Preparations for the by-election had to be made speedily and I set to work with a will. In the midst of it all I got a telephone call from a Paul Watson who said he was making a number of ‘year in the life’ films. He had recently completed a year in the life of a race horse and now wanted to do a year in the life of an MP. He had decided that I was going to win the by-election so wanted to follow me round before, during and after the campaign and throughout the coming year. I saw no harm in the idea but it turned out to be a gruelling experience. It caused great merriment among our friends when we started turning up at cocktail parties with a camera crew in tow. When eventually the film was shown on television Barney, our fell pony (true name Hades Hill Jupiter) was the star, tearing across the moors with Gilly on top. When Gilly was not on horseback she was seen and heard philosophising in a very plummy voice about the ills of the world and the beauty of Lancashire while driving a car at breakneck speed round twisting country lanes.

My opponents in the by-election were Betty Boothroyd, Labour, later to become famous as a truly great Speaker of the House of Commons; a Liberal, David Chadwick; and an Independent, Brian Tattersall. Tattersall stood for tougher immigration control and the restoration of hanging. Capital punishment was much in the news with Sydney Silverman having introduced a Private Members’ Bill leading to its abolition, and Ian Brady and Myra Hindley having recently been tried for the Moors murders. I felt abolition had been a mistake but I did not make much of the issue. There were plenty of other things to talk about, particularly the dismal performance of the Labour government.

An array of important people came to support me including Alec Douglas-Home (whose public meeting attracted 1,000 people), Quintin Hogg and Selwyn Lloyd. Betty Boothroyd was supported by Barbara Castle, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as he still called himself), Emanuel Shinwell and George Brown. None of their meetings were well attended and Betty herself made greater play of a telegram of support from Annie Walker of the Rover’s Return in Coronation Street. Selwyn Lloyd stayed with us at Whins House. When he came down to breakfast we asked him whether he had slept well. He said: ‘Yes, until about seven o’clock when I had two visitors in my bed. Once I had got Alistair to take his wet trousers off we became good friends.’

Gilly worked unceasingly – attending meetings every evening and canvassing all day. We campaigned in beautiful weather and ran from door to door so that we would cover every street. I made much of the fact that I was the local man, I complained that Nelson & Colne had been neglected and its industry allowed to decline while the government lavished vast subsidies on Merseyside.

The government had at about this time encouraged Courtaulds to set up in Skelmersdale. Courtaulds were naive enough to believe that outside the traditional textile areas they would be able to introduce efficient, new, labour-saving working practices. In fact, it was only a matter of months after the establishment of the factory that troublemakers moved in from Merseyside and after that it was downhill all the way. It turned out to be a major disaster for Courtaulds and a major disaster for north-east Lancashire which could well have used the new investment. All this was just around the corner when the by-election took place, but all my most pessimistic prognostications were borne out by events.

A week before we polled there was a by-election in Oldham, and that safe Labour seat fell to the Tories. I began to relax. It seemed inconceivable that I could fail to win Nelson & Colne after that result and so it happened. At about 1 a.m. on 28 June the acting returning officer announced that I had won with a majority of 3,522. There had been an 11.4% swing from Labour to Conservative which, if reflected countrywide, would have given the Conservatives a massive 250 seat majority. The votes cast for each candidate were:

The next day was an anticlimax – a call from a newspaper at 8 a.m. asking for my comments and after that virtually the whole day with Paul Watson’s camera crew. But I did receive a call from the Chief Whip, Willie Whitelaw, to check that I would be reporting to his office at 2 p.m. the following Tuesday before taking my seat.

On the Monday, Gilly and I plus Matthew and James set off for London and stayed overnight in my father-in-law’s flat in Whitehall Court. The camera crew said that they wanted film of my getting into a taxi at Whitehall Court and getting out at the Palace of Westminster and that it would be impossible, for obvious reasons, for one crew to do both shots. Could we therefore be filmed getting into a cab on the Monday? ‘Yes,’ we said, but unfortunately when we hailed a taxi on the Tuesday it was a red one and the completed film showed that the cab we had got in to had turned red on the short journey down Whitehall.

Matthew, then aged six, announced that he liked London and was going to stay until his teeth fell out. But his patience was exhausted long before the moment came for me to approach the Table flanked by Willie Whitelaw and Mark Carlisle. I then handed the returning officer’s writ to the clerk and took the oath to the loud baaing sound which is customary on such occasions. The whole thing went without a hitch, but only just. Minutes before I was due in the chamber I woke up to the fact that I had lost the writ, and a feverish hunt ensued. Eventually it was discovered in one of the many lavatories in the Palace. The experience led to a slight alteration in my perception of the Labour Party. How easy it would have been for some malicious fellow to have flushed the writ away, leaving me embarrassed and seatless!

After taking the oath I shook hands with Mr Speaker King and then went to meet the Leader of the Opposition. Ted Heath had become leader three years before, it being thought that he was a great debater who would knock spots off Harold Wilson. But in office he never showed himself able to knock spots off anything or anybody. As an elder statesman he learned to make a good authoritative contribution from the front bench below the gangway but he had few debating skills and his stodginess of approach made him a sure loser in any tussle with the wily Wilson.

I had only been in the House for two days when I received a telephone call from the clerk of my Manchester chambers asking me if later in the week I was prepared to sit as a deputy County Court judge somewhere in London. This would allow my colleague Bob Hardy, who had contracted with the Lord Chancellor’s Department, to sit as a judge on that day, to take over a brief of mine, a libel action in Leeds. At the eleventh hour someone pointed out that if I were to sit, my career as an MP would come to an abrupt end because as a result of the House of Commons Disqualification Act I would have disqualified myself from membership of the House, thereby precipitating another by-election. I was then begged by Bob to go and explain to the lady in the Lord Chancellor’s Department why he could not sit and why I had turned out to be an inappropriate replacement. I set off and, after journeying along many corridors and ascending and descending many staircases, I eventually found a little old lady sitting alone in a tiny office at the bottom of a gloomy stairwell somewhere in the bowels of the House of Lords. I apologised for troubling her and she said: ‘I can assure you it is no trouble. In fact I am delighted to see you. I have been in this office for thirty-five years and you are the first person who has ever visited me.’

The next day I was in the chamber at 2.30 p.m. for prayers, and thereafter I always tried to attend prayers once or twice a week. I am addicted to the Book of Common Prayer and cannot understand why modern churchmen think it clever to substitute the banal for the beautiful. It is an insult to ordinary people to say they cannot understand the language of the early seventeenth century; and, if teachers cannot be bothered to explain to children how the meaning of words sometimes changes over the years, they are not fit to be teachers. Daily prayers in the House are a constant reminder that Christianity has helped to shape virtually every facet of British life from democracy to law, to morality, literature, art and education. At her coronation the Queen pledged herself to maintain the laws of God and as Supreme Governor of the Church of England she symbolises the important place the church has in our constitution. Nowadays it sometimes seems that we cannot even trust Her Majesty’s judges to protect the Christian traditions on which this country is founded, and that makes it even more important that Parliament should do so. Daily prayers should remind all of that task.

MPs are enormously privileged to work in the Palace of Westminster – a building of rare beauty – but in 1968 one heard little recognition of this and there were constant complaints about working conditions. In 1979 when things had greatly improved some Members were still complaining. A new Labour Member in 1979 actually told me that as a post office worker grade ‘x’ he was entitled to ‘y’ cubic feet of space, and it was outrageous that in the House of Commons he was having to share a room with five other Members. He did not get any sympathy from me. When I got into Parliament I was so grateful to be there that I would willingly have worked in a boot cupboard. But I did not rate a boot cupboard and I dictated my correspondence, as did most other Members, sitting on a bench downstairs on what was called the interview floor. Now in the same area are hundreds of filing cabinets stuffed full of the useless correspondence generated by over-generous secretarial allowances. In 1968 we did not have offices and we did not have lavish secretarial allowances, but we still managed to do our work to the satisfaction of our constituents. Offices have, in fact, brought with them many problems as well as costing the taxpayer a lot of money. They have helped to empty the smoking room which used to be a splendid place to get to know colleagues and discuss events. When some new offices for Members came along in the early eighties, an Ulster Unionist Member told me that now his best friend and one of the chief sources of smoking room gossip spent all his time upstairs in his room canoodling with his secretary. He was unconvinced that this made Parliament a more efficient place or his friend a better Member.

Anyhow, I was grateful to have got into Parliament. I found life very congenial and I wasn’t the only one or there would not have been a queue of people wanting to get in and another queue of people trying to get back in after being thrown out.

I made a pot-boiling maiden speech before the summer recess just to get it out of the way and then settled down to making a minor nuisance of myself. I must be the only person who benefited personally from the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, for that led to what I considered a very happy event – the recall of Parliament in the long recess.

Soon I was put on the standing committee of the Post Office Bill, the measure which turned the Post Office from a government department into a public corporation. Our side argued strongly for the telecommunications part of the business to be separated from the postal part, an approach adopted in the early 1980s Telecommunications Act.

The following year I was on the committee of the Ports Bill – an even duller measure, but I was beginning to learn the art of time wasting with a purpose, the purpose being to delay the progress of government business and keep some government supporters engaged upstairs on the committee floor and hopefully out of worse mischief.

But the whips did not really wish to keep me fully engaged in the Palace of Westminster. My job was to hold Nelson & Colne at the coming general election and if that meant missing divisions to attend events in the constituency, so be it. Gilly and I set out to involve ourselves in as many activities in the constituency as possible, to take an interest in everything that was going on, in the hope that people would feel we were doing a good job and would be prepared to vote for us even if they did not think much of the Tory Party or Mr Heath.

During the 1960s there had been a steady increase in the number of Pakistanis living in the constituency, and each year more of them were finding their way on to the electoral register. I made great efforts to get to know them and show an interest in their concerns. Once I was asked to support an application to bring a young man into the country to marry a constituent’s daughter. The boy arrived and we were invited to the nuptials which took place in the Silverman Hall. The father greeted us at the door with: ‘All my English friends I want to go upstairs. All the Pakistanis I ask to go downstairs.’ ‘Why,’ I said, ‘do you want all the English upstairs and all the Pakistanis downstairs?’ ‘Upstairs champagne,’ he said, ‘downstairs orange juice.’

A few weeks later I was visiting the Salvation Army hostel when the bride popped her nose round the door and asked me to come out and speak to her. I asked her what was wrong. She replied: ‘He is no man. You got him into England so please get him out.’

Nelson and Colne were two very different places. Nelson grew out of a village when cotton weaving came to the valley towards the end of the nineteenth century. Colne was a place of some antiquity with a fine old parish church, and those who lived there considered themselves a cut above those who lived two miles down the road. The town had a rousing song, much in use at mayor-making. It went like this:

While still a pretty new MP I had a brush with General Gowon, the ruler of Nigeria – then engaged in a bloody war against secessionist Biafra. I was sufficiently naive to write a personal letter to the General enclosing a letter from a constituent complaining about the many atrocities perpetrated in the war; and, to my astonishment, received a personal letter back from the General in which he berated me in most intemperate language for daring to interfere with the domestic affairs of Nigeria. The General cannot have had much to do with his time.

I also had an interesting encounter with Robert Maxwell which perhaps sheds some light on that extraordinary character. He was chairman of the catering committee in the House of Commons and already showing signs of megalomania. In those days I was writing a regular column for my local newspaper and, running out of anything to say, I put in a few lines about the poor food in the House of Commons. I had no reason to believe that the great Maxwell was an avid reader of the Nelson Leader and I was surprised when a few days later I received a letter from him in which he complained at my lack of courtesy in not telling him of my concerns about the food in the Palace of Westminster before rushing to the press.

One of the truly memorable occasions during the run-up to the 1970 general election was Bernadette Devlin’s arrival in Parliament after she had won Mid Ulster in a by-election. On 22 April 1969, and within an hour of taking her seat, she made her maiden speech and, although it was full of monstrous nonsense, the fluency, command of language and complete self-possession of this 21-year-old left everyone spellbound. The Reverend Ian Paisley then made his contribution and a wit remarked that it was the only speech delivered on the floor of the House of Commons which could be heard distinctly on the floor of the House of Lords.

In 1968 the government had introduced the Parliament (No. 2) Bill which would have allowed existing hereditary peers, but not their successors, the right to attend the House of Lords but not to vote, and would have created a House of voting peers based exclusively on patronage. Left wingers in the Labour Party joined forces with right wingers in the Tory Party led by Enoch Powell to defeat the measure, both factions believing that the scheme, supported by both front benches, would weaken still further the very few constitutional checks on abuse of power by the Executive.

It was a splendid opportunity for a new Member. I supported the rebels and gloried in the discomfiture of the government. Eventually the government abandoned the measure, using as an excuse the need to introduce urgent legislation to penalise unofficial strikers and bring some semblance of order into the ever more chaotic industrial relations scene. Eventually this measure was also abandoned, largely as a result of Jim Callaghan’s decision to side with the TUC against Barbara Castle’s modest attempt at reform. Callaghan was later alleged to have stated that the key to success for a Labour government was to find out what the trade unions wanted and give it to them; and certainly he practised in the late 1960s what he later preached.

In January 1969 I went on a trip to North Africa sponsored by the Ariel Foundation. My travelling companions were Keith Speed, Peter Archer and David Marquand. Algiers was shabby. The flowers which used to decorate the centre of the city were no more. The government was building an enormous steel mill with Russian money but had no idea as to who would want the steel when they had made it. Tunisia, with a far more successful economy, was dull – apart from our meeting with President Bourguiba who showed us numerous photographs of people he said were friends shot by the French in the fight for freedom. We were impressed with Libya which had suddenly become enormously rich following the discovery of oil, but we did not fully appreciate how the reforms aimed at bringing the country into the twentieth century were also releasing other forces. It had been decided to move Parliament to the green hills of Cyrenaica, King Idris’s homeland. The parliamentarians were to sleep in long barrack rooms on army-style beds. We arrived on a Saturday; the parliamentarians were coming on Monday to start their labours on Tuesday and already at the foot of each bed were laid out two neatly folded blankets, a mess tin with knife, fork and spoon and a chunk of bread for their first breakfast.

We travelled across the border into Egypt and as we approached Cairo there were bunkers along the side of the road housing Russian MIG jets. We visited some of the fifteen ships trapped in the Great Bitter Lake since the Six-Day War, and we went up to Aswan and saw the dam being built.

I cannot pretend that all parliamentary trips are educational but this one certainly was; and it certainly broadens one’s mind getting to know Members on the other side of the House.

In January 1970 I joined the board of J. B. Broadley Ltd, makers of leather cloths and coated fabrics in Rossendale Valley. This was at the invitation of Michael Jackson, who died a few years later after the firm was taken over by Ozalid. He was a good man and a very good businessman, and I am very grateful for the opportunity I had to learn at his feet. I also went on the board of Wolstenholme Bronze Powders Ltd. – later renamed Wolstenholme Rink Ltd. – a firm of which John Wolstenhome (goalie for Bury football club as well as a businessman and Gilly’s grandfather) was co-founder. I think all this broadened my experience and made me a rather better MP than I would otherwise have been.

In 1969 James went away to school, to Aysgarth in North Yorkshire. The poor boy hated going and for many months before leaving home used to get into our bed in the early morning and beg to be allowed to stay with us. Once he said: ‘If you let me stay, I’ll do all the housework and the cooking.’ We felt dreadful, particularly when I myself had been so homesick, but we also felt we had to grit our teeth and do it for his sake. If he had stayed at home he would have been the only one of his friends not going away to school. The awful day came when we motored over to Aysgarth and left him there but the next day the headmaster, Simon Reynolds, telephoned to say he had settled in well. However, James’s own letters did not bear this out, and for the first few years he suffered greatly. Matthew went to Aysgarth a year-and-a-half later and, although in constant trouble, loved school right from the start. While Matthew thrived, James lamented and after nearly two years at school wrote:

Matthew on the other hand wrote:

In the early summer of 1970 Harold Wilson called a general election. He did so after the Labour government had got up to a monstrous piece of trickery. The Parliamentary Boundary Commission had reported and by law the government had to present to Parliament for approval the order implementing its proposals for changes to constituency boundaries. The report was not to Labour’s liking so, while complying with the law by presenting to Parliament the order, they then whipped the Parliamentary Party to vote the order down. As a result, the election was to be fought on the old boundaries giving Labour an advantage they did not deserve.

Gilly became ill with glandular fever and was unable to take part in much of the campaign. It went well enough from my point of view although, according to the polls, we did not seem to be making much headway nationally. But on the last morning a more encouraging poll was published and in Nelson & Colne we felt we would be all right. We were – just. The result was:

The Party was back in office with a perfectly adequate majority of thirty-one seats.