The Relugas Compact: Tales of political skulduggery from Scotland to Upper Islington.

IF YOU ARE A KEEN FLY-FISHERMAN, Relugas is as good a place as any, and better than most, to practice your sport. Herbert Asquith was very keen fly-fisherman and a regular visitor to the trout streams and rivers of Scotland. Sir Edward Grey, also a fly-fishing aficionado, owned Relugas House, a rambling old fishing lodge, nestled comfortably above the winding Findhorn River. In September 1905, he invited his closest political allies, Asquith and Richard Haldane, to join him in the thickly forested glens of remote Morayshire. Their intention was to engage in some serious political plotting. Where better than Relugas?

All three visitors to Relugas House were exceptionally ambitious politicians. After ten years in the wilderness of Opposition they at last scented the odour of defeat wafting from the direction of Sir Arthur Balfour’s Conservative-Unionist Government. But Asquith, Haldane and Grey had no intention of participating in a Liberal Government formed on the traditional Gladstonian model. They wanted to build a modern Liberal Party: one that recognised the reality and importance of the British Empire and was dedicated to the radical modernisation of British society.

None of them were convinced that the party’s existing leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was up to the job. They plotted to “kick him upstairs” to the House of Lords where he could play the role of “dummy prime-minister”. Asquith would take on the role of Leader of the House of Commons (the true centre of political power) while Grey would become Foreign Secretary and Haldane Lord Chancellor. Liberal Party policy, both foreign and domestic, would receive the biggest shake-up in half-a-century.

Such was the Relugas Compact. Like most political plots it did not go precisely according to plan, but within a relatively short space of time the three visitors to that remote Scottish fishing lodge had indeed eclipsed the dithering Campbell-Bannerman. Prime Minister Asquith presided over what was, arguably, the most successful reforming government in modern British history. Sir Edward Grey was the subtle architect of the anti-German alliances that dragged the Britain into World War I. And Richard Haldane’s career straddled the 20-year period during which the Liberals gave way to Labour. (He was a senior minister in both the last Liberal and the first Labour governments.)

EIGHTY-THREE YEARS LATER, and on the other side of the world, the two most powerful politicians in Australia rolled up to Kirribilli House, the official prime-ministerial residence in Sydney, to negotiate a deal.

By 1988, the Labor Party leader, Bob Hawke, had been Australia’s Prime Minister for close to five years. The Aussie electorate loved the man they called “the Silver Budgie” and their feelings were entirely reciprocated by the former trade union boss and reformed larrikin who had somehow become convinced that between himself and the Australian people there existed a mysterious and very special bond.

Unfortunately for Hawke, the man who considered himself the brains of the outfit, Labor’s reforming Treasurer, Paul Keating, wasn’t prepared to wait indefinitely for Bob the Budgie’s welcome to wear out. He had come to Kirribilli House with an ultimatum: If Hawke wasn’t prepared to make way for him in the months immediately following the next General Election, then it would be all-on, man and boy, and may the best collector of French Ormolu clocks win!

Not being an overly trusting soul, Keating had arranged for the so-called “Kirribilli Agreement” to be witnessed by his mate Bill Kelty from the Australian Council of Trade unions and Sir Peter Abeles, a businessman friend of Hawke. It was a wise precaution, because the Silver Budgie was to prove extremely reluctant to leave his perch.

Those who considered Kevin Rudd’s relentless stalking of Julia Gillard unseemly have either forgotten about, or are simply unaware of the unholy war that Keating unleashed within the ranks of the Australian Labor Party when Hawke welched on the Kirribilli deal. Keating came after his erstwhile ally with an axe, finally bringing him down, 56 votes to 51, in a Party-Room leadership ballot just six days before Christmas in 1991.

WITH THE UGLINESS OF KIRRIBILLI before them, one might have expected the two British Labour party tyros dining together at the Granita Café in London’s Upper Islington to think long and hard before considering a similar leadership deal. But these two young Labour MPs clearly did not believe they had anything to learn from Australians.

Following the sudden and unexpected death of the British Labour Party leader, John Smith, on 12 May 1994, most pundits’ identified the leading contenders to replace him as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But, as those same experts were only too happy to point out, under the Labour Party’s rules for selecting a new leader, it was entirely possible that if Blair and Brown ran against each other they could well be pipped at the post by the royally proletarian, John Prescott.

Though for more than ten years both men would adamantly deny that any deal went down at the Granita Café in May 1994, a host of political journalists have insisted that in return for certain assurances on policy, Brown generously made way for Blair. It is also claimed that Blair undertook to step down and campaign for Brown to become Labour’s leader at some point in the future.

Brown’s mistake, like Keating’s, was to forget that being the Prime Minister fundamentally alters one’s perspective on the world. Deals done with mere mortals may be broken with impunity if History so dictates. That mystical bond, forged between a leader and his people, certainly cannot be broken on the basis of some sordid arrangement entered into in an Upper Islington café!

The toxic political sludge which gradually engulfed the British Labour Party as Brown and Blair waged their unacknowledged battle for supremacy ultimately rendered it unelectable. The long struggle had hollowed out Brown as a politician to such a degree that even when he secured the leadership, uncontested, in 2007, there was nothing left in him that was worth having.

The “Granita Pact”, by transforming the British Labour Party into a quasi-dynastic oligarchy, in which one leader secretly agrees to anoint a self-appointed successor – only to waste vast quantities of precious political energy in vain attempts to welch on the deal – turned out, in the end, to be a suicide pact for the whole Labour Movement.

HAS  RECENT NEW ZEALAND POLITICAL HISTORY anything to show that matches the Relugas Compact, the Kirribilli Agreement or the Granita Pact? Not in the sense of a widely acknowledged (to the point of being given a name!) agreement whose working out – for good or ill – has been readily apparent in the behaviour of our political leaders. The recent behaviour of leading figures in the New Zealand Labour Party does, however, give rise to speculation that the morbidity of oligarchic succession was (and maybe still is) present in its ranks.

The election of David Shearer, in particular, was effected by a series of promises and trade-offs that appeared to involve a significant number of caucus members in behaviour which brought as little credit to themselves as it did to their party.

The “agreement” (if that is what it should be called) at the  heart of the New Zealand Labour Party caucus’ recent shenanigans, however, was very different from the examples already described. Those agreements were the work of supremely confident political players who possessed clear and compelling ideas about where they wished to take their party. In New Zealand’s case it was exactly the opposite: our deals represented the coming together of weak and purposeless men and women whose motivations were purely negative.

Summed up in the expression “Anybody But Cunliffe”, such deals as were struck were designed to prevent the one supremely confident political player in Labour’s caucus from becoming Labour’s leader.

What they had not counted on, however, was the deal that David Cunliffe had struck. Not with a mate, or even a rival, but with the Labour Party itself. By abandoning oligarchy for democracy, Cunliffe entered into an agreement which, unlike Relugas, Kirribilli or Granita, grows stronger and more productive the longer it is kept.