error of their ways. Rather, they were universities of crime where people were, at best, confirmed in their antisocial behaviour and, at worst, learned even nastier tricks. But when I arrived on the scene little attempt had been made to work up a balanced package which would convince our own supporters that we were not just going soft on crime. We had, I believed, to balance the new proposals on sentencing with changes in the parole system on the lines of the Carlisle Committee’s proposals so that when a prison sentence had to be imposed the sentence served bore a closer relationship to the sentence passed by the judge. There had then to be heavier sentences for crimes of violence, new policies to bring home to parents their responsibility when their children fell foul of the law, and more imaginative forms of punishment in the community. These could include curfew orders enforced through electronic tagging. Lastly there had to be a ‘victims’ charter’ which recognised that those who suffered from crime also had rights.

  The Green Paper published by my predecessor had proposed unit fines and I had been down to Basingstoke and had seen the pilot scheme in operation. It seemed to have many merits. What, after all, could be more sensible than a fine’s size being related to the offender’s means? But a few years later it was destroyed by the folly of politicians and the magistracy. At the behest of the Treasury the government had agreed on a unit scale so graded that at the top end wholly ridiculous penalties could be imposed on high earners for relatively trivial offences and some magistrates, who disliked the whole idea of unit fines, decided to make a political point by applying the scale in an entirely inflexible way, choosing to ignore the admittedly limited discretion given to them under the Act.

  From the moment I arrived back in the Home Office the press wanted to talk of nothing else but capital punishment. I was, they said, the first ‘hanger’ to have occupied the Home Office since Reggie Maudling, and that, having marked me out as a very rare beast, was all that needed to be said about me. While I was certainly not going to change my views overnight to thwart the press, I was anxious to try and put the matter in perspective. I have to confess, however, that I was only partially successful in that regard.

  I believed then and believe now that the first job of a Home Secretary is the protection of society and I felt then and I feel now that that protection would be reinforced by the restoration of capital punishment. Surely if a person knows that if he uses a gun in a robbery, he is likely to hang, he is less likely to take a gun with him. But I was a realist and I knew the way votes on capital punishment had gone over the years: not once since the War had there been a majority in the Commons in favour. The chances of capital punishment ever being restored were slight indeed. My job, therefore, was to do my best to give the public the greatest protection possible without capital punishment and do my best to ensure that those guilty of the worst types of murder stayed in prison, if necessary, for the rest of their lives. I did not believe that without capital punishment there was nothing I could do to improve public safety. There were plenty of worthwhile things to do within the system as it was. It was an uphill struggle trying to get this message across but I did my best.

  The responsibilities of the Home Secretary were greater in the 1980s than they have now become. The Home Secretary was, for instance, concerned with the administration of criminal justice, criminal law, the treatment of offenders and the prison service – all matters now within the remit of the Ministry of Justice. He was also responsible for broad questions of national broadcasting policy; and in my first few weeks back in the Home Office broadcasting was another enormous headache. As Chief Whip I had for two years sat on a committee chaired by the Prime Minister which was working up proposals for radical change to independent broadcasting, but it still came as a nasty shock to learn that in a few days’ time I had to address an important gathering of broadcasters on the government’s plans – particularly the proposal that, subject to the passing of a quality threshold, television franchises should be awarded to the highest bidders.

  Then it was Remembrance Sunday when I found my responsibilities even more alarming. My job was to review the police on parade in the quadrangle in the old Home Office bu
ilding, then greet the members of the Royal Family attending the ceremony, including the then King of Norway who never missed. Finally I had to take the Queen through the building to the top of the stairs leading out into Whitehall. There stood an army officer alongside an ancient chronometer. ‘It is 10.58 and twenty seconds, Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘and the time you normally set off.’ And off went the Queen, arriving at her spot in front of the Cenotaph at precisely 10.59 and fifty-five seconds. I followed at a discreet distance and tucked myself in at the end of the line of Cabinet ministers. At the end of the service I had to set off after the Queen and take her back through the building, praying that I would not lose my way.

  Later that morning I missed a trick. After the Queen had left, I was chatting with the Prime Minister and we got on to the beauties of the old Home Office building. ‘Would you like it back?’ said Margaret. ‘I have other things on my mind,’ I replied.