Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  I was then invited to join a group chaired by Bruce Millan, the most impressive of the Glasgow MPs, and a future European commissioner, which included Jim Sillars and a couple of able young activists, George Robertson and Helen Liddell, who were clearly destined for higher things. The group was charged with setting out an economic strategy specifically for Scotland when Labour returned to power. We were influenced by fashionable ideas of state capitalism that were then being refined by a group of economists around Tony Benn, notably Stuart Holland, but in Scotland there was more emphasis on practical ideas for regeneration, based on the model of the Highlands and Islands Development Board. Out of our report came the Scottish Development Agency, then Scottish Enterprise, which somehow survived Mrs Thatcher’s bonfire of quangos and became a model for other regional development agencies. I have become less of an enthusiast for such bodies since then. But in the context of the 1970s and 80s a positive contribution was made by a body working pragmatically with the grain of the market, acting in support of business innovation, not as a tool of public ownership, and concentrating on infrastructure development.

  The big issue of the early 1970s, however, was Europe, with Heath’s decision after the Tories were re-elected in 1970 to negotiate UK entry into the Common Market. All of my friends and allies on the left of the Glasgow Labour group were viscerally opposed to the whole idea of Britain joining this capitalist club and they were seriously puzzled when I came out in favour alongside old enemies on the right of the party and the Tories. I was in a minority within the party – though supporters included George Foulkes, a young Highland MP, Bob Maclennan, and future European commissioners George Thomson and Bruce Millan, as well as Willie Hannan in Maryhill. I was drafted in by pro-European groups to make the case at public meetings across Scotland. These included debates with fierce critics of the European project like Robin Cook, who must have been grateful, when he later became a pro-European Foreign Secretary, that his earlier comments had not been recorded. Our proselytizing zeal was such that a group of us, under the leadership of George Thomson, were sent to Norway to support the pro-membership campaign there. There were bitter splits in the Norwegian Labour Party which our arrival did nothing to help heal. The Norwegian campaign was lost, permanently.

  The other wider campaign in which I became involved was more personal. Olympia and I were one of the few racially mixed couples in the city, and the immigrant minority – mainly Asian shopkeepers and a small Pakistani community in the south of the city – was tiny. We encountered little prejudice in general, but there were periods of tension during the Kenyan Asian crisis and then later when Mr Enoch Powell made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. At that time the atmosphere cooled noticeably and Olympia, when on her own or with me, attracted racial abuse on the streets. Teddy Taylor invited Enoch Powell to Glasgow and sought to make immigration an issue. We felt personally exposed and threatened and leaned heavily for emotional support on our friends, including Labour activists, who, whatever our other differences, were unfailingly supportive. I was drawn into the embryonic community relations group forming in the city, led by the city’s first non-white councillor, Bashir Mann, and we were active in the anti-apartheid movement. In 1971 there was another upsurge of racist feeling caused by the exodus of Asians from Uganda. Fortunately, the Conservative government dealt with it decisively and honourably, making it clear that citizenship and immigration rights would be respected. Committees were organized around the country to welcome and absorb the refugees. I organized the Scottish committee and my councillor colleagues showed some courage in volunteering a number of council houses. In the event, few Ugandan Asians came to Scotland and, of those who did, many departed south after experiencing their first winter.

  By the middle of 1973, Olympia and I had been in Glasgow for five years and had every reason to feel content. We were happy and settled with two young children in a comfortable, new, bought flat, with a warm circle of friends, enjoying the high quality of life the city had to offer and regular holidays in the Highlands. I had successfully completed my PhD, alongside my teaching, and Olympia was making good progress with hers. My political career seemed to be going from strength to strength, with a leading position on the council and a growing reputation more widely.

  I was encouraged by the leading lights in the Scottish party to believe that, at thirty, I should be aiming to be one of the new wave of actual or prospective MPs – John Smith, Robin Cook, Gordon Brown, George Robertson – who could transform the party’s fortunes on a wider stage. Then, a series of errors and misfortunes led to the collapse of the political dream and to my leaving Glasgow for good.

  The first set of problems followed the announcement that Willie Hannan was stepping down as MP for Maryhill. I threw my hat in the ring. As the local councillor in one of the three wards making up the constituency, with by far the highest profile and a good reputation, I thought I stood an excellent chance. I had the support of several trade union branches and some solid friends among the activists. The competition did not seem, at first sight, all that strong: a trade union nominee, Jim Craigen, with good local connections but who had been away from the area for some years; and a councillor from another ward, Gerry McGrath, who had done little on the council and combined the positives and negatives of a stereotypical Glasgow Irish Catholic machine politician – expansive charm and wit, a great talent for networking, and a strong, clannish, preference for his kith and kin.

  It soon became clear, however, that I was not going to win and that the next MP would be Craigen or McGrath. The first reason was incompetence on my part. I had not taken the trouble to work out the constitutional mechanics of how the Labour Party adopted candidates in seats that, unlike Hillhead, actually mattered. Having, as I did, a good following among the membership and supporters who were not members counted for nothing. Entitlement to vote came with being an accredited delegate to the general management committee from a ward or union branch or affiliated organization. While I had been cutting a dash on the council, and in the local community, Messrs McGrath and Craigen had been quietly ensuring that their friends were planted in dormant union or Co-op branches and formally approved as voting delegates. Just under fifty delegates were eventually authorized to vote, most of whom had never been to a party meeting before and would never do so again, while I could count on only half a dozen.

  I had only myself to blame for this failure, but what happened next was worse. McGrath had a team of dedicated supporters, including Davie Hodge, a councillor who later achieved notoriety as Lord Provost for claiming as his own property a silver sword donated to the city by the Saudi royal family. They set about winning over the neutrals, and delegates committed to me, with an appeal to their Catholic religion. False rumours started to circulate about my (and my wife’s) alleged support for sexual promiscuity, divorce, abortion, ‘humanism’ and ‘atheism’. I had some form on the issue of faith schools, but was otherwise socially conservative. Nonetheless, I found myself answering lists of questions designed to isolate me from the devout. To their credit, a majority of the Catholic activists treated these approaches with the contempt they deserved, but some were undoubtedly influenced. My growing sense of paranoia was increased when, following a meeting at my home to discuss tactics, one young man, a Catholic teacher who had been effusively supportive in public, turned out to be a spy who passed the details of the discussion to the other side.

  By the time of the selection meeting it was clear that I was there to make up the numbers and, after making a speech, I walked the streets of Maryhill with Donald Dewar, who had just spoken brilliantly but to no effect, and together we bemoaned the state of Glasgow Labour politics. In the event, Craigen beat McGrath by the narrowest of margins and there was a certain rough justice in the outcome. Craigen turned out to be a loyal, reliable and decent, but largely invisible, MP, which I think is what the local party really wanted. McGrath and his allies were badly tarnished by the reports of their sectarian activities and never made a
ny further headway in local or national politics. Donald Dewar became MP for another Glasgow seat, Garscadden, based largely on the Drumchapel estate, and in due course reached the Cabinet and became Scotland’s first minister.

  I tried to rebuild relationships in Maryhill but serious damage had been done. Then, events occurred that put the situation beyond repair. On the eve of a planning meeting I was telephoned by an ex-councillor, John Dunne. He had won the pools, invested some of his fortune in local pubs, and given generously to church charities, which had given him a halo of virtue. One of his pubs, the Lord Darnley, now faced a difficult planning decision over expansion plans and the weight of council opinion was against his application. He accused me of being biased against him and tried to persuade me to vote for his application. His approach was seriously out of order, but when reporting it, somewhat emotionally, to the local party in Maryhill, I left the impression with some present that he was indulging in corrupt practices. My newly acquired enemies reported the meeting back to him in those terms. A libel letter followed. I secured the services of a good lawyer, Keith Bovey, who happened to be a leading light in the SNP and relished the prospect of a case exposing the sordid goings-on in the Glasgow Labour Party. The local party members were put through the ordeal of making formal statements about what they remembered having heard. I had sufficient support from Bovey to see off the libel action, but by this stage even my friends were beginning to worry that I was becoming a liability.

  These events occurred against a background of uncertainty over the future of local government. Following a report on local government reorganization, Glasgow was to move, in 1975, from unitary to regional government (the future Strathclyde) with residual powers vested in a city-based district council. There was an almighty, undignified scramble for seats in the new structure, which added to the somewhat febrile atmosphere. I confronted the scenario of rebuilding from scratch a political career in a new system of local government that had less attraction, with the distinct possibility of never breaking through into parliamentary politics. I was in a comfortable but undemanding academic niche from which I was keen to progress. I decided to walk away.

  Chapter 7

  Latin Detours

  One of the more bizarre twists in the long road to Parliament was my move from Clydeside politics to the non-political diplomatic service. A university colleague, Chris Mason, my predecessor as chair of the Cambridge University Liberals and a future leader of the Lib Dems in Strathclyde, had just enjoyed a two-year secondment to the Foreign Office and asked whether I might be interested in doing the same. Since I was looking for an exit strategy from Glasgow, the opportunity was too good to miss, even though I would have to withdraw from front-line politics and sit out the next general election in the neutral zone of Whitehall. The move would be a wrench for the family, which had by this time settled into the rhythms of Glasgow life. But Olympia understood, I think, the reasons for my restlessness and saw the possibilities, too, of wider horizons in London.

  A potentially more serious obstacle was the Foreign Office security vetting. My friends included a fair sprinkling of Clydeside’s revolutionary left, and my own loyalties were scarcely a secret. Moreover, there was at the time a preoccupation with left-wing traitors in government, following the Vassall affair, which had lurked in the background of my Hillhead election, and the earlier scandal of Philby, Burgess and Maclean. A Hong Kong policeman spent a week in Glasgow ‘positively vetting’ my application. he was either exceptionally astute or exceptionally dim because he was totally unfazed by, or uncomprehending of, either my political history or my alarming bank overdraft. His one serious line of inquiry was into homosexuality, a subject to which he returned in all our conversations. He was wholly unpersuaded that I could be quite as happily married as I appeared to be and trawled through my acquaintances for a secret male lover who might blackmail me. Whatever my failings, this was definitely not one of them, and I was told that I had passed my vetting with flying colours and could be entrusted with the nation’s secrets. I expressed a wish to work on something interesting – the EU, the USSR or the Middle East – but the personnel department had already marked me down for Latin America.

  The diplomatic service had a formidable reputation for putting square pegs into round holes but, not unreasonably, assumed that someone who had spent several years researching economic integration in Latin America and had passable, though halting, Spanish could contribute more in that department than those I had applied for. In between teaching, parental and political duties in Glasgow I had managed several visits to Central America. The countries of the region had been trying to bury their history of class and racial divisions, military oppression and petty nationalism in a modernizing project based on the European model, and I was there to observe, and encourage, this fragile experiment in cooperation. In the event, the project on which my somewhat geekish research was based failed abjectly while I was involved with it. Two of the countries – El Salvador and Honduras – went to war following riots at an international football match between them (the real casus belli being illegal cross-border migration), while three of them – Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua – abandoned any pretence at democratic government and descended into vicious repression. My visits were superficial, but I saw and heard more than enough of the arrogant, reactionary, racist elite in Guatemala, and their frightened, brutalized Indian and mestizo (mixed race) subjects; the lavish lifestyles of the small clique of landowning families who controlled El Salvador; the thuggish goons who enforced the will of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua; and the banana republic of Honduras. Had I stayed and been more courageous, I would have been strongly tempted to support the embryonic guerrilla movements. But I remained an academic tourist-voyeur collecting material for a PhD and, as things turned out, setting myself up for a job behind a desk in Whitehall.

  The grand Victorian splendour of the Foreign Office buildings on King Charles Street was designed for a global empire. The interior, now brightly refurbished, had in the 1970s seen better times, with the great rooms of state hiding a hinterland of dingy corridors and dilapidated offices. I took up my post as a first secretary. This was the grade at which the high-flyers were winnowed out from more stolid types who were destined for obscure embassies or the lower depths of consular, personnel and protocol work. In geopolitical terms, Latin America was somewhere in the middle of the departmental pecking order, boosted in importance recently by Venezuela’s pivotal role in OPEC, the discovery of Mexican oil, and the political relevance of Chile after the Pinochet coup.

  Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The department’s newly appointed head was Hugh Carless, who was better known as the companion of Eric Newby in the latter’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Hugh had elaborate good manners, a strong sense of status and protocol, and a slow upper-middle-class drawl which bordered on affectation and, I sensed, grated on Labour ministers and the bright grammar-school boys who had reached the top of the Foreign Office, like the permanent secretary, Tom Brimelow. Hugh was also restlessly ambitious and had a deep attachment to Latin America, a connection strengthened by his artistic Brazilian wife. His prejudices were somewhat reactionary and, to his credit, he made no attempt to conceal the fact. Despite some obvious differences, we got on very well and, I think, he saw my energy and ambition, and economic background, as a way of widening his own sphere of influence. In any event, he was generously indulgent of my numerous faux pas and careless staff work: failing to copy minutes to all the relevant departments; sending scruffy, smudged notes to ministers; and messing up the placements for diplomatic dinners at the Palace.

  He did in due course rise quite high in the Foreign Office to become ambassador to Argentina, a posting that coincided with the Falklands War. Reading between the lines, I suspect that his soft spot for the Argentine military, and his eagerness, already apparent in the mid-1970s, to dispose of the Falklands as elegantly and quickly as possible, did not endear him much to Downing Street. In any event,
he left the service without a knighthood and went to work for the Hinduja brothers, which was not the glittering end to a diplomatic career he could reasonably have hoped for.

  My first staff meeting set the tone. It could have been an episode from Yes, Minister. Hugh announced that we were going to change our minister. Our departmental minister of state, Joan Lestor, was worryingly left-wing; almost as bad as the Marxist harridan at Overseas Development, Judith Hart. She was not the kind of minister who could be expected to hobnob with generals from Argentina and Brazil who held the key to lucrative deals with British companies, particularly for armaments. She also belonged to the cult of the Blessed Salvador Allende, which was becoming tiresome. Miss Lestor would be much happier looking after starving babies in Africa. A sounder man had been identified: David Ennals, an ally of the Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan. Minutes were addressed to him, not her. Latin American visitors were steered in his direction. A ‘ fact-finding trip’ was arranged. Within a few weeks, the ministers were changed.

  I should perhaps have protested at this masterly abuse of civil service impartiality, but I played along with it for reasons of cowardice, fascinated curiosity, and a preoccupation with settling my family in London. I also realized that Hugh was no fool; he had read very well the Foreign Secretary’s mind and his distaste for the Labour Party’s radical left. I knew that my relaxed approach to the left was not shared by many in the civil service establishment and intelligence services. This was, after all, the time when battier right-wing elements in the armed forces and intelligence services are reported to have seriously considered military intervention to oust the Wilson government. When inflation reached a post-war high in 1975 and the IMF was called in to help rescue the economy there was a palpable sense of national crisis which, for some, was attributable to the influence of reds under the bed, or in government.