David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  Soon, on 21 November 1989, we had the State Opening of Parliament and the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The loyal address was moved by Ian Gow. In the course of it he said:

  We should send a message from this place, to friend and foe alike, that our resolve will never weaken, that those who choose the bullet and the bomb, will gain no concessions from Her Majesty’s government and that their campaign of terror is as odious as it is futile. Terrorism flourishes where those who perpetrate it believe that one day terror will triumph. That is why all of us need to give no hint that it ever will.

  Those words must have strengthened the IRA’s belief that Ian was an inveterate foe, and in the summer of the next year he was blown up in his car by one of the brutes.

  Shortly before Christmas we went to Paris and stayed with our Ambassador, Sir Ewen Fergusson. In his younger days he had been a great rugger player. He liked to show off his international caps to visitors male and female – which sometimes led to difficulties as he kept them in the gents’ lavatory. We went to dinner with Pierre Joxe, then Minister of the Interior, and were most impressed by the magnificent palace which was his official residence. He did not believe me when I told him that a William Henry Waddington who was born in Britain had been Prime Minister of France in the 1870s, but eventually with the aid of reference books I proved to him that I was right. We went to see the David exhibition in the Louvre and were suitably shocked by the pyramid placed therein with the connivance of President Mitterand. We went Christmas shopping to try to forget it.

  One of my first jobs when the House met in the New Year was to deal with Lord Justice Taylor’s Report on the Hillsborough disaster. The Report poured scorn on the football membership scheme which had been strongly advocated by the Prime Minister as the government’s response to football hooliganism. I had no option but to go to the Prime Minister and give her the unpalatable news that the scheme had to be ditched. My statement in the House was eagerly awaited by the Opposition who felt that if ever there was a case of a government finishing up with egg on its face, this was it. But everything went incredibly well. Having announced that we were accepting the Taylor recommendation not to go ahead with the scheme because of the technical difficulties identified, I went on to highlight Taylor’s support for all-seat stadiums, and to say that a football licensing authority would require an end to terraces on designated grounds by 1999. In addition, there would be improved arrangements for crowd control, and urgent consideration of the case for new offences and new powers to deal with those excluded from grounds by the Courts. Roy Hattersley, in his reply, jeered at the government for being forced to abandon the membership scheme but rejected the one proposal by Taylor which could also have a bearing on the fight against football hooliganism – all-seat stadiums. All-seat stadiums meant, he said, a ban on standing and ‘could lead to people who leapt to their feet out of joie de vivre being slammed in gaol.’

  Matthew Parris described the scene for readers of The Times with the headline:

  ‘STRIKER DAVE PLAYS THEM OFF THE PARK’

  On a football pitch tilted against the government by Lord Justice Taylor, and leading a team whose bootlaces had been tied together by their own Prime Minister, Home Secretary David (‘Dave’) Waddington yesterday snatched victory from the jaws of – well, not quite defeat – but Roy Hattersley. Labour’s manager, Neil Kinnock, must have been as sick as a parrot.

  Waddington has only just been put in Cabinet United’s first team. New to the top division, this player’s strike-rate was unknown. He had (before Christmas) been not so much talent-spotted as dragged on as a substitute at half time when ‘bully’ Lawson stormed off the pitch in protest at the appointment of a new physio, Alan Walters.

  And now here he was, on a rainy Monday afternoon, kicking Labour viciously in the goolies whenever the ref. wasn’t looking – and scoring time and again. Waddington was proving that, just occasionally, this country can still produce great strikers on the wrong side of sixty.

  In the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery Taylor’s demeanour was wholly un-partisan. Waddington’s was anything but. Those who expect magisterial detachment from a Home Secretary will be disappointed in this magnificent old shin-kicker.

  Mr Waddington speaks in the manner of an angry school master interspersing strokes of the cane with a point-by-point recital of the crimes of the errant boy.

  Lord Justice Taylor, he said, had pointed the finger of blame at ‘poor facilities’ (thwack), ‘hooliganism’ (thwack), ‘excessive drinking’ (thwack) ‘and poor leadership’ (thwack). Furthermore, ‘squalid conditions’ (thwack) ‘encouraging squalid’ (thwack) ‘behaviour’. In short, the real hooligans were the clubs.

  It was shamelessly effective. By the time the Home Secretary sat down, we had quite forgotten that he had come to the House to announce that the government was abandoning the centrepiece of its Football Supporters Bill, the ‘membership scheme’, because an independent judge had said that the whole thing was a nonsense.

  Curiously, Hattersley made little of this. After a few ritual insults hurled like soggy sprouts at the absent Mrs Thatcher, he endorsed the Taylor Report, which could be ‘the basis of much-needed improvement to football grounds’.

  Then he rejected the cornerstone of the whole thing. Labour could not, he said, support all-seater stadiums. After all, what if people wanted to stand up in their seats? Those MPs who do not expect the Princess of Wales to be dragged by police out of her box at Covent Garden next time she feels moved to give a standing ovation, felt that Hattersley exaggerated the problem here.

  A most extraordinary incident occurred about this time which showed how utterly useless the football authorities were and explained why the game was in such an appalling mess. A near-riot had taken place at Bournemouth after the police had warned the football authorities that there was going to be trouble and had begged them to either move or cancel the match. They had refused. I summoned the chairman and gave him an imperial rocket after which cooperation with the police did improve a little.

  If I had my time again I would organise my life a lot better, and certainly I should have arranged my life in the Home Office a lot better. For some reason civil servants are good at drawing up submissions and identifying courses of action available in a particular situation but quite hopeless at writing speeches, presumably because they themselves rarely make them and they cannot imagine how their words will sound when spoken. I wasted hours rewriting the most dreadful offerings when I should have (a) refused to go to half the events in the diary for which the offerings were intended and (b) made a few off the cuff remarks at the events which I did attend. One reform I did introduce which should be of lasting benefit: I flatly refused to motor across London in heavy traffic to have lunch with journalists. Those who wanted to see me could choose between a sandwich in my room or a quick meal in the nearest hotel to Queen Anne’s Gate.

  We stayed in Denny Street until the New Year, by which time the Hurds had left South Eaton Place for Carlton House Gardens. South Eaton Place had its advantages, principally a decent-sized dining room in which one could entertain. There was also ample room for visiting members of the family. But it was a dismally dark house with the basement occupied by the police, whom I was supposed to inform if I ever wished to venture out.

  I was not sleeping well and one Sunday morning I got up at four o’clock to walk to Victoria bus station to buy the papers. There was a camera above the front door and I had to be very stealthy leaving the house, creeping along the wall to keep out of the camera’s view. I made good my escape, bought the papers and prepared to re-enter the house in the same manner. Pressed against the wall and with latch key in hand I moved slowly towards the door-step. I then tripped over it and the papers went flying in all directions. The door was flung open from the inside. ‘Hello, hello,’ said a burly constable. ‘And what might you be up to, sir?’

  I got on well with the Metropolitan Police. The only trouble was their eating habits. I have ne
ver known people put away so much food at the multiplicity of lunches and dinners I was required to attend at Christmas time. Every rank in turn invited me to stuff myself – literally, I mean.

  Douglas Hurd had introduced a War Crimes Bill to confer on the British courts jurisdiction to try people for war crimes committed in the 1939–45 war even though they were not British citizens or otherwise subject to the jurisdiction of the British courts at the time the crimes alleged were committed. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had come up with evidence that a number of people who had found their way into Britain after the War as ‘refugees’ or displaced persons had been party to the most horrible massacres in Eastern Europe after the German attack on Russia in 1941, and we could not sit by and do nothing. We had either to send these people back to face trial in the places where the crimes were committed or give the British courts power to try them, and trying them here seemed the better choice. The Baltic states and Belorussia where the incidents had taken place were still a part of the Soviet Union and few had much confidence in the ‘justice’ meted out by the courts of those benighted lands. Furthermore most, if not all, the people under suspicion were now, by naturalisation, British citizens and legislation to deprive them of their citizenship and deport them would be at least as controversial as giving the British courts jurisdiction to try them.

  The Bill got a huge majority on second reading and passed through the rest of its stages in the Commons at breakneck speed. The Lords took one look at the measure and threw it out; and now that I had taken over at the Home Office we had to decide whether to introduce the Bill again. I was sure we should. One could not just forget about a Bill which had received such a ringing endorsement from the elected House; and the Parliament Act, passed to resolve differences between the two Houses in favour of the Commons, was tailor-made to deal with the situation. If, after the Commons had approved the Bill a second time, the Lords again rejected the measure, it would proceed to Royal Assent and become law without any further debate. In Cabinet I was surprised to find Douglas Hurd and Geoffrey Howe against reintroduction, but their objections were overruled and the Bill then went through the Commons again – as easily as it had the first time. What happened in the Lords the second time round I will describe later, because when I left the Home Office and went to the Lords, the Bill followed me there.

  At Easter 1990 I was due to chair the World Summit on Drugs in London; I thought it a good idea to fit in a trip to America before the summit to educate myself a little about the drugs problem in the States.

  In Washington a police anti-drugs squad took us out late at night to see the extent of drug trading on the streets and the way the police were trying to cope with it. The police station from which we started was austere in the extreme, a concrete floor, an army-style trestle table and a few upright chairs. The police in England would not have put up with it for a moment and it did not suggest that Washington, the capital city of the richest country in the world, was awash with money to maintain law and order. Out on the streets a number of young people – some very young – were searched, the method adopted being to spread-eagle the suspect over the bonnet of the car and train a shotgun on him. Some arrests followed.

  It was interesting to talk to both the police and the politicians in Washington. They all insisted that public attitudes towards the use of drugs were changing and they were winning the war against the casual or recreational user. But they were disturbingly unwilling to face up to or at any rate voice the conclusion that the drug problem in the States was now largely an inner-city problem afflicting a black underclass and associated with urban decline and poverty. What was very encouraging was the close working relationship between the American agencies and our own drugs liaison officer, Superintendent Trevor Cutts, who was attached to the British Embassy.

  We went to Quantico and saw members of the FBI in training and then on to St Louis. We were entertained by an austere and puritanical mayor at a river boat restaurant which served overcooked beef, and gravy with the consistency of porridge. Across the river was East St Louis, almost a wasteland with only government buildings looking habitable. We spoke to the US Federal Prosecutor who said he liked to get his staff home early in the evening and certainly before dark because in the evening the locals took pot shots at them from the roof tops. An FBI agent had been shot dead the day before when he had entered a house to execute a search warrant and had come face to face with a man high on crack. The house was full of weapons.

  In St Louis the courts had been overwhelmed by a horrifying escalation in juvenile crime. In 1987, fifty juveniles had been arrested for drug offences. Since then there had been a tenfold increase. Ninety per cent of all crimes were drug related, with ninety per cent of drug offenders high at the time of arrest. Sixty-five per cent of other offenders were also high. It was not just a case of violence being used to feed the drug habit. Crack cocaine actually induced aggressive and violent behaviour. It was being sold for only five dollars a smoke.

  We went to a school where children of only seven and eight were taught a WAR (We Are Responsible) programme. The teaching was jargon-riddled with much talk of resisting ‘peer group pressure’ when performing one’s ‘job functions’ and all the teachers coupled alcohol and the smoking of tobacco with the use of hard drugs. I suggested that they were hardly likely to get the enthusiastic support of parents in the fight against drugs if they preached the message that perfectly lawful habits in which probably ninety per cent of the parents indulged were just as bad as the use of illegal substances. I got nowhere.

  I also got pretty exasperated with the many criticisms of ‘interdiction’, the word the Americans used to cover prohibition. The Mayor of St Louis went so far as to say that interdiction forced up the price which led to the commission of more crime to feed the habit. More and cheaper drugs were apparently his answer to the ills of society.

  We went on to New York and saw Mayor Dinkins who, unlike the Mayor of Washington, had not been arrested on drugs charges. The next day we visited an impressive drugs rehabilitation programme – Daytop. At the end of the trip I had learned some unpleasant lessons. (1) There was something especially destructive about crack cocaine. (2) The tougher the Americans got in the fight against drugs the greater the likelihood that Britain would face a flood of imports. (3) Jamaican gangs had a hold on the American trade and their links with gangs in Britain increased this likelihood. (4) There was a need for ever closer international cooperation in the fight against drugs. (5) Children in Britain should be taught about the danger of drugs, but the American approach would not do.

  Things would have to get a lot worse before parents in Britain would put up with children chanting for hours on end ‘Say “no” to drugs, say “no” to drugs’; and it was simply wrong to lump together in one’s teaching legal and illegal substances, as if whether a thing is legal or illegal is neither here nor there. Things were serious enough in Britain but we could take some comfort in the fact that we had not yet the same lethal mixture of gang crime, urban dereliction, inner-city deprivation and freely available firearms. In Britain street dealers were still a rarity – in America commonplace. But there was nothing for us to be complacent about.

  I made another interesting journey in the early part of 1990. I went to Brussels for a series of meetings and then on to Zeebrugge to see some of the key people there who did such a marvellous job when MS Herald of Free Enterprise sank. I then went on to the Menin Gate in Ypres to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Nearby there was a beautiful cemetery in which were buried many members of the East Lancashire Regiment in which my father had served.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Trouble at Strangeways

  and Elsewhere

  Norman Harrison, a great Sabdener and the husband of our daily help Mary, decided that it was about time we took up fishing and on the afternoon of Saturday 31 March 1990 Gilly and I went with Norman to Churn Clough reservoir above Sabden to try and catch some trout. We had a lovely af
ternoon although it must have been pretty boring for our detective and our police driver who had to sit on the bank twiddling their thumbs.

  When we got back home at quarter to five the telephone was ringing and moments later I learned that that afternoon there had been a riot in Whitehall and Trafalgar Square which had been instigated by demonstrators against the poll tax. I set off at once for London and the next morning saw many of the police officers who had been on duty. I also saw the considerable damage caused by the rioters in Trafalgar Square and the surrounding streets. There were a number of unpleasant characters still loitering about the place and at one point we got into difficulty when a gang of young men rushed at me, spitting and screaming and then attacked the car. The police moved with enormous speed and almost before I knew what was happening I had been bundled into the car and we were on our way. It was in the midst of all this excitement that I was told that a riot had broken out at Strangeways Prison.

  The riot, I was told, had started during the Sunday morning service in the chapel and the number of men actively involved or caught up in the disturbances – in the region of 1,500 – had meant that all prison officers had been able to do so far was contain the men in the gaol and prevent a mass breakout. Rioters had at first taken almost complete control of the place but the staff were now being moderately successful in extricating prisoners who did not want to be involved and plans were already being made to move these prisoners to other gaols in the north-west.

  The next morning I had a series of briefings to prepare myself for the two separate statements I would have to make to the House that afternoon – one about Trafalgar Square and the other about Strangeways. There was no detailed discussion of the tactics to be employed at Strangeways. So far as I was concerned the deputy director-general of the prison service, Brian Emes, had as his chief responsibility the handling of a situation like this and his first priority was to ensure that none of the 133 prisoners still on the loose escaped; his second was to transfer to other accommodation the rest of the inmates. They could hardly stay where they were because the rioters had already done enormous damage to every wing.