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'Goodbye, Roger,' he whispered.
SUNDAY 28th NOVEMBER
True to the information their editors had given him the previous day, the quality Sunday newspapers made good reading for the Chief Whip and his supporters.
'Urquhart ahead', announced the Sunday Times, adding the endorsement of its editorial columns to boost the Chief Whip's campaign still further. Both the Sunday Telegraph and the Expressopenly backed Urquhart, while the Mail on Sunday tried uncomfortably to straddle the fence. Only the Observer gave editorial backing to Samuel, but even this was deeply qualified by its front page report of Urquhart's clear lead in the opinion polls.
It took one of the more scurrilous Sunday papers to give the campaign a real shake. 'Samuel was a commie!' it screamed over half its front page, declaring it had discovered that Samuel had been an active left-winger while at university. Indeed, when contacted by a friendly sounding reporter from the newspaper who said he was 'doing a feature on the early days' of both Samuel and Urquhart and had discovered some youthful indulgence in radical politics, Samuel had rather reluctantly admitted to a passing involvement in many different university clubs, saying that until the age of twenty he had been a sympathiser with a number of fashionable causes which, thirty years later, seemed naive and misplaced.
'But we have documentary evidence to suggest that they included CND and gay rights, Mr Samuel,' the reporter pressed.
'Not that old nonsense again,' responded Samuel testily. He thought he had finished with those wild charges twenty years ago when he had first stood for Parliament. An opponent had sent a letter of accusation to party headquarters,- the allegations had been fully investigated by the Party's Standing Committee on Candidates and he had been given a clean bill of health. But here they were again, risen from the dead after all these years, just a few days before the final ballot.
'I did all the things that an eighteen-year-old college student in those days did. I went on two CND marches, and was even persuaded to take out a regular subscription to a student newspaper which I later found was run by the gay rights movement' He tried to raise a chuckle at the memory, determined not to give any impression that he had something to hide.
'I was also quite a strong supporter of the anti-apartheid movement, and to this day I actively oppose apartheid, although I intensely dislike the violent methods used by some of the self- proclaimed leaders of the movement' he had told the journalist. 'Regrets? No, I have no real regrets about those early involvements; they weren't so much youthful mistakes as an excellent testing ground for the opinions I now hold. I know how foolish CND is - I've been there!'
Samuel could scarcely believe the manner in which his remarks had been interpreted in the newspaper. It was ludicrous to suggest he had ever been a Communist; he wondered for a moment whether it was actually libellous. Yet underneath the headline, the article got even worse. 'I marched for the Russians', admitted Samuel last night, recalling those days of the 1960s when ban -the-bomb marches frequently ended in violence and disruption.
He also acknowledged that he had been a financial supporter of homosexual rights groups, making regular monthly payments to the Cambridge Gay Charter Movement which was amongst the earliest organisations pushing for a change in the laws on homosexuality.
Samuel's early left-wing involvement has long been a source of concern to party leaders. In 1970 when the twenty-seven-year-old Samuel applied to party headquarters to fight as an official party candidate in the general election of that year, the Party Chairman wrote to demand an explanation of 'the frequency with which your name was associated at university with causes which have no sympathy for our Party'.
He seemed to satisfy the Party then, and won his way into the House of Commons at that election. However, last night Samuel was still defiant about those early involvements.
'I have no regrets', he said, acknowledging that he still sympathised strongly with some of those left-wing movements he used to support.
For the rest of the day there was fluster and commotion amongst the political reporters and in the Samuel household. Nobody really believed that he was a closet Communist; it was another of those silly, sensationalist pieces intended to raise circulation rather than the public's consciousness, but it had to be checked out, causing confusion and disruption at a time when Samuel was trying desperately to reassure his supporters and refocus attention on the serious issues of the campaign.
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