Book review: Against the Tide by Dick Taverne

The defining episode in Dick Taverne’s public life came in March 1973 after he resigned from the Labour Party and stood as a Democratic Labour candidate for Lincoln in the ensuing by-election. It was an acrimonious affair that attracted huge publicity, partly due to a World in Action TV confrontation with the chairman of the local Labour Party during which Taverne upheld Edmund Burke's principle that an MP should be a representative, not a delegate. Taverne won a crushing victory. When the election result was announced, loyal Labourites turned on his supporters, yelling abuse, jostling them and pulling hair.

A few years later Taverne and I began a BBC Radio 4 debate programme You the Jury. It was commonplace for contributors to say "I’ll come on because I admire that man Taverne for sticking up for his principles," or, occasionally, "I’ll never appear with that traitor Taverne; he betrayed the Labour Party." Later, in 1981, even some of the newly formed SDP found him too hot to handle because of his reputation as a renegade; others saw him as a John the Baptist figure. This fits well with the cover of Against the Tide that invites comparison with a revivalist preacher proclaiming the Second Coming. During the by-election Taverne tried to persuade Roy Jenkins (at one of those London Italian restaurant dinners) to join him. Jenkins had just resigned as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Taverne foresaw a Lincoln victory as a Jenkins victory and the start of a new centre party with Jenkins as a future prime minister. Jenkins declined, but now we know from John Campbell’s new biography that he felt he had taken the coward’s path and his failure to support Taverne “remained a scar on his conscience ever after.” The issue that had split the Labour Party was Europe. In October 1971, Taverne and 68 other Labour MPs followed Jenkins in defying a three-line whip and voting for membership of the European Community. In debates over the subsequent European Communities Bill arguing out the detail, such was the political pressure that Jenkins several times voted against his conscience in order to oppose the pro-Europe Tory government, despite Taverne and others urging him to resign. In fact Taverne admits that he did not acquit himself well either because he abstained rather than vote for the Bill: “I should have been more principled and courageous. I should have voted boldly for the Bill. I should have denounced the extraordinary spectacle of MPs speaking one way and voting another.” It would be wrong to give the impression that Against the Tide is primarily about adversarial politics. Nor for that matter is it primarily about the affairs of state when Taverne was working for Jenkins first as a junior minister in the Home Office (1966-68) and then as a Minister of State at the Treasury (1968-1970). Taverne considers Jenkins to be one of the two outstanding figures of British politics since the war; only Margaret Thatcher, he “reluctantly concedes," had "greater impact”. Obviously Taverne’s main legacy must be the huge reforms of the Home Office and then the uniquely successful management of the economy by the Treasury during these years. Essentially, Against the Tide is a memoir about “politics and beyond”, much of it “beyond”. It is not an autobiography, nor is it a diary because he never kept one. This is a pity in a way because diaries are the raw material of history. Taverne’s memory, however, is extensive and his equivalent of the diarist’s often pungent one-liners (see Alan Clarke and Chris Mullin) is his vast collection of debating putdowns, most of them parliamentary, which he can’t resist bringing into his memoir. For example, Roy Hattersley, speaking about a Conservative U-turn, asked, “Can anyone imagine a more signal example of the triumph of expediency over principle?” Norman St-John Stevas replied: “Has the Right Honourable gentleman considered his own career?” Against the Tide reads in large part like one of Taverne’s "conversational" monologues that captivate the listener because they are fluent, amusing and charmingly combative. For instance: “Tony Benn had an unusual gift: despite achieving high office in a number of senior departments, as Secretary of State for Technology, then Industry and then Energy, he managed to remain uncorrupted by the slightest taint of realism.” Taverne left Parliament in 1974 and soon set up the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a think tank to “help create a more rational tax system”. He began with the Meade Report, a commission to examine what a good taxation might look like if it started from first principles, and when he left ten years later the IFS was already regarded as the fount of fiscal wisdom. From there he moved to the boardrooms of Equity and Law and the British Oxygen Company as a non-executive director. For a former Labour MP who had once doubted the morality of owning shares this was a move, as Bernard Shaw might have observed, from "the heart" to "the head". How an energetic and reforming mind set to work on the traditional corporate governance of the City makes interesting reading. His main target, which he was unable to do anything about, was the doctrine of "shareholder value" whereby shareholders have the unqualified right to take a short-term view and sell a company to the highest bidder. His criticism of the House of Lords, which he joined as a life peer in 1996, is equally convincing. Calling it “the politician’s nirvana,” he recommends reducing its “enormous numbers” by the obvious expedient of limiting the time any peer may serve. It was an article in this magazine that inspired Taverne to set up the pressure group Sense About Science (SAS). In 1999 Sir John Maddox, the editor of Nature, wrote about the irrational attack on GM crops, to which Taverne responded in Prospect with a seminal article about the “Dangers of Anti-Science”. This seems the cause closest to Taverne’s heart, the serendipity of a rational education, the influence of his scientist wife Janice and his combative nature. He sets out his stall in typical manner in Against the Tide. Referring to the gap between the cultures of science and the humanities he writes: "It explains why so few influential civil servants and politicians and the media generally know anything about science. That is why the government takes no steps to discourage the NHS from funding homeopathy, why the Department of Health has several times asserted that its policy is neutral as between evidence-based medicine and alternative medicine (in effect between sense and nonsense) and why much government policy is not evidence-based." The chronology of a life does not always fit with a thematic approach and Against the Tide could be better organised. However, unlike sailing against the tide in my experience, this book is an easy and exhilarating read: the account of a courageous, fully committed and important life. Hugh Purcell is a writer and former BBC producerAgainst The Tide by Dick Taverne is published by Biteback, £25