liberal democrat history group - issue 18 spring …2014/10/18 · liberal democrat history group,...

Ten Years OnThe Legacy of the Alliance

and Merger

Bill Rodgers

Alan Beith MP

Richard Holme

Willie Goodhart

Michael Meadowcroft

Dick Newby

Tim Clement-Jones

Graham Watson

Stuart Mole

Dr Tudor Jones

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Liberal Democrat Historyissue 18 spring 1998 £5.00

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journal of liberal democrat history 18: spring 19982

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March 1998.

Issue 18: Spring 1998Special issue:The Legacy of the Liberal-SDP Alliance

4 The SDP’s Ideological LegacyDr Tudor Jones

8 The Merger Debate in the SDP 1981–87Bill Rodgers

12 Alliance DaysRichard Holme

14 The Alliance: Two-Party Cooperation in PracticeDick Newby

17 The Alliance: Parties and LeadersMichael Meadowcroft

32 The Merger Process: An SDP RetrospectWillie Goodhart

36 The Two DavidsGraham Watson

38 The Alliance and AfterThe Travelling of a Necessary RoadStuart Mole

41 One Man’s PrideOwen and his Impact on the AllianceTim Clement-Jones

43 Merger Hopes and Fears: Were they Realised?Alan Beith MP

45 ReviewsGreaves and Pitchford, Merger: The Inside StorySykes, Losing from the Inside

48 Research NotesChronology of key Alliance datesBibliography: sources on Alliance history

journal of liberal democrat history 18: spring 1998 3

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EditorialThe Alliance Years

This issue of the Journal of LiberalDemocrat History goes to press as theLiberal Democrats prepare to cel-ebrate their tenth birthday.

It aims to explore the question:what did the new party inherit fromthe old, Liberals, Social Democratsand Alliance? What is the legacy ofthe seven years, from to ’,during which Britain experiencedthe phenomenon of two separateand distinct political parties fightingelections on a common platform,with agreed policy positions? Whatare the lessons to be learned fromthat unique period of cooperation?Above all, why did a political forcethat was regularly perceived as a se-rious contender for power with theConservative and Labour Partiesconsistently fail to achieve its prom-ise, and collapsed with such speedinto mutual recrimination and inter-nal conflict?

Our contributors write frommany different backgrounds and per-spectives. Most of them share cer-tain beliefs: that the Gang of Fourand their followers were right toleave the Labour Party and found anew political organisation; that, oncethe SDP was formed, it would havebeen electoral suicide for it and theLiberal Party to fight each other(though that was not the universal

view at the time); that the experi-ence of working in alliance broughtLiberals and Social Democrats to-gether so closely that for most,merger seemed an inevitable anddesirable destinations; that far andaway the biggest drawback of the Al-liance was the hours spent – andwasted – in painful internal nego-tiations, over seats and policy posi-tions; that, more than anything else,it was the ambition and judgementof David Owen that undermined theAlliance and made the merger proc-ess so unnecessarily painful.

Most, but not all. MichaelMeadowcroft powerfully argues thecase that involvement in the Allianceactually held back the Liberal causein Britain, that the Liberal Partywould have prospered more in thes if the SDP had never beenformed, and that David Steel must

The cartoons on pages27 and 42 were reproducedwith the kind permission of

Martin Horwood.

bear at least as much, and possiblymore, of the blame for the failuresof the Alliance and of merger thanshould David Owen.

We hope that these contributions– in the longest Journal the HistoryGroup has produced – will spark in-terest, controversy and debate. Bear-ing in mind our mission to promotethe research of historical topics, wehave also included a new section,‘Research Notes’, with a concisebibliography and chronology of theAlliance period. Additions to these,and responses to any of the articles,will be – as ever – very welcome.

Duncan Brack (Editor)


The social-democratictradition since 1945Most of the former Labour MPs and manyof the other new members who joined theSDP in the early s had been influencedby the assumptions and values of British socialdemocracy. Since this term had gradu-ally come to mean, in Hamilton’s succinct defi-nition, ‘a non-transformative type of socialismor social reform’ in the sense that it offered anideological approach that sought ‘ameliorationof injustice and the promotion of commonwelfare and a measure of equality .... rather thantransformation of the economic and socialstructure’.

During the s and early s this so-cial democratic approach in Britain becamesynonymous with the revisionist tendencywithin the Labour Party. This amounted to adeliberate attempt, most apparent after following Hugh Gaitskell’s accession to theparty leadership, to reformulate the principlesof democratic socialism and to revise Labourpolicies through a new analysis of economicand social changes in postwar Britain.

Developed mainly by Gaitskell’s parliamen-tary supporters, revisionist socialist thoughtfound its most coherent expression in AnthonyCrosland’s major work The Future of Socialism(). The analysis which underpinnedCrosland’s principal arguments focused both onmajor changes in the pattern of economicpower in Britain since and on theachievement during that period of full employ-ment and sustained economic growth by meansof Keynesian macroeconomic intervention.Such developments, Crosland persuasively ar-gued, had removed many of the deep flaws ofprewar capitalism.

Fortified by this theoretical analysis, revi-sionist social democracy proceeded to challengeentrenched Labour orthodoxies in two ways.First, it repudiated the traditional view that so-cialism could be identified, above all, with thepublic ownership of the means of production.It thereby questioned the established Labourcommitment to extensive public ownership asthe precondition for achieving all major re-formist objectives.

Second, Labour revisionism presented a dis-tinctive ethical interpretation of socialism interms of core values such as personal liberty,social welfare and, in particular, social equality,ideal ends that could be pursued, it was nowargued, within the context of a mixed economy.Moreover, from this ethical perspective the tra-ditional doctrine of public ownership – as en-shrined in Clause IV of the Labour Party con-stitution – was viewed as merely one usefulmeans among several others for realising en-during socialist values and ideals.

Throughout the s and early ’s revi-sionist ideas on public ownership, economicstrategy and social policy were further devel-oped and promoted – notably by Crosland,

The SDP’s IdeologicalLegacyWhat was the ideological inheritance of the Social Democratic Party?And what did it bequeath to the Liberal Democrats? Dr Tudor Jonesanalyses what the SDP stood for.

Although at its foundation in the SocialDemocratic Party was the first significant new partyin British politics since , it inherited a longideological tradition. The core values and beliefs anddistinctive themes of that tradition – British socialdemocracy – were to shape the character and broadpolicy approach of the new party and were thus toinfluence, too, the Alliance which the SDP was toform with the Liberal Party.


Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and RoyJenkins – and incorporated into partypolicy documents such as Industry andSociety ().The economic founda-tion on which those ideas rested wasa firmly Keynesian one since thatcreed offered the techniques bywhich future Labour governmentswould, it was hoped, seek to achieveeconomic growth and full employ-ment and hence secure the economicsurplus that could be redirected intohigher social expenditure. Builtaround this Keynesian foundationwas the distinctive strategy ofCroslandite social democracy –namely, the promotion, within amixed economy, of social welfare andgreater equality by means of highpublic expenditure and redistributivetaxation and upon the basis of sus-tained economic growth.

This revisionist social democraticmodel was a major ideological in-fluence on Labour thinking andpolicy for about years – from themid-s to the mid-s. But inthe face of the inflationary pressuresof the s, the intellectual and po-litical appeal of Keynesian social de-mocracy began to fade. Intellectu-ally, its confident assumptions wereundermined by the economic stag-nation, sterling crises and bitter in-dustrial conflicts of those years, andconsequently by the strains of officeexerted on the Wilson and Callaghangovernments between and ’.

Politically and ideologically, too,British social democracy seemed anincreasingly marginalised force bythe late s. On its left flank itfound itself challenged within theLabour Party by the revived funda-mentalist socialism of Tony Benn andhis supporters. On its right flank,meanwhile, it was confronted after with the revived market liberaldoctr ines of an increasinglyThatcherite Conservative Party. Thegrowing isolation of social democratswithin the Labour Party at this timewas also greatly increased by theirstrong identification with the causeof British involvement in the Euro-pean Community. Their predica-ment deteriorated further with RoyJenkins’ departure from British poli-tics in to become President ofthe European Commission and withthe deaths of Crosland in andJohn Mackintosh, another iconoclas-tic thinker, in .

In the face of their declining in-fluence some social democratic poli-ticians, notably Mackintosh, DavidMarquand and Evan Luard, had be-gun to develop a critique of thecentralist and corporatist tendenciesinherent in state socialism. BothMackintosh and Marquand had alsostressed the need to reviseCroslandite social democracy in theharsher economic and political cli-mate of the late s, and therebyto work out what Marquand called

the purposes of ‘a new-model liber-tarian decentralist social democ-racy’. Although little systematicprogress was made in that direction,both Marquand, by implication, andRoy Jenkins, more explicitly, indi-cated that a new political vehiclemight be needed for a revised socialdemocratic theory and strategy. Inhis Dimbleby lecture, ‘HomeThoughts from Abroad’, Jenkins thuswelcomed the possibility of a newparty of the radical centre whichwould support state intervention andmarket forces in equal measure.

Social democracy inthe SDPWhen that new party did eventu-ally emerge on the political scene inMarch , its new launch state-ment, ‘Twelve Tasks for SocialDemocrats’, together with books bythree of its founder-leaders – DavidOwen, Bill Rodgers and ShirleyWilliams – sought to provide theSocial Democratic Party with a clearpolitical and ideological identity.

At first this undertaking appearedto be inspired by the pantheon ofmajor British socialist thinkers of thepast – G.D.H. Cole, R.H. Tawneyand Evan Durbin, to whom Owen,Williams and Rodgers respectivelypaid homage. But it also becameevident that the SDP’s political lead-

Five years after the Limehouse Declaration: Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers at Bath,25 January 1986.


ers were engaged in developing acr itique of the bureaucraticcentralism and statism of establishedLabour policy. For they demon-strated a shared commitment to theprinciple of political and economicdecentralisation previously affirmedby Marquand, Mackintosh andLuard in the late s.

Owen thus advocated a revival of‘the concept of fellowship and com-munity within a participatory demo-cratic society’ in place of the ‘deeplycentralist’ tradition of Fabian collec-tivism which had dominated theLabour Party for so long. In prac-tice, he argued, that process wouldrequire ‘a detailed programme of leg-islative and administrative reforms todiffuse power in Britain’. That goalwas supported, too, by Williams who

favoured both an extension of indus-trial democracy and wider popularparticipation in public policy-mak-ing and on public bodies.

This decentralist approach wasendorsed by official party statementsof principle and policy. The originalLimehouse Declaration of , forinstance, affirmed the new party’ssupport for ‘the greatest practicaldegree of decentralisation of deci-sion-making in industry and govern-ment’. Embedded in all this, how-ever, as Owen and Williams recog-nised, were some problematic issues,including the possibility of dispari-ties in, say, health care provision be-tween different localities and regions.In that instance, decentralisationmight well clash with the socialdemocratic commitment to equal-

ity of opportunity and treatment.There were thus, as Owen admitted,‘genuinely conflicting argumentsand attitudes .... posed within thecentralist/decentralist dilemma’.

Nevertheless, this emphasis onpolitical decentralisation, welcomed,of course, by the new party’s Liberalallies, had become established as anessential element of early SDPthought. As part of the developingsocial democratic critique of anover-centralised and bureaucraticstate, associated both with traditionalsocialism and with the postwarcollectivist consensus in general, theidea was reinforced by an eagernessto embrace a market-oriented mixedeconomy. For Marquand such acommitment constituted one of themost distinctive and important prin-

ciples of social democracy. A fewmonths after the new party’s foun-dation he thus depicted the mixedeconomy not just as the source ofprosperity and personal freedom butalso as ‘neither a staging post on theroad to full socialism not a regretta-ble compromise between economicsin and economic virtue, but an en-tity in its own right, positively de-sirable in and for itself ’.

In the Labour Party from whichMarquand had recently departedsuch a stance remained ideologicallycontentious. For support for themixed economy had become La-bour’s ‘official heresy’, as the politi-cal journalist Peter Jenkins neatlydescribed it, reflected in officialpolicy documents and in the con-duct of Labour governments, yet de-

nounced by the party’s rank-and-fileactivists. By , however, DavidOwen had discarded the term itself,favouring instead the idea of a ‘so-cial market economy’ or ‘social mar-ket’. For in his view, the ‘mixedeconomy’ had become a broad, de-scriptively imprecise term to whichvirtually anyone in British politicscould subscribe. From September, therefore, after succeeding RoyJenkins as SDP leader, Owen increas-ingly employed the concept of a ‘so-cial market economy’ as a means ofdefining his party’s ideological posi-tion.

The term ‘social market’ had firstbeen used by German economicliberals after and taken up byChristian Democrats, particularlyby Ludwig Erhard. It originallymeant a market economy in whichthe state’s role was restricted to en-suring that market forces operatedwithout distortion. The term en-tered British political discourse in when it was enthusiasticallyadopted by Keith Joseph and hisfree-market Conservative Centrefor Policy Studies. Within the SDP,however, Owen revised the mean-ing of the concept so that it implied,in Peter Jenkins’ definition, ‘thatwealth should be created by mar-ket forces but redistributed accord-ing to social principles’. This in-terpretation suggested that the op-erations of the market economywere to be supplemented by gov-ernment intervention of variouskinds – by an industrial strategy, forinstance, that would promote skillstraining and research and develop-ment; by an incomes policy; and bythe redistribution of incomes andresources by means of taxation anda more generous welfare system.

Owen elaborated his interpreta-tion of the social market economyin the opening chapter of his bookA Future that Will Work (), as wellas in a succession of articles andspeeches. Further theoretical jus-tification for the idea was providedby Owen’s economic policy adviserAlex de Mont and by the socialpolicy specialist Nick Bosanquet,who stressed the need to combine

What remained, however, of the SDP’soriginal social democratic legacy, apartfrom enduring egalitarian and welfarist

ideals, was perhaps more a political styleand approach – pragmatic, flexible,

favouring cautious reformism with the aidof active government and an enabling

state.


competitive markets with govern-ment action to provide public serv-ices such as health-care and educa-tion and to correct market failuressuch as, for instance, the omission ofthe costs of pollution from the mar-ket price of a good or service.

By the concept of the so-cial market economy had becomeclosely identified with Owen’s lead-ership and was officially adopted asa central SDP policy at the partyconference of that year. In spite,however, of its elevated status inSDP thinking and policy it did notfeature prominently in the Allianceprogramme in the run-up to the general election. The detailedAlliance policy statement, The TimeHas Come, whilst endorsing thebroad underlying approach of thesocial market economy, containedno references to the phrase itself. Itmerely stated that the Alliance par-ties ‘bring together ideas which theConservative and Labour Partiesbelieve to be mutually exclusive:enterprise and welfare, a marketeconomy and social justice’. Thisomission of the term was repeatedin the Alliance election mani-festo Britain United, although Owenhimself did try to revive his empha-sis on the social market during theelection campaign.

Ultimately, then, the idea of thesocial market economy exerted lit-tle direct influence on Alliance strat-egy, even though it had been one ofthe few distinctive political ideas toemerge from SDP thinking between and . It had proved useful,in terms of both policy and rheto-ric, in helping to widen the gap be-tween a more market-oriented SDPand the more collectivist and inter-ventionist approach of social demo-crats such as Denis Healey, RoyHattersley and John Smith who hadremained loyal to Labour. But as itscritics argued, both at the time andlater, the Owenite concept of thesocial market economy lacked eithera precise meaning or intellectual co-herence. It was unclear, for instance,whether the emphasis lay on the ‘so-cial’ or the ‘market’ factor within the

equation. It could thus be inter-preted as meaning a marketeconomy accompanied either by aminimal state that intervened onlyto ensure competition and end mo-nopolies or by an active, enablingstate that intervened to correct mar-ket failures and promote social wel-fare and justice. It was also unclear,largely for that reason, what exactlythe economic and social policy im-plications of the idea were for theSDP’s programme and strategy.

ConclusionAs a consequence, Owen’s innova-tive use of this distinctive but im-precise idea failed to provide a clearideological redefinition of social de-mocracy towards the end of theSDP’s political life. In other respects,its doctrinal and strategic platformwas built upon ideas and attitudes –political and economic decentralisa-tion, constitutional reform, selectivegovernment intervention within amarket economy – which helped tocement the Alliance with the Liber-als after , marking out a broadcommon ground of principle andpolicy.

What remained, however, of theSDP’s original social democraticlegacy, apart from enduring egalitar-ian and welfarist ideals, was perhapsmore a political style and approach– pragmatic, flexible, favouring cau-tious reformism with the aid of ac-tive government and an enablingstate. But what had given British so-cial democracy its distinctive char-acter in the period from the mid-s to the mid-s – namely, itscentral strategy of egalitarian redis-tribution through the use of tax andwelfare systems and upon the basisof Keynesian economics – had bythe late s largely declined as amajor political influence.

When, therefore, the newlyformed party, the Liberal Democrats,painfully emerged in from thecollapse of the Alliance, it, too, likethe SDP in , faced the task ofestablishing a distinctive political andideological identity that would re-

tain its appeal and value in the faceof the economic and politicalchanges sweeping through Britainand the Western world during thes.

Dr Tudor Jones is a senior lecturer in poli-tics at Coventry University. His publi-cations include Remaking the LabourParty: From Gaitskell to Blair(Routledge, ) and ‘Liberal Demo-crat Thought’ in The Liberal Demo-crats (ed. D. MacIver) (HarvesterWheatsheaf, ).

Notes: M.B. Hamilton, Democratic Socialism in

Britain and Sweden (Macmillan, ), pp., .

See, for instance, D. Marquand, ‘Inqueston a Movement’, Encounter, July ; E.Luard, Socialism without the State(Macmillan, ); D. Marquand (ed.),John P. Mackintosh on Parliament and So-cial Democracy (Longman ).

D. Marquand, ‘Inquest on a Movement’,Encounter, July , p. .

See Marquand, op. cit.; R. Jenkins, ‘HomeThoughts from Abroad’, Dimbleby lec-ture, , published in Partnership ofPrinciple (The Radical Centre; Secker &Warburg, ), pp. _.

See D. Owen, Face the Future (revisededition, Oxford University Press, ),p. ; W. Rodgers, The Politics of Change(Secker & Warburg, , p. ); S.Williams, Politics is for People (Penguin,), p. -.

Owen, op. cit., pp. , . ibid., p. . Williams, op. cit., p. . Owen, op. cit., p. ; see also Williams, op.

cit., p. . D. Marquand, Russet-Coated Captains: The

Challenge of Social Democracy (SDP, ),p. .

P. Jenkins, The Guardian, September.

See also, for example, D. Owen, ‘Agendafor Competitiveness and Compassion’,Economic Affairs, :, October .

See A. de Mont, A Theory of the SocialMarket (Tawney Society, ), and N.Bosanquet, ‘The “Social MarketEconomy”: Principles, Behind the Poli-cies?’ Political Quarterly, July–September.

D. Owen and D. Steel, The Time HasCome (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), pp.–.

See, for instance, L. Andrews, LiberalismVersus the Social Market Economy (HebdenRoyd, ); D. Brack, The Myth of theSocial Market Economy (LINk, ).


As the Labour Party continued to slide to-wards disaster, I had given it a year, no more,to come to its senses. Unlike Roy Jenkins, whohad set out his stall very clearly in his Dimblebylecture, I was locked into the party I had joinedover years earlier, and as yet had no coher-ent view on realignment. I was ready to con-cede the possibility of a new party but my en-ergies were still devoted to the rescue of anold one.

David Steel was aware of this, but on sev-eral occasions tried to open a dialogue. We hadworked together during the European refer-endum campaign of and I had acted as aconduit between him and the Prime Minister,Jim Callaghan, in the early days of the Lib-LabPact. I was in no doubt that he was a man wecould do business with. For the moment, how-ever, that was a bridge too far. The position ofboth Shirley Williams and David Owen wassimilar: it was too soon to discuss what rela-tions we would have with the Liberal Party ifit came to a break.

What is strange, looking back, is that wehad not discussed the matter much betweenourselves even by the beginning of whenthe Limehouse Declaration and the formationof the Council for Social Democracy – whichled two months later to the SDP – was immi-

nent. We took for granted that a partnershipof a kind would be essential. There was, how-ever, no collective view of what form it shouldtake, not because of disagreement within theGang of Four but because it was absent fromour agenda. It follows that any idea that twoparties – one not yet launched – might even-tually merge was very far away. It may havecrossed Roy Jenkins’ mind but it never crossedmine.

The first hint that there might be seriousdifferences of opinion in the Gang of Fourabout relations with the Liberals came on theday of the launch on March . The fourof us sat together on the platform at the Con-naught Rooms, off Kingsway in central Lon-don, each to make a short statement and toanswer questions on an allocation previouslyagreed between us. Apart from the largest con-

The SDP and Merger1981–1987Bill Rodgers traces the history of the SDP-Liberal relationship, frombeginnings to alliance to merger.

In January I wrote a letter to Roy Jenkins, asmuch to clear my own mind as to convey a message.Hitherto I had been concerned only to find a wayof saving the Labour Party from itself. Now I washesitantly considering the possibility of helping tolaunch what I called ‘a fourth party.’ I was notsanguine about the prospects but reflected on thescope for an understanding with the Liberals. Forthe moment I favoured a cautious and discreetapproach to them.

A new party is launched: the Connaught Rooms,26 March 1981.


erals or in saying they were perceivedby the public as representing failure.Thus the lines were drawn up whichwere to persist to the decisive mergervote of .

Relations with the Liberals re-mained a constant theme in the twoyears that led to the generalelection. For the most part, Roy,Shirley and I saw no point in re-straining a closer partnership, butDavid Owen was constantly on thealert to anything that might com-promise the SDP’s identity either byopen decision or by stealth. I re-mained more cautious than Roy, andoccasionally found myself sharingsome of David Owen’s reservations.My essential theme was of ‘naturalconvergence’, a bottom-up growing

together of the two parties with ac-tivists setting the pace. But mergerwas not then part of my vocabulary.

It was the result of the elec-tion that made it a serious subjectfor discussion. The Alliance won.% of the vote and was within.% of overtaking Labour. It wasfirst or second in seats and nearlyeight million votes were divided al-most equally between Liberal andSocial Democrat candidates. TheSDP had the highest proportion ofwomen candidates and an effectivenational organisation. The result nev-ertheless was a great disappointmentafter the byelection victories ofCrosby, Hillhead and Bermondsey;and after the time, in December, when Gallup had recorded% of the electorate prepared tovote for the SDP or the Liberals andan average of all polls had given theAlliance .% of the vote. RoyJenkins’ position as leader of the SDPhad become untenable with DavidOwen making clear that he wouldchallenge Roy if he failed to giveway. Thus at the moment thatmerger became a credible option todiscuss, the SDP’s new leader ruledit out.

From the earliest days of the SDPDavid Owen had seen it – at leastin its central core – as divided intoJenkinsites and Owenites. This wasnonsense in the case of the other two

members of the Gang of Four. Al-though close to Roy, my negotia-tions with the Liberals in –over the allocation of Parliamentaryseats – including my public row withDavid Steel – had won DavidOwen’s approval whilst Roy hadbeen unhappy. Shirley had seenDavid Owen to be the more accept-able image for a new party and hadnominated him against Roy for theleadership. A small group of key peo-ple who had kept in touch with Royduring his Brussels years, particularlyafter his Dimbleby lecture – DavidMarquand, Clive Lindley, MatthewOakshott, Jim Daly – were some-times more royalist than the king.But for the most part even thosemost active in committees preferredto judge issues on their merits. Theywanted a harmonious collectiveleadership.

This was not the way DavidOwen saw it. He preferred to labelthem and balance their numbers oncommittees and working groups.The Jenkinsites were pro-Liberal andtherefore pro-merger. His owntroops were anti-Liberal and not pre-pared to see merger discussed.

Merger by stealth was what hemost feared when it came to anotheragreement with the Liberals aboutParliamentary seats. The LiberalParty did not want the prolongedand damaging round of previous

tingent of UK press, radio and tel-evision I had ever seen, there werereporters from most of western Eu-rope, the United States, the Com-monwealth and the rest of the world.One of these was Bonnie Angelo,head of Time magazine’s Londonbureau and she asked how many Par-liamentary seats the SDP wouldfight. This fell to me to answer and Isaid without hesitation, ‘About half,at least three hundred.’

Had I been asked this questionbefore the Limehouse Declaration,I might have suggested about seats, the figure I had in mind in myletter to Roy Jenkins a year earlier.But the immense enthusiasm we hadaroused and the skeleton of a nation-wide organisation for which therewas already a blueprint, made meconfident in my announcement.David Steel might not like it, but ifthe Liberals and the SDP eachfought half the seats it would be ameasure of our equal partnership.

My answer was given on thespur of the moment, but it did notoccur to me that exception wouldbe take to it within our own ranks.I was mistaken, and soon DavidOwen was arguing that I had madea serious error in ‘giving away’ halfthe seats to the Liberals. I should, Iwas told, have threatened to fightall seats as a measure of the domi-nance the SDP proposed to achieve.We might even choose to fight the

‘What do you mean, can’t we slow down a bit? We haven’t even started the motoryet!’ (2 February 1981)


negotiations. Nor did most SocialDemocrats. Under pressure fromDavid Owen, I agreed to take chargeof the negotiations once again but,apart from agreed exchanges, hopedto leave the arrangementslargely in place. But the questionarose of who should choose the can-didates, individual Liberals and in-dividual Social Democrats (each intheir own seats) or Liberals and So-cial Democrats voting together forwhoever they thought to be the bestman or woman?

Most of us would have left thisto local decision with no more thanguidance from the centre, but in the

end we devised a system of jointclosed and joint open selection.Under the first, members of bothparties would vote together butonly for a shortlist made up entirelyof Liberals or entirely of SocialDemocrats; under the second, open,system members of both partiesvoting together would choose froma mixed list of Liberals and SocialDemocrats. These arrangementswere monitored by the NationalCommittee of the SDP whichwould approve or disapprove localproposals with David Owen takinga close interest in every seat. It wasa laborious process. The objectiveseemed reasonable enough – to en-sure a fair share of seats for bothparties, especially good seats – butfor David Owen it was meant toplace a barrier wherever possibleagainst members of two parties be-ginning to think and work as one.He only abandoned the attempt inthe autumn of when I toldhim I would no longer oversee it

and that the remaining seats shouldsimply choose the candidate theypreferred.

David Owen’s attitude to mergerinsofar as it had previously seemedinchoate was firmly articulated in hisfirst few months as leader. RoyJenkins was not in favour of mergerbut of keeping the door open to it.I certainly rejected an instant mergerbut in an article for the Political Quar-terly, said this was ‘quite different froma deliberate attempt to frustrate theorganic growth of the Alliance.’ ‘If ’,I continued, ‘members of both par-ties wish to turn a loose Alliance intoa close day-to-day relationship .... itwould be foolish to resist such pres-sure on the grounds that prematuremerger might result.’ But this wasunacceptable to David Owen, and hecontrived to ensure a motion fordebate at the SDP’s Salford Confer-ence in September that effec-tively ruled out merger until the endof the Parliament. The Party, alwaysdeferential to its leader, agreed andthis became a point of reference inthe years ahead.

What slowly emerged was aclearer view of David Owen’s strat-egy. Put simply, it was to keep theAlliance together only long enoughto win proportional representationfor Westminster; and then for theSDP and the Liberals to go theirseparate ways. This was flawed intwo crucial respects. Whatever re-straints he placed on coming closertogether, there was very little interms of ideas or policies that sepa-rated the two parties. The Allianceitself was a measure of this. For theSDP to turn on its previous alliesat some future date and fight theLiberals was quite unrealistic. Eventhe Salford delegates would havefound that unacceptable had it beenspelt out to them.

The second objection was evenmore profound. David Owen hadabandoned the ‘win-a-majority,form-a-government’ message ofboth the SDP and the Liberals priorto the election. He now set hissights much lower, makingholding-the-balance in a hung par-liament the aim. This was an unsat-

Liberals in a byelection (and, it wasimplied, trounce them). But withina few days, my approach to the di-vision of seats was agreed by theSteering Committee of the SDP, al-though not without some argu-ment, and we turned to how ne-gotiations should be conducted. Isaid in a paper: ‘Relations with theLiberals are bound to follow an ir-regular pattern. In some areas, therewill be hard bargaining with littlegenuine spirit of cooperation; inothers, the Liberals and SocialDemocrats will get on happily to-gether.’ And so it proved.

Nine days after the launch of the

SDP, Shirley Williams and I de-parted for the Anglo-GermanKönigswinter Conference on theRhine. In the margins of it we hadserious discussions with David Steeland Richard Holme, in which wewere joined by David Marquand.The outcome was the so-called‘Königswinter Compact’, an agree-ment between the two parties writ-ten out by Richard Holme on alined sheet of greenish paper thatlooked as if it had been torn froman office ledger. It committed us tofighting the next general electionin alliance, ‘as distinct parties but of-fering the nation a government ofpartnership.’

Shirley Williams and I returned toLondon well pleased, believing thatour agreement was totally consistentwith previous understandings. Butagain there was trouble, principallyfrom David Owen who said we hadno mandate for our Königswinteractivities. He was not alone in dislik-ing a closer relationship with the Lib-

What slowly emerged was a clearer viewof David Owen’s strategy. Put simply, itwas to keep the Alliance together only

long enough to win proportionalrepresentation for Westminster; and thenfor the SDP and the Liberals to go their

separate ways.


isfactory formula for campaigningand it crucially depended on a stale-mate between Labour and the Con-servatives which only the voterscould decide. There had been threeoccasions since the war – , and – when a strong and con-fident third party might have beenable to negotiate a deal, but this gaveno more than a one-in-four chanceof a hung parliament next time.David Owen was not alone in grasp-ing at the idea: it seemed our besthope. But to predicate the future ofthe SDP on such an outcome wasfragile.

We are now, in , also wiserabout the process by which propor-tional representation might havebeen secured. An agreement witheither Labour or the Conservativeswould have been extracted underduress and the new governmentwould have looked for an early op-portunity to hold a further electionand win a clear majority. The needto decide on the form of PR, thepossibility of a referendum and thedifficult progress of legislationthrough parliament (there wouldhave been backbench revolts) wouldhave provided the necessary breath-ing space. A hung parliament wouldnot have delivered what DavidOwen wanted from it. The wholeexperiment would have ended intears.

Throughout the Parlia-ment, the two leaders, David Owenand David Steel, preferred to makedecisions together rather than findthemselves bound by any jointcommittee of the two parties. DavidOwen in particular feared that someSocial Democrats, myself andShirley Williams included, mightmake common cause with Liberalsin an unacceptable majority. Butfrom the Alliance StrategyCommittee, chaired jointly by theleaders, met regularly to discuss andsometimes resolve problems be-tween the parties. In early meetingsthere was a desultory attempt toraise merger until it was seen to befruitless. And the row over the JointCommission on Defence and Dis-armament when David Owen re-

jected its unanimous report whichI, together with other Social Demo-crats, had signed in the spring of, was evidence that he pre-ferred to keep his distance from theLiberals rather than reach anyagreement that involved compro-mise. Defence was, he believed, onearea where SDP policy should bedistinct. It helped to mark an iden-tity he hoped the SDP would re-tain.

The report of the Commissionon Defence and Disarmamentcaused much bitterness in the SDP.David Owen always demanded greatpersonal loyalty and he also equatedlosing with humiliation. The beliefthat John Roper and I had been dis-loyally responsible for him ‘losing’ inthe Commission made us the objectof his anger. My personal relation-ship with him was never to be thesame again.

During and we hadbeen quite close. I admired his domi-nating parliamentary performanceand his relentless determination tokeep the SDP in the political game.By any standards, it was an achieve-ment of a high order. Over lunch,he would relax for a moment andconfess how tired he was and howuncertain about the future. I wouldthen try to persuade him not to ruleout eventual merger and leading themerged party thereafter. He neverdismissed this out of hand but a ma-jor obstacle was plainly his contemp-

Membership ServicesThe following listings are available to History Group members:

Mediawatch: a bibliography of major articles on the Liberal Democratsappearing in the broadsheet papers, major magazines and academicjournals from 1988; plus articles of historical interest appearing in themajor Liberal Democrat journals from 1995.

Thesiswatch: all higher degree theses listed in the Bulletin of the Instituteof Historical Research under the titles ‘Liberal Party’ or ‘liberalism’ (none yetunder SDP or Liberal Democrats).

Any member is entitled to receive a copy of either listing free; send an A4SSAE to the address on page 2. Up to date versions can also be found onour web site (http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~dbrack/index.html).

tuous impatience with much of theLiberal Party which he thought ofas jejune and ungovernable. Therewas no song in his heart about theprospects for the next parliament.

In the early hours of Friday June any hope of a hung Par-liament fell apart as Mrs Thatcheragain headed for a three-figure ma-jority. At .am Alan Watson, aformer Liberal President and one ofDavid Steel’s close advisors, and Iwere interviewed together on televi-sion by Robin Day. Our message wasthe same: merger was now a seriousoption that our two parties shouldaddress without delay. Six difficultmonths later, against David Owen’swishes and after much politicalblood-letting, it was achieved. HadDavid Owen been prepared to ac-knowledge that merger was the logicof two consecutive electoral defeatsfor the Alliance – or been willing toaccept the ‘Yes’ verdict of the SDP’smembership in a one-member, one-vote ballot – the Social and LiberalDemocrats could have beenlaunched with hope and excitement.As it was, the climb back to cred-ibility was to be hard.

William (Lord) Rodgers was Secretaryof State for Transport –, one ofthe SDP’s ‘Gang of Four’ founders in, and SDP Vice President until. In he was elected to succeedLord Jenkins as leader of the LiberalDemocrat peers.


Somewhat to my surprise we managed toreach agreement in principle, without toomuch difficulty, that the attempt to break themould should be concerted rather than com-petitive. I set down, there and then, on a papertable napkin in rather blurred handwriting, thethree-point understanding which we hadreached: broad agreement on principles; seatsharing rather than fighting each other, thedetails to be negotiated; and Joint Policy Com-missions on major issues. On the way throughthe winding alleys of the town towards the hillafter lunch I vividly recall Shirley saying to meruefully that she supposed she would now haveto support PR.

This event, and its consequences, were seensubsequently as an historic sell-out of the iden-tity and independence of the new party byDavid Owen. To David Steel and myself theyseemed common sense. To the other SDP par-ticipants I believed they seemed inevitable fortwo third parties in a political system withwinner-takes-all voting.

Then, as part of the follow-up to that agree-ment, in constructing the broad agreement onprinciples I recall sitting with David Marquandin the refreshment room at King’s Cross, in lateMay, drafting and redrafting amid the puddlesof cold tea, the document which was to be called,at least officially, ‘A Fresh Start for Britain’.

Another vignette, and I find it difficult to re-member the date, is a recollection of walkingthe beautiful hills around Ettrick Bridge withDavid Steel and his labrador, talking about thename we should put on this new combinationand agreeing ‘Alliance’ was the best option,lending itself to an alternating prefix.

And subsequently telling Roy Jenkins at arally at Central Hall that in the Croydonbyelection Bill Pitt would be fighting asLiberal-SDP Alliance, and showing him stick-ers and leaflets. He gulped but took the ‘bounce’with his usual aplomb. Jennifer Jenkins wasforthright in her support.

Then there is the painful memory of negoti-ating the manifesto. Negotiated manifes-tos are not a good idea, whether intra-partyor, as this was, between parties. They tend to-wards the lowest common denominator ratherthan the highest common factor. And whereasI am proud of my part in the and Liberal Democrat manifestos, I cannot say thesame of the last Alliance platform. It was blandand uninspiring.

The miracle is that we succeeded in get-ting agreement on anything at all. The prob-lem was not with Ian Wrigglesworth and my-self, heading our respective teams, nor withWendy Buckley and Peter Knowlson consci-entiously servicing our labours. It was ratherwith Michael Meadowcroft and Sue Slipmanfacing each other across the table – for whommost issues were issues of principle and forwhom differences of emphasis wereunbridgeable chasms. I was not surprised that,whereas most of us involved ended up in thesame party, Michael and Sue decided to fol-low their respective lonely paths.

Then, who of those involved would not recall,generally with a feeling of furious sorrow, theevents surrounding the Joint Defence Com-mission. John Edmonds, an emollient andknowledgeable chairman had laboured hardover a compromise with a certain amount ofbehind-the-scenes diplomacy between the

Alliance DaysRichard Holme provides a few vignettes of the days of elation andexperiment, frustration and failure.

First the famous, or no doubt to David Oweninfamous, Königswinter Compact. In in themargins of the annual Anglo-German Conferencebeside the Rhine there was a lunch at a riverside hotelfollowed by a walk up the Drachenfels. Theparticipants were Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams, JohnRoper, then SDP Chief Whip, David Steel and myself.The SDP was in its first flush of heady opinion pollsuccess, the subject of enormous interest among theconference participants and understandably ratherpleased with itself. At the lunch there was white wine,pale spring sunshine and a lot of mutual teasing.


equally knowledgeable John Roperand myself, less expert but willing.

It was clear that he had succeededwhen Bill Rodgers, with his ownrecord of opposition to unilateral-ism in the Labour Party, gave his sup-port to the report. We all thoughtwe had built a bridge across whichpeople with different perspectives inthe Alliance could move freely andwithout embarrassment.

We had all reckoned without theDoctor. Undoubtedly provoked byDavid Steel, in the shape of a pre-emptive briefing on publication ofthe report, his fellow leader went bal-listic. Every hawkish instinct came to-gether with his barely concealed con-tempt for lily-livered Liberals and hisdeep distrust of his collaborationistfellow leaders.

Eastbourne was not happy. I re-member making a very poor speechmyself, in good company it must besaid, and leaving there miserablyaware that the best of the Alliancewas behind us. ‘ Never again gladconfident morning.’ I went directlyto the British-American Projectconference in Philadelphia and,

when someone asked me how theAssembly had gone, said that I wasthinking of applying for politicalasylum.

Then, as for so many other Liberalsand Social Democrats, there are thememories of the byelections. Croy-don, and the recollection of break-fast daily with Bill Pitt, the table amass of newspapers and Weetabix,preparing the rigours of the morn-ing press conference which Ichaired.

Or Roy Jenkins turning a narrowdefeat in Warrington into a moral vic-tory and then converting that into thereal thing at Hillhead. I rememberone lady in Kelvinside, of overpow-ering refinement herself, telling methat although she was a lifelong Toryshe would be voting for Roy becausehe was such a gentleman.

Then minding Shirley for a dayin Crosby and realising for myselfthat beneath the charm andwide-ranging policy interest, therelay an incomparable election fight-ing machine of great stamina andtoughness of mind, something

The party agent and English electoral culture,c.1880 – c.1906. The development of political agencyas a profession, the role of the election agent inmanaging election campaigns during this period, and thechanging nature of elections, as increased use was madeof the press and the platform. Kathryn Rix, Christ'sCollege, Cambridge, CB2 2BU; [email protected]

Liberal defections to the Conservative Party,c.1906–1935. Nick Cott, 24, Balmoral Terrace,Gosforth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE3 1YH;[email protected]

The Liberal Party 1945–56. Contact with members(or opponents) of the Radical Reform Group during the1950s, and anyone with recollections of the leadership ofClement Davies, sought. Graham Lippiatt, 24 BalmoralRoad, South Harrow, HA2 8TD.

Research in ProgressThis column aims to assist research projects in progress. If you can help any of the individuals listed below with sources,contacts, or any other helpful information – or if you know anyone who can – please pass on details to them. If you know ofany other research project in progress for inclusion in this column, please send details to the Editor at the address on page 2.

The Liberal Party and foreign and defencepolicy, 1922–88. Book and articles; of particularinterest is the 1920s and ’30s; and also the possibility ofinterviewing anyone involved in formulating the foreignand defence policies of the Liberal Party. Dr R. S.Grayson, 8 Millway Close, Oxford OX2 8BJ.

The grass roots organisation of the LiberalParty 1945–64; the role of local activists in the late1950s revival of the Liberal Party. Mark Egan, First FloorFlat, 16 Oldfields Circus, Northolt, Middlesex UB5 4RR.

The political and electoral strategy of theLiberal Party 1970–79. Individual constituencypapers from this period, and contact with individuals whowere members of the Party’s policy committees and/or theParty Council, particularly welcome. Ruth Fox, 7 MulberryCourt, Bishop’s Stortford, Herts CM23 3JW.

which was in my mind when weput together the team for the general election.

The final vignette is of being takenout to lunch by Mike Thomas, DavidOwen’s most loyal henchman –older readers will remember RoyJenkins’ description of him as ‘thepint-sized Pavarotti’ – in early .

I was slightly surprised by theinvitation because we were hardlysoulmates. He made me a threat Icould not refuse. I should desist fromthe so-called convergence strategy, ofletting the two parties evolve towardscloser union, putting no obstacle inthe way of this, or something terri-ble would happen.– ‘What?’– ‘Good people like David Owenand myself will simply leave politics.’We didn’t – and they did.

Lord Holme of Cheltenham CBE wasPresident of the Liberal Party –and candidate for Cheltenham in and’. Made a life peer in , he was elec-tion manifesto coordinator in andelection campaign director in .


The Alliance: Two-PartyCooperation in PracticeHow did Liberals and Social Democrats cope with the mechanics ofalliance? Dick Newby examines the record.

The first was that one of the partners, theSDP, was a new party. Born out of desperationby pro-European social democrats in the La-bour Party, it tapped a vein of enthusiasm for anew style of non-confrontational politics whichled tens of thousands of political neophytes –the so-called ‘political virgins’ – to join a po-litical party and, in many cases, devote a hugeamount of effort to active politics. To establishand maintain a new party in Britain is daunt-ingly difficult. Even if you can generate an ini-tial surge of enthusiasm and members, to main-tain momentum under the first-past-the-postelectoral system is incredibly hard. As the GreenParty found when it obtained % of the votebut no seats in the European Parliamen-tary elections, members and activists drain awayin the absence of tangible electoral success.

In order to give itself a chance in electoralterms, the SDP, from the date of its launch, an-nounced that it would cooperate with the Lib-eral Party, not least in sharing out the Parlia-mentary seats between the parties. As BillRodgers explains elsewhere in this issue, hisstatement at the SDP’s launch press conferencethat the SDP would seek to fight half the Par-liamentary seats, leaving the Liberals to fightthe other half, was a spur-of-the-moment de-cision, rather than the result of careful strate-gic thought. This decision, more than any othersingle act, however, set the framework in whichthe two parties would work. For, as soon asvoters had been denied the opportunity to votefor the SDP in over seats, SDP leaders hadto be able to say that a vote for a Liberal can-didate in those seats was equivalent to a votefor the SDP. This required a common mani-festo, a single campaign both nationally and in

individual seats and a single leadership team.Of all these requirements, arguably the most

problematic was how to divide up the Parlia-mentary seats in the first place. In the springof , when the SDP was in its infancy, itdid not have a national constituency organisa-tion. The Liberal Party, by comparison, had atleast some activists in the large majority of seats,and even if few in number, they understand-ably often had a very strong attachment to theidea that a Liberal representative should fightthe seat. By the summer of , they also had candidates in place.

The agreement on how the seats would beallocated was reached in October aftersix months of sometimes fraught discussion. Itstipulated that there should be rough parity inthe number of seats fought by each party; thatin any one region, the ratio of seats fought bythe parties should not be greater than :; andthat seats should not be ‘clustered’. A six-strongNational Negotiating Team was establishedfrom each Party, and the two teams were tomeet in a Joint Negotiating Group (JNG). Myrole was to act as the SDP official responsiblefor servicing this Group and for managing theprogress of the negotiating process.

The way in which the two parties tackledthe negotiations reflected – to SDP eyes at least– a fundamental difference of approach on howto run a political party. We undertook an ex-tensive amount of research, coordinated by USpolling expert Sarah Horack, and with aca-demic input from Ivor Crewe, on thewinnability of each seat. Based on this work,we ranked seats in each sub-regional negotiat-ing unit and provided our national team mem-bers with a detailed negotiating brief. Localmembers of the negotiating team were ex-pected to take a lead from the national teammember, who was either an MP or a memberof the Steering Committee. On the Liberal sidethere had been considerable resistance to there

The Alliance was a unique experiment. It had twodistinguishing features which are rare in Britishpolitics and, in combination, unparalleled.


being any national input at all andtheir national negotiators were of-ten little more than observers. Localwhim often appeared to matter morethan objective judgement.

The first negotiating meeting washeld in Maidstone on December, two months after the negoti-ating framework had been agreed.The SDP negotiator was JohnHoram (now Conservative MP forOrpington). I accompanied him. TheLiberal national negotiator wasHugh Jones , the Party’s Secretary-General. The day was frosty. So wasthe meeting. The Liberals were ex-tremely reluctant to cede any seatwhere they had any significant de-gree of organisation. Armed with ourranking list, we demanded what webelieved to be a fair mixture of goodand bad seats. The meeting broke upwith little achieved. A similar patternwas followed in the handful of othermeetings held before Christmas.

It took an outburst from BillRodgers over the New Year, sus-pending the talks until a more con-structive attitude prevailed, to injectreal momentum into the negotiat-ing process. As the year progressed,my priority became how to ensurethat rough parity of outcome wasachieved. Agreement was reached inthe JNG that the Liberals could re-tain their top (‘golden’) seats andthat the SDP would then have two-thirds of the next (‘silver’) seats.Reaching this outcome was tricky,given the number of regional nego-tiations which were taking place. Iregularly trudged up to Hugh Jones’dusty lair in the Liberal Party head-quarters (then part of the NationalLiberal Club) for a glass of wine, adry biscuit and careful considerationof the silver seat list (which he wasnot allowed to admit to his partyever existed). All but seats wereallocated by August and, as theSeptember conferences approached,Roy Jenkins and David Steel horse-traded the rest.

The gold-and-silver approach wasvindicated by the election re-sults. They showed that if the Alliancehad won or more seats (ourworking assumption during –

), there would have been paritybetween the parties. As we only won seats between us, it was hardly sur-prising that the Liberals had the ma-jority ( to the SDP’s ).

Despite the success of the pre-’ seats negotiations, it was clearthat such a national approach wouldnot be acceptable again. Local Lib-eral associations had hated it fromthe start and their national leader-ship had found it irritating and em-barrassing to have to soothe the an-noyance of associations and candi-

dates in seats which were to befought by the SDP. On the SDP sidethere was also a recognition that anational deal was politicallyunachievable. Agreeing to devolvenegotiations to area party level wasrelatively easy for the SDP. The prob-lem which quickly arose, and bedev-illed the whole of the process, wasthe request from many SDP con-stituencies to have joint selection ofcandidates by members of both par-ties living in the seat. There were twovariants of this option: joint ‘closed’selection where a shortlist was drawnfrom members of one party; andjoint ‘open’ selection, where therewas a shortlist drawn from membersof both parties. David Owen, nowSDP leader, saw both these devices– but particularly joint open selec-tion – as a threat to the selection ofOwenite candidates, and feared thatSDP applicants would temper theirviews to gain Liberal support. Thisview was not assuaged when ParryMitchell – a textbook Owenite –won one of the first joint open se-lections in Salisbury, and I was giventhe unenviable task of travelling thelength and breadth of the countryexplaining to local parties whichwanted joint selection that theycould not have it.

By mid-, David Owen hadadopted a rather more pragmaticview. After returning from Colches-ter where I had been to explain whythey couldn’t have joint selection, Iexplained to him in frustration thatwe would win the nomination inany event. ‘Let them have joint se-lection then’ was his reply.

The process still required delicatenegotiations to complete and AndyEllis (now Liberal Secretary-Gen-eral) and I were sent to several placesto arbitrate. One particularly diffi-

cult area was Kirklees, and Andy andI spent a tedious evening hearingfrom representatives of the two par-ties why they should both fightDewsbury. As we left the splendoursof Dewsbury’s Victorian town hall toreturn to the station, we walkedacross the open market. One stallcaught my eye. ‘Eat tripe, don’t talkit!’ it proclaimed. Unfortunately thisprinciple was not enforced duringthe negotiations.

Following the acceptance of apackage of joint open selectionsby the National Committee in July, the seats allocation was sooncompleted. Although some seatshad changed hands between the twoelections, the SDP fought seatsin , only five fewer than in .

The two rounds of seat alloca-tion were unprecedented in Britishpolitics. In one sense the process wasa great success. The seats were allo-cated on a broadly equal basis andthe deal held across the country. (Thetwo parties only fought each otherin three seats in , where localLiberal associations ignored the na-tional seats deal.) The unintendedconsequence of the process, and onewhich was anathema to theOwenites, was that, by the end, in-creasing numbers of activists were

Having seen the final edit of thebroadcast, John Harris returned to CowleyStreet claiming that it would be ‘either a

triumph or a disaster’. He was right.


questioning the need, and in somecases the viability, of the two partiesmaintaining their separate existence.There were a number of reasons forthis, not least the experience of fight-ing elections jointly on the ground.But the huge amount of additionaltime spent in negotiating on seat al-location and, in the case of manySDP local parties, the need to havean argument with the national partyabout joint selection, led many ac-tivists to see merger as the logicaloption. From my national standpoint,the thought of having to organise athird round of seat negotiations af-ter was deeply depressing.

Just as the experience of the seatnegotiations led local activists andnational figures to question the vi-ability of a continuing two-party al-liance after , broadly similarconsiderations applied in three otherareas with a large national input,namely Parliamentary byelections,general election campaigning andpolicy formulation.

Parliamentary byelections werethe oxygen of the Alliance, breathingnew vigour and support into third-party politics even in times of nationaldoldrums. From Warrington in to Greenwich in , SDPbyelection organisation had benefitedgreatly from Liberal help. InWarrington – the first ever SDPbyelection – Liverpool Liberals dra-gooned by Trevor (‘the vote’) Jonesenthusiastically supported RoyJenkins. By the time of Greenwich,six years later, senior Liberal cam-paigners such as Chris Rennard werefully integrated into SDP campaignteams. Under the leadership of AlecMcGivan, the SDP had introducedinnovations into byelection cam-paigns, not least the use of high-vol-ume target mail shots. This had gainedLiberal respect to the extent that largenumbers of Liberal activists were pre-pared to travel and help as byelectionfoot soldiers. Equally, SDP politicians,staff and activists regarded it as axi-omatic that they would visit Liberalbyelections. Both parties fairly quicklyrealised that they both benefitedequally from byelection success, or,as in Darlington, suffered equally

from failure.General election campaigning

activity was arguably the least suc-cessful area of Alliance cooperation.Although joint press conferenceswere held and joint party electionbroadcasts were produced, the na-tional campaigns of and ,for different reasons, were unhappyaffairs. In , the greater popular-ity of David Steel compared to RoyJenkins led to the farce of the EttrickBridge summit at which Jenkins waseffectively replaced by Steel as leaderof the campaign only days beforepolling day.

In , Owen and Steel dis-trusted both their professional partystaff, and each other, to such an ex-tent that they excluded staff fromelection planning and ran virtuallyindependent campaigns. It was arecipe for confusion and producedpredictably confused results. Nowherewas this lack of a coherent structuredemonstrated more clearly than in thearea of party election broadcasts. Nei-ther leader would relinquish personalcontrol of the broadcasts to staff andso, when the campaign began, virtu-ally no work had been done on them.John Pardoe and John Harris, jointchairs of the day-to-day campaigncommittee, were given responsibilityat the last minute, leading to the pro-duction of the famous ‘rabbit’ broad-cast which featured Rosie Barnes andher family’s pet. Having seen the fi-nal edit of the broadcast, John Harrisreturned to Cowley Street claimingthat it would be ‘ either a triumph ora disaster’. He was right. Unfortu-nately it was not a triumph. All thecampaign professionals involved withthe election were convincedthat such amateurism was crazy. Ithelped fuel their support for merger.

Policy was an area both of greatsuccess and of the Alliance’s greatestpresentational disaster. TheLimehouse Declaration and otherearly SDP policy statements causedno great Liberal alarm, and ShirleyWilliams and David Steel were ableto launch a ‘A Fresh Start for Brit-ain’ document in the spring of with the minimum of fuss. Furtherjoint statements were produced and

joint commissions established, nota-bly the Fisher Commission on con-stitutional reform, which again wereable to agree on both the frameworkand detail of Alliance policy. No is-sues of unacceptable policy differ-ence emerged and, during the election, differences within the Alli-ance had much more to do with per-sonality than policy.

The disaster occurred on defencepolicy. A joint commission produceda report in June which said Brit-ain should retain its independent de-terrent and decide on a replacement(or not) only when Polaris was com-ing to the end of its natural life – years later. David Owen vehe-mently rejected this suggestion, say-ing that it was ‘the sort of fudging andmudging’ he had left the Labour Partyto avoid. In response, and amid scenesof confusion, the Liberal Assembly atis Eastbourne in September passed an anti-Alliance, unilateralistmotion. Although Steel and Owenpatched up their relations, the East-bourne vote was a godsend to theAlliance’s opponents and demon-strated an inherent flaw in the Alli-ance. Nobody doubted that there wasa large majority of members of thetwo parties combined who opposedunilateralism. The nature of the par-ties’ relationship and the segregationof their decision-making meant thatthis majority had no outlet throughwhich to express itself.

Six years after the Alliance wasformed, the experience of negotiat-ing the division of Parliamentaryseats, fighting byelections and na-tional elections and forming jointpolicy had led me to the firm con-clusion that an independent SDPwas neither politically necessary ororganisationally viable. Nothing thathas happened in the first decade ofthe life of the Liberal Democrats hasshaken that view.

Dick (now Lord) Newby joined the SDPas Secretary to the Parliamentary Com-mittee in April . From October until Easter when the Party mergedwith the Liberal Party, he was the Par-ty’s National Secretary. He now speaksin the Lords on Treasury issues.


It is still difficult to take a sufficiently dispassionatepersonal view of the seven-year period from theformation of the SDP to the two parties’ final votesto merge. I still have very emotional feelings on howmuch better it could have been, on how badly theLiberal Party qua party was treated, particularly inthe early days, on whether or not, in retrospect, itwould have been better – or even possible – to rejectthe Alliance root and branch, on the tactical naïveteof David Steel, on the eventual supineness of almostall the Liberal Party’s negotiating team, and onwhether the final settlement really did represent acompromise too far.

political and electoral damage. On occasionone relied – usually rewarded – on one’s tar-get audience reading between the lines.

The title of this essay emanates from my read-ing of the history of the period. The relation-ship between the two parties and their leaderswas, to my mind, the most influential factor inthe way that the key events unfolded. I focuson the political aspects of the Liberal leader,rather than his personality. I have always foundDavid Steel personable and easy to get on with.Unusually for a politician, he does not appearto harbour grudges. He also has a good sense ofhumour and likes jazz – what more could oneask! Alas, his relationship with the Liberal Partywas always one-sided and, I believe, his politicaljudgement was highly flawed. It is clear fromhis autobiography that Steel revelled in beingsomehow above the party debate.

The Grimond legacy marks my fortieth year as a member ofthe Liberal Party, and to a larger extent than isoften realised, one’s perception of the poten-tial and the frustration of the Alliance years iscoloured by one’s experience of previous op-portunities and failures. The party of theGrimond years was by no means as ‘Left-Lib-ertarian’ as Jo was. To a certain extent the in-crease in support, and the byelection victories,in the – period rode on a social demo-cratic style, and an anti-Conservative appeal,in places where Labour could not hope to win.In a curious reversal of the Steel years, the thenleader was, at least in terms of philosophy andpolicy, more liberal than the party. Why elsewould the then Young Liberals have felt theneed to launch its excellent New Orbits seriesof pamphlets? The contrast with – issalutary.

For me, at the time at party HQ as LocalGovernment Officer, the local elections

The Alliance:Parties and LeadersHow successful was the Alliance? Was merger the right road to follow?Michael Meadowcroft puts the case against.

If one had to deal with developments sincemerger, I suspect that the difficulty of beingless than dispassionate would be still more evi-dent. Suffice to say that an absence of com-ment does not indicate a weakening of resolve!

In exploring these questions I am con-scious of the excellence of Tony Greaves’ andRachel Pitchford’s account of the merger ne-gotiations. The very few quibbles that I havewith their text will become apparent in duecourse. Also, I have never been able to hidefrom, nor disavow, current views – even if Iwished to – as I have always found it difficultto resist invitations to write for any journalor publisher aware of how easy it is to flatterme. Also I have always had a quaint belief inthe need for intellectual rigour and philo-sophic consistency in politics, without whichit is invariably difficult to accommodate thenecessary tactical compromises. As a conse-quence there are numerous texts extant whichput on the record what I felt vital at the time.To be sure, there are weasel words therein; inpolitics one can never wholly shrink from thenecessity to avoid every possible scintilla of


were a great shock. The party hadromped home in council after coun-cil in May on the coat tails ofthe March Orpington byelection,winning seats in town after town, of-ten with little or no organisation. InMarch the immense opportu-nity of a possible gain from Labourin Colne Valley presented itself andwas, I believe, tactically muffed. Even

without such a timely byelectionboost we expected to repeat the successes. With a number of honour-able exceptions we dropped back inplace after place. The palpable disap-pointment was followed by a numberof defections of sitting councillors

and it was certainly clear to me thatif Liberal officers and candidates didnot possess at least some understand-ing of liberal philosophy they wereliable to be wafted about by everypassing political breeze. Again, thecomparison with the – periodis, I believe, significant.

Grimond was so personally at-tractive and charismatic that, eventhough he was invar iably plainspeaking, few members of the pub-lic, let alone many members of theparty, looked beyond the sound ofwhat he was saying to the wordsthemselves. In contrast, the Thorpeyears were politically and organisa-tionally horrendous, if at timeselectorally successful. Labour’s deepunpopularity from and Heath’sstolid leadership, particularly in Op-position, provided an unrivalled op-portunity, which was simply dis-sipated and finally sunk in the po-litically catastrophic entrails of theThorpe trial. And whereas theparty was mired in the struggle topresent a semblance of unity be-

tween leader and party, the YoungLiberals had continued their Liberalodyssey into their ‘Red Guard’ pe-riod, and were duly taken on pub-licly for their pains, with debilitat-ing effects.

The relevance of this period to theAlliance years is threefold. First, thestruggle to maintain the party’s lib-eral identity vis-à-vis its leader began

with Jeremy Thorpe, not with DavidSteel, and was a direct consequenceof the lessons learned in the Grimondera. Second, the contrast between theresponse within the party to theThorpe-Heath talks in February and the Steel-Callaghan pactof is revealing. During the ’s,I was leader of the Leeds City Coun-cil Liberal Group and a national partyofficer. When Jeremy Thorpe went toDowning Street immediately after theFebruary election, my tel-ephone, along with other regionaland national colleagues’, was perma-nently occupied with irate and wor-ried Liberals appalled at what dealmight be being contemplated. In, my recollection is that I hadthree mildly concerned calls over thePact. It would have been impossibleto carry the party into a coalitionwith the Conservatives in , what-ever the terms, but, despite perfectlyjustified fears as to its possible effecton the party, the Lib-Lab Pact of– was generally accepted asbeing a justified risk. Third, the fail-ure of David Steel to extract suffi-cient political and electoral benefitsfrom the Pact gave clear and ad-equate notice that he was not goingto be the tough leader determinedto protect his party in crucial nego-tiations.

Leader versus partyThose Liberals who committedthemselves to involvement in theparty nationally – often at consider-able domestic, financial and electoralcost – were not, with very few ex-ceptions, wild revolutionaries deter-mined to embarrass the leadershipat every opportunity. The much-maligned Liberal Party Council, forinstance, spent far too much of itstime agonising over how to temperits policy leanings towards the ‘lead-ership’s’ position where the latter wasknown or assumed, or how topresent palpably different strategydecisions as being an example ofparty unity. Of course, from time totime, sometimes when goaded by theleader’s – and, by and large, thewhole Parliamentary Party’s – ne-glect or criticism, the Party Councilwent to the barricades but, in gen-eral, conscious of the retribution thatthe electorate tends to wreak onparty disunity, the party was remark-ably well behaved – even when pro-voked. I am absolutely convincedthat had ‘the leadership’ chosen towork with the Party Council (and toa less public degree, the Party Ex-ecutive), as some MPs did, includ-ing John Pardoe and, from time totime, David Penhaligon, rather thantreating those who were, after all,Liberal colleagues with barely con-cealed contempt, the gains in mu-tual trust and recognition wouldhave had immense benefits duringthe traumatic Alliance years. As ex-amples of what would have beenpossible, one only has to look at thecivilised debates and the acceptanceof party consensus at the special as-semblies called to debate specificcrucial strategic issues.

Byelection candidatesTo take two key examples of thefrustration and, indeed, the lack ofunderstanding of basic courtesy, oneonly has to examine the question ofthe Alliance candidatures for theCroydon North-West and Crosbybyelections. An astute Liberal Party

The failure of David Steel to extractsufficient political and electoral benefitsfrom the Pact gave clear and adequatenotice that he was not going to be thetough leader determined to protect his

party in crucial negotiations.


leader, faced with the Croydon op-portunity, and having a perfectly rea-sonable desire to secure the electionof an attractive SDP luminary, wouldhave immediately consulted the ob-vious key people – the CroydonNW Liberal Association candidateand officers, the party’s nationalofficers, and significant ‘trouble mak-ers’ – and attempted to sort out theminimum terms for a ‘deal’: the nextvacancy guaranteed for a Liberal,minor concessions on seat negotia-tions generally, something vague onpolicy etc.

Instead, faced with Steel bully-ing – from, as usual, a great distance– the Liberal Party Council atAbingdon (this rather curious loca-tion is etched in my memory) re-sponded by passing enthusiasticallya motion supporting William Pitt(the Defector). I recall seeing DavidSteel in his bijou House of Com-mons office early the following weekand asking him what he now in-tended to do. He replied, extremelychurlishly, ‘I suppose I’ll have to bowto democracy’!

Not long afterwards the SDPembarked upon a pro-British Railcampaign. It wasn’t intended as such– indeed, it rather backfired whenBR failed to deliver the conferencedelegates on time at, I think, GreatYarmouth (and why not!) – but wasplanned as a typical SDP mould-breaking gimmick of a ‘rolling’ con-ference at three locations, as opposedto the infinitely more boring but atleast achievable and even sustainablepractice of assembling at one resort– usually beginning with the letter‘B’. The SDP at least recognised thelatter imperative by holding one-third of its Conference en route atBradford, which I duly attended.

Whilst in the bar at the St George’sHall, ascertaining, as one does onsuch occasions, the real facts of thestate of play of the SDP, I was as-tounded to hear, over the PA system,Shirley Williams unilaterally an-nouncing her candidature for theCrosby byelection. The existing andproperly-selected prospective Liberalcandidate for Crosby – whom I hadpersonally recruited to the party

years early – was also present atBradford. We were both outraged.Suffice to say that Anthony Hill gen-erously accepted and supportedShirley Williams at the byelection.However, I am inclined to think thathad the situation been handled dif-ferently, and given the different lo-cations and personalities, one justmight still today have ShirleyWilliams and Anthony Hill as MPsfor Croydon NW and Crosby re-spectively.

Labour hegemonyLike, I imagine, most Liberals dur-ing the early s, I observed thesuicidal tendency of the LabourParty in action with a mixture ofdisbelief, hilarity and sheer unadul-terated joy. I vividly recall drivingalong the M – to or from what oc-casion I cannot now recall, but it wasvirtually bound to have been a Lib-eral meeting – as the news camethrough of the special Labour Con-ference’s totally bizarre decision onthe arithmetic for its electoral col-lege to elect its leader and deputyleader. Had I not been bombingalong a motorway I would havedone a dance of joy, as it was I con-fined myself to a minor whoop. Per-haps naïvely, I had at that time nopremonition of the dangers lurkingahead for the Liberal Party, eventhough there had been a number ofletters, and even introductory arti-cles, in the serious press, and in TheGuardian, for the eventual SDP byits soon-to-be luminaries. I saw it asan unrivalled opportunity to under-mine a hegemonic, politically cor-rupt and illiberal Labour Party. Thosewho shared this view, and who suc-ceeded against the odds to win seatsin the big cities and other Labourfiefdoms, not only believed theoreti-cally in the vital necessity to defeatLabour electorally, but actually setabout doing it. It was always a strangeparadox to find ourselves castigatedas being political theoreticians, un-interested in power, when we wereactually winning seats. Winning,moreover, without visible supportfrom the party centrally who seemed

to be curiously antipathetic to fight-ing Labour.

There certainly was at the timea big difference between those Lib-erals – the majority of the party –who had no direct personal experi-ence of Labour in local governmentcontrol, and those, such as the partyin Leeds, who suffered and struggledagainst sophisticated political chican-ery and the calculating and cynical– and legal – abuse of public fundsto maintain Labour in office. Theformer saw only the pleasant, pro-gressive but mildly erroneous LabourParty, whereas the relatively few Lib-erals winning seats from Labourknew a very different political ani-mal. Inevitably this dichotomy ofparty priorities coloured the debatesand negotiations with the SDP inthe succeeding years.

The inexorable spiral‘Our’ failure – my failure – to po-liticise the Liberal Party, and our er-ror of taking for granted the pre-sumed existence of an inherent radi-calism in the party at large, were salu-tarily brought home to us at theLlandudno Liberal Assembly of – the Alliance Assembly. Those of uswho sought to argue for a philo-sophical position vis-à-vis the SDP,and for constitutional niceties, suchas the – minor? – point that the SDPwas not at that time actually consti-tuted, were comprehensivelyswamped by a wave of enthusiasmfor some vague but attractive emo-tional spasm, epitomised by the pre-Assembly rally with Shirley Williams,Roy Jenkins, Jo Grimond, DavidSteel, Gordon Lishman and – a val-iant but downbeat – Tony Greaves.Having been Assembly Chair for fiveyears, and therefore well aware thaton setpiece occasions heart alwayswins over head, I suppose I knewthat the ‘promote Liberalism, safe-guard the party, vigilance, watchful-ness and all that’ case was doomed;nevertheless, having opted for thetactical compromise of an amend-ment to delay assent to the Alliance(nothing more could conceivablyhave been salvaged from the wreck-


age at that point), the vote on it wasat least respectable. However, one ofthe great myths of that Assembly isthe subsequent final vote on the pro-Alliance motion itself. From theChair, Gruff Evans simply countedthe delegates against the motion,subtracted that figure from the totalnumber of registered delegates andannounced that as the result. Thevotes for were never counted and,consequently, the substantial numberof abstainers – either by convictionor, like me, out of sheer gloom, wereunknown.

The problem of party ‘placement’in the political spectrum, and its con-sequential imperative in seat alloca-tion etc., lay some way ahead and, atthe time of the formation of theSDP, I felt genuinely excited by theevident potential for a cataclysmictransformation of the political – andelectoral – structure. Like, I suppose,others, I smiled wryly at the launchof the new party and at its obses-sion with PR styles and with reject-ing all received ‘truths’, but was pre-pared to give it the benefit of thedoubt and to be proved wrong.

In line with the previous, and dif-

ficult to break, addiction to accept-ing commissions to write, I followedmy Liberalism for a New Decade witha booklet for Liberator, Social Democ-racy – Barrier or Bridge. This delvedinto the background to social de-mocracy, and analysed the state ofplay between the Liberal Party andthe SDP. It stated that ‘[t]he SDP isat one and the same time the great-est opportunity and the greatest dan-ger to Liberalism for thirty years.’

This was intended as a contributionto what one presumed would be anongoing debate on the fluid andevolving relationship, but its recep-tion was altogether different. EdwardLyons QC, then Labour turned SDPMP for Bradford West – and withhis wife, Barbara, extremely goodcompany, then and now – becamealmost incoherent during a joint ra-dio interview in Leeds at my sug-gestion in the booklet that, as thingsthen stood organisationally with thetwo parties, the Liberals should fightat least seats and the SDP someof the rest. Provocative this clearlywas, but the rebuttal, generally, lackedconfidence and content. Alas, far toomany of the concerns of Barrier or

Bridge proved to be accurate.No ‘working’ politician with any

nous believes that leaders shouldn’tlead, or that there are never occa-sions when leaders cannot immedi-ately share with their party col-leagues all the delicate nuances ofpossible developments, but thewilling acceptance of such reality re-quires, first, confidence in the lead-er’s capability to deliver, and, second,a visible willingness to work to en-sure that the led follow the leader.On both counts David Owen suc-ceeded and David Steel failed. Anassessment of the style and achieve-ment of the two men during thecrucial period of the Alliance’s lifeturns on its head the received truthof the responsibility for the Alliance’sultimate disappointment. This is notan assessment of the policies andelection tactics pursued by them –for instance Owen’s error during the general election of admitting apreference for working with theConservatives was a significant fac-tor in losing Leeds West – but rathera judgement on the way each han-dled his party. The problem of theAlliance was not, as is commonlythought, the problem of DavidOwen but rather the problem ofDavid Steel. One knew where onewas with Owen – for better or forworse – but one was never sure ofwhat Steel would come out withnext – whatever had been agreed inhis presence at the party meeting inadvance.

SDP triumphalismThe SDP was an ‘all or nothing’break for fame and power. Inevita-bly it ended up as nothing. There arethose who argue that it could havebeen all. Maybe there was an out-side chance but I doubt it. There wasa problem from day one with theSDP’s parliamentary recruits, and, inparticular the SDP leadership – withthe exception of Roy Jenkins – ini-tially generally treating Liberals inrather the same way as Steel did: asdedicated espousers of worthycauses, but with no commitment tothe required discipline for gaining

The first contest: Steel and Jenkins before the ’83 election.


power. To some extent this was aconsequence of being elected as La-bour MPs ‘on the ticket’ and be-ing initially wholly unaware of theimmense problem of achieving elec-tion as a third party. SDP MPs,faced with tough Liberals, for whompolitical survival was a daily strug-gle, came to revise their opinions, buttoo late to revise the strategy for the

longer haul. A less arrogant and pat-ronising attitude, and, for instance, aseat allocation strategy which con-centrated less on an equality of seatsfought and more on who was mostlikely to win each seat, might con-ceivably have not only producedmore ‘Alliance’ victories but wouldarguably also have entrenched theSDP on the scene far better for thelong haul.

Perhaps it was emotionally im-possible for the then SDP to haveswallowed a numerically ‘junior’ rolebut the consequences of not doingso are numerically apparent today.Paradoxically, the one tactic thatcould have given the SDP electoraland political dominance over theLiberals, and, indeed, could havegiven them phenomenal impetus,was the one they backed away from– the defectors resigning their seatsand fighting byelections. The argu-ment was, of course, finely balanced.The parliamentary custom and prac-tice of the party holding the seatchoosing the timing of thebyelection – not to mention the costof so many campaigns – would, forinstance, probably have denied theSDP a significant tactical advantage.However, in the heady electoral at-mosphere of the SDP’s early days,and with an extended stream of par-liamentary recruits, my firm belief isthat the electorate would have re-acted positively to the highly prin-cipled action of each individual seek-

ing a new mandate. The moral au-thority of SDP MPs elected as suchwould have given them considerablygreater stature in the House, ratherthan having permanently to coun-ter the argument that they had beenelected on a different ticket. Suchjudgement is, of course, subjective,but frankly, in the circumstances, itwas well worth the risk. I have to

confess, as one who soon came tobelieve in the need to protect andpreserve the Liberal Party’s base andits position from the SDP maraud-ers, aided and abetted by the Liberalleader, I was mightily relieved thatthey didn’t choose the byelectionroute!

As it was, the Alliance soon be-came a bureaucratic nightmare. Itwas difficult enough for Liberalcouncil groups to have to acceptSDP members who were oftenamongst the Labour, and occasion-ally Conservative members theyhad in the main felt least affinity with– though in the main they swallowedhard and got on with it – but wehad to embark on an interminableround of joint committees, particu-larly to determine seat allocation.The bureaucracy involved was phe-nomenal! There were ‘gold’, ‘silver’and ‘bronze’ seats, allocated to eachcategory on the basis of theirwinnability, and each party had tohave its due share of each. There wasa national ‘panel’ of representativeswho either led the team – usuallyon the SDP side, the Liberals be-ing happier to rely on leading localcolleagues – or who ‘observed’ eachnegotiating meeting, and there wasprovision for an appeal mechanismin the event of deadlock! Some ofthese meetings, often where little wasat stake in terms of winnable seats,or constituencies which had beennursed for many years by a Liberal,

were concluded without much dif-ficulty, but others had to be recon-vened time after time, using up timewhich could more valuably havebeen spent actually winning the seatsin question.

One ought not to disparage norminimise the many cases and occa-sions when Liberal and SDP col-leagues worked together effectivelyand efficiently but there was often avery different attitude to politics andpolitical activity. Paradoxically, it wasoften the reverse of the general per-ception of which of the two partieswas playing at politics and which wasserious about winning. Liberalstended to despise the SDP’s predi-lection for interminable meetings ondetailed policy formation and its af-fection for social gatherings – pref-erably with big names – whilst theSDP tended to deride the Liberals’incessant community-politics activ-ism. Such differences tended to arisefrom the SDP view that victorywould come via the ‘Grand Slam’whereas the Liberals believed in thenecessity of the incremental longhaul.

In the end, although the traumaof getting there left a number ofscars, it was surprising in the circum-stances that only three seats in the general election were contestedby both SDP and Liberals.

Owen’s dominanceI learned a lot from David Owen’schairmanship of meetings. The jointmeetings he chaired did not onlycome to a conclusion on somepolicy point or on some item on thefollowing week’s parliamentary or-der paper; when agreement had beenreached, Owen would then ask, ‘OK– now what are the politics of this?’There would then ensue a short dis-cussion on how one dealt with thedecision made and what were thetactical implications of it. The needto relate policy and parliamentarydecisions to the current politicalagenda would certainly not havebeen dealt with in so disciplined away in a purely Liberal context.

I had the adjacent office to David

‘The problem with the Liberal Party’, saidOwen, ‘is that you have a leader who isn’t

interested in policy’.


Owen in the Norman Shaw Northbuilding on the Embankment, andfrom time to time when we walkedtogether across to the main buildinghe would say, ‘The problem with theLiberal Party is that you have a leaderwho isn’t interested in policy’. Thiswas palpably obvious, as the later fi-asco over the infamous ‘dead parrot’document demonstrated, but onecould well have responded that theproblem of the SDP is that it had aleader who was obsessed with theminutiae of policy. Not as desperatea fault, to be sure, but nonetheless abarrier to a healthy policy formationpartnership between party andleader. One innocent analysis of SDPpolicy came from one of the splen-did sign language interpreters whotranslated for both the Liberal As-sembly and the SDP Conference. Iwent to the Salford SDP Conferenceand spotted one of these colleaguesduly performing on the edge of thestage. When she descended I wentround to greet her. ‘Oh, Michael’, shesaid spontaneously, ‘I’m so glad to seeyou. I’m having awful trouble trans-lating these speeches. There’s no sub-stance to them!’

As SDP leader Owen was alsophenomenally alert to immediatepress comment. He believed that itwas essential to impress the mediawith his ability to know what wasgoing on at all times and to be firstwith a comment. John Sargent of theBBC remarked to me once that theapogee of this came when, in April, Owen ‘phoned the BBCnewsdesk with a comment on theshooting of WPC Fletcher in StJames’ Square, opposite the LibyanEmbassy, before the newsdesk hadheard of the shooting! Owen wasalso rather wryly proud of havingspoken at one of LINk’s ‘RadicalConference’s’ at which, gauging hisaudience well, he gave just about hismost left-wing address of the Alli-ance period – extracts from whichwere forever being quoted thereaf-ter by Leighton Andrews.

The Alliance nationally between to is less vivid to me thanit should be, mainly because I with-drew from virtually every responsi-

bility outside the constituency inorder to concentrate on winningLeeds West, though I did manage towrite a fair bit to defend the LiberalParty whenever it was being ma-ligned by its own leader, or misun-derstood by the SDP – both ofwhich occurred fairly often. Cer-tainly in West Leeds at that time theSDP was no vote winner. Generalopinion, particularly in the six Lib-eral clubs there, was, first, that theyshould have stayed in the LabourParty and continued to fight theircorner, and, second, that particularlyas seen through Leeds’ eyes, Liberalshad been fighting these self-samepeople for years and could hardlyembrace them now. The local partywas virtually unanimous in decidingthat tactically we should be ‘Liberal’on the ballot paper ‘without prefixor suffix’ and should not seek todepend on any Alliance-based assist-ance. We had no outside speakers andno outside money, but we did havethe excellent Leighton Andrews andJim Heppell (who should both havebeen fighting seats themselves butwho weren’t) who added a winningflair to all the solid fifteen-year localbuild-up.

The 1983–87ParliamentThe early days of the new parliamentwere taken up with one of the mostbizarre episodes of my time in theLiberal Party. Instead of concentrat-ing on how we could build on thehuge popular vote we had just won,the initial Parliamentary Party meet-ings were taken over by vitriolic at-tacks on Steel’s leadership by CyrilSmith, supported by David Alton.Steel himself was clearly fed up withthe whole business and it was leftlargely to David Penhaligon to tryand restore calm. This led to Steel’sso-called ‘sabbatical’, though in facthe actually resigned the leadershipand had to be talked out of it oversome days – often at long distance.

Astonishingly it was somehow keptout of the press.

I gathered from the response from

parliamentary colleagues when I ar-rived at the House that the LeedsWest victory was unexpected. It hasbeen suggested to me that it was alsounwelcome to some, but I never hadany sense of this from anyone.Stephen Ross – a splendid Liberalwho always wore his heart on hissleeve – did say to me after a coupleof years, ‘When I heard you’d wonLeeds, I thought, ‘Oh, we’re getting atroublemaker’, but you’re actually theultimate loyalist!’ The only responseI could come up with was to ask howhe thought it could be otherwise af-ter my years in the party.

Stephen Ross’ comment cameduring my period as Assistant Lib-eral Whip. With the increase in Lib-eral members, and the heavy spokes-person duties each of us had to carry(apart from David Alton and CyrilSmith, who refused to take on anysuch responsibilities), Alan Beith feltthat it would be useful to have twoAssistant Whips. Archy Kirkwoodand I were appointed, Archy particu-larly to look after Scottish interests.I was very happy to take this on. Iregarded it as an opportunity to de-velop the vital relationship betweenthe Parliamentary Party and theparty in the country, which wouldbe crucial to winning many moreseats. I was more interested in beingone of than being one of andthe risk of spending more time atWestminster than was wise in termsof holding Leeds West seemed worthtaking if, over the course of a fullparliament, we could make the Lib-eral Party sufficiently attractive as toboost the national vote sufficiently.Also, and relevant to this article, Ihoped to play a part in developing ahealthy and mutually useful relation-ship between the Alliance parties,which were organised separately –and whipped separately – for mostof the – Parliament. In anycase, contrary to some popular be-lief, I reckon that I am a ‘natural’Whip! I believe that party solidarityis extremely important and that, forinstance, council group discipline isalso vital – and has to be worked atrather than simply imposed. Overmy years as council group leader


in Leeds we ran a very tight ship andit served us well in a tough politicalsituation.

The two years as a Whip werehard going but not exceptionally dif-ficult so far as the Alliance was con-cerned. There were rare occasionswhen the two parties agreed to pro-mote different arguments and tovote in opposite lobbies but thesewere regarded as worthwhile exam-ples of being two parties and suffi-ciently rare to be promoted as suchwithout damage. John Cartwrightwas the remarkably well-organisedSDP Chief Whip and the relation-ship between the two parties’ Whipswas as amicable and cooperative asone might expect faced with thejoint pressures of maintaining a ‘thirdparty’ presence in the face of a two-party system. The parliamentary par-ties met separately each Wednesdayevening to discuss the followingweek’s parliamentary order paperand then met jointly to comparenotes, with the two leaders alternat-ing in the chair.

The tasks of maximising the Lib-eral impact in the House, of writingand debating – such as with TonyBenn and with Ken Livingstone –of building the partnership with theparty in the country, and of find-ing the most acceptable modus oper-andi for operating the Alliance,coursed through the Whips’ officefor two years, and had to be carriedon alongside coping with constitu-ency casework and nursing WestLeeds. Then, in July , came oneof David Steel’s perennial obsessionswith ‘reshuffling’ parliamentary re-sponsibilities, mainly in order to re-move Alan Beith from the Whips’Office. I had had hardly any prob-lems in working with Alan andwould have been very happy to con-tinue, but, if he was to be moved,then there was no secret that I wouldhave been happy to have been pro-moted. There were those in the Par-liamentary Party, including PaddyAshdown and Archy Kirkwood, whopressed for it, but Steel eventuallytelephoned David Alton, who was atthe time in the USA, to persuadehim to take the job on! Alton went

from not being part of the team tobeing responsible for it. ClementFreud, as commendably straightfor-ward as ever, told me that Steel hadoriginally wanted to appoint me but‘the Welsh won’t have it’!

The 1985 reshuffleI regard that particular Wednesday, inJuly , as a disastrous day. Thecommitments to making a LiberalParty – and Alliance – impact na-tionally were, in theory, in parlia-mentary terms, less than half waythrough, but were being, as I saw it,seriously damaged by Steel’s changes.Knowing how Steel operates – lead-ership by announcement – I realisedthat he would come to the Parlia-mentary Party meeting at pm thatevening with a fait accompli. Early thatafternoon, when Steel’s changes wereknown, I saw Paddy Ashdown whooffered to make ‘representations’ toSteel. I replied that this was, alas, nouse. Unless he told Steel categori-cally that, in the circumstances, hewould not take on the Trade andIndustry spokesmanship – and thusputting the reshuffle back into themelting pot – it would all be doneand dusted before the pm meeting.

Paddy didn’t believe me but kindlywent to make his ‘representations’anyway, particularly to state the ob-vious: that the Parliamentary Partyshould have the opportunity to dis-cuss the proposals that evening. At.pm the changes were an-nounced to the press, and the meet-ing an hour and a half later, as ever,rather than having a public row withits leader, knuckled under. It was awell tried technique of the leaderand, in a narrow sense, served himwell, but it didn’t make many friends

– or allies.We were clearly in for a bout of

mindless activism, with overheatedphotocopiers, a deluge of House ofCommons franked envelopes, andwith whole forests being lined up forslaughter, rather than continuing todevelop radical and soundly-basedpolitical and campaigning initiativeslinking parliamentary and party cam-paigning. Given the changes thatwere being made, which were boundto make it more difficult to win LeedsWest, all I could do was to opt out ofmy then spokesmanships to try andspend enough time in Leeds to holdthe seat. We had no-one full-time inLeeds. The local association slavedaway devotedly, helped conscien-tiously and innovatively by my Par-liamentary staff – from a distance –but the lack of someone able to pullthe strings together day by day was agreat handicap. Eventually in the Rowntree Social Service Trust –bless ’em! – came up with enoughfunds to employ an agent but, alas, itwas too little too late. Such detail isonly worth mentioning because it il-lustrates the inherent lack of party andAlliance commitment to winning andholding seats which would otherwisebe Labour.

During the – parliamentwe had a number of Liberal Parlia-mentary Party ‘away days’, for whichI religiously prepared papers on tac-tics and strategy. At this distance intime I don’t recollect any of thesesessions resulting in any effective col-lective action. The ParliamentaryParty meetings became more andmore Alliance-oriented – which wasnot necessarily a bad thing, thoughOwen was consistently disparagingof Ashdown, and Penhaligon regu-larly teased Owen. We had Alliance

The Liberal Party was side-stepped by theSteel/Owen trick of appointing ‘expert’

commissions which were supposedlybipartisan but whose members were not

even rubber-stamped by the party.


spokesmanships and endeavoured tomake the best of a difficult politicalsituation. All the time, however,policy problems were simmering,without any effective party mecha-nisms for resolving them. The Lib-eral Party was side-stepped by theSteel/Owen trick of appointing ‘ex-pert’ commissions which were sup-posedly bipartisan but whose mem-bers were not even rubber-stampedby the party. The problem with thiswas that there was consequently noparty accountability for these ‘Com-missions’’ findings and they had tobe bludgeoned through the PartyAssembly. We, the Alliance – me be-ing the Whip in charge – nearlycame unstuck over the NorthernIreland motion at the Bourne-mouth Assembly and the lesson sim-ply wasn’t learnt.

DefenceThen came the biggie: defence. Thisone had run and run. The AllianceDefence Commission beavered awaywith commendable conscientious-ness. Bill Rodgers was, as ever, sen-sible and undogmatic. LauraGrimond organised a number ofvaluable consultations and those ofus with views on the subject weremuch involved. But Owen was, per-fectly legitimately, a hawk on the is-sue and would not countenance areport which gave the impression of

weakness. Just before the report wasdue out, David Steel made an un-fortunate lobby lunch commentwhich appeared to divulge the con-tents on the key issue of a non-nu-clear Britain. Owen was furious andused his SDP conference to go overthe top. The result was that the un-fortunate Commission Chairman,John Edmonds, was forced to amendhis report in a last-minute attemptto find a new consensus. The resultwas unimpressive. As a rescue at-tempt Steel and Owen embarked ona round of European defence con-sultations out of which emergedtheir Euro-bomb option. As a policyit was unsustainable, and even theusual refuge of calling frantically forunity and for backing the leader(s)at the subsequent Liberal assemblycould not hide the threadbare case.

There is a useful analysis of theEastbourne debate in RadicalQuarterly and, therefore, there areonly a few extra items of importanceto relate here. First, the booklet Acrossthe Divide, which was produced bya number of Liberals at the time wasattacked for being deliberately in-tended as an ‘alternative’ defencecommission. Why this should havebeen necessarily a heinous politicalsin is debatable, but it was certainlynothing of the kind. It gained a no-toriety way beyond its then signifi-cance. Essentially it was a Young Lib-eral initiative. A small group of them

approached Simon Hughes and my-self with the idea of producing abook of essays on defence whichwould explore the increasing steril-ity of the sloganising between thepro-NATO hard-liners and theemotional CNDers. Others, includ-ing Archy Kirkwood, joined in thediscussions and, to our pleasant sur-prise, we all found the meetings ex-hilarating. Contrary to what Steellater alleged, the meetings were openand were usually held in a meetingroom at the Norman Shaw NorthBuilding, where a number of Lib-eral MPs had offices. Eventually,rather than writing individual essays,there was enough common groundto produce the booklet under ourjoint names. It had unambiguous ar-guments on the intellectualunsustainability of the deterrencetheory but it was far from being theunilateralist rant that it was later de-picted as.

While this was going on, ClayFreud, as the Chair of the PolicyCommittee – a job he carried outwith commendable seriousness andassiduity – was trying to get Steel toagree on a wording for an assemblydefence debate which would have todeal with the commission report. Iwas also a member of the PolicyCommittee and was perfectly ame-nable to having a motion whichwould get us over a big political hur-dle. I seem to recollect that WilliamWallace produced a wording whichwas adequate. Steel would have none

of it. He rejected attempts atmediation and decided togo for the high wire act.Which is how the Euro-bomb came to be on theEastbourne agenda. It wasunnecessary and, alas, all tootypical. The high-wire actrequires a specialist in get-ting to the other side. Ourerstwhile leader was notsuch a person!

The outcome of thedebate is well enoughknown. The appalling eventsof much later that eveningare less well known. Inevi-tably, rather hyped up by the

‘Aaah, isn’t that nice – he’s wishing us luck!’ (26 September 1986)


emotion of the debate and its out-come – though not so hyper as tomuff a ‘let’s put the lid on this; gooddebate; now let’s get on with thepolitics’ television interview with ahighly professional Bill Rodgers –Archy Kirkwood and I were bookedto play in the jazz band at that night’sLiberator review, which left us oneven more of a high. We finished justbefore midnight and Archy tel-ephoned Steel’s hotel suite, wherethere had been the scheduled regu-lar Parliamentary Party meeting, justto check that it had finished. Hecame back from the telephone look-ing suddenly serious and said that heand I were urgently needed at themeeting. We went straight across andexperienced just about the most ap-palling and unpleasant Liberal meet-ing I have been to in years in theparty. The level of anger and bitter-ness was beyond belief. Simon

Hughes had been under personalattack for some time before we ar-rived, and our colleagues then startedon us. Simon was surprisingly cool– and, to his immense credit nevercriticised our culpable neglect of himthat night – but the others seemedto have had some sort of collectiveaberration. Stephen Ross, of whomI was extremely fond, wagged hisfinger within inches of Archy’s faceand shouted, ‘I can understandMichael – he’s always held these views– but you! You! Steel made you!’ Itwas bizarre. Eventually, after a lotmore of the same, George Mackie,whose physical stature was somewhatsubstantial, virtually frog-marchedArchy away with him, and the meet-ing subsided. The following morn-ing Archy told me that, when he hadfinally got away, he had got into hiscar and driven around without any

clue as to where he was going orwhere he had gone.

Those who were present, or whofollowed the assembly on television,will doubtless remember the valiantefforts of the Chief Whip, DavidAlton, on breakfast television thenext day, to make a disaster out of adifficulty, parading the tabloid head-lines in front of the camera. Worsewas to follow with the leader’sspeech. Knowing Steel well, and as-suming that Alton had cleared hisoutburst with him, I guessed thatSteel would use his speech to con-tinue the attack. For these setpieceoccasions the parliamentary partyhad assigned seats on the platformin full view of the television cam-eras. I therefore sought out the par-ty’s press officer, Jim Dumsday, andtold him that I would not sit on theplatform as I did not wish to be inthe spotlight when Steel attacked his

colleagues. Jim, faced with yet an-other PR problem, was understand-ably unhappy with this informationand said that he couldn’t believe thatSteel would do such a thing. I saidthat, if he was right, it would pre-sumably be possible for him to finda way of getting an assurance on thematter. Jim suggested that I see Steelmyself and obtain a copy of the ad-vance of his speech. I duly wentacross to his hotel suite and was de-nied access by the Special Branchofficer outside. So, in due course, Iwatched the speech on a televisionmonitor outside the hall, and, despitebeing mentally prepared for it, I wassickened to see the Liberal Partyleader, without any warning to them,attack his own colleagues in public,and to watch the cameras home inon Archy, Simon and on MaggieClay – loyal Liberals who had done

nothing to deserve such disloyaltreatment. In the foyer afterwards,despite such provocation, TonyGreaves and others still managed totemper their response to the inter-viewers.

Back eventually at the House, amore constructive atmosphere tookover and an uneasy but wearablecompromise Alliance defence posi-tion was hammered out which I de-fended, somewhat uncomfortably, inthe Chamber. It was akin to the po-sition which had been available toSteel in advance of the Liberal As-sembly and which he had rejected.

The 1987 electionPreparations for an Alliance mani-festo were already underway by thistime. Sensible and practical ar-rangements had been made for itscomposition. Rightly, an originaldraft from a ‘single pen’ was thoughtimportant and Alan Beith duly pro-duced a typically professional pieceof work. As anyone accepting sucha commission would have done – asopposed to writing a Liberal mani-festo – Alan produced a draft whichreflected Alliance thinking, such asit was, and wrote with an eye to whatwould be acceptable to a consensusof both parties. Thereafter the draftwas referred to a joint committee ofboth parties, chaired by myself andIan Wrigglesworth, with the help ofa ‘New Ideas Group’, chaired by DesWilson and Shirley Williams. Thislatter was charged with the not un-known task of ‘thinking the un-thinkable’. It duly did so and someof its better ideas found their wayinto the manifesto, sometimes as lit-tle inset boxes within the text. Otherideas were less sound, including oneto help first-time house buyers bymaking capital grants to them. was still a time when house priceswere flying high and it was an eco-nomic fact of life that house pricesreflected the amount of cash avail-able in the market, so that any capi-tal grants made available to prospec-tive purchasers would put the priceof houses up by approximately thesame amount. This was debated on

Those who were present will doubtlessremember the valiant efforts of the Chief

Whip, David Alton, to make a disaster outof a difficulty, parading the tabloidheadlines in front of the camera.


the report of the ‘New Ideas Group’and duly referred to the full jointmanifesto committee. As it happenedit came up quite late on the latter’sagenda when most of the SDP had,probably sensibly, departed. I dulyexplained the economics of the pro-posal and it was agreed to drop it. Ithen went to King’s Cross for thetrain back to Leeds. I arrived athome to be met by Liz saying that Ihad to ‘phone Owen immediately. Idid so and was told that I ‘had playeda dirty trick tonight by waiting un-til the SDP members of the com-mittee had gone and then gettingthis attractive idea defeated’. I wentthrough the economic arguments yetagain and was met by a brief silence,then ‘OK – so what do we do forfirst-time buyers?’ I suggested thatmore assistance with ‘back-loading’mortgages, i.e. lower initial interestrates and higher later ones, wouldhelp first-time buyers but would nothave anything like the same finan-cial effect. Owen then said, ‘Can youexplain this to Alex?’ Wearily, I didso and Alex conferred with Owen.Then Owen asked, ‘Can you get thisthrough your side?’ and I said I

would clear it with AlanBeith, which I duly did.When I got back to theHouse the next day Ibumped into MaggieSmart, David Owen’s per-sonal assistant. Shelaughed when she sawme and told me thatDavid had been breath-ing fire and slaughterwhilst awaiting my calland had stamped offinto his private room totake it. He had eventu-ally emerged smilingand announced,‘We’ve an even betterpolicy now’.

The Alli-ance manifesto was, Ibelieve, a respectableand reasonable at-tempt to maximisethe Alliance’s politi-

cal attractions. It wasn’t aLiberal manifesto but it representedthe best that could be produced froma partnership which had ceased tofire the imagination of the elector-ate. I got on fine with IanWrigglesworth – which might shocksome colleagues – and we had nogreat difficulty in reconciling ourdifferent perceptions in order to pro-duce a readable final text, so muchso that, from time to time during themore traumatic moments of themerger negotiations, he would sug-gest that he and I should be sent ofto produce an acceptable format forboth groups.

This task completed, I headedback northwards to grapple with fatein West Leeds. Our local associationagonised briefly over the descriptionon the nomination paper and com-promised on ‘Liberal Alliance’. Add-ing ‘SDP’ stuck in the throat. I reck-oned that we would need a nationalvote of around % for us to hangon and the final tally was some %short of this figure. There were otherminuses (including horrendous li-bels, legal actions on which were notfinally won against Maxwell andMurdoch until after the election),including the legal but immoral use

of massive city council resourcesagainst us by our city-councillor La-bour opponent, and an inability tosqueeze the Conservative vote. Areasonably accurate comment fromone Conservative voter was that Iwas more dangerous than Labour! Isuspect that this was a common re-sponse; after all, one cannot main-tain the kind of radical positionwhich goes with Liberalism and notexpect it to be understood from timeto time.

However, I recall the momentwhen I realised that we were notgoing to win. I was doing some day-time canvassing on a council estatewhen the news was broadcast thatDavid Owen, when pressed at anews conference, had said that onbalance he would find it easier to doa deal with Mrs Thatcher. In the in-dustrial West Riding this was farfrom being a seductive appeal to pro-spective ‘Alliance’ voters who hadbeen painstakingly weaned awayfrom Labour over almost years,and whose views on Mrs T weremore sadistic than salacious. Thesharp change in the response on thedoorsteps was predictably sudden.

MergerThere was little enough time to sulkafter the result. Steel launched him-self into the dash for merger, and yetanother futile attempt to protect thecause from its leader had to be made.The Harrogate Assembly of was a very different affair from thatof . I ran for election as PartyPresident, as much to tackle a worth-while party job whilst out of Parlia-ment as anything else, but one couldnot, I suppose, escape from the con-test between myself and Susan Tho-mas tending to be depicted as rep-resenting different positions on theAlliance and, by extension, onmerger. I won, and Susan went tothe House of Lords. There are somerewards for being in the LiberalDemocrats!

In retrospect, when contrastedwith the special merger assembly atthe Norbreck Castle – a somewhatgiant Fawlty Towers – in Blackpool


the following year, the delegates atthe Harrogate gathering were clearlydeliberately determined to get thebest deal. The negotiating teamelected appeared to be weighted onthe side of those used to extractingthe uttermost farthing in tough po-litical circumstances. I sallied forthto London for this vital task butfound that one had reckoned with-out the ex-officio team members,particularly those from Scotland andWales, who were far more con-cerned to get a deal than to standup for the Liberal Party. One Scot,Chris Mason, openly admitted thathe was for ‘merger at any price’. And,of course, we had a leader who wasoften absent, didn’t understand whatcaucuses were for, and who foundsolidarity a difficult concept. TonyGreaves and Rachael Pitchford havedone all that is necessary for an un-derstanding of the whole disastrousnegotiation. Time after time Tonyand I ended up on the .pm trainfrom King’s Cross to Leeds withTony miserably huddled in his duf-fel coat. I would reach home aroundam and Tony, I guess, another houror so later in Colne.

As so often in this sorry tale, theoutcome could have been much bet-ter. There was no need to form themerged party on such disadvanta-geous terms – which, I would stillargue, were and are an intellectualand political fraud. There came amoment, late on in the negotiationswhen Bob Maclennan dissolved intears as members of his team re-signed, and said that he would haveto withdraw to consider his situa-tion. The Liberal team went back tothe National Liberal Club absolutelyclear that it was possible to achievemerger, if we so wished, on termswhich would be palatable to the Lib-eral Party and which would entailfew if any resignations. I was aston-ished to find that the immediateview of a majority of colleagues– theotherwise stalwart Alan Beith in-cluded – was ‘what will it take to getthe SDP back to the negotiating ta-ble?’ That, as they say, was the defin-ing moment. Shortly afterwards theLiberals caved in over the name of

the proposed party and, havingproudly fought for the Liberal Partyfor years, this was too much tostomach and I left – to be unexpect-edly door-stepped by John Sargentwho was waiting in the entrance ofCowley Street on the off-chance ofa news item. I resigned over thename, not over the NATO nonsense.

I was still around for the ‘deadparrot’ episode. Once again it pro-vided a vivid example of the party’sleadership problem. David Steel washappy to let Robert Maclennan andhis aides draft the policy statementthat was to accompany the comple-tion of the merger negotiations. Steelsaw the draft and pronounced him-self satisfied with it. When Alan Beithand other Liberals saw the finaldocument, at the eleventh hour, theywere horrified at its reactionary con-tents and realised that there was nochance of it being accepted by theLiberal Parliamentary Party, let alonethe party in the country. There wasthe bizarre press conference thatwasn’t, when copies of the draft hadto be scooped up again from thepress, and then the frantic efforts toproduce an acceptable version intime to rescue the situation. Twothings are significant about this epi-sode: first, that the SDP’s real viewson policy became starkly apparentto Liberals, but didn’t affect my col-leagues’ judgement re the value ofmerger; and, second, even when

asked much later why he ever ac-cepted the original draft, David Steelstill defended it as an acceptablestatement.

The special assembly was un-pleasant. It was as well ‘fixed’ as I usedto do as Assembly Committee Chair.Those opposed to merger had fewbig guns and some of those col-leagues who were called to speakwere not unduly helpful – somewere genuinely too upset to copewith the occasion. I suspect that Imade my worst assembly speech everand the vote was in any event a fore-gone conclusion. I was, however,more proud of the ‘manifesto’ thatsome of us wrote, printed and dis-tributed which put the case ratherbetter than the constraints on debatepermitted in the hall.

Even then I couldn’t bring my-self finally to abandon the cause en-tirely. I thought that if Alan Beithbecame leader of the new party therewas just a chance that it might be-come Liberal enough to encompassthose who felt bereft. It was noth-ing personal against Paddy Ashdown,whose company I’ve always enjoyed,but simply a political judgementbased on an assessment of their rela-tive consistency and awareness overthe preceding years. I never paid asubscription but I availed myself ofthe rule which let one’s membershipextend into the new party, so that Icould campaign for Alan. Even that


glimmer of a possibility was extin-guished and I headed off into limbo,until it became bit by bit apparentthat there were enough people oflike mind, some of whom had kepttheir local Liberal associations going,to relaunch the Liberal Party nation-ally. In its small way it remains aforthright witness to a political causewhich has inspired so many indi-viduals for so many years, and whichhas been treated so badly by somewho should have known better.

ConclusionA number of questions arise out ofthis somewhat diffuse narrative anddeserve whatever measure of objec-tive assessment is possible. First, wouldthe Labour Party have reinvented it-self without the SDP defections? Ithink the answer is ‘yes’, but only be-cause of the final Conservative elec-tion victory of which drove theLabour Party into its ‘anything so longas its not socialist’ desperation phase.I doubt whether, if the SDP MPs hadremained within the Labour Partyand fought on, the changes wouldhave come any quicker and it is evenarguable that Labour would not havebeen able so easily to jump a genera-tion to Blair had the SDP still beenaround. If this analysis is right then itfollows that the SDP – and by ex-tension the Alliance – has given usthe current Labour landslide. Someof them are, indeed, active within it.

Second, would the Liberal Partyhave achieved the level of elec-toral support on its own, without theAlliance? I am inclined to think thatit would have reached around thesame mark had the SDP never beenformed and had the Liberal Partytherefore carried the third-party ban-ner alone. The protest vote indicatorswere all in place and the party wasin fine fettle, with good harvests ofcouncil seats in the years immediatelypreceding the general election.Within the Alliance vote in theLiberals polled significantly higherthan the SDP. The SDP explained thisas being a consequence of the Liber-als getting the ‘better’ seats – as de-fined by the SDP. I am unconvinced

of this. I believe that in therewas a somewhat warmer feeling to-wards the Liberals than towards theSDP, possibly because of the pro-un-derdog feeling that it was the Liber-als who had ‘soldiered on through thewilderness whilst the SDP had so-journed in the tents of theunrighteous’. I don’t think that thisresponse should be oversold, but Ibelieve that it was there.

What I am more sure about is thathad the Liberals fought all the seatsin which they had been building upthen the tactical, and ‘stature’, argu-ment for a Liberal vote would havebeen maximised and a significantlyhigher vote could have been obtained.

This is, of course, speculation and,indeed, the tactical opportunitywould never have been conceded bythe SDP who were certainly not inbusiness to assist the Liberal Party.Whenever the argument of Liberalbuild-up was advanced in seat nego-tiations the SDP response was ‘andyou’ve failed to win the seat – so letus show you how’.

Third, would it have been possi-ble to ignore the SDP’s formation andto have fought them electorally withany chance of success? The answer is,alas, firmly ‘no’. For many years theLiberal Party had tacitly garnered the‘none of the above’ vote withoutchallenging that vote’s motivation,and enough of it would have slippedto the SDP in four-cornered fightsto have blighted Liberal prospects.

Fourth, did the arrival of the SDPand the Liberals’ participation in theAlliance harm the Liberals’ politicalproject? Unequivocally, yes. It is thispolitical disaster – for the countryrather than the party – that is theheaviest price paid for the way theeight years from unfolded. Thepolitical inspiration – and education

– of the late s and the sGrimond years had rooted itself inthe determination to build, in Jo’swords, a ‘radical non-socialist pro-gressive alternative to the Conserva-tives’. This determination, as withall political strategies, had continu-ally to re-interpret itself within thecontext of the immediate politicalagenda. Hence the struggle with theThorpe and Steel leadership cliques;hence the delicate electoral trick ofsuborning the mainly right-wingprotest vote whilst ploughing a dis-tinctly radical furrow; hence the at-tempt to develop an intellectuallycoherent and distinct philosophy inthe teeth of an impatient Poujadist

element in the Liberal Party ranks;and hence, above all, the dismay atthe successful hijacking of this vitaland vibrant Liberal project, firstly bythe Alliance and then, finally, by themerger.

It must not be thought thatthose of us who committed ourwaking hours to this project overmany years had some sort of curi-ous umbilical and myopic attach-ment to the Liberal Party per se. Farfrom it. Our commitment was, andis, to a coherent and highly relevantset of Liberal values which we saw,and see, as the best chance of a civi-lised, peaceful and convivial world.The Liberal Party was, by its con-stitution, its record and its promisethe only vehicle for those values. Ofcourse, like all human institutions,it was flawed. Of course, the graphof commitment and achievementwas far from showing a steady up-ward advance. But, at its heart, thepre-Alliance party was sound andsecure – not least in the sense thatone could rely on its instinctive re-sponse in a political crisis.

Nor must it be thought that those

Did the arrival of the SDP and the Liberals’participation in the Alliance harm the

Liberals’ political project? Unequivocally,yes.


who held these views were somehowstrange denizens of some isolated andobscurantist sect who went to theLiberal Party Council to hold handsto try and contact the living. Thesewere colleagues who were passion-ate about the desperate conditions oftheir neighbours in those long ne-glected, quasi-Indian-reservation, ur-ban deserts that are misnamed as‘housing’ estates. These were col-leagues who saw the urgent need tofind some way of making the eco-logical imperative relevant to thosewho struggled to conserve anything,let alone energy. These were col-leagues who took principled standson development aid, on the folly ofthe nuclear deterrence theory, and onthe nonsense of nation-state war-mongering. What is more, these werecolleagues who did all this in the teethof Labour’s urban hegemony just asmuch as in the depths of Conserva-tive complacency. It is these col-leagues who survived everything thatthe opposition could throw at themand, for their pains, were traduced bytheir erstwhile colleagues who hadbeen seduced by the superficialsloganising of the Alliance years andhad then been stampeded by the sim-plistic attractions of the merger. Theresult is a merged party with a stead-ily declining electoral base, with vir-tually no presence in areas that wouldotherwise be Labour-held, whosecommendable gains in seats are theconsequence of tactical voting, andwhose hybridity as a party guaran-tees a lack of that intellectual rigournecessary to forge a visibly distinc-tive image. In one way or another,those of us who couldn’t reconcileourselves with merger felt as we didbecause we were conscious of the cal-lousness which – at the time, but farless evident today – epitomised thesuccess of the quick fix over the po-litical crusade, and which clearly nei-ther esteemed our long struggleworthwhile nor had any regard forthe party which had carried the Lib-eral banner with pride for so long,and which was still serviceable andvery much viable.

It is, I suppose, a sign of encroach-ing senility or even of political atro-

phy to find oneself recalling earlierspeeches. At the risk of demonstrat-ing the truth of this, I well recall theLiberal Assembly philosophy debateof . I was Assembly CommitteeChair and I wanted to experiment.The Thatcher victory earlier thatyear provided an opportunity to doso. We set aside an entire afternoonfor a debate without a motion andwith only a vague structure of ab-stract concepts. It was an inspiringand formative session – which Istill have on cassette – and I havefrom time to time remembered say-ing that electoral success ‘might fallunbidden into our grasp, but politi-cal success has to be worked for’. Idearly wish I had not been so accu-rate nor, indeed, so prescient!

Michael Meadowcroft was MP for LeedsWest – and a member of the Lib-eral merger negotiating team. He helpedfound the independent Liberal Party andwas subsequently its President.

Notes: To meet the deadline most of this essay

was written whilst on mission in Cam-bodia – which may explain, if not ex-cuse, its somewhat diffuse style.

See for instance Michael Meadowcroft,Focus on Freedom – The Case for the Lib-eral Party, (Liberal Party, ).

Rachael Pitchford and Tony Greaves,Merger: The Inside Story (Liberal Renewal,) (see review elsewhere in this issue).

I once committed the ultimate narcis-sistic indulgence of looking up my ownentry in the British Library catalogue,and was surprised to see a number ofearly pamphlets listed which I could notremember writing!

David once agreed to play the piano oncamera for a ‘Children in Need’ televi-sion appeal and then came to me in apanic in order to get the Granny LeeJazz Band to accompany him. We spenta whole morning recording I can’t giveyou anything but love which, when trailedon air, no viewer was prepared to pledgecash to hear! I have the rushes of thewhole recording session – they are avail-able in exchange for a rather large brownenvelope.

David Steel, Against Goliath (Weidenfeldand Nicolson, ); see for instancepages , , and .

Note, for instance, a typical Grimondcomment: ‘There must be a bridge be-tween socialism and the Liberal policyof co-ownership in industry through atype of syndicalism coupled with a non-

conformist outlook such as was pro-pounded on many issues by GeorgeOrwell’, The Observer, October .

I still have a full set of the publishedtitles, presumably because I did not al-low colleagues to borrow them. Number, The Left and the Liberals, was a par-ticularly prescient and relevant tract forthe times, written by one Jim Cousins,Labour MP for Newcastle-upon-TyneCentral since .

It would be a very interesting and po-tentially valuable research project to fol-low up the subsequent careers of thoseelected as Liberal councillors in .

See Michael Meadowcroft, ‘Jo Grimond– an appreciation’, in Liberator , De-cember .

One of the perennial ‘what if ’ discussionsamongst Liberals involves pondering howdifferent the Liberal performance in Oc-tober might have been had JoGrimond then been the party leader andat the height of his powers as he was ex-actly a decade earlier when the parliamen-tary arithmetic was not as helpful.

The opportunity at the time to gain andto entrench victories from Labour, cou-pled with the excitement of debating onat least equal terms with Labour, is shownin the municipal electoral record of theperiod but was apparently marginal to theparty leadership’s national strategy.

See the most recent, and most explicit,book on the affair: Simon Freeman withBarrie Penrose, Rinkagate – The Rise andFall of Jeremy Thorpe (Bloomsbury, ).

The Liberal Assembly included aprivate session at which a censure mo-tion from Dr James Walsh on the partyofficers re their treatment of Thorpe wasdefended by the Party President, Chairand Assembly Chair (Gruff Evans, GeoffTordoff and Michael Meadowcroft re-spectively). The three officers agreed be-forehand that there was no point in con-tinuing to cover up the reality of theThorpe disaster and decided to confrontthe Assembly with the bare facts. If themotion was carried, all three agreed toresign. Gruff Evans stunned the packedroom with his frank exposition of whatwe had had to go through. I have nodoubt that the motion would have beendefeated but Tony Greaves and JohnSmithson decided – uniquely – to act asconciliators and got it withdrawn.

At one Scarborough Assembly Cyril Carrattacked the Young Liberals publicly. Thisled to the setting up of a ‘Commission’under the Chairmanship of StephenTerrell QC to look at the status of theYoung Liberals within the party. So far asI know, no copy of the Terrell Report hassurvived – assuming that it ever existed.

The February ’ election left no partywith an overall majority; Heath at-tempted to arrange a deal with the Lib-erals to keep him in office.


For the Pact, see Alistair Michie andSimon Hoggart, The Pact – The inside storyof the Lib-Lab government, – (Quar-tet Books, ).

Both Christopher Mayhew and, later,David Owen told me that they wereconvinced that, had Steel insisted that ‘noPR for Europe, then no Pact’ then itcould have been delivered. It is interest-ing, also, that no Liberals secured placeson important quangos during the Pact.

We were usually, in any case, far too oc-cupied in undertaking speaking engage-ments in far-flung outposts. I recall onesuch event in Llanelli where, after an in-terminable train journey, I was given acivic welcome by the Assistant TownClerk – clearly an accurate local assess-ment of my status! Having thus beenwell looked after and transported to eachplanned venue, I spoke at a dinner whichin due well-lubricated course progressedto the hymn-singing stage and I had tofind my own weary way back to the sta-tion for the sleeper back to London.

‘Leadership’, in this context, is not solelythe Leader himself but that Parliamen-tary charmed circle which felt that it hadto impose whatever ‘corporate’ decisionit had alighted upon. In this context TheEconomist ( September ) com-mented that ‘Social Democrats have lit-tle difficulty in working with the muchsmaller group of smoothies that surroundMr Steel.’

June , on Lib-Lab relationships; January , on the Lib-Lab Pact;– January , on the Liberal-So-cial Democrat merger.

On arrival at Westminster in , I in-herited Bill Pitt’s splendid secretary, MaryWalker, who regaled me with stories ofregularly having to do Bill’s weekend sur-

geries in Croydon whilst he went on par-liamentary delegations overseas. Accord-ing to Mary, Bill would also go throughthe post each morning searching for en-velopes which might conceivably containcheques from television interviews, etc.!

One could add ‘such as they were’; I amunder no illusion that there was a dy-namic and well organised association inCroydon NW, but the point is still valid.

In the s the Liberal Party indulgedin fantasies about moving the Assemblyto exotic locations. A project to hold itin Douglas, Isle of Man, eventuallyfoundered because the Isle of Man’s thenpredilection for birching young offend-ers was thought to be potentially em-barrassing politically. Another scheme toshow European solidarity by holding itin Scheveningen, Holland, had to bedropped because the party was advisedthat it was probably illegal to hold theAGM of the party outside the UK!

Contrary to the received truths about myantipathy to the SDP, I probably at-tended, and participated in, more SDPfunctions than any Liberal MP apartfrom the leader.

It may have been the Party Council, inBath, I think, where Peter Freitag en-gaged me in interminable conversationon the pavement outside the hotel venue.There was then a bomb warning and theentire hotel disgorged on to the pave-ment and milled all around us. Peter con-tinued his earnest colloquy with me, ob-livious to the emergency. Eventually the‘all clear’ was announced and still Peterimpressed his views on me. We eventu-ally staggered inside to the Councilmeeting with Peter totally unaware ofthe Irish interlude.

An extra source of glee was the thought

of Derek Gladwin’s discomfort. Derekwas the long-serving Chairman of theLabour Conference ArrangementsCommittee and, when from time to timewe compared notes, he used to pridehimself on his ruthless ability to keep theConference under control.

The ‘winnable seats’ list, to which wasdirected central financial and other sup-port, always included the ‘traditional’Liberal constituencies – for decadesMerioneth was a favourite target for aid– but studiously avoided seats in indus-trial areas. Leeds had support from theJoseph Rowntree Social Service Trustbut never received anything from any ofthe HQ slush funds.

The evidence for this is among my po-litical papers recently deposited with theBritish Library of Political and EconomicScience (at LSE). I also used much of itduring the committee stage of one of thelocal government bills in the – par-liament, and it can therefore be found inthe Committee Hansard.

This tendency is even more the case withthe Liberal Democrats, who appear tohave impaled themselves on the memo-rable slogan ‘End Equidistance’ with theinevitable consequence that their voteslumped in virtually all constituenciesthat would otherwise be Labour.

Michael Meadowcroft, Liberal Values for aNew Decade (Liberal Publications Depart-ment, ). William Wallace persuadedme to write this booklet and gave valu-able editing comments. In particular heencouraged me to make explicit the dif-ference between Thatcherite ‘economicliberalism’ and genuine ‘political liberal-ism’. Curiously, William’s drafts for therecent Liberal International th Anni-versary manifesto incorporate laudatory

How the Alliance worked ....‘At one session, Steel stormed out .... [When hereturned,] the photographer had to stand on his head tomake everyone smile. [He] kept calling them Roy Rogers,Dr Death and so on. They behaved like children, the waythey fought and sulked.’

Consultant from Gold Greenlees Trott (who handled theSDP account in the 1983 campaign)

‘From the beginning, I knew it would have been betterwithout involving Roy, but Bill and Shirley were vacillating.... In the beginning, it was truly a Gang of Three, andwe should have kept it that way.’

David Owen, 1984

‘The others could never have done it without me .... I wasthe founder. I delivered the Dimbleby Lecture. I made thefirst radical move ....’

Roy Jenkins, 1984

‘David Owen has no tolerance for failure. He virtually toldJenkins to leave. He said, “you’re of no use to us now”.’

Bill Rodgers, 1984

‘I was against going to bed with the Liberals from thebeginning. We should have run against them in the earlybyelections and beat them into the ground. Then wewould have had more clout in the negotiations.’

David Owen, 1984

‘Yes. We did make one tactical error. We underestimatedthe capacity of the Alliance to make a mess of its owncampaign’

Norman Tebbitt (Conservative press conference, 1987)

‘The press operations should have reflected the strategymore .... But of course there was no strategy really.’

Graham Watson, on the 1987 campaign


support for economic liberalism. Michael Meadowcroft, Social Democracy

– Barrier or Bridge? (Liberator Publica-tions, ). It is interesting that DavidSteel began by believing that the SDPshould fight one hundred seats (DavidSteel, Against Goliath, page ).

To complete the ‘set’ I also wrote twoother Liberator Publication booklets:Liberalism and the Left (), and Liber-alism and the Right ().

It was a time for setpiece debates and Itook part in very well-attended occasionswith David Marquand (which was pub-lished as Liberalism and Social Democracy(Arena, LPD, )), Tony Benn, at theHarrogate Assembly , and with KenLivingstone, at LSE, in .

Roy Jenkins was reliably reported as hav-ing attempted to join the Liberal Partyon three occasions: firstly in the lates, when he was allegedly dissuadedby Lady Violet Bonham Carter, then inthe s when the Labour Party wasturning against European unity, and fi-nally at the end of his Presidency of theEuropean Commission and before theSDP ‘project’ was mooted, when he wasurged by David Steel to launch the SDPinstead. David Steel has denied that RoyJenkins formally applied to join the Lib-eral Party and told me that the only La-bour MP actually to ask about member-ship was Neville Sandelson!

Roy Jenkins, in his short period in of-fice as the first SDP leader, had a verydifferent style, and did not ruffle feath-ers in the way David Owen managed to,hence the concentration on the Owenleadership period.

One SDP recruit, Chr istopherBrocklebank-Fowler, was elected as aConservative MP.

When I gently warned Barbara Lyons ofthis new challenge she looked surprised,‘Oh, I think we’ll be all right – they’vealways been happy to vote for Edward’.

The only defector to resign and fight thesubsequent byelection, in Mitcham andMorden, was a late recruit, Bruce Doug-las-Mann. His timing was exquisite, withthe byelection taking place at the heightof Falklands hype. Bruce duly got clob-bered.

One such difficult councillor recruit, fromthe Conservatives, was in Huddersfield,where the man in question wrote longand often accusatory letters on an antiquetypewriter with a bi-coloured ribbon. Hewent to the amazing trouble of switch-ing to the red half of the ribbon for theletter ‘D’ every time he typed ‘SDP’!

The SDP’s national nominee in Yorkshirewas John Horam, who ended up as aConservative Minister.

These were Liverpool Broadgreen,Hackney South and Shoreditch, andHammersmith. Official Liberal HQspeakers spoke for the SDP candidate –

and, therefore, against the official Lib-eral Party candidate – in Broadgreen.

Sue Robertson, who ran the SDP Whips’office with great efficiency, once told methat I was David Owen’s favourite Lib-eral MP. I implored her not to spreadthis information.

I shared this office with Simon Hughes,who has been a long-time friend. Thisfriendship was occasionally strained bySimon’s addiction to clerical colonialism,in that his papers encroached inexora-bly across the floor, forcing me into asmaller and smaller corner!

The early chapters of the first edition ofDavid Owen’s book, Face the Future(Jonathan Cape, ), contained muchthat strikes chords with Liberals. See, forinstance, the positive references to earlylibertarian thought in the Fabian move-ment, pages and .

The phrase comes from H. H. Asquith,referring to himself in contrast to theCoalition Liberals, November .

For once, I kept a diary of those earlyParliamentary Party meetings and this isin my papers recently deposited in theBritish Library of Political and Eco-nomic Science, at LSE.

It was at this time that the role of the PolicyCommittee was enhanced with seriousattempts to make it a genuine partnershipbetween the Parliamentary Party and theparty in the country. Also LINk (LiberalInformation Network) was formed, par-ticularly with Leighton Andrews and Vir-ginia Morck, as a vehicle for new Liberalthinking on topical issues.

Contrary to what one what might havebeen assumed, the relationship betweenSteel and Beith was neither warm norcooperative. Alan Beith appeared to haveno great belief in Steel’s capabilities andDavid Steel appeared to suspect Beith ofpermanently angling for the leadership.See, for instance, the whispers that Beithknew in advance about the contents ofthe ‘Dead Parrot’ document but keptquiet, hoping that it would bring Steeldown and open the way to Beith becom-ing leader – an allegation that I believeto be wholly wrong and mischievous (seeIvor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP –The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Demo-cratic Party (OUP, ), p. ).

One exception was the Labour SeatsCommittee, financed personally by CyrilSmith, but largely coordinated by me,with the late Mike Harskin as its some-what capricious, often brilliant but oc-casionally wayward staff person. This ini-tiative produced material specifically ofuse to those colleagues whose main op-ponent was Labour.

The local situation was not helped bythe embarrassing hijacking of the Lib-eral nomination for my vacated citycouncil seat by a candidate who turnedout to be an undischarged bankrupt as

well as being unstable. Efforts to con-tain the problem only exacerbated it andhe eventually defected.

This was not the only reason for losingWest Leeds. The pervasive and clever(though legal) use of city council fundsto promote the Labour candidate cer-tainly had an effect, as no doubt did ahighly unpleasant libel action whichtook four years to win against theMurdoch and Maxwell empires. As statedelsewhere in this essay, Owen’s admis-sion that, if the coalition opportunityarose, he would prefer to do a deal withMrs Thatcher rather than with NeilKinnock was a serious blow.

These are in the papers recently depos-ited at BLPES.

Typically it was an abrasive and toughnegotiation with Owen over the word-ing of the motion, but, once agreed itstayed agreed.

Radical Quarterly , Autumn . Across the Divide, Liberal Values for Defence

and Disarmament (LINk, September).

Britain United – The Time has Come, theSDP-Liberal Alliance Programme forGovernment, . The same sweateredand smiling leaders’ picture as on themanifesto was on many posters aroundthe country, with the accompanying slo-gan ‘The only fresh thing on the menu’.In West Leeds some wag added ‘Sell-bydate: th June’.

Alex de Mont, David Owen’s econom-ics adviser.

Pitchford and Greaves, Merger: The InsideStory.

‘I wouldn’t say that there was muchwrong with the document itself ’. DavidSteel on the ‘Dead Parrot’ policy state-ment, BBC Radio , March .

Merger or Renewal? A Report to the JointLiberal Assembly, – January ,Michael Meadowcroft.

Jo Grimond, when asked once in a tel-evision interview, whether the Liberalvote was to a large extent a protest vote,replied, ‘Well, there’s a great deal to pro-test about.’

A typically biblical phrase used by SirFrank Medlicott at the Liberal Assem-bly of , following his return to theLiberal Party after spending years asa ‘National Liberal and Conservative’ MP.Clement Davies, Liberal leader from to , once said that the NationalLiberals were ‘Liberals to save their soulsand National Liberals to save their seats.’

Jo Grimond was typically contrary, inthat he was opposed to the Lib-Lab Pactbut, generally and far from uncritically,supported the Alliance.

Alan Watkins told me that he anticipatedit being a disastrous session but that ithad turned out to be one of the moststimulating party conference debates hehad experienced.


In September representatives of the LiberalParty and the SDP sat down together to begin acourtship that ended in marriage six months later.The courtship was extremely difficult and on morethan one occasion nearly ended in disaster. Yet themarriage has turned out to be remarkably happy.Like the White Nile and the Blue Nile meeting atKhartoum, the two streams retained their distinctiveidentity for a while but then merged into an almostindistinguishable whole.

SDP conference) in Portsmouth in late August.This was a sad and angry event – so much sothat a supporter and opponent of merger cameto blows one evening in a restaurant. The CSDadopted a resolution authorising negotiationsfor merger to proceed.

Shortly afterwards, the Liberals held theirAssembly at Harrogate. This was a much morecheerful occasion, at which the principle ofmerger was approved by an overwhelmingmajority. However, a decision that was takenthere – to create a negotiating team of peo-ple – was responsible for much of the subse-quent trouble. The Assembly decided to electeight members of the negotiating team; by thetime ex-officio members and representativesof the Scottish and Welsh Liberals had beenadded, the number had risen to . It shouldhave been obvious that this was far too big tobe a serious negotiating body. Meetings be-came far too long drawn out and turned intodebates on party lines. Things would havegone far more smoothly if there had been nomore than five or six negotiators on each side.However, once the Liberals had decided onsuch a large team, the SDP had no option butto follow suit.

Another decision which was arguablywrong, and for which the SDP was rather moreto blame than the Liberals, was the decision toinclude the two party leaders as members ofthe negotiating teams. It was understandablethat Robert Maclennan wished to be a mem-ber of the team. He was extremely interestedin party constitutional issues and very skilledat them. He had been responsible for devisingthe SDP constitution (which I had drafted onhis instructions) and was naturally keen onplaying an active role in the planning of thenew party’s constitution. But his direct involve-ment had two unfortunate consequences. First,if the leaders had remained outside the day-to-day negotiations they could have acted as akind of appellate body to which questions on

The Merger ProcessAn SDP RetrospectWillie Goodhart looks back at the merger process from the perspective ofthe SDP negotiating team. Could it have been handled differently?

The merger negotiations started against thedepressing background of the SDP split. Afterthe failure to achieve a breakthrough in the elections, some of us in the SDP felt thatwe needed to start talking with the Liberalsabout merger. However, a vote at the SDP au-tumn conference in Salford (a gloomy eventin a gloomy location, cheered up only by a bril-liant maiden platform speech by the party’sonly new MP, Charles Kennedy) made it clearthat most of the party was not yet ready. Fouryears of tedious haggling over seat allocation(single-party selection, joint closed selection,joint open selection – remember them?) andthe fiasco of the two Davids’ campaign in changed people’s minds and convinced manyof us that merger was essential.

This view was emphatically not shared byDavid Owen. Over the opposition of nearlyhalf the members of the SDP’s National Com-mittee (including my wife Celia) he forced theparty into a highly divisive referendum imme-diately after the general election. The ‘Yes toUnity’ campaign (run from our house) wonabout per cent of the vote. Owen refusedto accept the result and resigned as party leader,being replaced by Robert Maclennan who hadopposed merger but was willing to accept theparty’s decision. This was followed by the meet-ing of the Council for Social Democracy (the


which the negotiators were dead-locked could be referred. Second,Maclennan’s involvement meant thatSteel necessarily became the leaderof the Liberal team. It was the im-pression of the SDP team – and Ithink of the Liberal team as well –that David was as deeply bored byconstitutional minutiae as Robertwas fascinated by them. But thesewere crucial to the negotiating proc-ess, and the result was that the Lib-eral team had no effective leadership.On the one hand, David was unwill-ing or unable to browbeat the moreobstreperous members of his team,with the result that the SDP was onseveral occasions enraged by the un-picking by the Liberals of issueswhich we thought had been agreed.On the other hand, David was notprepared to put up a stiff enoughfight against us, with the result thaton some issues we won when thiswas not in the long-term interest ofthe new party.

On policy issues the parties werenot in fact very far apart. If that hadnot been the case, it would not havebeen possible to form the Alliance.Even on defence, the Liberal Partynever called for unilateral nucleardisarmament or withdrawal fromNATO. The difference was that the

Liberals – unlike the SDP – had alarge unilateralist minority, and theofficial position of the party wastherefore less clearly multilateralistthan the SDP’s. The vote at the Liberal Assembly at Eastbournewhich did so much harm to the Al-liance was not a call for unilateral-ism but a rejection of the absurd pro-posal for an Anglo-French bomb.This had been floated by the twoDavids to try to make good thedamage done by Owen’s rubbishingof the sensible ideas of the joint Al-

liance Commission on defencepolicy. On other issues, there was lit-tle serious difference except on nu-clear energy, which the SDP sup-ported while the Liberals passion-ately opposed it.

The cultural differences betweenthe parties were much deeper.Those of us from the SDP who paidfraternal visits to Liberal Assembliesfound them lively, stimulating andobviously much enjoyed by the par-ticipants. We also found them anar-chic and self-indulgent, with im-portant policy decisions being takenwith little or no preparation; toomany points of order and othertime-wasting technicalities; consti-tutional amendments being passedby unrepresentative groups of del-egates at early-morning sessions;and annual pleas by the party head-quarters for a little financial supportfrom the constituency parties. Allthis contributed to the public im-age of the Liberals as a well-mean-ing but disorganised bunch, domi-nated by beards and sandals (andanyone who thinks that that was notthe public image should ask them-selves why our opponents continueto call us ‘Liberals’).

The SDP, on the other hand, wasperhaps too intellectual and too

centralist. We were full of journal-ists, academics and lawyers. We haddebates of high quality and producedwell-thought-out, well-written pa-pers on national policy, but we werebasically uninterested in local poli-tics. Few of us had much interest inFocus leaflets on the aspects of com-munity politics which had, by ,enabled the Liberals to build a sig-nificant base in local government.The SDP was also a very centralistparty in terms of organisation. Mem-bership was recorded on a national

list. There was almost no regionalstructure, and the words ‘Scotland’and ‘Wales’ did not appear in theparty constitution. Control of theparty’s administration rested firmlyin the hands of the National Com-mittee. The Council for Social De-mocracy had limited policy-makingpowers but had no power to debateor decide on questions of party ad-ministration. SDP local parties werevery much under the control of theparty’s HQ. The SDP’s centralismwas understandable in the context.The Gang of Four were not certainwhat kind of members their newparty would attract; they were afraidthat unless they retained tight cen-tral control it would end up as some-thing quite different from what theywanted. As it turned out their fearswere unjustified, but the centralismwas hard to abandon.

The task for the negotiators wasto reconcile these very different cul-tures. This was a long and painfulprocess. I do not propose to go intoany detail about it; the merger ne-gotiations have been described fullyby Rachael Pitchford and TonyGreaves in their book, Merger: theInside Story (see review on page ).Their book, though written from aviewpoint very different from mine,is an excellent description of thenegotiations and factually reliable.They were of course not in a posi-tion to report on internal debateswithin the SDP negotiating team,but these were far less interestingand dramatic than the internal de-bates within the Liberals. With theexception of John Grant (who wasbasically an Owenite and dislikedthe whole concept of merger) and,to a lesser extent, Will Fitzgerald,the team worked on a commonagenda and had no great difficultyin reaching a consensus on almostall issues.

We were also very defensive, fear-ing that the Liberal Party, with itsmuch larger numbers, would domi-nate the new party. This was to aconsiderable extent a mistakenanalysis. In the first place, it is by nomeans certain that the numbers ofthe Liberal Party were as large as all

David was not prepared to put up a stiffenough fight against us, with the result thaton some issues we won when this was notin the long-term interest of the new party.


that. In the absence of a centralmembership register and with thepractice in many constituency par-ties of keeping names on their listslong after they had stopped payingsubscriptions, the claimed Liberalmembership of , was probablya considerable exaggeration. In thesecond place, there were many Lib-erals – not just those close to theSDP, such as Richard Holme andAlan Watson – who wanted a moreefficient and coherent party struc-ture. Many of us had met such peo-ple at constituency level and hadfound them easy to work with. Weunderestimated their influence,partly because they were not ad-equately represented on the Liberalnegotiating team.

The negotiations were helped bythe fact that relationships of trustwere developed at two key levels –between Andy Ellis and DickNewby as the parties’ Chief Execu-tives (helped by the fact that Dickhad made it clear that he did notwish to become the Chief Execu-tive of the new party), and betweenPhilip Goldenberg and myself as theconstitutional draftsmen. The closeworking relationship between Philipand me enabled us to produce draftswith great speed, and with the con-fidence that neither of us was tryingto steal a march on the other. The

negotiations were, however, consid-erably hindered by the Liberal PartyCouncil – a body whose main func-tion appeared to be to intervenefrom time to time to reject agree-ments reached by the negotiatingteams. This strengthened the resolveof the SDP team to ensure that therewas no equivalent body in the con-stitution of the new party.

The negotiations involved a lotof discussion about the federal struc-ture of the party. The SDP team hadlittle difficulty in accepting that ourown constitution was too centralist(particularly for a party supportingdevolution in national politics!) andthat a federal structure was necessary.The Liberals equally accepted thatthe Scottish Liberals should be partof a federal party rather than (as theyhad previously been) a legally inde-pendent body. There were, however,long arguments about the nature ofthe federal structure – argumentswhich were rather more betweenthe Scottish and English Liberalsthan between the Liberals and theSDP. At any rate, agreement wasreached, though it had to be substan-tially modified by the review of theLiberal Democrat constitution in.

The issues on which the SDP feltmost strongly were a national mem-bership register; an elected, and

therefore representative, conference;and a deliberative policy-makingprocess. On these, we scored perhapstwo and a quarter out of three. Anational register was adopted(though with a separate register forScotland). This was undoubtedly theright decision. Information technol-ogy had of course only recentlymade an effective national registerpracticable, but the register has re-lieved local parties of a lot of time-consuming record-keeping and sub-scription renewal duty. A nationalregister has also made it possible forthe national party to communicatedirectly with its members, to financeits own activities more effectivelyand to conduct party-wide electionson the basis of a proper register ofmembers. The Labour Party has nowfollowed us into a national registerand the Conservatives will probablyhave to follow suit.

The negotiations on the com-position of the conference ended inthe Liberals’ favour. Although vot-ing membership of the Liberal As-sembly was, in theory, not self-se-lected, the number of places allo-cated to constituency parties was solarge and there were so many al-ternative routes to becoming an as-sembly delegate (through bodiessuch as the students’ or women’s or-ganisations) that, in practice, anyparty member who wanted to at-tend and vote could do so. The SDPteam believed that this made assem-blies unrepresentative and, in par-ticular, gave the Young Liberals dis-proportionate influence. We weretherefore anxious to limit thenumber of voting conference rep-resentatives to a level which wouldmake it likely that there would becontests in most local parties forelection to the conference. We didnot achieve this. Although the al-ternative routes to conference wereeliminated (except for students,whom we acknowledged to be aspecial case because they would notnormally be active in their localparties) the number of places allo-cated to local parties (which wasfurther increased by the re-view) was large enough to mean

Now you see it, now you don’t; Alliance leaders Steel and Maclennan explain tothe media why the policy declaration is not available (13 January 1988).


that most active party memberswho wanted to attend conferenceas voting representatives were ableto do so, either as elected membersor substitutes.

It has to be admitted, with hind-sight, that the compromise over con-ference membership has proved to

be justified. There are advantages –both in presenting ourselves to theoutside world as a substantial party,and in improving party morale byinvolving a large number of mem-bers in the work of the party’s gov-erning body – of having a large vot-ing membership. The SDP’s fears thata large conference, mostly electedwithout a contest, would behave ir-responsibly have proved to be un-justified.

On the policy-making process,the balance swung back towards theSDP, with the acceptance of theprinciple that policy-making shouldbe a deliberative process based onproperly researched and arguedpolicy papers commissioned by theFederal Policy Committee. The ac-tual process adopted in the originalLiberal Democrat constitutionproved to be too elaborate and hadto be altered by the review, butthe principle remains. In practice,almost all major policy commit-ments follow from the approval ofPolicy Committee motions based onpolicy papers. The process has giventhe Liberal Democrats a broadly co-herent and well-argued set of poli-cies which could not, in my view,had been achieved by the more in-formal methods of policy formationin the Liberal Party.

The final battle of the negotiat-ing process came down to two is-sues – the inclusion of a reference

to NATO in the preamble to theconstitution, and the name of thenew party. In my view, the first ofthese was necessary. There was a sig-nificant degree of concern in theSDP about Liberal defence policy,particularly in view of the East-bourne Assembly vote. While I be-

lieve that this concern was largelyunjustified, it undoubtedly existedand, in the absence of a clear com-mitment to NATO on behalf of thenew party, there was a real likelihoodthat the SDP would have rejectedmerger. The Liberal argument that areference to NATO was inappropri-ate as part of the new party’s consti-tution may have been correct inprinciple but ignored the politicalrealities. None of us could haveknown that within four years notonly the Warsaw Pact but the SovietUnion itself would have broken up– making the removal of NATOfrom the preamble in entirelyuncontroversial.

The name was another matter.This was the prime example of theSDP team’s more effective negoti-ating skill enabling us to win battleswhich it would have been better forus to have lost. The unwieldy ‘So-cial and Liberal Democrats’ was aname which was deeply unpopularwith most of the party and subjectedus to ridicule by our opponents. Weshould have called ourselves ‘LiberalDemocrats’ from the beginning.

There was one last sting in thetail of the negotiations – the infa-mous ‘dead parrot’ policy declaration.This represented a compromise be-tween the SDP demand that the newparty should start with establishedpolicies and the Liberal insistencethat the negotiations were about

party structure, with the new partybeing left free to determine its ini-tial policy position. The compromise– not in itself unreasonable – wasthat there should be a non-bindingpolicy declaration, agreed betweenMaclennan and Steel. The negotiat-ing teams played no part in its com-position. It was presented to the SDPnegotiating team the evening beforeits publication, after several hours oftense negotiations on the issues ofNATO and the name. It has to besaid, in the light of the furore whichit caused the next day, that in thebrief time we were given to study itnone of us objected to it or saw it aslikely to create problems, though itwas hardly a ringing call to arms.

What is strange is that DavidSteel, who should have been farmore closely attuned to Liberal sen-sitivities, so completely failed toforesee that it would be unaccept-able to his colleagues. This was aself-inflicted wound, because thepolicy differences of the SDP andthe Liberals were (as I have saidabove) less significant than the dif-ferences of style and organisation.It should have been relatively easyto agree an acceptable policy state-ment – and indeed such a statementwas quickly hammered out, thoughtoo late to save us from a seriousattack of psittacosis.

And yet, in the end, the mergerhas worked. The SDP has given ourparty an efficient party structure anda well-regarded policy-making proc-ess. The Liberals have given it inter-nal democracy and a commitmentto community politics which hasbeen the foundation of its remark-able success in local government.This is not a bad record. We builtbetter than we knew.

Willie (Lord) Goodhart, a barrister,helped write the SDP and LiberalDemocrat constitutions, and has beenchair of both parties’ Conference Com-mittees. He speaks in the Lords on homeaffairs and social security issues.

The name was another matter. This wasthe prime example of the SDP team’s more

effective negotiating skill enabling us towin battles which it would have been

better for us to have lost.


The astonishing thing about the four years in whichthe Alliance was captained by Davids Steel andOwen is the amount of time spent by hundreds ofidealistic people in sterile argument about theinternal ar rangements of the two parties’cohabitation. That their joint and several leadershipfailed to overcome this was without doubt its greatestfailure. Steel and Owen failed to unite their followersbehind a coherent vision of an alternative course toThatcherism. Why?

of the two. Owen was a moving star in thefirmament, exploring new galaxies, picking upcosmic dust in the post-Keynes explosion. Ina new party, where many perceived the manifesto to have been proven a losing propo-sition, he found room to develop these ideas.Steel was firmly wedded to the John Rawlsethic of social Liberalism, as was the LiberalParty whose policy-making process he neversought to dominate.

Owen and Steel were never, in the latter’s general election quip, ‘Tweedledum andTweedledee’. On the contrary, they were de-cidedly ‘not bosom pals’. Relations rangedfrom the acid spreading of stories by the Owencamp about Steel having suffered a nervousbreakdown to the farcical combined familylunch at Steel’s Pimlico flat where only claretor whisky were on offer, while Owen likedlager and champagne. Nor were the woolly-jumpered Judy or the debonaire Debbie wellmatched to smooth the course of convivialitybetween their respective husbands.

At work, both leaders were under attack.Owen was opposed in succession by Jenkins,Williams and Rodgers and by a growing sec-tion of the SDP, in particular by those whofavoured merger with the Liberals. Steel’s strat-egy of realignment was challenged ever moreirately in a Liberal Party which, in Jo Grimond’swords, tended at moments of greatest need toturn to putty in its leader’s hands. The furiousmonotony of party controversy was a drag fac-tor in both men’s approaches to Alliance. Thesolidarity between them which it might haveengendered showed itself only in brief flashesof uncharacter istic mutual generosity;schadenfreude was the more ready emotion inboth camps.

Defence policy – the issue which, as Creweand King point out, disrupted the Labour Partyfor much of the postwar period – became aconsiderable problem for the Alliance. ForDavid Owen, a hawkish position was a talis-man. For Steel, it was a betrayal of mankind’spotential. Yet major decisions, such as the sit-ing of cruise missiles in the UK and the re-placement for Polaris nuclear submarines, arose

The Two DavidsGraham Watson examines how much the failure of the Alliance was dueto the failures of its leaders.

Richard Holme has described the Allianceas a tragic comedy: in the first act (–)the political space opens for the Liberal Partyto be taken seriously and the SDP to form; inthe second (–) the two parties mountthe strongest third-party challenge since thewar to the established two-party hegemony andalmost equal Labour in the polls; and in thethird (the denouement, –) it all goeshorribly wrong. No progress is made and theAlliance subsequently collapses in a hailstormof recriminations. Perhaps unjustly, but inevi-tably, the buck stops at the top.

A major difficulty lay in the similarity of theirpersonal appeal. Both in their mid-forties, bothtelegenic politicians, each ambitious and with acertain flair. They were natural rivals. But theirdifferences posed substantial problems too. Owenrepresented the well-to-do, Oxbridge-educated,English upper-middle classes. He was steepedin the easy graces of money and cosmopolitansociety. Steel sought refuge in a more calvinistic,self-denying, introverted Scots tradition. His wasthe way of the campaigner for the common man.While the differences might in other circum-stances have been complementary, each mantended to deny his hinterland and approach. Butthese governed for each the ground rules onwhich their relationship had to be based. Andthe rules were different. For Steel, personalfriendship was a prerequisite. For Owen, a busi-ness partnership would suffice.

The second determinant in the affair wasthe difference between the political approaches


during the parliament. Steel, withone eye on public opinion and theother on Alliance unity, attempted tomove the Liberal Party away fromwhat he regarded as a dangerouscourse of unilateral nuclear disarma-ment. Liberal opponents, some withpersonal ambitions to the leadershipand others in opposition to merger,exploited the issue successfully topromote their case by wounding theirleader (in the case of the former, onlyto back down from their policy po-sition a year later). Steel then let slipsome details of the contents of thereport of the joint commission on de-fence policy and Owen hastily over-reacted, thus dashing a subsequentattempt at compromise too close toa general election for recovery.

Agreement between the partieson individual policies was renderedall the more difficult by a fundamen-tal difference of approach betweentheir leaders. Thatcherism was theorder of the decade. Owen was pre-pared to come to terms with it; Steelwas not. Nor was public oppositionto Thatcherism ever quite strongenough to catapult the Alliance for-ward. The runes of the opinion pollswere pored over and re-read. Thebusiness community was tested. Butclass warfare was still a powerful de-terminant of the island’s politics. MrsThatcher’s troops had survived theirwobbly start. She was at the centreof Thatcherism, and neither Owen’ssub-Thatcherite posture nor Steel’ssteely opposition to its social conse-quences satisfied the appetite of amiddle class engaged in a nihilismnot seen in Britain since the s.

The Tories were blessed by a di-vided opposition. The Alliance couldmake little headway against a LabourParty whose low water mark hadbeen met under Michael Foot. NeilKinnock, though never to enjoy thecredit, had put his party back afloaton a rising tide. The Alliance’s in-ability to appeal to Labour support-ers was clear from its very lack ofclarity. While Steel met the Notting-hamshire miners and the TUC dur-ing the coal dispute, Owen courtedcoal boss Ian McGregor, the govern-ment’s hatchet man.

On issues of constitutional re-form, agreement between Liberalsand their SDP counterparts wasnever hard to find. Yet as an issue ofinterest to the electorate, constitu-tional reform never found the po-tency in the s which it was togenerate a decade later. Despite theAlliance’s best efforts, it was not suf-ficient as a basis for a winning cam-paign in a general election in whichthe two parties still talked of the is-sues which interested them ratherthan those which interested the vot-ers. Would a consistent message havebeen possible on other issues? Re-form of pensions policy, attitudes tothe National Health Service, ap-proaches to crime and policing, themerits of public versus private trans-port; all were areas where disagree-ment was never more than paperedover. For the local governmentelections, the SDP launched itsmanifesto without informing theLiberals of either timing or content.The parties were engaged separatelyin creative thinking.

It is tempting in a third party toblame the media for failing to givefair coverage to one’s ideas. In thes such concerns were amply jus-tified, as a former editor of The Timeshas made clear in a seminal auto-biographical work. With control ofthe public print and broadcastingmedia in fewer minds, and with theAlliance unable to open them, the

medium for communicating a dis-tinctive message was severely limited.In defence of the media, however,there was rarely a distinctive Alliancemessage to communicate.

Nor were the two parties organ-ised in any synchronous fashion tofight a common campaign. Muchcan be ascribed to mutual fear. If theimbalance in numbers of MPs hadfavoured the SDP before , feed-ing Liberal paranoia, the conversewas true from ’ to ’. An earlyAlliance slogan had been ‘workingtogether’: yet while in some con-stituencies party members were be-ing told by party headquarters towork together against their wishes,in others they were ordered not tounite behind a general electionstandard-bearer even where localagreement was possible.

The obvious question to any thirdparty is: ‘faced with the choice, whichof the other parties would you putin to government?’ This proved therock on which the Alliance was tofounder. Interviewed on WeekendWorld on April , before theelection was announced, Owen skil-fully refused to be drawn on whichparty he preferred, as had Steel on anumber of occasions. But on May,in a lengthy general election inter-view on Panorama in which the twoDavids were interviewed together by

The end of the road: Richmond at the end of the 1987 campaign.

Concluded on page .


most frustrating of all, in . Perhaps it wasthe iron that entered the soul after thebloodletting and internecine struggles of thelate ’s which saw some former colleagues onboth wings of the old Alliance opt not formerger and reconciliation but for illusion andoblivion. Or perhaps, once merger had becomea reality, it was the sheer grind of keeping athird party in British politics on the road, brav-ing the disappointments – long on hope andshort on almost everything else.

Today, I doubt if party activists give a sec-ond thought to the provenance of their col-leagues. Certainly, the stereotypes can no longerbe sustained. We are all – male or female –sharp-suited, mobile-phoning, Peugeot own-ers now.

Indeed, the Liberal Democrats, a new partyno longer, are a force in the land. We control,or significantly influence, councils across muchof Britain, with nearly , councillors onprincipal local authorities. Most remarkable ofall, there is now a parliamentary party of realsubstance, comprising MPs. This is the largestthird force in parliament since the days of LloydGeorge, despite a rather modest nationalvote of just over %. A new generation is be-ginning to emerge for whom the Alliance isno more than a distant memory.

But, in , with a brave new politicalworld waiting to be born, none of this couldhave been foreseen. Could it have turned outdifferently? After all, the events of that yearpromised a great deal. By the time of the spe-cial Labour conference at Wembley, in January, the prospect of a substantial break-outfrom the Labour Party had becomeunstoppable and, with the birth of the SDP inMarch , the extent of the electoral possi-bilities were becoming apparent. Alone, theSDP registered extraordinary levels of support.But, combined with the Liberal Party, thewhole really did seem greater than the sum ofits parts and, for a time, led both Conservativeand Labour in the opinion polls. True, the Lib-eral Party, after the Orpington byelection vic-

There was a time, early in the life of the LiberalDemocrats, when political pedigree mattered.Indeed, it revealed itself in the familiar stereotypes:sharp suits, Volvos and hands dirtied by mailshotsfor the SDP; corduroy and sandals, Morris Travellers,and ink-stained Focus hands for the Liberals.

The Alliance and AfterThe Travelling of a Necessary RoadWas it all worth it? Stuart Mole looks back at the Alliance years.

History was everything: who had been atthe defining battles of the early days of the Al-liance – at Warrington, at Croydon, at Crosbyand at Bermondsey? Who were founder mem-bers of the SDP, and what had been the sacri-fices that had been necessary for those, in par-ticular, who had taken the difficult route fromthe higher echelons of the Labour Party? Whohad done what in the seat negotiations – andto whom? What mattered most: Westminstercredibility, and connections with the great andthe good, or street credibility, and years of com-munity politics and municipal power?

Of course, it was a divide to do with sub-stance and interest, as much as with historyand style. Many had a lot to lose by gamblingon political realignment. Some had put at risktheir parliamentary seats and staked their repu-tations and careers, in the process turning theirbacks on erstwhile political colleagues. Thatwas particularly true of the Gang of Four: RoyJenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams andBill Rodgers.

Many on the Liberal side had also investedmuch in the status quo: in assiduously culti-vating otherwise barren electoral territory; inbuilding a precious local government base; orin actually winning and holding a parliamen-tary seat. Nor had David Steel any desire toend his respectable career as Liberal leader asthe one who had destroyed a proud and once-great party.

And then there came the moment whendifferences between Liberals and Social Demo-crats ceased to matter at all. Perhaps it was theshared disappointments of electoral hopes andhubris cruelly dashed – in l, in l and,


tory of , had briefly achievedsomething similar, but never at suchconsistent levels of support, not atsuch heights (with the Alliance ac-tually cresting the % mark at onepoint).

What destroyed the dream? Wasit the ‘Falklands Factor’, whichturned Mrs Thatcher from beingBritain’s least popular national leaderon record into one of its most popu-lar ever, with the Tory Party surgingto an unassailable lead of % in theopinion polls after the capture ofPort Stanley? Or was it the descentof the Alliance from the frothyheights of ambition, idealism andhope into the murky realities ofpractical – and worse, coalition –politics?

But the general election of showed it to be a close-run thing.The Liberal-SDP Alliance polled.% – well over . million votes– which was the best result since the election when the Liberals hadscored .% of the vote. Then, amarginally higher vote share hadnetted the Liberals seats. But, in, with its vote too evenly spreadand insufficiently concentrated inmore than a few areas, the tally wasjust Members of Parliament(mostly Liberals). Of the LabourMPs (and Conservative) who hadformed an instant SDP parliamen-tary party back in , scarcely ahandful survived.

Had the Alliance managed toedge ahead of Labour (which diddisastrously, barely managing % ofthe vote), all might have beenchanged. In such circumstances, theremorseless dynamics of the two-party system would have worked inthe Alliance’s favour, pushing Labour

down into third-party status andconsigning it to be ground betweenthe two-party millstones. But it wasnot to be.

Could the SDP have ignored theLiberals, gone out on their own andhoped to clear their rivals from thefield by putting everything into anearly ‘blitzkrieg’? I think not, al-though some might have dreamedso. But most recognised from theoutset that, even if they consideredthe Liberals an insufficiently ad-equate or attractive vehicle for po-litical realignment, competition withit would be electoral suicide. Thatcertainly was the view of Tom Ellis,the then MP for Wrexham, who cir-culated to Labour defectors a secretpaper demonstrating the madness of

a third party in competition with thefourth in a two-party environment.Besides, whatever the froth of opin-ion poll ratings and media hype,some knew that life at the wrongend of the British political systemwas tough. Progress could not bemade just by advertising andmailshots. It needed grassroots or-ganisation and bodies on the ground,and the SDP just did not have thenumbers where it mattered most.

If there was no realistic way for-ward for the SDP than an accom-modation with the Liberals, that wasrather less so for the Alliance part-ner. For the Liberal Party, there wasan alternative strategy: to capitaliseon the steady disillusion by voterswith the two-party system (and inparticular with the then Conserva-tive Government); to encourage po-tential Labour defectors to join theLiberals, rather than form a separateparty; and, above all, to present theLiberal Party, rather than any new

alternative, as the most effective ve-hicle for radical realignment. SirCyril Smith, the former Chief Whip,put it more succinctly: the aimshould be to strangle the new partyat birth.

It is a hypothesis worthy of ex-ploration, and one which perhapsdeserves more original research anda greater historical perspective thanthat offered by a decade or so. Butcertain facts are well established.There is no denying, for example,that David Steel deliberately encour-aged Labour dissidents to proceedwith the new party, once he was surethat something like the SDP waspossible. Indeed, he went further anddiscouraged at least one prominentLabour politician from joining theLiberals, judging that the welcomeaccretion of a handful of LabourMPs over time would have nothinglike the potentially cataclysmic im-pact on British politics that thelaunch of a breakaway group wouldhave as a fresh political force.

What if he had done the oppo-site? What if the Liberal leader hadoffered a sympathetic shoulder topotential defectors and encouragedthe fracture of the Labour Party butenticed recruits into the ranks of theLiberals, rather than elsewhere,warning those tempted to think oth-erwise that a new party would haveno future and would be rigorouslyopposed? Some would have joinedthe Liberals. Perhaps Roy Jenkins.Possibly – but not immediately –Shirley Williams. Probably not BillRodgers – ever. Certainly not – ever– David Owen. The new recruitswould have been far fewer and thepublic impact correspondingly less.But Liberals would have been flat-tered rather than threatened by theirnew allies. Change would have beendigestible. The trauma of seat nego-tiations and policy bartering, and ofinterminable internecine warfare inan Alliance supposedly offering theBritish people a new kind of poli-tics, would have been avoided. Giventhe Liberal Party’s six million votesin February , its growing localgovernment base and its increasinglyeffective campaigning style, it is not

The Alliance will be seen as importantperiod in the creation of a new kind ofmulti-party and consensual politics, very

different from the old adversarial two-partysystem.


unreasonable to believe that it mighthave done at least as well as the Alli-ance electorally, if not better.

Could the Alliance itself havebeen better constructed? There is agreat deal which, with the luxuryof hindsight, many would wish un-done. The public rows over seat ne-gotiations, the disputes over policy(particularly defence), the dis-aster of a ‘Prime Minister designate’,and, in the elections, the im-possibility of two parties and twoleaders, ostensibly part of a singleforce, campaigning in different partsof the country and frequentlywrong-footing each other. Nodoubt it could have been done bet-ter. But certain realities would nothave changed. Once the decisionhad been taken to proceed with thecreation of a new party, some pe-riod of coexistence with the Lib-erals became an inevitability. A new‘merged’ party, constructed from theoutset in part upon the existing Lib-eral Party, would not have been re-motely possible.

Once the Alliance was formed,the most destructive strategy, in myopinion, was to hold to the view thatpolitical allies might in time becomeparty competitors. Such an approachwould in any case have been disas-trous for both the SDP and the Lib-erals had it become reality. As it was,the existence of such a notion fedsuspicions and distrust and inhibitedmoves towards ‘organic’ merger.

The only realistic approach – andone which most embraced, withvarying degrees of enthusiasm – wasto work for an ‘ever-closer union’,an Alliance which was a meeting ofminds and hearts rather than the re-sult of mere political expediency.Even so, it was a process that tookthe best part of decade and wasdeeply enervating and traumatic formany of those involved. It mighthave been done sooner and possiblywith less pain; but, in some shape orform, it was always the price whichthe Alliance – by its very nature –was bound to pay.

There is no denying that therewas much about this time which was

also beneficial, with each partner intheir own way bringing strengths tothe Alliance – and later, the mergedparty – which the other had beenunable to supply. Undoubtedly, theSDP helped in the development ofa greater professionalism – in partystructures, in internal decision-mak-ing and membership, in public rela-tions and fund-raising. It also en-couraged a greater rigour in nationalpolicy creation and in the develop-ment of new ideas (not least throughopening up new and fertile sourcesof thought in academia and else-where). It brought in recruits whowere substantial and respected fig-ures, but it also attracted many more,some of whom had never beforebeen involved in politics.

For their part, the Liberals hada ready-made organisation at con-stituency level, attuned to the re-alities of third party politics andhoned by disappointment and ad-versity into a force of considerabletenacity and commitment. Thesewere the ‘political missionaries’ ofwhich Dick Taverne had spoken,who had developed formidablecampaigning skills and an ability towin and use power at the local gov-ernment level. Liberalism itself – inpolicy terms or in the approach ofindividual activists – also proved tobe a useful antidote to tendencieswhich sometimes erred towards anover-rigid, centralised and authori-tarian view of politics.

Above all, I believe that the Alli-ance will be seen as important pe-riod in the creation of a new kindof multi-party and consensual poli-tics, very different from the oldadversarial two-party system. Back inNovember , in his Dimblebylecture, Roy Jenkins had seen thetwo-party system as a citadel, fromwhich it was necessary to break out,if political realignment, the free flowof ideas and fundamental changewere ever to be possible. DavidSteel’s leadership of the Liberals in-volved an odyssey – stretching overthe course of a decade and more –building upon the ideas of cross-party cooperation developed at the

time of the European referendum of, the experiment of the Lib-LabPact of – and, in particular,the creation of an Alliance which, fora moment, promised everything butwhich, in time, may have beenshown to deliver far more than werealise.

Over more than years, LiberalDemocrats (in whatever their pre-vious manifestation) have learnedthrough these experiences – andthrough the realities of using andsharing power in local government– that ‘coalition’ politics is a neces-sary component of the new politics;and that the third force needs to bestrong and mature enough to copewith the contradictions and pressureswhich such a system entails.

That is surely the reality of thepresent, and Paddy Ashdown’s strat-egy of ‘constructive opposition’. Hemust now lead his parliamentarycolleagues along a difficult pathwhich involves both working withthe Labour Government, on a JointCabinet Committee, to help deliverconstitutional reform, and maintain-ing the Liberal Democrats’ separateidentity and electoral credibility byproviding vigorous oppositionwhere the issues demand. It is a per-ilous task, requiring courage and de-termination. But it is the surest wayof delivering the greatest prize of all– proportional representation. Andit has come a step closer with thesetting up of an independent com-mission on electoral reform –chaired by that great architect of po-litical realignment, Lord Jenkins – torecommend a broadly proportionalalternative to Britain’s present first-past-the-post electoral system.

If proportional representation canbe achieved, the dream of the Alli-ance - the shattering of the old two-party mould – will have been finallyattained and its purpose surely fullyjustified.

Stuart Mole was head of David Steel’soffice, and now works for the Common-wealth Secretariat. He fought Chelms-ford for the Alliance in and .


Lib Dems, like their Liberal predecessors, are by andlarge forward-looking, optimistic creatures. In thatrespect we have been spoilt by the successes of thepast years. Leapfrogging the mainly positivememories of the s to the Alliance era is thereforean uncomfortable process. Last September’s LiberalDemocrat conference at Eastbourne – the scene ofthe ‘Euro-bomb debate’ in – brought backmemories of the inter-party and internal tensionsof the Alliance years

discussions. If Owen, instead of radiating dis-trust and paranoia in the period between thegeneral elections, had built on the legacy of ‘thepartnership of principle’ left him by Roy Jenkinshe could have become leader of a powerful jointmovement and even a joint party.

David Steel suffered from a bad virus im-mediately after the ’ election and took a sab-batical. Owen was widely admired by many atthe time. If he had seized the initiative and builtbridges between the parties instead of deliber-ately blowing them up, in time, with his en-ergy and public profile, he could have becomeleader of a merged party. This would have beena formidable force at the ’ election ratherthan the quarrelsome two-headed creature itappeared to be, and, at the top, was.

Owen, however, saw the relationship aspurely pragmatic. He was clearly keen to ditchthe Liberals as soon as the SDP could politi-cally do so. The Jenkinsites, like the Liberals,saw the Alliance as a meeting of policy minds.Owen and his followers clearly had a differentvision, bound up with a view of him as a ‘manof destiny’ sure to lead the SDP to politicalglory provided it remained a disciplined force.This emphasis on discipline and the destiny ofone man was of course anathema to Liberals.Owen’s argument was that the separate partyidentities needed to be preserved so that eachcould blossom under PR when it was achieved.The irony is that without close cooperationthis could not be achieved, and Owen’s behav-iour was not likely to encourage this.

After the ’ election, as relationships be-tween the two lawyers’ organisations, the Asso-ciation of Social Democratic Lawyers and theAssociation of Liberal Lawyers, were so friendlyand constructive, Anthony Lester and I, the re-spective chairs, fondly imagined that the nextobvious step was to make joint policy in keyareas of legal affairs such as legal aid, or a pro-posed Ministry of Justice. We set up powerful

One Man’s PrideOwen and his Impact on theAllianceTim Clement-Jones regrets the lost opportunities of the Alliance years.

David Owen and his apologists would, I amsure, like to think that this was the age of thegods and Titans when superhuman politicalfeats appeared possible. Certainly many in themedia seemed to believe that he was a colos-sus bestriding the Alliance. The tale, however,ended in the classical way, with human frailtiescausing downfall. Dr Owen’s fatal arrogance ledto a tragic waste of leadership, human effortand most of all political opportunity.

For many it was a disappointing time of failedambitions which still occasionally require treat-ment by expert political therapists. I, for one,am still angry in retrospect about the waste ofenergy that went into internal wrangling, andthe missed political opportunities. Having – de-spite hiccups over seat allocation – started tobuild relationships so well between the partiesbefore the general election, it is galling tolook back and think how little progress we madepolitically over the period from to .

For the election manifesto, it is true wenegotiated on policy between the parties, but itwas a fairly amicable process. Joint home andlegal affairs policies were thrashed out overbreakfast at Eric Avebury’s house in Pimlico be-tween Simon Hughes, Ian Wrigglesworth, EricLyons, John Harris and myself. We did have somedifferences of principle, but this did not sour the


joint groups to reach joint conclu-sions. This was instantly frowned onby the Doctor. Under Owen’s lead-ership this way of working was her-esy in the SDP. Joint working partiesand official joint policy papers wereinitially forbidden (until it was utterlyclear that a commission had to be setup for defence policy in ). In theend, despite strenuous representationsour papers could not be made offi-cial joint publications and the law-yers’ associations published themthemselves as joint papers.

I remember sitting in a Com-mons committee room shortly be-fore the election at a jointmeeting of the two parties’ policycommittees, arguing over the posi-tion of commas in the joint state-ment of defence policy – withNancy Seear threatening to walk out– reflecting that things could havebeen very different. Instead of everyitem in the manifesto being negoti-ated between the parties, often on aline-by-line basis, policies could, aswith our Ministry of Justice proposal,have been thrashed out in jointworking groups over a period ofyears. The joint manifesto could havebeen the distillation of already-agreed policy positions.

Even worse than the manifestodeliberations, the structure for agree-ing strategy and organisation for the general election was byzantinein the extreme. There were two tiersof committees: the ‘Leaders’ AdvisoryCommittee’, which became the jointAlliance Strategy Committee; andthe Joint Planning Committee. Inaddition there were separate electioncommittees for each party, each withtheir own budget. All this has beendocumented in all its ineffectivenessby Des Wilson in Battle for Power.

The ’ general election itselffeatured not only twin campaignmanagers (John Pardoe and JohnHarris), but twin heads for everyfunction. However well we got onwith our opposite number – and inthe candidate briefing area I was for-tunate in John Roper – most of uswho had any depth of involvementsaid ‘never again’. The poster slogan,‘The Only Fresh Thing on the

Menu’, seemed laughable. We allseemed stale by then.

Many of the problems of themerger negotiations and the reactionto merger proposals were in them-selves the result of scar tissue, suchas this, formed during the Allianceyears, when closer relationships andfraternisation were not encouraged.This was discouraging enough forLiberals but little did many of usknow at the time how difficult lifewas for those in the SDP who disa-greed with Owen’s line. I can onlyadmire their tenacity over those yearsin staying with the SDP and argu-ing for merger when the time came.

I was reminded of my own posi-tion on merger before the electionwhen I recently came across a Sep-tember edition of LimehouseGrit (a publication produced by theleft of the SDP), on the front pageof which is an article by me headed‘Stuff Merger!’ arguing that the twoparties’ cultures were very differentand merger was not desirable. If wehad been able to work out a morepositive and cooperative way ofworking between the two parties,without suspicion and paranoia, thenthe post-election pressure for mergerwould not have been nearly so great.

It was hardly surprising, in thelight of the frustration and wasted op-portunities of those years, that DavidSteel raised the banner of merger im-mediately after the election, especiallywhen Owen had tried to rule it outso completely. All credit to him. It had

to be done then if it was to be doneat all. He may not have always beenfully in touch – or wanted to be –with the Liberal Party during his pe-riod as leader, but on that occasionhe certainly reflected its mood.

The SDP stance on the negotia-tions was reached in the shadow ofOwen, with the hope that if the SDPterms were tough enough, he wouldbe reconciled to merger. Some of theaspects of merger which caused suchdifficulty and were only finally re-solved later, such as the name of theparty and some aspects of the pre-amble, could have been resolved ear-lier, I believe, if it had not been forthis doomed belief. As a result it hastaken us years longer than itshould have done, under PaddyAshdown’s generalship, to make themajor parliamentary breakthroughmany of us have worked for anddreamed of since we joined the partyor its predecessors.

The contrast between the twomen’s contribution could not begreater. Don’t tell me that one per-son can’t have a major impact onpolitics. It’s just sad that Owen’sshould have been so irredeemablynegative.

Tim Clement-Jones was Chair of theLiberal Party –, during the mergernegotiations. He has chaired the LiberalDemocrats’ Federal Finance and Admin-istration Committee since and wasdeputy chair of the election cam-paign.


It seems an age since a number of us werecondemned to endless meetings in often miserable– but never smoke-filled – rooms for the mergernegotiations between the Liberals and the SDP. Wasit really only ten years ago? Were we once in separateparties? Did the process of merger really have to beso painful and damaging, given that the party whichemerged became, after the first couple of years, avery congenial party to be in and one which is nowenjoying well-deserved success?

the Tories at the one after.The Social Democrats who backed merger,

and had to put up with undisguised bitternessand calumny from others in their party as aresult, saw merger as essential to the continu-ance of their mission to provide an electableand responsible alternative to the Tories. Theyrealised that what they had achieved in detach-ing so many from the Labour Party and at-tracting significant new support would not lastif they remained in competition with the Lib-erals. They hoped to advance many policieswhich they found they shared with Liberals.

Then there were the fears which made thenegotiations so difficult. Liberals feared thatLiberal identity in the minds of voters wouldbe lost, and that Liberalism itself could be dan-gerously diluted in the philosophy and poli-cies of the new party. They feared that the SDPwas not committed to grassroots campaigning.They feared that the new party would be cen-tralised and undemocratic in its internal struc-tures. Liberal critics of the merger packagefeared that ‘the real Liberal legacy of over ,councillors and a local campaigning force’might ‘just melt away’.

Social Democrats feared that the new partymight retain what they saw as an amateur ap-proach, a disorderly method of policy-makingand a tendency for a limited number of activiststo have disproportionate influence. And even ifthey did not themselves have these fears, theyknew that others did and were anxious not tolose too many people to the Owenite camp. Attimes they feared that the vote for merger atthe SDP conference could be lost, although inreality the Owenites had accepted that mergerwas going to happen and seemed to be lookingforward to being left on their own. Key battlesin the negotiations, such as the ill-fated deci-

Merger Hopes andFearsWere They Realised?Alliance into merger: how has it worked? Rt. Hon. Alan Beith, MPexamines the myths and the realities.

It is instructive to look back to the hopesand fears which surrounded the Alliance andthe merger. Liberals hoped to prevent the dis-sipation and division of their potential supportwhich resulted from competition between thetwo parties. (The effect of such division wasvividly displayed in the later election of WilliamHague to the House of Commons. Either theSDP or the Liberals could have won thatbyelection if both had not been standing.) MostLiberals shared the SDP mission to ‘break themould’ and draw new support from alienatedvoters, although they believed that many in theSDP underestimated the campaigning task andromanticised the prospects of early success.Some Liberals hoped that the central organi-sational skills and presentational flair shown inthe SDP launch could be productively mar-ried with Liberal experience in grass-rootscampaigning. They hoped to release energieswasted in the duplicated processes of the Alli-ance. Some Liberals – although I was not oneof them – believed that the merged party wouldreplace the Labour Party, by pursuing a strat-egy which would fatally wound Labour at thenext election and move into position to tackle


sion on the party name, were hauntedfor some Social Democrats by theghostly apparition of the dreadedDoctor holding a sign pointing hisway for ‘Social’ Democrats and theother way for ‘Liberal’ Democrats. Itwas that perception rather than merestubbornness which led SDP nego-tiators to insist on the inclusion of areference to NATO in the party’s

original constitution and on a namefor the party so unmemorable thatmost people have now forgottenwhat it was. It probably contributedto the near-fatal decision of the lead-ers of the two parties to promote the‘dead parrot’ policy document EvenDavid Owen found it rather tooright-wing, at least at the time.

So, were these hopes and fearsrealised? The main political hope wascertainly not realised at the begin-ning. A combination of the disunitedpicture presented by the merger ne-gotiations and public confusion overthe party’s name and identity meantthat it was in no position to with-stand what turned out to be very un-favourable political circumstances.The new party had disastrous Euro-pean election results and hit % inthe opinion polls. Liberal fears of aloss of identity were briefly realisedwhen the new party, in defiance ofthe cumbersome negotiated settle-ment on the name, resolved to callitself the Democrats. It took a re-versal of that decision in October to restore damaged morale, andthe climb back to viability beganwith successful local elections inMay , followed by the East-bourne byelection success.

The idea that the new partywould replace the Labour Party be-came clearly unsustainable even dur-ing John Smith’s leadership, and wasburied when Tony Blair set about re-

positioning Labour.Success for the Liberal Demo-

crats was slow to come, but it waspainstakingly built at grassroots level,while a more professional approachto national organisation was devel-oped simultaneously. , council-lors and campaigners did not disap-pear. The party organisation did notprove to be an undemocratic mon-

ster – a more orderly conference andpolicy-making structure has largelyproved its value. It was particularlynecessary in setting out a full rangeof policies in the party’s early years,although the policy-making ma-chinery now appears to have beenrather too cumbersome and not suf-ficiently geared to campaigning.

Now at last, however, the newparty’s hopes are being realised. It hasa record number of MPs and is over-shadowing the official opposition ineffectiveness in the House. The Lib-eral Democrats are the second partyin local government. The party hasset much of the policy agenda forthe new parliament, particularly butnot exclusively on constitutional is-sues. Success would not have beenpossible, however, had the party’s

Liberal identity not shone through,confounding the fears of many Lib-erals at the time of merger.

Those key SDP members whohave contributed most to the Lib-eral Democrats are the ones whoseemed most at home in it. Theirinstincts were Liberal and they hadconfidence that the new party theyhad helped to design was seriousabout winning power and modern-ising its methods. Bob Maclennan isan example: at times he was amind-numbingly intransigent nego-tiator in the merger process, but inthe new party he has been largelyresponsible for ensuring that we areclose to the achievement of a seriesof key Liberal policies on constitu-tional issues. As Party Presidents,both he and Charles Kennedy haveunderstood and fostered the inter-nal democracy of the party which isnow unique among the three mainparties. A few careerists in the SDPranks who did not feel at home inthe Liberal Democrats are nowBlairites, but the others have main-tained and in many cases helped toshape a genuinely Liberal identity forthe new party.

Alan Beith has been MP for Berwick-on Tweed since . Liberal Chief Whip–, he is currently Deputy Leaderof the Liberal Democrats and spokesmanon Home Affairs.

Notes: Rachael Pitchford and Tony Greaves,

Merger: The Inside Story (Colne: LiberalRenewal, ), p..

Success would not have been possible,however, had the party’s Liberal identitynot shone through, confounding the fearsof many Liberals at the time of merger.

Gladstone Lectureby Roy Jenkins

6.30pm, Thursday 14 May

Strathclyde University, Richmond Street, Glasgow

Followed by dinner at Ingram HotelSpeakers include David Steel

Tickets for lecture free; dinner £20+wine; contactJudith Fryer, 0141 423 0336 (after 6.00pm).

Organised by Greater Glasgow Liberal Democrats


This short volume lays bare the de-tailed discussions at every meetingof the two parties’ negotiation teams,as well as the Liberal team’s ownmeetings, and various Liberal PartyCouncil meetings and Assembliesalong the way. Both writers have a‘committed standpoint – Liberal,radical and activist’ and they makeno apologies for it. Regardless oftheir own position in the negotia-tions, their’s is the only contempo-rary record of the merger talks, be-ginning in September and con-cluding the following January.

The authors indicate throughoutthat the outcome of the talks – bothin terms of the new party’s consti-tution and the policy documentwhich accompanied it – was unsat-isfactory. In their view, while theSDP team remained united behindtheir leader, Robert Maclennan, indefence of the policy and constitu-tional issues which had initiated theGang of Four’s break from the La-bour Party, David Steel repeatedlyundermined the Liberal position,selling the party out to the SDP.Maclennan and his team took thetalks to the brink on numerous oc-casions, each time forcing a Liberalclimb-down on issues including theparty’s name, the reference to

NATO in the preamble to the con-stitution, the creation of an Englishparty rather than several autono-mous regional units, and the ac-countability of party officers andthe Federal Policy Committee tothe conference and the membershipat large.

In the words of MichaelMeadowcroft, another member ofthe Liberal team, ‘David Steel putsfar less premium on trying to keepthe Liberal Party united’ than didMaclennan. Maclennan’s brief was tostrike a deal which would keep the

SDP intact and, at the conclusion ofthe talks, he even embarked on a latemission to convert David Owen tothe merits of merger. The spectre ofa strong Owenite party competingwith the merged party, or evenblocking merger altogether, was fre-quently used by both Maclennanand Steel to force the Liberals tocompromise. Steel seemed con-vinced that the Liberal Party wouldunite behind the necessity of anaes-thetising Owen’s political appeal.Ultimately, he was wrong andMeadowcroft spurned merger tokeep the independent Liberal flagflying, although Steel probably re-garded that as a price worth payingfor the success of the merger.

While Liberals voted on January by votes to to back merger, the policy dec-laration which accompanied thenew party’s constitution was quicklyabandoned. Pitchford and Greavesreveal little about the writing of the‘dead parrot’ largely because it wasleft almost entirely to the two par-ties’ leaders. Alan Beith’s recollec-tions of this incident would bemuch appreciated, especially be-cause he saw the document in ad-vance of its publication but failedto convince Steel that it wouldprove wholly unacceptable to hisparty. The ‘dead parrot’, redolent ofthe ‘stench of Thatcherism’ accord-ing to Greaves and Pitchford, shred-ded the credibility of the SLD and

ReviewsMerger Most FoulRachael Pitchford and Tony Greaves:Merger: The Inside Story (Liberal Renewal, 1989)Reviewed by Mark Egan

Reading Merger: The Inside Story, it is difficult to imaginehow Pitchford and Greaves had any time to contribute tothe negotiations which led to the merger of the Liberal Partyand the SDP, so painstaking must their note-taking have beenat meetings.

Owen resigns as leader after SDP vote for merger negotiations (7 August 1987)


Writing in , the Americansociologist Downs formulated amodel in which voters try to gainmaximum utility from the outcomeof elections, and parties attempt tomaximise their chances of winning.Parties’ political ideologies will de-velop to maximise their electoralappeal, and will therefore convergetowards the centre from both left andright. Downs presupposed that par-ties were single units or cohesiveteams, following rational calculations

in order to win power.This simple model was later re-

fined by other theorists; intuitivelythere is obviously something to besaid for it. But, as Sykes observes,relatively few academics have everexamined closely the internal struc-tures of parties and how this may af-fect their electoral behaviour andsuccess. Even those who have doneso tend to view internal faction-fighting as being essentially aboutwhich leader or group can seize con-

trol of the party machine; internaldisagreement then ceases as soon asan election is called.

Sykes examines the experience ofthe and ’ election campaigns,and, more broadly, the history of theSDP and the Alliance, in order todiscredit the Downsian economictheory of elections (which would, ofcourse, have predicted Conservativesand Labour converging on the Alli-ance position, instead of maintain-ing quite distinct programmes) and,in particular, the ‘myth of unifiedparties’. In the former, she is notwholly convincing, especially whenviewed from the perspective of May, but in the latter, which is themain theme of the book, she is en-tirely successful. In particular, sheshows how intraparty competitionand conflict can drive leaders andactivists to make decisions whichmay be entirely rational in terms oftheir own perspectives and strategies,while being utterly disastrous whenseen from the outside. Hence thebook’s title.

The SDP is of course a perfectcase study for this approach. Bornout of conflict within one party, anddedicated to ending the strife-rid-den mould of British politics, withina tragically short period it found it-self descending into a new set ofantagonisms: with the Liberals, overthe seats share-out and major policydisagreements; between Jenkinsitesand Owenites; to merge or not tomerge. Sykes painstakingly traces thehistory of these internal struggles,from the foundation of the SDPthrough to merger.

Despite its thorough treatment ofthe basic hypothesis, the book couldbe a good deal better written; per-haps Transaction Books competeswith the bigger publishers by notemploying editors. The two chapterssetting out the background of La-bour and SDP history are annoy-ingly superficial and simplistic; thechapter on the different roles playedby journalists (‘representative’, ‘scep-tic’, ‘prophet’) is interesting but tan-gential; arguments are laboured; andirritating clichés are liberally de-ployed (seats are never ‘won’ or

its leaders at the moment of itsbirth. Revealingly, Paddy Ashdown,the MP least involved with themerger negotiations and thereforeleast tainted with the embarrass-ment they caused to ordinary partymembers, was swiftly elected leaderof the new party.

The book’s main drawback is thatthe mass of detail it contains – whosaid what and when, how negotiat-ing positions were decided and aban-doned, concessions granted andwithdrawn on each side – tends toobscure the reader’s understanding ofwhether or not the talks succeededin their aim of creating a new partywhich amalgamated the best ele-ments of its two antecedents and, ifnot, who was responsible for the fail-

ure. Pitchford and Greaves often be-come engrossed in their own par-ticipation in the talks, littering thetext with unnecessary references tolong-forgotten policy papers, wise-cracks by the negotiating teams andreferences to the food and drink or-dered during nocturnal sessions,without clarifying exactly what wasat issue. This is a shame because thenegotiations were historic, the onlyinstance in this country of two in-dependent political parties jointlydeciding to pool their resources toform one new entity. A broader,more objective academic study ofthe talks is still required. In themeantime, this book is an indispen-sable guide to the merger process.

Falling ApartPatricia Lee Sykes:Losing from the Inside: The Cost of Conflict inthe British Social Democratic Party (Transaction Publishers, second edition, 1990)Reviewed by Duncan Brack

Patricia Lee Sykes’ book makes an interesting addition tothe sparse collection of studies on the SDP and the Alliance,and is about the only one to be rooted in political theory.First published in , and in this edition revised to takeaccount of merger and the first months of the LiberalDemocrats, the book sets out to nail Anthony Downs’‘economic’ theory of party competition in a democracy.


‘gained’ but always ‘stolen’). The epi-logue, added after merger, mighthave been better omitted, since it waswritten at the lowest possible pointin the new party’s existence, andmuch space is taken up with point-less speculation over the future of theOwenite SDP and the Greens – butread it and remember how badthings were in .

The introduction and conclusion,which explore the Downsian theoryand its faults, are much better. So toois the chapter tracing the opinionpolls’ reflections of Alliance disagree-ments, and Alliance leaders’ views ofthe polls and public opinion, whichhelp to explain their own personalstrategies and differences. Steel’s‘challenge’ to Jenkins at EttrickBridge in the midst of the ’ cam-paign, for example, followed pollsconsistently showing Steel to betwice as popular as the SDP leader.Bill Rodgers’ throwing down of thegauntlet to Steel over the seats ne-gotiations in December istraced to his own self-image as theguardian of SDP party interests (and,in this narrow context, his action wasa success – though the Alliance im-mediately fell seven points in thepolls). Jenkins was a consensus poli-tician, Owen a conviction one; per-haps that was the basic tension thattore the SDP apart. And so on.

The best chapters deal with thetwo election campaigns and theirrun-ups and aftermaths, spotlightingthe internal rivalries within the Gangof Four, and the growing animositybetween Steel and Owen. The sham-bles of the campaigns – ‘joint’ me-dia operations that couldn’t coordi-nate with each other, a basic failureto agree on any coherent strategy,leadership manoeuvring with an eyeto internal struggles after the elec-tions – are examined in painful de-tail. The – defence commis-sion and debates are described thor-oughly and accurately. And theDownsian assumption of unifiedparties fighting rational and focusedelection campaigns is left in shreds.

Where the book is most inter-esting and enjoyable is in its use ofinterviews as source material. Sykesapproached her topic systematicallyand thoroughly, interviewing atlength most of the key players, manyof whom are quoted throughoutLosing from the Inside. A few exam-ples will suffice, and more are repro-duced elsewhere in the Journal. Read’em and weep.

‘David Owen, an ambitious, talentedyoung man, found himself withouta party, and so he decided to form anew one .... [At the same time] Roy

Jenkins believed that he was form-ing a new party. Actually, there weretwo formations of the SDP but, aswe know, only one SDP ....’

SDP supporter and journalist,

‘I do not believe the Dimbleby lec-ture has any major significance in thecreation of the SDP .... I found theDimbleby lecture an impediment forconcentrating people’s minds on theneed to try and fight genuinely fromwithin.’

David Owen,

‘I suppose we’ve always had differ-ent approaches to the party. Owendisapproved of my Dimbleby lecture.He was not ready for it. He is not asradical as I am .... I made the firstradical move. It’s a paradox, isn’t it?– that people should consider Owenthe radical. Well, there are a greatmany paradoxes in politics.’

Roy Jenkins,

‘In the two-leader thing was aproblem .... So, you see, we had tohave the Ettrick Bridge meeting ....At the same time, we thought theproblem was simply Jenkins .... Wethought we dealt with the centralproblem when we got rid of Roy.Didn’t work. The problem was notRoy. It was dual leadership itself.’

John Pardoe,

‘Ill-feeling between the pro-mergerers and anti-mergerershas grown into bitterness, and there has been angry talkon both sides of fighting each other in the next generalelection. If that really happens, the future of the third forcecan be defined shortly: none.’

Economist 5 September 1987

‘The Liberal Parliamentary Party was lined up behind thetwo leaders like warders surrounding a pair of newly-recaptured prisoners. Bob Maclennan was asked whetherany of them would comment on the foundering policydocument. ‘They will not be allowed to open theirmouths’, he replied.’

Bruce Anderson, The Times, January 1988

From the Liberal merger debate, 23 January 1988:

‘We will create a Frankenstein party with ready-madedivisions. From the word go we will be divided more

To merge or not to merge ....thoroughly and obviously than the Liberal Party has everbeen.’

Martin Horwood

‘We have not gone through all of this just to add to Dr.David Owen’s credibility.’

Tim Clement-Jones

‘The country is not demanding that we merge. Thecountry could not care less whether we merge or not .’

Claire Brooks

‘If that is what you want, all I can say is goodbye.Goodbye to every one of you.’

Michael Meadowcroft

Opponents of merger sometimes talk as if the LiberalParty is going to be abolished, that the new party will notbe Liberal. If that were so, I should be voting againstmerger.’

David Steel


1979 MayGeneral election won by Tories. De-feated Labour MPs include ShirleyWilliams.

JuneSocial Democrat Alliance (SDA) re-organises itself into a network of lo-cal groups, not all of whose mem-bers need be in the Labour Party.

NovemberRoy Jenkins delivers the Dimblebylecture, ‘Home thoughts fromabroad’.

NovemberBill Rodgers g ives speech atAbertillery: ‘Our party has a year, notmuch longer, in which to save itself.’

DecemberMeeting of Jenkinsites and othersconsidering forming a new party or-ganised by Colin Phipps (RobertMaclennan declined invitation).

1980 MayLocal elections. Liberal vote changeslittle, though seats gained with largeadvances in Liverpool and control ofAdur and Hereford.

MayLabour Special Conference at Wem-bley. Policy statement Peace, Jobs, Free-dom, including pro-unilateralism andanti-EEC policies, supported. Owendeeply angered by vitriolic hecklingduring his speech.

JuneOwen, Rodgers and Williams warn

they will leave Labour if it supportswithdrawal from the EEC: ‘There aresome of us who will not accept achoice between socialism and Eu-rope. We will choose them both.’

JuneWilliams warns that a centre partywould have ‘no roots, no principles,no philosophy and no values.’

JuneRoy Jenkins delivers lecture toHouse of Commons Press Gallery,calling for a realignment of the ‘radi-cal centre.’

JuneLabour’s Commission of Inquirybacks use of an electoral college forelecting the leader and mandatoryreselection of MPs.

JulySDA announces plans to run up to candidates against Labour left-wingers.

AugustOpen letter to members of Labourfrom Owen, Rodgers and Williamspublished in Guardian.

SeptemberDavid Marquand speaks at Liberal As-sembly. David Steel says Labour rebelshave six months to leave the party.

SeptemberGroup of MPs, led by MichaelThomas, publish statement in TheTimes, calling for major reforms inLabour’s structure.

September – October L a b o u rconference at Blackpool votes tochange method for electing leader.Unilateral disarmament and with-

drawal from the EEC passed aspolicy. Shirley Williams and TomBradley refuse to speak from theplatform on behalf of the NEC.

OctoberJames Callaghan resigns as Labourleader.

NovemberFirst round of Labour’s leadershipelection (Healey , Foot , Silkin, Shore ).

NovemberMichael Foot elected leader of La-bour (defeating Healey –).

NovemberOwen announces he will not berestanding for Shadow Cabinet.

NovemberWilliams announces she cannot bea Labour candidate again with itscurrent policies

DecemberLabour proscribes SDA.

DecemberMeeting in Williams’ flat, includingIvor Crewe and Anthony King, whooutline considerable possible supportfor a new party.

1981 JanuaryJenkins returns from Brussels.

JanuaryLiberals publish ten-point plan foreconomic recovery. Several LabourMPs publicly welcome it.

JanuaryGang of Four (Jenkins, Owen,Rodgers and Williams) agrees to is-sue a joint statement followingWembley Conference.

JanuaryLabour Special Conference at Wem-bley. New electoral college for elect-ing the leader gives trade unions thelargest share of the vote (%, with% for MPs and % for constitu-ency parties).

JanuaryLimehouse Declaration issued byGang of Four.

Research NotesChronologyKey Alliance dates 1979–88Compiled by Mark Pack


JanuaryNine Labour MPs join Council forSocial Democracy

JanuaryOwen tells his local party he will notbe standing for Labour in the nextelection.

FebruaryAdvert published in Guardian sees people declare their support forthe Council for Social Democracy,and elicits , letters of support.Alec McGivan appointed organiser.

FebruaryCouncil moves into offices in QueenAnne’s Gate. Williams resigns fromNEC.

FebruaryTwo Labour MPs resign whip to sitas social democrats.

MarchTen Labour MPs and nine peers re-sign whip so sit as social democrats.

MarchChristopher Brocklebank-Fowlerbecomes only Conservative MP tojoin Council.

MarchOfficial launch of SDP in Con-naught Rooms, Covent Garden at-tracts more than press.

AprilAnglo-German Königswinter con-ference: Rodgers, Williams and Steelmeet and agree on the outlines ofan alliance between their parties.

MayLocal elections: Liberal vote risesthanks to increase in number of can-didates; take control of Isle of Wightand hold balance on eight countycouncils. Small number of independ-ent social democrat candidates makelittle impression.

JunePublication of A Fresh Start for Brit-ain, a joint Liberal-SDP policy state-ment, along with photo-opportunityof Steel and Williams sitting on thelawn of Dean’s Yard, Westminster.

JulyWarrington byelection: Labour’s

majority cut from , to ,.Jenkins stands for Alliance: ‘This ismy first defeat in years of politicsand it is by far the greatest victoryin which I have participated.’

SeptemberLiberal Assembly at Llandudno.Jenkins and Williams address fringemeeting. Motion calling for an elec-toral pact overwhelmingly carried.Steel calls for delegates to ‘Go backto your constituencies and preparefor government.’

SDP rolling conference travels bytrain between London, Perth andBradford.

OctoberCroydon North-West byelectionwon by Liberal Bill Pitt.

OctoberHealey just defeats Benn’s challengefor the Labour deputy leadership.

NovemberCrosby byelection won by ShirleyWilliams.

DecemberGallup poll shows % would voteLiberal/SDP.

1982 JanuaryRodgers breaks off negotiations withLiberals over seat allocation forforthcoming general election.

MarchJenkins wins Glasgow Hillheadbyelection.

AprilLiberal-SDP negotiations over divi-sion for seats for general electionconcluded.

AprilArgentina invades Falkland Islands.

MayLocal elections. Liberals win fivetimes as many seats as the SDP,which makes a net loss.

JuneTories gain Mitcham & Morden(byelection caused by Bruce Doug-las-Mann resigning his seat on de-

fecting to the SDP in order to standagain under his new party’s colours).

JuneEnd of Falklands war.

JulyJenkins defeats Owen to becomeSDP leader.

SeptemberWilliams elected SDP President.

1983 FebruarySimon Hughes wins Bermondseybyelection.

MarchDarlington byelection: SDP candidateslumps to a poor third; Labour’s vic-tory saves Michael Foot’s leadership.

MayLocal elections. Alliance’s nationalvote slips, though number of seats in-creases. Thatcher calls general elec-tion for June.

MayEttrick Bridge meeting: Steel at-tempts to remove ‘Prime Minister-designate’ title from Jenkins.

JuneMrs Thatcher wins general election;Alliance (.%) almost catches La-bour (.%). Liberals win MPs(from ), SDP (from ); Rodgersand Williams defeated.

JuneFoot announces he will not restandas Labour leader.

JuneJenkins resigns as SDP leader.

JuneOwen becomes SDP leader unop-posed.

JulyLiberals fail to win Penrith & Bor-der byelection by votes.

JulyDavid Steel starts three months’ sab-batical.

SeptemberSDP conference at Salford rejectsproposals for joint selection of Euro


and Westminster candidates and anychance of merger before election.

1984 MayLocal elections. Alliance makes netgains of seats.

JuneEuropean elections. Alliance wins.% and no seats but SDP winsPortsmouth South byelection.

SeptemberSteel defeated at Liberal Assemblyover calls to withdraw cruise missilesfrom Britain.

1985 MayLocal elections. Alliance gains over seats and out of Englishcounty councils end up under nooverall control.

JulyLiberals win Brecon & Radnorbyelection. During July (and againin September), Alliance briefly topsopinion polls.

SeptemberSuccessful SDP conference atTorquay represents high point ofSDP strength and self-confidence.

DecemberAudience of over million watchesJohn Cleese present party politicalbroadcast on PR for SDP – possiblythe most-watched PPB ever.

1986 MayLiberals win Ryedale byelection andjust miss West Derbyshire. Local elec-tions: Alliance gain control of Adurand Tower Hamlets and make a netgain of around seats.

MayOwen reacts furiously to Steel’s hintsto press that Alliance Defence Com-mission report will recommend noreplacement for Polaris nuclear sub-marine fleet.

JuneAlliance Defence Commission re-ports, avoiding decision on Polarisreplacement. Owen and Steel sub-sequently explore options for Anglo-French cooperation over nucleardeterrent (the ‘Euro-bomb’).

JulyLiberals narrowly fail to win New-castle-under-Lyme after hard-hittingcampaign which draws criticismfrom David Steel.

SeptemberLiberal Assembly in Eastbourne de-feats leadership over European co-operation on nuclear weapons.

1987 January‘Relaunch’ of Alliance at Barbicanrally. Joint Alliance parliamentaryspokesmanships announced.

FebruarySDP wins Greenwich byelection.

MarchLiberals hold Truro in byelectioncaused by David Penhaligon’s deathin a car accident in December .

MayLocal elections: Alliance gains over seats. Labour losses and Con-servative gains lead Thatcher to callgeneral election.

JuneMrs Thatcher wins general election.Alliance’s vote drops by .%. SDPfalls from to seats (Jenkins losesHillhead) and Liberals from to .

JuneOwen gives press conference wherehe appears to reject any attempts atmerger.

JuneSteel announces to media supportfor merger. Owen fails to receive hismessage before being contacted bythe press and accuses Steel of tryingto bounce him.

JuneSDP National Committee decides tohold a ballot on whether to negoti-ate over merger with Liberals.

July‘Yes to Unity’ campaign launched bySDP pro-merger members.

AugustSDP votes %–% in favour ofmerger negotiations.

AugustOwen resigns as SDP leader.

AugustMaclennan becomes SDP leader.

SeptemberLiberal Assembly votes to open ne-gotiations on merger.

DecemberMerger negotiators agree on ‘NewLiberal Social Democratic Party’ (or‘Alliance’ for short) as the new par-ty’s name, but forced to rethink af-ter Liberal Party Council protests.

1988 January‘Dead parrot’ policy document(Voices and Choices for All) issued andthen withdrawn.

JanuarySpecial Liberal Assembly in Black-pool approves merger by to, subject to a ballot of members.

JanuarySDP conference in Sheffield ap-proves merger by to (Owenites largely abstain or are ab-sent), subject to a ballot of members.

MarchLiberal and SDP members’ ballotsgive majorities for merger (Liberals, – ,; SDP , – ,).

MarchPress launch of Social and LiberalDemocrats.

MarchConstitution of new party comesinto force at midnight.

MarchOwenite ‘Continuing SDP’launched.

MarchPublic meeting to launch Social andLiberal Democrats.


Books and bookletsLeighton Andrews, Liberalism versus the

Social Market Economy (HebdenRoyd Publications, )

Paddy Ashdown, After the Alliance(Hebden Royd Publications,)

Peter Bartram, David Steel (W.H.Allen, )

Alan Beith, The Case for the LiberalParty and the Alliance (Longman,)

Alan Beith, The Fullness of Freedom(Hebden Royd Publications,)

Vernon Bogdanor (ed.), Liberal PartyPolitics (OUP, )

Duncan Brack, The Myth of the So-cial Market (LINk Publications,)

Duncan Brack (ed.), Why I am a Lib-eral Democrat (Liberal DemocratPublications, )

Ian Bradley, Breaking the Mould?(Martin Robertson, )

Ian Bradley, The Strange Rebirth ofLiberal Britain (Chatto & Windus,)

John Campbell, Roy Jenkins(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, )

N. Carter, Is There Life After Hanging?(Centre for the Analysis of SocialPolicy, Bath University, )

Ken Coates, T¡he Social Democrats:those who went and those who stayed(Nottingham )

Chris Cook, A Short History of theLiberal Party – (Fourthedition, Macmillan, )

Ivor Crewe & Anthony King, SDP:The Life and Death of the SocialDemocratic Party (OUP, ) (re-viewed in History Group Newslet-ter , December )

Arthur Cyr, Liberal Politics in Britain(Transaction Books, ) (re-viewed in History Group Newslet-ter , March )

Ralf Dahrendorf, After Social Democ-racy (Unservile State Paper, )

Radhika Desai, Intellectuals and So-cialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and theLabour Party (Lawrence &Wishart, )

Henry Drucker, ‘All the King’sHorses and All the King’s Men’,in Paterson and Thomas (eds.),Social Democratic Parties in WesternEurope (OUP, )

R Eccleshall (ed.), British Liberalism:Liberal Thought from the s tos (Longman, )

Tony Greaves & Rachel Pitchford,Merger: The Inside Story (LiberalRenewal, ) (reviewed in thisissue)

M.B. Hamilton, Democratic Socialismin Britain and Sweden (Macmillan,)

Stephen Haseler, The Tragedy of La-bour (Basil Blackwell, )

Roy Jenkins, Partnership of Principle(Secker & Warburg, )

Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre(Macmillan, )

Jeremy Josephs, Inside the Alliance(John Martin, )

David Marquand, Russet-coated Cap-tains: The Challenge of Social De-mocracy (SDP, )

David Marquand, The UnprincipledSociety (Fontana, )

John Martin (ed.), The Meaning ofSocial Democracy and Other Essays(John Martin, )

Don MacIver (ed.), The LiberalDemocrats (Prentice Hall, )

Michael Meadowcroft, Liberalism andthe Left (Liberator Publications,)

Michael Meadowcroft, Liberalism andthe Right (Liberator Publications,)

Michael Meadowcroft, Social Democ-racy – Barrier or Bridge? (Libera-tor Publications, )

Michael Meadowcroft & David

Marquand, Liberalism & Social De-mocracy (Liberal Publications,)

Stuart Mole, The Decade of Realign-ment: The Leadership Speeches ofDavid Steel – (HebdenRoyd, )

Matthew Oakeshott, The Road fromLimehouse to Westminster (RadicalCentre for Democratic Studies inIndustry and Society, )

David Owen, Face the Future(Jonathan Cape, )

David Owen, A Future That WillWork: Competitiveness and Com-passion (Penguin, )

David Owen, A United Kingdom(Penguin, )

David Owen, Personally Speaking toKenneth Harris (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, )

David Owen, Time to Dec lare(Michael Joseph, )

David Owen & David Steel, TheTime Has Come (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, )

S. Padgett & W. Patterson, A Historyof Social Democracy in Postwar Eu-rope (Longman, )

William Paterson & Alistair Thomas(eds.), The Future of Social Democ-racy (Clarendon Press, )

William Rodgers, The Politics ofChange (Secker & Warburg, )

Hannan Rose (ed.), Where Next?,Radical Quarterly special edition,

David Steel, Partners in One Nation(Bodley Head, )

David Steel, Against Goliath: DavidSteel’s Story (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, )

Hugh Stephenson, Claret and Chips:The Rise of the SDP (MichaelJoseph, )

John Stevenson, Third Party Politicssince : Liberals, Alliance and Lib-eral Democrats (Blackwell, )

Patricia Lee Sykes, Losing from the In-side: The Cost of Conflict in the Brit-ish Social Democratic Party (Secondedition, Transaction Books, )(reviewed in this issue)

David Thomson, The Shock Troops ofPavement Politics? An Assessment ofthe Influence of Community Politicsin the Liberal Party (HebdenRoyd, )

BibliographyKey sources on Alliance history.Compiled by Mark Pack


Shirley Williams, Politics is for People(Penguin, )

Des Wilson, Battle for Power (SphereBooks, )

Peter Zentner, Social Democracy inBritain: Must Labour Lose? (JohnMartin, )

ArticlesAnon, ‘Social democracy doesn’t

thr ive abroad,’ Economist March

Terry Barton & Herbert Doring,‘The Social and Attitudinal Pro-file of Social Democratic Activ-ists’, Political Studies ,

John Bochel & David Denver, ‘TheSDP and the Left-Right Dimen-sion’, British Journal of Political Sci-ence ,

John Curtice & Michael Steed, ‘Turn-ing Dreams into Reality: The Di-vision of Constituencies betweenthe Liberals and the Social Demo-crats’, Parliamentary Affairs ,

John Curtice, Clive Payne andRobert Waller, ‘The Alliance’sFirst Nationwide Test: Lessons ofthe English Local Elections’,Electoral Studies ,

David Denver & Hugh Bochel,‘Merger or Bust: Whatever Hap-pened to Members of the SDP?’,British Journal of Political Science ,

Sir Robin Day, Owen said he wouldregard the Conservatives as ‘the lesserevil’ and that Labour’s position (onBritain’s security) was ‘unacceptable’.The pass was sold.

The Liberal-SDP Alliance neverquite made the grade. While the Lib-erals’ strength was growing, particu-larly in local government, the partyhad not been able to consolidate itsnew support. Nor had the SDPcaused sufficient defections from La-bour to sustain a long-haul campaign;and it had failed almost entirely toattract prominent Conservatives.

The two Alliance leaders foundthemselves locked in a pantomimehorse, each pulling in different di-rections, with large sections of bothparties cheering the resulting con-fusion. Just entering middle age, nei-ther had the experience to analysehis situation and plan a way out.Though Owen had served briefly asForeign Secretary after one or twojunior ministerial positions, and Steelhad completed eighteen years in Par-liament and seven as party leader,neither had substantial experience oflife outside politics. Nor was eitherentirely convinced that the game wasworth the candle. In a cruel symbi-otic twist to their relationship, how-ever, each was determined to pre-vent the other from scooping theprize. If there was ever a prize toscoop, they succeeded. In any event,the third force had to wait a decadebefore beginning to realise again thepotential it had shown in the Lib-Lab agreement.

Graham Watson was head of the Liberalleader’s private office in the House of Com-mons –. In he became the firstLiberal Democrat to be elected to the Eu-ropean Parliament. He is currently seek-ing a publisher for his book on the Alli-ance in the – Parliament.

Notes: The quote is David Steel’s, in a televi-

sion interview. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The

Birth, Life and Death of the Social Demo-cratic Party (OUP, ).

Henry Drucker, ‘All the King’s

Horses and All the King’s Men’,in Paterson and Thomas (eds.),Social Democratic Parties in WesternEurope (OUP, )

S.J. Ingle, ‘The Alliance: Piggy in theMiddle or Radical Alternative?’,Hull Papers in Politics ,

Vincent McKee, ‘Factionalism in theSDP, –’, Parliamentary Af-fairs ,

Michael Meadowcroft, ‘EastbourneRevisited’, Radical Quarterly ,

Michael Meadowcroft, ‘Steeling theParty, Radical Quarterly ,

Alan Butt Philip, ‘Europeans first andlast: British Liberals and the Eu-ropean Community’, PoliticalQuarterly :,

R. Pinkey, ‘An Active Political Strat-egy: Liberals in Power in EnglishLocal Government’, Local Gov-ernment Studies :,

Geoffrey Pridham & Paul Whiteley,‘Anatomy of the SDP: Is the PartyStructurally Top-Heavy?’, Govern-ment and Opposition ,

William Rodgers, ‘The SDP and theLiberal Party in Alliance’, Politi-cal Quarterly ,

Colin Seymour-Ure, ‘The SDP andthe Media’, Political Quarterly ,

Books on Liberal History andBritish Politics

We sell second-hand and hard-to-find books andephemera on Parliament, elections, politicians,

parties, and women in politics at competitive prices.

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