A Fortunate Life (33 page)

Afterwards I made a desperate attempt to cheer up my workers and supporters at the local pub, and then went home dejected, knowing that I would have to return to face them all again when the District Council results were counted the following morning.

It was, once again, Jane who brought me back to reality. On the way home she pointed out to me that we had in fact achieved almost everything we set out to achieve. True, we had not reduced the Tories’ majority, but that was hardly surprising given the national landslide to Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives. However, we had decisively beaten Labour into third place, scored what was, in percentage terms, the highest Liberal vote in Yeovil since before the Second World War, and were now the clear challengers. She said that Nick had done a calculation just after the count and had told her that Yeovil had moved up from the eightieth most winnable Liberal seat in the country to the seventeenth. Everything now depended on tomorrow’s count for the District Council. If we had won a few of the ten seats we had contested, she pointed out, then all our strategic aims for this election would have been fulfilled.

She, my father and several stiff glasses of whisky did a little to cheer me up but not much. I was dreading the morning.

A ‘celebratory’ lunch was planned the following day at the house of our then Constituency Chairman, Sydney Harding, who had spent the morning attending the District count. He was late arriving back, so I spent the time before lunch doing what I could to cheer up our dejected workers. Suddenly Sydney burst into the room, his eyes brimming with tears, and announced, ‘They’ve all won. Every single one of them has won! All ten of them have won! We have wiped the Tories and Labour out of every seat we fought and we are now the opposition on the Council.’ What had become a wake swiftly turned instead into an instant and uproarious celebration. We might have been bloodied the previous night, but we were triumphant today – the strategy had worked – we were on our way!

I knew that the Labour candidate would return home and never be seen in Yeovil again. So that afternoon I issued a press statement saying that I would fight on and was starting the campaign for the next election the very next day, with a ‘thank-you’ leaflet to all who had voted for us. As I hoped, our local government victories and my declaration that my campaign for the next election would begin immediately received almost as much coverage in the local papers as the fact that Yeovil had once again (and with an increased majority) got a Tory MP.

The next four years were dominated for me by three developments on the national stage, three others that affected the constituency and two that personally and very painfully affected me.

The national developments were, first, the initial deep unpopularity of Thatcherism, counterbalanced in part by the second, the Falklands war, both of them played out against the backdrop of the third, the decline of Labour, the creation of the SDP and the formation of the SDP–Liberal Alliance.

The local developments were the redrawing of the Constituency boundaries, the announcement in 1982 that the Tory incumbent, John Peyton, would not stand again, and the rise and rise in strength and effectiveness of the local Yeovil Constituency Liberals.

The personal ones were that I lost my father, and then soon afterwards my job, and found myself unemployed again.

In 1978, shortly after he came to live with us, my father, who smoked more than sixty cigarettes a day until he was sixty, started to complain of pains in the chest. His GP said he thought it was an ulcer, but sent him down to Dorchester for a proper internal examination. After the examination, and before he came round from the anaesthetic, the surgeon called me in and told me my father (who only had one lung as a result of a wartime injury) had advanced cancer of the lung. They could not operate because he was too frail and because it was too deep-seated. I asked the surgeon when he was going to tell my father this. He said he wasn’t; he was leaving on holiday and was therefore leaving it to me to tell him, after which he should have professional advice from his GP. That evening, in one of the worst moments of my life, I had to tell my father that he had cancer and was going to die. The doctors gave him a year to live.

Jane, once again, carried most of the burden of nursing him, along with everything else she had to cope with. In fact, he declined much faster than the doctors had anticipated. At one stage the visiting District Nurse recommended that he should be put into hospital or sent to a care home, but Jane and I insisted that he should stay with us. Above all things, my father was a most fastidious man, and we both knew how he dreaded the thought of others seeing him go through the humiliations of the failure of his personal functions, which (along with a lot of pain) attended his last days. In April 1980, shortly after my thirty-ninth birthday, our GP told me that the cancer had travelled up the arteries into his brain, but that he still thought my father had six months to live. In the third week of May, I decided that the time had come to call my brother Mark, who had returned to England and lived at the time in London, and tell him it was time to come down to say his goodbyes. This coincided with Jane and I having a terrible row, brought on by the fact that we were both physically exhausted (but Jane more so, for she carried more of the burden) and under great mental strain. I still plague myself with the thought that my father may have heard us rowing and, having said goodbye to my brother, concluded that he was a burden and the time had come to go. What I remember clearly was that, when I kissed him goodnight on that last evening, there was a full bottle of sleeping tablets and pain-killers on his bedside table. Jane and I woke together at 6 a.m. the following morning, 29 May, and immediately commented to each other that we had not been woken during the night to carry him to the lavatory. I rushed into his room to find him dead and, as I recall it, the bottle empty by his side. (Jane has no recollection of this story of the bottle and the sleeping tablets and is certain that he did not kill himself.)

I then went into my daughter Kate’s bedroom (my son Simon was away at a scout camp), broke the news to her and asked if she would like to see her grandfather. She said she would, and I took her in to see his body.
*

Although he had only been with us for eighteen months or so, my father had become something of a personality with our neighbours and
amongst our friends, so there was quite a crowd at his cremation, after which we sent his ashes out to be scattered on the graves of my mother and their two children, Robert and Melanie, in Castlemaine in Australia.

Even if a death is expected, it does not diminish the impact, and I felt my father’s death most painfully – as did Jane and our children. That we were able to nurse him to the end, and so prevent him having to endure the indignities of this kind of death in the company of strangers, gave us pride – and in some way enabled us all to be much more enriched by the process of his leaving us than we would have been if he had been cared for by others. But the fact that neither he nor my mother lived long enough to see me elected to Parliament has been a source of deep and still-felt sadness in my life.

Throughout the period of my father’s last illness, the political pace, both nationally and locally, quickened. Normally there is something of a political hiatus after an election, especially one in which a new government is elected. During this period the opposition parties stand back for a bit and leave the new Government to find its feet during its early, honeymoon days. But the Thatcher revolution got under way almost immediately, with the brutal application of her monetarist doctrine. This soon produced a spate of closures and layoffs, with a sharp increase in unemployment and an equally sharp decrease in her popularity. It is often forgotten how swiftly she moved in these early days from the triumphant liberator who had freed the country from a hated Labour Government to the most unpopular Prime Minster since polling records began.

Meanwhile Labour, under the leadership of Michael Foot, was going through convulsions which looked at one time as though they might be terminal. The radicalisation of the Party and the rise of the militants had begun immediately after the 1979 defeat, leading in January 1981 to the ‘Gang of Four’ breaking away to form the SDP. The difficulties the other two parties were going through created fertile territory for me in the Yeovil constituency. The task now was to expand our base from Yeovil town to the other main centres of population in the Constituency, Chard, Crewkerne and Ilminster, and to begin to rebuild our campaigning structures in the countryside, which we had allowed to decay somewhat while we concentrated on Yeovil. Chard, where we had launched our first-ever community leaflet back in the electric duplicator days, was already a strong base. So I spent much of 1980 recruiting new teams of young activists in the other areas where we now needed to grow.

We were lucky with local government by-elections. There were seven of these in all corners of the Constituency between 1979 and 1983, and we won all of them, taking seats from Labour and the Tories in roughly equal measure. We were now clearly the coming force in the Constituency, and this brought us defectors, too. We gained two Tories on the local Council and one key Labour activist, Greg Jefferies, who would later prove a most gifted Chairman of Schools on Somerset County Council.

It was at this time that we unleashed an explosion of local community leaflets across the Constituency, most of them called
Focus
, but some with more imaginative names like
The Merriot Ferret
and
The
Martock Bean
. Clarissa was busier than ever, and our dining room table was ever more frequently occupied by teams of activists setting leaflets for printing.

This caused us a problem.

Shortly before the 1979 election, I had been ‘headhunted’ (if that is not too grand a word) by Morlands Sheepskin Coats of Glastonbury to help them set up a subsidiary called Tescan in Yeovil. This was the brainchild of one of the Morland family, Richard Morland, who was a neighbour and friend in Norton and a Liberal supporter. The plan was to set up a separate arms-length subsidiary of the long-established Glastonbury firm, which would buy, process and sell ‘raw’ sheepskins (that is sheepskin purchased straight from the abattoir). We would be the main supplier of these products to the parent firm, but could also sell them on the open market to any customer. Richard wanted me to look after Personnel and Marketing for the new firm. This meant learning entirely new skills but I leapt at the opportunity, in part because it meant a higher salary, in part because it meant leaving what was essentially a clerical job at Normalair Garrett and taking on a management one – and in part because Richard believed in worker participation, a key tenet of Liberal policy at the time and asked me to create the systems and structures to put this into operation. After eighteen months he then asked me to take on a more senior job, managing the production department, which was at the heart of our business and which dealt with the treatment and grading of all our raw sheepskins.

What all this meant was that our family finances received a much-needed boost from the salary which came with the new job – just as well, as the financial cushion we had accumulated was now exhausted. But we still had to be very careful about money. So providing hospitality
to all the hungry and thirsty activists who descended on our house put a lot of strain on our very meagre resources. To alleviate this we took on one of the village allotments, where we grew all our own vegetables, and I took up home brewing. I brewed all my own beer, which was kept in a large plastic pressurised barrel in a corner cupboard in our kitchen, from which everyone knew they could help themselves. This led to disaster one evening when one of our activists tried to inject more gas into the container, without knowing how to stop it, causing the barrel to explode with a large bang and distributing five gallons of beer all over the room and everyone in it.

I also brewed my own wine from almost any fruit, or even vegetable, I could lay my hands on. I have to confess that the results were of variable quality. My apple wine was, I thought, excellent. But I could not, in good conscience, recommend the carrot or the parsnip. The flower wines, too, could be good, though the sight of me tripping home from the fields in the spring with baskets of primroses led to much ribald comment and an occasional lifted eyebrow on the part of my village neighbours – who clearly wondered what such behaviour said about the nature of Liberalism.

Good, bad or indifferent, however, the one thing all my wines had in common was their alcoholic content. We used to have an annual summer party for all our activists in our garden, and more than once this resulted in people wandering off into the dark, to be found insensible in some field or hedgerow the following morning.

But my home-made wines were more than just fun. They were also a deadly weapon when it came to persuading reluctant candidates to stand for us in a forthcoming local election. I tried the technique out first on one of my closest friends, Dick Budd, who, thanks to the best part of a bottle of apple wine, was persuaded to fight and eventually win our first country by-election in a strongly Tory rural ward in 1981. Thereafter there was no stopping me, and there are today many people high up in the ranks of South Somerset District Council (as it is now known) and Somerset County Council, whose political careers were launched on a tide of apple or rhubarb wine in my sitting room.