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  In My Own Time

  Reminiscences of a Liberal Leader

  Jeremy Thorpe

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One: Relations

  Chapter Two: Early Years

  Chapter Three: Personalities

  Chapter Four: National Politics

  Chapter Five: Commonwealth and Africa

  Chapter Six: Rhodesia

  Chapter Seven: Europe

  Chapter Eight: Britain

  Copyright

  Foreword

  With the publication of Jeremy Thorpe’s recollections from his life in politics, the time is ripe for a reassessment of his dramatic and unparalleled impact on the British political scene. In welcome contrast to the reminiscences of other former party leaders, Jeremy does not blow his own trumpet. Let me do it for him.

  In the 1959 general election, Jeremy was the only Liberal to gain a seat, and only two others out of the six elected (Jo Grimond and Clement Davies) were victorious in three-cornered fights. Thus Jeremy won North Devon against the general trend, and this was a great tribute to his exceptional talents. His experiences in the Oxford Union, at the Bar and as a television commentator had made him a fluent speaker and given him enormous confidence. On top, he was always humorous and good-tempered, with a flair for instant communication with his fellow beings. He went about electioneering with genuine gusto and enjoyed it, showing an aplomb which was all his own; he was an extremely attractive candidate.

  There had been some Liberal revival in Tory-held seats in the wake of the Conservatives’ humiliation over Suez in 1956 and Anthony Eden’s enforced resignation as Prime Minister. Then, in early 1958, Jeremy’s and all Liberal hopes were ignited by remarkable performances in two by-elections. On 12 February, at Tory-held Rochdale, uncontested by Liberals for several elections, the charismatic Ludovic Kennedy, much helped by his attractive wife, shocked the Conservatives by pushing them down into third place and coming within 3,000 votes of defeating the Labour victor. On 27 March, the Liberals did even better, winning Torrington in Devon with Mark Bonham Carter by 219 votes – the first Liberal by-election victory since 1929. Mark was a good candidate, but the star of this by-election was his mother Violet, daughter of Asquith, who seized on the easy publicity available to exploit her charisma to the full, with great effect.

  The Rochdale and Torrington by-elections convinced Jeremy that with charismatic candidates, Liberals could win seats.

  It is well established that charisma can be exploited more easily in by-elections than in general, and this makes Jeremy’s performance in 1959 in defeating a pleasant aristocratic sitting Conservative quite unique.

  Once in Parliament, Jeremy was an instant success, wisely refusing a suggestion that he should mimic Harold Macmillan in his maiden speech.

  However, appreciating the limited opportunities for a party of six in Parliament, he threw most of his efforts into his own constituency and making Liberals an efficient fighting force. His speciality was by-elections. He had an eerie eye for forecasting which MPs would die and making preparations in advance.

  This strategy paid off. In November 1960, six by-elections on the same day showed a strong swing towards the Liberals, especially at Tiverton, close to Jeremy’s own seat; while Frank Byers, breaking the long-standing electoral pact with the Tories at Bolton East, scored a respectable 24.8 per cent.

  In the spring of 1961, there was a Liberal breakthrough at Paisley, the scene of Asquith’s dramatic by-election victory after the First World War. The charismatic John Bannerman, immensely popular in Scotland, came within 1,600 votes of victory, pushing the Tory share down from 43.8 per cent to 13.2 per cent, although the Liberals had not contested the seat since 1951. Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader, was tremendously encouraged by this result, declaring that he: ‘wrung his hands that Bannerman had not got in.’ Although popular nationally, Grimond had until then been rather a dilettante leader; now, prodded by Jeremy, he began the most active political campaigning of his leadership. Then, when Orpington fell vacant six months after the Paisley by-election, Jeremy realised that here was a golden Liberal opportunity. Liberals were in third place in 1959, only 1 per cent behind Labour, but since then they had had considerable success in local government, with twelve Liberal councillors.

  At the time of Orpington, the Macmillan government was in disarray. The pay pause and rising prices, together with high and demonstrably inequitable taxation, were making the Conservatives unpopular, and opinion polls soon showed Labour had no chance in this by-election. The sound Liberal candidate, Eric Lubbock, cleverly exploited electoral dissatisfaction over Schedule A property tax in a community of 75 per cent owner-occupiers. The by-election was long delayed, and as opinion polls showed the likelihood of a Liberal win, Jeremy threw everything into the campaign.

  He galvanised Liberal supporters all over the south of England to canvass there, persuaded Liberal candidates to allow their agents to work full time, and personally spent long hours on the doorstep. The Liberal by-election majority was 7,855 against a former Tory majority of 14,760, and the victory was almost as much Jeremy’s as Lubbock’s. There might even have been a double Liberal triumph. For technical reasons the by-election in Blackpool North was held the day before Orpington, and the Liberals with a tiptop candidate came second, only 973 votes behind the successful Tory. Had Blackpool North polled the day after instead of the day before Orpington, Liberal credibility would surely have been high enough to produce another victory.

  Macmillan noted in his diary: ‘we have been swept off our feet by the Liberal revival and made the world safe for Liberalism.’ Although the Liberal upsurge in Orpington is still largely unexplained, one thing is clear – it was a triumph for Thorpe. The Liberals followed up by nearly winning Derby West on 6 June with a weak candidate. With an even weaker candidate in Leicester North East on 12 July, where the Conservatives had been only 1,431 votes behind Labour in the general election, the Liberals ended a close second to Labour, pushing the Tories down into third place with 6,578 votes against their previous 17,990. However, while Leicester North East was polling, Macmillan, in his ‘night of the long knives,’ sacked seven of his Cabinet colleagues, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer – whereupon Jeremy made his famous comment: ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’

  Unfortunately for the Liberals, Macmillan’s medicine worked. In spite of the Profumo scandal and the substitution of Alee Home for Macmillan as Prime Minister, the Conservatives, both in opinion polls and by-election votes, won back the ground they had lost to the Liberals. After nearly winning by-elections at Chippenham and Colne Valley in 1963, Liberal support tailed away drastically. Abolition of Schedule A tax due entirely to the Liberal resurgence – contented traditional home-owning Tory voters.

  The 1964 general election was a grave disappointment after the heady days of Orpington. By now Jeremy had collected funds which he put into winnable constituencies, and in the case of Russell Johnston, he created the post of director of Scottish Liberal Research, based in Inverness. In this way, Russell was able to devote the required time to winning the seat.

  Gratifying increases in the Liberal vote were notched up in most of Jeremy’s other winnable seats. However, the overall result was frustrating; the two Liberal enclaves at Bolton West and Huddersfield West, no longer protected by local pacts, fell, and there were only four gains – Bodmin and three Highland seats. Bodmin owed much to Jeremy being a neighbour. Still, the Liberals were second in fifty-four seats, while in 1959 they had been second in only seventeen, and polled over three million votes, a considerable advance.

 
Following the 1964 general election, Jo Grimond disclosed in private that he wanted to resign as Liberal leader and for Jeremy to take over. With another general election only a few months off, Jeremy was appalled and managed to persuade Jo to carry on until after the votes were counted. In 1965, there was a false dawn when the future Liberal leader David Steel won the by-election in Roxburgh, Selkirk & Peebles. As soon as the seat fell vacant Jeremy used his ‘winnable’ funds to install four full-time agents and spent a considerable time himself in the constituency, even canvassing on the doorstep. Thus David Steel owes a debt to Jeremy for the help he received to win his first and crucial election.

  In the 1966 general election, Jo Grimond suffered the tragic loss of his son during the campaign, and as a result his impact was muted. Jeremy gallantly battled in the ‘winnable’ constituencies, distributing largesse from his funds to the most deserving, including myself in North Dorset. Chippenham, Cardigan, Caithness and Banff were unluckily lost by the narrowest of margins, but consolation prizes were surprise wins at Aberdeen West, Cheadle, Cornwall North and Colne Valley. All those constituencies, as those narrowly lost in 1964, had benefited from Jeremy Thorpe’s special financial treatment and encouragement.

  Jeremy had become party treasurer in 1965 and party leader in 1967. He raised considerable sums for the party but the 1970 general election was not a happy hunting ground for him. The nation was choosing between a Conservative and a Labour government and the Liberals were squeezed. After giving generous time to winnable constituencies, Jeremy saw his own majority in North Devon drastically reduced and the number of Liberal MPs fall from thirteen to six. Jeremy, still under the shadow of the death of his charming first wife, may not quite have played himself in as yet as a party leader; irresponsible behaviour by Young Liberals also dented the Liberal image and was not stopped by firm management at party headquarters.

  February 1974 was to be a different story. By then Jeremy, happily married again, had achieved considerable stature as a major political figure. He raised impressive sums of money and stepped up his work in the ‘winnable’ constituencies. By-elections soon told the tale. The Heath government’s honeymoon with the electorate was short-lived, and this time discontented Tory voters turned to the Liberals, as they had eleven years earlier at Orpington. In by-elections in 1973, Liberal candidates won more votes in total than either Conservatives or Labour. Jeremy was convincing in asserting that the Liberal resurgence in these by-elections showed the electorate believed the Liberals were now a practical alternative to the two big parties.

  Varied types of seats – Rochdale, Sutton & Cheam, Isle of Ely, Ripon and Berwick-upon-Tweed – became startling Liberal by-election victories. Dedicated attention to local grievances and community politics fostered by Jeremy played a big part, and in August 1973 opinion polls showed Liberal support reaching 30 per cent. It was clear the Liberals would be a major force in the coming general election.

  Jeremy, now defending a 300 majority in North Devon, decided to conduct his campaign mainly from Barnstaple, using helicopters to visit some of the winnable seats and a closed-circuit television link to London for the daily press conference. Opinions differ as to whether this paid off or not; it clearly muted hostile questions and emphasised how different was the Liberal campaign from others. Five hundred and seventeen Liberal candidates took the field and produced enormous public exposure. Each night on television, Jeremy skilfully and with ready wit projected an attractive and constructive image which was compared very favourably in the national press with those of Heath and Wilson. A poll showed that 40 per cent would vote Liberal if the party had a chance of holding the balance of power, and 48 per cent if the party could be the next government. Jeremy had made the Liberal Party a credible alternative government for the first time since 1929 under Lloyd George. Liberals had surpassed all their expectations; obviously they were about to harvest their largest total since the war.

  The 1974 result, while hugely rewarding in terms of total votes cast, was bitterly disappointing for Jeremy in the number of seats won. He recounts in this book how, after the result, Ted Heath asked him to join a coalition so that the Conservatives could continue in government. The Liberal Party would not agree, and anyway the numbers were wrong. Lobby correspondents almost to a man have criticised Jeremy for not accepting Heath’s offer. In fact it was just not on.

  Still, in 1974 an overwhelming case had been made for a change in the voting system. A Labour government had been returned with only 37 per cent of the votes cast – less than the Tories; while the Liberal vote, which had gone up by nearly four million to six million, had produced only 14 MPs. Jeremy immediately appointed a strong Liberal committee to conduct an all-out campaign for voting reform, and provided considerable funds. One of his ideas was a nationwide ballot like the Peace Ballot of 1935 (this caused a complete change in government policy); another, an exit poll after the next general election to show what percentage of the voters favoured a change. Either would have been effective. When Jeremy gave up the leadership, his successor did not follow his lead and the strong case for voting reform made in 1974 was largely allowed to go by default.

  The second 1974 election was an anti-climax. The Liberal vote, at five and a quarter million, more or less held in spite of a marked swing to Labour; Jeremy personally got 46 per cent of the votes in North Devon. However, the total Liberal vote was high enough to reinforce the case for voting reform which Jeremy pursued vigorously in his last months as party leader.

  Then disaster struck him. Because of widely publicised allegations, Jeremy was forced to resign in May 1976. David Steel was elected leader in his place and took on a difficult inheritance. Within a very short time he negotiated the Lib–Lab agreement, which enabled the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, to remain in office. It is a mystery how Steel got his parliamentary party to agree, because Jo Grimond and John Pardoe were opposed.

  Because of this pact the Liberals were taunted by the Tories as being responsible for all Labour mistakes and in the 1979 general election the Liberal vote fell drastically to 4,300,000 – a far cry from February 1974 – and Jeremy himself, although polling 23,000 votes, was defeated in North Devon. Not until the alliance with the SDP in March 1981 did the Liberal phoenix arise from the ashes again.

  Between 1959 and 1976, Jeremy had been the life and soul of the Liberal Party. He brought eloquence, humour and compassion into politics and had a flair for picking out the issues which mattered to the nation. With the odds stacked against him by the first-past-the-post voting system, his inspired leadership brought the Liberals to the brink of breaking the two-party system in 1974. His like will not be seen again.

  Richard Lamb was a prominent Liberal in the Grimond and Thorpe revivals, and the author of eight books, including The Macmillan Years (John Murray, 1995).

  Introduction

  Time and again when I have recalled a political situation, friends and colleagues have said: ‘I hope you will write it down somewhere’. This is a modest attempt to do just that. Having been involved in politics for the past fifty years, it has become clear to me that many of the things I could write about from first-hand experience were merely part of history to those who were later entrants into politics.

  So, I have written about Lloyd George, whom I was privileged to know. With Churchill, my contact was limited to two encounters, each of which for me was memorable; a fair sprinkling of British and foreign personalities; events in the Commonwealth, some humorous, some less so; developments in the UK; I refer to my trial; I go in some detail into two political issues which dominated my life – the European Community and Rhodesia.

  This is not an autobiography. It is more of an anthology. If any part of it stimulates enthusiasm for politics, I shall be content.

  Acknowledgements

  My warm thanks to Richard Lamb for his introduction, and to him and Richard Moore, my gratitude for reading through my manuscript and making valuable suggestions. My thanks also to Eric Avebury, Asa Br
iggs, Clement Freud, Russell Johnston and Cyril Smith for their commentaries; to Trevor Jones, Jenny Day, Liz Cocks, Yvonne Keer and Laura Wallace, for their help; to the British Library at Colindale, for their efficient and courteous assistance; to my editor, Duncan Brack, and lain Dale and John Simmons at my publishers, Politico’s, who, whilst highly professional, have been a delight to work with; to Judy Young, who has patiently typed each page of the book and supplemented my recollections with her own; and to son Rupert, some of whose photographs are included and whose idea it was that I should draw extensively on the photographs in my collection.

  Above all, to Marion, who has been a constant source of advice and inspiration – which comes as no surprise.

  Jeremy Thorpe

  March 1999

  Chapter One

  Relations

  My maternal grandparents

  Since this is not an autobiography, I shall pick out only one or two of my relations. Undoubtedly, the matriarch of the family was my maternal grandmother, Lady Norton-Griffiths, who died, in full possession of her faculties, at the age of 101 in 1974. There is a record of longevity in her family, since her mother died aged ninety-nine and her grandmother, whom she remembered well, and who was at her wedding, was born in 1797 and died in 1901, having lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries and five reigns. My own mother died in her ninetieth year.

  My grandmother was short of stature but had a commanding personality. Throughout her long life she was to experience some appalling tragedies. These she met with calm and amazing courage and faith. She obviously adored my grandfather and was a tremendous encouragement to him in his career. During her long period of widowhood she travelled extensively. I remember staying with her in Rome in her high eighties – the sightseeing schedule kicked off with two churches and a picture gallery before lunch. At one of the churches, she said that she had not visited it for seventy years; there was, however, a family connection with the church since her uncle, a civil engineer, had drained the foundations, which had become waterlogged and threatened the stability of the building.