'Return Taverne': 50 years on from the Lincoln by-election

Fifty years ago today, Westminster was rocked by what Sir John Curtice describes as 'the most significant by-election success ever'. After over a year of 'local difficulty' with his constituency party, Dick Taverne, the former Labour MP for Lincoln, capitalised on the public's disillusionment with both Edward Heath's government and Labour's resurgent 'militant left wing' to trigger 'the start of a new force in British politics'. 

Born in a 'jungle house on stilts' in Sumatra in October 1928, Dick Taverne is something of a collector's item - having been a Labour MP in the 1960s and '70s, a parliamentary candidate for the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, and a Liberal Democrat peer since 1996. Educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford - where he partnered William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob) on a debating tour of the United States - Taverne enjoyed a successful career as a barrister, becoming a Queen's Counsel in 1965. An appointment to Dingle - brother of Michael - Foot's chambers in the early 1960s saw Taverne's initial specialism in shipping law give way to a flurry of cases from the Commonwealth, helping Foot represent 'nearly every African nationalist imprisoned by the British in colonial days, and after independence regularly appearing for opposition leaders imprisoned by his former clients'. 

After contesting Putney at the 1959 general election - beating Anne Clark (later Kerr) who Richard Johnson dubbed 'Labour's forgotten firebrand' to the party's nomination - Taverne was elected to parliament three years later as the MP for Lincoln after his predecessor, Sir Geoffrey de Freitas, was appointed British High Commissioner to its newly independent former colony, Ghana. A door-knocking session by the 'Daughters of the Revolution' - Julia Gaitskell, Pat Brown, Margaret Callaghan, Ann Gordon Walker, Frankie de Freitas, Judith Pakenham, and Susan Walston - brought Taverne and an otherwise uninspiring election to national attention. 

In his early years in Parliament, Taverne helped establish the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS) which sought to bolster Hugh Gaitskell's leadership of the party and bypass the 'pusillanimous' parliamentary party. As Hugh Purcell, the former BBC producer who worked with Taverne during his chairmanship of Radio 4's You the Jury, observed, the nonagenarian who now sits in the House of Lords was, politically, 'too hot to handle' after 1973, but continues to be a popular parliamentarian. Like his friend and mentor, Roy Jenkins - who, according to his biographer, John Campbell, retained a 'scar on his conscience ever after' not endorsing the 'Return Taverne' campaign in 1973 - Taverne is fluent, amusing, and charmingly combative. 

While Taverne had an almost 5000 vote majority and had been Lincoln's MP for over a decade, the by-election in 1973 was caused by 'irreconcilable' differences between Taverne and his constituency Labour party (CLP). A life-long European, Taverne had been threatened with 'deselection' as the official Labour candidate if he endorsed Britain's membership of the European Community against the party whip. Ultimately, while Taverne was one of the 69 Labour rebels who defied a three-line whip in October 1971 to vote for membership, he now laments that he was not 'more principled and courageous' in voting for the European Communities Bill itself, rather than abstaining. 

As Taverne recalls in his characteristically elegant memoirs, Against the Tide - a title shared with Tony Benn for the 1973-77 volume of his diaries - his 'local difficulties' were rooted in a 'fundamental change' when the Lincoln Left - led by Leo Beckett who helped his future wife, Margaret, defeat Taverne in October 1974 - 'promptly forgot its own history of dissent and vociferously proclaimed the duty of every MP to toe the party line'. On a fiery episode of World in Action, Taverne told Beckett (and his supporters on what Taverne later described as his 'local jihadist management committee') that 'I take note of your opinions, but I am not a puppet - I do not vote as I am instructed by my party masters'. 

While the cathedral city had been a safe Labour seat since Clem Attlee's landslide in 1945, Taverne won a 13,191 majority as the 'Democratic Labour' candidate on an almost 73 per cent turnout. Although the by-election was not the watershed moment that proponents of a third party believed it to be, it reaffirmed, as Taverne intended, Edmund Burke's dictum that a Member of Parliament should not just vote in accordance with the instruction of their constituents. For the Aberdeen Evening Express, Taverne's victory showed that independents and smaller parties could overcome Labour and the Conservatives' 'exclusive "bully boy" right to sort out who rules Britain without interference from outsiders'. 

While Michael Foot told a meeting in Monmouth that Taverne was 'part of a wretched conspiracy against the Labour Party', effusive newspaper coverage reflected on a 'day of reckoning' for the Opposition. The Coventry Telegraph borrowed Bruce Forsyth's catchphase to proclaim 'Didn't Dick do well!', while coverage in Scotland led with a photo of Dick skipping past Lincoln Cathedral with his daughters, Susie and Caroline, under the headline 'Rebel Dick gets that happy feeling'. One letter from a Labour Party member in the Daily Mirror even argued that the country owed Taverne a vote of thanks for 'rubbing in the lesson that the electorate are not a pack of morons'

In an era when popular opinion of professional politicians - particularly those housed in SW1A - is almost on a par with traffic wardens and employees of HMRC, I would argue that Dick Taverne's example reminds us of the importance of having independently minded Members of Parliament with the vigour, shrewdness and elegance of the 'Victor of Lincoln'. While I suspect that a future biographer will stress that his victory was an outlier - both failing to launch a third-force, or stopping 'the rot' as Labour drifted leftward - the moral of the story, as Taverne observed on an earlier anniversary, could be that deselection is not 'inevitable political death for an MP who sticks to his or her principles'. 

Tom Chidwick is the Manager of the Mile End Institute.