He also said that many former members of the SDP were now ‘fed up’ with being in a ‘political backwater’ and wanted to be ‘part of the excitement which the Labour Party will generate’.Well] Lord Rodgers had not only openly challenged Mr Ashdown’s fiction that the Liberal Democrats were separate and equidistant from the two other parties That would have been reprehensible enough. What was more shocking still was that, with even greater brutality (recalling to us connoisseurs of the Movement stirring times in the early 1960s, when he was Gaitskell’s not overscrupulous bodyguard), Lord Rodgers virtually urged old Social Democrats to rejoin Labour.Lady Williams had not gone as far as this. In a respectable lecture – accordingly hardly noticed at all except by a few – she had merely called on both parties to work towards a ‘common programme’. Lord Jenkins, while praising Mr Blair, had urged him to enter into ‘friendly relations’ with the Liberal Democrats.The effect of these pronouncements was to produce a crisis for Mr Ashdown Admittedly it was a small crisis When all this was going on, he was observing a bigger one. Having tried to set the world to rights in the Balkans, he returned to be asked not about Bosnia but about Blair No wonder he was tetchy. It was as if we had returned from abroad, with all manner of marvellous tales to tell, only to be informed on our arrival home that the roof was leaking.The simile may not be unapt For leaking roofs can collapse. It may be that we are seeing the breaking up of the Alliance which fought the elections of 1983 and 1987 and was transformed (minus Lord Owen and his rump) into the Liberal Democrats who fought in 1992 We shall be left with the old Liberals.

As a party they may not do any worse than the existing Liberal Democrats. In February 1974 they polled 19 per cent of the vote under Mr Jeremy Thorpe, who has now been written out of Liberal party history as comprehensively as any opponent of JV Stalin in what was the USSR.Of the former luminaries of the SDP, Lord Jenkins is growing old gracefully, with other matters with which to occupy himself than the coarse asperities of party politics. By contrast, Lord Rodgers and Lady Williams still, I suspect, hanker after red boxes and black cars So does Lord Owen. But he, unlike the other two, would never accept them from a Labour government. In the 1980s Mr Alan Clark had a plot, of which surprisingly little appears in the Diaries, to make him leader of the Conservative Party in succession to Lady Thatcher Nothing came of it Nothing could now come of it. A peerage precludes the premiership – even though there is, in strict constitutional theory, no reason why the two should not be combined.

(Until Lord Home was appointed in 1960 it was widely believed that, in modern times, no peer could be foreign secretary.) Lord Owen’s fate is to be a kind of Flying Welshman, restlessly traversing the world in search of crises which unhappily remain forever unresolved.All in all, what has happened with the old SDP is a striking tribute to the importance of personality in politics Labour’s policies are unchanged from John Smith’s day. In any case, in the Labour Party, unlike the Conservative Party, policy is not made by the leader. It is made by the national executive, whose proposals have to be approved by the conference by a two- thirds majority if they are to be incorporated into the party programme. This is a near-mystical compendium of all such resolutions (some of them doubtless contradictory).