Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Politician and writer: UK Chancellor, Home Secretary, first President of the European Commission, and Chancellor of Oxford University.
On the island
Eight records
Well, I think um my first record ought to take me back to my Welsh um childhood. I was born, brought up, went to school in Wales, and both my both my parents were Welsh. But we were, in a sense, Border Welsh and non Welsh speaking. And, of course, my um life has been semi detached from Wales. I've been away from Wales most of the time, but I retain a very strong affection for it, and the tune I have chosen, I think, perhaps expresses that semi detached position.
I think called the Soviet Airmen Song, and I've chosen it for two reasons, because it it it recalls those Oxford days. I remember very vividly driving to a University Labour Federation conference with Tony Crossland, who finished up as Foreign Secretary, and Leo Pliatzki, who finished up as a permanent secretary, and Tony Crossland, who was a great singer, singing this tune a great part of the journey, so far as I can remember. And it also expresses a slightly sort of infantile leftism.
Enigma VariationsFavourite
Yes, we we now have the theme from Elgar's Enigma Variations, which um which take which reminds me of the war, not the war at Oxford, but the war when I'd gone into the army. And I remember playing a record, an old seventy-eight record of this, over and over again in Nissenhut on on Salisbury Plain in the summer and autumn of um and through into forty three, summer and autumn of forty two three.
Samson and Delilah: Printemps qui commence
And this is chosen not because it particularly reminds me of anything, but just because I think it is a very beautiful in a slightly lush way, but a very beautiful piece of music.
National Philharmonic Orchestra
Well, let's have one which does remind me of my Very strongly of my early days in Brussels. It's again rather like the Enigma variation, something which I played very frequently at a particular time, and that's the um well, I played the whole opera, that's Verde's Ballarin Mascara, but it's the prelude, which um has this particular um reminiscent quality for me, because in my early days in Brussels I was rather a stranger to the bureaucracy of the community, and I sometimes thought that In my first month or so there were things going on in the background which I didn't wholly understand, and this the music here, I think, very much captures that atmosphere.
And this again is a record which I've chosen for a very special reason. When I came back from Brussels I plunged into British politics to founding the SDP and within four months of leaving Brussels I fought a by-election in Warrington which seemed a very unpromising seat though it turned out more promising than we expected and we went round in a great van as one did and we went round to this music.
The Land of the Mountain and the Flood
It takes me on to the next political phase, but not only political, and that is a Scottish record, because I won the Hillhead um division of Glasgow and sat in Parliament for Glasgow for five years and immensely enjoyed that connection with Glasgow
Symphony No. 92 in G major, 'Oxford'
Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam
Which is an obvious choice is um Well, I have ended up as, in some senses, Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:08Was it an ordinary little Terraced Valleys house the same as the rest of them?
No. The house I was born in, from which we moved after about two years, was a terraced house set up above a road a bit bigger than what one would think of as a minor's cottage, but not much. Then we moved to another one rather similar and then, um, after I've become Member of Parliament, we moved two miles from Abbasuccan to Pontypoole, and there we did live in a lodges detached house.
Presenter asks
18:34Was [your resignation from the front bench in 1972] the beginning of your separation from the Labour Party?
Looking back, yes, that that was um fairly decisive from the beginning of the separation, because I began increasingly to feel the Times were out of joint for my relationship with British politics in some ways. I'd I'd got disenchanted with the party game.
Presenter asks
23:23Which of the [European] leaders did you most admire?
Schmidt. Helmut Schmidt, the Chancellor of Germany. Schmidt, like all of us, had his faults, but he was the most constructive statesman, certainly of Europe, but I think of the world, in those years of the late seventies, my time as President of the Commission. He was also agreeable, interesting, bit unpredictable, bit moody, but he was also agreeable to deal with.
The keepsakes
The book
A & C Black
it would so exactly express my position on the Desert Island, and also I find it fascinating reading for hour after hour.
The luxury
we'll have a case of wine, but it would be primarily not to drink, but use the bottles for sending messages.
Presenter asks
27:42What, apart from your own return to this country, was the signal for you that the moment had come for the take off of [the SDP]?
Two things happened, and the both parties plunged in what seemed to me extremist directions the early days of the Thatcher government. [The country] plunged deep into recession, into unemployment, and the Labour Party went on an excursion round the wilder shores of extremism, symbolized by the defeat of Dennis Healey for the leadership Callahan Went Michaelfoot, who was a left wing figure and seemed a left wing figure in those days, but there were great numbers of policy issues which came up, too. And so this, I think, sparked it off and created a position in which there were quite a number of other figures Shirley Williams and Bill Rogers, David Owen, who were willing to break as well.
Presenter asks
32:10Will you, as you step on to the island, feel a sense of relief that the pressure is now off, or a sense of frustration because you've still got so much to achieve?
Well, one might begin with a sense of relief, but I guess a sense of frustration would set in fairly soon. What I always find is that the periods I most enjoy are those when one suddenly has a relaxation of pressure, after a period in which one's tried to achieve something and hopes one's got it done. But then, very soon, when the relaxation of pressure is off, one begins to want to do other things again.
“I've never tremendously enjoyed speech making.”
“I horrified, looking back, to think that when that result came out and victory was snatched away from me from five votes, not absolutely sure for a moment. I didn't think it was more important than what was happening in France. And I'm always tired after that to try to say to myself that things that you get very worried about and very personally concerned about in the context of history, or even in the context of your life as a whole, don't amount to all that much.”
“I began to teach myself to be a writer.”
“I think we all have a certain amount of hidden passion.”