The Nice Gang
By then, however, many thought it was already too late. For a breakaway had begun and a new party was being formed. The idea had come first from Roy Jenkins before the Bennite revolt, as he contemplated the state of the British party system from his grand offices in Brussels, where he was President of the Commission. Offered a BBC lecture in 1979 to ruminate about the future, he argued that perhaps the two-party system established since Victorian times had come to the end of its useful life. Coalitions, he said, were not such a bad thing. It was time to strengthen ‘the radical centre’ and find a way through that accepted the free market economy but which also took unemployment seriously. His lecture was coded, tentative but clear enough. He was no longer a Labour politician and he was looking around. He was in touch with David Steel, the Liberal leader, but felt that although he was close to Liberal thinking, only a new party would give British politics the hard poke it needed. Always a famous host, he began holding lunches for old friends from the right of the Labour party, including Bill Rodgers, who was still in the shadow cabinet, and Shirley Williams, who had lost her seat but was still one of the best-liked politicians in the country. Then Jenkins made a second speech to journalists and their guests, Kinnock among them, in the Commons where he speculated more openly about a new party as ‘an experimental plane’ which might just take off. At this stage the public reaction from Labour MPs was discouraging. Williams had said that a new centre party would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’. David Owen, the young doctor who had been a rare glamorous star as Foreign Secretary in the Callaghan government and was now fighting against unilateral nuclear disarmament, said Labour moderates must stay in the party and fight even if it took ten or twenty years.
The Bennite revolt changed many minds. After the Wembley conference, at which Owen was booed for his views on defence, he, Jenkins, Williams and Rodgers issued the Limehouse Declaration, describing Wembley as ‘calamitous’ and calling for a new start in British politics. That was duly formalized as the Social Democratic Party or SDP two months later, in March 1981. In total thirteen Labour MPs defected to it and many more might have done had not Roy Hattersley and others fought very hard to persuade them not to. Within two weeks 24,000 messages of support had flooded in and a temporary headquarters, manned by volunteers, had been found. Peers, journalists, students, academics and others were keen to join. The nice people’s party was on its way. Public meetings were packed from Scotland to the south coast of England. Media coverage was lavish and flattering. In September an electoral pact was agreed with the Liberal Party after delirious scenes at the party’s Llandudno conference, and the Alliance was formed. Trains proved an unlikely theme of the new party, with the SDP holding (literally) rolling conferences for their first two years, journalists and politicians crammed together singing their way round provincial Britain. After giving Labour a terrible shock in the Warrington by-election, the SDP won their first seat when Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives in November, with nearly half the votes cast, followed by Jenkins winning Glasgow Hillhead from the Tories the following year. Some sense of the early excitement can be captured by the thought that had they taken their stratospheric opinion poll ratings seriously (which sensibly they did not) the SDP could have expected to win nearly 600 out of the then 635 parliamentary seats.
His victory allowed Jenkins to become the leader of the party in the Commons. But he had lost his old mastery of the place; or perhaps leading a rump group caught between Thatcher’s Conservatives and the baleful Labour ex-comrades was simply impossible. In due course Jenkins would lose his seat at the general election and Owen would take over as leader. The personality problems that would later cause such mayhem were soon unavoidable. David Owen was handsome, romantic, arrogant, dogmatic, Welsh, patriotic and never a team player. He had always believed that leadership was more rightly his and feared that Jenkins was leading the SDP towards a merger with the Liberals. Owen saw himself still as a socialist although of a new kind. Jenkins, for his part, found his old protégé Owen prickly and arrogant. In short, their relationship was every bit as cordial as that between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in later years. As with that, personal rivalry did hold the party back. The upsurge of the SDP shook even Mrs Thatcher, while it led some in the Labour Party to fear their cause was finished.
It also gave a new lease of life to the Liberals. In the early fifties, the once mighty party of Gladstone and Asquith had been a negligible force, down to half a dozen MPs and 3 per cent of the national vote. Under Jo Grimond it had enjoyed a revival as the party of genuine liberalism and in the sixties it attracted an increasingly radical wing, anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, in favour of community politics and, in general, amiably stroppy. Liberal conferences were distinguished by stalls of organic apples, large hairy men in sandals and enthusiasts for obscure forms of land taxation, as if a medieval fair had somehow collided with a chartered surveyors’ seaside outing. Yet so great was the public disenchantment with conventional politics that this unlikely caravan rumbled ahead, particularly under the flamboyant, dandyish, sharp-witted Jeremy Thorpe. Faced with allegations about a homosexual affair and a murder plot (though only a dog perished, and the prosecution failed), Thorpe resigned. By the early eighties the party was being led by Steel, ‘the boy David’, looking for a strategy. The SDP provided a route back to the centre ground but Owen was not alone in despising the Liberals and the eventual merger between the parties was bitter and difficult. Nevertheless, by the early spring of 1982 the SDP and Liberals could look forward with some confidence to breaking the mould of British politics. Mrs Thatcher was hugely unpopular. Labour was in uproar. What could possibly go wrong?