My appointment got a reasonably favourable reception from the press. There was a nice piece by Robin Oakley and Woodrow Wyatt – generous and thoughtful:

The Tory party has held its nerve better than may have been expected over the Lawson affair. The irony of the reshuffle forced on Mrs Thatcher by Lawson’s resignation is that it may in the end actually strengthen her government. It has given her team greater coherence by fixing in the top jobs a group of people eminently suited to occupy them. The key to the whole affair was experience. Mrs. Thatcher installed in the three top offices of state men who had held the number two job in the same department. David Waddington enters the Cabinet probably more in tune with the instincts of rank and file Tories than anyone there already. A barrister whose days as a workaholic immigration minister gave him a keen insight into the workings of the Home Office and the human nature of his parliamentary colleagues (since put to good use as Chief Whip), he is an ‘art of the possible’ politician. He has one advantage over Hurd. As a natural right-winger on law and order, Waddington will be able to use the code words and to make those little growls in the back of the throat which assure the hangers and floggers at the Tory Party Conference that he is on their wavelength and that he understands their instincts even if he can never give them back the rope.

Gilly also got a very good and well-deserved write-up for all the support she had given me over the years, in good times and bad. One journalist quoted her as saying: ‘I could gossip for Britain in the Olympics.’ Another asked whether she was surprised at her husband’s appointment? ‘Not at all,’ she said, ‘if they made him Pope he would want to be God.’

There was no time to sit back and enjoy my good fortune. On the Sunday evening I was back in London and on Monday morning at my desk. There were some matters which had to be dealt with without delay. Not surprisingly the events in Tiananmen Square had had a very unsettling effect in Hong Kong and it was important to take steps to maintain confidence in the future of the place and stem the rising tide of emigration. To this end the Foreign Office had proposed a scheme to give a large number of key people British passports. Far from this being to encourage them to leave Hong Kong it was to give them confidence to stay, for they would know that if things went terribly wrong they would have somewhere to go. The Home Office could see the arguments in favour of the scheme but did not want to be accused of undermining the tough immigration policy which had been so successful in taking immigration right out of the centre of political debate. I looked at the list of so-called key jobs which the government of Hong Kong was suggesting should come within the scheme and soon concluded that it would leave us wide open to attack in the House. In essence Hong Kong wanted a scheme which, while heavily weighted against the unskilled, would still have given every category of worker, including the unskilled, some chance of success. But this seemed entirely inconsistent with the statements we had made in Parliament to the effect that highly-skilled people in Hong Kong would be selected. One would find it pretty hard to argue, I thought, that minor posts in the social services were key posts which, if left vacant, would undermine the stability of the territory; and I told the Prime Minister that in my view the list had to be revised and there had to be a strict limit – 50,000 – on the number of heads of families who could benefit.

The Bill was a short enabling measure to provide a framework for the operation of the selection scheme, with the scheme itself to be set out in an Order in Council. Norman Tebbit threatened to cause mayhem when the Bill was introduced, but he was not able to muster much support and I was greatly helped, not for the last time, by Roy Hattersley who did not find it easy to explain Labour policy, if any, on the matter. Perhaps I misunderstood him but at one stage he seemed to be saying that the government’s scheme was ‘wicked’ because it involved ‘a denial of basic justice’ to the great majority of citizens of Hong Kong. All 5 million of them, or at any rate the 3.2 million British Dependent Territory citizens there, should have been given a passport and the right to settle in Britain. At another stage he seemed to be saying he would give the right to come here to some, not all, but he would not say to how many.

This was one exchange on BBC Radio:

Nobody could be expected to make much sense of that.

When I got back into the Home Office, planning for a Criminal Justice Bill for the 1990–91 session was fairly well advanced. By an earlier Criminal Justice Act the powers of the courts to impose custodial sentences on young offenders had been strictly limited and it was thought it was now time to take the next step, and impose similar restrictions on the sentencing of adults. Many in the Home Office who were on the criminal justice side of the shop genuinely felt that judges and magistrates were still sending to prison offenders who could be better dealt with in the community, but many others wanted limits on sentencing powers for an entirely different reason. The Home Office had for years been faced with intractable problems on the prison side of the business. The government had, in 1979, embarked on a great new prison-building programme but the prison population had gone up and up and there was constant sniping at the government because of overcrowding. What better way could there be of tackling the problem than to make it more difficult for the courts to send people to prison? My own view was that there was no point in sending people to prison if there were other ways of dealing with them. There was not the slightest evidence that prisons taught people the error of their ways. Rather, they were universities of crime where people were, at best, confirmed in their antisocial behaviour and, at worst, learned even nastier tricks. But when I arrived on the scene little attempt had been made to work up a balanced package which would convince our own supporters that we were not just going soft on crime. We had, I believed, to balance the new proposals on sentencing with changes in the parole system on the lines of the Carlisle Committee’s proposals so that when a prison sentence had to be imposed the sentence served bore a closer relationship to the sentence passed by the judge. There had then to be heavier sentences for crimes of violence, new policies to bring home to parents their responsibility when their children fell foul of the law, and more imaginative forms of punishment in the community. These could include curfew orders enforced through electronic tagging. Lastly there had to be a ‘victims’ charter’ which recognised that those who suffered from crime also had rights.

The Green Paper published by my predecessor had proposed unit fines and I had been down to Basingstoke and had seen the pilot scheme in operation. It seemed to have many merits. What, after all, could be more sensible than a fine’s size being related to the offender’s means? But a few years later it was destroyed by the folly of politicians and the magistracy. At the behest of the Treasury the government had agreed on a unit scale so graded that at the top end wholly ridiculous penalties could be imposed on high earners for relatively trivial offences and some magistrates, who disliked the whole idea of unit fines, decided to make a political point by applying the scale in an entirely inflexible way, choosing to ignore the admittedly limited discretion given to them under the Act.

From the moment I arrived back in the Home Office the press wanted to talk of nothing else but capital punishment. I was, they said, the first ‘hanger’ to have occupied the Home Office since Reggie Maudling, and that, having marked me out as a very rare beast, was all that needed to be said about me. While I was certainly not going to change my views overnight to thwart the press, I was anxious to try and put the matter in perspective. I have to confess, however, that I was only partially successful in that regard.

I believed then and believe now that the first job of a Home Secretary is the protection of society and I felt then and I feel now that that protection would be reinforced by the restoration of capital punishment. Surely if a person knows that if he uses a gun in a robbery, he is likely to hang, he is less likely to take a gun with him. But I was a realist and I knew the way votes on capital punishment had gone over the years: not once since the War had there been a majority in the Commons in favour. The chances of capital punishment ever being restored were slight indeed. My job, therefore, was to do my best to give the public the greatest protection possible without capital punishment and do my best to ensure that those guilty of the worst types of murder stayed in prison, if necessary, for the rest of their lives. I did not believe that without capital punishment there was nothing I could do to improve public safety. There were plenty of worthwhile things to do within the system as it was. It was an uphill struggle trying to get this message across but I did my best.

The responsibilities of the Home Secretary were greater in the 1980s than they have now become. The Home Secretary was, for instance, concerned with the administration of criminal justice, criminal law, the treatment of offenders and the prison service – all matters now within the remit of the Ministry of Justice. He was also responsible for broad questions of national broadcasting policy; and in my first few weeks back in the Home Office broadcasting was another enormous headache. As Chief Whip I had for two years sat on a committee chaired by the Prime Minister which was working up proposals for radical change to independent broadcasting, but it still came as a nasty shock to learn that in a few days’ time I had to address an important gathering of broadcasters on the government’s plans – particularly the proposal that, subject to the passing of a quality threshold, television franchises should be awarded to the highest bidders.

Then it was Remembrance Sunday when I found my responsibilities even more alarming. My job was to review the police on parade in the quadrangle in the old Home Office building, then greet the members of the Royal Family attending the ceremony, including the then King of Norway who never missed. Finally I had to take the Queen through the building to the top of the stairs leading out into Whitehall. There stood an army officer alongside an ancient chronometer. ‘It is 10.58 and twenty seconds, Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘and the time you normally set off.’ And off went the Queen, arriving at her spot in front of the Cenotaph at precisely 10.59 and fifty-five seconds. I followed at a discreet distance and tucked myself in at the end of the line of Cabinet ministers. At the end of the service I had to set off after the Queen and take her back through the building, praying that I would not lose my way.

Later that morning I missed a trick. After the Queen had left, I was chatting with the Prime Minister and we got on to the beauties of the old Home Office building. ‘Would you like it back?’ said Margaret. ‘I have other things on my mind,’ I replied.

Soon, on 21 November 1989, we had the State Opening of Parliament and the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The loyal address was moved by Ian Gow. In the course of it he said:

Those words must have strengthened the IRA’s belief that Ian was an inveterate foe, and in the summer of the next year he was blown up in his car by one of the brutes.

Shortly before Christmas we went to Paris and stayed with our Ambassador, Sir Ewen Fergusson. In his younger days he had been a great rugger player. He liked to show off his international caps to visitors male and female – which sometimes led to difficulties as he kept them in the gents’ lavatory. We went to dinner with Pierre Joxe, then Minister of the Interior, and were most impressed by the magnificent palace which was his official residence. He did not believe me when I told him that a William Henry Waddington who was born in Britain had been Prime Minister of France in the 1870s, but eventually with the aid of reference books I proved to him that I was right. We went to see the David exhibition in the Louvre and were suitably shocked by the pyramid placed therein with the connivance of President Mitterand. We went Christmas shopping to try to forget it.

One of my first jobs when the House met in the New Year was to deal with Lord Justice Taylor’s Report on the Hillsborough disaster. The Report poured scorn on the football membership scheme which had been strongly advocated by the Prime Minister as the government’s response to football hooliganism. I had no option but to go to the Prime Minister and give her the unpalatable news that the scheme had to be ditched. My statement in the House was eagerly awaited by the Opposition who felt that if ever there was a case of a government finishing up with egg on its face, this was it. But everything went incredibly well. Having announced that we were accepting the Taylor recommendation not to go ahead with the scheme because of the technical difficulties identified, I went on to highlight Taylor’s support for all-seat stadiums, and to say that a football licensing authority would require an end to terraces on designated grounds by 1999. In addition, there would be improved arrangements for crowd control, and urgent consideration of the case for new offences and new powers to deal with those excluded from grounds by the Courts. Roy Hattersley, in his reply, jeered at the government for being forced to abandon the membership scheme but rejected the one proposal by Taylor which could also have a bearing on the fight against football hooliganism – all-seat stadiums. All-seat stadiums meant, he said, a ban on standing and ‘could lead to people who leapt to their feet out of joie de vivre being slammed in gaol.’

Matthew Parris described the scene for readers of The Times with the headline: 

‘STRIKER DAVE PLAYS THEM OFF THE PARK’

On a football pitch tilted against the government by Lord Justice Taylor, and leading a team whose bootlaces had been tied together by their own Prime Minister, Home Secretary David (‘Dave’) Waddington yesterday snatched victory from the jaws of – well, not quite defeat – but Roy Hattersley. Labour’s manager, Neil Kinnock, must have been as sick as a parrot.

Waddington has only just been put in Cabinet United’s first team. New to the top division, this player’s strike-rate was unknown. He had (before Christmas) been not so much talent-spotted as dragged on as a substitute at half time when ‘bully’ Lawson stormed off the pitch in protest at the appointment of a new physio, Alan Walters.

And now here he was, on a rainy Monday afternoon, kicking Labour viciously in the goolies whenever the ref. wasn’t looking – and scoring time and again. Waddington was proving that, just occasionally, this country can still produce great strikers on the wrong side of sixty.

In the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery Taylor’s demeanour was wholly un-partisan. Waddington’s was anything but. Those who expect magisterial detachment from a Home Secretary will be disappointed in this magnificent old shin-kicker.

Mr Waddington speaks in the manner of an angry school master interspersing strokes of the cane with a point-by-point recital of the crimes of the errant boy.

Lord Justice Taylor, he said, had pointed the finger of blame at ‘poor facilities’ (thwack), ‘hooliganism’ (thwack), ‘excessive drinking’ (thwack) ‘and poor leadership’ (thwack). Furthermore, ‘squalid conditions’ (thwack) ‘encouraging squalid’ (thwack) ‘behaviour’. In short, the real hooligans were the clubs.

It was shamelessly effective. By the time the Home Secretary sat down, we had quite forgotten that he had come to the House to announce that the government was abandoning the centrepiece of its Football Supporters Bill, the ‘membership scheme’, because an independent judge had said that the whole thing was a nonsense.

Curiously, Hattersley made little of this. After a few ritual insults hurled like soggy sprouts at the absent Mrs Thatcher, he endorsed the Taylor Report, which could be ‘the basis of much-needed improvement to football grounds’.

Then he rejected the cornerstone of the whole thing. Labour could not, he said, support all-seater stadiums. After all, what if people wanted to stand up in their seats? Those MPs who do not expect the Princess of Wales to be dragged by police out of her box at Covent Garden next time she feels moved to give a standing ovation, felt that Hattersley exaggerated the problem here.

A most extraordinary incident occurred about this time which showed how utterly useless the football authorities were and explained why the game was in such an appalling mess. A near-riot had taken place at Bournemouth after the police had warned the football authorities that there was going to be trouble and had begged them to either move or cancel the match. They had refused. I summoned the chairman and gave him an imperial rocket after which cooperation with the police did improve a little.

If I had my time again I would organise my life a lot better, and certainly I should have arranged my life in the Home Office a lot better. For some reason civil servants are good at drawing up submissions and identifying courses of action available in a particular situation but quite hopeless at writing speeches, presumably because they themselves rarely make them and they cannot imagine how their words will sound when spoken. I wasted hours rewriting the most dreadful offerings when I should have (a) refused to go to half the events in the diary for which the offerings were intended and (b) made a few off the cuff remarks at the events which I did attend. One reform I did introduce which should be of lasting benefit: I flatly refused to motor across London in heavy traffic to have lunch with journalists. Those who wanted to see me could choose between a sandwich in my room or a quick meal in the nearest hotel to Queen Anne’s Gate.

We stayed in Denny Street until the New Year, by which time the Hurds had left South Eaton Place for Carlton House Gardens. South Eaton Place had its advantages, principally a decent-sized dining room in which one could entertain. There was also ample room for visiting members of the family. But it was a dismally dark house with the basement occupied by the police, whom I was supposed to inform if I ever wished to venture out.

I was not sleeping well and one Sunday morning I got up at four o’clock to walk to Victoria bus station to buy the papers. There was a camera above the front door and I had to be very stealthy leaving the house, creeping along the wall to keep out of the camera’s view. I made good my escape, bought the papers and prepared to re-enter the house in the same manner. Pressed against the wall and with latch key in hand I moved slowly towards the door-step. I then tripped over it and the papers went flying in all directions. The door was flung open from the inside. ‘Hello, hello,’ said a burly constable. ‘And what might you be up to, sir?’

I got on well with the Metropolitan Police. The only trouble was their eating habits. I have never known people put away so much food at the multiplicity of lunches and dinners I was required to attend at Christmas time. Every rank in turn invited me to stuff myself – literally, I mean.

Douglas Hurd had introduced a War Crimes Bill to confer on the British courts jurisdiction to try people for war crimes committed in the 1939–45 war even though they were not British citizens or otherwise subject to the jurisdiction of the British courts at the time the crimes alleged were committed. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had come up with evidence that a number of people who had found their way into Britain after the War as ‘refugees’ or displaced persons had been party to the most horrible massacres in Eastern Europe after the German attack on Russia in 1941, and we could not sit by and do nothing. We had either to send these people back to face trial in the places where the crimes were committed or give the British courts power to try them, and trying them here seemed the better choice. The Baltic states and Belorussia where the incidents had taken place were still a part of the Soviet Union and few had much confidence in the ‘justice’ meted out by the courts of those benighted lands. Furthermore most, if not all, the people under suspicion were now, by naturalisation, British citizens and legislation to deprive them of their citizenship and deport them would be at least as controversial as giving the British courts jurisdiction to try them.

The Bill got a huge majority on second reading and passed through the rest of its stages in the Commons at breakneck speed. The Lords took one look at the measure and threw it out; and now that I had taken over at the Home Office we had to decide whether to introduce the Bill again. I was sure we should. One could not just forget about a Bill which had received such a ringing endorsement from the elected House; and the Parliament Act, passed to resolve differences between the two Houses in favour of the Commons, was tailor-made to deal with the situation. If, after the Commons had approved the Bill a second time, the Lords again rejected the measure, it would proceed to Royal Assent and become law without any further debate. In Cabinet I was surprised to find Douglas Hurd and Geoffrey Howe against reintroduction, but their objections were overruled and the Bill then went through the Commons again – as easily as it had the first time. What happened in the Lords the second time round I will describe later, because when I left the Home Office and went to the Lords, the Bill followed me there.

At Easter 1990 I was due to chair the World Summit on Drugs in London; I thought it a good idea to fit in a trip to America before the summit to educate myself a little about the drugs problem in the States.

In Washington a police anti-drugs squad took us out late at night to see the extent of drug trading on the streets and the way the police were trying to cope with it. The police station from which we started was austere in the extreme, a concrete floor, an army-style trestle table and a few upright chairs. The police in England would not have put up with it for a moment and it did not suggest that Washington, the capital city of the richest country in the world, was awash with money to maintain law and order. Out on the streets a number of young people – some very young – were searched, the method adopted being to spread-eagle the suspect over the bonnet of the car and train a shotgun on him. Some arrests followed.

It was interesting to talk to both the police and the politicians in Washington. They all insisted that public attitudes towards the use of drugs were changing and they were winning the war against the casual or recreational user. But they were disturbingly unwilling to face up to or at any rate voice the conclusion that the drug problem in the States was now largely an inner-city problem afflicting a black underclass and associated with urban decline and poverty. What was very encouraging was the close working relationship between the American agencies and our own drugs liaison officer, Superintendent Trevor Cutts, who was attached to the British Embassy.

We went to Quantico and saw members of the FBI in training and then on to St Louis. We were entertained by an austere and puritanical mayor at a river boat restaurant which served overcooked beef, and gravy with the consistency of porridge. Across the river was East St Louis, almost a wasteland with only government buildings looking habitable. We spoke to the US Federal Prosecutor who said he liked to get his staff home early in the evening and certainly before dark because in the evening the locals took pot shots at them from the roof tops. An FBI agent had been shot dead the day before when he had entered a house to execute a search warrant and had come face to face with a man high on crack. The house was full of weapons.

In St Louis the courts had been overwhelmed by a horrifying escalation in juvenile crime. In 1987, fifty juveniles had been arrested for drug offences. Since then there had been a tenfold increase. Ninety per cent of all crimes were drug related, with ninety per cent of drug offenders high at the time of arrest. Sixty-five per cent of other offenders were also high. It was not just a case of violence being used to feed the drug habit. Crack cocaine actually induced aggressive and violent behaviour. It was being sold for only five dollars a smoke.

We went to a school where children of only seven and eight were taught a WAR (We Are Responsible) programme. The teaching was jargon-riddled with much talk of resisting ‘peer group pressure’ when performing one’s ‘job functions’ and all the teachers coupled alcohol and the smoking of tobacco with the use of hard drugs. I suggested that they were hardly likely to get the enthusiastic support of parents in the fight against drugs if they preached the message that perfectly lawful habits in which probably ninety per cent of the parents indulged were just as bad as the use of illegal substances. I got nowhere.

I also got pretty exasperated with the many criticisms of ‘interdiction’, the word the Americans used to cover prohibition. The Mayor of St Louis went so far as to say that interdiction forced up the price which led to the commission of more crime to feed the habit. More and cheaper drugs were apparently his answer to the ills of society.

We went on to New York and saw Mayor Dinkins who, unlike the Mayor of Washington, had not been arrested on drugs charges. The next day we visited an impressive drugs rehabilitation programme – Daytop. At the end of the trip I had learned some unpleasant lessons. (1) There was something especially destructive about crack cocaine. (2) The tougher the Americans got in the fight against drugs the greater the likelihood that Britain would face a flood of imports. (3) Jamaican gangs had a hold on the American trade and their links with gangs in Britain increased this likelihood. (4) There was a need for ever closer international cooperation in the fight against drugs. (5) Children in Britain should be taught about the danger of drugs, but the American approach would not do.

Things would have to get a lot worse before parents in Britain would put up with children chanting for hours on end ‘Say “no” to drugs, say “no” to drugs’; and it was simply wrong to lump together in one’s teaching legal and illegal substances, as if whether a thing is legal or illegal is neither here nor there. Things were serious enough in Britain but we could take some comfort in the fact that we had not yet the same lethal mixture of gang crime, urban dereliction, inner-city deprivation and freely available firearms. In Britain street dealers were still a rarity – in America commonplace. But there was nothing for us to be complacent about.

I made another interesting journey in the early part of 1990. I went to Brussels for a series of meetings and then on to Zeebrugge to see some of the key people there who did such a marvellous job when MS Herald of Free Enterprise sank. I then went on to the Menin Gate in Ypres to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Nearby there was a beautiful cemetery in which were buried many members of the East Lancashire Regiment in which my father had served.