The anguish being endured by the Liberal Democrats at the moment must be made worse by reminders of what might have been. Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Limehouse declaration, the document that rendered the coming of the SDP and the division of the Labour Party virtually inevitable. For a brief period it looked as if this new force, combined with the old Liberal Party, would take political life by storm and seize power. As it happened, the biggest of bangs was to end in the most wimpy of whimpers. The SDP was meant, in Roy Jenkins’s phrase, to “break the mould”. In the end, the mould would instead break it.
This anniversary has been the cause (not untypically) of introspection on the Centre Left of the spectrum. This has involved the charge that the “betrayal” of the Gang of Four enabled Margaret Thatcher to maintain office despite securing “only” 42 per cent of the popular vote. This is a ludicrous accusation. The voters did not need the departure of Shirley Williams to show them that Labour under the leadership of Michael Foot and with a manifesto infused with the poison of the ultra-left was unelectable. The SDP provided a place other than the Tories for those appalled by this shift to move to. If it had not been born, Mrs Thatcher could have won more handsomely.
That this birth led to a quick death is not a signal of outright failure. The numbers who followed the party may not have been huge, but the influence of the individuals concerned has been considerable. They have fanned out across all three main parties, in academia, over numerous cultural institutions and the media. Their potency has been such that the letters SDP should stand for “still doing politics”.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the SDP’s founders can feel smug about its impact. Tony Benn has accused new Labour of being an “SDP Mark II” and in this (at least) he is broadly correct, even if neither Tony Blair nor (especially) Gordon Brown would care or dare to admit it. There is also a sense in which David Cameron, although he would hardly state it to The Daily Telegraph, is fishing in similar waters. He too wants to be viewed as “ tough but tender”, a champion of market economics and social reform. It is thus the Liberal Democrats who seem less sure of the SDP’s principles.
That is less paradoxical than it may appear. The Limehouse declaration itself was not the Gettysburg Address. It was long on platitudes that are hard to disagree with (although Mrs Thatcher and Mr Foot managed to). Despite that, it went through 18 drafts. All this editing may be because there was not one SDP, but a collection of them. Mr Jenkins looked to the past and longed for the (improbable) revival of the Edwardian Liberal Party. Mrs Williams, then, was a classic Gaitskellite, wanting an egalitarian Labour Party shorn of its swivel-eyed Marxist tendencies. David Owen was a radical who understood the appeal of Thatcherism.
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Similar splits exist in our time. What is often referred to as if a simple “middle ground” in politics is in fact undulating terrain. There are electors who, even if they do not express it as such, identify with Dr Owen’s approach to politics and others who would be more at home with the Jenkins or Williams ethos. While it is may be said that all of the parties are charging towards the “middle”, that does not mean they will end up in exactly the same place. Some who were in the SDP can be pleased, 25 years on, that they were in this area first.