‘Wilson likes to have nonentities about him’, Cecil King once wrote in his diary.1 And you certainly see what he meant, when you consider that, upon taking office in 1964, he made Patrick Gordon Walker the Foreign Secretary (he had even lost his seat, Smethwick, in the General Election and must, even by the undistinguished standards of the period, be seen as one of the dullest holders of that office); or that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer was James Callaghan, a party apparatchik, who never had an idea in his life, and who was so uncertain of his powers that he often went next door to Number 10 to seek the Prime Minister’s advice, often in carpet slippers, and sometimes in tears, late at night, so worrying did he find the task of managing the national economy.2
Seen from a slightly wider perspective, however, King’s judgement will not stand up. Compared with the outgoing party, the new administration was richly filled with colourful personality. What had the Conservative Party to compare with George Brown, Wilson’s rival for the Labour leadership after Gaitskell’s death, and now presiding over the newly created Department of Economic Affairs? Born in Borough, Southwark, Brown had the appearance of a clever bird, instantly amiable, clever, passionate, with large, dark watery eyes and a voice which moved from bass to falsetto especially, a not infrequent occurrence, when he was drunk. A keen womaniser and Anglo-Catholic, not always enthusiasms which go together in a man, Brown was determined to keep the Labour Party on the Gaitskellite straight and narrow, but there was nothing straight or narrow about his approach. His biographer says that in the annals of the civil service there had been nothing like the creation of the DEA since the Middle Ages when ‘Lords of Misrule…furnished with hobby horses, dragons, drums and gongs, were permitted, briefly, to take over the city, as a reminder to the anointed rulers, and the populace, of how thin is the line between order and chaos’.3 Brown was only one of a whole brigade of brightly exaggerated characters who by no stretch of the imagination could be described as nonentities. There was the large, shambolic, bisexual (he had slept with W. H. Auden and had a shaky marital history) figure of Dick Crossman, a representative of the left-wing intellectuals, whom Wilson placed at the Department of Housing and Local Government. With his swept-back hair and Billy Bunter specs he still resembled the firebrand don he had once been. Or there was the red-haired, theatrical figure of Barbara Castle, whose North Country accent and left-wing credentials became more exaggerated as she entered a television studio, someone who was halfway between being a journalist (like her husband, Ted) and an ideologue (like Michael Foot) and whose determination to make a career for herself in politics was manifested in dogged hard work and toe-curling exhibitionism. She began as Minister for Overseas Development, often a ‘woman’s job’ in British politics, but was determined to make her mark on the domestic scene. Waiting in the wings, and destined to be Wilson’s Home Secretary and Chancellor (though in the first administration only a Minister of Aviation), was the orotund, clever Welshman Roy Jenkins (Woy), whose Balliol bumptiousness and claret-marinaded dinner-party manners made no attempt to conceal high ambition. He had written some well-turned books about Asquith and about Sir Charles Dilke. He had been one of Gaitskell’s closest courtiers, and some of his love affairs, notably with Gaitskell’s mistress Ann Fleming, could be seen as useful career moves. The grandeur of his manner and pomposity of his aristocratic-high-table verbal mannerisms–the lisped ‘r’, the ever-stirring right hand, sometimes to emphasise a debating point, sometimes to feel along a hostess’s thigh, could only have been an act, and anyone with a memory stretching back to his youth could remember his father as a trades unionist, later MP, who had been imprisoned in the General Strike, and Woy as the grammar-school boy from the Welsh Valleys. And what of Colonel George Wigg, whose sly question in the House of Commons had exposed the Profumo scandal, and who liked to feed the Prime Minister with troubling details of the plots against him, even when they did not exist? What of (in those days centrist and anti-left-wing) Anthony Wedgwood Benn, pop-eyed MP for Bristol, whose dinner table in Holland Park, subsidised by a millionaire American wife, provided a useful meeting place for the Prime Minister’s supporters and ‘Kitchen Cabinet’? What about the paunchy figure of the solicitor Arnold Goodman, dubbed by the satirists Lord Goodmanzee, who knew the secrets of all in high places and was fast to become an indispensable adviser to the Prime Minister? What of Wilson’s bright-eyed, tall, toothy secretary, Marcia Williams?
No, Cecil King’s word ‘nonentities’ is the wrong one. Indeed, all these tuppence-coloured puppets in the new toy theatre make the central character, Harold Wilson, seem the nonentity, not his entourage.
The smile which was drawn on to his round face was thin and unscrupulous. Smoking (he was seldom without a pipe) was a habit to which he had become addicted when at Oxford, during tutorials with G. D. H. Cole, the leftist historian of the Labour Party. Wilson, however, was never really socialist, even though it suited him to pose as the ‘candidate of the left’ in his jockeying for position in the party. At Oxford, where he got a first class degree, and taught economics at New College (as a lecturer) and University College (as a research fellow), he was noted as a clever but not as a cultivated or charming man; nor as one, as so many of his contemporaries were, who was in the least drawn to the ideological debates of the times. Jenkins, even as a student, had been an anti-Marxian Social Democrat. When the great schism occurred in the Oxford Labour Club between Marxists and Social Democrats, with the huge majority veering to the extreme left, the Treasurer of the Marxists, Iris Murdoch, wrote a letter about the matter beginning, ‘Comrade Jenkins’, and he wrote back ‘Dear Miss Murdoch’. Denis Healey, later to succeed Jenkins as Shadow Chancellor in 1972, like most clever people at that time was drawn not merely to the political drama of the age (the Spanish Civil War, the advance of fascism) but also to cultural experiment, eagerly devouring Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Crossman, as befitted a lover of W. H. Auden, thought of himself as a man of letters as well as a politico.
Wilson, who had never befriended any of these future colleagues in his student days, was, in spite of brief membership of the Oxford Labour Club, primarily a Liberal, who worked as the secretary to Lord Beveridge, Master of University College, on the drafting of the famous Beveridge Report, a blueprint for social change and improvement after the war. Whereas those destined to form his Cabinet had gone on, after war service, to move in a social circle in London which included writers, bohemian aristocrats, philosophers and musicians, Wilson had no social circle. This had nothing to do with class, though he liked, with his chippy denunciations of Gaitskell’s Frognal Set, to imply that it had. Healey, Jenkins and the others were no grander than Wilson. He chose to marry a teenage sweetheart and to live a life of petit bourgeois quietness, eating cold pork pie and HP sauce while reading Dorothy L. Sayers detective stories. Arnold Goodman rightly categorised him as a philistine and ‘half-educated’.4 Where others in this new Labour government (which was what made the emergence on to the public scene of Castle, Jenkins, Healey, Crossman, Crosland, Longford et al. so entertaining) had a rounded life, Wilson’s existence had revolved, since undergraduate days, around self-promotion pure and simple. He had met his wife, Gladys Mary Baldwin (no relation of the pre-war Prime Minister), at a tennis club in the Wirral when he was still a schoolboy. She was a shorthand typist at Lever Brothers, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. Dissent was a bond between them, though she distinctly did not share her husband’s political interest, and it was torture to Gladys, who later came to be known as Mary, when her husband entered Number 10.
Private Eye began a satirical ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’, which made fun of the very qualities which had made the Wilsons popular with some elements in the electorate, namely their homeliness and Mary’s belief that her parish magazine level doggerel verses were ‘poetry’.
Mary Wilson’s happiest times were spent at Lowenva, a prefabricated bungalow on the Scilly Isles which she had purchased in 1959. They visited the place with their two sons two or three times a year. These holidays, obviously enjoyed by all the family, make a contrast with the breaks which a later Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, enjoyed with his family, in the villas of the rich. But the marriage was not a happy one. There was a third element, ever present, which disrupted the possibility of harmony between Harold and Mary, and this was his desire to lead the party and the country. The embodiment of this ambition, as well as its most eager abetter, was his secretary Marcia. Bernard Donoughue, Wilson’s Press Secretary in the 1970s, wrote, ‘Harold and Marcia’s relationship was one of great intensity and complexity… Its existence mattered to everyone who worked in Number 10 trying to serve the Prime Minister. It inevitably pervaded our lives, sometimes intruding merely as rumbles of distant thunder, sometimes striking centre stage like lightning. It was an influence which clearly met some deep need in Harold and may well have assisted him greatly in his rise to the top of British politics, providing the necessary aggression and jagged edge which was lacking in his own rather soft personality.’5
Inevitably, the relationship gave rise to ribald gossip. Donoughue and his Kitchen Cabinet Colleague Joe Haines had no doubts about the strength of her influence over Wilson, though they remained more puzzled by the means with which she continued to exercise her all-controlling spell. Perhaps none of the three men, neither Wilson, Haines nor Donoughue, in their quest for a secret to explain Marcia’s power, took sufficient account of the obvious, namely her foul temper, a quality in women so disagreeable to men that many will do anything to appease it, in the hope that it will simply go away. Margaret Thatcher, to far greater effect than Marcia Williams, would use this very nasty characteristic to gain supreme mastery over an entire Cabinet. Perhaps Marcia also knew secrets about Harold Wilson’s early dealings in the Soviet Union when he went on supposed trade delegations as a representative of Montague L. Meyer Ltd. ‘Certainly in my hearing’, Donoughue writes, ‘Marcia threatened to “destroy” Wilson, tapping her handbag ominously (though I never saw its contents).’
These, then, were some of the ‘nonentities’ who now controlled Britain.
Those who had voted the Labour Party into power no doubt did so because they wanted a more liberalised society in which the birching of miscreants was no longer permitted, in which capital punishment was abolished, in which the laws governing censorship, of the kind which the Chatterley trial had made farcical, were overthrown, and in which practising homosexual adults could live without the fear of the policeman or, not always the same person, the blackmailer. These liberalisations in the law were effected. More important to the majority of Labour voters was the hope that, with an increase in prosperity, the poorest in society could receive a share of the benefit, not only with improved wages and conditions of work, but also in housing, health care and education. Some of these hopes were realised, but, alas, Harold Wilson as an economics don from Oxford arrived with a whole fleet of economic advisers such as Thomas Balogh, who in 1945 had seriously advised a Labour Party Conference that the dynamism of the Soviet economy would give the USSR ‘an absolute preponderance economically over Western Europe’.6 Thomas Balogh’s fellow Hungarian Nicky Kaldor used to joke that ‘every time he was called by a foreign country to advise what changes should be made in its system of taxation, a revolution followed within a year or two’. Kaldor and Balogh urged upon Wilson, as Roy Harrod had urged upon Macmillan, a broadly Keynesian approach to state borrowing and to inflation. Wilson never wished, any more than did Kaldor and Balogh, to turn the country into a miniature Soviet Union, but their idea that the Soviet programme represented an economic success story underpinned the disaster these men inflicted upon the British economy and explained why such comparatively little progress was made in building up a cleaner, better-housed, or better-educated Britain. The sheer mismanagement of the economy by the economists is one of the tragi-comic stories of the age.
Wilson was an adept at the art of politics, of persuading individuals or groups within the Labour Party to support him, even if they felt ideologically or temperamentally disinclined to do so. He extended the same mesmeric art over the electorate, and was the first Labour Prime Minister to win three general elections for his party–quite a feat when one considers the palpable mismanagement of national and international affairs his administrations achieved. Part of the Wilson formula was based on his own pleasant personality; for it is one of the paradoxes of political life that some of the most skilful practitioners in the unpleasant tricks of the trade–manipulation, dissimulation, self-assertiveness and a willingness to do down their closest friends and allies–could be combined with a pleasant temperament. Wilson was liked, by electorate and colleagues, for the very simple reason that he was likeable. His cleverness was unthreatening, taking the form of prodigious memory feats, when it came to dates of speeches made by members of the party executive, for example, and a perfect recall of innumerable Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics. By sleight of hand–and this was the other great cause of his success and popularity–he discarded doctrine, indeed never had the smallest interest in it (by contrast with the ideologues of his party to right and left), in favour of a generalised belief in progress, and what in an earlier age had been called the March of Mind. Britain was marching forward to an exciting new classless era in which technology would transform everyone’s lives. There was a hint of truth in this vision, though neither the classnessness which comes with economic liberalism nor the skills of technologists had the Labour Party to thank. Wilson, however, made it seem as if he was the driver of the bandwagon on which he had leapt aboard.
At the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough in 1963, the year before he had taken office, he had drawn the contrast between the class-bound, old-school-tie Conservative Party and the up-to-the-minute Labour Party, which was on the side of science and technology. Echoing Marx, he said, ‘If there had never been a case for socialism before, automation would have created it. It is a choice between the blind imposition of technological advance, with all that means in terms of unemployment, and the conscious, planned purposive use of scientific progress to provide undreamed of living standards and the possibility of leisure ultimately on an unbelievable scale.’7 In spite of Wilson’s promises, however, of state-owned science-based factories to compete with private enterprise, the truth is that technological expertise and scientific cleverness do inevitably lead to a reduction in the workforce, and nearly all such progress in history has been independent of state subsidy or interference. His claim in that speech that Britain had become a team of Gentlemen in the world of Players who could not compete against the gloriously state-subsidised scientists of the Soviet Union conveniently overlooked the fact that, ever since 1945, there had been a steady brain drain of scientific and technological skill, usually from well-established universities, and the boffins and men in white coats had overwhelmingly chosen not to work in the scientific labs of the Gulag Archipelago but in the United States, where private money and private enterprise paid for infinitely better laboratories than were available in Europe, and gave double the salaries.8
Once he took office, however, Wilson did make good his promise to put state money into higher education on a scale hitherto unprecedented. Wilson imaginatively invented the University of the Air, or the Open University as it came to be known, which enabled grown-ups to restart educational adventures which the intervention of jobs and family had made impossible. For many mature students, especially women who had never had the opportunity to take their studies further before their first pregnancy, the Open University was a gateway to learning which no previous establishment, except perhaps Birkbeck College London (which provides lectures in the evenings for mature students), had provided. Following the counsel of the Robbins Report in 1963, the Labour government provided grants for all students in higher education. There were thirty universities in 1962. By 1968 the number had risen to fifty-six. To the stolid ‘civic’ universities such as Birmingham, Reading, Leeds and Bristol were added the plate-glass powerhouses of modernity such as Sussex, East Anglia, Warwick and Lancaster, all built on greenfield sites, and quickly developing a campus ‘ethos’, a ‘student life’ comparable to the youth culture of France or the United States. This had its political and social consequences as we shall see, very little of which was reflected in the ‘white heat of technology’. As busily as the new government built new places of higher learning–thirty polytechnics were commissioned by the Education and Science Department in 1967–it worked diligently to destroy the solid groundwork of traditional schooling which would have made these new colleges into intellectual powerhouses. The man who commissioned the polytechnics, Antony Crosland, is known to history for one sentence–his ambition to ‘destroy every fucking grammar school in England’. This is not to say that the development of comprehensive schools (about 60 percent of British secondary pupils were educated in them by 1970, and about 90 percent by 1980) was not introduced with the kindliest motives. Whether standards of numeracy, literacy, scientific knowledge or technological skill arose across the nation, and whether there was more chance for the clever children of the economically disadvantaged than in the old system, will remain a matter of debate. It is hard to imagine Roy Jenkins, Roy Hattersley, Margaret Thatcher, Denis Healey, Edward Heath or Harold Wilson himself having been quite as successful as they were had they not been educated in the despised grammar school tradition. But they all supported the comprehensivation of the system, Thatcher as Education Minister, in the hope that the opportunities they had enjoyed would be extended from the 25 or 30 percent of those who attended grammar schools in 1944 to all.9
Wilson’s distinctive contribution to the cultural debate, however, was not just to make higher education available to all but also to counteract the bias against science which had prevailed in British education ever since Matthew Arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy.
When Sylvia Plath was interviewed at Cambridge for her Fulbright Scholarship, she was asked her views of C. P. Snow. She had never read him, and felt ashamed, as if caught out not having read Tolstoy or Proust.
Charles Percy Snow (1905–80) is a vanished name today. The son of a clerk in a Leicester shoe factory, Snow proceeded from Leicester University, via London University, to Cambridge, where his work in the Cavendish Laboratory ended in failure. (Research into infra-red spectroscopy was based on an unsustainable intuition.) Having failed as a scientist, Snow threw himself into the pleasures of personal ambition and college intrigue (he was a Fellow of Christ’s), preoccupations which he thinly disguised as fiction in his cardboardy novel sequence Strangers and Brothers. When Snow, who had advanced his literary career by marrying a good second-rank novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson, delivered a lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, he advanced the technocratic creed which he shared with Harold Wilson. He thought it sad that so few scientists read literature, but equally sad that literary folk did not know the second law of thermodynamics.
The response by F. R. Leavis, the closest thing modern Cambridge produced to Savonarola, was characteristic.
‘The judgement I have to come out with is that not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.’ Thus, Savonarola. But, Leavis went further and in this he was surely completely fair and absolutely accurate. ‘If that were all, and Snow were merely negligible, there would be no need to say so in any insistent public way, and one wouldn’t choose to do it. But…Snow is a portent. He is a portent in that, being in himself negligible, he has become for a vast public on both sides of the Atlantic a master-mind and a sage. His significance is that he has been accepted–or perhaps the point is better made by saying, “created” he has been created an authoritative intellect by the cultural conditions manifested in his acceptance…he doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.’10 This completely deserved invective will be seen to apply to almost every sage, pundit, bestselling writer, poet and novelist of the age. When civilisations are in freefall, everything becomes inverted. It is the sages who say the most foolish things; those behaving with the deepest solemnity become like clowns. Snow’s pompous, leaden belief in ‘science’ was, and would continue to be, widely entertained, and matched Harold Wilson’s belief in the white heat of technology. The dangers inherent in industrial capitalist society, against which Carlyle and Ruskin had inveighed in the nineteenth century and D. H. Lawrence in the early years of the twentieth, were matters to which Snow and his many adherents were completely blind.
Leavis, a great critic, and, for all his undoubted absurdities, an obviously great man, denounced the political philosophy of our times. ‘It is the world in which, even at the level of the intellectual weeklies, “standard of living” is an ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim, a matter of wages and salaries and what you can buy with them, reduced hours of work, and the technological resources that make your increasing leisure worth having; so that productivity–the supremely important thing–must be kept on the rise, at whatever cost to protecting conservative habit.11
Harold Macmillan had promised an ever increased ‘standard of living’. Under Harold Wilson it was ‘business as usual’, with government borrowing more and more money which it was unable to recoup in taxes, high as these were. Meanwhile, such questions as soul, What We Live By, the value of human life itself on the planet, was forgotten in a scramble for votes, a lust for more and more kitchen gadgets and television programmes, and trips to by now wrecked foreign resorts, and a mindless belief in ‘science’. Of all this, C. P. Snow was a worthy prophet and spokesperson.
Snow had his reward. Readers of his turgid novel sequence must often have wondered whether they were in an alternative universe, reading Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time rewritten by the plodding yet aggressively ambitious anti-hero Widmerpool. Wilson ennobled Snow (just as Widmerpool is ennobled) with a life peerage. Snow joined the Wilson government as parliamentary secretary in the newly created Ministry of Technology.12
The room in the ‘Corridors of Power’ (like Harold Macmillan, whose family-owned business published him, Snow had a genius not only for using other people’s clichés but for coining his own) and a title were not enough for the large-faced, hectoring, homburg-hatted Snow.
Writing from Millbank Tower on 11 December 1965, Widmerpool/Snow requested not merely a car, but also a chauffeur. ‘I do not really want to worry the Prime Minister, when he is so very busy, but, hoping it is no great nuisance, I should like to trouble you a little with the matter of having an official car made available for my use…I do need to get around socially and otherwise more than most Parliamentary Secretaries and it would diminish my usefulness if I could not do this freely… The official car pool is helpful but when I make last-minute arrangements–and most of my arrangements are last minute–it often happens that they just do not have a car available. I hate being so heavy-footed over a matter like this but the sheer mechanics of driving are rather difficult just now.’13
‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ And in the political sphere it takes a while for reality to sink in. Macmillan’s six and a bit years as Prime Minister and Alec Douglas-Home’s postscript had permitted these ageing men of the 1930s to nurse the illusion, as they negotiated with foreign statesman, that Britain’s place in the world was still as it had been before the Suez fiasco. Harold Wilson would only be able to demonstrate to the world that Britain had become at best an impotent spectator of world events (as far as the American crusade against communism was concerned) and, at worst, a powerless ‘leader of the Commonwealth’ when the former colonies in Africa began the inevitable post-colonial backlashes.
Wilson’s most conspicuous foreign policy failure was in Rhodesia. Ian Smith (1919–2007), the son of a Scottish butcher and cattle dealer who had come to Rhodesia in 1898, became Prime Minister on 13 April 1964. His political position was clear: ‘the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity’ in Rhodesia by means of white-only government. Seeing the way that other African countries had gone, ‘good old Smithy’, as he was known by his supporters, saw no reason to appease world opinion just because the rest of the world was ‘too corrupted, too prejudiced, too subverted to perceive the advantages that white rule gave to the peoples of Rhodesia’.14 He asked Alec Douglas-Home to grant Rhodesia independence and the request was refused, unless Smith ended the policy of racial discrimination, and adopted a policy of majority rul.15 Wilson’s attempts to impose such ideas on good old Smithy were as unavailing as had been Home’s. On Armistice Day 1965.16 Ian Smith’s government declared UDI–a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. They swore loyalty to the Queen, and continued to fly the Union flag, but they would no longer take orders from London. Smithy’s government was composed of some distinctive figures, including the 7th Duke of Montrose, who had bought his 1,600-acre farm for 16s. per acre. Six foot five inches in height, the Duke opined, ‘It is a common observation that the African is a bright and promising little fellow up to the age of puberty. He then becomes hopelessly inadequate and disappointing, and it is well known that this is due to his almost total obsession henceforth with matters of sex.’17
While Harold Wilson felt paralysed by the situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed the view, ‘If Britain has to take over the government and administration of Rhodesia, then the British government is bound to consider the use of force as the ultimate sanction. One could not quarrel with the use of force in such circumstances.’18 There was an uproar, nearly all of it hostile, against the Archbishop. Several hundred white Rhodesians burnt their Bibles and sent the ashes to Lambeth Palace. An Anglican priest in the Low Veld wrote to the Archbishop to tell him his remarks had done more damage in five days than most could have done in five years.19 One correspondent noted that, ‘All Britain’s emotions about a disappeared Empire and an ailing Commonwealth lie behind this story.’20
Wilson put economic pressure on the Smith regime. Rhodesia was expelled from the sterling area. Oil imports to Rhodesia were banned. For a small landlocked country dependent on foreign oil supplies and foreign trade, these should have been crippling blows. Wilson misread the courage and defiance of the white Rhodesians, and he did not realise that the South African and Portuguese governments would be only too happy to make fools of the United Kingdom by defying the sanctions. Wilson, five months after UDI, realised he was losing and summoned Smithy to talks on the British cruiser HMS Tiger, sailing emblematically, round and round in circles in the Mediterranean off Gibraltar.21 Wilson caved in to Smith, offering to accept his idea of white majority rule until the end of the century, but this was not enough for Smithy’s right-wing critics at home who wanted to introduce the Municipal Amendment Act (which passed into law in 1967) empowering municipalities to segregate parks, swimming pools, lavatories, hospitals, and to fade out any African representation in parliament. Rhodesia was destined to become a time warp of racial intolerance and neo-colonisation until Margaret Thatcher and Peter Carrington, at the Lancaster House Conference in 1979, gave the government of Zimbabwe to Robert Mugabe, leader of the ludicrously named National Democratic Party. Within twenty years, the most fertile country in Southern Africa was suffering from starvation, the economy was plagued by Weimar levels of inflation, Mugabe and pals grew rich while opposition politicians and journalists were tortured, killed and imprisoned. On 28 February 1979, Ian Smith had said to the Rhodesian parliament, ‘History recalls many cases of once great nations which have decayed and crumbled into ignominy, but none which have collapsed with such rapidity and completeness as far as Great Britain is concerned. For us in Rhodesia, it was a tragic stroke of fate that we came in towards the tail end of Britain’s expansion and civilisation in this world… Because of this, we lost out in gaining this thing called independence… Because of this, we have been left to the end, right to the bitter end, in that we have been dragged down in the morass of Britain’s decadence and decline.’22
It was in 1962 that the Americans began their ill-starred attempt to shore up the corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam against the incursions of Vietcong troops from the communist North. Following the example of the British success in Malaya during the 1950s, the Americans attempted to isolate ‘secure villages’, in which government troops protected the peasantry from the ravages of the communist guerrillas. However, under Diem’s generals, the villages had become little better than concentration camps, and it became clear that the Americans must choose between allowing Vietnam to go communist and intervening directly. By January 1962, the US had begun to fly helicopters to back up South Vietnamese forces. General de Gaulle advised President Kennedy to keep out. ‘You will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire,’ he sagely foretold. But Kennedy went in. By the time Harold Wilson had become the British Premier, and Kennedy had been assassinated, the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was waist deep in the quagmire. US warships regularly patrolled the North Vietnamese coast, and on 2 August 1964 their destroyer the Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Air support from USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier, led to an engagement. The Maddox was saved; one of the torpedo boats was sunk. President Johnson could see the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin as an ‘unprovoked military action’ by the communists, justifying sending in yet more troops and military hardware. By early 1965, about four-fifths of South Vietnam was under the control of the Vietcong guerrillas. They were only twenty miles from Saigon, the capital city; Johnson responded by escalating the war. By the end of the year in excess of 184,000 US troops were engaged in Vietnam and 1,350 military personnel had been killed in action.
The Vietnam War occupied a comparable position in the collective imagination of the 1960s to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, with the difference that it was much further away from Britain, and the leftists of various colourings who felt exercised by it did not send even a token brigade or two to fight their cause. Instead, they identified with the struggle of the American left by playing Joan Baez and Bob Dylan protest records, and by growing their hair longer.
Wilson had begun his career in the Labour Party with the statutory anti-American prejudices. ‘Not a man, not a gun must be sent to defend the French in Indo-China,’ he told a May Day rally in 1954, as the communist leader Ho Chi Minh was taking over what became North Vietnam. Yet as Prime Minister in 1965 he could tell the House of Commons (1 April 1965): ‘So far as Her Majesty’s Government are concerned, I repeat, that we have made absolutely plain our support for the American stand against Communist infiltration into South Vietnam…The people of South Vietnam, like the people of North Vietnam and every other area, are entitled to be able to lead their own lives free of terror, free from the danger of sudden death or from the threat of a Communist takeover, and the Government of South Vietnam are entitled to call in aid allies who could help in that purpose.’23 Although Private Eye had a cover drawn by Gerald Scarfe showing Wilson applying his tongue to LBJ’s rump,24 the Wilson slyness saved him from some of the more abject and dangerous postures into which later British Prime Ministers would contort themselves before American Presidents. He resolutely refused Johnson’s appeal for British troops to be sent to Vietnam, chiefly one must assume because he knew this would be electorally disastrous, and that the left of his party would not have tolerated it–such was their power in those days over their leader. Nevertheless, he did send 70,000 ‘peace-keeping’ troops to Borneo and Sarawak to defend Malaysia. Johnson knew perfectly well that Britain, isolated in the world, and with no real power of its own, felt itself obliged to tag along behind America, however many mistakes in foreign policy it made. In exchange for using Britain as a launch pad for its nuclear missiles trained on Moscow, and as an ally in the United Nations and elsewhere against an increasingly horrified rest of the world, America could afford to lard the Prime Minister of the day, whoever he happened to be, with the statutory comparison with the old warlord. ‘In you sir,’ LBJ told Wilson in July 1966 after he had won a second term in office, ‘England has a man of mettle, a new Churchill in her hour of crisis’25–the hour of crisis was, of course, a sterling crisis. Having spent his years in Opposition explaining to left-wing audiences that American domination of the British economy was disastrous, he immediately switched, when Prime Minister, to believing it to be necessary, as when the Chrysler Corporation bailed out the collapsing Rootes Motors which had been limping along under British management.26 If American money could be found to pay the wages of British car ‘workers’, then it was worth defending the deforestation of South Vietnam or the bombings of Hanoi, in which thousands of Vietnamese civilians got killed. Although he dissociated himself from the bombings, and carefully leaked an off-the-cuff remark to the effect ‘Johnson’s gone mad. We’ll have to find a new ally’27–he knew perfectly well that no such ally existed.
Whatever the twists and turns of Harold Wilson’s foreign policy might produce, he was able, in his second administration, to perform a comedic masterstroke by appointing George Brown to the Foreign Office. The appointment lasted nineteen Dionysian months, a period of particular happiness for cartoonists, headline writers, satirists and all who preferred to be amused by the antics, rather than concerned with the policies, of the Foreign Secretary. An early moment of joy came when Bill Lovelace, a photographer for the Daily Express, snapped the Foreign Secretary aboard the Queen Mary, on 22 September 1966, attempting a popular dance called the frug with New York publicist and cookbook author Miss Barbara Kraus. Lovelace’s photograph recorded George Brown, his eyes on a level with the bosomy front of the tall Miss Kraus. Though the eyes were on this level, they were closed and the picture captured him in a swaying posture, as though on the point of collapse. ‘It’s the end of my marriage,’ Brown wailed, when he saw the Express. ‘Sophie won’t accept this, nor will the girls.’28 In fact the long-suffering Sophie put up with her husband until, on Christmas Eve 1982, he left her for a much younger woman, his secretary Margaret Haines. (He died in 1985 of cirrhosis of the liver, having become a Roman Catholic.29) As Foreign Secretary, the moment on board ship with Barbara Kraus was only one of many incidents where the accident-prone George behaved according to type. Diplomatic niceties were not his style. There was the occasion in 1967 when the Belgian government–their Prime Minister, Chiefs of Staff, Foreign Minister, Defence Minister–held a banquet for Brown at the conclusion of a European tour. As the meal came to an end and the diners made to leave, Brown barred their way, standing in the main door of the dining room and waving his arms. ‘Wait! I have something to say,’ he told them. ‘While you have all been wining and dining here tonight, who has been defending Europe? I’ll tell you who’s been defending Europe–the British Army. And where, you may ask, are the soldiers of the Belgian Army tonight? I’ll tell you where the soldiers of the Belgian Army are. They’re in the brothels of Brussels.’ British Embassy staff hustled him away, while the Belgians stared, frozen with incredulous embarrassment.30
The incident which most endeared him to the Foreign Office, however, occurred during an official visit to Brazil during a diplomatic reception at the Brazilian President’s Palace of the Dawn. A witness recalled, ‘It was really beautiful–I think only the Latin Americans still do it that way: all the military officers were in full dress uniform, and the ambassadors were in court dress. Sumptuous is the word, and sparkling. As we entered, George made a bee-line for this gorgeously crimson-clad figure, and said, “Excuse me, but may I have the pleasure of this dance?” There was a terrible silence for a moment before the guest, who knew who he was, replied, “There are three reasons, Mr Brown, why I will not dance with you. The first, I fear, is that you’ve had a little too much to drink. The second is that this is not, as you seem to suppose, a waltz the orchestra is playing, but the Peruvian national anthem, for which you should be standing to attention. And the third reason why we may not dance, Mr Brown, is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.’31
Ever since Kenya became independent in 1963, Jomo Kenyatta had committed his country to a racialist policy of ‘Americanisation’, putting the position of some 80,000 Kenyan Asians in question. The Conservative Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, said in that year that it would be ‘out of the question’ to deny these Kenyan Asians entry to Britain if they wished it. ‘It would be tantamount to a denial of one of the basic rights of a citizen, namely to enter the country of which he is a citizen.’32 By 1967, Kenyatta was making it clear to his Asian fellow Kenyans that they must leave. In the first two months of 1968,13,000 arrived in Britain. The Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, reacted with panic and hastily introduced a bill to the House of Commons to restrict the entry of any more. Only 1,500 ‘non-patrial’ (that is non-white Asians) from Kenya could be admitted per year, though it was permissible for as many white Kenyans as so desired to enter Britain.
These white Kenyans were referred to as British subjects, and their entry into Britain was referred to as ‘welcome home’, whereas Richard Crossman, for example, could refer to ‘Kenyan Asians with British passports’, as if there was something strange about these particular Kenyans possessing such documents. The reason for the government’s panic, however, was clear enough. Britain, in common with other European countries, depended for their expanding economy on more and more cheap labour, particularly since the indigenous members of the white working class who had grown up since the war found menial work unattractive. The ineluctable growth of free trade, about which the socialist parties of Europe were sceptical, but the so-called right-wingers were optimistic, carried with it the natural consequence that many people, from all over the globe, would gravitate towards the expanding Western economies for work.
The paradox, politically, here was that those who most fervently embraced market economics, and the ideas of what came to be called monetarism, were likely, in social policy, to be conservatives who instinctively disliked the changes to national life which mass immigration inescapably brought with it. And many such monetarist conservatives were, like a good number of Little Englander socialists, and indeed human beings generally, racialist by instinct. By October 1961,300,000 new immigrants had arrived in a decade: a fact which prompted the Commonwealth Immigration Act. But in that year alone, a further 130,000 migrants entered Britain. As the 1960s progressed, the proportion of dependants to active workers also went up. Whereas a high proportion of the early immigrants were adults who worked in the National Health Service and in public transport, by 1971 women and children made up three-quarters of the immigrant population.
Harold Macmillan had asked a special group of his Cabinet to form the Commonwealth Immigration Committee, and this group, which included Reginald Maudling and J. Enoch Powell, recommended that the annual migration should be limited to 45,000–still a huge number if it were repeated year on year for decades.
Since that time, Macmillan and Home had gone, and the Conservative Party had elected as its leader a former Church Times journalist and organ scholar by the name of Edward Heath as its leader. Heath, who was to develop in rancorous old age into a sort of Social Democrat, had been the right-wing candidate in the leadership contest against Reginald Maudling. His right-wingery manifested itself in a deep commitment to Europe, a profound desire to sign Britain up to the European experiment, and hence to promote free trade. This led to his having a confrontational attitude to industrial relations–much more so than a man such as R. A. Butler. In the area of race relations, however, he was modern, and he did not wish to appease the racialist wings of his party. This attitude probably had the inevitable effect of making the wilder extremists break rank, as would occur memorably in Birmingham in April 1968.
J. Enoch Powell was an even more fervent free marketeer and monetarist than Heath ever was, and so the logic of his position would surely have led him to wanting as much immigration as possible. As the Secretary of State for Health in Macmillan’s government and an astringent economiser, he had been only too happy to fill 34 percent of junior hospital posts with immigrant doctors and nurses.33
But Powell’s desire to be on a limb, to cut a dash, went hand in hand with a wish shared with almost all politicians–the wish to be popular. In April 1968, as the controversy about the Kenyan Asians gathered pace, and the towns of the West Midlands, such as Wolverhampton (which Powell represented in Parliament), filled up with immigrants from Pakistan and India and the West Indies, Powell was very well aware of how passionately the indigenous population felt betrayed in this matter by the governing classes. Powell, ever since the Labour governments had taken office, had attacked the ‘New Model Army of gentlemen who know best’–a New Model Army which grew apace in England, with the addition of many female members. And one of the things which the New Model Army most deplored was racial prejudice of any kind. It was when addressing the Birmingham Conservatives in April 1968 that Powell managed to deliver a speech which was calculated to cock a snook at the New Model Army, both within Labour’s ranks and among the Shadow Cabinet–for Edward Heath was a gentleman who knew best if ever there was one.
‘We must be mad,’ Powell said, in his Brummy voice to his Brummy friends, ‘literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some fifty thousand dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation building its own funeral pyre.’ It was a speech which drew upon the anecdotal evidence of his correspondents, including a somewhat mysterious lady in Northumberland who claimed that a woman in his own constituency in Wolverhampton was afraid to go out. ‘She finds excreta pushed through her letter-box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist” they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder’…Powell did not make it clear why this woman could go to prison, or even whether she existed. When he was asked to identify the street in his constituency where the excreta had been posted through the door, he was unable to do so, and on a televised interview broadcast to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the speech he rather unimpressively claimed that he did not believe the world ‘piccaninny’ had any racial connotation. (If it hadn’t, why were the piccaninnies chanting ‘racialist’?)
Powell certainly did not emerge well from the episode of the speech, for which he was instantly sacked by Edward Heath from the Shadow Cabinet. And it would perhaps not be worth dwelling at such length upon this speech were it not for two remarkable things: one was the sibylline prophecy which it contained, and the other was the degree of popular response which it elicited.
The prophecy was drawn from Virgil, who was seen by the Middle Ages not just as a poet but also as a wizard. ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’34
In 1987, Powell made the remark on television that ‘If I had a regret, it was that I didn’t quote Virgil in Latin, but then I didn’t want to appear pedantic, so I took the Latin out and put in a translation. I probably ought to have stuck to the Latin… Nobody would have troubled to translate it.’
Like many of his remarks on the subject of the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, as it came to be known, this cluster of half-truths is puzzling. It surely was not just the quotation from Virgil which excited so much controversy. What about the assertion that ‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’? Powell’s belief that an allusion to one of the best-known passages in the whole of European literature would have baffled every listener in the land, including newspaper editors and commentators who, like himself, had degrees in classics, also suggests arrogant solipsism on a titanic scale, as if Latin were a private language known only to himself. Others would have perhaps been less careless in their quotation. In Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid (at that time a set text for Latin ‘O’ level and probably read by tens of thousands of boys and girls in Britain), the Cumaean sibyl, about to escort Aeneas to the underworld, foresees
bella, horrida bella
Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
(I see Wars, horrid wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood–Aeneid vi. 86).
A few days later in his house in South Eaton Place, Powell was found by his friend John Biffen MP ‘preoccupied among his classical reference books’. ‘I can’t find the Roman,’ Enoch remarked. He had realised that it was not ‘the Roman’ (which Roman? Virgil?) who had the vision of the Tiber foaming with blood, but the Sybil. Anyone can make a slip, but how strange for the classical professor to make such a very elementary howler, or for it to take him more than ten seconds to find the quotation to verify.
More important than the origin of a Latin quotation were two questions: whether the Wolverhampton seer’s own prophecy came true–whether there were rivers of blood flowing through England as a result of huge numbers of immigrants; and, secondly, what the speech showed about the feelings of the indigenous population towards the immigrants.
If Powell had foretold that Islam was an uncompromising faith, and that the arrival of tens of thousands of Muslims into a Christian or post-Christian country would store up problems for the future, then there might be some justification for the assertion, often made to this day by bar-room experts, that ‘Enoch got it right’. But Powell’s speech was simply racist. He predicted that there would be a ‘civil war’ on racial lines. ‘What’s wrong with racism?’ he candidly asked on television in 1995. ‘Racism is the basis of a nationality.’35
Powell’s intellectual and spiritual journey went forward in a series of strange leapfrog hops, in which, after a long spell of believing one thing, he suddenly believed the opposite. He had been a passionate imperialist. Then he had ‘discovered’ the doctrine that no sovereign parliament could have an Empire whose members were not represented in that assembly. (The Bostonians had discovered that during their Tea Party in 1773.) He was an atheist, and then, on a misty evening in autumn in Wolverhampton, he stepped back inside the Church. He had been a keen European–even advocating a shared European army; and then the most eloquent exponent of the independence of the nation state. Had he lived longer, it is conceivable that he would have seen what a very great number of people have seen over the last fifty years: yes, the immigrations changed England forever, but part of this change was a growing ability, among those of different ethnic backgrounds, to live alongside one another without conflict on anything like the scale Powell predicted. (The case of radical Islam, which comes later in our story, is not unrelated to the prophecy of the Wolverhampton Prophet, but it is different.)
This was not how it seemed at the time of Powell’s speech in 1968. In the ten days after he had made the speech, Powell received more than 100,000 letters, only 800 expressing disagreement with him. Diana Spearman, editor of New Society, analysed the letters. Relatively few were blatantly racist or unpleasant in tone. The huge proportion ‘feared that continued immigration was a threat to British culture and traditions’. Spearman noted how many of the letters reflected a sense of ‘alienation’, a feeling of distrust of the Establishment. ‘The letters reflect the feeling that they by their actions have produced problems for us, which do not in any way affect them and which they are not doing anything to help us solve. Their idea is to tell us what we must and must not do.’36
This feeling remains. It was the issue of immigration which exacerbated it. That of the European question (Common Market, European Union) carried it on. During the next fifty years there would be a growing sense that the New Model Army of gentlemen who know best, the New Establishment, had detached itself from the general will of the electorate. Up to this point, many voters felt common cause with the broad, amorphous coalitions of interest represented by one of the three chief political parties. In the Harold Wilson era this began to change. The left would begin its bid for dominance of the Labour Party, a struggle which took up most of the next decade and ended in its defeat. Conservatives–those who were truly conservative, and wanted England to stay as it was, or to go back to the demographic, architectural or gastronomic conditions of pre-war Britain–no longer had a voice in Heath’s Conservative Party.
If your ordinary, instinctive Tory found no representation of his life-view in the Conservative Party, there was an equal sense of betrayal among those socialists who had been simple-hearted enough to hope that Harold Wilson, once the candidate of Labour’s left and torch-bearer for Bevanism, would bring to pass a Socialist Britain. Paul Foot wrote, ‘The two years of Labour government from March 1966 to March 1968 have seen the death of Harold Wilson, Yorkshire socialist and Moral Crusader. Every one of his priorities have been reversed or abandoned. Racialist minorities in Southern Africa have been appeased. The American Government, with his support, have trebled their fire power in Vietnam. Programmes for overseas aid, housing, hospital building, school building, a minimum incomes guarantee have been abandoned or slashed…’ And so on. His catalogue is a long one.37
This sense of impotence, of political parties ‘knowing best’, but not representing the aspirations of their natural supporters, was to be a characteristic of Britain for the next forty years, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher’s first two terms of office. Those of naturally Conservative instincts were simply turned off politics altogether.