Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In hindsight, the remarkable thing is how few Labour MPs followed their example. Crewe and King estimate that in 1981 there were about 120 moderate Labour MPs in the House of Commons, most of whom were deeply unhappy with the triumph of the activist left. Yet only twenty-eight jumped ship, which means that more than three-quarters stayed put. What was more, none of the Gang of Four’s recruits was remotely close to being a household name. How many people had heard of Ronald Brown, James Dunn, David Ginsburg or Eric Ogden? If the SDP had managed to recruit one or two former Cabinet heavyweights, such as Denis Healey or Roy Hattersley, its history might have been different. But Healey and Hattersley had too much to lose by leaving the Labour Party. With time, they told themselves, the pendulum would swing back their way.

  For lesser-known MPs, there was no single reason why they left. It is not true that the split was all about Europe. Some of the most pro-European MPs stayed in the Labour Party, while not all the defectors were especially enthusiastic about Brussels. Nor was the split all about the threat of deselection. Many of the defectors got on reasonably well with their activists, although MPs with very supportive local parties were less likely to break away. The SDP’s recruiters thought working-class MPs, terrified of losing their salaries, were less likely to defect. But Crewe and King’s research suggests that the really decisive factor was an individual MP’s relationship with the intensely tribal Labour movement: its community, its hymns and its history. An MP from a Labour family, who had joined a trade union and served as a local councillor, was far less likely to defect than one who had joined at university and spent years working outside politics. For Owen, leaving was a wrench, but not the end of the world. But for Hattersley, born and brought up in Sheffield’s Labour Party, it was literally unimaginable.18

  One early disagreement was whether the defectors should resign their seats and force by-elections. Owen, buoyed by polls showing that he would annihilate the opposition in Plymouth Devonport, was all for it. A string of victories, he thought, would give them priceless legitimacy in the Commons and demonstrate their fighting spirit to the country. But Rodgers thought the practicalities were against them. It would, he pointed out, make it harder to attract defectors if they risked losing their seat in a by-election. What was more, the Labour whips would almost certainly schedule them in ‘dribs and drabs’ to puncture any momentum. As Rodgers recalled, ‘we would be picked off one by one, probably starting with those MPs most vulnerable to defeat. I doubted whether even half of us would survive, and the morale of the party would be severely damaged.’ But he was probably being too pessimistic. With the tide running so heavily in their favour, the defectors might well have retained most, if not all, of their seats. That would have given them a colossal morale boost, as well as much greater local traction two years later. As it was, they opened themselves up to Labour criticisms that they lacked the courage to face the voters. Of the fourteen original SDP MPs, just four survived the 1983 general election.19

  The SDP’s other obvious mistake was that it made no serious effort to attract Conservatives. On 16 March, during a debate on the Budget, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler, the MP for North West Norfolk, suddenly announced that he was resigning the Conservative whip, crossed the floor and sat down with the Social Democrats. But where he led, nobody followed. Part of the problem was that Williams, Owen and Rodgers had always envisaged the SDP as a centre-left party, and never bothered to appeal to MPs from the other side of the aisle. Owen, for example, worried that an influx of Tory patricians would dilute their radicalism, though he later regretted not trying harder. By contrast, Roy Jenkins recalled that some Conservatives promised him that ‘they were definitely coming. It was only a matter of choosing the time.’ But the time never came. Most were in safe seats; if they walked away, they would lose careers and incomes as well as friends and status. If a relatively big name such as Sir Ian Gilmour had led the way, things might have been different. But the fact that somebody as semi-detached as Gilmour stayed put spoke volumes about the resilience of the old loyalties. Perhaps the fact that Jenkins was sleeping with Gilmour’s wife had something to do with it.20

  At 9 a.m. on Thursday 26 March, the Gang of Four took their places on the platform for the official launch of the Social Democratic Party. The venue was the Connaught Rooms on Great Queen Street: grandly old-fashioned, all cream and chandeliers. In an unlikely coincidence, it was just a few doors down from the Blitz club, where Spandau Ballet had made their first public appearance fifteen months earlier. An imaginative journalist could have had some fun with the fact that both organizations saw themselves as breaking with the pessimism of the 1970s, both sold themselves as a blast of fresh air, both placed a heavy emphasis on style and image, and both were decried by their critics as media-driven fantasies. But in the spring of 1981 few political commentators were connoisseurs of the latest pop music. As for the New Romantics, they had mixed feelings about their political counterparts. ‘What kind of things annoy you?’ an interviewer for The Face asked the Human League’s Phil Oakey. ‘People that vote for the SDP,’ Oakey said, before correcting himself: ‘But I don’t know why that’s so bad on reflection; if politics has got to be showbusiness you might as well give it to competent showbiz people like David Owen.’21

  In good New Romantic style, the most memorable thing about the launch of the SDP was how it looked. ‘We were out to show that we were a bright, modern, professional party,’ remembered Owen, ‘and proud of it.’ The key figure was the pugnacious Newcastle MP Mike Thomas, who had a background in market research and had thought hard about how they should present themselves. It was Thomas who dreamed up their logo, based on the three letters SDP with a patriotic red-white-and-blue colour scheme. This, he explained, ‘would touch on a national desire to pull Britain up by the bootstraps that people really do feel in the present economic mess’. The designer Dick Negus, best known for his work with British Airways, was credited with the finished product. But the final touch came from Rodgers’s wife Silvia, who suggested putting a thick line under the three letters to make them stand out.

  Purely as a spectacle, the launch could scarcely have been more successful. Nothing had been left to chance: even the publicity had been arranged by a City public relations firm, with a team of twenty working full time for a fortnight. Owen recalled an ‘infectious mood of excitement and bustle’, while Rodgers had never seen so many reporters and camera crews ‘from most of Western Europe, the United States, the Commonwealth and the rest of the world, some 500 people in all’. On the ITN lunchtime news, all but two minutes were devoted to the SDP, while Mike Thomas estimated that they attracted at least £15 million worth of free coverage. And in a first for a British political party, people could join simply by ringing a helpline and handing over their credit card number, which seemed a breathtaking innovation. ‘I lost my prejudice against plastic money’, wrote Owen, ‘and got my own credit card for the first time.’22

  The day did not end there. As soon as the Gang of Four left the stage, they were whisked off by air, rail and road around the country, making individual appearances at Edinburgh, Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Southampton, Norwich and Plymouth. But not even they had envisaged how popular their appearances would be. In Norwich some sixty people were turned away from a Rodgers press conference, while Owen gave an impromptu speech on the steps of Southampton’s Civic Hall to several dozen people who had failed to get in. Only once did he betray a hint of tiredness, when a woman berated him about the SDP’s failure to publish a manifesto. It was up to the members to decide the new party’s policies, he said. ‘We are not going to spoon-feed them … Look, love, if you want a manifesto, go and join one of the other parties.’23

  Even without a manifesto, the momentum was running in their favour. As the political scientist Ivor Crewe had argued just before the SDP’s launch, the prospects for a third-party breakthrough were ‘better than at any time since the present two-party system was formed in the 1920s’. The average o
f seven polls since the Limehouse Declaration gave Labour 31 per cent, the Tories 27 per cent, the SDP 26 per cent and the Liberals 14 per cent. Another survey for the Observer painted an even more sensational picture. This time it put an alliance on 46 per cent, which would mean an electoral landslide. Amazingly, even if the SDP stood on their own, they would still finish first, with 35 per cent to Labour’s 29, the Tories’ 27 and the Liberals’ 7 per cent. Yet as the paper’s commentator Anthony King noted, there was a potential time bomb in the small print. When Gallup asked people if they felt ‘very close’ to their preferred party, SDP supporters were the softest of all. Support was ‘widespread, but far from solid. A lot of it could still evaporate.’24

  In many respects the Social Democrats were always fighting an uphill struggle. Despite all the hype, they had no constitution, no leader, no policies and no voters. As one early account puts it, they ‘had to run from the very start, just to keep up with events’. And although their critics painted them as the political equivalent of an advertising agency, all slick sound-bites and fancy logos, their hastily improvised machine often struggled to cope. Their policymaking got bogged down in endless sub-committees; hundreds of unopened letters piled up in mailbags; even their pioneering computer system, purchased from the Midland Bank, was incapable of sorting the list of party members into regions. Later, some writers saw their marketing efforts – balloons, T-shirts, tea towels, even a signed mock-antique copy of the Limehouse Declaration – as proof that they had sold out to the gospel of commercialism. What they really reflected, though, was how desperately the SDP missed Labour’s union funding. In any case, the merchandising drive was a complete flop. Their chief marketing man left after just seven months, and the total profits came to just £14,509.25

  Yet at first things went better than the Gang of Four had dreamed. Within ten days of the Connaught Rooms launch, they had 43,566 paid-up members and more than £500,000. More importantly, they had that most precious political commodity, momentum. With Tony Benn having challenged Denis Healey for the Labour deputy leadership, their old party was tearing itself apart, while the government appeared to be staggering from one economic calamity to the next. By contrast, in the words of the SDP’s historians, the new party enjoyed an image of ‘brightness, modernity and efficiency’, offering a ‘break with the past’ and ‘high hopes for the future’. And as a result, their polling remained spectacularly good. By the autumn of 1981, the combined SDP–Liberal average had reached 42 per cent, which would give them a crushing majority in the House of Commons. Never had any new party come so far, so fast.26

  For the Gang of Four these felt like days of heaven. When, on 20 March, they had lunch at The Times, Hugo Young found them ‘very buoyant’, with the ‘serenity of people who think they’ve done the right thing’ as well as a palpable ‘excitement at having got the show on the road so fast and well’. Every week seemed to bring another MP, a few more local councillors, more veteran activists, more fresh-faced members. For Rodgers, the sense of relief was ‘altogether exhilarating’. A year ago they had been talking about winning a handful of seats. Now they were ‘talking seriously amongst ourselves of forming the next government or, in more sober moments, of holding the balance of power’. Owen, too, felt ‘free and unfettered’ for the first time in months, revelling in the ‘immense fun’ of starting something new. And among their sympathizers there was a thrilling sense of expectation. After years of winter gloom, said an editorial in the Observer, ‘the SDP’s arrival coincides with the daffodils and the first bright days of spring’.27

  To their admirers, one of the things that made the SDP stand out was their collective leadership. At first the Gang of Four met every week at the aptly named L’Amico, an Italian restaurant in Westminster, and it seemed to work well. Jenkins was in charge of policy, Williams handled publicity, Rodgers ran the party machine and Owen chaired their delegation in Parliament. Some of them thought they should keep it up indefinitely. Rodgers liked the idea of copying West Germany’s Social Democrats, who effectively had two leaders in Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. Williams, too, enjoyed their experiment with collective decision-making, which gave an impression of ‘friendship and a common objective, by contrast to the civil war in the Labour Party and the growing strains in the Conservative government’.28

  Yet even at this early stage, there were tensions. Owen’s brusque ambition did not make him one of life’s natural collaborators. The bigger problem, though, was Jenkins. He was older than the others, infinitely more experienced and far better known. In his own mind, he was an international statesman, who had issued a call to arms in his Dimbleby Lecture and had graciously allowed the others to fall in behind him. But to the Gang of Three, the SDP was their project, not his. They had been brave enough to break from the Labour Party; he had merely flown home from Brussels. They had brought the recruits, the energy, the enthusiasm; he was merely the fairy on the Christmas tree. They were naturally infuriated to find Jenkins’s hangers-on treating them as vassals at the court of King Roy. As the SDP’s historians put it, ‘the Jenkinsites’ snootiness and air of ineffable superiority, their pleasure in making cutting remarks about their rivals and opponents’, even their fondness for ‘a table laden with good food and wine’, seemed intolerably offensive. Even when Jenkins invited Owen for lunch at the Athenaeum, the younger man felt insulted. ‘He knew perfectly well’, Owen wrote, ‘that these all-male London clubs got up my nose.’29

  On top of that, Jenkins seemed a very incongruous front man for a dynamic new political operation. When Owen talked of the SDP as young, different and ‘fresh-looking’, he was listing everything Jenkins – a former Home Secretary, Chancellor and President of the European Commission, with an intimate knowledge of Belgium’s wine cellars and an accent from the mean streets of St James’s – was not. In Rodgers’s words, Owen always saw his former mentor as ‘yesterday’s man, a sybaritic and whiggish figure’. But Rodgers thought there was a fair degree of jealousy there, too: ‘the resentment of an adolescent boy on discovering that his rejected father is dangerously attractive to his girlfriend and still a fast mover on the football field’.30

  Williams’s relationship with Jenkins was no less uneasy. She thought him grand to the point of pomposity; he considered her informal to the point of scattiness. And since they were by far the best-known members of the Gang of Four, there was an underlying personal rivalry, too. ‘I readily conceded, publicly and privately, that Roy was a greater person than I was,’ Williams wrote later, which was an odd thing to say given that she was far more popular. What she could not forgive, though, was that his admirers constantly told journalists that she was ‘disorganised, indecisive and incapable of leadership’. If she had been less amiable, she might have reminded them that she was a single mother bringing up a teenage daughter, whereas he was a spoiled voluptuary who was literally incapable of boiling an egg. But she said nothing, so his acolytes had it all their own way. They even had fun with her name: an anagram, they pointed out, of ‘I whirl aimlessly’.31

  This Nicholas Garland cartoon (Sunday Telegraph, 14 June 1981) perfectly captures Roy Jenkins’s image in the SDP’s early days. The ‘Sparkling Rosé’ is very nicely judged, but the teetotal Tony Benn would never have touched ‘Socialist Beer’.

  Behind these personal animosities lay a deeper issue. The SDP’s founders agreed that things had gone wrong with Britain and that the country needed something new. But what? To many commentators, the Limehouse Declaration implied a return to the semi-mythical consensus of the 1950s, uniting moderates of left and right in a non-ideological National Government. Yet at the launch on 26 March both Rodgers and Williams had gone out of their way to describe the SDP as a new ‘left-of-centre party’, not a centre party. And even that was ambiguous. It might mean a more moderate version of the Labour Party, appealing to a largely working-class, socially conservative base. Or it might mean an updated version of the Edwardian Liberal Party: classless, high-minded, open to new issue
s like feminism, environmentalism and gay rights. So what was the SDP really for?32

  Each member of the Gang of Four would have answered this slightly differently. Rodgers was a Gaitskell tribute act, advocating incomes policies, high spending and high taxes, as well as the nuclear deterrent and the Atlantic alliance. Williams, too, saw the SDP as basically another Labour Party, shorn of the unions and the hard left. By contrast, Owen was more forward-looking, dreaming of an aggressively radical party that would emulate the ‘vibrant, cocky … classless, market-orientated culture’ of the United States, Canada and Australia. But the real anomaly was Jenkins. While his comrades still described themselves as socialists, he pointedly told the Guardian that he had not ‘used the word socialist, or socialism, for some years’. In style he often struck a remarkably conservative figure, and many commentators treated him as a kind of Victorian Whig. And when he talked about policy, his prescriptions sounded identical to those of the Tory Wets. As the journalist Hugh Stephenson remarked in one of the first books about the SDP, Jenkins said absolutely nothing ‘which could not have come from the lips of a radical Tory’.33

  None of this was lost on Jenkins’s partners. Owen even believed that Jenkins had never been serious about building the SDP as a separate entity with a political culture of its own, but was bent on a merger with the Liberals. From the start, he wrote, Jenkins ‘subtly and systematically undermined the SDP’s independence’. This might sound a bit paranoid, and Jenkins dismissed it in his memoirs. But there is a considerable amount of truth in it. As Jenkins’s authorized biographer, John Campbell, points out, he had envisaged some sort of association with David Steel’s party long before he joined the Gang of Three. In reality, he probably never saw the SDP as anything other than a bridge to the Liberals. Indeed, the reason he insisted on putting the word ‘realignment’ into the Limehouse Declaration, over Williams’s objections, was precisely because he hoped to tilt British politics back towards his hero H. H. Asquith’s old party.34