Integrity of Electoral Processes

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, it is of course always a great pleasure for me to follow my noble friend Lord Tyler, and it is with considerable sadness that I now do so for the last time.

It was in 1964, 58 years ago, that my noble friend was first elected to the Devon County Council and became the youngest councillor in the country. In February 1974, he was elected as the Liberal MP for the Bodmin constituency. He won then by just nine votes, then narrowly lost in the October election by just 665 votes. Many people might have given up politics at that point—but not Lord Tyler.

He fought the Beaconsfield parliamentary by-election in 1982. He came a strong second, easily consigning to third place the new young Labour candidate—one Tony Blair. In 1983 and 1987, he organised the general election tours for David Steel. He became chair of the Liberal Party, while I was one of its campaign officers, and we had high hopes for the then Liberal/SDP Alliance. But at the end of that decade, my party hit the rocks in the European elections of 1989.

Sensing the national disaster ahead, I decided to abandon what was happening at my party HQ and began making the first of my many campaign visits to Cornwall to support my noble friend’s campaign there to try to become the MEP. Again, he did not win, but, after a campaign in which I worked closely with his election agent, Dame Annette Penhaligon, he was the only Liberal Democrat in the country to achieve second place in that election, polling over 30% of the vote, compared to just 6% for my party nationally. Our campaign, including the distribution of over 250,000 tabloid newspapers in his support, set in motion the process which eventually resulted in every seat in Cornwall being held by a Lib Dem MP.

In 1992, I helped him to win the North Cornwall constituency, which now included the town of Bodmin. He later became the Chief Whip in the Commons for my party, while I was its director of campaigns and elections. We worked very closely together with the late and much missed Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon.

We then became colleagues here when he retired from the other place in 2005. We worked together on many aspects of reform to your Lordships’ House, seeking, as he said, to go much further than we were able. We worked together to try to establish the principle of fairness in the funding of elections nationally, and to defend the principle of there being a level playing field in constituency campaigns, and we have worked to try to reduce the number of people unable to participate in our democracy because they are not registered to vote, to prevent the Government changing the rules of elections in favour of their own party, and to protect the independence and role of the Electoral Commission.

My noble friend’s debate today is very timely. Never before have a Government sought to gain control of the independent Electoral Commission, to change spending rules to enable marginal seats to be bought, and blatantly to increase the power that comes with millions of pounds rather than with millions of votes.

We will greatly miss my noble friend in the debates ahead, we thank him for his many contributions, and we are most grateful to Lady Tyler for everything that she has done in support of him, his constituents, and the cause of democracy.