Teddy, Mrs T’s favourite Tartan Terrier
In 1990, at the beseeching of Michael Forsyth – then chairman of the Scottish Tories – Teddy Taylor returned for a couple of days to his old Clydeside haunts. ‘I remember people in Scotland saying, “Don’t go to Easterhouse or Castlemilk, because things have changed and they’ll throw stones at you,’ he chuckled.
‘The day I came to start on the initiative for Michael we went to Castlemilk and had a glorious reception from people in the shopping centre and held fabulous meetings. I said, “This shows the Tories are still there if you’ll go for them…”’
Teddy Taylor, who has died at the age of 80, was in his final Commons career that rare beast indeed: a Tory MP with a Glasgow accent.
More, a genial populist with a keen grasp of how Scots really tick and who should be best remembered for his deft partnership with Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s.
At a time when few had confidence in the grocer’s daughter, the MP for Glasgow Cathcart early grasped his new leader’s mettle, served proudly as her shadow secretary of state for Scotland and egged her on along lines many thought suicidal for the Scottish Tories – to have nothing to do with any scheme of devolution and instead, in unabashed Unionism, to destroy the Scottish national Party.
And they succeeded. Their party’s commitment to home rule was dumped in 1978, to pearl clutching resignations from the front-bench by Alick Buchanan-Smith and Malcolm Rifkind.
In the March 1979 referendum the Scottish electorate did not, after all, back the Callaghan administration’s devolution plans by the necessary margin. The Government fell and, in the ensuing election, the nationalists lost nine of their 11 seats – seven to the Scottish Tories.
But, as Taylor had feared, the slump in the SNP vote gifted his Cathcart seat to Labour. George Younger, not he, became Secretary of State. And, though Taylor was back in the Commons within the year – winning the distant Essex seat of Southend East in a March 1980 by-election – he would never again hold office.
Edward MacMillan Taylor was born in Glasgow on April 18, 1937, of lower middle-class parents of straitened means.
His father was a stockbroker’s clerk who took over the business when his boss died. It failed: they had to sell up everything and Mrs Taylor had to take a job in a textile factory, putting by every penny she could for her son’s future.
He prospered at the High School of Glasgow, then a highly respected Corporation grammar, and enjoyed study at Glasgow University, where he became part of a brilliant group of student debaters, alongside the likes of John Smith, Donald Dewar, neil MacCor- mick and James Gordon.
Taylor duly found a niche in journalism, fought in 1959 the hopeless seat of Glasgow Springburn for the Scottish Unionists, and in 1960 won election to Glasgow Corporation. In October 1964 he successfully defended the Glasgow Cathcart constituency – becoming the youngest MP – and held the south side division, by generally parlous margins, for the next 15 years. His parliamentary career coincided with the rise of Ted Heath – technocratic, corporate, self-consciously modern and obsessed with the Common market – and decline of the Scottish Tory vote.
The great new housing schemes created Labour ghettos; membership of the Kirk steadily declined; old industries shrank and vanished, and with them skilled working-class jobs held by folk who had generally voted Unionist. ‘You had a social change,’ Taylor mused many years later. ‘People were moving out of the town. Respectable middle-class people, bank clerks and the like, were gradually moving into new developments. Areas like Cathcart and Pollok were going down socially. But there’s no point in hiding the fact that there was a workingclass Tory vote based on religious divisions. That faded away…
‘We abandoned the working class. They did not abandon us. Unfortunately, the impression was given that the Conservative Party in Scotland was a branch of the English Conservative Party.’
When the Tories unexpectedly won the 1970 General Election Taylor, obviously able, became a minister at the Scottish Office – only to resign in protest in 1971, when Heath committed his government to seeking membership of the Common Market.
He did not care for Heath, or Gordon Campbell – his ineffectual Secretary of State for Scotland – and was bewildered by their U-turn in 1971, when the Rolls-Royce works at Hillington and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders were bailed out by the taxpayer. ‘We could probably have achieved more,’ Taylor despaired, ‘by sending an aeroplane to drop £10 notes over the area.’
nevertheless, as Heath fought to cling to power after the botched February 1974 election, it was Taylor he entrusted to put out feelers to the nationalist MPs. In a misjudgment, from 1972 the Glasgow Cathcart MP joined the infamous Monday Club, a hard-Right Tory grouping against Europe and immigrants, and in October 1974 – in the wake of the IRA’s bloody mainland bombing campaign – tried to introduce a Bill to restore capital punishment.
The young Brian Wilson cracked that calling him by such a cuddly name as ‘Teddy’ was like addressing the Hound of the Baskervilles as ‘Rover’. Yet Taylor was esteemed across party lines. More importantly, he was an early supporter of Margaret Thatcher, who respected his candour and found him much easier to relate to than his patrician Scottish colleagues. Accordingly, in 1976, she asked him to become her shadow secretary of state for Scotland.
Taylor duly directed a brilliant no campaign in the 1979 referendum, and capped that with a deft Tory one weeks later, with astute and funny election broadcasts, a new party logo and a detailed manifesto. They won almost a third of the Scots vote and 22 seats. But, in Cathcart, Labour fielded John Maxton, a vacuous Englishman but with the fabled surname of his late uncle Jimmy and – as Taylor had feared – the collapse of the nationalist vote let Labour in. ‘In decimating the SnP,’ he recalled dryly, ‘I decimated myself.’ Taylor was still only 42 and would be back in Parliament within months – but nothing was ever the same again. He grew the more raucously Eurosceptic, even noisily opposing construction of the Channel Tunnel.
Thatcher never found another job for him and – though Major wrangled a Taylor knighthood in 1991 – nor did her successor. By the end of 1994 Sir Teddy was one of an incorrigible band of Tory rebels, prominent in a succession of revolts and undeterred even when stripped (briefly, until the humiliated Prime Minister had to eat crow) of the Tory whip.
‘An unclubbable loner,’ wrote Byron Criddle in 2002, ‘he is, however, seen as “nutty but nice” in his old-fashioned suit, redolent of a character from a 1950s Ealing comedy. He accompanies his Europhobia with across-the-board Right-wing sentiments on hanging, homosexuality, abortion and immigration, but is in the small Conservative minority opposing fox-hunting…’
Taylor’s views were by no means remarkable for a man of his generation and background. Thatcher herself, as a young MP, had been rather keen on the birch and local Tory associations had far more freedom in selecting Parliamentary candidates than they do today. And his robust stances were much diluted by his unassuming good humour.
BUT he was no unpasteurised Thatcherite: in 1986 he refused to support her legislation to allow Sunday shopping. And his antipathy to Europe is striking because it was lifelong and – at real cost to his career – undeviating. Like his disapproval of devolution, it was founded on keen regard for power and power expressly founded on British sovereignty – and the absolute sovereignty of her Parliament.
‘As a pessimist he could well dub his career a failure,’ sneered one pundit in 1999, ‘as the UK seems poised for balkanisation and entry to a single European currency.’
In fact, Sir Teddy lived to have the last laugh. He sat for Southend East until retiring at the 2005 election; but his second Parliamentary career was a sad ghost of his first. ‘In a way he was also a victim of the devolution years,’ Arnold Kemp thought.
Taylor was ‘a huge figure in the Scottish party,’ Ruth Davidson yesterday declared, ‘and of the proper tenement-Tory mould. Also, he was my mum’s MP growing up. Lots of folk in Glasgow would declare “I’m no voting Tory, but I am voting for Teddy Taylor…”’
And, remarkably, nearly 40 years after Taylor was ousted from Glasgow Cathcart, its current nationalist MP still finds he casts a long shadow. Sometimes, ‘I felt I was running against him,’ cracked Stewart McDonald.
‘He had that gift of being able to secure the respect and votes of those who opposed his politics, because he always put his constituency first and foremost.’
In 1994, Sir Teddy appeared as a guest on Have I Got news For You and, to general surprise – droll, unassuming and self-mocking – quite stole the show, not least when he outed himself as a fan of the late Bob Marley. He was thrilled, within days, to be invited to present the prizes at the British Reggae Awards.