Sandy 4 St Albans

I am genuinely sorry to hear of Cyril Smith’s death earlier today.  His 1972 by-election victory in Rochdale came just after I joined the Liberals in Cambridge and he was a towering presence for the first decade of my involvement in the party.  When I was agent for the Cambridge  by-election of 1976, he came up as chief whip to do the adoption meeting and then did sterling work getting the rest of the parliamentary party to come up to support the student-run campaign.

We then worked together in the House when I was the last “chocolate soldier” as a parliamentary researcher funded by the Rowntree Trust in 1978/9 and subsequently in the first cohort of Short money recipients after the May 1979 election.

David Steel had his own leader’s office staff but Andrea Hertz and I did all the speech-writing and research for the rest of the parliamentary party – it was wing and prayer stuff and the MPs had to do a lot of it themselves.  Cyril was employment spokesman at that time and I was always hugely impressed by the way that he could crunch through a draft bill and seize the key points.

He was a brilliant public speaker and he was kind enough to come up to St Albans to support me at a public meeting at the Town Hall in the early 1980s.  I remember the ticket collector asking for his autograph on the way back.

Cyril’s tragedy was that his weight made him a figure of fun when he was in fact a shrewd and insightful politician who never got the recognition he deserved.