On 16 March 1976, Harold Wilson suddenly announced that he was resigning as Prime Minister. He had developed advanced paranoia, a personal condition which spreads its sufferings to those in the sufferer’s environs. For some years he had believed that the secret services were plotting against him–a theory borne out when the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright published his sensational Spycatcher in 1986, revealing that some of his fellow intelligence officers believed Wilson to be a Soviet agent. They thought that Gaitskell had been murdered by the KGB so as to place ‘their’ man in Number 10 Downing Street. James Angleton, the American counter-intelligence chief, gave weight to the belief that Wilson was a Soviet agent. There was indeed a plot among MI5 officers to oust Wilson, but the men involved were comparatively junior and the upper echelons of the service quashed the conspiracy long before it took effect.1
Whether or not Wilson had any inkling of the plots themselves, or whether he had merely imagined the existence of them, his persecution mania caught on, and the press was slow to believe that there was nothing sinister in his resignation. They looked around feverishly for evidence of some secret wrongdoing which would subsequently ‘come out’.
Wilson’s wrongdoings as Prime Minister, however, were not concealed. They had been apparent for all to see–a dithering and indecisive foreign policy, and gross mismanagement of the economy. He had capped it all by ennobling a gang of scoundrels in his Resignation Honours List.
As happens with all but the most unusual of Prime Ministers, Wilson vanished without trace. His actual reason for resigning was that he had begun to recognise in himself the signs of incipient dementia. It was not for this reason, though, that he was forgotten so quickly. He simply had not added up to anything. His very great cleverness was all skin-deep, and the philistinism, which so troubled his friend and adviser Arnold Goodman, and the lack of interest outside politics, dealt its own cruel punishment. When the political life was over, Wilson’s life and reputation were over, too, though he lingered on, a twilit existence, first on the back benches of the Commons, then in the House of Lords, and finally with his wife in a flat off Victoria Street. He who had once possessed a photographic memory for Treasury figures and Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics was now unable to remember his own name.2
Wilson’s departure provided the Labour Party with an opportunity to choose a leader with more depth or integrity. It was one which it passed by. On the right of the party, Social Democrats Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey were both plausible leaders. They were well read, and well rounded in all senses, their Balliol bumptiousness being no obvious barrier to office. On the left, there was the colourful and intelligent figure of Michael Foot, who was eventually to have his turn as leader, and to demonstrate just how unelectable the left could become. Foot was by far the most powerful ally Margaret Thatcher had in her political career. His extreme stances on matters as varied as Europe, the armed forces and the economy would have guaranteed any Conservative leader the victory in a General Election. Denis Healey, a bruiser as well as an intellect, would have given Thatcher a run for her money. Woy Jenkins would have offered the middle classes what he would no doubt have considered a very civilised alternative to Conservative government. Instead, when Wilson resigned, the Labour Party elected the party apparatchik, the backroom fixer Leonard James Callaghan (1912–2005), a figure much less distinguished even than Wilson himself. He would manage to get into The Guinness Book of Records for two feats over which he had little control. Until the arrival of Gordon Brown, Callaghan was the tallest Prime Minister in British history (six foot one), and he turned out to be the longest lived. Apart from this pair of boring statistics, he had absolutely no distinction of character or of intellect. His attempts to compare himself with Baldwin.3 as a safe pair of hands in a crisis overlooked, first, his own record of extreme incompetence in any crisis, and, secondly, Baldwin’s intellectual weight, shown not only in his political canniness but also in the eloquence and depth of his public speeches. Baldwin had his faults, and history has been strict with them–he treated the unemployed with indifferent contempt; he sacked a popular King on a trumped-up charge; he appeased, or appeared to appease, Hitler. Yet beside Callaghan, Baldwin was a giant. Callaghan, who had started out as a white-collar trades union official, was little better than a party hack. He always voted at his party’s call and never thought of thinking for himself at all.
He had held three of the most senior offices of state. In 1964, as Chancellor of the Exchequer he began to borrow at reckless levels to stabilise reserves (there was the traditional run on the pound after any change of Labour leadership) and to finance unaffordable levels of public expenditure. He resigned when the pound was forced to devalue. He was also the Chancellor who approved of the joyless change from pounds, shillings and pence to a decimal currency, though this was not brought in until February 1971 by the relentlessly modernising Heath. As Home Secretary, Callaghan had brought in the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, a typical fudge, seen by those who wished to limit immigration as entirely inadequate; liberal opponents, such as Ian Gilmour, Tory owner and editor of the Spectator, saw it as a measure to ‘keep blacks out’–which it was. It was an Act which had the Callaghan hallmarks of being both inefficient and unenlightened. As Foreign Secretary, he had made no mark at all. No great enthusiast for the EEC, he had nonetheless led the campaign within the Labour Party for the Yes vote in 1975 which guaranteed continued British Membership of the European experiment.
Callaghan as party leader and Prime Minister was elected because he believed, rightly, that he could hold together the warring factions of left and right in his party, rather than because he would make a distinguished Prime Minister. Being possessed of no observable beliefs or principles, he found it easy to negotiate deals between left and right. Denis Healey, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had the task of balancing the books. This was no easy undertaking, with a world recession in progress, the trades unions continuing to make crippling wage demands, the left of the Labour Party continuing to resist any ‘cuts’ in public expenditure and the Keynesian liberals in the party such as Antony Crosland, Foreign Secretary, being unsupportive of Healey for personal reasons. It took only a few months for the economy to unravel. Healey, like the finance minister of some emergent African nation, was obliged to go to the International Monetary Fund to secure a loan of $3.9 billion, without which Britain would have gone bankrupt. ‘The disaster at Suez had revealed that without its Empire, Britain was no longer a major power except in the minds of its leaders. The IMF loan application suggested that the pioneer of the Industrial Revolution had become a charity case.’4
Healey it was, therefore, who, three years before Margaret Thatcher came into office, was compelled by financial pressure to adopt a strictly monetarist policy. The IMF loan came in three instalments, conditional upon £2 billion of cuts in public expenditure. A further £500 million was raised by selling most of British Petroleum shares, thereby effectively privatising BP.
Neither the Keynesians in the Cabinet such as Shirley Williams or Antony Crosland (who disliked Healey’s bullying manners) nor the left-wingers such as Peter Shore or Michael Foot, could accept the reality of things, even after the IMF debacle. Figures such as Wedgwood Benn, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, continued to believe that what Britain in its desperate economic plight most needed was more socialism. In 1974, Benn had pushed the Cabinet to accept investment in a workers’ motorcycle cooperative in Meriden, a Midlands town near Coventry. The factory had been part of the Norton-Villiers-Triumph conglomerate and was doomed to closure until the workers formed their co-op. The civil servants who costed the enterprise could see that it was unviable, and said so in their reports. Benn, however, and his wife, Caroline, paid a visit to Meriden in 1974. ‘It was a fantastic spectacle,’ he told his diary. ‘There was the freshly-painted factory with an old picket tent and brazier on the gate and a couple of bikes out front.’5 When he went round the factory, Benn found it was ‘just like going round a Chinese factory–they were speaking with such confidence about their own skill and their work and how they wouldn’t need many supervisors and so on’. When Benn left, the men sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, sentiments which, in time, the majority of Benn’s countrymen came unaccountably to share. A few years later, Benn’s successor Keith Joseph, in a Conservative government, wrote off the co-op’s debts and the factory closed. It could not compete with its Japanese competitor Yamaha, which was producing motorcycles not with bands of happy Chinese-style workers, but with robots.6
The nation which had not only invented the Industrial Revolution but had also, in the 1840s, unleashed the triumphs of free trade upon a global economy, following the repeal of the Corn Laws, had forgotten its past. Trade and Industry was not in the hands of a man who showed the smallest glimmering of understanding that, with Japanese, and later Malaysian, and later still Indian and Chinese competition, the European labour markets would have to revolutionise their attitudes. Far from seeing the IMF as a warning signal, as a chilling message of realism, the British trades unions and their political allies continued to press for more wages, more public services, more welfare.
The so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978–79 doomed not merely Callaghan and his wretchedly undistinguished government, but also socialism in Britain as a viable option for any of the major parties. The socialists did not go away, but their attitude was well summarised by a young militant in the Brent constituency, Ken Livingstone, who in 1987 wrote If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.7
While Healey and Callaghan tried to impose a 5 percent wage rise, the winter saw strikes among rubbish collectors, gravediggers and hospital orderlies. In all the bigger towns, the garbage formed huge mountains, metaphors of what Callaghan and his cohorts had made of Britain. The dead lay unburied. Schools could not be opened because the caretakers were out on strike, as were cleaners, coal suppliers and cooks. In the post-war era there can never have been a time, even during the three-day week imposed by Edward Heath, when Britain felt closer to anarchy. Returning from an economic summit in Guadeloupe, Callaghan was asked at the airport, ‘What is your general approach, in view of the mounting chaos in the country at the moment?’ His answer was, ‘Well, that’s a judgement that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you’re taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don’t think that other people in the world share the view that there is mounting chaos.’ That very week, the lorry drivers achieved a pay rise of 20 percent. Public sector unions such as NUPE and NALGO called for a twenty-four-hour general strike.8
The Sun newspaper, recently acquired together with The Times by the American-Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch, summarised this waffly speech in the devastating headline: CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? After a no-confidence debate in the House of Commons, Callaghan lost by one vote. He went to the country and if ever there was a feeling of retributive justice in a British election result it was on 3 May 1979 when Callaghan’s disgraced government was removed from office and replaced by the Conservative administration of Margaret Thatcher.
The defeat of Callaghan, however, had one unfortunate consequence for Britain. His young Foreign Secretary, David Anthony Llewellyn Owen (born 1938), had been in the job scarcely two years. Owen had been appointed Foreign Secretary at less than forty years of age, following the sudden death of Antony Crosland.
This death left at large Crosland’s simpering American wife, Susan, who continued to write prying, spiteful articles in the Sunday newspapers about other people’s private lives. Crosland’s death, however, enabled his Minister at the Foreign Office, David Owen, to take over. Owen was a world statesman. He, for example, was one of the first world leaders to see the dangers of a radicalised Islam, and he had supported the Shah of Persia against the Islamic revolutionaries. He had managed to negotiate peace in Rhodesia, and bring the nationalists to a negotiating table with the illegal white government. He had powerful charisma, high intelligence and real skills. Sadly, the Labour Party was no place for the likes of Owen. Inevitably, when Roy Jenkins and the others left to form the Social Democratic Party, Owen joined them, a disastrous career mistake. Had he stayed in the Labour Party, or crossed sides to the Conservatives, he had all the makings of one of the truly great Prime Ministers. He immediately saw that it had been a mistake to get mixed up with the likes of Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins, and when they joined up with the Liberal Party, Owen ploughed his own lonely furrow, in the end being the only member of the Social Democrats–or possibly one of two since Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, used to say that he continued to regard Owen as his party leader.9
Altogether, 1979 was an eventful year. It saw, for example, the dramatic murder of Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900–79). It also saw a Privy Councillor put on trial for murder: Jeremy Thorpe, who, only a few years before, had been wondering whether to accept the Prime Minister’s offer of a place in the Cabinet.
The Rt Hon. Jeremy Thorpe, with his hats at jaunty angles, his double-breasted, watch-chain-adorned waistcoats, and his crinkly, oily dark hair and shifty dark eyes was an allusion to an earlier age of English raffishness. ‘The Card’ and ‘Gilbert the Filbert’ were outmoded phrases which his appearance evoked. He looked like an Edwardian actor, on the verge of seedy, trying to exemplify those other obsolete words, rotter, scoundrel, cad. He was also a charmer. He was an Etonian and an Oxford man, ready with quips. It was he who had set the House of Commons in a roar, when Harold Macmillan sacked a handful of dud Cabinet Ministers, with the quip, ‘Greater love hath no man, that he lay down his friends for his life.’ It was a joke which returned to haunt him. For, laying down a friend–not to put too fine a point on it, having the friend killed in order to save his own political life–was what, to the Crown Prosecution Service, Thorpe had appeared to have done. He would be acquitted of the charge. But what did it say about England, that so many of his friends, fans and admirers appeared, whether he was found guilty or not, to condone the preparedness to commit a murder? The Thorpe affair revealed a certain amount about the life of Jeremy Thorpe. But it also revealed that many English people believed that it was permissible for public school-educated men to silence their more embarrassing former friends and lovers by any means at their disposal, including murder. If a classless weirdo threatened an Etonian, then Eton must be allowed the final say and the weirdo must be humiliated and his words distorted and his character, if not his body, assassinated. Whatever the truth of the case, it was a dazzling example of how, when an Old Etonian finds himself in the soup, the other public school boys were prepared to close ranks and protect him, whatever the truth of the charges brought against him.10
The General Election of 1979 was held on 3 May. Jeremy Thorpe, Privy Councillor, formerly leader of the Liberal Party, and a man who, during the heady period of the Lib-Lab pact had been offered the post of Home Secretary by Harold Wilson, did not spend the day electioneering. He had stood down as a parliamentary candidate. With three other men–very rum coves all–he was in the dock of Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey, charged that ‘on divers days between 1 January 1973 and 18 November 1977 in the county of Devon and elsewhere they conspired together and with others unknown to murder Norman Scott’. Thorpe was also charged ‘that between 1 January 1969 and 30 March 1969 he unlawfully incited David Malcolm Holmes to murder Norman Scott’.
It was a curious case. During the committal proceedings at Minehead Magistrates Court the previous November, the country had been gripped by the full newspaper accounts of the prosecution case. The key witness was the alleged murder victim himself, Norman Scott, known previously as Josiffe. He had told the magistrates that he first met Thorpe before the changes in the law which allowed consensual sex between adult males. At the time of their first meeting, according to Scott, he was still a minor, which would have made Thorpe guilty of at least two serious offences at the very time when he was beginning his rise to political fame. When they met, Scott was working as a stable boy for a man whose real name was Norman Vater, but who styled himself the Honourable Brecht van de Vater. Vater was a friend of Thorpe’s. Thorpe was already a Member of Parliament, and he is supposed to have told Scott on this occasion that if he ever needed help, he should get in touch. Not long afterwards, the stable boy had what was described as a nervous breakdown, and on leaving the clinic where he was treated, he called on Thorpe at the House of Commons. Scott alleged that he had had sexual relations in Thorpe’s room at the Commons. And in a vivid, unforgettably graphic piece of evidence, he described being taken to spend a night in the house of Thorpe’s mother, where he was given James Baldwin’s gay novel Giovanni’s Room to read in his camp bed, and then buggered on repeated occasions through the night. Later, he received a letter from Thorpe referring to his nickname, Bunny, which told him to clear off: ‘Bunnies can and will go to France.’
On 24 October 1975, Scott had met one Andy Newton, who shot Scott’s dog, a Great Dane named Rinka. This Newton, a professional hit man, was imprisoned for two years and charged with the unlawful possession of a gun with intent to endanger life.
When Scott went further, alleging that Newton had been hired by Thorpe, or, rather, by a strange gang of men on behalf of Thorpe, first to frighten him off, and then to kill him, the matter came to court. For the duration of the trial at the Old Bailey, in May 1979, the nation was gripped by the daily newspaper accounts. Thorpe gave no evidence, and never once spoke in the course of the proceedings, except to give his name. The prosecution, led by Peter Murray Taylor QC, took the jury through the story which was already familiar to newspaper readers who had, agog, read the committal proceedings–namely that Thorpe, having had a homosexual relationship with Scott in the early 1960s, became frightened that this would damage his political career, and took steps to shut Scott up. David Holmes, the sometime deputy treasurer of the Liberal Party, became convinced that the only way to achieve this end was to kill Scott. Through John Le Mesurier, not the widely loved comic actor of that name but a carpet dealer from South Wales, and George Deakin, a dealer in fruit machines, Holmes met Andy Newton, an airline pilot who was prepared to earn £10,000 as a hit man. The defence was conducted by George Alfred Carman QC, a tiny, chain-smoking heterosexual, domestically violent and much agitated man, who lived on his nerves. He had been at Cambridge with Thorpe and subsequently developed a high reputation for his skills at the Bar. Even Carman’s skills, however, would not have been able to persuade the jury to acquit, had they not been more or less directed to do so by the judge, the Honourable Sir Joseph Donaldson Cantley. ‘Remember, I have the last word.’
Thorpe was acquitted. At the time of the Stephen Ward trial, and suicide, in 1962, the public had seen the Establishment in the mode of attack. Under threat of exposure as a result of the indiscretions of Ward, and of the young women in his circle, the Establishment had savaged someone, destroyed his life, in an act of murderous hypocrisy which had sickened the public. In 1979, the Establishment was seen once again to be protecting its own, this time in defence mode. Lord Goodman issued a statement after the trial in which he said, ‘In view of the observations from the learned judge and leading counsel relating to the individuals whose names were brought into the case without being parties or witnesses, it would be quite unnecessary for any further statement to be made by me except to reaffirm that there is not a scintilla of truth in any of the allegations that have been aired.’ This statement, apart from provoking the obvious epistemological question–how would a scintilla of truth differ from the whole truth?–sat oddly beside the fact that everyone in Britain had heard, night after night on the television news, the statements of the witnesses and of the prosecution: viz. that Thorpe had siphoned off money given to him for Liberal Party funds to give to a professional hit man, who had shot Scott’s dog and who alleged, together with some of Thorpe’s former friends and colleagues called to the witness stand, that the intention had been to kill the unfortunate Scott. These allegations might or might not have had a scintilla of truth in them, but the interesting thing was that Carman did not produce any evidence to contradict them. They were passed over in silence until the judge effectively told the jury to acquit Thorpe.
It had been a lively year, since in addition to the Thorpe trial the public had also feasted on the excitement of Lord Mountbatten’s assassination.
Mountbatten was regarded by the Royal Family, and especially by the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, as a fount of authority and wisdom. To ‘Uncle Dickie’ they turned in a crisis. But this elderly popinjay, with his offensively arrogant manners and his fondness for naval ratings, was not popular with the public. If they had to stomach Mountbatten at all, they preferred him in the fictitious film version of his Second World War exploits, In Which We Serve. In this moving picture, his sometime lover Noël Coward portrayed Mountbatten as a gallant sea captain. There was some truth in this, and the central incident of the film, in which Mountbatten lost his ship, HMS Kelly (called in the film HMS Torrin), is substantially true. Coward’s laughably implausible attempt to play the happily married man with Celia Johnson was viewed with as much derision as was Mountbatten’s improbable pretence to do the same with his wife, Edwina. Both had been promiscuous adulterers, sometimes, it was alleged, with the same man–e.g., Nehru.
It was a great pity that Antony Lambton never published his biography of Mountbatten, but he did publish a prolegomenon, which went into the question of Mountbatten’s ancestry. Although he arrived as a boy cadet at Osborne Training College in May 1913 with a trunk inscribed, ‘His Serene Highness the Prince Louis of Battenburg’, Mountbatten was a very distinctly minor, not to say ‘shabby genteel’, royal personage. Heiligenberg, near Judenheim, a few miles south of Darmstadt in Hesse, was the closest thing his father ever had to a country house (they had no English seat). It has been described by Lambton as ‘two bald houses opposing each other across a court, joined up by an ugly ballroom and other uninteresting buildings’–scarcely the romantic Schloss in which Mountbatten liked to pretend he had grown up. His closest claim to real grandeur in childhood was that an uncle by marriage, Prince Henry, was the brother of the Kaiser.
His passionate wish to belong to the royal circle was a common characteristic of semi-royalties, who are often more concerned with ‘position’ and the importance of ‘blood’ than the heads of their families.Mountbatten’s morganatic and uncertain ancestry made him desperately desire to be a trusted part of an inner circle which, when he was a young man, had reigned on the thrones of Europe east of the Rhine. Defending his birthright he collected, and then ignored and hid away, papers in his own archives, and created myths flattering to his vanity by romantically rewriting his family history.To his critics his obsession was and is ridiculous, but it should be balanced against his fearlessness and the greatest of all qualities in a leader, the ability to inspire those under his command.11
When Mountbatten’s nephew Philip married the future Queen Elizabeth II it was the fulfilment of all Mountbatten’s desire to control the destinies of the British Royal Family. As a boy cadet, he had witnessed the humiliation of his father, Prince Louis, who had so longed to become the First Sea Lord but was dismissed in the understandable wave of anti-German feeling which swept the country upon the outbreak of the First World War. The family name of Battenberg was changed to Mountbatten, just as the House of Saxe-Coburg became the House of Windsor. (‘Now,’ the Kaiser had joked, ‘I suppose we shall have the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg.’) Mountbatten was so anxious to attend, and interfere in, the wedding of Philip and Elizabeth that, even though he was the last Viceroy of India, he rushed home for the event. It was for this trivial reason alone that he was so anxious to speed up Indian independence arrangements, leaving Greater India with the Partition of West and East Pakistan (the latter subsequently Bangladesh), with much avoidable slaughter and perhaps a million lives lost.
Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark had seriously entertained the idea that his bride would take his surname. Apart from the fact that it was without precedent in British royal history, the surname itself was ludicrous–Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. The Home Secretary of the time, Chuter Ede, suggested that he should take his mother’s surname and be married as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. Pushed by ‘Uncle Dickie’, he had done his best to persuade the Royal Family that the future Queen should have the surname Mountbatten. This was roundly rejected, much to Philip’s rage. He is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘I’m nothing but an amoeba!’–by which he presumably meant that his only function in the constitutional scheme of things was as a stud to provide the monarch with heirs. In 1960, the Queen had declared, ‘I and my children shall continue to be styled and known as the House and family of Windsor.’ Yet by the time of Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973, Mountbatten wrote to the Prince of Wales, ‘her marriage certificate will be the first opportunity to settle the Mountbatten-Windsor name for good’. It was outrageous of Mountbatten to have asked the Prince of Wales to contravene a decision made by the Queen in Council, but the trick seems to have worked. After the wedding, in which Anne did indeed sign her name in the register as Mountbatten-Windsor, the Queen said that in future she wished her descendants to be known by the new name, having long wished, according to her press secretary, ‘to associate her husband’s name with their descendants’. Most people who gave much thought to such things, an admittedly diminishing band, recognised it as a mistake.12
Mountbatten, born 25 June 1900, was the age of the century. In August 1979, he and his family took a holiday off the coast of Ireland. Their twenty-nine-foot fishing boat Shadow V was left for long spells unattended in the little harbour of Mullaghmore while the party was ashore. On the 27th, Mountbatten went aboard with Lord and Lady Brabourne, Mountbatten’s son-in-law and daughter, and their fourteen-year-old twin sons Nicholas and Timothy, together with Lord Bra-bourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother Doreen. An Irish boy from the neighbourhood, Paul Maxwell, was also of the party. The bomb, which had been planted on the boat, went off just as they cleared the harbour. Paul Maxwell and Nicholas Knatchbull were killed, Doreen Brabourne was fatally injured, Timothy and his parents were badly injured. Mountbatten was killed outright.13
The IRA issued the half-witted declaration that it had carried out an ‘execution’, as a way of ‘bringing emotionally home to the English ruling-class and its working-class slaves…that their government’s war on us is going to cost them as well’. The murders merely exacerbated the intensely anti-Irish feeling in England which the IRA outrages always provoked. Princess Margaret, on a visit to Chicago two months after Uncle Dickie’s death, got into trouble, when someone expressed sorrow at Mountbatten’s murder, by replying that the Irish were pigs, a remark which some thought provoked the immediate departure of the Mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, from the party. Hasty denials were issued next morning, but no one was convinced. As for Dickie, Mountbatten’s slavish biographer surely exaggerated when he wrote that ‘the world mourned’. Mountbatten had not been loved, and except by Noël Coward fans he was not even much respected. Private Eye had discovered an easy target with its repeated suggestion that Mountbatten was not merely homosexual, but also a Soviet agent. Even if it was not quite true, he certainly did as much damage as many an enemy spy could have done. By gross mismanagement in India he was in effect, if not in intention, a mass murderer. By interfering, and giving disastrous advice to the Royal Family, he contributed to the very low esteem in which they had come to be held by the end of his life. They had their ups and downs in popularity after the Mullaghmore bomb exploded, but, on the whole, their fortunes have steadily improved.
As always, public feelings about the Royal Family, Establishment, the hierarchical structure of society and the inheritance of the past, were mixed. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 had occurred during a blazing hot summer. Street parties were held all over Britain, with bunting suspended from trees and lamp-posts, and children sitting at trestle tables eating egg sandwiches and drinking lemonade, much as they might have done in the year of the Coronation. These parties were quite spontaneous. No one was compelled to arrange them. Yet there was an air of defiance about them, as though the times were out of joint, and this expression of loyalty to the Queen was, paradoxically, itself an act of protest, against the state of Britain which the politicians had created.
A more strident form of protest against the existing order of things was punk. In the 100 Club, a small basement in Oxford Street, on Tuesday nights from 1976 onwards, the Sex Pistols performed their furious routines.14 ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was one of their most famous numbers, screamed out by the author of the lyrics, Johnny Rotten, the stage name of John Lydon, an etiolated red-haired urchin who yelled at his squirming audience that he was the anti-Christ and he wanted to destroy everything. The audience bounced up and down, pogoing, and, in so far as thought was possible in minds blown with narcotics, they responded eagerly to Rotten’s message, just as they thrilled to the sight of his friend Sid Vicious smearing himself with blood, or Siouxsie Sioux, a punk goddess with naked breasts protruding from her bondage outfits, and swastikas adorning her arms. For the Jubilee, Johnny Rotten wrote a version of ‘God Save the Queen’ which reached Number Two in the charts. The sleeve of the single disc was a Warholesque representation of Her Majesty with her eyes blocked by a collage reading God Save the Queen and her mouth pasted over with the words Sex Pistols. The lyrics equated the twenty-five years of her reign with a ‘fascist regime’. Real fascism was now something which had retreated so far into the historical shadows that the word ‘fascist’ was used to denote more or less any form of hierarchy, any rule of law, any attempt to hold on to the concept of personal property, anything, in short, of which the speaker disapproved. The BBC awarded Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’ the high accolade of banning it from any of its radio or TV stations.
The Sex Pistols’ was a cry of horror, not from the absolute depths but from the stultifyingly boring fringes. The natural haunts of their fans were the soul-destroying purlieus and suburbs of London.
Siouxsie Sioux (of Siouxsie and the Banshees) was really a girl called Susan Janet Ballion (born 1957) from Bromley. John Lydon’s background was ‘lace curtains Irish’. His family lived in a council flat in Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park. Like Germaine Greer, Madonna, and many others in our times, Johnny found that a dysfunctional Catholic childhood had been the first brilliant career move.
The Catholic Church provided him with the props of Gothick horror, both against which to react, and with which to clothe his iconoclasm. It also inspired his most celebrated lyrics–the ‘God Save the Queen’ parody being almost word for word the same as the IRA’s explanation of why they had blown Mountbatten sky high. Johnny Rotten, who had something of the artist about him, stood detached from the bizarre punk creation of which he was by far the most stylish representative. Punk was in any event always surrounded by irony and Rotten was a stylishly ironic exponent of it. Sid Vicious (other names John Beverley/John Simon Ritchie) was, by contrast, less an ironic exponent than an appalling object lesson of the movement’s negativism. The child of a junkie, he appeared at the front of the band in a drug haze, mutilating himself and mouthing idiocies or making, sometimes feigned, puking sounds, sometimes trying to remember Lydon’s lyrics. At the age of twenty-one he took up with a fellow heroin addict named Nancy Spungeon. The autumn of 1978 found them in New York, where, following in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, they checked into the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street. On 12 October, Nancy was found dead in the hotel room, lying under the bathroom sink with stab wounds in her stomach and a hunting knife at her side. When the police arrived, Sid admitted responsibility. After a spell in a psychiatric hospital he was sent to prison on Riker’s Island. On 1 February 1979, he was released on bail, and found his mother, Anne Beverley, awaiting him. She gave him some heroin. Sid went to a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village and shot up. ‘Jesus, son, that must have been a good hit,’ said the mother when she saw her son lit up with the smack. He injected himself once more that night and died of an overdose. Anne was in the room next door. ‘I’m glad he died,’ said Sid Vicious’s mother. ‘Nothing can hurt him any more.’15
The commercial success of the Sex Pistols was a paradoxical fact given their desire to attack and defame the ‘fascist’ world of privilege and, presumably, of commerce. But the music industry knew that there was big money in the sheer offensiveness, not only of words, such as Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’, but of the noise itself made by the great bands of the era. Synthesisers were invented in the late 1960s by Bob Moog, while he was studying engineering and physics at Cornell University, and thereafter the noisier the band, and the greater the scream of mindless rage they represented, the happier were the fans. On tour in 1972, the Rolling Stones fed their sound through massive banks of speakers hoisted high above the stage, guaranteeing deafening noise. Even this noise was as nothing to the volume produced by Led Zeppelin, described by Germaine Greer as the Wagner of rock music. They continued their mind- and ear-blasting career until 1980 when their drummer, John Bonham, drank himself to death. Huge sums had been generated by these assailants of the eardrums.
Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, likewise, saw that there was money in punk chic. Their boutique at 430 King’s Road selling rubber clothes, studs and bondage clothes fitted with buckles and straps, PVC which could be opened to reveal the genitalia, soon expanded into a multi-million-pound business. Épater la bourgeoisie, the old decadent rallying cry of the 1890s, now became immensely lucrative, creating not so much a bourgeoisie but an aristocracy of rock stars, clothes designers, film-makers and architects. Indeed, those attacking the system in Callaghan’s Britain stood a much greater chance of making a good old-fashioned fortune than those trying to shore up conventional businesses while battling with the wage demands of trades unions. Youth was not merely in rebellion–against what it was never quite sure–it also had money to burn.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was first broadcast on BBC television in October 1969, and which continued until 1974, was a late flowering of surrealism, a televised version of the humour made popular by Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers in The Goon Show. It was a series of larky comedy sketches, in which, for example, a football match might be played between teams of the great German versus the Greek philosophers, or two young men in drag, impersonating charwomen, would go to Paris to meet Jean-Paul Sartre. The prodigious popularity of the series, and its long afterlife as a cult on American television, probably derived from its skilful flattery of the audience into thinking that they, too, enjoyed such juxtapositions of student essay subjects with the despised life of provincial middle- or lower-middle-class England which had been left behind when the actors themselves had gone to university. It was an undergraduate rag warmed up for general consumption. Some of the sketches, such as a man taking back a parrot to a pet shop because it was dead and had been dead when sold, became so much part of the common culture that pub bores could recite the whole of it to one another as a substitute for wit of their own. If compared with the sketches of The Two Ronnies, which were being aired during the same decade, most of the Monty Python sketches cannot be seen as funny at all. Compare the dead parrot sketch with, for example, the episode of The Two Ronnies in the hardware shop, where the customer, a taciturn Ronnie Barker, asks for ‘fork handles’ and is given ‘four candles’.16 The verbal ingenuity and the deadpan acting make this a small comic masterpiece. The best thing about the Monty Python show was the ingenuity of the graphics by the American Terry Gilliam. Had the sketches not been interrupted by Gilliam’s visual jokes, nor accompanied by John Philip Sousa’s march ‘Liberty Bell’, they would not have been so hilarious. Gilliam made the sketches into surreal circus, in which cut and pasted Victorian strongmen can lift the actors up like ants, or the foot from Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid descends upon the set to squash them. Heads blow off, and flowers burst from the gaping neck. Naked girls chase cardinals on tricycles, both crushed in turn by the descending foot, or by a nursery scrapbook cherub.
The Pythons themselves, a little like the Beyond the Fringe team of an earlier generation, came from the older universities. Terry Jones and Michael Palin were Oxford, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and John Cleese were Cambridge.
They captured the mood of their generation by their expressed hatred of religion. Earlier generations had been prepared to leave alone the shattered shell of the Christian religion, but the Python team lived in an era when the Church was on the run, and Christianity itself seemed to many people to be fraudulent, even dangerous. Geza Vermes, a former Hungarian Roman Catholic priest then teaching at the University of Oxford and an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in 1973 a book called Jesus the Jew. It was an attempt to place Jesus in his historical setting. Few people have ever known more about first-century Palestine, its languages and religions than Professor Vermes, and his book had a great impact, seeming to many biblical scholars to destroy the plausibility of Christian beliefs that Jesus could ever have made the claims for himself which were made by later theology–above all that He was a divine being. Had Vermes, however, managed to create a more plausible Jesus than the figure of the Four Gospels? Many thought that he had, among them, presumably, the Pythons, whose Life of Brian, a spoof version of the life of Jesus, was designed as an assault upon the Christian religion. In a cowardly way, they covered themselves by asserting, in the first five minutes of the film, that Brian Cohen was a contemporary of Jesus, but in all the scenes which follow it is clear that Jesus himself was the object of their abuse. We have the Sermon on the Mount in which Brian’s words, Blessed are the Peacemakers, is misheard as Blessed are the Cheesemakers, and it ends with a parody of the Crucifixion. Many theologians, religious teachers and priests at this period had come to accept the Vermes–Python version of Christian origins. ‘Men said that Christ slept, and his saints’–the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s despondent observation on the chaos of King Stephen’s reign, would have made a fitting epitaph for the 1970s.
It was while the Pythons were filming an episode of Monty Python in Torquay that they came upon the ill-tempered hotelier, Donald Sinclair, who inspired one of the most enduring characters of the decade, Basil Fawlty. ‘Could you call me a taxi, please?’ Cleese asked him. ‘A taxi?’ ‘Yes.’ Sinclair emitted a deep sigh. Then through gritted teeth the grudging reply came, ‘I suppose so.’
Cleese wrote the scripts of Fawlty Towers with his American wife Connie Booth. Their model was the Feydeau farce, but they outsoared their master. Each thirty-minute episode was a tightly wrought harmony of plotting, the different strands of the story coming together in an invariably hilarious catastrophe. Cleese played the irascible Basil, and Prunella Scales was his wife, Sybil, with an irredeemably common bouffant hairdo, and twangy south-eastern accent. Connie Booth, poised and beautiful, was Polly, the maid-of-all-work, and one of the many inspired things about the series was that (Booth, one suspects, being the real mind behind the comedies) never for one instance was any comic mileage made out of the fact that Polly is a meltingly beautiful blonde. No guest ever makes a pass at her and the termagant wife Sybil never suspects Basil of straying with Polly, though Basil once suspects Polly of indecent relations with someone who turns out to be an old family friend. They are all far too busy trying to train the idiotic Spanish waiter, Manuel, or coping with the disasters, nearly all of Basil’s making, which befall their unfortunate guests. They stopped when the going was good, only making a dozen episodes, and it could be said that television knew no finer hour.
In one of the most electrifying episodes, an aggressive American stays at Fawlty Towers and is the first who is brave enough to confront Basil with the fact that the place is a dump. It leads to a minor rebellion in the ranks, with other guests, when challenged, admitting that the service, food and general standards of the hotel are lousy. You feel at this moment that it is a miracle that the hotel, like the marriage of its proprietors, has managed to survive. Luckily, by the next episode Basil is back in the semi-control, which is the most he ever exercises over life. With his regimental ties, sense of England going to the dogs, despair at the success of the trades unions, suspicion of the foreigner, but inability to be a good manager, Basil Fawlty was the archetypal Englishman of Callaghan’s Britain. The wounded dignity, the feeling that the country was under threat, the despondent sense that nothing can be done to get them out of the mess into which Fate has dug them–these matched the mood of an electorate who watched powerless as the politicians caved in to union pay demands, and the economy lurched from one crisis to the next. (Basil is obsessed by strikes, especially by the car workers, and is wistfully envious, as he reads the newspapers, of the power and influence of Henry Kissinger.)
Johnny Rotten had said, at the time of the 1977 Jubilee, ‘You don’t write a song like “God Save the Queen” because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re sick of seeing them mistreated.’
Some of the electorate, probably including the surviving Sex Pistols themselves, felt alienated by the entire political system. Some vainly believed that the creaking old system could serve them for their lifetimes: the series of industrial crises, labour disputes, high taxes. They offered corporate political and fiscal solutions to something which others felt to be not so much an economic as a moral malaise. The German guests in Torquay, treated to a gross series of insults by Basil Fawlty who is unsuccessfully trying not to mention the war, eventually stare at him, his head in a bandage from concussion, collapsed beneath a moose’s head, which he had unsuccessfully tried to hang on the wall to add a bit of class to the hotel lobby. As the drunken Major leans over him to offer ineffectual help, the German asks, ‘How did they ever win?’ By the date of Fawlty Towers and Sunny Jim Callaghan it had indeed become unimaginable that Britain had ever been a country which could win a war or solve its own problems without intervention from the International Monetary Fund or injections of cash from America.
‘There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics,’ said Callaghan to Bernard Donoughue. ‘It does not then matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change–and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’ The fatalism of the remark reveals what the electorate found so insufferable about, not only Callaghan’s Labour Party, but also about the old Heathites of the Conservative Party: namely the suggestion that they, who had been elected to solve certain problems, were incapable of doing so. The only reason that they were turning to Mrs Thatcher in this view of events was that there had been a mysterious alteration in mood. It was about this time that the political clichémongers appropriated the beautiful Shakespearean phrase sea-change (‘into something rich and strange’ from The Tempest) and used the phrase simply to mean ‘change’. At a similar date they raided, and thereby desecrated, the Apostle Paul, as translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible, and spoke of themselves grappling for ‘hearts and minds’, in their language, as a clichéd synonym for ‘votes’.
Johnny Rotten in a sense spoiled the effect of his ‘God Save the Queen’ lyric by coming out from behind the screen and saying that he was sick of seeing the people of England mistreated. Mrs Thatcher could in a comparable sense be seen to have diluted her message, when she had won the election and became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, by quoting the supposed words of Francis of Assisi–‘Where there is hatred may we sow love, where there is injury pardon, etc.’ She had arrived at Number 10 Downing Street and her speechwriter Sir Ronald Millar had, on the spur of the moment, suggested the words for her. They were apt neither to herself nor to the times. Mrs Thatcher was the first politician in a generation to appeal to something visceral in voters. Her appeal to her admirers had something of what made punk attractive to fans of the Sex Pistols. To vote Thatcher was to issue a cry of rage. Where there was pardon, to sow injury, where there was love, hate. A vote for Thatcher was psephological pogoing, and to many of her followers she was the Siouxsie Sioux of politics, revealing things on the stage which had normally been reserved for the specialist market. Her fellow Somervillian and polar opposite Shirley Williams lost her seat at Hertford and Stevenage. Callaghan said he was ‘heartbroken’. Alas, Williams would return. All the old duds expressed their sadness at Callaghan’s defeat. A. J. Ayer wrote to commiserate, and Sir Goronwy Daniel, Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, made what must rank as a double-edged remark: ‘You will surely be as highly esteemed by tomorrow’s historian as you are by the great majority of today’s public’: it sounds like a compliment, until, read twice, it becomes the deadliest insult.
In fact, the Labour Party had polled its lowest result in a General Election since the debacle of 1931, a mere 36.9 percent of the vote. The Conservative share was 43.9 percent, and the final result, in terms of parliamentary seats, was Conservatives 339, Labour 268 and Liberals 11. Callaghan’s biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, an Old Labour Welsh academic, was right to describe him as representing ‘more clearly perhaps than any other living politician’ the post-1945 consensus. ‘He was the classic consensus man.’17
Of course nothing ever changes as radically as revolutionaries, or as story-tellers, would like. The old Heathites heavily outnumbered Margaret Thatcher in her Cabinet. The civil service remained the same. The benefits system still continued to underpin the lives of the unemployed and the sick and the old. But the Siouxsie Sioux of Grantham came not to bring peace but a sword.
The times were not auspicious for classic consensus men. Airey Neave MP had been one of Mrs Thatcher’s keenest supporters and allies. He had escaped from the Colditz prisoner-of-war camp and lived, as a barrister, to take part in the post-war Nuremberg trials. As a fervently Unionist Opposition spokesman for Northern Ireland he had been blown up in his car as he was leaving the Houses of Parliament on 30 March. In Pakistan, President Bhutto, the closest thing Pakistan possessed to a Nehru-style Westernised liberal democrat, was executed for ‘conspiracy’. In Iran, the Revolutionary court was ordering summary executions in a Robespierre-style bloodletting. Karol Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II on 16 October 1978, was on his way to Poland (his visit began on 2 June) in one of the most confrontational demonstrations against communism to take place since the Russian Revolution. But nor did he endorse the Western capitalism model of society. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, he deplored the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor of the world, and criticised both the communists and the believers in free trade.
The Pope’s political and economic ideas derived from his nineteenth-century predecessor Leo XIII and were of the kind sometimes labelled Distributism, popularised in England during Edwardian days by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc–a distrust of international finance, of companies and financial institutions, a belief that Small Is Beautiful.
Britain did not have the option to experiment with the Distributist belief that all society’s ills would be solved if each family were given an acre and a cow. The left had failed to help the poor, yet in its blundering efforts to do so it had destroyed the economy. Thatcher would take the risk of making an American decision: to allow the lumpenproletariat to stew in its own juice while the Treasury attempted to save British industry from terminal decline, establish a culture of share and home-ownership, and increase prosperity for the fortunate 80 percent. Could this ruthless programme be put through without calamitous social consequences? Was it possible so to control the money supply that unemployment was used as a weapon? And what compensation could be offered, in terms of real job creation, real improvement in education and training, for those who unfortunately suffered ruin in the first waves of the monetarist revolution–not through fecklessness, but simply because they happened to be employed in a dying industry, or an industry which the monetarist politicians had condemned to death? In times past, an angry underclass could be contained by press gangs and workhouses, institutions which no longer existed. The lunatic asylums were closing down, but could the prisons hold the numbers of dissidents if, in the face of rising unemployment and disillusionment, the young of the urban wastelands, in a punk gesture of despondency, and in order to fund their drug habits, turned to crime and plunder? The alternative to consensus is confrontation. What if the balance of civilised life in Britain turned out to be much more precarious than had formerly been supposed? From 1945, the politicians had lived with little worse than the dread that the trades union barons would turn nasty. They had never had to confront, as earlier generations had done, the possibility of the Mob erupting once more as a factor in British political life. With one part of herself, no doubt, Mrs Thatcher merely wanted a standard of middle-class decency to prevail, and to protect the interests of her natural constituents–the aspirant upper working classes, who would like to have owned their own homes; the old people with savings; the entrepreneurs trying to make something of small businesses, and labouring under bureaucratic laws and crippling taxes. With a deeper part of herself she felt instinctively that none of these benefits were to be had without a struggle. In her world-view the Labour Party, and Shirley Williams and A. J. Ayer and the Principal of the University of Wales, were merely hydra heads sprouting from the monster of anarchy who questioned the very validity of hard work, thrift or saving, who would undermine Britain itself.
In May 1978, Margaret Thatcher had been driving across Tehran with the British Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons. She remarked to him, ‘Do you know, there are still people in my party who believe in consensus?’ Parsons expressed surprise, suggesting that surely this was the belief of most British people, himself included. ‘I regard them as Quislings, as traitors,’ she replied. If she had her way–and given the power of the quislings in the Cabinet it was to be a big If–those traitors were to be smoked out as the first step in full-scale confrontation with the Enemy.18