Jenkins’s lecture has entered political legend. Yet when his old friend Bill Rodgers told him that an early draft was ‘rather dull’, he was being generous. In fact, Jenkins said nothing that people had not heard a thousand times before. There were no specifics, just a succession of high-minded aspirations. And as The Times’s columnist David Wood observed, at least one of Jenkins’s premises was plain wrong. Jenkins argued that British politics suffered from an excess of partisanship, with the country undergoing a succession of ‘queasy rides on the ideological big dipper’. But as Wood pointed out, every administration since the war had actually ended up ‘astride the point of balance on the see-saw’, with incomes controls as the prime example. Far from being too extreme, the two parties had been ‘too much alike’, invariably abandoning their more daring commitments and governing from the centre. But after two decades of corporatist, social democratic underachievement, Wood thought the public wanted something new: a ‘genuine choice of policies’, as presented by Mrs Thatcher on the right and Tony Benn on the left. For all his talk of the ‘radical centre’, Jenkins was merely offering the same formulae that had failed before.7
This was, as it turned out, a very astute criticism. But with plenty of people shrinking from what they saw as the rival extremisms of the Bennite left and Thatcherite right, Jenkins’s talk of civilized non-partisanship found a small but enthusiastic audience. ‘Until now I believed that Roy Jenkins was the best Prime Minister we never had,’ one admirer wrote to The Times. ‘Now, I believe that he is the best Prime Minister we will have.’ And for some of his admirers, the lecture was a welcome reminder that another world, or at least another political home, was possible. Bill Rodgers suddenly had a ‘vision of himself sitting in the headquarters of the new party with his sleeves rolled up, actually organising things’. A week later, he told a meeting in Abertillery, South Wales, that Labour had only ‘a year – not much longer – in which to save itself’. The next day, Rodgers had a long talk with Jenkins and Shirley Williams. A new centre-left party was not impossible, he said: it might win as many as sixty seats, with the Liberals taking another twenty-five.8
Yet for the next year nothing happened. There was no rush to the Old Pretender’s banners. As the definitive history of the Social Democratic Party points out, most Labour MPs saw their party as a ‘cause, a way of life, a church – self-contained, comfortable and secure’. Even many moderates shuddered at the thought of giving it up to join an exiled political has-been. The day after Jenkins’s lecture, David Owen told a Labour dinner that the moderates would ‘not be tempted by siren voices from outside, from those who have given up the fight from within’. A new party, Owen told a friend, would be ‘rootless, brought together out of frustration. It would soon split apart when faced with the real choices and could easily reflect the attitudes of a London-based liberalism that had neither a base in the provinces nor a bedrock of principles … My inclination is to go down with the ship – not search for a new boat.’9
Even Rodgers, on reflection, agreed with him. In January 1980 he told Jenkins that, for the time being, he would stay put. A centre party, he said, would sink without trace. To survive, a new party would have to supplant Labour, an almost impossible challenge by any standards. ‘Otherwise it would split the left, to the benefit of the Tories.’ And that, it seemed, was that. Rodgers went back to the front line inside the Labour Party. The moderates battled on, despairing but not yet entirely despondent. And Jenkins returned to Brussels and the pleasures of the table.10
Yet all the time other tectonic plates were shifting. First came Wembley, then Bishop’s Stortford. Slowly but surely, the moderates were losing heart. Then, one day at the beginning of June, David Owen was walking through the tunnel from the underground station to the House of Commons when he bumped into a journalist from the Financial Times. The journalist wondered if he had heard that the Shadow Industry Secretary, John Silkin, had just unveiled a campaign to commit Labour to unconditional withdrawal from the Common Market. Owen had not, and was appalled. Further down the tunnel, he bumped into Rodgers and told him the news. They must do something, Owen said. Rodgers agreed, and suggested talking it over with Shirley Williams the next morning. In that moment the Social Democratic Party was born.11
Like Roy Jenkins, David Owen did not look like a Labour man. Born to Welsh parents in Plymouth in 1938, he had gone to public school and Cambridge, where he studied medicine. Only later, while he was training at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, did he join the Labour Party, eventually becoming a junior minister. Then, in 1977, Callaghan catapulted him into the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary, the youngest in a generation. He was still only 38, and many of his colleagues never forgave him for it.
Owen had all the ingredients for political success: the brains, the looks, the charisma, the hair. Even a sceptical observer like the former Labour MP David Marquand was impressed by his ‘gripping passion on the public platform, his relentless mastery of committee detail, his driving, sometimes self-lacerating energy, his personal magnetism and his unsleeping will’. Above all, Owen saw himself as a star, a quality he shared with Mrs Thatcher. Marquand wrote of the ‘marvellous effrontery’ with which he managed to be ‘taken at his own valuation: as a heavyweight national politician whose sayings and doings were important simply because he said and did them’. Sometimes it was easy to forget that he had been in the Cabinet for barely two years.12
Yet few politicians of his generation had such a knack of falling out with their colleagues. Owen’s memoirs reveal a man who was thoughtful, passionate and patriotic, and had, as a doctor, seen a different side of life from most of his fellow MPs. But perhaps because he seemed so well favoured, he had an unrivalled talent for alienating people. Again and again the same words come up: impatient, insouciant, brusque, arrogant. Austin Mitchell thought that Owen was a young man suffused with ambition, ‘all bustle and shining ego’. Rodgers thought that, although ‘vigorous and bold’, he was a ‘hollow man’, who stood for nothing but himself. Jenkins compared him with the Upas tree, ‘which destroys all life for miles around it’. Most memorably, Denis Healey remarked that although the good fairies had given Owen ‘thick dark locks, matinee idol features, a lightning intelligence, unfortunately the bad fairy also made him a shit’.13
Yet perhaps because he was slightly detached from Labour’s traditions and represented a working-class constituency on the South Coast, Owen understood, far better than many of his critics, the impatient, ambitious mood of the 1980s. It was telling that, like Mrs Thatcher, he was a passionate admirer of all things American. His wife was American; they held annual Fourth of July barbecues, with baseball games during which, Rodgers recalled, ‘David usually made the highest score and was always determined to win’. Like Mrs Thatcher, too, Owen was fiercely patriotic. Having worked on a building site as a teenager during the Suez crisis, he never forgot his workmates’ instinctive nationalism, and was determined to reflect their values rather than the ‘sogginess’ of the ‘liberal establishment’. As Marquand put it, Owen combined a kind of ‘southern English patriotism’ with an aggressive anti-liberal populism, a ‘yearning for hard, clear, simple solutions’ and a ‘contempt for compromise and compromisers’. And when he talked about his ideal Britain, ‘thrusting’, ‘radical’, ‘dynamic’, harnessing ‘market forces’ and ‘promoting technological advance’, it was easy to imagine the Prime Minister nodding in agreement.14
By the summer of 1980, Owen’s patience with life in the Labour Party was stretched to breaking point. An intensely proud man, he had been shocked by his terrible reception at the Wembley conference. Although no shrinking violet, he had no desire to spend his political career being abused by his own members, nor did he want to spend it promoting policies he passionately opposed. So when, standing there in the Westminster tunnel, he heard about Silkin’s plan to commit Labour to leaving the Common Market, he was furious. The next morning, he met Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, and together they drafted a statem
ent for the Sunday papers, insisting that they would ‘not accept a choice between socialism and Europe. We will choose them both.’ Here, as Owen knew, was the first clear indication that they might consider a new ‘socialist’ party, should Labour turn its back on Europe.15
Until this point, few people had thought of Owen, Williams and Rodgers as a natural alliance. Rodgers, always the outsider in histories of the SDP, was the consummate backroom boy, the ultimate ‘politicians’ politician’. A child of Liverpool during the Depression, he had been Callaghan’s Transport Secretary, but he was best known as the great organizer of the Labour right, toiling unceasingly behind the scenes to build support for the nuclear deterrent and the European cause. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, he remained faithful to the policies of the Wilson and Callaghan era: redistributive taxes, high spending and an incomes policy to restrain inflation, but no further nationalizations and no retreat from Britain’s position in NATO and the EEC. By the turn of the 1980s, however, many grass-roots activists thought those views were tantamount to membership of the Conservative Party. After the general election, Callaghan had appointed him as Labour’s defence spokesman. But Rodgers’s support for nuclear weapons made him vulnerable: within a year the left were calling for his head.16
If Rodgers was little known outside Westminster, everybody knew Shirley Williams. The daughter of the political philosopher Sir George Catlin and the feminist writer Vera Brittain, she had risen quickly through the Labour ranks, becoming Wilson’s Prices Secretary in 1974 and Callaghan’s Education Secretary two years later. As an ardent advocate of comprehensive schools, she often infuriated the Tory papers, but few public figures enjoyed such widespread affection. Famously warm, earnest and articulate – and infamously scruffy and unpunctual – she was one of the only politicians whom ordinary people seemed genuinely pleased to see. The Times’s Louis Heren thought she was ‘everybody’s favourite aunt – albeit an aunt with a political science degree’. But she suffered from very bad luck. At the beginning of the 1970s, her husband, the philosopher Bernard Williams, had left her for another woman. As a single mother looking after a school-age daughter, which made her even more of an outsider in the masculine world of Westminster politics, Williams was constantly rushing to keep up – which puts a different complexion on all those taunts about her lateness.17
Williams’s other slice of bad luck came in May 1979, when she lost her Stevenage seat. This was classic Thatcher territory, a successful New Town of ambitious skilled workers attracted by the Right to Buy. But by then Williams was already feeling miserable about her future inside the Labour Party. A keen pro-European, she had long despaired of Labour’s ‘ancient prejudices’, and thought Wilson and Callaghan had ‘conceded too much to the unions’. Above all, she was horrified by the growing ‘intolerance and savagery’ of the left, which was not a fashionable position when activists were always talking about crushing this and smashing that. She dreamed of a genuinely kinder, gentler Britain, not one that took its lead from the Militant Tendency. And although she found Tony Benn likeable enough, she could not stand the ‘appalling insularity’ and ‘anti-parliamentarian’ extremism of his politics. ‘When he speaks about the primacy of the activists,’ she told Hugo Young, ‘he virtually parrots Lenin … He does not really know what he is saying.’18
Williams and Rodgers had been sharing thoughts about the party’s future for years. And now, buoyed by Owen’s impatient enthusiasm, they had the bit between their teeth. On 1 August 1980 the three of them published an open letter in the Guardian, intended as a last warning to Labour and a manifesto for a social democratic alternative. ‘The Labour Party’, read the first sentence, ‘is facing the gravest crisis in its history – graver even than the crisis of 1931.’ The priority, they argued, was to tackle Britain’s enormous ‘industrial, economic and social problems’, which were ‘far more intractable than they seemed in the comfortably optimistic 1960s’. Ironically, almost everything that followed could have been written in the 1960s, from a mixed economy and an incomes policy to European co-operation and the Atlantic alliance. The only difference was the last section, in which they warned that the hard left threatened democracy itself. The final lines read like an ultimatum. They were not prepared to ‘abandon Britain to divisive and often cruel Tory policies’ because people had no ‘acceptable socialist alternative … If the Labour Party abandons its democratic and internationalist principles, the argument may grow for a new democratic socialist party to establish itself as a party of conscience and reform committed to those principles.’19
There was no mistaking what this meant. For the first time, three of Labour’s most senior figures had publicly floated the idea of a ‘new democratic socialist party’. The Guardian’s front page dubbed them the ‘Gang of Three’, borrowing a nickname coined by their left-wing critics. As for their open letter, Tony Benn thought it ‘disgraceful’. But it is not clear what he expected the Gang of Three to do. He had fought for his principles for years; was it so illegitimate for them to do the same? If they stayed in the Labour Party, they were fifth columnists; if they got out, they were traitors. Presumably they should just have converted and joined the hard left. Alas, not everybody was as fortunate as Benn. He had been privileged to see the light. But they could have wandered up and down the road to Damascus for years without ever emerging from the fog of moderation.20
Yet the departure of the Gang of Three was by no means inevitable. Most commentators thought their threat was a political tactic, not a serious proposal. The day after their European statement was published, Roy Jenkins resurfaced with a speech to the parliamentary press gallery, suggesting that a new centre party would be like an ‘experimental plane’, which might ‘soar in the sky … further and more quickly’ than people imagined. But most observers thought it very implausible that the Gang of Three would ever board Jenkins’s plane. After all, Shirley Williams had already said that a centre party would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’. If they stayed loyal to Labour, said The Times, then any new party would merely be ‘Mr Jenkins’s dining club going public’. Even harsher was the Spectator, which thought his plane would be better described as a ‘fat, flabby and near-extinct bird endeavouring to fly but lacking the muscle and momentum to take flight’. To cap it all, a poll found that only three out of ten people would seriously consider voting for a centre party, with six out of ten considering it ‘unlikely’.21
Jenkins spent the next few weeks sunk in gloom. If all else failed, he told friends, he could always join David Steel. And if things had unfolded differently inside the Labour Party, that is probably what would have happened. It is possible to imagine a scenario in which the major union leaders called for compromise and the party’s warring factions reached an uneasy stalemate. In that case, Jim Callaghan might have been succeeded by Denis Healey, the Gang of Three might have stayed to fight for more moderate positions and Labour’s internal divisions would probably have declined to a slow simmer. As for Jenkins, he would almost certainly have become a Liberal.22
But that, of course, is not what happened. The union leaders were in no shape to take on the left, the leadership had long since lost the will to fight and the activists were in no mood to compromise. So Labour went to Blackpool, and all hell broke loose.
*
On the last weekend in September, the Labour tribes assembled for what everybody knew would be an explosive showdown. The setting, at once gaudy and threadbare, a great Victorian resort abandoned by the tides of change, could hardly have been better chosen. Decades of decline, wrote Anthony Sampson, had left Blackpool ‘more uncompromisingly working-class’ than ever, the seafront lined with cheap bars and boarding houses, the ‘elegant Victorian terraces and hotels’ covered with ‘hoardings and plastic façades’. The huge Metropole Hotel felt sad and shabby; the old Winter Gardens were hemmed in by amusement arcades. People still came to Blackpool in search of fun, but a council spokesman admitted that it was no
w ‘regarded as the bargain basement of the holiday business’. Comedians joked that the council propped up dead bodies in the bus shelters, to make it look as if the town still had some life in it. That was the kind of thing they said about the Labour Party, too.23
From the moment the first delegates arrived, the party conference was charged with tension. The columnist Peter Jenkins thought it had the feel of a ‘Chinese-style Cultural Revolution’, the foyer of the Imperial Hotel ‘like a Soviet permanently in session’, the conference hall and surrounding corridors ‘ankle-deep in leaflets and revolutionary newspapers’. And right from the start, the moderates knew the mood was against them. Bill Rodgers recalled the ‘smell of almost revolutionary hysteria’. Shirley Williams remembered being jostled and heckled as she moved around. Some delegates even spat at her. The atmosphere was ‘not only unpleasant’, wrote Ivor Crewe and Anthony King; it was ‘positively insane’.24
But of course the left did not see it that way. This was their hour, their moment in the sun after a decade of betrayals. And as Tony Benn moved from meeting to meeting, he radiated conviction, telling one audience that he saw himself as the heir to the Chartists, another that he was upholding the radical traditions of the Levellers and the Diggers. To his admirers, he had never been more charismatic, more eloquent, more obviously the man of the future. But to his critics he was literally mad, his ‘staring eyes’ a sign that he had lost his reason. He was ‘at his apogee’, remembered Williams. ‘He seemed almost in a self-induced trance.’25
On the first full day, Monday 29th, Benn rose to speak on behalf of the National Executive during a debate on the economy. In a sign of the mood, Denis Healey had been hissed even before he had made it on to the rostrum. But when Benn stepped forward, nobody hissed. What was wrong with Britain, he said, was ‘not just Mrs Thatcher’. It was capitalism. And ‘if this woman and this Cabinet, who believe in capitalism, cannot make it work better than it does’, then the next Labour government should tear it down once and for all. That meant scrapping defence spending, taxing wealth, halting imports, reintroducing capital controls, promoting workers’ co-operatives and moving to a statutory thirty-five-hour working week. It also meant breaking the power of the City of London, defying the IMF and pulling out of Europe.
Who Dares Wins Page 53
