Gilly was just about to go to Brighton College of Art, and half way through her first term there I went to see her. I had a peacock blue Morris Minor, easily recognisable at a considerable distance; and as I drove towards the front of the college still dressed in the black striped trousers I had been wearing in court that morning I saw Gilly run across the road and beckon me into a nearby side street. I assumed that she was trying to find me a convenient parking space and not the horrible truth that she was scared stiff that her bohemian college friends would see me in all my squareness. In spite of this somewhat inauspicious happening we soon became engaged. I have to confess that this was after Gilly had raised the subject of politics. ‘I could not possibly marry a politician,’ she said. ‘One in the family, my father, is quite enough. I hope you are not thinking of standing again.’ And I told her what I think I then honestly believed – that I had got politics out of my system.

A month or two later we paid a visit to St Helens which I imagine strengthened Gilly’s views about politics. Mark Carlisle, who was to be my best man, was fighting a by-election there and we went to support him. In the morning we did a bit of desultory canvassing and in the afternoon Mark and his recently acquired fiancée, Sandra, and Gilly and I set off in a loudspeaker van to look for a crowd. There was nobody about when we got to the St Helens Rugby Club but we parked and awaited events. We heard a distant whistle and a few people began to appear. Mark addressed a few remarks in their general direction which one or two acknowledged with a genial shake of the fist or obscene gesture. Rather more people began to debouch on to the vast concrete area in the middle of which stood our minuscule van; and then the gates were opened and we were engulfed in a veritable tide of humanity. The girls leapt into the van, just in time for it to be picked up off the ground and shaken like a child’s rattle. This was all done in great good humour while somewhere beside, or perhaps in part beneath, the vehicle Mark’s voice could be heard battling against the uproar – ‘Vote Conservative. Vote Carlisle for a better future.’

Gilly and I were married in Preston Parish Church on 20 December 1958. The venue was chosen for political reasons (Preston South being my father-in-law’s seat). The date was chosen for legal reasons. A honeymoon over the Christmas holiday would lose me the least work. We went to Sicily and Rome and when we arrived at the Timeo Hotel in Taormina there was much tongue-clicking from the lady behind the desk who clearly thought I was a dirty old man who had run away with a child bride.

Back in Lancashire in January we found that the little house we had created out of the stables at the top of my parents-in-law’s garden was not yet finished and when in February we did move in, it was freezing cold and we regretted having decided that central heating was a luxury we could not afford. What made matters even worse was that most of the curtains had not arrived – including the one designed to separate the living room from the dining room – and the bedroom was so cold that we woke up each morning with the top blanket soaking wet with condensation. But it did not seem to matter all that much; and I counted myself the luckiest man on earth.

Those were the days before rampant inflation hit Britain and we converted the stables and furnished them quite adequately with a gift of £5,000 from my father and a wedding present of £1,000 from Gilly’s grandfather. I was earning quite a lot at the Bar and without any children and no school fees to pay we felt very well off. But I kept getting invitations to go before selection committees in the north-west and when, in 1959, Richard Fort was killed in a car accident and there was to be a by-election in Clitheroe, I was sorely tempted to go back into the fray. I realised, however, that it was expecting far too much of Gilly, and the temptation was resisted.

Looking back on our engagement it does seem to have taken place in the most unlikely circumstances for we were often rendered speechless when in each other’s company. One night I took Gilly to a cocktail party at the judges’ lodgings in Salford and we reached Besses o’ th’ Barn on the outskirts of Manchester before I summoned up the courage to say anything. In fact, one or two drinks turned it into rather a good evening. At the party the judge who was our host became alarmed at the speed at which the drink was disappearing and, at 7 p.m. when we were just beginning to enjoy ourselves, he hammered on the table and rudely declaimed, ‘Gentlemen, all good things must come to an end.’ We slunk out of the front door like whipped curs but got back our courage when at the top of the drive we spotted a member of the Manchester Constabulary standing to attention in a mobile sentry box. One shove and the box began to trundle down the drive, not at a great speed but fast enough to make it difficult for the officer to leave with dignity. So he remained upright and travelled to the bottom of the slope, cheered on by the bibulous spectators.

I am lucky to have some of Gilly’s school reports from Moira House, Eastbourne – better known as MoHo. They reveal an interesting state of affairs and how well qualified she was for marriage. Autumn Term 1951: ‘Seldom punctual for bed. Very untidy. Thirty-five order marks against her name.’ Spring 1952: ‘Too often late for bed. Untidy.’ Summer 1952: ‘Most unpunctual downstairs. Better in bedroom.’ Autumn 1952: ‘Gillian breaks rules without compunction and goes her own way regardless.’ Spring 1954: ‘Persistently late for bed through playing. Is vague over time. Late for breakfast nine times.’ Autumn 1956: ‘Very pleasant upstairs but she does not take enough responsibility.’

If truth be told, Gilly was taking on an awful lot marrying when so young and marrying someone ten years older than herself. I think, looking back, that my insistence that we should marry before she had even completed her course at Brighton was quite unreasonable, but I can only say in my own defence that I was madly in love, that I knew a good thing when I saw it and I was simply not prepared to take the chance of waiting and her finding somebody else. I felt I could make her a good husband and I knew she would be a super wife, loyal and forgiving. For Gilly, marriage was an act of madness. In her journal she writes:

I suppose we had our ups and downs like every married couple. Once, I threatened to go home to her mother. I knew I could not go home to mine. But we had some marvellous times and still do.

We had a miniature poodle called Sydney. One day Gilly went down the garden to have lunch with her mother, leaving the house unlocked. She returned home to find a masked burglar coming down the stairs. Sydney shot under the dining room table, teeth a-chattering. Gilly locked herself in the cloak room. After a conversation through the keyhole the burglar left and the constabulary were summoned. The sergeant went upstairs and when he came down again he offered to make my wife a cup of tea and began to explain that some burglars had very beastly habits and she had to prepare herself for the possibility that something very nasty might have happened to her dog. At first Gilly could not think what the man was talking about but, on going upstairs herself and seeing a pile of black curls on the white bedroom carpet, remembered that before going to lunch she had given Sydney his monthly trim. This was the evidence that had so impressed the officer and convinced him that he was in pursuit of a pervert.

While making a good living, I was not greatly enjoying life at the Bar. I seemed unable to lose a case and then forget all about it. Instead I always felt personally responsible if things did not go absolutely right. So when in 1960 my father-in-law suggested I should go off to America and see whether there was an opening for me in the Beloit Iron Works in Wisconsin. I leapt at the idea. Beloit manufactured paper-making machinery and had recently bought an interest in Walmsleys in Bury, a firm of which Gilly’s grandfather had been chairman and managing director.

It was curious being in America at that time. Few there seemed to think world war and a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Indeed, this dismal topic featured in almost every conversation and overshadowed my whole visit. Beloit as a town had nothing to commend it. It was built round a lake so polluted that anyone bathing in it would have been dead in minutes. I also saw an example of the dangers of keeping fit. The chairman of the company had a harness contraption rigged up in his private lavatory and, having performed his normal duties, used to haul himself up in the harness a few score times to strengthen his muscles. Shortly after I returned to England he was found dead in the loo.

The countryside round Beloit was flat and uninteresting but a thirty-mile drive took one to a fairly pretty lake from which, I was told, people thought nothing of commuting 100 miles to Chicago. One night we had dinner at a hotel called the Wagon Wheel. The manager said in jest: ‘If a guest is given a room with a high number, he is advised to take a packed lunch for the journey.’ And, indeed, it was about a mile from one end of the hotel to the other. The people in Beloit were immensely friendly and on my last night the lady with whom I was staying said: ‘Gee David, I just love your accent. I’d like to hide you in my closet and bring you out whenever we had people in for dinner.’ I came home sure that Beloit would not appeal to Gilly and resolved to settle down at the Bar.

In October 1960 James, our eldest boy, was born. My father lived long enough to see him but died of a heart attack on 17 March the following year. He was sixty-seven. In August 1962 Matthew arrived on the scene and soon turned out to be a bundle of trouble and the life and soul of the party.

We had a succession of girls to look after the children. One was a Danish girl called Kirsten, known as Puck to her family and friends. James went into Barclays Bank in Burnley and declared in a piping voice ‘we have a new nanny and she is called “Fuck”’. The name proved particularly apt, and the house was besieged by boys from the village who had never had such luck.

In about 1963 Mark Carlisle was adopted for Runcorn to succeed Dennis Vosper, and again my thoughts turned to politics. They would probably have remained no more than thoughts had not the Nelson & Colne Association approached me and asked me to be their candidate for the 1964 election. After much doubt and indecision I accepted. I do not think Gilly was very enthusiastic, but she had probably by then come to realise that I had not got politics out of my system and there was no point in making a fuss when my efforts in an unwinnable Labour seat would surely come to nothing.

The Labour Member was Sydney Silverman and the name Silverman was painted in enormous letters on the tallest mill chimney in Nelson town. Nelson itself was called ‘little Moscow’ by the locals and its town council, proudly pacifist, had before the War refused to allow the East Lancashire Regiment to march through the town.

A succession of ambitious Conservatives had fought the constituency over the years, none with much success. Harmar Nicholls was the candidate in 1945, Alan Green – my father-in-law to be – in 1950, Elaine Kellett-Bowman in 1955. In 1945 Harmar Nicholls was in the army, as were the two others invited for interview but fog in the Channel led to only Harmar turning up on the night. Glamorous in service dress he was duly selected and was then so intoxicated by his success that when he met the press outside the room he announced that he was going to challenge Sydney Silverman to an open debate. The Tories were horrified because they knew Silverman’s reputation as a skilled and canny debater but there was no turning back. The Imperial Ballroom, Carr Road, was an enormous establishment with a tin roof, later used for big band concerts, and on the day appointed for the great contest it was packed. A vicar had been asked to take the chair and said that each candidate was to have exactly twenty minutes to state his case. He then took off his watch and placed it on the table in front of him. The debate then proceeded and to no one’s surprise Harmar Nicholls had a very painful time. But at the end of the evening the vicar looked down and was horrified to discover that his watch had gone, stolen apparently by someone in the front row of the audience. This was good news for the Tories for the following day the headline in the Nelson Leader was not about Harmar’s humiliation. It read: ‘ELECTION MEETING DRAMA. VICAR’S WATCH STOLEN.’

To come across Sydney Silverman in a motor car was an unnerving experience. He was so short in the body that he could not see over the steering wheel of his Jaguar and oncoming motorists were confronted with what appeared to be a driverless vehicle. He was also a wily creature. There was a church service to herald the opening of the 1964 campaign. The vicar told me that I was to read the Old Testament lesson and Sydney the New, but he did not reveal that Sydney had insisted on choosing his own lesson. I read over the one that I had been given and was somewhat disappointed to discover that it was little more than a long genealogical table, beginning ‘Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob’ and thereafter down through the generations. But the day came, the service began and after singing a psalm I went up to the lectern and read the lesson with all the verve I could command, returning to my pew well satisfied. We then sang another psalm and it was Sydney’s turn. ‘Revelations Chapter 21’ he said and then, with a voice quivering with emotion, ‘I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth…’ When he was finished, I suspected that I was finished and that the campaign was lost before it had even begun. Sydney, however, had forgotten that Revelations Chapter 21 is part of the funeral service and some may think it poetic justice that a few years later he was under the sod and I was MP for Nelson & Colne.

But back to 1964, and in a debate organised by the local churches, Sydney revealed how short could be his temper. He stormed off the platform because he disliked the way I answered a question about race relations. I pointed out the obvious – that we were hardly likely to have good race relations if we did not have firm immigration control – but it was not an answer to Sydney’s liking.

In my election address I said that Labour’s slogan ‘Thirteen Wasted Years’ was patently untrue. In thirteen years of Conservative government the living standards of the British people had improved more than in the previous half-century. I did not claim that the government had bestowed all those benefits. I did say that what had been achieved could only have been achieved in a free enterprise system where individual effort, initiative and savings were encouraged, and that was the sort of system we would maintain.

It all seemed very reasonable but I knew that I and all fighting under the Conservative banner were in difficulties – thirteen years was a long time and ‘Time for a Change’ was an attractive slogan for the unthinking. At the time I did not think it helped that the Tories were led by Alec Douglas-Home who looked like a figure from the past and did not appear a match for the nimble, quick-witted Wilson with all his talk of the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. I later came to see that Alec had done a fine job in almost impossible circumstances. For years the BBC in particular had seized every opportunity to portray the Conservative government and the Conservative Party as not just old-fashioned but degenerate and probably corrupt. In David Frost’s programme That Was the Week That Was individual MPs in Conservative marginals were picked upon as idle, incompetent, or both, with none of the evidence of wrongdoing – cash for questions and the like – which fuelled the ‘sleaze’ campaign against the Tories in the 1990s. So to have run Wilson so close was quite a triumph for Alec Douglas-Home. And, with a fall in the Labour majority to 2,644, I was quite pleased with my own result.

Mark Carlisle was now in the House as member for Runcorn and I could not help feeling that, if I had arranged things better, I could have been in the House myself. But my restlessness and determination to get back into the fray clouded my judgement and I closed my mind to the fact that despite his thin majority Harold was in a very strong position. He could go back to the country at a moment of his own choosing claiming that he needed a bigger majority to carry out Labour’s programme.

It was in this state of mind that I fell to the blandishments of Conservative Central Office and got myself adopted as prospective candidate for Heywood & Royton. It was a weary place, according to Gilly ‘curled around Rochdale like a sooty feather boa’, and next to it was grim Saddleworth Moor where at about that time Brady and Hindley were burying their victims. Until 1964 the constituency had been represented in Parliament by Tony Leavey (Conservative) but had then been won for Labour by Joel Barnett, who later became a Labour minister and in 1983 a peer. Joel’s 1964 majority was beguilingly small – 800 – but nobody told me before I threw my cap in the ring that a vast new overspill estate had just been completed at Darnhill – eight tower blocks which Joel later referred to as ‘his eight pillars of wisdom’.

It was with great enthusiasm that I started working the constituency. I was described in the Daily Express as passionately provincial and quoted in the local paper as saying: ‘If you ask me for one reason why the Tories did worse here in the north-west than anywhere else, it was because we had too many MPs who dissociated themselves from the region as soon as they became MPs. They went to live in London.’

The Conservative agent was a very elderly gentleman called Jim Somerville who had been in the job for longer than anybody could remember. The constituency Association provided him with a car, and one night I was coming out of a pub where I had been garnering votes and saw that Jim, having removed the back seat from the car, had packed it with sheep.

Meanwhile, Gilly had fallen back on the maxim ‘when in doubt have a baby’. No one, however, had reminded her that it might be two, and it came as quite a shock to learn that twins were on the way. When the twins were born Jenny had dislocated hips and, on the advice of John Charnley, who pioneered artificial hips for elderly people, she was put in plaster from neck to toe. She had tremendous spirit and at children’s parties used to propel herself across the room by deft use of her powerful ankles. Alistair, her twin brother, with thumb in mouth, rode on her back as if astride an armoured warhorse. When in 1966 the general election campaign began, Gilly and I moved into a hotel outside Rochdale, taking Jenny with us but leaving Alistair with my parents-in-law. Late at night we lay in our beds with Jenny in a cot between us, trying without much success to rock her to sleep.

It was a nightmare fortnight. There was little response on the doorstep to my plea that Harold Wilson was only having an election because he knew it was now or never, that there was bad news round the corner and Wilson wanted a bigger majority under his belt before the bad news broke. I listed Labour’s broken promises, principally their 1964 pledge that they would not need to increase the general level of taxation. That pledge looked pretty sick in 1966 after swingeing increases in income tax and hikes in the taxes on petrol, cigarettes and beer. So did their pledge to halt the rise in the cost of living, for costs had risen steeply and mortgage rates were at their highest level ever.

In spite of many difficulties I managed to whip my supporters up into a frenzy of excitement and we had a magnificent rally on the last night when I shouted myself hoarse. But to no avail. The jovial Joel was returned to Westminster on April Fools’ Day 1966 with his majority greatly increased. And Harold Wilson set out to make complete fools of us all and bring down on Britain a financial crisis of massive proportions.

In 1968 Enoch Powell made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Shortly afterward the Clitheroe Association asked him to speak at Padiham and as a former candidate I was invited along. There were queues of people trying to get into the hall and a sizable demonstration outside by banner-carrying Pakistanis. The atmosphere inside was electric and everyone waited with eager anticipation for the inflammatory rhetoric associated with the name of Powell. But he rose to his feet to deliver a dry as dust speech on the future of the ports industry which left people groaning with boredom. I do not know whether he did it as a prank or thought Padiham was on the seaside. But it taught the audience a good lesson.

Late in 1967 Juby Lancaster, MP for South Fylde, announced his decision not to stand at the next general election and I was invited to put my name in for the seat. One of the front runners was Alan Green who had lost Preston South in 1964 and had failed to regain it in 1966, but he was quite happy for me to put my name forward as well in case the Association wanted a younger man. At about the same time Nelson & Colne were in the process of adopting a candidate for a by-election following the death of Sydney Silverman, and Association chairman Derek Crabtree asked me to put my name forward. I had to tell him that I was awaiting interview at South Fylde and could not do so.

At Easter 1968 we had arranged to take the children to Swanage for a short holiday, and on the day we were leaving home I received a letter from Richard Sharples, then vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, asking me to ring him as a matter of urgency. I did so from a call box on the journey south and he asked me to withdraw my name from South Fylde so that I could accept the invitation from Nelson & Colne. I told him I was not prepared to do so but asked him to get Nelson & Colne to postpone their selection for a week, i.e. until after the meeting at South Fylde. He said he could not possibly do so and the upshot was that Nelson & Colne selected a man called Penfold with bizarre consequences. I then attended the selection at South Fylde and together with Elaine Kellett-Bowman was eliminated, leaving Alan Green and Edward Gardner to fight it out in the final. No doubt I was very obstinate but at the time I thought it was right to stick to my guns.

Derek Crabtree and the other Officers at Nelson & Colne were now landed with Penfold who, not being a local man, would not have been their first choice, and they soon began to seek a way out and pestered me with phone calls asking me to challenge Penfold even at that late stage. I could not see how I could possibly do so, but I was left in no doubt that on the night set for Penfold’s formal adoption there was going to be trouble.

The night came and I was on the drawing room floor mending the vacuum when the telephone rang. It was Phil Somers, the treasurer of the Association. Would I come to the Nelson Club as quickly as possible? There had been a spot of bother. The general meeting of the Association had refused to adopt Penfold and wanted to adopt me. It sounded very strange and if I had had any sense I would have said so and stayed at home. But I got in my car and ten minutes later was parking outside the club. Phil Somers ran down the street towards me with a happy grin on is face which for the moment allayed my fears. In the secretary’s office I found a disconsolate Penfold and also Jean, the widow of John Crabtree who had for many years been a much respected Association chairman. Jean warned me that there would be big trouble if I went into the meeting but Phil Somers and Derek Crabtree, who by then had joined us, said they were in a terrible spot because of the rejection of Penfold. The by-election was almost on them, there simply was not time to start the selection procedure all over again, and they begged me to go in to the meeting and accept the candidature. So into the room I went and onto the platform. There was an uncanny stillness, a frosty, icy calm as Derek Crabtree asked me if I would be the candidate and I replied: ‘Yes.’ The motion that I should be adopted was then put to the vote and carried by a show of hands: but I could see from the disapproving and angry faces of some in the audience that there was a substantial minority who did not like what had happened and probably thought that there had been a carefully engineered conspiracy with me a co-conspirator.

There was work to be done and I have never worked harder in my life. I rang up my clerk to tell him that I could not be in court for the next week and I set about visiting every single person who I was given to understand might have disapproved of my adoption, and eventually I persuaded each and everyone of them that there had been no jiggery pokery on my part and that I would be a worthy candidate in the by-election.