by Andy Beckett
We sat down and he leaned in very close. ‘Are you ready with your pen?’ he said. ‘In 1974,’ he began, ‘I was offered [ministerial jobs in] employment, trade and industry, and local government, and I refused them all. Then I accepted the job of deputy chief whip. I knew with the majority we’d got that I would be required. There had been a fragmentation in the Labour Party … a deterioration … We had people in high positions who thought they were exempt from strong discipline … I had the attitude that irrespective of how high up the ladder MPs were, they were all equal in keeping the Labour government in power.’
Harrison came from a family of ten. His father died when he was young, and one of his brothers died of malnutrition in the thirties. ‘The atrocities that were done in those days,’ he said with a sudden intensity, ‘they were everlasting memories. I considered it my duty to sustain a Labour government that I knew to be better for the people of this country.’ His thin face relaxed a little. ‘As deputy chief whip,’ he said, ‘I worked seven days a week. I rang MPs at home. I got to know their mothers, their sisters. I had contacts all over. The Welsh Nationalists – I was talking to them. I had a good relationship with the Scottish Nationalists. I had a dossier on every Tory MP. What their hobbies and interests were. I persuaded one Tory MP with an interest in the navy to witness a naval exercise off Norway when there was a crucial vote. And I tried to help people with their problems. If anybody was in domestic trouble, I became a welfare officer … I knew the Commons staff, the Commons police. I knew all the cafes. I knew all the restaurants, the bars. I got round everywhere.’ He gave a sly smile. ‘It once came to me that two civil servants were talking, and one said to the other, “I saw Walter in the upstairs committee room.” “Oh, that’s funny,” said the other, “I saw him on the library corridor at the same time. D’you think he’s got one of those cardboard cut-outs?”’
Harrison helped allocate offices for Labour MPs, a potent form of patronage. He noted which ones liked freebies: flights on Concorde were a favourite, usually secured by claiming an ‘interest in aerospace’. He insisted that he and his fellow whips maximize their Commons authority by refusing any freebies themselves. He divided Labour MPs into interest groups and sought to keep them separate and satisfied. ‘I knew all the personalities,’ he said, ‘I knew all my men that I could rely on and trust.’ And when there were crucial parliamentary votes, he kept them hidden in rooms around the Commons until the last possible moment, so that the Conservatives would underestimate the likely Labour attendance. ‘I had old men staying in the House all night,’ Harrison said. ‘Sir Alfred Broughton, even though he was ill, he used to come down.’ Broughton was a dying Yorkshire Labour MP with a constituency close to Harrison’s. ‘I had to turf a minister out of his office so Sir Alfred could stay there and Lady Broughton could look after him,’ Harrison continued. ‘I remember the night when we brought five sick men in.’ He held up five skeletal fingers. ‘Five! Three of them from hospital! I have records of a dying man and a fit man who had an equal Commons attendance record. A fit minister!’ Harrison’s chin was wet with spit. ‘That’s what grips me,’ he said. ‘That’s what grips me.’
But, by the late seventies, he knew that one day all his fierceness and diplomacy would not be enough. A no-confidence motion would be put, and the Callaghan government would lose it. That moment came on 28 March 1979.
The government lost for many reasons. One was Broughton. ‘I spoke to him at 1.20 p.m. on the day of the vote,’ Harrison recalled. The vote was that evening. ‘He said he was too unwell to travel from Yorkshire. I said, “OK.” My father had emphysema. I could read what the problem was.’ It was a Commons convention that when an MP was too ill to vote, an MP on the opposite side abstained. But when Harrison approached his Conservative counterpart Bernard Weatherill – ‘a very good friend of mine’ – the Tory deputy chief whip told him that the informal rule could not possibly apply in such a pivotal vote and that, besides, it would be impossible to find a Conservative MP prepared to abstain. Then Weatherill changed his mind. ‘He offered not to vote,’ said Harrison. ‘But I didn’t want him put on the rack.’ A pause. The fan creaked. ‘So I said no.’
Four days later, Broughton died. Yet a bigger part in the no- confidence defeat was played by other MPs from northern Britain: the Scottish Nationalists. Since their surge at the 1974 general elections, life had become more complicated for the SNP. The party now had eleven MPs, but they were inexperienced. And, as often with electoral breakthroughs by minor parties, a distracting number of possible paths had opened up for them. Should the SNP, as its leadership wished, remain a broadly left-wing party, partly out of conviction, but also to attract some of Labour’s huge Scottish vote? Or should the SNP acknowledge the fact that most of its MPs represented former Tory seats, and move to the right? Between 1974 and 1979, the SNP tried to do both in the Commons, siding sometimes with the Conservatives and sometimes with the government. Attacked by Labour as ‘Tartan Tories’ and by the Conservatives as old-fashioned left-wingers, the SNP lost support. Meanwhile, the inflated expectations and more complex party organization generated by the successes of 1974 also pressed on the Nationalists. Should they back the Scottish parliament which their election victories had made a possibility, or should they still work for full independence?
During the Callaghan government, the idea of Scottish devolution, which both Labour and the Conservatives had flirted with since the late sixties, slowly acquired legislative flesh and bones. It was not a straightforward process. The Liberals were initially opposed. The Conservatives, swiftly reversing their position under Ted Heath, were hostile. The Labour Party was divided. The Commons contained plenty of determined supporters of the Anglo-Scottish union as it stood; plenty of left-wing MPs who saw devolution as a distraction from the class struggle; plenty of northern English MPs with industrial seats who feared a Scottish parliament would secure preferential treatment for its declining heavy industries; and plenty of Tories who simply wanted to trouble a vulnerable Labour government. The SNP, after an agonized internal debate – exacerbated by the fact that the party often rose in the polls when progress towards devolution seemed to have stalled – decided to back Labour’s proposals for a Scottish parliament with modest powers, as a ‘stepping stone’ towards independence. Despite this temporary alliance, in 1977 the first devolution bill was defeated in the Commons. A second bill was passed the following year, but only after Labour rebels had amended it, so that the establishment of a Scottish parliament would require the support of 40 per cent of the total Scottish electorate at a referendum. Any abstentions, intentional or otherwise, would effectively count as votes against.
The referendum was set for 1 March 1979. In the weeks beforehand, campaigning took place in virtually the worst circumstances imaginable for securing a ‘yes’ vote. The Winter of Discontent and disillusionment with the Callaghan government had soured the Scottish electorate. The weather was atrocious, with snow on polling day. Senior Labour figures, taken up with the aftermath of the strikes and with ensuring the government’s survival in the Commons, contributed little to the ‘yes’ campaign: Callaghan made a single brief visit to Glasgow. The sagging popularity of the SNP weakened the ‘yes’ campaign’s impact further. The much-hyped Scottish football team had recently been humiliated in the World Cup, which had stirred up feelings of national inadequacy and self-loathing, which in Scotland were never that far below the surface. And all the while, the opponents of devolution campaigned with great intensity and stubbornness. Their cause was personified by Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP for West Lothian, Commons personality and professional contrarian, who relentlessly posed what had become known as the ‘West Lothian Question’: how could devolution be just if it left English and Scottish MPs with unequal Commons voting rights?
Given all this, the result on 1 March was respectable for supporters of devolution – a 64 per cent turnout, of whom 52 per cent voted ‘yes’ to a Scottish parliament – but not nearly good enough
: this added up to less than 33 per cent of the electorate, well short of the 40 per cent required. The elegant old Edinburgh school that had been earmarked for the parliament was left empty on its hillside, its closed-up facade in plain sight.
The SNP blamed the government’s distracted contribution to the ‘yes’ campaign for the outcome of the referendum. The fact that a simultaneous vote on a parliament for Wales, conducted against a similar political backdrop, had produced a far worse result for devolution supporters there – less than 12 per cent of the Welsh electorate had voted ‘yes’ – cut no ice with the Scottish Nationalists. Nor did the fact that their Welsh counterparts Plaid Cymru, who had three MPs and had undergone their own pro-independence surge during the sixties and seventies, continued to support the Callaghan administration. The SNP demanded that the government ignore the referendum’s 40 per cent rule and establish a Scottish parliament, otherwise the party would put down a motion of no confidence in the government.
In the days immediately after the referendum, both sides made an effort to avoid this outcome. The SNP met with Michael Foot, now Callaghan’s Commons fixer and a stronger advocate of devolution than the prime minister. After the meeting, Foot proposed an intricate parliamentary manoeuvre whereby the government would encourage the Commons to reject the Scottish referendum result and then delay the official abandonment of the devolution project until after an autumn general election, thus luring the SNP into supporting the government in the interim. But Callaghan rejected Foot’s plan as too complicated and constitutionally questionable. Instead, the government proposed that there should be ‘a short interval for reflection’, in Callaghan’s words, ‘for talks between the parties … to see if any accommodation could be reached on how to carry Devolution forward’.
Unsurprisingly, the SNP found this proposal far too airy. As threatened, they put down a motion of no confidence in the government, to be debated in late March. The Conservatives, seeing an opportunity, then let it be known that they were planning to put down their own no-confidence motion. As the main opposition party, theirs would be debated first. ‘When assurances of SNP support … seemed to be forthcoming,’ wrote Margaret Thatcher later, ‘I agreed that it [our motion] should be tabled.’ The SNP had joined forces with the one British party that was opposed to devolution altogether, ‘the first time in recorded history’, as Callaghan witheringly put it in the no- confidence debate that followed, ‘that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas’. Scotland, even more than the rest of Britain, would feel the consequences of the SNP’s decision.
In his hot living room Walter Harrison got up and retrieved an old cassette player from where it had been resting on top of a coal scuttle next to Callaghan’s autobiography. ‘I’m going to put something on for you,’ he said. The recording of the no-confidence debate of 28 March 1979 was crackly and raw, the cassette player, turned up full, distorted it even more, and the fan in the living room creaked distractingly back and forth. But the moods and rhythms of the six-and-a-half-hour debate were still easily decipherable. We sat in our sticky armchairs and listened to the main passages, as the drawn curtains kept out the sun and the rest of the world. Harrison was quite still, his hollow chin resting on a single fingertip, looking into the fireplace.
Margaret Thatcher opened the debate with a mediocre speech. Her sentences, usually biting and direct on less formal occasions, were stiff and long-winded, full of unnecessary historical digressions and economic jargon. She sounded as if she had been waiting too long for this moment: simultaneously stale and nervous. She was heard in near silence. Callaghan, responding, was much better: loud, alternately jokey and contemptuous, seemingly uninhibited. He mocked his would-be executioners: ‘So, tonight, the Conservative Party which wants the [Scotland] Act repealed and opposes devolution, will march through the lobby with the SNP, which wants independence … and the Liberals, who want to keep the Act. What a massive display of unsullied principle!’
On the tape Labour MPs cheered frequently and strenuously. In his armchair Harrison smiled. But the bounce in Callaghan’s rhetoric – he sounded relieved that the day of judgement had finally arrived for his government – could not completely disguise the weakness of his position. The SNP and the Liberals, he was being forced to acknowledge, were about to vote to bring down his administration. Meanwhile, the unions remained at least partly outside Labour’s control: ‘The government have reached a new agreement with the TUC [the recent and vague Valentine’s Day concordat]. It is not perfect, and it may be breached on occasion …’ In other areas, too, the government had little new to offer: ‘We shall make most progress by adapting and broadening the policies that have served so far… and not by sudden switches or reversals …’
Yet it was partly the government’s existing policies which had left it so vulnerable. Deep into the debate, long after Callaghan had finished speaking, one of his Commons allies stood up and announced that he had become utterly alienated by what Labour had done in office. Gerry Fitt was a Catholic MP from Belfast, a left-winger and moderate Irish nationalist who usually voted with the Labour government. He had even escorted Callaghan when, as home secretary ten years earlier, Callaghan had gone on a risky walkabout in the Bogside in Derry. But now Fitt had had enough. ‘I believe’, he said, ‘that the policy on Northern Ireland adopted by the Labour government since 1974 has been disastrous … I made up my mind the Friday before last when I read the Bennett report on police brutality in Northern Ireland… I have a loyalty to this government … But … I cannot go into the lobby with them tonight.’
The disorder and fragmentation of British politics in the seventies, which had left so many governments with tiny or non-existent majorities, also meant that by 1979 Callaghan had to deal with forty-three MPs from small parties, an unprecedented number by post-war standards. In the days leading up to the no-confidence debate, and even during it, frantic, close to farcical negotiations went on between the government and the minor parties. The Ulster Unionists, who had ten Commons MPs and a sharp appreciation of how best to exploit their parliamentary leverage, had already won from the Callaghan administration an increase in the province’s representation at Westminster, from twelve to seventeen. Now, in March 1979, they requested that, in return for their support in the no- confidence vote, the government agree to lay a gas pipeline between Northern Ireland and the British mainland. The pipeline was not an outlandish idea. The government had already independently thought of building one, and the plan was acted on a few years later. But Callaghan, perhaps now with an eye on his reputation after he left Downing Street, felt that agreeing to a pipeline at such a climactic Commons moment would seem too transparent a political bribe, and said no to the Unionists’ suggestion. Two of their MPs, Harold McCusker and John Carson, indicated that they might still back the government anyway. Roy Hattersley, the prices and consumer- protection minister, was given the task of securing their votes. On the morning before the no-confidence debate, which was due to start at 3.30 p.m., he had a meeting with the two Unionists.
They wanted a special Retail Price Index which monitored the higher cost of living in Northern Ireland … They asked for Price Commission enquiries into the cost of those commodities which made life particularly expensive in the six counties … We agreed the policy in about ten minutes. Working out the joint communiqué was far more difficult. By lunch I had begun to suspect that they wanted the negotiations to drag on into the afternoon. The Chief Whip was sure they were looking for an excuse to renege. He told me not to let them out of my sight. Mercifully they wanted to lunch alone. The two men presented themselves in my House of Commons room at just after three … and asked for a drink. They drank whisky all afternoon as they stared at, argued with and changed the draft text. At six we ran out. [The Labour whip] Anne Taylor went across the corridor to obtain fresh supplies from [the trade secretary] John Smith – who always had plentiful stocks … At eight they agreed to sign … McCusker wrote his Christian name and then, discov
ering he was using green biro, tore up the entire document. We stuck it together with sellotape …
At 10 p.m., the Commons voted on the confidence motion. Gerry Fitt abstained, but McCusker and Carson supported the government. So did the three Plaid Cymru MPs and the two MPs of the breakaway Scottish Labour Party, who had left Labour in 1976 over its slowness to introduce devolution. Added to the 303 MPs Labour could muster, in Sir Alfred Broughton’s absence, this made a total of 310. In the crush of the Commons that evening – Callaghan ‘had never seen the Chamber as crowded’, and the ailing Broughton would have struggled – many Labour and Conservative MPs thought that the pro-government vote would be just enough. A strike by Commons catering staff had led some Tory MPs to go off to their gentlemen’s clubs for dinner and, deliciously for supporters of militant trade unionism, a few had not got back in time for the vote. Those who did ‘returned to the Chamber looking rather crestfallen’, remembered the Tory MP Kenneth Baker in his memoirs, ‘while the Labour benches looked very cheerful’. No British government had lost a vote of confidence since the first, flimsy Labour administration in 1924. As the votes were counted, Callaghan recalled,
The wait seemed never-ending. At last one of the Government Whips, Jimmy Hamilton, a Scot from Bothwell, emerged from the Lobby which had counted the Members who had voted for the Government. He struggled through the almost impassable crowd… and as he went to the clerk’s table he gave me an almost imperceptible thumbs-up. For one moment I wondered whether, as in The Perils of Pauline, we had escaped once more, a prospect I would have greeted with mixed feelings …
