On the evening of 27 November, John Major became leader of the Conservative Party. As soon as I had heard the news I had to leave for a dinner at which I was the guest of honour. I made my speech and then was passed a message. I had to go to No. 11 Downing Street at once. I went so fast that I got there before John Major who was still in the House of Commons for the ten o’clock division. Norma was at home and, having offered me a drink, invited me to sit at the end of their bed and watch on television the scenes in the House as John was congratulated by all and sundry. Eventually he arrived at No. 11 and, having talked for a little while on our own, we were joined by Andrew Turnbull and the Cabinet Secretary. We had a long conversation about who might fill various jobs and what I might do and, eventually, he offered and I accepted the leadership of the House of Lords. If I had had any sense I should have stuck out for remaining Home Secretary where my work was only half done, but I sensed that John wanted a change and I got it into my head that going to the Lords would be a more worthwhile challenge than stepping down from the Home Office and becoming, say, Leader of the Commons. I was wrong and I think my judgement was affected by the stressful time we had been through as a result of Margaret’s departure.

Next morning I saw John at No. 10 after he had returned from the Palace. After chatting about other changes he said that he wanted Lord Denham (Bertie) replaced as Chief Whip by Alexander Hesketh, but I soon persuaded him that it would be a mistake to hurry the change. Bertie had said that he wanted to go in the spring in any event and the sensible course was to wait until then rather than make two key changes at the same time.

I went back to the Home Office to pack up my belongings, and some of the trappings of office of one of Her Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State were then removed with astonishing rapidity. As soon as my move was made public I was told that my detectives were leaving as there were not considered to be any security problems connected with my new post. The next morning I went to the Palace and the Queen gave me framed photographs of herself and Prince Philip.

The next few days I spent in a state of black despair. I felt that in taking the job in the Lords I had let myself down badly. The children, not surprisingly, were not at all interested in becoming ‘Hons.’, and Gilly, whom I had expected to be delighted, was doubtful whether I had done the right thing. We went to a wedding and got stuck in a snow drift and I could not help thinking how nice it had been to be driven everywhere by the police. Gilly put a brave face on it publicly, telling the local paper: ‘David finished his job as Home Secretary a success. He is still in the Cabinet and instead of sitting opposite the Prime Minister, he will now be sitting next to him.’ But she then had to cope with the death of her mother, and both of us were miserable.

My move was, however, quite well received by the national press. Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph wrote:

One small consolation was the Leader of the Lords’ magnificent room directly over the peers’ entrance in Old Palace Yard; but my first job was not to get my feet under the desk, but my bottom on the red benches. This involved choosing a title and being introduced into the Lords as soon as possible. It did not take me long to settle on Waddington, of Read in the County of Lancashire; and Garter King of Arms did a fine job hastening on the formalities so that the introduction could take place before Christmas.

This was how the scene was described in the Lancashire Evening Post:

The 61-year-old Burnley-born Tory made none of the fuss that Baroness Castle caused when she was initiated as a life member of the aristocracy a year ago. There was no repeat of her objections to the red and ermine robes or her point blank refusal to wear and doff her hat.

Mr Waddington, the typical Tory officer and gentleman, was the soul of obedience and respect for tradition. At just after 2.30 p.m. he was led in by Black Rod – Air Vice-Marshall Sir John Gyngell and Garter King of Arms, Sir Colin Cole. His prime supporter, government Chief Whip Lord (Bertie) Denham, and his secondary supporter, Lord Carlisle of Bucklow – former Education Secretary Mark Carlisle – followed three paces behind. With an audience which included Baroness Castle in an autumn print dress, former Prime Minister Lord Callaghan in a grey suit and ex-Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham with his inevitable stick, the three made their stately pace through the red and gold splendour of the Lords. The words that established the new Lord Waddington as a trusty counsellor of the Queen were read and he shook hands with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern. Nodding his head in the direction of the Queen’s chairman of the Lords, Baron Waddington and his supporters processed round the Chamber. They then took their seats at the side and respectfully put on their black hats, which date from the era when Wellington won Waterloo. With Garter King of Arms facing them, they doffed their archaic headgear three times to Lord Mackay, rose and, once more led by Black Rod, processed out of the Chamber. Mr Waddington – barrister and former Crown Court recorder of true Lancashire mill-owning stock – was now a peer of the realm for life.

I then got a bill from Garter King of Arms for £1,630, the fee for a grant of armorial bearings with supporters. The covering letter read like double dutch: ‘You might care to suggest the tinctures which you would like to see employed and also such symbols and devices as are of appeal to you and would look well upon your shield or forming the crest.’

I soon discovered that my new job was far from taxing. Most mornings there was virtually nothing to do. I would call my private secretary and ask her to bring in some work and after a while one letter would appear and a notice of a meeting of the Dorneywood Trust of which I was chairman. If I had remained Home Secretary, I would probably have been about to occupy Dorneywood. Instead I was told, as if a great prize was being bestowed on me, that I could stay in South Eaton Place which I heartily loathed. John Major had told me that, as Leader, I would be his right-hand man, but within a matter of weeks it was obvious that that was not going to be the case – through no fault of the Prime Minister. Ninety per cent of the business management problems of the government were House of Commons problems and what happened in the Lords was small beer. Furthermore, with a general election not all that far off the Party Chairman’s role was of great importance and time and again, when I saw the Prime Minister with John MacGregor (the new Leader of the House of Commons) on a Monday, our meeting lasted only a few minutes because the matters the Prime Minister thought important had already been covered in an earlier meeting with Chris Patten, the new Party Chairman.

I had to make my maiden speech from the dispatch box. Lord Elton initiated a debate on sentencing policy which gave me the opportunity to talk of the Criminal Justice Bill which I had introduced in the Commons the previous month. The debate was like most of those I had to listen to as Leader – well informed but sleep-inducing – with the Tory peers as critical of the government as the Opposition. Six former Home Office ministers spoke after me and a former permanent secretary; and I soon discovered that even in those days, when the hereditary peers far outnumbered the lifers, nearly all who took part in important debates had had distinguished careers in industry, the academic world or public service and made really well-informed contributions. Peers did not queue up at the Whips Office asking for a one-page brief on a subject down for debate, as sometimes happens in the Commons. Whips did not go around the place asking people to speak in order to keep a debate going until the hour at which a division had been arranged, as also happens in the Commons. People who knew what they were talking about put their names down to speak and their records entitled them to be listened to with respect. When I opened a debate during the Gulf War I was followed by two Field Marshals and after that experience I did not think I knew all there was to know about warfare.

Question Time I found a worry. It was not often that I had to answer any questions myself but I had to sit on the front bench worrying about the performance of others. There were few departmental ministers in the Lords, certainly not one in every department, so very often questions had to be answered by the Whips (entitled ‘Lords in Waiting’). They did their best to mug up on subjects raised but they were either not particularly well briefed by the government department concerned (departments attached little importance to what was going on in the Lords) or they were not skilled enough to know what extra briefing they needed. As a result, they were always at risk of being caught out. Andrew Davidson, the deputy Chief Whip, provided a briefing for new whips in biblical language, part of which read: ‘A Lord in waiting should stick to his brief. The further he strayeth from it, the deeper the pit he diggeth for himself to fall into; and if he knoweth not the answer, he should say so but not too often.’

In February 1991 there was the mortar attack on Downing Street. My room in the Privy Council Office overlooked Downing Street and I could see from my desk the usual group of photographers outside No. 10. Suddenly there was a loud bang and a cloud of black smoke rose above the roof of No. 12. I rushed down the stairs and out into the street and hammered on the door of No. 10. When I got inside a number of people were coming through the connecting door from No. 11. Nobody seemed to be injured and as there was nothing useful I could do, I went back into Downing Street and had a somewhat inconsequential conversation with a chap carrying a television camera on his shoulder. I was mightily surprised when I saw the news that night and found the whole conversation had been filmed. No harm had been done but I should have taken more care. I repeated in the Lords the statement on the incident made by Kenneth Baker in the Commons.

Gilly’s father died in February. He could have been a great poet and would, I think, have made a more successful poet than he was a politician. He was a very intelligent man but his plain speaking, his refusal to suffer fools and his determination to fight marginal seats in Lancashire rather than seek a safe haven further south ruined his chances of rising as high as he deserved in government. His death left us a load of trouble. Under his will Whins House, where we had lived since 1965, had been left to Gilly and her two sisters equally so we could only stay there if we bought out her sisters.

We could not buy them out by selling our own house, The Stables, where the Greens had been living, because we would have had to pay a vast sum in capital gains tax as a result of The Stables not having been our residence. So a family arrangement made with the best will in the world twenty-five years earlier (the swapping of the two houses without transferring ownership) turned out to have been a monumental blunder. Eventually, we decided to do up The Stables and go back there. Gilly made a marvellous job of the alterations and it turned out all right in the end.

I was very worried as to what was going to happen in the by-election caused by my elevation. My advice to the Ribble Valley Association was that they should pick someone with previous parliamentary experience and local connections. There was only one person who fitted the bill, Derek Spencer, whose parents had a farm in Waddington, and he would have been excellent. The Association, however, thought nothing of my advice. They saw Derek and thought him boring, and chose a very worthy young Welshman, Nigel Evans. Nigel has, since 1992, served Ribble Valley extremely well, but he was a strange choice for a by-election in the middle of a parliament when even a local person was going to have an uphill struggle. The by-election came – and my 19,000 majority went down the chute. I had precipitated the by-election, I had lost it for the Party and what had I got in return? The leadership of a House in which one’s own side had little idea of party loyalty and no compunction about embarrassing the government they had pledged themselves to support. I felt like cutting my throat.

There were some moments that brought me cheer. In the spring of 1991 Mikey Strathmore* asked me if I would give a cocktail party in my room in honour of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother who, being a relation of his, was coming to dine in the Lords’ Dining Room. Queen Elizabeth arrived with her private secretary, Sir Martyn Gilliatt. It was rather hot and I thought Sir Martyn looked a bit vacant. The next moment he fell as if poleaxed. I thought he was dead. A number of people gathered round, someone went out to find a doctor. Queen Elizabeth, looking down kindly on him, said: ‘He’s always doing that,’ and then carried on chatting with those around her.

I mentioned earlier that when Home Secretary I reintroduced the War Crimes Bill and saw it carried through the House of Commons for a second time with little dissent. On 30 April 1991, I had to move the second reading in the Lords. The Bill was word for word the same as the one the Lords had rejected in 1990. This was intentional. If it had been different in any material respect then, on rejection by the Lords, the Parliament Act would not have applied and the Bill would not automatically have become law. But the fact that the Bill was in the same terms did not mean that the government had made up its mind in advance to reject any amendments. I made this abundantly plain in my opening speech,* and it was absolutely obvious to me, and ought to have been just as obvious to the House, that it was in the interests of opponents of the Bill to give it a second reading. If it was rejected at second reading, it would become law immediately – warts and all. If, on the other hand, it got a second reading, the House would then have endless opportunities to either improve it by amendment or harass the government throughout a long hot summer and hope that eventually it would feel it had better things to do with its time.

Luckily for the government the noble lords or, rather, a majority of them did not grasp these obvious points and the Bill was rejected and duly became law. The tactics of the Bill’s opponents were plain stupid but their speeches were often brilliant. Douglas Houghton, who, having fought at Paschendale, must have known as much about the horrors of warfare as any man, and Hartley Shawcross, who prosecuted at Nuremberg, made truly magnificent contributions. Roy Jenkins mounted a most extraordinary argument – namely that it was perfectly proper for a Labour government to use the Parliament Act to bulldoze legislation through against the opposition of the Upper House but quite improper for the Parliament Act to be invoked in the case of a non-political measure like the War Crimes Bill. To me, the opposite view seemed much more attractive. It is surely very much more worrying to see the Upper House ignored when it is trying to put a brake on a dictatorial government bent on whipping its majority in the Commons to force-feed the public with unpopular legislation, than to see the Lords ignored when its opinion flies in the face of the views of the vast majority of members in the Commons expressed in a free vote. I put the point (tactfully) in my wind-up speech:

And I went on to say that the only result of accepting Lord Houghton’s amendment (that the Bill be read a second time not now, but ‘this day six months’) would be that the House would lose its opportunity to improve the Bill. My words were, however, to no avail and the Houghton amendment, which under standing orders had to be treated as a rejection of the Bill, was carried by 131 votes to 109.

Lord Mayhew (of Wimbledon) was not on good form in the debate. Perhaps he was still suffering from a splendid put-down administered by Viscount Tonypandy at Question Time a week earlier. Lord Mayhew had asserted that in 1946 the Labour government of the day, of which he was a member, had decided that there should be no more war crimes trials. In fact, the Labour government had decided nothing of the sort; and Tonypandy drew attention both to this inaccuracy and to the fact that at the time Lord Mayhew was ‘a very junior minister’.

At the beginning of June 1991 Humphrey Colnbrook* who, if Margaret had had her way, would have become Speaker in 1983 instead of Jack Weatherill, told me he was going to introduce a debate on defence. In my innocence I thought his idea was to give a helping hand to the government. Defence was hardly the Opposition’s strong suit, and a speech strongly supportive of government policy coupled with a bit of knockabout fun at the Opposition’s expense would not go amiss. Not for the last time I was in for a nasty surprise. There was precious little support for the government in Humphrey’s speech or, for that matter, in any of the other speeches from the Tory benches and not a glove was laid on the Labour Party. But I do remember the debate for an exchange between Lord Mayhew and Lord Boyd-Carpenter. The latter, in his reply to a completely fatuous comment of Lord Mayhew’s (‘the Soviets were building hundreds of submarines for purely defensive purposes’) provided a perfect example of a particularly lordly debating style which can deflate the windbag in very quick time. ‘My Lords, because it is the noble Lord’s birthday today I shall wish him many happy returns. I hope that when he reflects on his intervention, it will not substantially diminish the pleasure of the occasion for him.’

The rules of order in the Lords require ‘All personal, sharp or taxing speeches to be foreborn, and whosoever answereth another man’s speech shall apply his answer to the matter without wrong to the person: and as nothing offensive is to be spoken, so nothing is to be ill-taken.’ So if one wants to put down an opponent, a certain subtlety of approach is required.

A new session of Parliament was opened by the Queen on 31 October 1991. I carried the Cap of Maintenance. Matthew Parris wrote of the occasion: ‘Not far from the throne stood a man I used to know as Mr Waddington, carrying a shower cap mounted on a broomstick.’

Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian allowed his imagination to run riot:

By November 1991 the Maastricht Summit was imminent and their Lordships wanted their say. Colin Welch in the Daily Mail reported: ‘Lord Waddington was his usual dry, semi-committed, cautious and circumspect self.’ What I said was that Britain’s view on the future of the Community did not tally with that of some other members of the community:

In February 1991 I became a deputy lieutenant for the County of Lancashire, which pleased me greatly. Also in February I was given the job of representing the government at the funeral of the King of Norway in Oslo. I boarded a plane of the Queen’s flight at Northolt and found myself in the company of various people who were connected with the Royal Family in some remote and minor way and had rung up Buckingham Palace asking if they could hitch a lift. A few minutes after take-off we seemed to be coming down again and I wondered whether we were in trouble; but we landed and the Princess Royal came aboard. We were somewhere near Sandringham. Up again and then Prince Charles appeared and asked if we were enjoying ourselves. He told us he was doing the flying. The funeral went off with many hitches. I had always thought the Norwegians were fairly efficient, but clearly ceremonial was not their strong point. After the service a lot of royals were left hanging around on the pavement. Their cars had been sent somewhere else.

There then came the enthronement of George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a splendid occasion; but I felt the Cabinet rather let the side down. There were well-rehearsed processions of the clergy and civic dignitaries, and then, without any attempt to marshal us into some semblance of order, the Prime Minister and the rest of us shambled along. As we hunted for our seats we were not a pretty sight.

On 4 May I attended the Gulf service of remembrance and thanksgiving in St Mungo’s Cathedral, Glasgow. The royal train broke down so the Queen was late.

In the same month Jenny was married. We had intended the ceremony to take place in the crypt of the House of Commons – more correctly the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft – but after all the invitations had gone out we were told that the maximum number of people allowed in the place had been drastically reduced on the introduction of new fire regulations. We waited for a few days hoping that the mail would bring masses of letters from people saying they could not come. Instead nearly everyone accepted so we decided to move to St Margaret’s and notified everyone accordingly. All went well on the day. Walking from the church to the House of Lords for the reception we came across some morris dancers in Old Palace Yard. A man-horse descended on the bride and wished her fertility.

Back to work, and the task of getting through the government’s legislative programme. Divisions I found pretty unnerving because rarely could a result favourable to the government be guaranteed. Whips worked hard to deliver the votes but the Conservative peers did not think twice about voting against the government. Some did not even think it their duty to tell us when they were unhappy with government policy and were minded to vote the ‘wrong’ way.

And I soon discovered that the built-in majority the Tories were supposed to have in the House simply did not exist. In 1991 there were, in fact, fewer peers who took the Conservative Party whip than there were members of the Opposition parties and the non-aligned peers together; but even the pure arithmetic exaggerated the strength of the Conservatives because a very high proportion of the peers on the other side of the House were life peers and dedicated party politicians, whereas the Conservative ranks contained many hereditary peers who called themselves Conservatives but did not feel under any obligation to be regular attenders and turn up for divisions.

Facing these difficulties I was bound to ask myself now and again whether the House of Lords as then constituted was worth preserving; but I always finished up answering the question with a resounding ‘yes’. No one in his right mind, charged with the job of devising a constitution, would have proposed a second chamber remotely like the one we had got. But we were not devising a new constitution, and the question was whether anyone had come up with proposals for reform of the Lords which would result in anything better. A wholly nominated chamber? We had gone through all that in 1968, and it was a non-starter. An elected chamber? If it were elected on the same basis as the Commons it would be a mere carbon copy of the Commons and serve no useful purpose at all. If it were elected on a different basis it would have the same democratic validity as, and be a challenge to, the Commons. So my conclusion was that for all its faults, the House worked pretty well and no changes which up to then had been mooted would make it any better.

On 18 April 1991 the government suffered a defeat when peers voted by a large majority (177 to 79) for an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill abolishing the mandatory life sentence for murder and allowing judges in murder cases to pass any sentence they wanted – from life to five years, to two years or, for that matter, to a fine or an absolute discharge.

In the debate I had pointed out that when the death penalty was abolished it had been decided that the sentence to be put in its place had to be one which continued to mark the unique wickedness of the crime of murder. The life sentence, the public were told, would not mean that every murderer would spend the rest of his days in prison, but that he would sacrifice his life to the State in the sense that he would only be released when the Home Secretary thought it appropriate. The Home Secretary would be responsible to Parliament if things went wrong; and, because the sentence was for life, the murderer would only be released on licence and for the rest of his life would be liable to recall to prison if he did not behave or appeared once again to have become a danger to the public. I also reminded the House that only a month earlier the House of Commons had once again voted not to restore capital punishment, that the vote had been taken against the background of there being the mandatory life sentence and, for that reason alone, it could not possibly be right to scrap it now.

Lastly, I made the point that it was highly unlikely that if the mandatory sentence was abolished, judges would pass determinate sentences which reflected the views of ordinary people. When some years before a proposal had come before the House for the abolition  of the mandatory life sentence in Scotland, the Scottish law lords had made it quite clear that in certain well-publicised murder cases they would have passed sentences which in view of their leniency the general public would have thought quite inappropriate.

The Earl of Longford argued that the public reaction to sentences was irrelevant and should be ignored, but I thought it extraordinarily arrogant to assert that we knew better than everyone else what was and was not justice.

The House was not persuaded, but the amendment was reversed in the Commons and that reversal was eventually accepted by their Lordships.*

In January 1992 I led a Lords’ delegation on a visit to the Pakistan Senate. We came back in poor shape and one of our number, Stanley Clinton-Davis, nearly expired. The trouble was a trip up the Khyber Pass. We had spent the night at Peshawar and the next day was brilliant with a cloudless sky. I did, however, detect a slight nip in the air and came down stairs carrying my overcoat over my arm. ‘You won’t need that,’ said my host, snatched it off me and threw it to the hall porter. By the time we reached the top of the Pass it was perishing. A general stood by a sand model and as the wind howled off the snow-covered Hindu Kush he lectured us for an hour on the goings on in Afghanistan and we slowly froze. We then had to endure a flight home on Pakistan Airways via Moscow.

Shortly after I got back from Pakistan, Gilly and I had another chilly experience. I had been invited to speak in Perth in support of Nicky Fairbairn, a highly eccentric former law officer, and we went to stay with him and his wife at their home, Fordell Castle. On the first day, having been offered a somewhat liquid lunch, we had to repair upstairs to our tower bedroom and breathe hard under the bedclothes in order to thaw out. On the Sunday our host invited members of his Association to drinks in the middle of the day and was moved to address the gathering wielding a broadsword which I thought at any moment might free itself from his somewhat shaky grasp and shoot across the room to impale his chairman.

The general election could not now be long delayed. I told the Prime Minister that I thought there would be advantages in waiting until May, but it was clear he had almost decided on 9 April and in due course the date was announced and Parliament prorogued. Prorogation involved five peers, appointed commissioners for the purpose, sitting on a bench in front of the throne and taking off their hats as the Royal Assent to Bills was signified. The five on this occasion were the Lord Chancellor, myself, Lord Cledwyn (Leader of the Opposition peers), Lord Aberdare (chairman of committees) and Lord Jenkins (representing the Liberals).

The general election came and, in my view, was won (a) because Chris Patten never stopped hammering away at Neil Kinnock’s obvious inadequacies and (b) because John Major used his soap box to great effect to show his courage, tenacity and ability to relate to ordinary people. But the press conferences held at Central Office each morning were a disaster. Each was supposed to begin with a Cabinet minister making a presentation about some aspect of policy for which he was responsible, and that was supposed to give the press something to chew on and set the tone for the day. Virtually all the presentations were appalling and the press showed no interest in them. Chris Patten seemed to go out of his way to invite the most troublesome journalists present to put questions to him. This had two disadvantages. One, he could not answer their questions. Two, friendly journalists who wanted to help got thoroughly fed up.

After each press conference my committee sat to answer questions from candidates, and only after that did I set off to campaign. I wasted a lot of time trailing round safe seats, but I did get up to Scotland to support James Douglas-Hamilton* and also to north Wales, Anglesey and the West Country, travelling in great style in a helicopter which had been lent to the Party by a wealthy industrialist. On 1 April I woke to hear Labour were between four and seven points ahead in the polls. Two days later I was in Bristol and was told by Michael Stern how badly things were going, but I myself could not detect a very sour atmosphere. On the Tuesday before polling day I was in Edinburgh and was well satisfied with what I saw in James Douglas-Hamilton’s seat. I was most amused by the respectful, indeed deferential, attitude of those attending the meeting I addressed. It was something I had never previously experienced. Perhaps the Scots reserve it for the sons of dukes. On the Wednesday morning I flew down to Manchester and then on to the East Midlands. That day I really did feel that things were coming back to us with John and his soap box having gone down well; and on the Tuesday Woodrow Wyatt, a wise old bird, said he thought we would win. On the Thursday, however, the exit polls were discouraging and Gilly and I sat at home expecting the worst. Then we heard the result at Basildon and soon after that it was clear Labour would not make it.

I was told that all Cabinet ministers should be available to see the Prime Minister on the Saturday, and on Saturday morning I was back in my office waiting for a call. It came just before 11 a.m. and, after I had congratulated John on his victory and we had had a short chat about the campaign, he said: ‘I have something unusual to say. I am having to ask a number of people to leave the Cabinet for a big reconstruction. This is no criticism of the way you have led the Lords. You have done very well. But I need your place and I am offering you the Governorship of Bermuda. As far as I am concerned you can have it for the whole of the parliament.’ I said I would like to talk to Gilly about that and after wishing him all the luck in the world I left. I rang Gilly and she said at once that I ought to accept the offer. And that was that. I had just become a grandfather and now was to become a governor as well. I felt very old.

* The 18th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

* Hansard 30 April 1991 col. 621: ‘This may be an appropriate moment to emphasise that the Bill being presented to your Lordships unchanged does not, of course, mean an unwillingness on the government’s part to consider any amendments to improve it which this House may wish to make. Naturally, any such amendments would have to be considered by the other place where there has been, and no doubt will continue to be, a free vote.’

* Before coming to the Lords, the Rt Hon. Sir Humphrey Atkins KCMG, MP.

* After the arrival of the Labour government in May 1997, Lord Ackner and others continued to argue for the abolition of the mandatory life sentence, but the government was having none of it, adopting many of the arguments I had advanced in 1991, which Labour had then treated with derision.

* Then Lord James Douglas-Hamilton MP, now the Rt Hon. Lord Selkirk of Douglas.