Admittedly, the love affair with the former Lib Dem party leader Paddy Ashdown eventually went sour but it was the Prime Minister who effectively broke it off, not the European Union’s current High Rep- resentative in Bosnia. Of course Blair never got on quite the same intimate terms with Charles Kennedy. Yet as short a time ago as July 2002 there was still enough mutual regard between them for the Prime Minister to be a guest at the Lib Dem leader’s wedding in the Crypt Chapel of the House of Commons (he was disgracefully late and held up the entire proceedings but that, no doubt, is the kind of thing liable to happen if you invite a very grand guest, even if he is one who happens to live just down the road).
Why, then, the falling-out since? The answer, I fear, has to be that the Prime Minister is a control freak and that Kennedy and the Lib Dems ceased to have any place in his affections once they started to act in their own interests and not as tame satellites of new Labour.
The change began to occur almost as soon as Kennedy took over from Ashdown in August 1999. I was surprised to read last week that, as a token of its displeasure, No 10 had decided to abolish the Joint Cabinet Committee on which Lib Dem wannabes used to sit alongside real-life Cabinet ministers. Nuts to that: the committee hadn’t met since Kennedy assumed the leadership and put an end to its somewhat pointless gatherings straight away.
Anyone tempted to question the wisdom of that pre-emptive strike on Kennedy’s part only has to go back and consult one of the moist poignant works on modern British politics, the second volume of The Ashdown Diaries. The account given there of the Joint Cabinet Committee’s initial meeting in September 1997 speaks volumes as to what an absurd constitutional contraption it always was — its sole purpose being to permit the Prime Minister to tickle Ashdown ’s tummy and play him rather as if he were a trout.
In fact, the more I reflect on the past eight years, the firmer becomes my conviction that — just as happened between James Callaghan and David Steel between 1976 and 1978 — this latest non-aggression pact between Blair and Ashdown yielded the Lib Dems no reward at all.
They should probably have known better than to enter into any such uneven arrangement. Quite apart from the Callaghan precedent — which seems to have been successfully disregarded only in Scotland — there was the clear and equally painful memory of the Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election of July 1995. Then under the guiding, manipulative hand of Peter Mandelson, the Blairite Labour candidate, who now holds a middling place in the Government, s ought to turn the tables on his Lib Dem opponent by accusing him of being “soft on drugs”. It very nearly worked.
Why, though, bring the memory of all that back now? The justification has to be that new Labour continues to behave in much the same recidivist way. Just a couple of days before the last general election the penny seems to have dropped in the Labour campaign headquarters that this time the Lib Dems were not going to prove quite as helpful as they had been in 1997 and in 2001. So what did the Prime Minister do? He immediately wrote, or had written for him, an article in The Sun advising its readers to “say no to Lib Dems over their drug policy madness”.
If anything, the Labour Government now feels far more threatened by the Lib Dems than it did before polling day. At the last election Kennedy snatched a dozen constituencies from Labour while sustaining a net loss of two seats to the Tories. Worse than that, the Lib Dems are now the runners-up to no fewer than 104 Labour MPs — with the potential all by themselves, therefore, of destroying the Government’s already substantially cut-back majority. So much for “the progressive alliance” which the pre-1997 Blair always envisaged.
Things, too, seem bound to get much nastier before the next election dawns. If the Prime Minister sounds cross, it is probably because he is thoroughly alarmed. But he really has no cause to feel aggrieved. If the two parties end up at each other’s throats, it will be because of Blair’s failure to slip the ring on to Paddy Ashdown’s finger at the tactical moment. And in politics the postman very seldom rings twice.
An unsettling life
MARK STUART’S official life of the former Labour leader, John Smith, is due out next week. I’m tempted to say “not before time” — it is, after all, more than a decade since Smith died at the tragically early age of 55. Since then the efforts of the more ardent Blairites to airbrush him out of Labour history have done them little credit.
Stuart, an academic, is a former biographer of Douglas Hurd so he may have had to learn his way around the Labour Party. But I find the fact that his book, originally scheduled to be published last March, should have been postponed until safely after the general election mildly encouraging. It suggests to me that someone somewhere isn’t too keen about what’s in it.
LUCK HAS always played its part in politics — and the Lib Dems can certainly claim to have suffered a stroke of ill-fortune in having to defend the classic “swing” constituency of Cheadle as the first by-election of the new Parliament. (Sir Patrick Cormack’s contest in Staffordshire South later this month does not strictly count as a by-election but rather as unfinished business from the general election.) Until last month, with its majority of only 33, Cheadle was the most marginal of all the Lib Dem seats but on May 5 the gallant Patsy Calton (already dying from cancer) increased her majority to 4,020.
Various Tory celebrities are said to be ready to throw their hats into the ring but my advice to them would be to have a care. They should recall what happened at Winchester in 1997.
Having been defeated by just two votes in that year’s general election, the Tory candidate complained of “ballot irregularities” to the High Court and got the election re-run. He then lost by the staggering margin of 21,556.
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