The SDP is just now at a critical juncture in its career. But then it has been at one critical juncture or another virtually throughout its brief existence. As much as the Labour Party, it has lived for two years in a state of endemic crisis, but whereas crisis has reinforced Labour's chronic debility, so far the SDP has been able to thrive upon it. Roy Jenkins talked of an experimental aircraft in adumbrating the idea of a centre party in the early summer of 1980: a 'dangerously caricaturable analogy', as he admits in a retrospective comment in The Rebirth of Britain. He said then that it 'might well finish up a few fields from the end of the runway'. At the time he was looked at askance by many social democrats within the Labour Party (people like me, as I readily admit) for supposing that there would be so much as a runway. Within a year, however, we had all strapped our safety belts, magnificently unprepared for life after take-off. Actually, it was called a 'launch' by then, and we realised that we were in for a heady but stomach-churning diet of mixed metaphors for some time to come.

LRB 21 October 1982 | PDF Download