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The prince among them was Harry Simpson, the Director of Housing. Harry had begun his working life, aged fifteen, with the London County Council, and became a rent collector. He rose to be one of the most respected housing administrators in the country, and after leaving Lambeth, became Director of the Northern Ireland Housing Authority and, at the end of his career, of the Greater London Council (GLC).
I learned a great deal from this amazing man, and it was his drive and Bernard Perkins’s leadership that earned Lambeth a high reputation in local government circles. Before and after meetings I would join Harry in his office and we talked housing – often late into the night. He was the best tutor there could be, both in housing and in the decent, civilised conduct of public affairs.
I also took an interest in my own housing, and bought my first home: a two-bedroom flat in Primrose Court, Streatham. It cost £5,600, and I was a reluctant purchaser, persuaded to buy by a fellow councillor, Geoff Murray, who already had a flat there. My hesitation was simply because I was too busy to buy, but he chipped away at me until I agreed. Later, a third Lambeth councillor, John Steele, also moved there, and Primrose Court became an annexe to the town hall – and my flat was often crowded with younger members of the council. I remained friendly with Jean, but our relationship had cooled.
That year I visited Russia, where Lambeth was twinned with the Moscow suburb of Moskvoretsky. Only the year before Russia had invaded Czechoslovakia to snuff out the Prague Spring of Alexander Dubcek, and I was interested to see for myself what our Cold War enemy was really like at close quarters.
The visit was a mass of contradictions. The Mayor of Moskvoretsky, a man called Chilikin, exercised his power ruthlessly, not least in his responsibility for housing. ‘It’s cold in winter without a flat,’ he told me, smiling, and I did not think he was joking. We were entertained royally, and I saw my first opera, Queen of Spades, at the Bolshoi Theatre and my first ballet, Swan Lake, at the Palace of Congresses, with Natalia Bessmertnova dancing the lead. I preferred the ballet, little knowing that I would soon meet someone who would introduce me more comprehensively to the delights of opera. The Russian system delivered political power with age, and Chilikin was fascinated that I was thirty years younger than the rest of our delegation. After the ballet he plied me with drinks until the early hours of the morning to see if I could stand the pace. As my father’s remedy for toothache for young children had been neat whisky (it took away the toothache but left a sore head and a sleepy child), I was well able to cope. Chilikin was impressed.
But I was not impressed with the new buildings he showed me. If this was communism, it was appalling. Hospitals had electrical wiring sticking out of the walls; houses and flats were built to a very low standard, with no attempt at landscaping to produce an attractive environment. Only mud and rubble lay between the housing blocks. It was a lesson in what to avoid, but a later study trip to Finland, where the quality of building was very high, left no room for complacency about what we were doing in Lambeth.
That year Lambeth faced a dustmen’s strike over ‘totting’, a practice in which the dustmen ransacked the bins to identify items for resale. We had negotiated the end of totting, but the dustmen went on strike to reclaim the right. We resisted. The strike continued, and the outlook for public health and cleanliness was grim. The Conservative councillors, with voluntary help, decided to collect the rubbish themselves, and commandeered the dustcarts. It was strike-breaking in a unique way. Almost every councillor helped. The action created headlines around the world, but they concentrated mostly on Sir George Young and his wife Aurelia, also a Lambeth councillor. George is a baronet, and the sight of him and Aurelia driving the dustcart and collecting bins was irresistible: ‘My old man’s a dustcart, Bart,’ chortled the press. But the councillors’ response was successful: a settlement was agreed, and Lambeth faced no more industrial action during the Conservative years.
In February 1970 I became Chairman of Housing, and the following month Chairman of Brixton Conservative Association as we began to prepare for the GLC elections on 9 April, and the expected general election. I had been asked whether I wished to contest the GLC elections for Hammersmith and Lambeth, but decided I had my hands full.
The GLC elections were held that year on a borough-wide basis, with four candidates being elected from Lambeth. One of the Conservative candidates was Diana Geddes, who on polling day was working out of our Brixton Road headquarters. Peter Golds brought a friend with him to help bring in the votes. I saw them as they arrived. She was slender, a little above average height, with mid-brown hair, shining brown eyes and a beautiful, curving, glamorous smile. Dressed in a beige checked suit, fawn blouse and white, knee-length boots, she was stunningly attractive.
‘Hi,’ said Peter. ‘This is Norma. She’s come to help.’
She was Norma Johnson, ‘mad on opera’, said Peter, adding that she’d been known to sleep outside Covent Garden all night to get tickets for Joan Sutherland. Within minutes I discovered she was a teacher with her own Mini, her own flat – temporarily living at home because she’d rented it out – not very political, but Conservative, and that she also designed and made clothes.
The demands of election day drove us apart. Norma and Peter went out in her Mini to collect and deliver voters to the polling station. I canvassed, cajoled workers, kept in touch with candidates, filled in wherever necessary and arranged for Norma to attend the count at Lambeth Town Hall. Although the Conservatives won control of the GLC that night, we did not win the seats in Lambeth. But I had found Norma.
A few days later she phoned. She was having a party – would I like to come? Parties weren’t much my scene then, and I wanted Norma alone, not in a crowd. I declined, pleading another engagement. She phoned again several days later. She ‘happened to have a spare ticket for a gala at Covent Garden’. Was I interested? I was.
The gala was a tribute to Sir David Webster, the retiring administrator at Covent Garden. It was a long programme and it overran. The opera house was hot and oppressive, and the music too somnolent for someone who had been reading council papers until 2 a.m. and writing banking essays from six in the morning. As Joan Sutherland closed the gala singing the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, I fell asleep.
I knew from the moment we met that I wanted to marry Norma. Ten days later we were engaged. Norma was an only child. Her mother, Dee, had been widowed as a twenty-two-year-old in 1945 when her husband Norman – who served in the Royal Artillery throughout the war – had died in a motorcycle accident days after it ended. Four months earlier Dee had lost her baby son, Colin, at only six days old, and with Norman’s death she and three-year-old Norma were on their own. When life treated Dee harshly she fought back. For much of her life she held down two or three jobs at the same time to ensure that she and Norma lacked nothing. Norma went to boarding school from the age of four, and had grown up very independent and practical.
My mother was back in hospital with yet another bronchial and chest infection, and I took Norma to see her. For once there was no caution, no holding back, no reservations. She was as certain as I was that this was the right girl.
Meanwhile, in Brixton, a mini-crisis was brewing. The Conservative candidate for the general election was James Harkess, personally charming but strongly right-wing, with Powellite views on race that he expressed vigorously and openly. He and I were never going to agree. He saw the problems of immigration. I saw people trying to better their lifestyle. Nor did it seem to me that implying that half of his electorate were unwelcome in the constituency was a vote-winning platform.
At the AGM of the association Harkess made a wild speech that was strongly anti-immigrant. I was appalled at his intolerance, and embarrassed too, especially as we had a new West Indian member present, who must have been mortified. I replied angrily from the chair, rebutting Harkess’s remarks, and the atmosphere turned sulphurous. I knew that relations between us were soured beyond repair. The ramifications were considerable. Jean Lucas, the group agent for Lambeth, strongly backed me, as did Lady Colman, President of the association, and widow of the former Conservative Member for the seat who had been defeated in 1945. Others in the association felt the same.
Gradually it became apparent that the consensus was that James Harkess’s views would damage race relations in Brixton, and with them the Conservative cause. I took soundings, and spoke to Harkess about our concerns, but did not receive any positive response. Finally I went ahead with a motion for the executive to consider selecting a new candidate. It would certainly have been approved, and I had Diana Geddes in mind as his replacement. Then Harold Wilson called the general election, and the meeting to discuss whether the candidate should be replaced instead endorsed him, dutifully and without enthusiasm.
It was an odd election campaign, in blazing weather. Opinion polls gave Labour a huge lead, but they proved inaccurate. When the votes were counted the swing to the Conservatives across the country was apparent from the first result. By the end of the night, to everyone’s surprise but his own, Ted Heath was prime minister with a comfortable majority.
There was never any doubt that Colonel Marcus Lipton, the Labour candidate, who was an excellent constituency MP, would be comfortably re-elected in Brixton. In nearby marginal Clapham, Bill Shelton, the Conservative candidate, comfortably took the seat vacated by its Labour MP, Mrs Margaret MacKay, from the recently adopted Dr David Pitt, a black Labour candidate, but without raising the race issue. The swing in Clapham showed what a potent force that issue was, and how inflammatory it could have been in Brixton. We had been fortunate. Labour’s huge opinion poll lead and Marcus Lipton’s long incumbency as the Member meant that James Harkess was considered to have no chance of winning. Passions were stilled by the certainty of his defeat, and he soon moved on from Brixton. Clive Jones lost in neighbouring Vauxhall. On Lambeth Council, the Conservatives were aware that we were probably only short-term tenants at the local level, and that Labour was likely to regain control at the next council elections in 1971. Too many of our majorities were tiny for us not to realise that even a small swing of the political compass would have a serious impact.
We thought our best chance was to mount a real attack on poor housing conditions, and set to it with a will. Bernard Perkins as leader and Peter Cary as Chairman of Finance gave me their full backing as we set about the task. We continued our building and slum-clearance programme. We drew up schemes to sell council houses and to build houses for sale in an attempt to revive owner-occupation and encourage skills and employment in Lambeth. We established registration schemes to tackle overcrowding. We set up arrangements with Peterborough New Town for families to move there into jobs and good housing (I little knew that eight years later many of them would become my constituents in Huntingdon). We encouraged ministerial visits so that we could show the new government our problems as we sought more help and finance.
I remember showing Peter Walker, the new Environment Secretary, the squalor of life in the Geneva Drive – Somerleyton Road area of Brixton, where there was mass overcrowding in dilapidated homes with poor facilities. We met one West Indian on the third-floor landing of one of these monstrosities.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked him for the Minister’s benefit.
‘Here,’ he said, puzzled.
‘No,’ I pressed him, ‘which room?’
‘I don’t have a room,’ he replied. ‘I live here.’
And he did, on the landing.
It was problems like that that encouraged us to open the first Housing Advice Centre in London. The concept was simple. Anyone with a housing problem, of any sort, could go to the Advice Centre for help and advice, free of charge. Soon it was so popular it was packed.
There was another aspect of life in Lambeth that struck me forcibly. Some people in need were aggressive; but very few. Most were frightened of bureaucracy, of government, of their powers to tax, to put up rents, to give or withhold planning consent and, above all, to house them in council flats or not. Moreover, councillors and council officials were too often hidden away. To the public they could be anonymous figures, but nonetheless figures whose decisions could blight or improve their lives. This was particularly true of the decisions to rehouse following slum clearance and new building, and the often artificial restrictions on council tenants even if they were rehoused. At tenants’ meetings the resentments voiced against these anonymous figures were fierce.
I decided to take the Housing Advice Centre on tour, with the main council officials accompanying councillors at public meetings, to face the people directly, answer their questions and explain our policies. There was, at first, a lot of resistance to this revolutionary idea, but with strong backing from Bernard Perkins and – among the officers – Harry Simpson, it was soon agreed. The meetings were a huge success, often attracting audiences of many hundreds that overflowed the halls we had booked. I chaired the meetings, with the Chairman of Planning and Social Services invariably in attendance as well as the local councillors for the ward. More importantly to the public, the Directors of Housing and Planning were there, with other officers, and especially the Lettings Officer, who allocated council houses and flats.
These meetings were generally good-natured, but with the occasional rowdy and angry intervention. I loved them, and thought they were a valuable safety valve. I regretted then – and still do – the fact that such meetings were not a regular practice for all councils. I believe they should be.
Some incidents still stick in the mind. Once, a man held up a rat he’d found in his house. What was I going to do about it? he demanded. I asked where he lived. He told me, and after a whispered consultation I was able to tell him that he lived over the border in Southwark. It was a Southwark rat – and he should take it to Alderman Ron Brown, brother of the former deputy leader of the Labour Party George Brown, and a leading member of Southwark Council. For my pains, he threw the rat at me – happily he was a very poor shot.
At a meeting in Kennington a young, strikingly attractive woman dressed from top to toe in shiny black leather rose to ask a question. The audience looked at her with more than passing interest.
‘I am the wife of the Vicar of …’ she began, but got no further, as the unlikelihood of this registered and the hall erupted in raucous amusement. We did get her question eventually, but I can’t recall what it was. Later she became a Labour councillor.
At the end of these meetings I would hang around, usually with Harry Simpson, who had given me a lift to the hall, to gauge reaction. Even those members of the public who hadn’t liked the answers they’d received enjoyed the meetings. It was politics made real, and not hidden away in committee rooms. These meetings made a profound impression on me: politics seemed so far removed from electors, and they rarely expected to meet the decision-takers. They were accustomed to poor service, remote officials and a system run for government and not for the public. I promised myself that, if I ever had the chance, I would try to open up government and make it more accountable.
I spent every spare moment I could with Norma. She learned about politics, while I began to understand opera. Norma’s mother Dee set herself to planning a big wedding. Then, in mid-September, just over two weeks before the wedding, the phone rang at four o’clock in the morning. I picked it up with foreboding. It was my brother Terry, very upset.
‘Mum’s dead,’ he said, ‘a few minutes ago. In Mayday.’
I had not expected this. My mother’s ill-health had been a constant feature of my life ever since I was a child, but she always battled through. She had been determined to come out of hospital for my wedding. Now she would not, and my heart broke for her. She had lost her last fight with just sixteen days to go.
I lay in bed after Terry’s call, reliving memories of the woman whose fondest hopes had always been for others: firstly my father, and then her children. As the youngest, more hopes had been poured into me, and I had always taken it so much for granted. The smallest gesture cheered and lifted her; the greatest blow would never crush her. My father may have dominated our family, but my mother was its heart. When she died, lame ducks lost a saint. Strangers found in her an instant friendliness. An hour’s acquaintance made a friend for ever. All her life she had been gregarious and, even in her last illness, had become so friendly with everyone at the local corner shop that it closed on the day of her funeral. She was open-hearted and open-handed. But her generosity of spirit was to her family and those in need. She could be an implacable foe when she chose, but in those near to her she inspired the same love she gave so generously. A few days after her death, Mum was cremated at Streatham Vale crematorium, and her ashes were laid beside Dad’s.
I wondered whether we should postpone the wedding, but I knew that my mother would have thoroughly disapproved of such a gesture. Besides, Pat and Terry insisted that we go ahead. The day before the wedding I slipped and fell in a corridor in Lambeth Town Hall, when my suspect left knee gave way. It swelled up like a balloon, and Clive Jones helped me home, where I lay in the bath with an ice-pack wrapped around my knee.
‘Eat your heart out, young Lochinvar,’ grinned Clive as he sipped a whisky beside the bath. ‘I suppose you could always hop down the aisle.’
Saturday, 3 October 1970 was crisp, clear and sunny, and in the morning I could hobble pretty well. My main worry was that the wretched knee would collapse under me as Norma and I walked back down the aisle. But the whole day went perfectly. Norma was acceptably late, and looked lovely. St Matthew’s Church in Brixton was packed. Clive had the ring. June Bronhill – the petite and lovely Australian soprano who had sung Lucia at Covent Garden and starred as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the West End production of Ronald Millar’s Robert and Elizabeth – sang ‘Ave Maria’, and her wonderful voice echoed around the church. Norma had known June for years, made dresses for her, lived with her as temporary nanny to her daughter, Biddy, and they were close friends. I clutched Norma’s arm as we walked back down the aisle, and we made it safely to the door. ‘I thought you were supposed to support her,’ was Clive’s comment.
After a honeymoon in Ibiza we returned to Primrose Court, and Norma turned it from a bachelor flat into a home. Writing in the late nineties, it is hard to remember how life was in 1970. Our combined income was around £3,000 a year, and £8 a week sufficed for the housekeeping. But week by week our flat took on a new face. Corners were filled, rooms were painted, books and records appeared, and astonished friends marvelled at the transformation of my spartan pad.
Life and politics resumed in Lambeth. In January 1971 I was shortlisted for the vacant parliamentary candidacy at Norwood, but this was Bernard Perkins’s fortress, and he was selected. We prepared for the council elections in May, and I was selected for Thornton Ward in Clapham, which was thought to be a much safer bet than Ferndale. On 28 March, the day before my twenty-eighth birthday, Norma told me she was pregnant, and in May, despite all our efforts, the Conservatives were soundly defeated in Lambeth as Labour regained its fiefdom. Ken Livingstone succeeded me as Housing Chairman, and Tony Banks also became a councillor.
I barely knew either of them before they were elected, although Ken’s emergence as a Labour council candidate caused quite a stir in Norwood, where his mother was an active member of the Conservative Association. Both of them were already identifiably the characters who later became so well known, and Tony Banks was soon involved in controversy as allegedly the moving spirit behind an attempt to ban the Queen’s portrait from the council chamber. (After the 1997 general election he was photographed taking the loyal oath with his fingers crossed behind his back.)
Moving to Thornton Ward did me no good at all: I lost by 411 votes. I was disappointed by the reversal of our fortunes in Lambeth because we were generally thought to have done a good job. Years later Ken Livingstone was very flattering about what our Conservative council had achieved. But there was still so much more to do. I was philosophical about my own defeat. The role of councillor in opposition did not appeal very much.
I decided it was time to try to move onto the national stage. To do so I needed to pass the selection procedure to get on the Conservative Central Office list of approved candidates. Jill Knight, the MP for Edgbaston, who lived in Lambeth and had heard me speak, sponsored my application, and by early June it had been submitted. Then fate, in the shape of Peter Golds, intervened.
Peter was a firm believer that I should be in Parliament. He had mentioned this to a fellow agent, Tony Dey, and took me to see Tony and Bob Bell, the affable President of the St Pancras North Association. It was suggested that I apply for the seat. No one was remotely bothered that I was not an approved candidate. St Pancras North was a safe Labour seat, with Jock Stallard as a well-established local Member. There was little chance of winning, but it was perfect for me: a London constituency, convenient to where I lived and worked, affordable, even on my average income, and the best I could hope for aged twenty-eight.
I had continued studying, and in September 1971 I finally sat and passed the Accountancy and Practice of Banking papers that completed my Banking Diploma. It had taken me six years to pass ten examinations, all of them at the first attempt, as politics, Nigeria, recovery from the car accident and marriage had competed for the limited hours of every day. I was delighted to have passed, even though the qualification was less a tool for a banking career than an element of building up the necessary curriculum vitae for politics. I applied for the vacancy at St Pancras North, was invited for interview with thirty others, and was shortlisted with only one rival.
That summer Norma and I enjoyed a glorious holiday in an old chantry with a secluded garden. We lazed through the long summer days and planned the future. Norma’s pregnancy was nearing full term. She had never been fitter or happier, and she bloomed with health. It was fortunate that she did so, because Elizabeth was in no hurry to make her first entrance. Then, early one November evening, she finally announced her impending arrival.
I saw both my children being born, and am glad I did so. In 1971, when Elizabeth was born, it was quite revolutionary to allow fathers to be present, but King’s College Hospital in Camberwell had no qualms about it at all. Elizabeth was a full-term baby, but her birth was interminable. After fifteen hours I was sent away to lie down – ‘This is all very tiring, dear,’ said the nurse. A few hours later the doctors took me aside and told me Norma needed an epidural. The risks were explained to us, but Norma agreed, and after thirty hours, in the early hours of 13 November 1971, a plump and chubby Elizabeth bounced across the delivery table and lustily announced that a new force had arrived.
There are some moments in your life when every second is implanted indelibly in your mind. Perhaps most parents feel this at the birth of their child. I certainly did. And when I held Elizabeth for the first time I knew my life was changed. She was warm and comfortable, vulnerable and dependent. Here was a baby who – whatever else happened – would for ever be loved, and who one day, I hoped, would tell her grandchildren about Norma and me.
It was after 2 a.m. when I left the hospital to walk home, for the buses had stopped and there were no taxis around at that time. I didn’t so much walk as float. Anyone about the streets that November night would have wondered, who was this lunatic who ran, walked, skipped, turned round in circles, hopped, stepped, jumped up and down and cheerily sang to himself out of sheer exhilaration?
I planned the future and, more immediately, wondered how early I could phone Dee, Norma’s mother, with the news. I needn’t have worried about that. As I stepped into our flat the phone rang. It was Dee. She was very agitated. ‘She’s had the baby, hasn’t she?’ she said. ‘I know she has. I haven’t been able to sleep. Is she all right?’
I told her. She sighed and hung up without a word. Moments later she phoned back.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was so relieved. I knew, just knew she was having the baby. Now tell me all about it.’
So I did. And if the world ever contained a more relieved and pleased grandparent – well, I can’t imagine her.
At first Elizabeth was going to be called Jane. But that didn’t last. When I visited Norma in hospital the following day she was cuddling a plump and contented baby.
‘I don’t think Jane is right,’ said Norma. ‘She looks like an Elizabeth.’ And so Elizabeth she became.
Later that month I was selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate for St Pancras North after addressing the interview panel and answering their questions. I had received an enthusiastic response, and was told I had won comfortably. ‘Some voted for you and quite a few for Elizabeth,’ as Joan Couzens, soon to be my press officer, put it. Joan was one of a number of characters in the association, and certainly the most vivid. She loathed the Labour Party she saw in London, which brought out in her some outrageously right-wing instincts which were held in check by her common sense. She enjoyed flirting with them, however, and often wrote me draft press releases in poetry, based on her instincts, not her common sense, which we both knew could never be used, but which gave us great fun. She was a fine artist as well, and she and her husband Bertie became firm friends.
St Pancras North may have been unpromising political territory for the Conservatives, but my three years as its candidate, which embraced both the February and October general elections of 1974, taught me a huge amount about the party and the volunteers who ran it at local level.
Tony Dey, the agent, was laconic and efficient. Bob Bell, the President, and his wife Edith, Francis Klein, the Chairman, Dennis Friis, Roland Walker and so many others worked tirelessly for little political reward other than to uphold Conservative principles. They weren’t ideological warriors. They believed in the Conservative cause. They grumbled sometimes about some of the leaders and some of the policy, but they loyally battled on.
I worked hard for them in St Pancras. Between my adoption as prospective candidate and the February 1974 election I worked the seat as if it were a marginal, visiting it nearly every evening and every weekend. Margaret Jay, who succeeded Tony Dey as my agent, worked me hard – and herself as well. Norma joined me whenever she could. It was hard work but it was a lot of fun too, although it became harder as Ted Heath’s government ran into difficulties.
Ted had been elected on a strong centre-right platform, but events had forced him off it. Trade union power forced up wages and prices and brought about an incomes policy that upset many in the party and even caused discontented murmurings amongst the St Pancras North loyalists. Ted took Britain into the Common Market, an inevitable, correct and courageous decision, but one that was very controversial, too.
Then came the miners’ strike over a pay claim that would have given some miners up to a 50 per cent rise. The National Coal Board had offered 13 per cent, which was rejected, and an overtime ban began. The miners were led by Joe Gormley, a traditional Labour figure, but not a militant. His interest was in the miners’ well-being and not in attacking the Conservative government. Other miners’ leaders, though, such as Mick McGahey and Arthur Scargill, did see the chance of confrontation and bringing down the government.
The strike worsened. Implacable positions were taken and Ted Heath was forced into a box. Many Conservatives, mostly but not exclusively on the right, wanted to ‘take on’ the miners. ‘Who governs the country?’ they asked. Others recognised the sympathy and respect in which the miners were widely held by the British people. Some of their leaders might be militant, but the British sense of fair play knew that the miners did a job that few would care to do. The public admired the miners and liked the common sense they often heard from rank-and-file NUM members. But they did not like the militants.
Crisis beckoned, and the three-day week was imposed from 31 December 1973 as stocks of coal fell. Pressure mounted. Ted Heath had a dilemma. If he negotiated a settlement because of the economic effect the strike was having, he would be accused of weakness, especially from within the Conservative Party. If the strikes continued the economy would suffer, and gradually public opinion would turn against the government. The third choice, a huge gamble, was a general election to reinforce the government’s authority. Little thought was given to what would happen if the government was re-elected, but the strike itself went on.
Ted Heath went for broke and called the election on the theme of ‘Who Governs Britain?’ At the time I was delighted, and the early opinion polls were favourable, as was reaction on the doorstep, even in St Pancras North. But a one-issue election is dangerous. Midway through the campaign complex evidence on miners’ pay suggested that they were earning even less than the NUM had declared. Harold Wilson claimed an election had been called over an ‘arithmetical error’. Sympathy swelled for the miners.
The public mood changed. Unhappy Tories voted Liberal, and Labour crept home as the largest party. Ted Heath was out and Harold Wilson, to his surprise and everyone else’s, was back in Downing Street, at the head of a minority administration. One bright spot was that George Young was elected to Parliament with a small majority at Ealing, Acton. In St Pancras North Jock Stallard was alarmed by the strength of support I had in some streets, but overall he won comfortably.
A second general election later that year was inevitable. The St Pancras North Conservative Association generously told me I could seek a better seat with their blessing, but could recontest St Pancras if I failed to find one. I did not try very hard, although I was shortlisted for marginal Paddington, where I was narrowly defeated by Mark Wolfson, later MP for Sevenoaks. I also applied for Portsmouth North, where I was assailed with questions about flogging and hanging, which the questioner favoured – whether sequentially or alternatively I wasn’t sure – and I didn’t. That was the end of Portsmouth North, who picked a well-known businessman, John Ward, who would later become my PPS when I was prime minister.
After this setback, I decided to stay in St Pancras North, and contested it again in the second general election of the year in October. The constituency was of little interest nationally, and the only publicity we received was for my new agent, Sue Winter, the youngest in the country and very pretty. It made no difference. Again I lost, after a rather bitter campaign and an unpleasant count, with jeering Labour activists. Jock Stallard’s majority increased. Labour gained seats nationally, and had a very narrow overall majority of only three seats. Soon they would need to rely on Liberal support to stay in government.
By now Norma and I had sold our flat in Primrose Court and bought a modern end-of-terrace house, West Oak, in The Avenue, Beckenham. Elizabeth was growing, and we needed more space. West Oak was a small estate in lovely wooded grounds, full of mostly young married couples, and we were very happy there. Among our neighbours were David Rodgers, a former aide to Iain Macleod, and his wife Erica, who had been National Vice Chairman of the Young Conservatives.
Norma was pregnant again, and James was born in January 1975. I was again present at the birth, and he arrived much more speedily and with much less drama than Elizabeth. We had no difficulty over his name: he was James, if a boy, from long before he was born. He was a fit, contented baby from the very start.
Politics moved on, and in February 1975 Margaret Thatcher defeated Ted Heath to become leader of the Conservative Party. I had never met her, and little guessed how much our paths would cross in the future.
No one expected another early general election – public and politicians were battle-weary – but as seats were advertised or fell vacant I applied for them. I received rejection after rejection without interview, and was puzzled and despondent. It was Jean Lucas, by then the agent for Putney, who solved the puzzle after I applied for the vacant candidacy there. She telephoned and asked whether my biography needed to be jazzed up, and then noticed that the biography sent to Putney by Central Office was not mine. She made enquiries. The answer was comical. There were two John Majors. One, me, on the approved candidates list for Parliament, and the other on the list of would-be candidates for the GLC. Someone at Central Office had transposed the biographies, and was sending out my namesake’s – which was pretty thin – to all the seats for which I had applied. Unsurprisingly, I had not been invited for interview.
After Jean’s intervention I was invited to Putney, interviewed and shortlisted. I was led to believe I was the front-runner and likely to be adopted. But, as their selection process rumbled on, a by-election was called at Conservative-held Carshalton, and I was interviewed and reached the last eight. I withdrew from Putney, and an unknown barrister was chosen: his name was David Mellor. ‘He is very clever and one day will make a real name for himself,’ predicted Jean Lucas.
At Carshalton I was preceded for interview by a confident young man carrying a briefcase with the initials ‘N.F.’ prominently displayed. I asked who he was, and was told his name was Nigel Forman. I had a premonition that he would be selected; he was, and comfortably won the ensuing by-election.
I continued to apply for a seat. Sevenoaks did not interview me. At Ruislip Northwood I disagreed sharply with a member of the selection committee over housing and was not invited for further interview. At Dorset South I reached the second round of interviews and was waiting with the others for my ordeal when I saw the selection committee rise respectfully as a well-built young man with dark hair entered the room. One of the other candidates scowled: ‘That’s Lord Cranborne – he owns the constituency.’ That was not quite true, although he certainly owned a lot of land. He was selected, and twenty years later I was to appoint him to my Cabinet as leader of the Lords, and he was to run a crucial campaign for me to save my premiership. Self-evidently, Robert had great ability, so perhaps owning the constituency didn’t matter.
After the two general elections I contested, Standard Bank had realised I was set on a political career, but remained supportive. Roy Mortimer, one of the senior executives, and Peter Graham, the managing director, were unfailingly helpful, even though they knew the bank was second in my working affections. By 1976, Tony Barber, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ted Heath’s government, was chairman of the bank, and took me with him as his personal assistant to the International Monetary Fund Conference in Manila. That was the year sterling hit trouble and Denis Healey had to turn back from Heathrow Airport to deal with the crisis.
As a result, Tony Barber, his predecessor, was bombarded with press and interviews at Manila, and I dealt with many of them on his behalf; it was my first exposure to high-profile politics, and it lived up to my expectations. I worked eighteen hours a day but it whetted my appetite for the drama of politics. I returned home even more eager for a political career.
When a vacancy for the Huntingdonshire constituency was circulated to all approved candidates I applied immediately, but was not hopeful. It was a rural seat with a large Conservative majority, and it seemed an unlikely home. Norma disagreed. ‘It is for you,’ she insisted. She knew the area because she had been sent to stay with her great aunt in nearby Bourn for summer after summer during her childhood, while her mother Dee continued to work through most of the school holidays. She was confident about Huntingdonshire from the start.
About three hundred candidates applied, including Peter Brooke, Chris Patten, Michael Howard and Peter Lilley, so I knew the competition would be tough. I contacted Andrew Thomson, the agent, and he generously answered all my questions about the association and the constituency.
The first interview merely involved the candidate giving a twenty-minute speech on a Saturday morning, followed by questions. It went well enough, and Andrew Thomson phoned me the next morning to tell me I had reached the last eighteen. Another interview followed, which went better, but against stiffer opposition I was not certain of progressing further. I followed Peter Lilley, and after I had finished, found him sitting on a bench at Huntingdon station waiting for the train to London.
‘It was fine,’ he said, responding to my enquiry, ‘but you never can tell.’ But I thought he looked despondent. Months later Peter was given a lift by a young agent, and was speculating ruefully on why I had been selected for Huntingdonshire. Who was I, he asked, and what had I done to earn such a gilt-edged seat? He seemed aggrieved. The young agent thought Peter was criticising me, and read him a lecture on my virtues. It was Peter Golds – my first trainee agent in Brixton.
After a third interview I was shortlisted. As Huntingdonshire was such a secure seat there was some interest in the final contestants. ‘Crossbencher’, the political column of the Sunday Express, said I hadn’t a chance of selection. Given Crossbencher’s forecasting record, this was good news. That same morning the phone rang. It was a member of the selection committee, Anne Foard.
‘I shouldn’t be phoning,’ she said, ‘but I am – so this must be private.’ She then gave me advice. Be yourself. Show humour. Bear in mind that half the constituency, and the electorate, are big-city overspill. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and by the way, the district council meet on Wednesday. It would be good for you to be there to listen. And to be seen.’
It was wise advice. Andrew Thomson had already said pretty much the same thing. Being used to the political activity of Lambeth, Huntingdon District Council was a pleasant surprise. I was almost the only spectator, and the object of as much interest, nudging and winking, as the agenda. And the debate puzzled me. It was fierce, and all about ‘local pyromaniacs trying to burn down our county’, as one councillor put it, to the accompaniment of much support. It seemed like a serious crime wave. Then sturdy, outdoor figures with weatherbeaten faces defended the pyromania, and the truth dawned: they were talking about stubble-burning. It was urban man against rural, and a real eye-opener into the issues that stirred the community. That visit to Huntingdon was one of the best investments in time I ever made.
On the way to the final selection meeting I was preparing myself mentally for another disappointment. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I might be selected for one of the safest seats in England. Norma had no such inhibitions. She was confident we would win. As our second-hand Austin 1300 estate chugged towards Huntingdon she asked me if I had remembered that ‘Friday is an anniversary’. I hadn’t, but it was.
‘It’s five years to the day that you were selected as the candidate for St Pancras North,’ said Norma. ‘Tonight you must do it again.’
I am superstitious, and that seemed a good omen. The selection meeting was in the Commemoration Hall, Huntingdon, and the final opposition was tough. I learned later that Jock Bruce-Gardyne, formerly MP for Angus, had under-performed, having a foul cold. Lord Douro was thought to have had one piece of good news already that week, having become engaged to the Kaiser’s granddaughter. Alan Haselhurst, later Deputy Speaker, spoke brilliantly, and was the runaway favourite when I spoke, last of the four. It went well, and, the ordeal over, Norma and I returned to the holding room and then to the local pub to consider our chances as the balloting got under way.
The Commemoration Hall as we returned was a scene of pandemonium. A decision had obviously been made. Wild applause and cheering could be heard, and as we hurried to the holding room I peered through the glass windows in the door of the main hall and saw Anne Foard, my telephone confidante of Sunday, standing on a chair whooping, with her hands clapping above her head.
Moments later Archie Gray, the Chairman of the association, entered the holding room. We all stood, tense and expectant.
‘You’ve all done magnificently,’ he said. ‘It was hard to choose, but Mr Major has been selected.’ Smiling, he walked over and shook my hand. As he did so I knew the course of my life had been determined.
From the start Huntingdonshire fitted me like a glove, although a few of the older members were startled to have a candidate from Brixton and an agent from Glasgow. They soon mellowed. Norma and I immediately decided to move to the constituency and put West Oak on the market. Unfortunately for us, subsidence of a neighbouring house in our terrace reduced its value and made it more difficult to sell. It took months, and throughout that time I commuted between my home in Beckenham, my job in the City and the constituency in Huntingdon. We found a lovely house in St Neots but, to my fury, we were gazumped by a partner in one of the local estate agents. Eventually we found a conventional four-bedroomed detached house in the beautiful village of Hemingford Grey, and moved in just before Christmas 1977.
By this time I was already getting to know the huge constituency and its rich variety of interests. From the outset, I was treated as the Member-in-waiting and not the candidate. It was assumed that I would win, though ‘not by as many as Sir David’, as I was regularly informed, though never by Sir David. He saw the constituency changing, and had no fears for the majority. Sir David Renton, QC, KBE, MP was an immense support. He had been elected in 1945, still in uniform, as Major Renton, and he and his wife Paddy were as firmly entrenched in Huntingdonshire as any Member could be.
David and Paddy had a handicapped daughter, Davina, and both worked tirelessly for charities, especially the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. David began to involve Norma in this work, and her association with Mencap, as it became, was to grow through the years. I began to get used to mentally handicapped adults, whose minds had not aged with their bodies, holding Norma’s hand or cuddling her with all the affection of children. We came to understand how so many volunteers work so devotedly for this cause, and years later we were able to put the famous addresses of 10 Downing Street and Chequers to good use in raising funds for this and other charities.
David and Paddy Renton were kindness itself, and there was never the slightest friction between us. They entertained us at their home, supported us throughout the constituency and eased us into the mainstream of Huntingdon life. I shall always be grateful to them and hope, one day, to be as gracious to my successor as David was to me.
And this support mattered. A long incumbency attracts a great deal of loyalty, and if Sir David had muttered uncomplimentary remarks, or hinted at criticisms, even in private, they would have been voiced abroad and caused difficulties. It is human nature to cast doubt over one’s successor to bolster one’s own sense of experienced superiority, but David never did so. Over the years I found in him a wise adviser and a political friend and confidant whom I could trust completely and who never let me down. In 1998, in his ninetieth year, David, now Lord Renton, was still active in the House of Lords, and I had the pleasure of speaking at several of the events to mark his landmark birthday. On one occasion Margaret Thatcher and I both spoke at Lincoln’s Inn. Margaret, as Margaret Roberts, had sought, and received, David’s help as a young barrister.
David’s joie de vivre never dimmed. In his eighties I called on him one Sunday lunchtime to find him in tennis shorts shaking his head sadly.
