But the issue of the Liberals exposed the fault lines in the Gang of Four. They all knew there was no room in a first-past-the post system for four competing parties. But as Owen pointed out, liberalism and social democracy were not the same thing. Liberals tended to be individualistic to the point of outright eccentricity; they distrusted big government, disliked concentrated power and were famously hospitable to all kinds of mavericks and minorities. But the Social Democrats saw themselves as a natural party of government, wielding power to improve the lives of millions. People like Owen and Rodgers knew how the machine worked and were keen to use it, but many grass-roots Liberals saw the machine as the enemy. The SDP, wrote Austin Mitchell, were ‘smooth men’; the Liberals were ‘hairy men’.35
The pace of events, however, left little time for debate. In April, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers met the Liberal leader, David Steel, at the annual Anglo-German Association meeting in Königswinter. They found enough common ground to issue a joint statement of principle when they got back, with Williams and Steel posing on the lawn outside the Palace of Westminster ‘like two young lovers’. By the autumn the two parties had laid the foundations for a formal alliance, although that did not save them from months of squabbling about the division of seats. But while Jenkins, Williams and Rodgers were happy to do a deal with the Liberals, Owen was much less contented. He thought of the SDP as a thrusting, hard-nosed party, at once radical and patriotic. By contrast, he saw the Liberals as a ‘miscellaneous collection of limp-wristed wets, frequently feeble as individuals, collectively incapable of action’. Why, he wondered, had they rushed into a deal with such a pack of losers?36
In hindsight, all this was merely a symptom of the SDP’s fundamental problem. In a different electoral system there might have been room for both Liberals and Social Democrats. But under first-past-the-post, even an alliance of the two was always going to find it extraordinarily difficult to break the mould. Indeed, even before the SDP had fought a single by-election, some observers warned that once the economy recovered and Labour’s civil war ground to a halt, they would end up being ‘squeezed’ as everybody’s second choice. To succeed, the Social Democrats needed Labour to disintegrate, repeating the pattern of the Liberals’ collapse in the 1920s. But if Labour steadied the ship, the SDP might end up as another version of the Liberals: a ‘middle-class “cop out”, “pious”, a non-urgent protest vote’, to use the words of their focus groups. They badly needed a social base, a demographic heartland to match the Tory shires and Labour cities. People thought them moderate, sensible, nice. But as the Liberals could have told them, niceness does not win elections.37
On the left, the launch of the SDP provoked all sorts of wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was a ‘major media festival’, complained Tony Benn, who thought it ‘unreal and potentially dangerous … The attack on the two-party system, the attack on the democratic process, the attack on choice, the attack on debate, the attack on policy – all these have within them the ingredients of fascism.’
Even by Benn’s standards, this was a truly ridiculous thing to say. But he was not alone in feeling an overwhelming sense of betrayal. John Golding described the SDP as a ‘mixture of the posh set and a convalescent home for Labour MPs who have caved in to the rough and tumble of constituency politics’. Michael Foot claimed that the Gang of Four’s new party had begun ‘with an act of dishonour’, and that they would ‘never be able to wipe away the stain’. For good measure, Foot blanked them in the Commons corridors and even cancelled their invitations to a farewell dinner for Jim and Audrey Callaghan. The most spectacular abuse, though, came from Neil Kinnock. The Social Democrats, he said, were ‘political lounge lizards’ who had ‘no moral or democratic right’ to cling on to their Commons seats. Unless the Labour Party exposed the ‘shallowness and dishonesty’ of their leaders, they would become the ‘Common Market loving, NATO worshipping, trade union bashing’ puppets of every ‘multinational boss, judge and general’ in the land.38
Of all these complaints, the most common was that the new party was a media creation, promoted by the spoiled elite who wrote newspaper columns and edited the television news. Austin Mitchell, for example, blamed ‘media Labour supporters’ such as the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins and the Observer’s Adam Raphael, ‘who used their positions to invent the new party’ and then gave it ‘disproportionate coverage … presenting it in the most favourable limelight, elevating it from opportunism and accident to a genuine contribution to political theory and new politics’. The left-wing paper Tribune claimed that the SDP was the political wing of the BBC. Benn, confusingly, argued that the BBC was merely an ‘agency of the SDP’. And the hard-left activist and future peer Peter Hain went further, claiming that the Social Democrats were being promoted by a ‘motley alliance’ of media interests. By the next election, Hain predicted, their supporters would include not just The Times and the Sun, but ‘the Guardian, BBC, ITV and perhaps even the Daily Mirror’.39
There was a minuscule grain of truth in all this. The SDP did benefit from extensive coverage, notably in the Guardian and the Observer. Four Guardian writers even stood as SDP parliamentary candidates, including the future saint, Polly Toynbee, and the future resident of HM Prison Leyhill, Chris Huhne. Even so, the claim that the party was ‘invented’ by the media is absurd. The press covered the birth of the SDP because it was an exciting and important story, not because they were biased. After the razzamatazz of its launch, however, the SDP never quite recaptured Fleet Street’s interest. On the front page of The Times it was typically mentioned twice a week; on the front page of the Mirror it was mentioned twice a month. Above all, it never secured the unequivocal backing of a single newspaper. When the general election came around, not even the Guardian wholeheartedly endorsed the SDP.40
The other common criticism was that the SDP was less a party than a dinner party, a social club for people who had a new hatchback in the drive, a home computer in the sitting room and a prep-school prospectus on the kitchen table. The Social Democrats were ‘people who run things rather than own them … the people who know what’s good for the people’, wrote the Express’s George Gale in October 1981. The Conservative backbencher Julian Critchley thought they were the kind of people who went to their party conference with a copy of the Good Food Guide; the journalist Peter York called them ‘Volvo people’, who helped ‘with the washing up’. Listening to the speeches at their party conference, wrote The Times’s Frank Johnson, was like listening to the ‘opinionated chatter about worthy subjects over the dinner party cassoulet or home-made taramasalata in one of the gentrified bits of North London’. The Spectator’s Ferdinand Mount thought their motto should be ‘Keep the yobs away from the best claret’, while the same magazine’s Geoffrey Wheatcroft nicknamed them LAFITE, the ‘League of Agreeable Fellows Incommoded by Tiresome Extweemism’. ‘They are a posh lot,’ agreed the Sun’s Jon Akass. ‘They can argue that they are not posh at all, that they have impeccable working-class origins, but they are betrayed by the clothes they stand in and by their accents.’41
But were they really so posh? After studying various surveys of SDP members in the early 1980s, Ivor Crewe and Anthony King suggested that the typical recruit was a ‘middle-class family man’ in his late thirties or early forties, living in a suburb, commuter town or cathedral city in southern England. SDP Man (and he was a man) came from a relatively modest background, but had passed his 11-plus, gone to grammar school and studied at university before pursuing a professional or management career, probably in the public sector. He usually voted Labour and read the Guardian, but he was not very deeply rooted in his local community, and had probably moved at least once for work. He had fond memories of the 1950s and 1960s, when he had grown up and taken his first steps in the adult world. But he was worried about the future and exasperated by the two main parties, which seemed to have comprehensively failed. It was time, he thought, for something new.
‘Posh’, then, is not the right
word. What made the party’s members stand out was that they were meritocrats, conscious of ‘having risen in the world’. They did not own businesses, were not self-employed and were not especially interested in making money. Instead, they worked as journalists, lecturers, teachers, social workers and local government employees. Their other defining characteristic was that they were exceptionally well educated. In Newcastle, for example, 31 per cent of SDP members had degrees, compared to 5 per cent of the electorate as a whole. The party’s biggest branches tended to be in places where graduates lived: university and cathedral cities like Oxford, Cambridge and Winchester; gentrified inner-city enclaves like Battersea and Kensington; affluent London suburbs like Hampstead, Richmond and Twickenham; booming hi-tech towns like Bracknell and Wokingham. Perhaps most revealingly, the first 150 SDP parliamentary candidates in the 1983 election had published no fewer than fifty-two books between them, embracing everything from the future of socialism to the geology of the Malvern Hills.42
The problem with all this, of course, was that it was easy for the Social Democrats’ critics to present them as sanctimonious prigs, more interested in their next trip to Tuscany than in the gritty realities of life at the bottom. Not all of the party’s founders were blind to the danger. David Owen, for example, was desperate to reach the skilled working-class voters he had known in Plymouth: people who read the Sun, bought their own council houses and admired Mrs Thatcher’s patriotic rhetoric. But his was often a lone voice, and SDP members like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’s Barry (Timothy Spall), a Black Country electrician who tells his mates that they are the ‘party of the future’, were relatively thin on the ground. Perhaps the party should have thought harder about a throwaway remark by Bill Rodgers during the Crosby by-election, when he turned up with ‘claret and chips’ for the campaign volunteers. The key word was ‘chips’: even in the early 1980s there were a lot more chip eaters than claret drinkers. But the SDP always seemed more comfortable as the voice of the wine bar than as the party of the chip shop.43
Yet, in the spring of 1981, it was easy to overlook the SDP’s weaknesses. The sun was shining, the polls were tremendous and the tide of history was running its way. Sir Geoffrey Howe’s Budget on 10 March had been a public relations disaster, while Tony Benn’s decision to challenge Denis Healey for Labour’s deputy leadership had ignited the most vicious faction-fighting yet. Even the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland and the riots in the inner cities added to the picture of a broken political system and a nation crying out for a return to moderation. And then, in late May, came an unexpected stroke of luck. The Labour MP for Warrington, Sir Tom Williams, a working barrister, accepted a promotion to circuit judge, which meant he had to resign his seat. There would obviously be a by-election. If the Liberals agreed to stand aside, would the SDP put up a candidate? And if so, who?
On the face of it, Warrington was a singularly unpromising place for the SDP to make its first stand. A working-class manufacturing town between Manchester and Liverpool, it had returned Labour candidates in every election for decades and had given Sir Tom a whopping 62 per cent of the vote in 1979. But everybody knew the Social Democrats had to fight it. Since Owen and Rodgers were already in Parliament, the leading candidates were Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins. Of the two, Williams was the more obvious choice. She herself thought that ‘if ever a constituency was made for me, this was it – moderate Labour, Catholic, a cohesive community’. A poll in the Sun found that, if she stood, she would win a staggering 55 per cent, with Labour on 36 per cent and the Conservatives on a risible 9 per cent. ‘You can do it, Shirl!’ urged the headline.
But she blinked. As a single mother with a teenage daughter, she was anxious about conducting a long campaign so far from London. What was more, as a parent with few savings she worried that a second defeat would destroy her political career and leave her without a job. So she turned it down. It was, she wrote later, ‘probably the single biggest mistake of my political life … My reputation for boldness, acquired in the long fight within the Labour Party, never wholly recovered.’ The journalist Hugh Stephenson thought it a ‘disastrous personal and political mistake’, destroying her chances of ever becoming party leader. Owen, too, thought it ‘the worst decision Shirley has ever made in politics’. Had she stood, he wrote, she would undoubtedly have won, setting her up to become the new party’s leader. ‘There would have been no question then’, he added, ‘but that it was a Social Democratic Party, standing in its own right as one of four parties in British politics. But it was sadly not to be.’44
To Owen’s disappointment, Williams’s decision opened the way for the man he least wanted to see as the SDP’s chief standard-bearer. Warrington was hardly Roy Jenkins’s natural stamping ground, even though he had represented the similarly working-class Birmingham Stechford for years. In a very Jenkins touch, he sent his wife Jennifer to inspect the terrain while he went off to ‘an international bankers’ convention in Switzerland’. On the night of 4 June, he recalled, ‘I stayed in the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, Lausanne, and looked out from the balcony of my suite across a moonlit Lake of Geneva to the Savoy Alps.’ Jennifer, on the other hand, ‘stayed in the Patten Arms Hotel, Warrington, and looked out, without a balcony I think, over the railway station and the soap works’. Jennifer reported that although Warrington would be a ‘very hard nut to crack’, it had a ‘fine church and a few good c. 1800 buildings’. She drew a veil over its restaurants, but Jenkins decided to go for it anyway.45
Warrington was the first in a series of extraordinarily dramatic by-elections, fought in the glare of the national spotlight, with memorably wry coverage by the BBC’s Vincent Hanna. Nobody seriously thought the SDP could win; the question was whether it could get close. It flooded the constituency with enthusiastic volunteers, while Jenkins and his comrades mounted a succession of cavalcades, driving around the town with speakers blaring out the theme from Chariots of Fire and Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Bill Rodgers remembered an ‘atmosphere of infectious excitement’, the local shopping centre packed with canvassers, the mood that ‘of a festival’. ‘Warrington has never seen anything like it,’ wrote one visiting reporter. ‘Never has it had such political attention.’46
To Jenkins’s former colleagues, his appearance in Warrington seemed an intolerable affront. Labour’s candidate, Doug Hoyle, a Bennite of such intemperance that the very mention of his opponent’s name seemed likely to bring on an apoplexy, described him as a ‘retired pensioner from the EEC’, while a local trade unionist called him a ‘pompous plutocrat, who is now showing his true anti-working class views’. Even Peter Shore, who had sat beside Jenkins in Cabinets since the late 1960s, got very overexcited, accusing him of succumbing to a ‘sick, overriding passion for the Common Market’ and a ‘specious, dangerous dependence not on the support of individual men and women, but upon the good opinion of the media’.47
Yet the residents of this hitherto uncelebrated corner of the north-west seemed thrilled that such a statesmanlike figure had descended from his suite at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage to move among them. Jenkins’s political manservant David Marquand never forgot seeing him discussing economic policy with an elderly working-class housewife, the latter ‘looking up at him with an expression of bemused yet indulgent admiration, like an aged aunt applauding the exploits of a favourite nephew’. It was clear that she had not the faintest idea what Jenkins was talking about, but was ‘delighted’ that such a grand figure was soliciting her vote. The sketchwriter Frank Johnson, too, was struck by the enthusiasm for Jenkins’s courtly manners and elevated accent, surmising that many people saw him as a ‘figure above and outside politics, like the Queen’. At one point he interviewed a man called Mr Done, who just had been talking to Jenkins in the shopping centre. What did Mr Done think of Jenkins? ‘A gentleman, and an educated man.’ Why educated? ‘Well, the Common Market.’ Did Mr Done approve of the Common Market? ‘No, detest it.’ So why did it make him think better of Jenkins? ‘Well, he go
t paid a lot of money by it, didn’t he?’48
The result came late in the evening of Thursday 16 July. In private, Jenkins’s campaign managers were hoping for about a third of the vote. In fact, he won a sensational 42.4 per cent, slashing Labour’s majority to just 1,759 votes. Given that Jenkins’s party had not existed four months earlier, it was a breathtaking performance. In his own words, it was his ‘first defeat in thirty years in politics. And it is by far the greatest victory in which I have ever participated.’ He was not exaggerating. The pro-Labour Mirror thought it the ‘most dramatic by-election since the war’; the BBC’s veteran pundit Robert McKenzie called it ‘the most sensational by-election of the century’; the Sun proclaimed that a ‘New Age of Politics Is Dawning in Britain’. If the Warrington result were repeated at a general election, wrote the Mirror’s veteran political editor Terence Lancaster, ‘the Social Democrats would be swept to power in a landslide’. That, he conceded, was very unlikely. ‘But one thing stands out. The Social Democrats are in with a chance of forming the next Government.’49
Warrington set the seal on a stunning six months for the Gang of Four. In January they had seemed friendless outsiders; now people were talking about them as a government in waiting. And the good news continued to roll in. When the Daily Star published the first nationwide poll after Warrington, it put Labour on 29 per cent, the Tories on 25 per cent and a putative SDP–Liberal Alliance on 43 per cent. Even the SDP’s first party conference, held that autumn, was an eye-catching triumph. In a symbolic break from the norm, it was held at three different venues, Perth, Bradford and London, with a special train carrying delegates between them. ‘On the train itself’, write the party’s historians, ‘songs were sung, drinks drunk and stories told’, the atmosphere one of ‘tremendous good will’. Given the backstabbing at their rivals’ conferences, the contrast could hardly have been more striking. Even Owen, despite his doubts about the Liberals, felt a sense of ‘esprit de corps, a mood of adventure and fun’ that he had never known in the Labour Party.50
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