Home Top

TOM UTLEY: Modern politics and the day my father's best friend was blown up at the Commons

Published: 20:40 EST, 12 February 2015 | Updated: 20:40 EST, 12 February 2015

View
comments

My first week at the Palace of Westminster was one of the most dramatic in modern political history.

This was the final week of March, 1979, and I had just arrived as the 25-year-old rookie lobby correspondent for a Liverpool paper, trying to learn the ropes and find my way around the labyrinthine building, while all about me hell was breaking loose.

It was my third day, and I’d just about mastered the route between my office and the gents, when the Opposition leader, one Margaret Thatcher, called the vote of no confidence that was to bring down Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government.

My first week in the Palace of Westminster was the final week of March, 1979, when the Labour Government of Jim Callaghan was toppled by a vote of no confidence - proposed by Margaret Thatcher

Nobody who was there that Wednesday night will forget the drama of the knife-edge result, announced at 10.19pm: ‘Ayes to the right, 311, noes to the left, 310’.

Up in the Press Gallery there was frenzy, as some raced to the phones to break the momentous news, others to the lobbies downstairs (well, those who knew the way) to seek reaction from MPs.

Next day, as the stories behind the historic vote began to emerge, the three miles of Westminster’s corridors were fizzing with fevered excitement.

It turned out that Frank Maguire, an Independent Republican MP, whose vote might have saved Callaghan, had made a rare trip from Northern Ireland the previous day — in order, as he put it, to ‘abstain in person’.

Another MP who could have swung the vote in the Government’s favour was Labour backbencher Sir Alfred Broughton, who lay mortally ill in hospital (he was to die the following week).

Against the strong advice of his doctors, he’d been determined to go to the Commons, where Parliamentary procedure would have allowed his vote to be counted even if he had remained in an ambulance in Speaker’s Court.

To his lasting credit, though it meant the end of his premiership, Callaghan decided he couldn’t jeopardise Sir Alfred’s health.

Airey Neave was a war hero, stalag-escapee, Colditz inmate and my father's best friend who had invited me for lunch to celebrate my new job

Such were the stories that kept me busy through the Thursday, while the parties’ election machines began to crank into action — with manifesto leaks promising the most radical clash of ideologies in an age — adding further to this clueless rookie’s workload.

Then came the Friday, and utter horror.

Just before 3pm, there was an explosion. A bomb had gone off under a Vauxhall Cavalier on the ramp leading from the MPs’ car park in Speaker’s Court.

We could see the twisted wreckage from the Press Corridor windows — and somebody was inside it, with his legs blown off.

When word went round that the dying man was Airey Neave, war hero, stalag-escapee, Colditz inmate, shadow Northern Ireland Secretary — and my father’s dearest friend at the Commons who, with characteristic kindness, had asked me to lunch the following week to celebrate my new job — I rushed to the gents and locked myself in.

We journalists are meant to have rhinoceros hides, but I was going to be no damned use to my employers for the rest of that day.

Indeed, I reflected that if Westminster was always like this, my first week as a lobby correspondent would almost certainly be my last.

But of course it isn’t always like that. In fact, that week was the first since 1924 in which a Government was brought down by a no confidence vote (Ramsay MacDonald was the previous victim) — and none has suffered the same fate since.

Nor, as far as I’m aware, has any murder been committed on the palace premises since Mr Neave’s assassination (though the IRA was to strike viciously in Brighton five years later).

Indeed, with the 1979 election out of the way, and 18 years of unbroken Tory government stretching ahead, I began slowly to settle in to the palace, learning the layout of its 110 staircases and 2,000 rooms and the whereabouts of most of its alleged 14 bars.

By the end of more than a decade as a lobby correspondent, on and off, I’d become used to the arcane rhythms and rituals of Parliament.

I knew all about such quaint traditions as the Speaker’s Procession, the ballot for Private Members’ Bills, the tortuous stages a draft law has to go through before it gains the Royal Assent, the practice of slamming the Commons door in Black Rod’s face at the State Opening, the art of the filibuster (waffling on for hours until a Bill runs out of Parliamentary time), the MP’s cry of ‘I spy strangers!’ to clear the public from the galleries, the rule by which the Speaker can suspend a member from the House by ‘naming’ him or her . . .

The remains of Mr Neave's Vauxhall Cavalier on the ramp from the MP's car park to Speaker's Court after it was hit by an IRA bomb, killing him

As a Tory to my bones, with a deep respect for tradition and ritual, I liked these time-honoured ways, thinking they lent a certain dignity and sense of continuity to the proceedings of our ancient legislature.

So when I settled down to watch Michael Cockerell’s BBC2 documentary series on the workings of Westminster, Inside The Commons, I expected to enjoy it hugely.

I was quite amazed when I found that, instead, it made me cringe.

Don’t get me wrong. These are hugely revealing programmes, as you would expect from Mr Cockerell, and I warmly recommend them to anyone interested in Parliament and the way our laws are made.

But I’m afraid they are too revealing for comfort. For many of the rituals I once thought delightful now strike me as plain silly and embarrassing.

I can’t quite put my finger on the problem. Certainly, it has something to do with the rapid march of technology and the ever-widening gap between the Norman French used to signal the Royal Assent to a Bill (‘La Reyne le veult’, or ‘the Queen wishes it’) and the outside world of Facebook, Google and the iPhone.

What on earth can my sons’ generation make of it all?

But I reckon another large part of it is the way the cast of characters has changed — and the striking incongruity between the dignity of the ancient rituals and the undignified new generation of MPs who perform them.

It starts at the top with the Speaker. All right, George Thomas, who held the job when I arrived in 1979, was a bit of a show-off and not quite the wise and lovable fellow many imagined him to be.

But while he was in the chair, in his full-bottomed wig, something of the gravitas of his office rubbed off on him.

John Bercow, with his sarcastic schoolmaster manner, exhibitionist wife and deep love of the sound of his own pompous voice, is perhaps a reason to let the old traditions die

Can there be anybody alive who sees the present incumbent, John Bercow, as a dignified figure — with his sarcastic schoolmaster manner, his exhibitionist wife and his deep love of the sound of his own pompous voice?

With only the tiniest handful of exceptions, the rest of today’s MPs are almost equally unimpressive — peppering their otherwise utterly unmemorable speeches with Twitter-style catchphrases, spoon-fed to them by their parties’ high command (I wish I had a tenner for every Conservative I’ve heard saying ‘long-term economic plan’, or every Labour MP who has referred to the ‘cost of living crisis’).

In this week’s instalment of Mr Cockerell’s documentary, there was a particularly depressing moment when an MP who had done well in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills said he was delighted because this would ‘raise my profile’.

Aren’t MPs supposed to go into Parliament because they want to improve their constituents’ lives? Apparently not any more. They’re in it just to promote themselves.

Which brings me to perhaps the most insidiously harmful effect of the old rituals I used to love.

For far from imbuing the modern political class with a sense of history and public duty, they seem only to reinforce their feeling of belonging to an exclusive club, playing arcane games of their own that have precious little to do with the concerns of the voters they’re meant to represent.

As a romantic old soul, with a taste for tradition, I’ll still be sad to see the end of the ceremonial, the breeches and the lace jabots.

But it may not be an altogether bad thing if, as I suspect, they are doomed.