Auberon Waugh, Spectator, 7 February 1981
[Rupert] Murdoch thinks their whole operation is a ‘lot of crap’ … Says afterwards that his main impression was of four people who hated each other’s guts. He has got it quite wrong.
The Gang of Four’s lunch at The Times, 20 March 1981, in Ion Trewin (ed.),
The Hugo Young Papers: Thirty Years of British Politics (2008)
The founding document of the Social Democratic Party was never meant to be called the Limehouse Declaration. Originally, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and David Owen had planned to meet at Roy Jenkins’s country house in Oxfordshire after Labour’s Wembley conference. There they intended to put the finishing touches to a statement of principles and call for recruits to a new party. But, in a hint of the tensions to come, the plan went awry. A week earlier, the Observer had run a front-page report that Jenkins was expecting the Gang of Three for a ‘summit meeting at his Oxfordshire home’, with a picture of the great man standing imperiously on his lawn, like a country squire waiting to receive a delegation from the village. The infuriated Williams promptly refused to go, so they convened at Bill Rodgers’s house in Kentish Town, north London, instead. For their meeting on Sunday 25th, they chose a new venue: David Owen’s Georgian terraced house in Narrow Street, Limehouse, overlooking the Thames in east London.1
Limehouse was not a bad place to launch a breakaway from an ailing Victorian institution. For one thing, they were literally across the street from the Brightlingsea Buildings, where Clement Attlee had lived as an idealistic young man in 1912. Ten years later, Attlee had become the local MP, representing the area in Parliament until 1950. Since then. however, Limehouse had seen wrenching social and economic change. Attlee’s Limehouse had been the bustling heart of the capital’s docklands, a place associated with poverty, crime and disease, but also with industry, immigration and Empire. But by 1965, when Owen bought his house at 78 Narrow Street for some £3,000, Limehouse was in deep decline. At first he enjoyed gazing out across the Thames ‘with the ships flashing past … activity and life everywhere’. But the docks closed, the ships disappeared and the life began to fade. In 1969 Limehouse Basin, far too small to handle the new container ships, closed to commercial traffic. The river rolled imperturbably on, the workers moved out, the warehouses fell silent. By the time Jenkins, Williams and Rodgers arrived in Narrow Street, Limehouse had become an object lesson in the costs of economic change.2
Now, as the press waited outside, the Gang of Four made the last additions to a document that would, they hoped, herald a national revival. At last, as the sun was beginning to dip, they emerged into the pale winter light. As they strolled self-consciously towards the river, the photographers snapping away, they cut oddly revealing figures, as if dressed by a costume designer with a keen eye for character. In the centre of the picture was Jenkins, round and sleek in his dark suit, as befitted a man who could never quite get over the fact that he was not already Prime Minister. On the right, sporting a lighter check suit and a slightly embarrassed grin, was the saturnine Owen. On the left was Rodgers, the perennial fourth man, who had declined to change out of his Marks & Spencer’s jumper and looked as if he had just got back from the garden centre. And sandwiched between him and Jenkins was Shirley Williams, beaming delightedly for the cameras. She had borrowed a baggy shirt from Owen’s wife Debbie, she wrote later, because ‘my appearance at that moment was not compatible with a serious attempt to found a new political party’. What on earth had she been wearing?3
The next day’s papers all led with their statement announcing the formation of a Council for Social Democracy, the decisive step towards a breakaway party. Yet to twenty-first-century eyes the Limehouse Declaration looks almost disappointingly uncontroversial. Like many political statements of the age, it began with the assumption of national decline, warning that ‘the country cannot be saved without changing the sterile and rigid framework into which the British political system has increasingly fallen in the last two decades’. As Hugo Young noted, the Gang of Four clearly shared Mrs Thatcher’s ‘apocalyptic vision of the state of the country’, but their prescriptions were much vaguer than hers. They were against extremism, poverty and inequality. They were for better services and a ‘competitive economy with a fair distribution of rewards’, which reminded some people of West Germany’s Social Democrats. They liked the thought of ‘radical change’, but they also wanted ‘greater stability of direction’. And they wanted a more ‘self-confident’ and ‘outward-looking’ Britain, committed to NATO and the European Community, not one that was ‘isolationist, xenophobic or neutralist’.4
None of this was exactly radical. Scores of Labour and Conservative MPs, as well as millions of voters, would have agreed with almost every word. The Gang of Four did not spell out how they would handle inflation, nor how they would deal with mass unemployment. There were hints of the future, most obviously the pledge to ‘create an open, classless and more equal society, one which rejects ugly prejudices based upon sex, race or religion’. But to many readers, the Declaration seemed a lament for the lost certainties of the 1960s: the mixed economy, the welfare state, the Atlantic alliance, the optimistic dream of European harmony. Tellingly, one early draft had talked of reviving ‘the party of Attlee and Gaitskell’. But many young men and women who would cast their first votes at the next election had been born after Gaitskell’s death, while it was thirty years since Attlee had sat in Number 10. No wonder the Social Democrats’ critics joked that they wanted a ‘better yesterday’.5
One other thing was very striking. The Limehouse Declaration mentioned the Labour Party several times, including in the very first sentence (‘The calamitous outcome of the Labour Party Wembley conference demands a new start in British politics’). But the word ‘Thatcher’ never appeared at all. Not once did the Gang of Four mention her government, her policies or the need to beat her in an election. Owen later told Charles Moore that when they were devising their plans, she never even came up. To people like Jenkins and Williams, it was self-evident that, having been foolish enough to elect somebody so strident, aggressive and narrow-minded, the British people would not make the same mistake again. ‘Roy and Shirley and Bill thought Mrs Thatcher was an aberration’, Owen said, ‘and they were looking ahead to the next bit. They assumed that they would come through the middle when Thatcherism failed.’6
Not everybody was carried away by the Limehouse Declaration. The Spectator’s Geoffrey Wheatcroft was struck by its ‘unimaginative dreariness’, and thought there was ‘something irredeemably second-rate about the Gang’. But other people saw it differently. On Monday morning every paper put the Declaration on its front page, and within a week the Council for Social Democracy had attracted thousands of letters of support. Even the Conservative press were reasonably kind. ‘THE GANG’S ON ITS WAY!’ exulted the Express, which welcomed a ‘decent, democratic alternative to the Tories’ and claimed to wish the new party well.7
What did ordinary people think? The Times sent a reporter to Stevenage, which had rejected Shirley Williams in 1979. Now three out of every four people canvassed by the paper said they would consider voting for a new party. ‘I would follow Shirley Williams to Timbuctoo,’ said Wendy Skiggins, a 23-year-old housewife who had voted Labour in 1979, ‘and I would probably vote for the social democrats even if she is not the leader. The party offers something new, away from the old extremes.’ ‘I could not vote for Michael Foot,’ agreed Peter Thomas, a local businessman who had voted Conservative, ‘but Roy Jenkins or Mrs Williams? Maybe, if the Tories do not stop cutting our throats.’
At a working men’s club near Southampton docks, meanwhile, there was plenty of sympathy for the Gang of Four. The 74-year-old James Flannery, a retired van driver, had voted Labour all his life, but had already decided to switch to the Social Democrats. ‘All the others are Marxists – Benn, Foot,’ he said. ‘The true Labour crowd are breaking away. The sooner they go in with [the Liberal leader David] S
teel and form a good, solid party we will get rid of Maggie.’ ‘They could be for the working bloke,’ agreed Brian Short, a 24-year-old lorry driver, while an older plant operator, who gave his name as Mr Newton, said he and his wife had already decided to vote for ‘a new social democrat party, as they will have the new ideas, and we hope be more for the working class than Labour is’. Indeed, almost everybody in the club agreed that the old Labour Party had disappeared and that the Gang of Four were the only realistic alternatives to Mrs Thatcher. ‘I have always voted Labour,’ said Ray Hoskins, a scaffolder. ‘But I am not interested in communism. And that is the way the Labour Party is going.’
Yet the picture was not entirely rosy. In Birmingham, bruised and battered by the crisis of manufacturing, there seemed much less enthusiasm for the new party. Workers at the engineering firm GKN told The Times’s future editor John Witherow that they were still loyal to Labour, ‘the party for the working man’. The Social Democrats, one said, would be a ‘nine day wonder, a protest vote’. But in Perry Barr, which had voted Labour in 1979, Witherow found one possible Social Democrat voter, a butcher who had opted for the Liberals in the last election. He would vote for the Gang of Four, he said – as long as they introduced ‘conscription for the unemployed and the return of hanging’. He was not really Roy Jenkins’s kind of person.8
While most of the Gang of Four’s old comrades seethed at their breach of tribal loyalty, at least one welcomed the chance to draw a firm line between the elect and the fallen. On Monday afternoon, still buoyant after the left’s victory at the shambolic Wembley conference, Tony Benn produced a motion for the party’s National Executive, demanding that all Labour candidates swear an oath, ‘wholeheartedly and without reservation’, to the party and its left-wing manifesto. As almost anybody could have foreseen, most of Benn’s fellow MPs were outraged, while the newspapers thought his proposed ‘loyalty test’ smacked of ‘the Thought Police in Orwell’s “1984”’, as the Express put it. The Gang of Four could scarcely have wished for a better send-off.9
For Michael Foot, whose leadership was rapidly descending into chaos, it seemed scarcely credible that Benn had contrived to turn the Gang of Four’s apostasy into yet another story about himself. But when he called Benn in for a dressing-down, the latter was utterly unapologetic. ‘Why do we need it?’ Foot asked, ‘angry and red-faced’. ‘Because the Social Democrats are saying they’re going to leave,’ Benn replied, before accusing his leader of being ‘soft on the right’. The exchange soon degenerated into a row about whether Benn and his allies on the National Executive were running a secret ‘left caucus’. Benn denied it. ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ Foot said. ‘So I just walked out,’ Benn wrote. ‘I am not being called a liar by anybody. I was pretty steamed up. So I went back to the left group … and told them what had happened.’ Almost unbelievably, he seemed not to notice the irony.10
Meanwhile, the Gang of Four’s bandwagon rolled on. On 5 February they took out a full-page advertisement in the Guardian, carrying the names of 100 vaguely prominent backers. The advert described them as a ‘cross-section of people who have expressed their support’, but as one observer remarked, it looked more like a list of their dinner-party guests. Almost half had previously been involved with the Labour Party, while thirteen had been Labour MPs, including the former deputy leader George Brown and the former Cabinet ministers Jack Diamond, Kenneth Robinson and Edmund Dell. Even more revealingly, a quarter were academics, including the historian Lord Bullock, the biographer Philip Williams, the chemist Sir Fred Dainton, the physicist Lord Flowers and the economists James Meade and Frank Hahn. Even the token celebrities – the rabbi Julia Neuberger, the opera singer Sir Geraint Evans, the presenter and musician Steve Race – were celebrities of a pretty highbrow kind.11
Benn thought the advert a roll call of ‘middle-class’ traitors and complained that the BBC (‘the voice of Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins’) had given it far too much coverage. And some Guardian readers took it very badly. One pointed out that the list contained not one ordinary ‘railway worker, bus driver, factory worker, electrician, plumber … or one out of the three million-plus unemployed’; another lamented that only fourteen were women; a third wondered if you had to be an ‘actress, rabbi, historian, company director, ageing egotist, failed politician or biographer of Gaitskell’ to join the Social Democrats. Yet as a public relations coup it was a triumph, creating the impression of a groundswell of support among the well educated and well connected. Within just a week, the Gang had received 8,000 letters, two-thirds of which contained money, and had a war chest of some £25,000. Within a month the mailbag had swollen to 80,000 letters and the bank balance to £175,000. Most of the money came from small individual donations; only thirty people gave more than £500 (the equivalent of almost £3,000 today), and only three gave more than £10,000. In this respect, the Social Democrats really could claim to be a grass-roots organization.12
In Westminster the new party was rapidly taking shape. Rodgers had already resigned from the Shadow Cabinet, but Williams did not leave Labour’s National Executive until 9 February, declaring that ‘the party I loved and worked for over so many years no longer exists’. The moderate John Golding told the press she was leaving because her ‘gentle upbringing’ had left her unable to ‘stand the rough and tumble like those of us who are used to scrapping in working class organisations’. The next day’s Times, meanwhile, called Williams a ‘somewhat indecisive woman, of middling intellectual attainments, and mistaken views’. Yet the paper also thought she was ‘often courageous, always human and always kind’ and was ‘quite likely’ to become Prime Minister within a few years. At this stage, the formal launch of the new party was still weeks away. Yet already The Times thought that, in alliance with the Liberals, the Social Democrats could take power at the next election with ‘about the same overall majority as the Labour Party had in 1945’.13
Events were now moving breathlessly fast. At midnight on 20 February the first four additional defectors, the MPs Ian Wrigglesworth, Tom Ellis, Richard Crawshaw and Tom Bradley, confirmed that they were leaving the Labour Party. Within a few weeks the total membership had risen to fourteen, who formed the first parliamentary committee of the Social Democratic Party. They did give some thought to alternative names: the Radicals, Progressive Labour, the Democrats, even the New Labour Party. But since the press had been calling them the Social Democrats for months, the label stuck. And for the founders, any nerves had been banished by an almost euphoric sense of relief. Jenkins remembered it as a period of ‘great exhilaration’, when they felt a ‘mixture of heady excitement and slight apprehension that we were dicing with the unknown, sailing an uncharted sea’. Williams, meanwhile, likened it to the experience of rafting down the Colorado River. ‘As I approached the rapids,’ she wrote, ‘I was gripped by a sense of excitement linked to an awareness of being no longer in control … I didn’t know whether or not we were going to come through. It was too late to turn back, and therefore pointless to worry.’14
Yet it was not all sweetness and light. For many of those who jumped ship to the Social Democrats, the experience fell somewhere between an acrimonious divorce and an existential crisis. ‘Being a member of a political party is not like being a member of a golf or tennis club,’ wrote Owen. ‘Membership carries with it tremendous emotional overtones, particularly in the Labour Party.’ He knew he would attract flak from party workers back in Plymouth, for whom leaving Labour ‘would be like amputating a limb’. Rodgers, too, did not escape without recriminations. At one point, three of his closest Commons associates visited his house to beg him to think again. He did not take it well, accusing his friend Giles Radice of being one of ‘those tedious middle-class socialists who always feel guilty about the working classes’. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ Rodgers said emotionally, ‘you’re a rich man and a public schoolboy.’ At that, Ken Weetch, who had worked under Rodgers at the Department of Transport, buried his head in his hands. ‘
I can’t believe this is happening,’ he said desperately.15
Among the herbivorous classes who usually voted Labour, the defection of the Gang of Four felt like the beginning of a nightmarish family feud. The Fabian Society lost a thousand people within a year, almost a third of its entire membership. The Guardian’s columnist Polly Toynbee, then 34, was among the new party’s first recruits and served on its steering committee. But even decades later she remembered the ‘sheer vitriol’ of the abuse from the left, and the ‘venomous’ rift within the newspaper’s office. When she and her SDP-supporting husband, the columnist Peter Jenkins, came into the canteen, some colleagues literally picked up their plates and moved away, so as not to be contaminated. Even the world of Adrian Mole was not immune from the aftershocks. ‘Pandora’s parents have had a massive row,’ he records in January 1982. ‘They are sleeping in separate bedrooms. Pandora’s mother has joined the SDP and Pandora’s father is staying loyal to the Labour Party.’ Fortunately, ‘Pandora is a Liberal, so she gets on all right with them both.’16
The SDP’s critics often accused them of being opportunists, even careerists. Roy Hattersley, for example, claimed they had left for the SDP because ‘they believed that they would do better in the new party and then dressed up self-interest to look like principle’. But since they were joining a party that stood far less chance of winning power, that was obviously nonsense. Most had left reluctantly, after months of soul-searching. Years later, some told the party’s historians Ivor Crewe and Anthony King that they had slept badly, drunk too much, quarrelled with their families and even suffered from stress-related illness. ‘I was tired of living a lie,’ one MP said. ‘I couldn’t go on week after week defending the indefensible.’ ‘I just didn’t want to go on seeming to stand for policies that I didn’t believe in,’ said another. ‘The choice in the end’, said a third, ‘was between ten years in which I kept my head down and crept into the division lobbies but didn’t really respect myself and three glorious years – short, maybe, but glorious.’17
Who Dares Wins Page 60
