Such was my level of self-belief and optimism that I wowed the York SDP – which had one of the largest memberships in the country – and they adopted me with an enthusiasm that reinforced my own. I acquired the most highly motivated and talented group of volunteers I have ever worked with, led by a York University academic, Ann Feinstein, wife of the economic historian, the late Charles Feinstein. She had a rare combination of brilliant organizing skills, political acumen and personal niceness that made our campaign professional, well funded and enjoyable.
As candidate, my first task was to understand and communicate our party message. The difficulty I had in doing so was the exact opposite of that facing the Liberal Democrats in recent years. It has been a genuine problem for the Liberal Democrats to say something distinctive and interesting when both leading parties are trampling all over the ‘centre ground’. In 1983 neither Conservatives nor Labour had any interest in the centre ground. There was plenty of room for a moderate, centre party arguing for a mixed economy and a sensible blend of free enterprise and social justice. The difficulty was that, in a country with strong tribal politics, a third party was an unfamiliar idea, and we mangled the communication of it by presenting not one party but two, with different leaders and symbols and messy internal disputes on the ground.
There were, indeed, serious local problems, which even the most optimistic among my team found difficult to conceal. The liberal-inclined intellectuals centred on the university who flocked to the SDP represented a tiny fraction of York’s population, which had a large, traditional working-class Labour vote in the big council estates and what was still in 1983 a strong manufacturing base of chocolate factories and railway carriage works. The Conservatives were also still deeply embedded in the city, thanks to years of campaigning by a highly motivated army of enthusiasts like my late father. The Thatcherite message that Britain’s prolonged, humiliating national decline required shock therapy and radical measures had considerable resonance among frightened lower-middle-class voters; and the promised sale of council houses also drove a Tory wedge into the council estates. The university actually lay outside the (then) city boundaries, and the mobile, educated professional classes who were attracted to the SDP mostly lived in the rapidly growing suburbs in the constituencies of Harrogate and Ryedale.
More seriously, our fledgling Alliance was deeply and irreconcilably split. The Liberals had begun to win council seats in the city through community politics and refused to accept the allocation of York to the SDP. Their leader, Steve Galloway, was a hard-working and tenacious activist who had already become lord mayor of the city and had expected to fight the parliamentary seat. Even by the standards of a party with more than its share of bloody-minded individualists, he was (and, I understand, remains) in a league of his own. In my five years of campaigning in the city he refused to meet me, despite many overtures, withdrew all cooperation in Liberal-held wards, and made it clear to the local press that I and the SDP were unwelcome interlopers in his fiefdom. He attracted and repelled support in equal measure, and over twenty years later led the Lib Dems to victory in district council elections but then made mistakes that led to them being swept out again shortly afterwards.
Despite these handicaps, a local poll six months out, commissioned by the local press, showed York to be a three-way marginal, with Labour struggling under Michael Foot’s leadership and, even after the Falklands victory, Mrs Thatcher far from universally loved. There seemed to be everything to play for and a real prospect of victory. The SDP should have won a by-election in Darlington in the run-up to the general election but failed to make a breakthrough and some of the sense of pre-election momentum was dissipated.
When the election came, however, there was real excitement and expectation around our campaign. The city had been used to two-party parliamentary campaigns for as long as anyone could remember and this was something different. SDP heavyweights came to town. Roy Jenkins spoke with me at a packed rally in the De Grey Rooms and was clearly excited and moved by the emotional intensity, the heckling and the enthusiasm. Shirley Williams attracted an enormous number to the market square but unfortunately caught the wrong train to York and eventually turned up after the longest hour and a half I have ever spent, trying to humour an increasingly restive crowd. Bill Rodgers came twice. I emerged the clear winner of a big public debate in the Guildhall, at which Alex Lyon was defensive and uncomfortable and the Conservative, Conal Gregory, provoked a constant stream of unintended laughter. I was helped by a wonderful picture of my photogenic eleven-year-old daughter surrounded by railwaymen at the carriage works, wearing SDP stickers and splashed across the front of the Evening Press.
On the doorsteps, I went from one emotional reunion to another: ex-school friends and teachers; my father’s numerous admiring pupils; distant relatives I had last met in childhood; former girlfriends. On one unforgettable evening of door-knocking, I met and achieved a family reconciliation with my aunt Evie, the widow of my father’s brother. She was suffering terribly, coping with the last violent and uncontrollable stages of my adopted cousin’s Huntington’s disease. This woman, whom I had been brought up to regard as the devil incarnate and as an overbearing, intolerable snob, was now totally broken with the burden of care and the humiliation of regular beatings from her once angelic son, trapped in his dying, uncontrollable body. Politics brought us together and made us laugh; she was a lifelong socialist, which she had kept a secret from the Cable family, but on this occasion she would break the habit of a lifetime and vote for her nephew.
The cold political reality was that I was suffering from acute candidatitis, with a wildly inflated sense of what I could achieve personally. But it sustained my confidence and energy, and was one of the few parliamentary campaigns that I have actually enjoyed. Deep down I did not expect to win. But then in the last few days, the Labour vote started to collapse. Particularly in the working-class areas there was a big switch from Labour to the Alliance as people made up their minds in response to the national campaign. I also had one final stroke of luck. Canvassing on a council estate, accompanied by local journalists and a photographer, I encountered a boy with blood pouring from what looked like a severed artery in his arm, with a crowd looking on helplessly. With the application of simple first aid, I stemmed the flow of blood and was able to return the boy safely to his parents. This earned me press publicity candidates would normally die for, three days out from the election.
Of course, it wasn’t enough. Despite doubling the third-party vote, I came third with 13,523 votes to Alex Lyon’s 20,662 and the Conservatives’ 24,309. In the cold light of day it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that embittered Labour activists had already drawn: that our – my – intervention had helped an unpleasant Tory defeat a basically decent Labour MP. But Labour’s wounds were largely self-inflicted, added to the perverse consequences of a first-past-the-post voting system. And I believed that, if we could get so near with a third of the city effectively off-limits because of Liberal non-cooperation, a full-blooded united campaign would have come close to victory. With a mixture of pride and regret, achievement and disappointment, I returned to normal family life in London and to a new job as an international civil servant working for Sonny Ramphal and the Commonwealth secretariat. I sensed that the best opportunity I had had, and ever would have, to win a parliamentary seat had gone and that I should be realistic and settle for a different career.
I then made one of the worst misjudgements of my years in politics. After a year or more of procrastination, I allowed my name to go forward for the York seat again, this time in an open competitive selection against Steve Galloway. Some of my old SDP team flattered me into believing that I was an outstanding candidate and utterly indispensable. Nor did they wish to see Steve win the nomination after his petulant behaviour in 1983. I persuaded myself that it would be a useful way to keep in regular touch with my mother, now in sheltered accommodation. In reality, I had become an addict needing a regular fix of a
pplause and publicity.
The easy bit was the selection meeting: a packed hall in the Quaker Meeting House. Although there were more Liberals than Social Democrats, Steve had plenty of enemies and I had speaking skills that he could not match. The rational part of me wanted to lose and acknowledge that it made far more sense to have a full-time candidate, however egotistical and wayward, than someone who would come for a few hours every few weeks. But I won.
It was downhill from then on. Steve, and most of the Liberals, again decided to boycott the campaign. My core team had either left, like Ann Feinstein, or lost their enthusiasm. Olympia needed support at home and my visits to York became more infrequent, resulting in minimal press publicity and further demoralization among the troops. The local press, and my opponents, realized that I was just going through the motions. One of the few things working for me was the personality of David Owen, who visited the city several times and who, despite a bored and disdainful manner, helped me to raise the profile of my flagging campaign.
When the election came in 1987, I struggled to find an agent until Walter Rich, one of the Quakers in our membership, agreed to act. We battled to get out literature. The month preceding the election day was bitterly cold and the volunteers shivered in an unheated campaign office. The national campaign went badly, with the two Davids sending out different signals and conveying to the public an image of disunity, which I knew all too well reflected the reality on the ground. Labour were altogether less shambolic than in 1983, with glossy literature, a softer, more moderate message and a plausible new candidate in York, Hugh Bayley. One of the ironic footnotes of the campaign was that in monocultural, monochromatic York, he and I both had multiracial families – his black, mine Asian – though I don’t think our wives ever met.
Unlike 1983, the campaign provided no pleasure. I became ever more conscious that my personal links with the city were now very tenuous, as friends and relatives had died or moved away, factories closed and new, unrecognizable developments changed the landscape. I nonetheless felt a real sense of humility among people who were willing to back me wholeheartedly even through such a dismal and half-hearted campaign. Although my vote dropped back to under 10,000, it didn’t fall far enough to help Labour recapture the city. After failing by a few hundred votes, Hugh Bayley had to wait another five years to take the seat, and the people of York were left with the dreadful Conal Gregory. I had nothing to show for five years of trying, albeit with diminishing zeal. I found it difficult to believe I would ever contest another election, or deserve to.
Far worse was to come. The family went on a week’s break to the Lake District to help me overcome the disappointment and to plan together all the things we would do together to make up for the time I had spent shuttling to and from York. The weather and the setting of our holiday accommodation in the village of Hawkshead were perfect. We started to enjoy an idyllic holiday. Then Olympia became uneasily aware of a small lump in her breast. We reassured each other that it was almost certainly benign, but feared the worst. Our GP and the consultant to whom he referred Olympia at the Royal Marsden were optimistic, not least because she manifested none of the hereditary or environmental factors that underlie breast cancer. The biopsy, however, was positive; she would need urgent surgery and radiotherapy.
That evening, sitting together in a hospital ward absorbing the news, alternately crying and cuddling, is forever embedded in my memory. The previous twenty years of our married life had been buoyed up by the optimistic belief that we could handle any crisis, however difficult. There had been highs and lows, as in any relationship, and differences, but we had absorbed them, always looking onwards and upwards. The idea of mortality and physical decay was something new and shocking, and we struggled to come to terms with it. Whatever the advances in medical science, then and since, cancer was seen as a death sentence. My first task was to communicate all of this to the children waiting at home. In the event, they made things easy for me. They had already figured out what the problem was, and the prognosis, and were trying to reassure me, rather than me them.
Olympia’s battle against cancer dominated the next fourteen years of our married life. The first round of treatment was not totally effective, so she needed a second. But after that she was pronounced to be in remission and equipped with a new drug, tamoxifen, which gave reasonable prospects of survival. Olympia’s positive outlook on life reasserted itself and she resolved to live and enjoy each day as it came, in particular expanding her private practice as a piano teacher and supporting the progress of our children. Paul had by now won a place to read music at Cambridge; Aida was embarking on A levels; and Hugo, the youngest, then eight years old, was developing a prodigious talent in maths and a passionate interest in complex models and electronics. I drastically scaled back any travelling in order to be at home as much as possible. We immersed ourselves in new interests like ballroom and Latin dancing classes and even took exams.
Politics receded into the distance and I followed the traumas of the Liberal–SDP merger with detachment and incomprehension. After five years of trying to manage a divided campaign, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that the two-party Alliance model wasn’t working and that a unified structure was required. The bitter disagreements I had encountered had precious little to do with ideology and everything to do with personal vanities and ambitions and the protection of turf. I had greatly admired David Owen’s brilliant communication skills on television and his instinctively good judgements on big issues. But I had never much warmed to the man, and his self-indulgent conduct over the merger was, I thought, unforgivable. But beyond making a strong recommendation to the SDP members in York and Twickenham to vote for merger, I was not involved. I was baffled as much as angry that, with public opinion inflamed over Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax and the Labour Party still far from providing a credible alternative (despite Neil Kinnock’s impressive and courageous efforts), my own party should be tearing itself to bits instead of making political hay. This unholy mess contributed, as it had a decade earlier, to my becoming emotionally disengaged from politics, and I regarded myself as retired and redundant.
But, as happened in 1979 with the call from John Smith’s office, another telephone call brought me out of retirement. An American friend from the local SDP, Malinda McLean, rang to tell me that there was now a vacancy in Twickenham for a candidate for the Liberal and Social Democrat Party (as we called ourselves). The sitting candidate, John Waller, had stood three times and, after bringing the Tory majority down to 4792 in 1983, had seen it go back up to 7127 in the 1987 election. He had become exhausted by the effort and his IT business was suffering. The sight of Lib Dem poll ratings in single figures, barely above the margin of statistical error, had, I think, persuaded him that further struggle was hopeless and a waste of time and money.
My initial assessment was similarly dismissive and I was loath to inflict more upheaval on my family. But Olympia persuaded me to think more positively. I had spent much of our married life dabbling in politics, in York at a distance, but here at last was an opportunity to work together in a campaign on our doorstep. She did not want to deal with her illness by sitting around feeling like an invalid but by living life to the full, and this was an opportunity to become seriously engaged along with me in local community issues.
Further reflection suggested that the position was not as hopeless as it seemed in the gloomy aftermath of the 1987 election. After all, Lib Dems were represented on the council in every ward in the constituency following a landslide victory in the 1986 local elections, though we knew it would be difficult to translate local into national votes. The Labour Party had been virtually wiped out and the Lib Dems would be the only plausible local alternative to the Tories once disillusionment with them seriously set in. The local Tory MP, Toby Jessel, was described, kindly, as a ‘character’ and had undoubted talents – but as a pianist, not a politician. His embarrassing gaffes were valuable ammunition for any half-competent campaign. Winning t
he seat was a long shot, but not impossible, and I decided to go for it.
I was not greatly loved by the Liberal establishment in the borough, who remembered me as a Labour opponent and were not impressed by my prolonged absences from borough politics. But in the event no local councillor thought it worth their while pursuing the parliamentary seat. I was the only local applicant and won the nomination quite comfortably.
The situation in Twickenham was in many respects the mirror image of that in York. In York my team and I had had inflated expectations, not justified by the political fundamentals. In Twickenham the problem was one of low expectations, despite it being a genuinely winnable seat. In the Borough of Richmond, Twickenham was the poor relation to Richmond both politically and socially: more marginal, with fewer of the leading local political lights, and less glamorous,
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