STAYING YOUNG WITH WOODROW

In the week of Lord Wyatt's memorial service, Norman Lamont misses his loyal friend

THE service was held this week at St Mar- garet's Westminster on April Fool's Day. The irony of the date would certainly not have escaped Woodrow's notice. Since he dictated the arrangements for this service, for one moment I wondered whether he had some final practical joke in store for the great and good who gathered to hon- our his memory.

What was it to be? Perhaps St Mar- garet's was going to be treated to one of those parodies of Anglican hymns that I used to hear him sing in Italy as he strut- ted around, cigar in mouth, in his swim- ming trunks:

God be in my head And on the upstairs landing....

Woodrow was, in a very light-hearted way, conscious of the littleness of life and that 'all is vanity'. I can imagine him tele- phoning from heaven to tell me with glee that the earth is a very insignificant place, that there are much more interesting parts of the universe, and that he didn't know why I was bothering to stay so long. Of course, Woodrow maintained he didn't believe in God. 'You don't believe in all that nonsense, do you?' But I once went with him to a monastery in Italy where we listened to Gregorian chants. He was near to tears and wrote about it in the Times.

Woodrow was unique and paradoxical. I have never met anyone who combined fun, frivolity and a sense of the ridiculous with such great seriousness and intelligence and a passion for politics and hard work. Woodrow had a remarkable range of friends. They included royalty, racing peo- ple, press barons, politicians and dukes and duchesses. But he also knew Bertrand Russell and Noel Coward. One reason he was a friend to so many was that he never betrayed a confidence. I had particular reason to be grateful to him when I was chancellor, carrying out what I believed to be necessary but unpop- ular policies. He defended me when most people wanted to lynch me — that was typ- ical. He loved controversy, and was not afraid to shock. But he didn't do so for effect. He said things because he believed them. Mind you, his way of defending his friends could sometimes be rather strange. He once appeared on Newsnight saying I could do a very good imitation of a scops owl. He then proceeded to give his own imitation.

His genius for friendship could have been a formidable political asset. In 1946 he was asked by Stafford Cripps to be his personal assistant in the Cabinet Mission to India to prepare for independence. Wood- row was a very junior member of the Mis- sion, but uniquely for a European he struck up a personal friendship with both Gandhi and his Muslim rival, Jinnah. Both leaders trusted him and were quite prepared to talk to this 26-year-old assistant to the Mission entirely on his own. At one point, Woodrow typically decided to take the negotiations into his own hands and gave Jinnah some over-candid advice. Stafford Cripps made him apologise to Attlee. But the PM appar- ently didn't hold it against him since he gave him a job in his government. If others in the Mission had had Woodrow's ability to strike up friendships the Mission might have been more successful.

Woodrow loved to argue, preferably over a meal. In 1991, on holiday in Italy over dinner at his house, I argued that we should reduce the size of the army because Russia was no longer a threat. 'You bloody fool!' he shouted. That night the attempted coup by hard-line communists against Gor- bachev took place. The next morning I was woken by Woodrow at the bottom of my bed wearing his hat with an MCC ribbon, singing the National Anthem and shouting, `Gorbachev has been overthrown! God save the Queen! I told you we couldn't cut the army!'

Woodrow had a curious but strong inter- est in science and health. He strongly dis- puted the link between cancer and smoking, but was adamant about that between heart disease and saturated fat. He was very careful about what he ate. Once he was in a restaurant where he dis- covered they were cooking the meal with the wrong sort of oil. He barged into the kitchen and demanded of the chef, 'Why are you murdering people?'

He was a fierce critic of the EU. He telephoned me a few days before he died. `You are going to carry on opposing the single currency, aren't you?' he said. I am sorry he is not alive to follow the introduc- tion of the euro.

Woodrow took enormous care with his articles, making notes from sound and television broadcasts, and ringing business- men and politicians. Sometimes when he started an article, I thought to myself, `Does he know enough about this?' And yet when the final article appeared it was full of interesting facts, and he invariably knew more than the so-called 'experts'. He always said that the tabloids were more meticulous about facts than the quality papers were. He took particular pride in his column in the News of the World. `Young man,' — he always called me that, even when I was Chancellor of the Exche- quer — 'my column is more influential than your speeches. I am read by 4.5 mil- lion people.'

Woodrow was one of the key figures of our time in bringing more democracy to the trade union movement. In the mid- 1950s he was a famous television journalist on Panorama. He was approached by Bill Carron, a member of the engineering union (AEU) executive, who told him the communists were going to take over the million-strong union through a combina- tion of ballot rigging and the apathy of its members. Woodrow turned the spotlight of television on the union and explained to its members and the public what was hap- pening. The result of the broadcast was that voting went up 40 per cent and the communists were defeated.

But this was only the start of his cam- paign. He was then approached by Jock Byrne, the last full-time non-communist official in the electricians' union (ETU), who told him similar things were happen- ing there. In many branches, communists were being elected with more votes than there were members. Woodrow spent months amassing evidence and took it to the TUC and George Woodcock, who brushed it aside. In 1957 he did another devastating television exposé. Witnesses with their faces hidden from the cameras — a daring device in those days described how communist officials falsi- fied election returns. To the fury of the Left, and the TUC, he continued to expose these practices in articles. And still the TUC did nothing. In 1959 he encour- aged and helped Frank Chapple and Jock Byrne to go to court, represented by Ger- ald Gardiner, over the fraudulent election of Frank Haxell as the general secretary of the ETU. It wasn't until June 1961 that the High Court overthrew Haxell's selection.

Woodrow always maintained the best thing he ever did was to stop the commu- nists capturing the engineering union and to help the campaign to get them out of the ETU. He was a ceaseless campaigner for compulsory secret home ballots for union elections. He was one of the influ- ential voices that persuaded a surprisingly reluctant Conservative government to include them in the 1984 Trade Union Act. From then on it became much hard- er, almost impossible, to get away with rig- ging union elections.

He hated injustice and hypocrisy. All his life he fought against trade union bullies and the Left. The more they criticised him, the more he spoke out.

Woodrow felt that in his life achieve- ment had fallen short of ambition, and that he had attempted more than he was capable of doing. But his many different lives were remarkable: chairman of the Tote for 21 years; a provincial newspaper owner; a period as a famous television pundit; a weekly newspaper columnist for 25 years, and an MP for 25 years. There might well have been other lives: he want- ed to be a playwright, but his plays never graduated to the West End from the Kent coast. Woodrow was wrong about himself. It was the fact that he attempted too much and believed he cou.ld do anything that made him what he was.

He once paid me the greatest compliment he ever could. 'You are very like me, young man,' he said. But I am not. I don't have, and never could have, his generosity, his knowledge of so many different subjects, including wine, racing, science and history. Above all, much as I love them, I could never smoke as many cigars as he did.

`Government regulations are simple and explicit — one guru to a mountain top'