Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  I effectively lived with Olympia in those hospitals, largely empty over the holiday, talking and reading together. When she was asleep I answered the piles of constituency mail that had accumulated, bringing me the worries of Twickenham on which urgent and firm action was demanded from me and the government: noisy neighbours, children playing football against the wall, overhanging tree branches, the plague of Cupressocyparis leylandii, unwanted emails, dog turds, broken fences, uncut grass, fireworks, pavement cyclists, oversized house extensions, litter, parking fines, parking, parking, and more parking. Sometimes my heart rose a little when I was asked to intervene in more exotic causes: cruelty to bears in Chinese circuses, underage children employed in Arab camel-racing, or the loss of Ecuadorian rain forests. I did my best to be helpful to those who needed help and civil to those with less pressing needs. But my heart wasn’t in it.

  One night, hearing a lot of noise outside the largely deserted hospital, I went out to see the sky covered in exploding fire-works and wandered down to the source of the festivities on the Embankment. There I saw the vast crowds and it slowly dawned on me that this was the millennium. I felt totally detached from the celebrations, as if I was looking through the window of a house at someone else’s party. On the way back through Chelsea amid the milling crowds, there was a church open, welcoming but empty. I sat inside, broke down in tears, and prayed for the first time in many years before returning to the now familiar smells and sounds of the hospital.

  Thereafter, back home, Olympia was increasingly dependent, able to hobble about on crutches but little else. She was still determined to be positive and active. She tried to help me by telephoning and stuffing envelopes. She smoothed over quarrels among her family and among my activists, using the moral authority that comes from someone who was demonstrating every day more fortitude than some people manage in a lifetime.

  She was also determined to stay at home, close to her family, and not to spend her last days in a hospital or hospice. Statistics show that the vast majority of the public wish to die at home among their loved ones in this way, but few manage it. I reverted to the role of carer and managed, just, to keep my own work as an MP going, with the help of a team of friends supplemented by periods of assistance from Olympia’s sisters, her mother, and a much-loved aunt who came from Canada for a while. We kept going in this way for a further eighteen months, far longer than the doctors thought possible. I was not a perfect carer – often clumsy and forgetful – and I came to understand the emotional turmoil and exhaustion that afflicts many carers struggling with the frustration and inner rage of a partner or parent who is acutely aware of their failing physical powers and growing helplessness. We had a large stock of accumulated love and drew heavily on it.

  Apart from friends and relatives we were indebted to the minister at the local Anglican church, Neil Evans. Despite being articulate and able to talk about almost anything, Olympia and I had never spoken to each other about spiritual questions and the meaning of life, and impending death. I had a broadly scientific outlook allied to a vaguely theistic set of beliefs, and a Christian sense of right and wrong, but nothing that could be seriously described as a living religious faith. Olympia’s gradual divorce from the Catholic Church had been finally completed when she first visited the Royal Marsden some years earlier and a young Catholic priest, barely out of college, tried to give her the last rites, seemingly in order to stop any other denomination getting to her first. But something religious had remained, and whenever we visited a church she would light a candle and offer a silent prayer. Neil was an utterly unpretentious, undoctrinaire Christian, who could understand Olympia’s condition and minister to her and he gave her considerable comfort.

  After almost a year and a half of struggle, cancer had reached most of Olympia’s body and, on a final visit to the Marsden, she said a final goodbye and thank-you to her consultant. Any hope that her last few weeks would be spent in uncomplicated tranquillity was blown by the imminence of a general election. Realizing my predicament, the party had a few months earlier sent me an organizer, Andrew Reeves, who worked around the clock to make sure that the local election machine was functioning effectively, even with a sitting MP who was something of a passenger. Blair’s decision to postpone the election for a month because of foot-and-mouth disease gave him an extra month to prepare, but presented a new challenge for Olympia, who had willed herself to keep going until she knew the result. With the campaign properly launched, I tried to divide my time between Olympia and a few hours daily door-knocking. I did enough to realize that the election was drifting away from the Conservatives and that I was probably safe.

  When I came back from the count in the early hours with a doubled majority, she was awake, waiting, and gave me a last smile. The following day she asked me to play Paul’s recordings for the final time, we talked about the children’s future and my hopes for the next parliament. After another night she stopped eating, her systems gradually closed down, and she died peacefully, her family around her as she had always wished.

  We sought to make her funeral a celebration of her life, with humour and fine music, and Twickenham’s parish church was full. The family that she had done so much to build tried to deal with its grief together and, as she would have done and would have wanted, immersed itself in work to ease its pain. She now lies in Twickenham cemetery, far from the countries of her origin and birth, but in a country she came to regard as home.

  Chapter 12

  New Millennium, New World

  The new century started for me in the late autumn of 2001. I had spent the preceding few months in a daze, immersing myself in the details of funeral organization, the routines of parliamentary business, and finding solace in tearful family gatherings. Everyone who has been through bereavement, particularly of a partner after a long, loving relationship, will have imbibed the same cocktail of emotions as I did.

  I decided to go to India in late summer to visit Olympia’s mother, brother and sister, who had been unable to come to the funeral, and to take my younger son Hugo, who had no partner of his own to fall back on and who, I could see, was deeply affected by the loss of his mother. After his degree he had taken a year out to spend time at home with her, and her steady physical decline had taken its toll on him too. I treated the trip to India as part family duty, part pilgrimage, but also as an opportunity to renew old friendships. I had always found India immensely invigorating and energizing. This time, somewhere in the packed commuter trains of Bombay, the crumbling but thrilling streets of Calcutta, the bazaars and mosques of Lucknow, the gardens and boulevards of New Delhi, and my old haunts in Goa, I rediscovered my natural optimism and renewed determination to make the most of life.

  In Goa, in my brother-in-law Celso’s house, Hugo and I returned from a morning walk to find the television on and the in-laws gazing at pictures on CNN of smoke billowing from one of the Twin Towers in New York. A few moments later the second was hit and, along with hundreds of millions of others around the world, we watched, in real time, the two towers collapsing. What was clear, if nothing else, was that the political world I was returning to would be different, transformed utterly by terrorism and the Middle East.

  A few weeks later my own life would be transformed too. I had made a resolution to revive the hobby of ballroom and Latin dancing which I had enjoyed with Olympia until she had become too weak, and also to make new friends, both men and women. I had an outstanding invitation – as the regional President of the United Nations Association – to talk to the New Forest branch. Near the front of the meeting was an attractive middle-aged woman whose elegant legs, enhanced by tight jeans, I kept noticing as I was speaking. At question time she rather forcefully objected to my economically liberal, free-trade approach to agriculture, arguing from the standpoint of a small farmer. We continued the conversation afterwards and I established that she had been a contemporary at Cambridge, Rachel Wenban-Smith, whom I remembered from a university party. She was now divorced, wit
h a grown-up family, and working on affordable rural housing. The unresolved debate about trade and agriculture led to an agreement to return to the New Forest and visit her farm.

  We spent the day walking on the beautiful moorland near the farm, which was an oasis of green pasture, home to her small herd of cattle and a few horses. We did not dwell too long on trade policy. That day we struck up a relationship that has provided both of us with love, fun, contentment, security and friendship ever since. My recollections of 2002, when the ominous build-up to war in the Middle East was taking place, are mainly of romance: weekend visits to the New Forest, long walks and log fires.

  I soon came to realize, however, that the emotions aroused by bereavement and grief on my side, and desertion and divorce on hers, are not straightforward. I wasn’t just a widower seeking and finding happiness in a new relationship, but the surviving head of a family whose dominant and unifying personality had died. My three children were, in different ways, puzzled and distressed to see their father disappearing so soon into a relationship with a new woman. I asked myself the question, which others were no doubt posing, whether the ability to move from a long, successful, loving marriage to another close relationship reflected some underlying shallowness or superficiality. I persuaded myself, and I think this is right, that good relationships have some common elements – emotional generosity, an ability to listen and willingness to communicate, patience and forbearance – which are transferable. My children gradually came to accept Rachel in the way I was accepted by hers, and we made visits in 2003 to Kenya to see Olympia’s eldest brother Aurelio and to Goa to stay with Celso’s family (where Olympia’s silent mother brought Rachel posies of flowers each morning, as if to say, ‘you are accepted’). We married in 2004, with a blessing in the House of Commons chapel, a joyful occasion for our families and friends as well as ourselves.

  But I had been reminded, and continued to be, that even for a father the umbilical cord is very long, and that a much-loved mother is irreplaceable for a child of any age. I had warning of this a year after Olympia died when I received a distressed call from Hugo in Cambridge to Shetland, where we were staying with Rachel’s friends; he was seriously stressed, suffering from acute back pain and had decided to pull out of an exam. Luckily, his earlier first proved enough to get him in to do a PhD at Imperial College, but he only started to enjoy life again when he went off to the USA three years later to embark on postdoctoral research.

  Family acceptance mattered, but it did not overshadow the huge miracle of rediscovering romantic love in later life. We are bombarded with images of young love though, if most youthful romance is anything like mine, the reality is crippled by inexperience, shyness, embarrassment, overexcitement and fear – of pregnancy, inadequacy or rejection. We are rarely told that people in their fifties, sixties, seventies and even eighties fall in love. It is perhaps assumed that wrinkles and balding heads are an insuperable barrier to physical attraction, that sex stops at the menopause and its male equivalent, and that the simple shared pleasures of amorous affection diminish with age. I now know that those things are not true.

  The years I have spent with Rachel have been brimful of emotions and memories: warm, comfortable and nourishing. Not that it was always easy. I had to adjust to someone not just of a different colour but a very different temperament. She had her own demons to conquer, reversing the loss of self-confidence that had come from her husband’s desertion after more than thirty years of marriage. But age not only brings wisdom and understanding, but also the clarity of mind that comes from realizing that there are not enough years left to waste on self-indulgent quarrels.

  It helped in adjusting to the emotions of loving a different woman that we met and built our relationship in, for me, a totally different world: centred on the idyllic setting of her farm in the New Forest. After a long and gruelling Friday constituency advice surgery, I would drive down late at night to the farm and find myself transported, as if on a magic carpet, to the depths of the countryside, which, as an urban or suburban man, I had often peered at but never absorbed. I would wake next morning to the sound of birds and the swishing of trees in the wind, before embarking on a few simple tasks, like feeding the chickens. And then the two of us would walk the dog around the farm perimeter, through groves of rhododendrons, across the parkland to the bluebell wood and on to the moors. As the song has it: ‘if paradise was half as nice …’.

  On these walks we planned the future. Rachel gradually introduced me to her family and friends and to her favourite haunts – Shetland in particular – and I did the same for her in Twickenham and York, where my mother still lived in self-reliant isolation. We prepared for our marriage. She retired from her job, which she loved, promoting affordable rural housing, to spend more time with me. She adjusted her lifestyle, in due course passing on most of her farm and selling the farmhouse to her elder son, and building a new home from scratch on the site of a former farmworker’s cottage, alongside the pastures that feed her herd of Dexter cattle. I admit to not having made comparable sacrifices. My obsessive interest in my work as an MP received a fresh injection of pace as my domestic contentment energized my commitment and ambition. Fortunately, Rachel is also a political animal: she had once chaired the New Forest SDP, had stood for local elections, and had chaired Brockenhurst parish council for several years. Her politics do not have the passion and anger of Olympia’s; but her views are held with conviction and are reflected in her ‘green’ lifestyle – and she is, like Olympia, unfailingly loyal and supportive of my work.

  To make a long-term success of being an MP required a strategy. The first step was to buttress my majority, which was respectable – now 7250 – but not impregnable. To do this required continued assiduous attention to local issues, the local press and constituents’ concerns. I had enjoyed this aspect of the work and it was no great burden to maintain a close interest and solid commitment. The second step was to make sensible use of Parliament. I was under no illusions. It was painfully apparent that Britain under New Labour had an elective dictatorship and our rulers had little time for Parliament, and even less for the views of MPs from a third party.

  A sensible strategy seemed to be to exploit my one source of competitive advantage – to be able to talk seriously and sensibly about economic matters based on some practical experience of the world outside Parliament – so as to build up a reputation inside my party and in Parliament; and from that platform to influence the wider national debate in the media and the world of think tanks and policy formulation. The objective was modest but achievable.

  I also wanted to make some contribution to the legislative process, which is, in theory, the main reason why MPs exist. I had an early stroke of luck in the first year of the 2001 parliament in winning a top-ten place in the ballot for private members’ legislation. It was explained to me that I could take on a controversial piece of legislation, obtain some publicity and credit with the relevant lobby groups, and then lose, or else take a less controversial bill, which the government would support, and win. I wanted to do something worthwhile and opted for the latter. I was despatched to see a government whip, Tony McNulty, who set out the options with refreshing clarity: ‘you play ball and I will make sure your bill gets through; you play games with us and you’re dead’, or words to that effect. Most of the apocryphal tales about the brutality of government whips have Tony McNulty at the centre of them. I warmed, however, to a man who didn’t exude the faintest whiff of hypocrisy or false bonhomie, and delivered on his side of the bargain in a businesslike way.

  I was offered a short list of private members’ bills that the government would support but otherwise didn’t have time for. I chose a bill designed to stiffen criminal penalties for pirates who breach copyright protection and steal intellectual property. Such piracy has become a major source of revenue for the criminal underworld and is seriously damaging to Britain’s creative industries: the arts, particularly music and film, and computer software. Repr
esenting a constituency heavy with creative artists, scientists and inventors, like Trevor Baylis, there was also a strong local interest in intellectual property rights. I worked with a coalition of industries seeking to strengthen the law, did as I was asked, or told, and the legislation passed quickly, unamended, through both houses of Parliament. It was not exactly a triumph of debating skill and tactical brilliance – I was not the legislative driver but a chauffeur-driven passenger – but I have the minor satisfaction of having done something useful and seeing the key provisions of the Cable bill splashed across the screen every time I watch a film or DVD.

  Being at last able to concentrate single-mindedly on the work of an MP paid dividends. I shadowed, successively, Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt as each, especially Mandelson, brought some direction and energy to the DTI. I made some impact as a result of promoting the policy of scrapping the DTI – which was designed to send the signal that good policy involved less, not more, government intervention and regulation. This earned me a page of compliments in the Sun, in a Richard Littlejohn column: ‘the only Liberal Democrat policy I have ever agreed with’. I attacked the banks over their anticompetitive charges and abuse of their regulatory privileges several years before this was generally accepted as a problem; and opposed the bail-out of the private nuclear power company British Energy, heralding a tough and sceptical approach to new nuclear power. I built good personal links with Digby Jones at the CBI and John Monks at the TUC, but if I made a substantial contribution it was in introducing a more consistent strain of economic liberalism into our party’s thinking, which had been hamstrung by conference resolutions calling for 1960s-and 70s-style industrial intervention.