Wallace Lawler arrives at Westminster

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Wallace Lawler's victory in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election of 1969, as I blogged last month, is the Liberal victory no one talks about.

That is because there seems to have been a racist element to his campaigning. He did give one of my maths teachers a good hoofing though.

Anyway, this photograph shows him arriving at Westminster as a newly elected MP, along with his wife and one of his daughters.

Candid portraits of West Midlands Liberal and Lib Dem candidates

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Researching my post on Wallace Lawler and the Birmingham Ladywood by-election, I came across a remarkable document online.

Liberal/Liberal Democrat candidates in parliamentary elections in the West Midland Region 1945-2015 was compiled Lionel King.

It gives a brief biography of each candidate in Who's Who style, but also a character sketch. These are often bracingly candid - so much so that I would hesitate to quote some of them here.

Among those I can quote is my former landlord in Sutton Coldfield, Jim Whorwood. He is described as a "party stalwart from 1950s; meticulous keeper of records and election information; respected for his integrity, serious minded approach, sense of humour and capacity for hard work".

I remember saying to one of the SDP candidates in the May 1982 local elections: "I love the Liberals. Jim does all this work and he has no hope of reward."

That shows how much I knew. In 2001 he was elected Lord Mayor of Birmingham.

Our PPC in those days was Edward Hooper, who is described as "noted for [his] courteous, unassuming demeanour".

For a taste of Mr King when he has the bit between his teeth, try him on Robin Day, who fought Hereford for the Liberals in 1959:

Day was said to have been of a cantankerous personality, difficult to work with, with few if any real intimate friends, though he had a myriad of superficial acquaintances. He lacked a genuine sense of humour and always wore a stony expression. The exaggerated professional reputation he enjoyed in life has justly received posthumous re-evaluation.

Wallace Lawler, James Haigh and the 1969 Birmingham Ladywood by-election

Wallace Lawler won the Birmingham Ladywood by-election for the Liberals in 1969, but lost the seat back to Labour in the following year's general election.

Lawler sounds like a pioneer of community politics, but I have never heard him talked about in Liberal or Liberal Democrat circles. 

This may be because his campaigning was tainted with racism - certainly that was the story I once heard from some Labour-supporting friends in Birmingham. No doubt I have readers who know all about this.

Click on the image above and you will go to a television report on the by-election. It includes interviews with all the candidates, Lawler included.

But he is not the one who interests me the most. The last interviewed - and the film siezes up while he is talking - is James Haigh. He was to finish last with only 34 votes.

Because Haigh taught me maths between 1973 and 1974.

Given my views on Welland Park College, Market Harborough, in that era - and on its mathematics department in particular - I am tempted to conclude that the electors of Ladywood got it about right.

But I shall rise above this because Haigh turns out to be an interesting figure.

At Ladywood he was standing for the Fellowship Party. This was an environmentalist and nuclear disarmament party that existed between 1955 to 2007. 

It attracted prominent figures as members, including Benjamin Britten, Sybil Thorndike, Vera Brittain, Donald Swann, Rowland Hilder and Leo McKern.

This was the only time Haigh stood for the party in a parliamentary election, but he had already fought Bromley as a nuclear disarmament candidate in 1964.

And a bit of scrabbling around on Google reveals that he was educated at Marlborough and the universities of Leeds and Oxford. In 1964 he is described as a primary school teacher and in 1969 he was teaching at Corby Grammar School. He had also taught in Nigeria at some point.

What I didn't know until I researched this post was that after Ladywood he joined the Liberal Party and fought the Kettering constituency (which then included Corby) at the 1970 general election and the two elections of 1974.

If I had known some of this at the time we might have got on better.

Book review: Winning Here by Chris Rennard

This is my review of Chris Rennard's memoirs from the current issue of Liberator. Since you ask, you can subscribe to the magazine via its website.

Winning Here - My Campaigning Life: Memoirs Volume 1
Chris Rennard
Biteback Publishing, 2018, £25

When Phil Reilly left his job as the Liberal Democrats’ director of communications last November, he announced the decision in a post on Lib Dem Voice. Writing of the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election, he said:

That night changed the course of our party’s fortunes, but it also changed my life. I had joined the press office of a party that hadn’t been in national government for decades, with no expectation that would be changing any time soon. A few short years later I would be working in 10 Downing Street.

After it was published I saw tweets from national political journalists congratulating Phil on the article, which suggests that his may become the official version of Lib Dem history.

The truth, however, is rather different. Cleggmania lasted only a few days and the party lost five seats at the election. We did end up in government, not because of the peculiar brilliance of Clegg or Reilly, but because the election produced a hung parliament, an outcome that will always be a fluke result.

A more accurate account of Liberal Democrat history was given in an earlier Lib Dem Voice post by Nigel Lindsay:

Liberal Democrats were arguably more effective as a party of government before Nick Clegg became leader. [In] the decade from 2000 to 2010, Liberal Democrats were coalition partners in the governments of both Scotland and Wales.  The achievements of Liberal Democrat Ministers in those governments were far-reaching and radical …. Liberal Democrats also controlled major local authorities in most parts of Britain during those years.

Chris Rennard’s ‘Winning Here’, which is billed as volume 1 of his memoirs, tells the story of how he helped the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats reached this position of comparative strength, ending with the defenestration of Charles Kennedy and then Willie Rennie’s victory in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election in February 2006.

This has the effect of ending the story before the emergence of the allegations of sexual harassment against him that have sometimes threatened to split the party along a generational divide. Chris does mention them in his introduction, but a full discussion will presumably have to wait until the appearance of the slightly improbable volume 2.

Chris’s father, a veteran of the First World War who lost a leg on the Western Front, was 71 when Chris was born. He was to die three years later, leaving Chris’s mother with three children and a complicated financial situation. The help she received in gaining a widow’s pension had historic consequences for the Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats.

One day Cyril Carr, the leading figure in Liverpool Liberals, called at the Rennards’ house, listened to their problems and made the call that secured the pension from their own phone. So Chris joined the Liberals.

Carr was one of the pioneers of community politics in the party and Chis became his protégé. This was an era when the party twice ran the city council (1974-6 and 1978-0) and contained nationally important figures like David Alton and Trevor Jones, but Chris was to become the leading Liberal agent in the city. Alton was to win the Edge Hill constituency, which was wonderfully compact for campaigners but already identified as for the chop by the Boundary Commissioners, at a by-election in 1979.

After the 1984 Liverpool council elections, which Chris suggests were swung by personation for the Militant-led Labour Party, he left the city to become the Liberal Party’s regional agent for the East Midland, and this is what he found:

The East Midlands Regional Party was considered to be one of the most viable in England because it owned a (near-derelict) house in Loughborough. The house did not even had a functioning loo and visitors had to rely on the facilities at the nearby railway station. This was the regional office and home for the administrative secretary, a man called Maurice Bennett, who also hailed from Liverpool. 

Maurice made sure that the Regional Executive … Regional Finance and General Purposes Subcommittee and Regional Council all met regularly and he tried to raise funds to cover his modest salary and the costs of the house by selling a weird assortment of pens, key fobs and party memorabilia, as well as organising draws and sponsored walks. 

The operation required the limited number of constituency associations to pay into the regional party £200 per year, unless they could plead great poverty. For this fee, they appeared only to have the benefit of being able to buy the key fobs and to send representatives to regional party meetings.

It was at this house, which was in Burder Street, Loughborough, that I first met Chris. We talked upstairs among stacked boxes of leaflets that must have challenged the joists while Maurice Bennett watched the racing on television downstairs.

Chris had an enormous influence on the party in the region. He brought community campaigning techniques from Liverpool that enabled Rob Renold to win Crown Hills, an inner Leicester ward on the county council with a largely Muslim population in 1985. He also put together a team of activists, based at a Liberal safe house in Kimberley Road, Leicester, who helped across the region. They ran the committee room at an important Harborough by-election, leaving us local activists free to knock up all day.

For some readers, the book will be too much of a catalogue of long-forgotten by-elections, but for me, at least in these years, it is riveting because I remember them all. I drove down with Chris to the Brecon and Radnor by-election in 1985 and was on the front line there in Ystradgynlais.

‘Winning Here’ sweeps on through the Alliance years, giving an inside view of the seat negotiations between the Liberal Party and the SDP and showing how poorly the two Davids worked together. It was not just a lack of personal chemistry, but a lack of organisation: when they arrived for a joint appearance they had never discussed who would say that.

Then we come to the period after the two parties merged. This is chiefly remembered as an era in which we argued over the party’s name – at one time we were going to be “the Democrats” – but Chris reveals how precarious the financial position was, with the party reliant for its continued existence at one point upon a major donor who insisted upon keeping his identity a secret.

The drama that dominates the latter part of the book is the fall of Charles Kennedy. It had been rumoured for years that Charles had a serious drink problem, but whenever you asked an insider you were told that, yes, Charles used to have a problem, but he has sorted himself out. Sadly he never did.

Chris reveals more instances of cancelled meetings and campaign trips than I remember reading about before and pays tribute to the people like Tim Razzall who kept Charles going for as long as he did. He also gives Donnachadh McCarthy his due as the man who pushed the Lib Dems into opposing the war in Iraq.

I suppose it was the lifestyle of politics that did for poor Charles, and Chris himself did not find it healthy either. Living in what was in effect a permanent by-election campaign for 30 years left him with diabetes and depression when he stood down as the Lib Dems’ chief executive in 2009.

In recent years, in part perhaps because of the allegations against Chris, it has been fashionable to decry ‘Rennardism’. Yet this style of politics did not come just from him and Liverpool: it was originated independently across the country by forgotten figures like Wallace Lawler in Birmingham and Stanley Rundle in Kew. It was solidified into a technique for winning seats by the Association for Liberal Councillors in the late 1970s, and Chris was the strongest influence on its development in the years after that.

And, though it is true that the ruthless targeting and playing up of local grievances can grate, it has never been clear what people propose putting in place of Rennardism. Nick Clegg’s charisma, which was based on a single attractive television performance, did not last a week as the centrepiece of our campaign.

When the history of the Liberal Democrats comes to be written, Chris will have a central place in it and this book, which already feels like a monument to a forgotten era, will be a valuable source. It’s just that you fear the historians may decide they have more important things to do.

The significance of Cyril Smith

Numerous tributes have been paid to Cyril Smith since his death was announced yesterday.

In a comment on Liberal Democrat Voice, Chris Rennard reminds us of his importance to the Liberal Party in the early 1970s:

Cyril Smith was one of only four Liberal candidates who increased their share of the vote substantially in the 1970 General Election. All four of those candidates (the others were Ronnie Fearn, Cyril Carr and Wallace Lawler) were popular local Councillors who were effective community campaigners. Their relative successes helped to give me and others some of our inspiration for how an electorally successful Liberal Party might be created.

When the Rochdale by-election occurred in September 1972, the Liberal Party had only six MPs (three in Scotland, one in Wales, one in Cornwall and one in Devon). When Cyril Smith won it, he became the only Liberal MP in England apart from John Pardoe in N Cornwall and Jeremy Thorpe in N Devon.

Cyril’s victory in the by-election began the the Liberal Party revival of the early 70s. His agent John Spiller was one of my many mentors in the party. John made sure that Cyril wrote a personal note to everyone that he knew in the constituency inviting them to his adoption meeting and inviting them to be an official signatory on his nomination paper – more than 5,000 people signed them.

The September Rochdale by-election win helped provide momentum and belief that Graham Tope could win Sutton and Cheam in the December by-election (masterminded by another of my mentors – Liverpool’s Trevor Jones and organised again by John Spiller. The community based campaigning approach from these campaigns (by now being spread by pioneers in places such as Pendle and LB Richmond) led to widespread Liberal gains in the 1973 local elections (inc control of Liverpool), two more parliamentary by-election gains that Summer and 29% in the national opinion polls that Summer.

Cyril’s contribution to the survival and recovery of the party in this very difficult period following the debacle of the 1970 General Election was therefore immense.

I heard Cyril Smith address a public meeting in Sutton Coldfield in 1982 and he was a terrific speaker. His style of oratory, which no doubt came from Nonconformist preaching, now seems a world away from today's culture of soundbites and glottal stops.

Because of his vast size, people expected Smith to be an uncomplicatedly jolly person, but he was always a more complex and difficult person than that. In a tribute I quoted yesterday, Sandy Walkington suggested:

Cyril’s tragedy was that his weight made him a figure of fun when he was in fact a shrewd and insightful politician who never got the recognition he deserved.

That feeling imbues the obituary by Michael Meadowcroft that appeared in this morning's Guardian. Anyone who was around in the party in those days will know that there was never much love lost between these two, and Meadowcroft is honest about Cyril Smith's shortcomings as a colleague and his sometimes unattractive views.

But his summing up is fair and reflects the ultimate sadness of Smith's career:

His success in transcending the disadvantages of his birth without acquiring any airs and graces, and without in any way abandoning his roots, seemed nevertheless to leave him with a curious inferiority complex.

Perhaps his most revealing comment was made in 1985: "I don't believe that I have ever been acceptable to the Liberal party establishment. I was handy to trot out to attack the Labour vote because I was working class."

Actually, such a complex is common among those born into extreme poverty and often with good reason. I suspect the largely public-school Liberal establishment of the day did rather look down on Smith.

Nor should we modern secularists forget the important role that religion once played in our national life. Because I remember from reading his autobiography that one of the reasons that Smith felt he was despised is that he was a Unitarian - the most free-thinking of the Nonconformist churches. In his days as a teacher, some found it positively shocking

In Leicester, by contrast, the Unitarians were wholly respectable and provided many of the city's Liberal mayors in the 19th century.

Wallace Lawler mentioned in first Red Riding novel

Last month I claimed in House Points:

If you watched Red Riding you will believe that life in the 1970s consisted of policemen beating people up in semi-darkness.

But I decided to give the novels a try yesterday and bought the first of the four, which is 1974.

And I think I am going to like it.

Because on page 16 David Peace writes:

I grabbed the reels, took a seat at a screen, and threaded through the microfilm.

July 1969.

I let the film fly by:

B Specials, Bernadette Devlin, Wallace Lawler, and In Place of Strife.

Wallace Lawler? He may be an obscure figure even for readers of this blog.

Wallace Lawler was the last Liberal MP in Birmingham before John Hemming. He won the Ladywood constituency at a by-election June 1969, but lost it at the general election the following year.

There are some interesting scraps about him on the net. I shall write them up one day.