David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  There then came the enthronement of George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a splendid occasion; but I felt the Cabinet rather let the side down. There were well-rehearsed processions of the clergy and civic dignitaries, and then, without any attempt to marshal us into some semblance of order, the Prime Minister and the rest of us shambled along. As we hunted for our seats we were not a pretty sight.

  On 4 May I attended the Gulf service of remembrance and thanksgiving in St Mungo’s Cathedral, Glasgow. The royal train broke down so the Queen was late.

  In the same month Jenny was married. We had intended the ceremony to take place in the crypt of the House of Commons – more correctly the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft – but after all the invitations had gone out we were told that the maximum number of people allowed in the place had been drastically reduced on the introduction of new fire regulations. We waited for a few days hoping that the mail would bring masses of letters from people saying they could not come. Instead nearly everyone accepted so we decided to move to St Margaret’s and notified everyone accordingly. All went well on the day. Walking from the church to the House of Lords for the reception we came across some morris dancers in Old Palace Yard. A man-horse descended on the bride and wished her fertility.

  Back to work, and the task of getting through the government’s legislative programme. Divisions I found pretty unnerving because rarely could a result favourable to the government be guaranteed. Whips worked hard to deliver the votes but the Conservative peers did not think twice about voting against the government. Some did not even think it their duty to tell us when they were unhappy with government policy and were minded to vote the ‘wrong’ way.

  And I soon discovered that the built-in majority the Tories were supposed to have in the House simply did not exist. In 1991 there were, in fact, fewer peers who took the Conservative Party whip than there were members of the Opposition parties and the non-aligned peers together; but even the pure arithmetic exaggerated the strength of the Conservatives because a very high proportion of the peers on the other side of the House were life peers and dedicated party politicians, whereas the Conservative ranks contained many hereditary peers who called themselves Conservatives but did not feel under any obligation to be regular attenders and turn up for divisions.

  Facing these difficulties I was bound to ask myself now and again whether the House of Lords as then constituted was worth preserving; but I always finished up answering the question with a resounding ‘yes’. No one in his right mind, charged with the job of devising a constitution, would have proposed a second chamber remotely like the one we had got. But we were not devising a new constitution, and the question was whether anyone had come up with proposals for reform of the Lords which would result in anything better. A wholly nominated chamber? We had gone through all that in 1968, and it was a non-starter. An elected chamber? If it were elected on the same basis as the Commons it would be a mere carbon copy of the Commons and serve no useful purpose at all. If it were elected on a different basis it would have the same democratic validity as, and be a challenge to, the Commons. So my conclusion was that for all its faults, the House worked pretty well and no changes which up to then had been mooted would make it any better.

  On 18 April 1991 the government suffered a defeat when peers voted by a large majority (177 to 79) for an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill abolishing the mandatory life sentence for murder and allowing judges in murder cases to pass any sentence they wanted – from life to five years, to two years or, for that matter, to a fine or an absolute discharge.

  In the debate I had pointed out that when the death penalty was abolished it had been decided that the sentence to be put in its place had to be one which continued to mark the unique wickedness of the crime of murder. The life sentence, the public were told, would not mean that every murderer would spend the rest of his days in prison, but that he would sacrifice his life to the State in the sense that he would only be released when the Home Secretary thought it appropriate. The Home Secretary would be responsible to Parliament if things went wrong; and, because the sentence was for life, the murderer would only be released on licence and for the rest of his life would be liable to recall to prison if he did not behave or appeared once again to have become a danger to the public. I also reminded the House that only a month earlier the House of Commons had once again voted not to restore capital punishment, that the vote had been taken against the background of there being the mandatory life sentence and, for that reason alone, it could not possibly be right to scrap it now.

  Lastly, I made the point that it was highly unlikely that if the mandatory sentence was abolished, judges would pass determinate sentences which reflected the views of ordinary people. When some years before a proposal had come before the House for the abolition of the mandatory life sentence in Scotland, the Scottish law lords had made it quite clear that in certain well-publicised murder cases they would have passed sentences which in view of their leniency the general public would have thought quite inappropriate.

  The Earl of Longford argued that the public reaction to sentences was irrelevant and should be ignored, but I thought it extraordinarily arrogant to assert that we knew better than everyone else what was and was not justice.

  Parliament has always paid regard to what ordinary people think in deciding what sentences should be passed in the courts. It will be a sad day indeed if we, from our Olympian heights, decide that ten years is an adequate punishment for murder. That could not possibly equate with the views of an ordinary man in the country. I should have thought that the public may have in mind, in the wicked beyond belief case, a penal term in the region of sixty years. After all, that would only be thirty years after the present or proposed system of parole has been brought in to effect. Sixty years would not be thought extraordinary at all. However, would judges in this country be comfortable with having to indicate sentences of that length? I do not know of a single sentence of that length ever having been passed by a judge.

  The House was not persuaded, but the amendment was reversed in the Commons and that reversal was eventually accepted by their Lordships.*

  In January 1992 I led a Lords’ delegation on a visit to the Pakistan Senate. We came back in poor shape and one of our number, Stanley Clinton-Davis, nearly expired. The trouble was a trip up the Khyber Pass. We had spent the night at Peshawar and the next day was brilliant with a cloudless sky. I did, however, detect a slight nip in the air and came down stairs carrying my overcoat over my arm. ‘You won’t need that,’ said my host, snatched it off me and threw it to the hall porter. By the time we reached the top of the Pass it was perishing. A general stood by a sand model and as the wind howled off the snow-covered Hindu Kush he lectured us for an hour on the goings on in Afghanistan and we slowly froze. We then had to endure a flight home on Pakistan Airways via Moscow.

  Shortly after I got back from Pakistan, Gilly and I had another chilly experience. I had been invited to speak in Perth in support of Nicky Fairbairn, a highly eccentric former law officer, and we went to stay with him and his wife at their home, Fordell Castle. On the first day, having been offered a somewhat liquid lunch, we had to repair upstairs to our tower bedroom and breathe hard under the bedclothes in order to thaw out. On the Sunday our host invited members of his Association to drinks in the middle of the day and was moved to address the gathering wielding a broadsword which I thought at any moment might free itself from his somewhat shaky grasp and shoot across the room to impale his chairman.

  The general election could not now be long delayed. I told the Prime Minister that I thought there would be advantages in waiting until May, but it was clear he had almost decided on 9 April and in due course the date was announced and Parliament prorogued. Prorogation involved five peers, appointed commissioners for the purpose, sitting on a bench in front of the throne and taking off their hats as the Royal Assent to Bills was signified. The five on this occasion were the Lord Chancellor, myself, Lord C
ledwyn (Leader of the Opposition peers), Lord Aberdare (chairman of committees) and Lord Jenkins (representing the Liberals).

  The general election came and, in my view, was won (a) because Chris Patten never stopped hammering away at Neil Kinnock’s obvious inadequacies and (b) because John Major used his soap box to great effect to show his courage, tenacity and ability to relate to ordinary people. But the press conferences held at Central Office each morning were a disaster. Each was supposed to begin with a Cabinet minister making a presentation about some aspect of policy for which he was responsible, and that was supposed to give the press something to chew on and set the tone for the day. Virtually all the presentations were appalling and the press showed no interest in them. Chris Patten seemed to go out of his way to invite the most troublesome journalists present to put questions to him. This had two disadvantages. One, he could not answer their questions. Two, friendly journalists who wanted to help got thoroughly fed up.

  After each press conference my committee sat to answer questions from candidates, and only after that did I set off to campaign. I wasted a lot of time trailing round safe seats, but I did get up to Scotland to support James Douglas-Hamilton* and also to north Wales, Anglesey and the West Country, travelling in great style in a helicopter which had been lent to the Party by a wealthy industrialist. On 1 April I woke to hear Labour were between four and seven points ahead in the polls. Two days later I was in Bristol and was told by Michael Stern how badly things were going, but I myself could not detect a very sour atmosphere. On the Tuesday before polling day I was in Edinburgh and was well satisfied with what I saw in James Douglas-Hamilton’s seat. I was most amused by the respectful, indeed deferential, attitude of those attending the meeting I addressed. It was something I had never previously experienced. Perhaps the Scots reserve it for the sons of dukes. On the Wednesday morning I flew down to Manchester and then on to the East Midlands. That day I really did feel that things were coming back to us with John and his soap box having gone down well; and on the Tuesday Woodrow Wyatt, a wise old bird, said he thought we would win. On the Thursday, however, the exit polls were discouraging and Gilly and I sat at home expecting the worst. Then we heard the result at Basildon and soon after that it was clear Labour would not make it.

  I was told that all Cabinet ministers should be available to see the Prime Minister on the Saturday, and on Saturday morning I was back in my office waiting for a call. It came just before 11 a.m. and, after I had congratulated John on his victory and we had had a short chat about the campaign, he said: ‘I have something unusual to say. I am having to ask a number of people to leave the Cabinet for a big reconstruction. This is no criticism of the way you have led the Lords. You have done very well. But I need your place and I am offering you the Governorship of Bermuda. As far as I am concerned you can have it for the whole of the parliament.’ I said I would like to talk to Gilly about that and after wishing him all the luck in the world I left. I rang Gilly and she said at once that I ought to accept the offer. And that was that. I had just become a grandfather and now was to become a governor as well. I felt very old.

  * The 18th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

  * Hansard 30 April 1991 col. 621: ‘This may be an appropriate moment to emphasise that the Bill being presented to your Lordships unchanged does not, of course, mean an unwillingness on the government’s part to consider any amendments to improve it which this House may wish to make. Naturally, any such amendments would have to be considered by the other place where there has been, and no doubt will continue to be, a free vote.’

  * Before coming to the Lords, the Rt Hon. Sir Humphrey Atkins KCMG, MP.

  * After the arrival of the Labour government in May 1997, Lord Ackner and others continued to argue for the abolition of the mandatory life sentence, but the government was having none of it, adopting many of the arguments I had advanced in 1991, which Labour had then treated with derision.

  * Then Lord James Douglas-Hamilton MP, now the Rt Hon. Lord Selkirk of Douglas.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Bermuda

  I was disappointed to leave the government, but I had known it was bound to happen sooner or later and I was grateful that I was going to have something useful to do instead. I got some nice letters which encouraged me to believe that I had played a useful part in the election campaign and had not been a failure as Leader of the Lords. I particularly appreciated a letter from Emily Blatch in which she referred to the ‘sharpness and political edge’ I had brought to the job of leader; one from Lord Simon of Glaisdale who had liked my speeches because they were ‘wonderfully economical’ and another from Roy Jenkins in which he said: ‘I thought you were a good leader, crisp, quick to take a point and totally dependable.’ One of the nicest was from Lord Jakobovits, the Chief Rabbi, who referred to the battle over the War Crimes Bill.

  During the next few weeks I spent many hours wandering round the Foreign and Commonwealth Office attending briefings about Bermuda. I already knew a little, probably more than the Foreign Office which could not even run to earth a copy of the Bermuda constitution and sent me off on a number of wild goose chases. One thing I knew for certain: I had no responsibilities in the field of labour relations. But meetings with the TUC featured large in the Foreign Office’s programme for me.

  Bermuda was one of Britain’s few remaining dependent territories and its recent history had not been trouble free. In 1973 the Governor, Sir Richard Sharples, had been murdered and there had been serious rioting when the man responsible was hanged. I got useful advice from Viscount Dunrossil, who as plain John Morrison had been a friend at Oxford and had been Governor in the eighties. I discovered that the government of Bermuda, not Her Majesty’s Government, was responsible for my salary and that once the British taxpayers had provided me with my uniform I was no longer to be a burden on them. I did not want to have to wait too long before taking up the appointment because it was not easy being without a salary; but I fully understood that Desmond Langley had to be given a reasonable amount of time to pack up and bow out. I did, however, begin to get anxious when the Foreign Office passed to me a message from Bermuda suggesting that I should delay my arrival until October as the Premier was going away on holiday in September and did not think there was any point in my coming until his return. I concluded that it was about time I asserted myself and a reply winged its way to the Premier saying that as he was going on holiday in September I would be arriving in August before his departure.

  It was strange, after so many years as a minister, to have no official car in London; but I swiftly became an expert on the bus routes and got sore feet tramping hot pavements. I paid numerous informative visits to important personages like the governor of the Bank of England. I went to see various enterprises with a stake in Bermuda such as Cable & Wireless. I was to be chief scout in Bermuda so had to mug up on scouting. I was to be president of the Council of St John on the Island, so I went off to the headquarters of the Order of St John in Clerkenwell to be knighted. And at the behest of the Foreign Office I made a completely pointless visit to Brussels to speak to EU officials who might have wished to meddle in things Bermudian but, luckily for Bermuda, had not been given the chance.

  I paid numerous visits to Mr Alan Bennett, tailor of Savile Row, and eventually took delivery of a blue uniform with black cocked hat for winter wear and a white uniform with pith helmet for the summer. Both hats were designed to sport a feather plume and Mr Bennett told the Daily Telegraph: ‘Finding swans’ feathers for these hats gets harder. The swan is a protected species, so we used to import them from Holland. That is now illegal. We eventually obtained about sixty from a swan factory in Norfolk. They follow the swans about, waiting for them to shed feathers.’

  The press took a great interest in all this, asking why I was going to wear uniform when Chris Patten was not. I explained that there was no similarity between the situation in Hong Kong, where Britain was preparing to surrender sovereignty to China, and the si
tuation in Bermuda, where Britain would remain the sovereign power as long as the people of Bermuda wished it. Presumably, at the present time the people valued the British connection and the traditions which went with it and many might look askance if I acted differently from my predecessors. Another matter in which the press took a great interest was the death penalty. In 1991 the British government had by Order in Council abolished the death penalty in the Caribbean dependent territories, but had not been able to do so in Bermuda, which in 1968 had been granted a constitution giving it complete control of its own internal affairs. The death penalty had been suffered by the man who had murdered Sir Richard Sharples and when the Island had had a referendum on capital punishment in 1990 there had been a four to one majority in favour of retention.

  Under the 1968 constitution the Governor had the power, after consultation with an advisory committee on the Prerogative of Mercy, to substitute ‘a less severe form of punishment’ and my predecessor had used this power to substitute life imprisonment for the death sentence in the two murder cases which had come before him. Now another murder trial was pending following the brutal killing of a German tourist in Dockyard, and the question which kept on being asked was whether I would act as had the previous Governor or allow the law to take its course. I could only answer that I would carry out my duty in accordance with the constitution, which required consultation with the Mercy Committee and an examination of each case on its merits; and that my own views on capital punishment were irrelevant. I did not say, although I knew it well enough, that I could not ignore the fact that the death penalty had not been imposed for many years and when it had last been used civil disturbances had followed.