IT IS BEGINNING to look as if it is payback time so far as the Liberal Democrats are concerned. Having enjoyed a fairly soft ride since Paddy Ashdown became the first leader of the new amalgamated party in 1988, the Lib Dems, even though holding their highest number of seats in the Commons for 60 years, have suddenly started to look vulnerable. The message from the delayed general election contest in South Staffordshire last month was hardly encouraging — the Lib Dem candidate scraping in third with only some 800 more votes than his UKIP rival. A lot, therefore, is going to ride on the result of the Cheadle by-election due in ten days’ time.
If anything should go wrong there — and though at the May general election the Lib Dems had a majority of 4,020, it was a mere 33 at the one before that in 2001 — mutiny could easily break out in the ranks of the parliamentary party. The omens, again, do not look wholly propitious, Patsy Calton, who died within four weeks of the general election, had already fought the seat twice before prevailing in 2001; her replacement, although possessing the dubious advantage of being leader of a local council, will be facing the same Conservative and Labour opponents as she did just eight weeks ago.
The nearest parallel I can think of for this first by-election of the new Parliament is also not encouraging. As if his other post-defeat troubles were not enough, Hugh Gaitskell in 1960 had the misfortune to have to defend the most vulnerable Labour majority in the country at Brighouse and Spenborough in the first by- election of that Parliament. Overnight, a fragile Labour majority of 47 was turned in to a scarcely more solid Tory one of 666.
I do not forecast that the same thing will happen at Cheadle on July 14 (for one thing, the Liberal margin, at least last time around, was larger). But Cheadle has traditionally been a Tory seat: lying alongside the Liberal constituency of Hazel Grove, it fell into the Lib Dem column only for the second time in its history in 2001. Moreover, when Calton first set out on her quest for victory 13 years ago in 1992, she got a mere 30 per cent of the total vote. It is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility, therefore, that the voters here could revert to their original Tory allegiance.
If they were to do so, the consequences for the Lib Dems would be catastrophic. There is already an undertow of resentment and unease within the parliamentary party, reflected in the eviction of Matthew Taylor by a relative newcomer for the party chairmanship only a month ago. Last week’s meeting of Lib Dem MPs was, by all accounts, a far from amiable occasion: Charles Kennedy went so far as to issue a threat that, if he ever established the identity of any frontbenchers seeking to undermine his position, he would have no hesitation in sacking them.
It was an uncharacteristically tough posture for the notoriously “laid-back” leader to adopt, but then Kennedy must know that the sands of time are running against him. True, he is only 45 and has not yet been leader for six years, but the declaration of their prospective retirements by both Tony Blair and Michael Howard inevitably means that at the next election the Lib Dem leader will be the most antique piece of furniture left on the political stage (it is not, I suspect, a coincidence that the question of who will succeed him has recently become part of the small change of gossip at Westminster).
It is difficult, though, to envisage the crimes on which Kennedy can plausibly be arraigned. All right, the Lib Dems did not make the breakthrough they had hoped for at the last election — but they scarcely did disastrously, putting up their total of MPs by ten and increasing their popular vote in the country by more than a million. Why then, do party members go on moaning in the way that they do? One answer must be that the dissatisfied tendency has always formed part of the fibre of British Liberalism: not for nothing was the party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George born of the tradition of Dissent.
But the days have long gone since the party used to be the embodiment of the “Nonconformist conscience” (the proof of that is that it should be led today by a Roman Catholic). Probably, Kennedy will find himself facing some sort of inquest at the party conference at Blackpool in September. But there is really no reason why it should descend into a drumhead court-martial, unless a grim result from Cheadle activates the panic button.
Short of that, my advice to the Lib Dems is that they could do worse than ponder the counsel immortalised by Oscar Wilde: “Please don’t shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”
Signs of Tory life
A REBELLION is rustling the political undergrowth in the House of Lords. Tomorrow the Association of Conservative Peers will be asked to agree that in future the Opposition Leader there shall be elected and not simply appointed on the say-so of the party leader of the time. That is what the Labour Party already does. The leader and deputy leader of the Labour peers are always elected when the party is in Opposition and become patronage appointments only once there is a Labour Prime Minister.
That is the more sensible system and the Tories would be well advised to adopt it. There can, of course, be hiccups: A. V. Alexander was brutally booted out by Harold Wilson in 1964 and poor old Ivor Richard survived for only a year once Tony Blair had moved into No 10. Fortunately, there is no question of a challenge to Tom Strathclyde — which is why the proposal is being put forward now.
A marshal’s fieldwork
EVER since I first encountered him (at MoD briefings during the Falklands conflict) Dwin Bramall has always struck me as the very model of a modern field marshal. Now The Times’s own major-general, Michael Tillotson, has produced an authorised biography of him — and a fine work it proves to be. There has always been an irreverent side to Bramall and I particularly liked the story of how, when he was Lord-Lieutenant of London, he discovered one day on returning from a ceremonial tree planting that the Garter Star was missing from his chest. An alarmed phone call, followed by a surreptitious excavation, established that he had planted it along with the tree.
Last minutes change
HOW near did we get to never being allowed to see Cabinet minutes? Of course, now — thanks to Dick Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn — they are two-a-penny. But I’m indebted to A. D. Harvey, writing in the current issue of the Oxford Magazine, for the discovery that a last-ditch attempt was made to prevent them from ever surfacing at all. In May 1950 C. R. Att lee, as Prime Minister, recommended that such “secret and confidential documents should not be published, even in paraphrase”. The chivalrous Attlee seems primarily to have been motivated by a desire to save the still-living 1st Earl of Halifax from obloquy — a Cabinet minute due to be published in an official diplomatic history exposed his effort to sue for peace via Mussolini in 1940 — but the rule the then Prime Minister proposed would have been a hard-and-fast one. Fortunately for historians, it never stuck.
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