Liberals down and out

Christopher Booker

As one totters along, Justice Shallow-like, towards middle age, there is a point where public life begins to take on a particular air of absurdity—and that is when one begins to see some of one's more unlikely youthful contemporaries suddenly occupying positions of startling prominence. One can never take the public pageant quite so seriously again. I still remember my father's incredulity when that rather undistinguished boy who had been in his house at school, young Peter Thorneycroft, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. And in a lesser way, in the past few days, I have been enjoying similar emotions.

Many years ago, around 1960 and 1961. I was a member of the staff of a tiny weekly organ known as the Liberal News, the housemagazine of the Liberal Party. My colleagues in the basement of one of those cavernous Victoria Street office-buildings (long since demolished) were a bizarre and lively crew—ranging from our cartoonist William Rushton, and Bruce Page, who is now something tremendously important and mysterious on the Sunday Times, to a tiny but dynamic sub-editor from the Daily Sketch called Donald Crawford, who has since, I hope, become enormously rich as a result of selling all those fabulously expensive, hand-tooled editions of Every Word Ever Written by Sir Winston Churchill.

The one person in that basement who no one would have predicted would one day become a figure of world stature was the newspaper's accounts clerk, or 'business manager', who sat quietly at the back of the room, poring over ledgers and signing our minuscule cheques—an amiable young man who had formerly been in advertising, called John Pardoe. My chief memory of the 'efficient bastard' in those days was that he was always badgering us to publish some thoughts he had compiled on 'reform of the House of Lords'.

Similarly one of my own tasks at that time was to compile the paper's gossip column, which was largely based on reams of worthy letters describing 'Bring and Buy Sales' held by Liberals in remote parts of the Celtic Fringe—and I recall that we had no correspondents more bureaucratically enthusiastic than the Liberal Club of Edinburgh University, who always seemed to be electing a student called David Steel to a succession ofever more high-sounding posts.

As, fifteen years on, the nation has this week been gaping in astonishment at the spectacle of these two colossi battling it out for the mantle of Gladstone, Asquith and

Sir Archibald Sinclair, these distant memories have been flooding back to me. And even if it appears to have had some of the over

tones of a cut-price Morecambe and Wise act, with the straight Mr Sober and the stand-up comic giving out such gags as 'stick around till we have given the traffic cop Steel the slip and I'll take you on the most exciting political motor-race you've ever seen', the tussle has, I must confess, had for me a certain poignance.

But I have also been wondering in nonpersonal terms just why it is that this battle seems so particularly pygmy-like and insignificant. It is not after all as if British politics had been swarming with giants in recent years. One would scarcely have thought that, in the wake of Sir Harold and in the presence of 'the lady in the red chiffon' (the only person who could have made Peter Walker seem like a dynamo of statesmanlike intelligence), it would be easy to envisage an even further declension into the irrelevant and ridiculous. I believe that the real reason is contained in one of the most perceptive observations ever made about British politics.

A while ago some acute person (perhaps a reader may be able to recall who) said that 'the Conservative Party is about power; the Labour Party is about Socialism; and the Liberal Party is about the Liberal Party'. Of course since that remark was made (perhaps in the late 'fifties), things have changed somewhat. After that mid-'sixties trauma, when the Tories in some intangible way seemed to lose their role, the Conservative Party no longer seems to be about power in the way it did in the days of Churchill and 'Supermac' and 'the knights of the shires'. But the Labour Party is still obviously more than anything else about Socialism, in precisely the sense the epigram implied: the constant battle between the paranoid dreams of the left, and the exigencies of power on the right. And of course the Liberal Party, alas, is today more than ever about nothing more than the Liberal Party.

I suppose the only time since the war when, for a brief moment, it looked as if the

Spectator 26 June 1976 Liberal Party might be about something other than its own fate was in that first heyday of revival under Jo Grimond. The startlingly different, attractive figure who in 1957 rescued the party from the edge of oblivion, lost in misty panaceas of Proportional Representation and Co-Ownership, seemed at the end of the 'fifties to lift the Liberal Party's attention to new horizons—Europe, a host of radical reforms, 'slashing government waste', a new age. Underneath, however, the party's chief emotional energies were still largely centred on itself and its own achievements. The great Liberal festivals were still its by-election triumphs ('Ludo's' second place at Rochdale, Torrington) and those wonderful emotional baths of Jo's Assembly speeches ('In the next ten years we must either get on or get out'). The climax of course was Orpington in 1962, and that unbelievable moment when the cry of 'a plague on both your houses' carried so much support that, for about three days, the Liberals actually led both the other parties on the opinion polls.

Then came the long slow decline of the

later 'sixties, when once again the party seemed to decline into nothing more than surrealistic internal squabbles about 'Red Guards', Grimond wandered rather forlornly off the stage, and it seemed only too appropriate that the sole tangible fruit of the great Liberal revival had been the Abortion Act.

Undoubtedly the most depressing thing

about the Liberals in the past ten years has been the sense that, as the failings of the other two parties were so transparent, there should never have been a more promising chance for the Liberals really to come out of their own little world, and go on to the offensive all over the political stage. Public overspending, inflation, land, the power of the unions, the environmental crisis, Britain's pathetic figure in the world, should all have provided a host of issues which the Liberals could quite naturally have made their own. Instead of which, we saw the pitiful spectacle of the 1974 elections, when the only issue which the Liberals seemed Prepared to talk about were their own prospects —whether they would join a coalition, how many votes they would get, Thorpe's

'great breakthrough'. The whole show had become nothing more than an exercise in political onanism, and it was hardly sur

prising that eventually the British b lost interest. Nothing was more revealing of people's undying hopes for the Liberal Party than the flicker of optimism a few weeks ago that if Grimond returned as leader he might once again make the Liberal Party pub something other than itself. But it was not to be. We are left with the grim battle between Pargs and Stargs, the two super-nonentities. And the phrase 'a plague on both Your houses', which once seemed to be the pathway to the Liberal Party's success, now seems to apply nowhere more appropriately than to the two men who would seem to be the measure of its failure.