LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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