A Fortunate Life (46 page)

We had an excellent candidate in Newbury, David Rendel, and fought a very strong campaign, once again under the direction of Chris Rennard. At 4.20 a.m. on Friday 8 May, the day after the Newbury Poll, the Party General Secretary rang to tell me that David Rendel had won by 22,000 votes. I said that I didn’t want to know how many votes he had got, I wanted to know what his majority was. ‘Paddy, that
is
the majority!’ he said. Newbury, which saw a 28% swing to the Liberal Democrats, did much to help us recover from the disappointment and lost momentum after the 1992 general election.

However, for me, 1993 was about more than Europe and by-election campaigning. I was by now deeply involved in writing another book:
Beyond Westminster
. After the 1992 election I had decided I needed to get out of the fug of Westminster and start refreshing my knowledge of the way ordinary people across Britain were living their lives. To be honest, it was something of a relief, for I never much liked Westminster, and the feeling was, I think, mutual. Some MPs take the view that politics is a purely Westminster affair. For me politics is what happens in people’s lives, and Westminster was just the place where I had to work. In 1983, when I was elected, I discovered that the things I had done in my previous ‘real jobs’, from soldier, to ‘diplomat’, to businessman, to youth worker – even to being unemployed – had greatly helped me with the job I now had to do in Parliament. Indeed, though my trajectory through these jobs had been entirely accidental, they all combined to form a very useful apprenticeship to being an MP. But, after ten years in Parliament, I felt jaded and increasingly caught up in the Westminster game. I needed to refresh the reservoir of my enthusiasm and personal experience, and
Beyond Westminster
was the way I hoped to do this.

I spent much of the early months of 1993 in a series of visits, living and working with people across the country. The format we hit on was for me to work for maybe two or three days with individuals in their workplace, spending the evenings with them and their families. The Press were not invited and only informed of my visits afterwards. My first visit was in January, to Britain’s deepest coalmine at Monktonhall in Scotland, where I worked a shift with the miners. Other visits included two days fishing with Cornish trawlermen in the Irish Sea; working with a businessman in Omagh, Northern Ireland; spending Ramadan with a Muslim family in Peckham and living with a black family in Moss Side, Manchester, which at the time was so under the control of drug gangs that it had become practically a no-go area for police. It was during my Moss Side visit that Jane got an early-morning phone call from Manchester police saying that they had just carried out a drugs raid, in the course of which they had stopped someone observing from the sidelines who claimed to be me and, indeed, looked very like me. But they couldn’t believe it was me. ‘Can you tell me if it is your husband?’ the caller asked. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jane replied, ‘that’s him!’

I made copious notes on each of these visits and then wrote
Beyond
Westminster
in my courtyard in France, getting up at 5 a.m. every morning so as to be able to do four hours of writing in the cool of the day.
The book was published in paperback in time for the Party’s Spring Conference in 1994 and, even if only briefly, reached the
Sunday Times
top ten paperback list – thanks, I think, to the loyal Party members purchasing it
en masse
during Conference week.

The central message of the book was that the Government was becoming dangerously out of touch with the lives of ordinary citizens in Britain and was fast losing their confidence. Unless we tackled this democratic deficit, I concluded, the gap between government and governed would only widen and perhaps even, in time, threaten the democratic process itself.

At the end of July 1993 we overturned a 23,000 Conservative majority in the Christchurch by-election, where our candidate, Diana Maddock, won by more than 16,000 votes. My press release after the result said that this was ‘a shout of anger from the heart of Britain’. At 35%, this was the biggest swing against the Tories in a by-election in more than fifty years and temporarily catapulted us above the Conservatives in national opinion polls. The day after the by-election I left for my fifth visit to Bosnia.

Having made the previous three trips through Croatia and across the Dinaric Alps into Bosnia with the help of British troops serving in the UN force, I decided that this time I would again go in through Belgrade. I crossed the Drina River, which marks the border between Serbia and Bosnia, at Zvornik, where my car was stopped by a Serb frontier guard sporting a fearsome beard and an even more fearsome machine-gun. He wanted to know who I was, where I was going and why, and seemed to be on the point of refusing to let me pass when another fearsomely bearded Serb stuck his head out of the machine-gun bunker he was manning and shouted, according to my interpreter, ‘Let him pass. His lot has just smashed Major in some British election!’

It was on this trip that I met General Mladić for the second time, when he attended a dinner for me given by Karadžić on the night of my arrival. Mladić spent much of the time boasting about his army. But I knew that, shortly before my arrival, a Bosnian Serb assault on Sarajevo from the East had been bloodily repulsed by the Bosniaks, with heavy losses. So I asked Mladić, somewhat mischievously, why, if his army was so superior, he had not taken Sarajevo already? His reply was chilling:

Its frontal assault having been driven back, the Bosnian Serb army was, however, now in the middle of a major offensive in the mountains above Sarajevo whose aim was to extend the Serb ring around the city by capturing Mount Igman, which dominates and protects the west end of the city. The day after our dinner I went to the area and met Mladić again, this time directing fire from a battery of 130mm howitzers high in the mountains above Sarajevo. His guns were parked, openly visible, on the side of the mountain and without either camouflage or concealment. I said to him, ‘You have never experienced air attacks or counter-battery fire, have you?’ He asked me why I had asked the question. I replied that, if he had, he would never have placed his guns in such an exposed position, with their ammunition piled alongside them. He replied that if NATO aircraft ever dared to attack he would knock them out of the sky long before they got to his guns. He was to get a very nasty surprise when, in the end, NATO did intervene two years later.

Just a few minutes after we left the gun site, a stick of Bosniak mortar bombs landed just where we had been standing, killing an Associated Press cameraman who had stayed behind to take pictures and terribly wounding his reporter colleague.

In mid-1993, following our by-election victories, our opinion poll ratings were beginning to rise quite sharply, reaching 28% in July and August, while Labour’s were languishing at a level insufficient to guarantee a Tory defeat at the next election. Indeed, John Smith was proving a much less decisive Leader than Neil Kinnock. He was taking Labour back to its old, socialist positions and was widely criticised for failing to carry through some of the reforms that Neil Kinnock had initiated, especially in modernising the Party and reducing the influence
of the trades unions. There was, I knew, quite a lot of unhappiness about this amongst newer Labour MPs.

On 14 July 1993, just before the Christchurch by-election, Jane and I were invited to dinner by my colleague Anthony Lester, who had just joined the Lib Dem team in the Lords, having been one of those who had left Labour to found the SDP. He and his wife Katya had also invited a young Labour MP called Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, whom I had never met socially before. Blair had been elected at the same time as me in 1983 and had been making quite a name for himself as Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary. We spent much of the evening talking privately in a corner, while the Lesters kept the others away in order to give us space. We discussed the need to realign the Left and the necessity for root-and-branch reform of the Labour Party. He said, however, that he was very concerned not to get himself too far out in front. He was especially worried about getting into a head-to-head with either the unions or Labour’s Left too soon – it would have to be done carefully, at the right time and step by step. ‘The history of the Labour Party is littered with nice people who get beaten, and I don’t intend to be one of them,’ he said. Before the evening ended, I suggested that he and his wife might like to come to dinner with us sometime before the end of the year, and he agreed. Commenting on our meeting afterwards Anthony Lester said that he thought Blair was very good – but doubted he was brave enough to do what needed to be done.

Our next meeting with the Blairs was on 1 December 1993, when they came round to dinner at our flat. We agreed on much, including the need for a new attempt at a realignment of the Left in order to beat the Tories and keep them out of power, perhaps for a generation; the belief that this should be based on a new relationship between the citizen and the state, and the fact that the modernisation of Labour had to go much further than Smith had so far committed himself to. The most revealing comment of the dinner came from Cherie, who confided that her husband was rather low at the moment, worrying that, if Labour under Smith didn’t change more, then they wouldn’t beat the Tories, and he didn’t intend to waste his life in permanent opposition. My diary for that night records that he appeared to have arrived at the same view of the new politics of the Left as I had, but from a different direction.

My assessment of our position at the end of 1993 was, therefore, an optimistic one. The Lib Dems were getting stronger and stronger. Our membership was rising, as were our poll ratings, and our funds were as
secure as they could be for a third party. Moreover, the by-elections of the last year had proved that we were able to beat the Tories in places Labour could not reach. Most important of all, John Smith was proving a very conventional Labour leader, retreating to old socialist positions and failing to institute the internal reforms which were essential if they were going to win. Meanwhile, I had a very clear view of where the open ground was on the Left of politics, and it was empty and waiting for us to occupy it. And, moreover, in Blair I had made a very useful contact amongst the new forward-looking Labour MPs with whom, I felt certain, we could do real business when the time came.

At the end of each year I wrote a ‘position paper’ for my MPs over the Christmas holidays, describing where I thought we were and what the challenges for the year ahead would be. Here is what I wrote in 1993: