The gravest danger the country faces at the present time is of our talking ourselves into a state of panic, paranoia and hysteria.
Joel Barnett, Chief Secretary to the Treasury,
August 1974
With my rucksack and guitar in hand, I came to London on 27 December 1973 brimming with the ambition and optimism of the Sixties – a dream of change, a sense of limitless possibility – only to find the Seventies enveloping the city like a pea-souper. A week after my arrival, Der Spiegel informed German readers that ‘the swinging London of the ’60s has given way to a London as gloomy as the city described by Charles Dickens’. The once imperial streets of the capital of a mighty empire were now ‘sparsely lighted like the slummy streets of a former British colonial township’. A month later the American journalist Richard Eder wrote a 4,500-word feature for the New York Times’s Sunday magazine. It was headlined: ‘The Battle of Britain, 1974. A gradual chilling, a fear of dreadful things’. The British, he reported, ‘are told that they face prolonged poverty, drastic inflation or a combination of the two. But more disturbing to this patient people are the warnings from right and left, in the newspapers, on television, that the fabric of British society is about to be ripped up.’
Why Britain? Why did so many American and European reporters descend on London like jet-age tricoteuses, waiting for the guillotine to fall on this once-mighty nation with a mixture of horrified fascination and sly schadenfreude? Hadn’t they problems enough of their own back home? ‘Though primarily involved with their own political, economic and industrial crises, Americans cannot fail to be concerned as Britain enters what may be its period of greatest strain and trial since the darkest days of World War II,’ the New York Times commented, as if anticipating gripes from readers at so many column inches being allocated to the subject. ‘A polarisation of British society and a paralysis of British democracy would gravely threaten the survival of democracy and political civility everywhere.’
Beyond the everyday vexations of inflation, unemployment, labour strife and IRA bombs, journalists discerned a more epic narrative of decline and fall. The nation which gave birth to the Industrial Revolution was now synonymous with industrial failure. The nation that once stood alone against the Nazis had won the war but lost the peace, slumping into an economic coma while vanquished enemies such as Japan and Germany powered ahead. The nation that, within living memory, had governed a globe-straddling empire now stood revealed as a piffling little offshore island whose inhabitants tried to shield themselves from the truth of their second-rate status by watching Colditz, Dad’s Army or countless other celebrations of British pluck, humour and resourcefulness. (A choir of American college students who were touring England in January 1974 entered into the spirit of things with an impromptu rendition of ‘Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be?’ on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, having decided that ‘London could do with some cheering up’.) Even those of us born more than a decade after the end of the war often felt we were still living through it, as parents whistled ‘Colonel Bogey’, teachers reminisced about the Blitz and politicians invoked the Dunkirk spirit.* ‘World War II had turned from history into myth,’ said Gerald Glaister, the producer of Colditz. ‘It is our last frontier, the English equivalent of the western.’
Where there’s a myth there will eventually be a myth-buster, and during the 1970s a new school of historians emerged, led by Correlli Barnett, to contend that what Churchill described as our finest hour had been nothing of the sort. In The Collapse of British Power (1972), Barnett argued that the summer of 1940 ‘marked the consummation of an astonishing decline in British fortunes. The British invested their feebleness and isolation with a romantic glamour – they saw themselves as latter-day Spartans, under their own Leonidas, holding the pass for the civilised world. In fact it was a sorry and contemptible plight for a great power, and it derived neither from bad luck, nor from failures of others. It had been brought down upon the British by themselves.’ The fault lay in that benign, dreamy amateurism exemplified by the Home Guard volunteers from Warmington-on-Sea in Dad’s Army. The Australian writer Donald Horne wrote in God is an Englishman (1970) that British business was stifled by ‘a refusal to take serious problems seriously because to do so would require a vigorous and sustained application of expertise that would be ungentlemanly … a nonchalance that sees business as a sideline, or a means to an end, and reveals its true interest by having copies of Queen on the tables of ante-rooms rather than copies of Fortune’.
This became the received wisdom, equally acceptable to spluttering old colonels and spluttering young Marxists. A 1973 television documentary presented by Paul Johnson, then well advanced in his transition from left-wing firebrand to choleric reactionary, began with a charming tableau of Johnson sitting at the breakfast table with his wife and children. ‘I wonder how far Britain’s gone down the plughole this morning,’ he said, picking up his Daily Express. ‘Has Britain had it? Are we on the road to Ruritania?’ His argument was simple and beguiling. The Suez crisis of 1956 had been the end of an illusion, and of the idea of keeping any kind of empire. Britain then sought a new role in Europe, only to be rebuffed and humiliated by General de Gaulle, the man we had taken in as a refugee during the war. Even when Britain did join Europe, there was further humiliation at the admission ceremony because Ted Heath spoke in French, ‘a language he could barely pronounce’. Since the collapse of the British empire, Johnson concluded, all we had left were uniforms and ceremony – an insubstantial pageant faded, leaving not a wrack behind. Success had bred complacency, arrogance, hubris and finally nemesis.
This assessment was unmistakably that of a pessimistic Tory, but it chimed harmoniously with the ‘theses prepared by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International’ at the same time. After nearly two centuries of dominance, they proclaimed, we were now witnessing ‘the precipitate decline of British imperialism within the international capitalist framework; with the end of British hegemony first on a world scale, then in Europe, South Asia, the Mediterranean and finally in Africa, the British capitalist class has been reduced to a third-rate power, already outstripped by the US, Japanese and West German imperialism’. Shorn of the jargon, this could have been a plangent editorial in the Daily Telegraph, or indeed a breakfast oration by Paul Johnson.
According to Correlli Barnett, the rot set in during the nineteenth century, supposedly the zenith of British power, when the Victorian elite abandoned the brisk Georgian pragmatism of their forebears and espoused chivalrous notions of ‘moral purpose’, thus becoming hopelessly enfeebled. A classical education, a surfeit of Romantic poetry and too many games of public-school cricket produced a dominant ethos whose values were pastoral and bucolic – a distaste for modern industry, a yearning for tree-lined lawns, a belief that playing the game in the right spirit mattered more than the actual result.* These flaws in the national character were a full and sufficient explanation of the United Kingdom’s subsequent decline.
For utter national humiliation, however, it is not enough to fail: others must succeed. It was American journalists who first spoke of ‘the British disease’ in the 1970s, much to the irritation of Ted Heath. ‘We aren’t in a state of continual crisis,’ he insisted in January 1974, in a magnificently grumpy interview with the New York Times. ‘I know anybody reading the American press will think this was the case because this is all that has been reported for the past few weeks. They have shown no interest in Britain for months and years, ever since the war. Now all they do is describe Britain as being in a state of decay and one of perpetual crisis, which does not bear any relationship to the facts. For the past year, until this particular dispute with the miners, we have had a period of very great industrial peace.’ One wonders if even Heath himself believed this twaddle. His first year in office, 1970, had been the worst since the war for industrial strife, with eleven million working days lost through strikes. That record didn’t last long: the next year more than 13.6 million days were lost, and in 1972 the total reached an astounding twenty-three million. True, the figure dwindled in 1973, but it was still far higher than at any time in the decade preceding his arrival in No. 10. If this represented peace, as he maintained, it was only after the fashion described by Tacitus: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Or, as Byron rendered it: ‘Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease!/He makes a solitude and calls it – peace.’
Heath’s protestations fooled nobody. The Japanese translation of ‘the British disease’ – Eikoku byo – was a familiar catchphrase in Tokyo business circles by 1974. ‘The words can be heard in the halls of banking and industry, in factory managers’ offices and along the corridors of Japan’s powerful economic institutions,’ The Times’s correspondent reported. ‘They strike fear into the hearts of the most hardened of Japan’s astute businessmen.’ Militant Japanese unions and campaigners for a welfare state were urged to look at Britain’s plight and think again. ‘We have to learn from Britain’s downfall,’ said Fumio Takagi, the deputy minister of finance.
Closer neighbours were even more fearful of the contagion. In 1974, a year after Heath led his country into the European Economic Community, the Brussels correspondent of The Times reported that ‘the British economy is now admired among EEC members only for its ability to stagger along on its knees’. A few years earlier there had been genuine anxiety on the Continent that British industry would prove a dangerous competitor when the Community – the Common Market, as most of us called it – was enlarged. Not any more:
The apparent fecklessness of the British worker and his delight in wringing the once golden goose’s neck is matched in continental eyes by the reluctance of British management to get to work first, roll up its sleeves, share responsibility more and fight strenuously for wider export markets. George Orwell’s view (as revealed in The Road to Wigan Pier) that the British are, despite their convictions of innate superiority, actually the laziest people in Europe, would find few dissenters on the Continent at the moment.
All of which sounded very like Correlli Barnett’s thesis, that Britain’s dismal economic performance was symptomatic of its effete character. Although his book ended in 1945, Barnett often popped up in British newspapers to emphasise the contemporary resonance in case anyone had missed it. When a journalist was foolish enough to attribute the German economic miracle to the wads of American dollars received after the war, he dashed off a rapid rebuttal pointing out that Britain was given $2.7 billion of Marshall Aid as against West Germany’s $1.7 billion. ‘It was our choice to spend much of this aid on supporting our outdated pretensions as a world power rather than on reconstructing our industrial machine,’ he wrote, adding the familiar punchline: ‘For our present ignominies we have to blame ourselves, not bad luck.’
Ted Heath certainly had no one but himself to blame for the ignominy that befell him after calling a snap election in February 1974, in defence of the statutory incomes policy that he had explicitly ruled out in the 1970 manifesto. In a fitting coda to his turbulent reign, the last item of parliamentary business before MPs returned to their constituencies for the campaign was the conveyance of a message from the Queen to the Speaker of the Commons renewing the state of emergency. ‘The House will note,’ the Labour frontbencher Roy Jenkins commented, ‘that this government, which has proclaimed more states of emergency than any other, has now appropriately completed the record by being the only one in history to leave the nation in a state of emergency and without a parliament.’ When the Prime Minister strode into the chamber, Labour MPs shouted, ‘Where’s your white sheet, Ted?’ – to which Conservatives yelled back, ‘Where’s your red flag?’
The question Heath put to the country was ‘Who Governs Britain?’, to which Britain gave the obvious answer: Not you, matey. In the words of Harold Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, ‘People who sat huddled in blankets for warmth, illuminated only by flickering candlelight, denied their radio and television programmes and afraid to go out into streets darker than at any time since the wartime blackout, had a ready response to the crisis: whoever governed Britain, it clearly wasn’t the government.’
But would it be Harold Wilson? On the afternoon of election day, after a tour of polling stations in his Huyton constituency, he discussed plans for the night ahead with his adviser Bernard Donoughue:
HW had most complicated schemes [Donoughue wrote in his diary]. After the count at Huyton he would tell the press he was going back to the Adelphi, but would in fact go to another hotel, the Golden Eagle in Kirkby. Stay there watching the results, have a brief sleep and then slip off quickly in the early morning to the plane – which would set off for London but be diverted in flight to a small airfield in Bedfordshire. HW would then race back to Grange Farm, his country house in Buckinghamshire, or even hide away at the cottage of a friend … I suddenly realised what was behind all these bizarre plans
– HW was preparing to lose! He was preparing his getaway plans.
Heath, by contrast, was sturdily confident – so confident that he even boasted about what many voters regarded as his most off-putting characteristic. ‘People tell me I am stubborn,’ he said in his final election broadcast. ‘Is it stubborn to fight and fight hard to stop the country you love from tearing itself apart? … Is it stubborn to want to see this country take back the place that history means us to have? If it is – then, yes, I most certainly am stubborn.’ True to his word, the obstinate jackass refused to pack his bags and leave Downing Street when the electorate delivered its verdict. Because Labour had won more seats than the Tories but fewer votes, and lacked an overall majority in Parliament, he felt entitled to try forming a new administration with the backing of the Liberals. The Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, a preening dandy who adored the limelight, longed to accept the offer of a place in the Cabinet but knew that his party colleagues would refuse to prop up a defeated and discredited regime. As he told Heath, although it mightn’t be clear who had won the election, it was quite clear who’d lost it. On the evening of Monday, 4 March, after four days of skulking and sulking in Downing Street, the Prime Minister drove to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation. ‘The squatter in No. 10 Downing Street has at last departed,’ the Spectator rejoiced, firing the first salvo in an onslaught by right-wing Tories that would culminate in Heath’s overthrow by Margaret Thatcher a year later. ‘Mr Heath’s monomania was never more clearly seen than in the days after the general election when, a ludicrous and broken figure, he clung with grubby fingers to the crumbling precipice of his power … The spectacle was ludicrous; it was pathetic; it was contemptible.’
In Private Eye, Auberon Waugh took aim at another party leader: ‘The most disappointing result has been Jeremy Thorpe’s success in North Devon. Thorpe was already conceited enough and now threatens to become one of the great embarrassments of politics. Soon, I may have to reveal some of the things in my file on this revolting man.’ One of the pleasures of reading Waugh’s diary in the Eye was trying to guess whether any of it was true: despite his protestations that the column was entirely jocular and fantastical, the veneer of surrealist comic fiction occasionally seemed to conceal genuine facts, or at least genuine gossip. So it was with his curious remarks about Thorpe. For Auberon Waugh wasn’t the only man with a ‘file’ on the Liberal leader: Harold Wilson had one too, which had been given to him a week before polling day by Sydney Jacobson, editorial director of the Mirror group of newspapers. Wilson revealed its existence to Joe Haines on the Monday after the election, while they sat for hours in Wilson’s drawing room waiting to hear if Thorpe had succumbed to Heath’s blandishments. As Haines recalled:
He was not going to take any chances, he said. If Heath decided to cheat the voters, then George Thomas, a former junior minister at the Home Office and future Speaker of the Commons, would come forward and expose Thorpe’s affair with Norman Scott, an eccentric homosexual who claimed to have had the affair in the 1960s and was obsessed with Thorpe’s alleged retention of his National Insurance cards. What’s more, Wilson added, his deputy, Ted Short (later Lord Glenamara), who also knew of the affair through his time as a minister, would do the same. That would have made impossible the rumoured post of Home Secretary for Thorpe.
That evening the call came through from the Palace: Heath had resigned, the Queen invited Wilson to form a government and there was no need to play the Thorpe card. But Wilson didn’t discard it. As the leader of a minority administration he would have to call another election later that year. What if Heath and Thorpe resumed their mating dance after an inconclusive result? Soon after becoming Prime Minister Wilson asked his new Secretary of State for Social Security, Barbara Castle, to hand over Norman Scott’s National Insurance records ‘for future possible use’. Castle, quite rightly, was appalled by the request that she exploit her ministerial power for the purpose of political blackmail. Annoyed by her scruples, Wilson subcontracted the job to her young adviser, Jack Straw. Almost thirty years later, by which time he was himself in the Cabinet as Tony Blair’s Foreign Secretary, Straw confirmed that he and Castle’s private secretary obtained Scott’s records and wrote a report on them for the Prime Minister. If a ministerial aide was caught in that sort of skulduggery now, he or she would be vilified in the press and obliged to quit; but no one seemed shocked or even surprised by Straw’s belated admission. It was the Seventies, other journalists explained when I asked why they weren’t making more of a fuss; normal rules don’t apply to abnormal times.
Nowhere is the abnormality more head-achingly apparent than in the diaries of Bernard Donoughue, a thirty-nine-year-old lecturer from the London School of Economics whom Wilson recruited to run his new Downing Street Policy Unit. As an academic political historian Donoughue thought he had a pretty good idea of how government worked, and relished the opportunity to witness the process at first hand rather than through old documents in the archives. He began keeping a diary on the assumption that it would be an illuminating record of serious people earnestly grappling with the great problems of the day – economic, social, geopolitical. It certainly illuminates, but not quite as intended: when he eventually published the diary, in 2005, Donoughue added a preface apologising for ‘the curious balance of priorities and concerns which is sometimes conveyed … The working reality of those two years [1974–76] was that on many days, while trying to cope with the major policy issues of the time, we were frequently diverted, delayed and even overwhelmed by the minor, extraneous but intensely irritating tensions generated within the Prime Minister’s team.’ International crises came and went, the Provisional IRA waged war on the British mainland, the economy continued its headlong slide into the abyss; but for much of the time the inner circle at No. 10 – Donoughue, Joe Haines, Harold Wilson himself and his political secretary, Marcia Williams – seemed almost oblivious to the tumult outside as they squabbled and screeched like fractious children fighting over a bar of chocolate.
On Wednesday, 6 March, only the second day of the new regime, Donoughue had his first inkling of what was in store:
Terrible lunch. We all go upstairs to the small dining room … Suddenly Marcia blows up. Already upset because we were eating whitebait. She says she hates them looking at her from the plate. The PM solemnly announced that they were whitebait from the Home for Blind Whitebait, so she need not worry. I added they were also volunteers.
Broke the tension for a while but then she blew up over Harold and me having a polite and friendly conversation together … She stalked out. HW followed, his meal unfinished. Gloom.
When Donoughue dropped in on Marcia’s office that afternoon, she put on her coat and announced that she was ‘leaving for ever’. Meanwhile, the civil servants downstairs were settling the miners’ strike.
At the next day’s lunch, Marcia Williams accused the Prime Minister of making ‘a stupid error’ in omitting the Labour right-winger Bill Rodgers from the government. She then walked out in a temper. ‘HW is clearly upset,’ Donoughue wrote. ‘She had attacked him viciously in front of the waiter.’ When he returned home at midnight, exhausted, Donoughue had to endure a seventy-five-minute rant over the phone from a ‘very depressed and neurotic Marcia’ who accused him, Haines and another of Wilson’s aides, Albert Murray, of ganging up against her. ‘She says she will retire to her country house and wait for HW to sack us all and come personally to ask her to return.’ On the following day she didn’t turn up at the office at all.
So ended Bernard Donoughue’s first week in Downing Street, and the first week of a new government that had been elected to rescue Britain from the disorder and madness of the Heath regime. It was a template for most subsequent weeks over the next two years. On 25 March, when Marcia Williams again failed to come to work, Donoughue rang her at home. ‘She says she is not coming here. Is going to emigrate. Everybody is against her.’ She wasn’t far wrong on the last point, but it seems never to have occurred to Marcia that there might be some justification for her colleagues’ hostility. A friend of mine who worked for Wilson in the early 1970s, when he was leader of the opposition, still shivers at the memory: ‘Without doubt, Marcia was one of the most unpleasant and rudest people I have ever worked with. She could also be completely charming. Unpredictable mood swings were the order of the day: she ruled by terror and psychological harassment.’ One day Marcia rang her brother Tony Field, who ran Wilson’s front office at the time, but since he wasn’t at his desk my friend picked up the phone. Marcia was apoplectic:
She made sense of the term ‘beside herself with rage’ … I was so appalled (and scared) by what she said firstly about me and then about someone else who was part of the entourage – the bile, hatred and disloyalty she expressed towards someone who thought of her as his friend was so intense and repulsive that I hung up on her. I immediately reported what I had done to Harold who went pale and instantly phoned Marcia to appease her. I heard him splutter out: ‘But … but … but you’ve hung up on me at times …’ It seemed to me that he was humiliating himself. Anyhow, I was so sickened by her – and her power over him – that I decided to resign. Which I did the next day.
Marcia could insult and humiliate Wilson with impunity, and she wanted everyone in the inner circle to know it. A month after the general election she stayed away from No. 10 all week, and although the Prime Minister rang her many times she refused to answer the phone. ‘I’m getting him worried,’ she told Donoughue. ‘He knows I am up to all of his tricks. He will come out here and I will keep playing with him. He will suffer. He knows I’ve got his number.’ In May he awarded her a peerage, but if he hoped this would make her more ladylike he soon learned otherwise. While Wilson and Haines were writing a speech in the PM’s office at the House of Commons one evening, the woman who now gloried in the title Lady Falkender burst in and commanded him to escort her to a cocktail party in the House of Lords. Wilson pleaded that he was busy. ‘Don’t tell me that,’ she snapped. ‘You have got to come.’ Wilson obeyed, but after a while – seeing Marcia happily chatting to a group of peers – he sneaked back to the office to resume work. A few minutes later she stormed into the room.* ‘You little cunt! What do you think you are doing? You come back with me at once!’
Why did he put up with it?† And how could she be so sure that he always would? ‘She would lift her ever-present handbag,’ Haines recalled, ‘tap it with a hidden and unexplained significance – the clear implication being that it contained some awful, unknown, documented and earth-shattering revelation – and declare: “One call to the Daily Mail and he’ll be finished. I will destroy him.”’ One evening in the spring of 1974, when she heard that the Daily Express was about to reveal the identity of her children’s father (who was in fact the political editor of the Daily Express), she tried ringing Wilson at Downing Street only to be told that he couldn’t be reached. He was actually travelling to Oxford to speak at the Labour club, but she deduced that he was hiding from her and left a message at No. 10 threatening to ‘tell everything’. Soon after Donoughue got home that night, the Prime Minister rang from an Oxford phonebox and begged him to go round to Marcia’s house in Wyndham Mews without delay: ‘Pull the telephone wires out of the wall to stop her speaking to the press.’
What was in the handbag? Even now it is impossible to say for certain, but Joe Haines, who has pondered the mystery for more than thirty years, concludes that Harold and Marcia had a brief affair soon after she started working for him in the mid-1950s, and that she had kept some sort of indisputable evidence – an indiscreet letter, perhaps. Strangely enough, it was Wilson himself who first planted the idea, when he entered Haines’s room in a flustered state on the evening of 12 January 1972 to explain why he had just banned Marcia from coming into the office for the next six weeks. Harold had taken his wife, Mary, to lunch at a Soho restaurant to celebrate her birthday, but didn’t tell Marcia about it beforehand. ‘Marcia was incandescent,’ Haines writes. ‘Wilson was not allowed to go to any public engagement unless she, The Keeper of The Diary, was consulted in advance.’ Or any private engagement, apparently. On returning home from lunch, Mary had a call from Marcia: ‘I want to see you.’ Haines continues: ‘When his wife arrived at Wyndham Mews, Wilson told me, she was abruptly informed by Marcia: “I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.”’
Wilson assured Haines that Marcia’s allegation was a hysterical fantasy, but the force of the denial was blunted by what he said next: ‘Well, she has dropped her atomic bomb at last. She can’t hurt me any more.’ Only one explanation of this comment seems to make any sense: that he was acknowledging an affair. If this was the bomb, however, why did he imagine that it couldn’t hurt him any more? So long as he remained in politics it could explode at any time, instantly demolishing his career and reputation. It might even land him in jail for perjury: in the 1960s he had sued the International Herald Tribune, and won substantial libel damages, because it published a picture of him and Marcia under the headline ‘The Other Woman in Wilson’s Life’.
The daily dramas in Wilson’s kitchen cabinet were a Strindberg play punctuated with scenes from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Here’s a typical entry in Donoughue’s diary, from April 1974: ‘Then I went at [Wilson’s] suggestion to phone Marcia, who I have not talked to since Friday. She was crazy, incoherent, violent and abused me. Said that we were enjoying life at No. 10 and leaving her to be persecuted. She didn’t want sympathy from any of us … Implied threat that she would turn the press on us. She said, “There must be plenty in all your private lives that can be exposed.”’ A few weeks later she told Wilson that Donoughue was sleeping with the Downing Street cook. Untrue, but perhaps it was Marcia’s revenge for the whitebait. At that summer’s Trooping the Colour ceremony she persuaded the PM that Donoughue, Albert Murray and their wives shouldn’t be allowed to attend the drinks party afterwards. ‘Albert was sad and humiliated in front of his wife – this of course was the intention. This woman is trying to destroy Albert by public humiliation and to exercise her paranoia on me … I am saddened and humiliated to see a Labour prime minister reduced to conniving at all this. She drags him down, diverts his mind on to the paranoid trivia which obsess her.’
Harold Wilson was now whey-faced and weary, suffering from an apparently eternal cold and sipping brandy from midday until bedtime. During an official trip to Paris for a European summit in December 1974, he had a heart flutter just a few hours after being harangued over the phone by Marcia, who was demanding that he return to London at once to deal with her various grievances instead of dining with President Giscard d’Estaing. Wilson’s doctor, Joseph Stone, prescribed a week’s rest; Joe Haines told the press that the PM had gone down with ’flu.
Dr Stone knew all about Marcia’s neuroses – it was he who prescribed the tranquillisers that she kept in a locket worn around her neck, within easy reach whenever anxiety reached screaming pitch – and he feared that the hysterical mayhem she incited would soon kill the Prime Minister. He decided on a drastic remedy: kill Marcia instead. Dr Stone told Haines that he could ‘dispose’ of her in such a way that she would seem to have died from natural causes. If he signed the death certificate himself, no one would ever find out.
Much as he detested her, Haines recoiled from this solution to the Marcia problem:
Even supposing our consciences had allowed us to go along with her killing, which they would not, how would we have lived the rest of our lives, always in fear that one or other of the co-conspirators would break? Supposing there had been suspicions? After all, she was only 42 at the time. Wouldn’t the truth have put Watergate and every other post-war scandal into the shade, destroyed the Prime Minister, destroyed his government and, no small matter, destroyed us as well?
Undoubtedly. But the fact that a mild-mannered, well-liked man such as Dr Stone proposed murdering the Prime Minister’s political secretary reveals how contagious the paranoid fever in No. 10 had become. Only a few months earlier, ironically enough, Wilson himself had asked the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to assassinate another head of government, Uganda’s Idi Amin. ‘We don’t have anyone to do that kind of thing,’ the mandarins replied, and he had to drop the idea. During a Downing Street discussion about Amin, Donoughue suggested that his symptoms were those of a madman, with periods of calm followed by wild ravings. ‘I know,’ Wilson murmured. ‘I am surrounded by those symptoms.’
In the 1960s Harold Wilson had been the cheeky chappie, the agile fixer who thrived on crisis and had a witty riposte to every heckler, the national impresario who gave the Beatles their MBEs – ‘good old Mr Wilson’, as Paul McCartney called him. Not now: there was no more visionary rhetoric about a new society forged in the white heat of the technological revolution, no more jokes about how England’s footballers only ever win the World Cup under Labour. The miners’ strike was settled swiftly, the lights went back on, but civic chaos and cataclysmic foreboding couldn’t be dispelled so easily. In the summer of 1974 the Cabinet Office prepared a script to be read on the radio if nuclear war broke out, instructing the populace to stay at home, turn off fuel supplies and ration food to last fourteen days. ‘This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons,’ it began. ‘Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known.’ In a note accompanying the script, a senior Whitehall official advised that it should be delivered by a BBC newsreader whose voice the public would recognise: ‘If an unfamiliar voice repeats the same announcement hour after hour for 12 hours, listeners may begin to suspect that they are listening to a machine set to switch on every hour … and that perhaps after all the BBC has been obliterated.’ But another potential problem went unmentioned: anyone half-listening to this talk of disruption, food rationing, water shortages and unknown numbers of casualties might easily mistake it for one of the daily news bulletins about industrial strife and IRA atrocities.*
Life was one damned crisis after another.† A general strike by Protestant workers in Ulster toppled the province’s power-sharing executive; the Provisional IRA killed twenty-two people by bombing pubs in Guildford and Birmingham; at the end of 1974 inflation reached a post-war record of 20 per cent. Pay rises were even higher – 28 per cent for civil servants, 32 per cent for teachers. Wilson’s much-vaunted Social Contract, designed to moderate prices and wage demands, was already in tatters. ‘From abroad I was able to see England a little clearer,’ Donoughue wrote on his return from a holiday in France. ‘It looked in a terrible mess. Falling apart socially as well as economically.’
Six days before Christmas 1974, the PM’s economic guru Lord Balogh sent him a memo written by an unnamed minister of state which predicted that a ‘wholesale domestic liquidation’ – the collapse of every British business – could be triggered by the bankruptcy of a leading company. ‘The magnitude of this threat is quite incalculable. The collapses which have occurred up till now, and even those which have been prevented, can really be likened to the tip of an iceberg.’ If inflation continued its acceleration, Balogh’s anonymous minister added, ‘a deep constitutional crisis can no longer be treated as fanciful speculation’.
Wilson, the man who used to thrive on crisis, couldn’t stomach it any more. When Secretary of State for Industry Tony Benn submitted a four-page document setting out his economic proposals – import controls, cuts in defence spending, selective help to industry – the Prime Minister scribbled across the first page in red felt-tip: ‘I haven’t read, don’t propose to, but I disagree with it. HW.’ As he confessed privately: ‘When old problems recur, I reach for old solutions. I have nothing new to offer.’ Nothing, that is, apart from occasional desperate pleas for wage restraint: ‘What the government is asking for the year ahead, what the government has the right to ask, the duty to ask, is not a year for self, but a year for Britain.’ Unable to confront problems of such magnitude he took refuge in trifles, asking the Cabinet to dream up popular ideas that would cost the government nothing, such as saving the British pint of beer from European metrication or standardising food packaging to make shopping easier – a project he called ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’.
It was a fitting motto for a man who now detected a hurricane in every passing breeze while dismissing monsoons as scattered showers. ‘We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds,’ the philosopher David Hume wrote in his Natural History of Religion. ‘All human life, especially before the institution of order and good government, being subject to fortuitous accidents, it is natural that superstition should prevail everywhere in barbarous ages, and put men on the most earnest inquiry concerning those invisible powers who dispose of their happiness or misery.’ Harold Wilson to the life: he saw invisible powers everywhere. Marcia half-persuaded him that an army exercise involving tanks at Heathrow airport was the start of a military coup. Finding a small metal plate screwed to the wall behind a portrait of Gladstone in the Cabinet room, he called in the head of MI5 and accused him of planting a bug in No. 10. It turned out to be the remnant of an old light fitting.
Any damaging newspaper story betokened a fiendish new conspiracy, rather than the traditional everyday business of the Tory press when a Labour government is in office. ‘Watergate!’ Bernard Donoughue exclaimed on 10 April 1974, when Wilson mentioned that his tax return was ‘missing – possibly stolen’. Joe Haines, who knew the PM far better than Donoughue did, had a simpler explanation: Wilson usually put personal documents and letters in a heap on the desk at his home in Lord North Street, and when the pile became too big he would glance through them and throw most into the wastepaper basket. ‘I hadn’t any doubt,’ Haines concluded, ‘that the missing tax papers had suffered that fate.’
Nevertheless, just as every moon had a man’s face in it, so every petty larceny was the crime of the century. ‘I have been burgled,’ Donoughue wrote on 28 October 1974. ‘It looks like a mini-Watergate.’ When some of Wilson’s old boxes were stolen from a lock-up in Buckingham Palace Road, Marcia summoned one of the most senior officers in Special Branch to investigate the theft of ‘very valuable papers’. Haines pointed out that most were copies of old speeches which he couldn’t even give away when they were new, but wisely avoided mentioning a similar burglary a few years earlier. While Labour was in opposition in the early 1970s, Marcia once refused to hand over a box of private papers that Wilson wanted. ‘He came into the office in triumph one Monday morning,’ Haines recalled, ‘telling me that he and Tony Field [Marcia’s brother] had broken into Marcia’s garage at the weekend and recovered the box and his documents.’ Haines’s immediate thought at the time, as Wilson’s press officer, was how on earth he could have spun the story if a passing policeman had caught the leader of the Labour Party breaking into the home of his political and personal secretary, aided and abetted by her own brother.
By 1974, the Watergate drama and its innumerable sub-plots had confirmed that apparently incredible allegations against senior politicians or government agencies – burglary, blackmail, phone-tapping, even conspiracies to murder their enemies – could sometimes be true. The lesson was not lost on Tony Benn, the new Secretary of State for Industry, who had always worked on the assumption that everyone was out to get him and now found himself living in an era when he might very well be right. An entry from Benn’s diary that September, just after Wilson called a general election in the hope of securing a parliamentary majority, reveals one of the many wild surmises now whirling in his mind:
Ken Coates [founder of the left-wing Institute for Workers’ Control] rang to say he was launching some sort of an appeal to Labour leaders about the CIA intervention against Allende in Chile. Of course, everyone is just a little bit anxious about whether this might be going to happen in Britain as well, particularly with the big international companies’ interests in operations here. Martha Mitchell, the wife of John Mitchell, US attorney-general, said on a television interview tonight that she thought Nixon had instructed or – at least – approved the attempt to kill Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Caroline [Benn’s wife] made the point that Nixon might be polished off because he knows too much. This is the general atmosphere of politics at the moment.
The other consideration is the extent to which the CIA might engineer a run on the pound or provoke some crisis during the election. If that were to happen, then the whole situation could go bad in a very big way … I just don’t think this is going to be an ordinary election. I think something very big is going to blow up on us.
The general election, which won Labour a small overall majority, passed off without a big bang from the CIA or anyone else; but there were many strange whispers, most of them inaudible to the electorate. One persistent rumour was that the Daily Mail had a damaging story ready for publication during the campaign. No one knew what it was – something about Harold Wilson’s finances, perhaps, or about Marcia Williams’s love life – but this formless menace was enough to provoke another fit of the vapours at No. 10. ‘Marcia has completely collapsed since hearing about the smear intentions of the Daily Mail,’ Donoughue wrote. ‘Trembling, afraid, taking sedatives and showing little interest in the campaign or the speeches … She wanted HW to get the newspaper unions to strike and stop the Mail from coming out.’ Sure enough, later that day the Mail’s proofreaders walked out, and its switchboard received several bomb threats. The general secretary of the newspaper union Natsopa warned that his members would stop the presses if necessary. To forestall any more disruption the Mail published a bizarre ‘open letter’ to the Prime Minister, denying that it had any intention of smearing him. For Wilson and his aides, the fact that it printed this on the front page confirmed their suspicion that the paper had planned to fill the space with something scandalous about himself or Marcia until its sudden loss of nerve. (As Donoughue noticed, the open letter ‘was very long and repetitive, clearly written hastily at the last moment’.) In a speech at Portsmouth, the PM told Labour supporters that Fleet Street was dispatching ‘cohorts of distinguished journalists’ around the country with a mandate to find anything – ‘true or fabricated’ – for use against the party.
At the last Cabinet meeting before the election campaign, Benn recorded, ‘there was some discussion about smears, and Barbara Castle said that she had heard that the Sunday Times was going to reveal that Ted Short [deputy leader of the Labour Party] owned six houses; and Harold said that there was a rumour that his income tax returns had been photocopied, and so on’. That ‘and so on’ speaks volumes: the isle was full of noises. Three months earlier, several newspapers had received a photocopy of a financial statement which appeared to show that Ted Short had 163,000 francs (about £23,000) in a Swiss bank account. This was a forgery, as they quickly established. The Daily Express’s veteran spook-watcher Chapman Pincher guessed that it was ‘a KGB-inspired device to bring down the British government’; the intelligence expert Rupert Allason, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Nigel West’, initially attributed it to right-wing mischief-makers in MI5 but later blamed the Socialist Workers Party. Harold Wilson described the forgery as ‘a characteristic product of the Dirty Tricks Department’ without saying whether the department was a subdivision of the Comintern, the Security Service, the Socialist Workers or the Conservative Party. But whoever it was had done Wilson a favour: there were now so many strange documents arriving anonymously in Fleet Street newsrooms that editors became wary. On 9 October, the eve of polling day, a cashier from the London branch of the International Credit Bank of Geneva offered the Evening Standard a story which would ‘blow the election open’: Harold Wilson had £1,500 secretly stashed away in an account there. This sounded too good to be true, since the Prime Minister had often railed against Swiss bankers (‘the gnomes of Zürich’), and for that reason the Standard’s editor refused to investigate. Yet the story was true: the money had been donated to Wilson several years earlier, as a contribution to the costs of his private office, by the bank’s managing director. It was deposited in an account at the ICB and then forgotten about.
Bob Edwards, the Labour-supporting editor of the Sunday Mirror, heard a rumour that Tony Benn was smoking cannabis and participating in orgies at Bickenhall Mansions, a large block of flats in the West End. Although Edwards knew this was nonsense – whoever concocted the tale couldn’t have chosen a less likely orgiast than the ascetic, teetotal and devotedly uxorious Benn – he thought he should mention it to Joe Haines, who thought he should mention it to Wilson. Thus it was that the Prime Minister rang his Secretary of State for Industry during the election campaign to enquire if he had ever enjoyed drug-fuelled evenings of sexual debauchery at Bickenhall Mansions.* Benn ‘thought nothing of it’: so many weird tales were circulating that all he could do was shrug, log them in his diary and wonder what new gothic horror tomorrow would bring. A few months later, while he was talking to a political adviser on the telephone, his son Josh heard the conversation on his transistor radio upstairs. ‘Obviously there is a transmitter bug in my room,’ Benn deduced, with no surprise, ‘whether put here by the CIA, by MI5, by the Post Office or the KGB, I don’t know.’ As the most left-wing member of the Cabinet he might have assumed that all his enemies were on the Right, but experience taught him otherwise. There were death threats from ‘Red Flag 74’, which claimed to be a breakaway faction from the International Marxist Group, and from the Defenders of Free Enterprise, a vigilante group of right-wing businessmen who had supposedly raised £20,000 to hire an assassin from America. ‘We regret that your husband is going to be killed and that you will be a widow, but it is in the public interest,’ they wrote to Caroline Benn. As usual, her husband could only shrug. ‘I don’t take much notice of death threats,’ he said, when an anonymous correspondent warned him that he had seven weeks to live. ‘I think because nobody has been murdered in the Palace of Westminster since Spencer Perceval, in 1806. But you never know …’
You never do, as Benn discovered a few months later. On 1 July 1975, a young hippy named Barry Woodhams was in his girlfriend’s London flat, reading the Guardian, when he noticed a brief report that French police were looking for a terrorist known as ‘Carlos’, who had killed two counter-espionage agents and a Lebanese informer in Paris. He wondered if this could be the same Carlos, a friend of Woodhams’s Spanish girlfriend, who had left a black holdall in the flat the previous month before departing for Paris ‘on business’. Surely not: his Carlos was a chubby playboy who claimed to be a Venezuelan economist. ‘He was a little bit shorter than me,’ Woodhams recalled. ‘I’m 5ft 11ins and he was of a much heavier build. It used to embarrass him. I once called him “fatty”. We weighed ourselves on the scales in my kitchen and he was 85kgs to my 82kgs. He was a bit vain about his looks and very shocked to find he was heavier than me.’ In their discussions, Woodhams had found him to be left-wing but not particularly militant. Carlos said that the trouble with the extreme Left in Britain was that it was disorganised, while the Right had a more businesslike style. Even so …
Woodhams noticed a sickly smell coming from the case as he broke its lock with a pair of scissors. It contained a packet of deteriorating gelignite sticks, three pistols with ammunition, three Mills-type hand grenades and several rubber coshes. He also found what appeared to be a hit list, with the home addresses of the Tory politicians Sir Keith Joseph and Ted Heath, the disc jockey David Jacobs, the singer Vera Lynn, the playwright John Osborne, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin – and the Rt Hon. Tony Benn MP.
As a hippy Woodhams was reluctant to trust the police, so he rang the Guardian, which sent its reporter Peter Niesewand to Bayswater. In his exclusive report the next morning, Niesewand noted that the holdall had been stashed in the living room, ‘behind a bookcase containing the Frederick Forsyth novel The Day of the Jackal’. Thus was ‘Carlos the Jackal’ born. By the time he led an attack on the meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna in December 1975 – seizing hostages while signing autographs and posing in his leather jacket for the TV cameras – this nom de guerre was in headlines around the world, enhancing the myth and mystique of a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel. He made his fictional debut soon afterwards, as the world’s most dangerous assassin, in Robert Ludlum’s novel The Bourne Identity (Ludlum had him shooting John F. Kennedy in 1963 – no mean feat, given that the real Carlos was born in 1949 and was still a schoolboy in Caracas at the time of the assassination), and over the next few years he transformed terrorism into a PR-savvy multinational conglomerate encompassing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Colonel Gaddafi, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany and many other revolutionary groups. And he’s still at it: in 2003, from a prison cell in Paris, he published a book in French announcing his conversion to Islam and presenting his strategy for ‘the destruction of the United States through an orchestrated and persistent campaign of terror’. He urged ‘all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists’, to accept the leadership of Osama bin Laden and so turn Afghanistan and Iraq into the ‘graveyards of American imperialism’.
Il ne regrette rien – well, almost rien. ‘The “Carlos myth” is a media fabrication,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘It had an unexpected side-effect in that I could manipulate my newly acquired fame to further the aims of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and for world revolution.’ Yet still the nickname annoyed him. When he was arrested at last, in 1995, he sent a belated complaint to the Guardian. ‘The Day of the Jackal is an excellent action novel,’ he wrote. ‘The Guardian had been my daily since 1966. It bothered me – its falling to the level of the gutter press in such a serious matter … Jackals are cute fox-eared predators which hunt in large family groups. I have observed them in the wild.’ Why would a not-so-cute Carlos the Jackal wish to murder Tony Benn? It is a question he has never answered.
* Here, for example, is Margaret Thatcher’s happy recollection of a party at a friend’s house in Kent just before Christmas 1973: ‘There was a power cut and so night lights had been put in jam jars to guide people up the steps. There was a touch of wartime spirit about it all. The businessmen there were of one mind: “Stand up to them. Fight it out. See them off. We can’t go on like this.” It was all very heartening.’ In a 1973 episode of the sitcom Are You Being Served?, when a transport strike obliged the staff of Grace Brothers to sleep in their department store, how did they spend the evening? Singing wartime songs and recalling the Blitz, of course.
* George Orwell made much the same point rather more concisely when he said that although the Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, all subsequent battles have been lost there. Did Orwell know, I sometimes wonder, that in 1859 a correspondent in The Times blamed the British army’s poor performance in the Crimea on deficiencies in the cricket system at Eton? I also wonder if he’d come across this 1915 poem by E.W. Hornung, the creator of Raffles: ‘No Lord’s this year:/no silken lawn on which/A dignified and dainty throng meanders./The schools take guard upon a fiercer pitch/Somewhere in Flanders./Bigger the cricket here: yet some who tried/In vain to earn a colour while at Eton/Have found a place upon an England side/That can’t be beaten.’
* According to Haines, Marcia never glided or walked or stepped into a room: ‘She always came and went in a blaze of sparks, like a plane landing with its undercarriage up.’
† The BBC interviewer Robin Day put this very question to Joe Haines on Panorama in February 1977. ‘I don’t know,’ Haines replied. ‘I am not a psychiatrist.’
* While in Paris for the EEC summit in December 1974, Donoughue bought four kilos of sugar ‘as stock against the threat of rationing at home’.
† From David Peace’s novel 1974: ‘I … switched on the radio: the IRA had blown up Harrods, Mr Heath had missed a bomb by minutes, Aston Martin was going bust.’
* Even fiction has consequences. Marcia Williams’s sister, Peggy Field, had her handbag stolen soon afterwards; Marcia was then rung by a man who had found the bag and said she could collect it from his flat in Bickenhall Mansions. Suspecting a plot to entice herself and Peggy into one of those famous orgies, Marcia alerted Special Branch. A swarm of detectives descended on the apartment block, only to discover that the poor chap really had found the handbag – empty except for a scrap of paper with Marcia’s name and phone number – and wished to do the decent thing.