David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  At that time I had no idea of tension, let alone disagreement, between the deputy director-general of the prison service and the governor of Strangeways. I assumed that Emes and the governor were in agreement that it was not practical to regain control of the prison at that time, that it would be too hazardous a venture and that the chances were that in the next day or so the number of rioters would be drastically reduced, making retaking the prison not too difficult.

  The statements, before a sympathetic House, went quite well. On the Trafalgar Square riot I told the House that a team of a hundred officers had been set up to take charge of a major criminal investigation into the incident. There was plenty of evidence available in the form of photographs and film to identify those responsible. What had happened had nothing whatsoever to do with the right of peaceful demonstration. A large number of people had set out bent on violence and there could be no justification whatsoever for the savage and barbaric acts which millions had seen on their television screens. I infuriated the Labour Party by saying in answer to questions:

  It really doesn’t help if MPs exhort people to break the law. Do they really expect those they seek to influence to draw a neat distinction between one sort of law breaking and another? Do they really expect the people they seek to influence to stop at trying to break the tax and abstain from breaking policemen’s heads? Any member, and it has been said there are up to thirty of them, who has been exhorting people to break the law ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

  The statement on Strangeways was a calmer affair, but unwittingly I made one mistake. I said in reply to a question that there was nothing to suggest that there was a connection between the poll tax riot and the happenings at Strangeways. In fact, some weeks, not days, later I was told that on the Sunday when the riot broke out the ringleaders on the roof unfurled a makeshift banner which referred to poll tax. Why I was not told this on the Monday I really do not know.

  In the next few days I was told over and over again by Brian Emes that the view of those on the spot was that it was far too dangerous to retake the prison. Landings had been made unsafe, booby traps laid and barricades built. The remaining rioters were in the rafters armed with scaffold poles and anyone who approached them from below would be horribly exposed. And surely, with the number of rioters falling each day as the lesser fry thought it politic to surrender, it was better to sit tight. On the Wednesday after the trouble started the rioters were still sixty-four strong, but the next day the number had fallen to forty-seven. On Wednesday 11 April there remained only sixteen. In these circumstances it was not just Emes who thought that the remaining rioters would not hold out very much longer and as all the Rule 43 inmates (segregated for their own protection) had been rescued we were not justified in risking the lives of prison officers retaking the place. The fact that nobody inside was in danger, that nobody had been taken hostage, also meant that there was no justification for asking the police to sort things out, let alone for bringing in the SAS.

  The unsung hero of those early days was David Mellor, then the Minister of State in the Home Office responsible for prisons. Copycat disturbances were breaking out in other prisons, but he wasted not a moment in getting over to the governors the simple message that enough was enough and that he and I would back them up to the hilt if they took whatever measures were necessary to snuff out the disturbances and would be on them like a ton of bricks if they didn’t. David’s political career came to a premature end when John Major was Prime Minister and I had left the government for Bermuda, but I was immensely lucky to have him as a colleague, particularly during the prison riots.

  For the first few days after the start of the trouble at Strangeways the press gave me a very easy time. A Daily Mail leader read:

  David Waddington is the first genuinely right-wing Home Secretary we have had for years. He has no need to pay obeisance to anyone in the law and order lobby. Everything he has ever said and done shows that he is prepared to be as tough on criminals and law-breakers as any potential critic of the Tory right.

  Because of this he has been able to take a cool and pragmatic view of the Strangeways and copycat riots which followed.

  A so-called ‘progressive’ would have sent in the SAS days ago and probably ended up with a good deal of blood on his hands. David Waddington has taken the eminently sane view that though prisoners on the rooftops of British jails may be very embarrassing to the government and galling to the prison service, these men are not endangering life.

  Only if they were doing that, would there be justification to use force to bring them down. No doubt they will be punished when it is all over and they deserve to be.

  David Waddington, by campaigning for years on issues of law and order, is at last someone at the Home Office who understands that if we are really to have law and order in this country we must have law and order for everyone and that sometimes includes the criminal.

  While the Mail applauded our restraint the Guardian brigade, sharpening their pencils for the day, which they could not believe could be long delayed, when they could accuse me of being a murderous fascist, had for the time being nothing at all to say. The same was not true of the Prime Minister. She had plenty to say across the table in the Cabinet Room and said it. In this instance, as in so many others, she showed an uncanny understanding of what the British people were prepared to put up with and what they would not stomach. She had seen on television the film of the rioters capering around on the prison roof. She had seen, as the public had seen, the millions of pounds of damage done. She could see that the rioters were making fools of us all and she knew that the British people did not like to be treated as fools. At the same time we in the Home Office could see that the mood of the press was changing. Some of the papers were beginning to murmur ‘enough is enough’ and were no longer prepared to give us credit for the fact that the copycat riots at Dartmoor, Bristol and Pucklechurch had been dealt with robustly.

  From day one I had been anxious to go up to Manchester, but others argued strongly that I should stay away. The chief constable of Manchester did not want me to go because he felt he had enough on his plate and could ill-afford to take men off the jobs they were doing in order to guard me. He felt that my arrival could spark off trouble on the streets and Manchester could finish up with its own poll tax riot. My office did not want me to go because they feared that they and I would be accused of acting improperly by trying to take control of the situation, as Churchill was before the First World War when he went to see the Sydney Street siege. The deputy director-general of the prison service, Emes, was the man with operational responsibility, they said, and he should be left to get on with it.

  Eventually I had had enough. I had been fobbed off with story after story as to why matters could not be brought to a conclusion. I was determined to see for myself what was going on. I got up early on Sunday 22 April and told my detective and driver that we were off to Manchester.

  Brendan O’Friel, the governor, welcomed me warmly and was obviously delighted to see me. But he looked at me strangely when I congratulated him on the way he had handled things and eventually he told me that right at the start he had had a serious disagreement with Emes on the tactics to be employed. He said that he had wanted to go in and retake the prison on the first day and had assembled the necessary people to do this, but over the telephone Emes had vetoed the plan. Once that opportunity had been thrown away and the rioters had had time to fortify themselves in the rafters they had had little option but to sit it out. There were now only seven rioters left in the prison but they had built formidable defences and would be difficult to remove.

  Back in the Home Office on the Monday I told the Permanent Secretary what I had discovered and that I was not at all happy at the way things had been handled. I think I convinced Clive Whitmore that he had got to get a grip on the situation himself and before long a plan was devised to retake the prison. A few days later a hundred prison officers in riot gear stormed in and nin
e hours later the last five prisoners surrendered. I flew up to Manchester by army helicopter to thank those who had carried out the good work.

  From the outset, the matter was not handled well and I had to take responsibility for that. If I had known of the disagreement between Emes and O’Friel I would have stepped in and resolved the matter in favour of the man on the spot who was far better able to assess the situation than Emes sitting in London, and I am pretty sure that O’Friel would have snuffed out the riot. But I could take comfort from the fact that only one person had died (a remand prisoner) and he only indirectly as a result of the incident. Lives are more important than bricks and mortar and it would have been far worse if an early storming of the prison had resulted in a blood bath.

  There is no doubt that the affair did great damage to my own reputation within the Parliamentary Party, and after it was all over Woodrow Wyatt was the only person to write in the press in supportive terms. Without, of course, knowing the whole story he said this in his News of the World column:

  Home Secretary David Waddington is not a sissy. The press and the media were full of lurid stories of mutilations and murders at Strangeways.

  The greatly exaggerated reports led to demands for the army to move in. That would really have caused a lot of deaths. It took courage on the part of the Home Secretary to stay calm. The ringleaders were desperate, evil men.

  Egged on by the TV coverage, they saw themselves as wild west heroes fighting to the last. But some good may come of it.

  The public will realise that more money has to be spent on prisons to stop overcrowding. And to make them fit for human beings, however wicked some may be.

  John Carvel in The Guardian took a very different and damaging line:

  The man is neither particularly hard, nor naturally wimpish. Mr Waddington is an early victim of Home Secretary’s disease – acute damage to reputation caused by inflammation of the media. Strangeways’s wider political significance is that it may have stripped the Tories of an image on which they relied to cover their lack of a real law and order strategy. It would be unfair to blame Mr Waddington for the Strangeways eruption or the handling of the siege. It would have been outrageous had he overruled the professional experience of his deputy director-general of prisons and sent in the SAS on the crucial second day.

  In six months, Mr Waddington has got most of his decisions right by his own lights and ideology. There is no hard evidence yet that he was to blame for botching anything at Strangeways. His danger is that none of that matters any longer. If he is to be classed as a wimp by the right, his value as a front man covering for an inadequate Tory law and order policy may have been eroded.

  A minister in the Home Office and the Home Secretary in particular often has to perform like a juggler. A number of balls are always up in the air at the same time and he can afford to drop none of them. While trying to cope with Strangeways I was also responsible for the World Summit on Drugs which had opened at the exhibition centre in Parliament Square; but it was very difficult to concentrate on this secondary task. The conference was useful but like so many of these international meetings it was somewhat spoiled by the determination of virtually all the delegates to read out lengthy statements completely unrelated to earlier contributions. At the beginning of one session I divided the time available by the number of those wishing to speak and told the assembled company that speeches had to be limited to seven minutes. The first person I called spoke for fourteen minutes and the second for eleven. I called for cooperation and self-control and the next person to rise spoke for seventeen minutes. I was fast losing my patience and when a Japanese delegate was still going strong after eleven minutes I rose and asked him to stop. His fury knew no bounds. He strode towards the podium and made as if to climb the two steps in order to upbraid or assault me. He tripped on the second step and fell on his neck. There was loud applause.

  A week after the World Summit on Drugs I was once again at Buckingham Palace administering the oath for the swearing-in of a bishop. The oath which the bishop has to repeat line by line is not for the fainthearted, with tongue twisters such as ‘all the spiritualities and all the temporalities thereof’. When it is all over the new bishop repairs to a downstairs lavatory to disrobe and is there given a glass of sherry. He badly needs it.

  At about the same time I had to attend an investiture at the Palace, summoning forward those to be knighted. The day before I had told Alan Glyn, the Alan Glyn who spent a night during the 1987 election under a cupboard, that as he was in a state of decrepitude Her Majesty had let it be known that there was no need for him to kneel, but when I called his name he ignored my advice. There was much dithering and shaking and ungainly manoeuvres as he tried, vainly at first, to make contact with the stool; and watching him try to regain his feet was even more nerve-wracking for the onlooker. The Queen’s face was a picture.

  A week later there was a state banquet at Buckingham Palace in honour of the President of India, and the week after that an event which was far more difficult to endure. I refer to the BAFTA awards ceremony at which stars of cinema and television indulge in a prolonged orgy of self-congratulation. The event started at 6 p.m. and when, at about ten, the whole ghastly business seemed to be grinding to a halt I said goodnight to the Princess Royal. She looked at me strangely and said “Oh dear, aren’t you going to stay for my speech?’ At which a well-wisher took me to one side to explain that we had only reached half-time.

  In May I attended the Police Federation conference in Scarborough. It was going to be a difficult occasion. The police were up in arms about their rent allowances which were going to be cut, and we had learned that by way of protest the delegates were going to listen to my address in stony silence – not a cough, not a clap. My secretary had a stroke of genius. Immediately before I went in to the hall he said, ‘What a colossal joke it would be if, at the beginning of your speech, you made some reference to their planned silence and treated it as an act of politeness.’ So I opened my remarks by saying,

  I know it is the custom at these conferences to listen to Home Secretaries in complete silence and I would not wish you to deviate in any way from that custom today, as long as the public fully understand the custom and recognise that it is an indication of support rather than the reverse, etc.

  The police had not a leg to stand on. Never once since 1979 had the government failed to honour the Edmund Davies formula and as a result police pay had gone up much faster than average earnings. On top of that the system of rent allowances had got completely out of control and we could not be expected to continue with a system which had led in the previous year to a 69 per cent increase in the allowances in Warwickshire and a 59 per cent increase in London.

  At about this time, Gilly and I had an interesting and relaxing visit to the Channel Islands. When I addressed the States in Jersey I said that the UK government had no intention of interfering in the domestic affairs of the Islands, words which, had I remained Home Secretary, I would shortly have had to eat. Within a year or so Kenneth Baker had to take action because of the shortcomings of the deputy bailiff who was not keeping up with his court work. I visited the new prison which seemed very short of customers.

  During my time in government Gilly and I attended all sorts of formal dinners and sometimes they seemed a very mixed blessing. There is always work to be done and time at a banquet means less sleep that night as boxes still have to be gone through in preparation for the next day. But there were some glorious occasions, and Geoffrey Howe should be thanked for persuading the powers that be to allow the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum to allow big diplomatic events, like the dinner on the Queen’s official birthday, to take place on the premises. On one such occasion Gilly and I were in a V&A festooned with ‘No Smoking’ notices when from behind a statue emerged Princess Margaret with an inch of ash at the end of her cigarette. ‘There you are,’ she said, as she approached. I bowed, put out my hand to receive the ash and popped it in my p
ocket.

  On 13 February 1990 a journalist and a photographer gained access to the intensive care ward of Charing Cross Hospital where Gordon Kaye, star of the popular television series ’Allo ’Allo!, was lying in very bad shape after an accident. Although he was in no fit state to talk about anything, and quarter of an hour later had no recollection of the occurrence, the journalists purported to interview him and their paper later proposed to publish a report of that ‘interview’.

  The behaviour of the journalists was monstrous but when the matter came before the Court of Appeal the court ruled that Gordon Kaye had no right of redress. What had happened was an appalling abuse of press freedom but it was up to Parliament to create a legal right to privacy.

  On 21 June the Calcutt Committee, appointed the previous year to review invasions of privacy by the press, produced its report. Its recommendations included the creation of a new criminal offence of invasion of privacy by the press and better self-regulation. This was to be achieved through a press complaints commission which would adjudicate on breaches of its code of practice and recommend how its findings should be published and how, in suitable cases, a correction, reply or apology should be made.

  In the House I said that the government welcomed the committee’s general approach and accepted the recommendation with regard to a press complaints commission. If the industry did not set up the commission within twelve months or if, after the commission had been set up, it did not prove itself, we would take steps to set up a statutory commission or even a tribunal. I also accepted in principle the recommendation that journalists or others entering or using surveillance on private property without invitation, in order to get hold of personal details for publication, should be guilty of a criminal offence. We would, however, have to consider the detail of the proposed offence of physical intrusion and the scope of the proposed defence of lawful authority and would announce our conclusions later in the year. In the event it fell to my successor to decide what, if any, further steps should be taken.