The whole world is whirling … I actually feel physically ill.
Diary entry by Tony Benn MP, 26 October 1976
On 21 November 1974, a month after the British general election, the Labour MP John Stonehouse vanished in Miami, at the end of an unsuccessful quest to find American investors for his floundering business, the London Capital Group. The discovery of his clothes in a bathing hut near the beach implied that he had drowned himself, but other theories were soon aired.
‘The John Stonehouse drowning is a bit mysterious,’ Tony Benn wrote, after noticing in Hansard that the last parliamentary question tabled by the MP was a request for statistics on deaths by drowning. ‘It was a most extraordinary coincidence – or else very mysterious. People don’t believe he’s dead. They think that with the financial trouble that he’s in, he’s just disappeared.’ Ever more rococo allegations surfaced daily: that he worked for the CIA, that he had been questioned by the British security service. ‘Terrible though it is,’ said his former parliamentary private secretary, Bill Molloy, ‘I believe it is on the cards that he has been destroyed by the mafia.’ On 17 December the Prime Minister told the House of Commons that MI5 had investigated Stonehouse in 1969 because an Eastern European defector named him as one of several Labour Members who received secret stipends from the Czech intelligence service. Wilson added, however, that there wasn’t ‘a scintilla of evidence’. The man himself rose from the dead a week later, when Australian police arrested one Donald Clive Mildoon at an apartment in Melbourne. They had been watching Mildoon for a week, ever since a neighbour reported her suspicions about the furtive Englishman who had moved in. ‘When we first started following you we thought you were the Earl of Lucan,’ Det. Sgt John Coffey told Stonehouse. ‘You were such an English gentleman and we knew Lucan was missing in England and wanted as a murder suspect.’ Lucan had disappeared on 7 November after attacking his wife and murdering his children’s nanny at their Belgravia home; he told a friend that he planned to ‘lie doggo for a bit’.
According to Stonehouse, his disappearance was triggered by a vague but overwhelming sense of existential exhaustion – a yearning to flee from ‘the pressures and tensions and miasma of disillusionment all round me’, as he wrote in his memoir, Death of an Idealist. This syndrome became known in Britain as ‘doing a Reggie Perrin’ after the hero of the TV comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, who fakes a suicide – leaving his clothes on a beach, like Stonehouse – to escape the treadmill of suburban commuting and cheese-and-wine parties. As recently as December 2007, a man who reappeared five years after he had supposedly drowned while canoeing in the North Sea was unanimously dubbed a ‘real-life Reggie Perrin’ by Fleet Street. ‘The disappearing canoeist has highlighted the growing phenomenon of “pseudocide” or “doing a Reggie Perrin” – faking your own death to avoid debt or unhappiness, or simply to start anew,’ the Financial Times commented. ‘Such stories have long caught the imagination, but the urge to escape seems to have increased in the age of surveillance cameras, traceable credit-card transactions and mobile phones.’ But, of course, all this electronic tagging makes the urge much harder to satisfy. Although the canoeist’s wife said that she had believed him dead right up until the moment he walked into a British police station, her story crumbled almost instantly when someone noticed a photo on the website of a Central American estate agent: it showed the couple celebrating the purchase of an apartment in Panama City a year or so earlier. As the film critic Joe Queenan has pointed out, most classic movies simply wouldn’t work if they were made today. Take Psycho: Janet Leigh’s sat-nav would prevent her taking that fateful wrong turn off the interstate, and as soon as she Googled ‘Bates Motel’ the users’ comments on Expedia or Travelocity would dissuade her from checking in at Anthony Perkins’s creepy guest-house. Hence the appeal to present-day authors and film-makers of the Seventies, the last pre-digital decade. Why was the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, released in 2007, set in the late 1970s? Let Queenan explain: ‘No mobile phones. No Internet. No Google. No easy access to phone records, maps, personal histories, criminal records. No way to track the killer merely by pinpointing the last phone tower that handled his call. No easy way in; no easy way out.’
When trying to explain The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in 2007 for the benefit of readers under the age of forty, some newspapers said that Perrin was inspired by Stonehouse, others that Stonehouse copied Perrin. They were all wrong. David Nobbs wrote his novel The Death of Reginald Perrin, from which the programmes were adapted, in 1974; by the time of its publication in 1975, the MP had already performed his brief vanishing act. (The TV version started the following year.) Neither could have influenced the other.* It is an understandable mistake, however, given the swirling convergence of fact and fiction at the time. Harold Wilson’s capacity for fantasy earned him the nickname ‘the Yorkshire Walter Mitty’, but he preferred to see himself as a Yorkshire Hercule Poirot. ‘This is Agatha Christie,’ he told a colleague in 1974, when the press obtained a forged letter falsely implicating him in a speculative land deal in Wigan. ‘We are at the last but one chapter. It still could be any one of five who did the forgery. So … who did it? Tell me your scenario. How will the chapter finish?’ In January 1975, Wilson was discussing the possibility of Arab terrorists seizing a plane at Heathrow. ‘PM was very excited and full of plans to trick and capture the hijacker,’ Donoughue noted.
A welcome escape, no doubt, from the seemingly insoluble mystery of how to prevent the murder of the British economy. Having committed himself to full employment, price subsidies and an extension of the welfare system, Wilson duly pushed up public spending – but at a time when the economy was actually shrinking, still battered by the consequences of the oil-price hike. A new word entered public discourse – ‘stagflation’, the lethal and unprecedented combination of rampant inflation and zero growth. Sir Leo Pliatzky, Second Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, described Labour’s first eighteen months in office as ‘a period of collective madness’.
Even ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary, found it hard to keep smiling. ‘The country expects both full employment and an end to inflation,’ he told a ministerial seminar at Chequers in the winter of 1974. ‘We cannot have both unless people restrain their demands. If the TUC guidelines [on pay] are not observed, we shall end up with wage controls once more and even a breakdown of democracy. Sometimes when I go to bed at night, I think that if I were a young man I would emigrate.’ He later claimed that the last comment was a joke, but how could anyone have guessed? Many people had the same thought. ‘Britain is a miserable sight,’ Bernard Donoughue wrote in his diary. ‘It is time to go and cultivate our gardens, share love with our families, and leave the rest to fester. And if it gets intolerable – because fascism could breed in this unhealthy climate – to emigrate if need be. For the first time in my life I have contemplated – and discussed with Carol [his wife] – the possibility of going to live in France or America.’ Dining with Margaret Thatcher after she ousted Ted Heath as leader of the Conservative Party, Kingsley Amis was startled to learn that she had been searching the atlas for sanctuaries to which she could dispatch her twins, then in their early twenties. ‘People have always said that the next election is going to be crucial,’ she said. ‘But this one really will be, and if it doesn’t go the way Denis and I want then we’ll stay, because we’ll always stay, but we’ll work very hard with the children to set them up with careers in Canada.’* The narrator of John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin (1977), an English expat in California, described England in the Seventies as ‘a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo’.
Fowles prefaced his book with a line from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks which could serve as the epigraph for Britain in the mid-Seventies: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.’ When Harold Wilson moved into Downing Street in March 1974 many of these symptoms could be explained away as merely the local prognostics of a global malaise, but by the spring of 1975 no such consolation was available. ‘This time last year, all the Western nations were suffering,’ Margaret Thatcher reminded the Scottish Conservative conference in May. ‘We seemed to be in much the same straits as our friends and competitors overseas. The country with the big problem then was Italy. The Press was full of gloomy reports about the imminent economic crisis. The commentators asked patronisingly whether Italian democracy would survive much longer.’ But where did Britain stand now? While inflation was falling in other advanced countries, even Italy, in the UK its ascent had actually accelerated – 20 per cent higher than the American rate, and the highest in the European Community. Sterling was the weakest of the major world currencies. The unemployment total would soon reach a million. The British economy depended entirely on massive borrowing from abroad. In short, Thatcher said, ‘we have changed places with Italy’.
What indicated a specifically British disease wasn’t so much the number of morbid symptoms as their variety: it was as if the patient had been struck down by rickets, malaria, whooping cough and the blind staggers all at once. Strikes and sterling crises, bomb threats and barricades, even the disappearance of John Stonehouse into a ‘miasma of disillusionment’ – all seemed to signify a compound affliction that was destroying the body politic’s immune system. Like Americans who spoke of ‘Them’ as a shorthand for unseen enemies and conspirators, Britons often resorted to an indefinite article as the only available epithet for a contagion with no precise definition. ‘It was, without doubt, the New Year of It,’ the Guardian columnist Peter Preston wrote on 8 January 1975:
Every party attended, when not preoccupied with plonk, did nothing but discuss It. It came from outer space. It happened one night. The Incredible Stinking It.
It? Civilisation’s collapse. Mankind’s nemesis. Weimar all over again. Democracy’s death. A special message from Harold Wilson. The holocaust, the pit, the cataclysm. What will It be like?
There is, of course, still a small body of partygoers who maintain It may never happen.
That small body was shrinking fast. Even the panglossian Ronald McIntosh of the National Economic Development Council began to notice the ubiquity of It. ‘This afternoon the Swiss ambassador came to see me to find out what I thought of our national prospects,’ he wrote in his diary on 12 March 1975. ‘He is an agreeable man and an anglophile but he does not see how we can get through our difficulties successfully. I spoke in mildly optimistic vein …’ Three days later, however, McIntosh picked up his newspaper and all that optimism dissolved: ‘The two main headlines in The Times this morning are “Militant consultants threaten to close NHS hospitals” and “Troops to move into Glasgow tomorrow”. This really does look like a collapsing society.’
Once again, as during Ted Heath’s power cuts and three-day weeks, foreign reporters followed the scent of political and economic putrefaction. ‘Goodbye, Great Britain,’ a Wall Street Journal editorial concluded. ‘It was nice knowing you.’ A few days later, on the CBS evening news of 6 May, the American commentator Eric Sevareid administered the last rites to British democracy:
It is not merely that her military strength is ebbing and her economic strength weakening but that Britain is drifting slowly toward a condition of ungovernability. It is now a debatable question whether Parliament or the great trade unions are calling the political tune. The country, as one English writer puts it, is sleepwalking into a social revolution, one its majority clearly does not want but does not know how to stop. As a rough analogy, Wilson’s government is at the stage of Allende’s Chilean government when a minority tried to force a profound transformation of society upon the majority – not that the backlash in Britain need be militaristic, but some kind of backlash is building up, with no certain policy and no certain leader.
Sevareid’s commentary was front-page news in Britain. Applauding the honesty of his ‘grave diagnosis’, The Times announced that British prestige in the world had not stood so low since Charles II was the pensioner of Louis XIV. ‘It is now most unlikely that anything effective can be done before some great actual crisis forces a complete change,’ it argued. ‘We need nothing less than a revolution in the spirit of the nation if we are to preserve the historic values of the nation.’ That revolution could be achieved only by the immediate formation of a new government, a coalition of national unity. There would be no room in it for Harold Wilson or Tony Benn, nor for the new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, who was too divisive. ‘When the crisis comes it will only be surmounted by those whom the whole nation will accept’ – by which The Times meant one-nation Tories such as Ted Heath, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, plus those social democrats in Wilson’s government who share ‘the common sense of the British people … Mrs Shirley Williams, Mr Denis Healey, Mr Harold Lever, Mr James Callaghan, Mr Reg Prentice, Mr Anthony Crosland and Mr Roy Jenkins’.
How on earth could these old lags be disguised as fresh faces? Weren’t they the very people who had got us into this mess? ‘Top people read The Times’, the paper’s old advertising slogan boasted, but few of the top people in boardrooms looked to Shirley Williams as a latter-day Joan of Arc. Soggy centrist politicians were the disease, not the cure. What the country needed, and now quite urgently, was a ‘businessman’s government’ led by – well, by businessmen such as themselves, along with a retired army general to impose order and discipline. The general they had in mind was Sir Walter Walker, a former commander-in-chief of Nato’s Allied Forces Command who regarded Harold Wilson as a ‘proven Communist’. Since the previous year he had been trying to enlist recruits for Civil Assistance, often referred to in the press as Walker’s ‘private army’ despite his insistence that it was merely a group of civilian volunteers who would keep essential services going during a national emergency. After a brief flurry of public interest in the summer of 1974 Civil Assistance disappeared from view, but only because Walker decided that private chats with grandees and money-men might be rather more productive than appeals for mass support in the correspondence columns of the Daily Telegraph, which had been his previous tactic. Sir Julian Tennant, the chairman of C. Tennant and Sons Ltd, hosted a City lunch in his honour in April 1975, a few weeks before the Eric Sevareid broadcast, at which the general was introduced to representatives of Consolidated Goldfields, Anglo-Eastern Bank, Lazard Brothers, M&G Unit Trusts, Cazenove and Cater Ryder & Co. The only politician present, the dry-as-dust right-winger Nicholas Ridley MP, was ‘talking in riddles’, according to Walker’s account. ‘It seemed to me that what he was trying to convey, but hadn’t the guts to say openly, was that the only hope for this country would be a military coup.’
Another lunch on 1 May, at which Walker expounded his thoughts on subversion and salvation to the directors of British & Commonwealth Shipping, elicited a cheque for £10,000 and a grateful letter from the company chairman, Lord Cayzer. ‘I see the army, the police and such a body as Civil Assistance standing between the wreckers and the vast majority of the people of this country who want to live in peace and who are reasonable people,’ Cayzer wrote. ‘The Conservative Party will have to rewrite its policy. Too long it has been a pale shadow of Socialism, and I am afraid expedience has always been the rule of the day rather than principle.’
Margaret Thatcher and her intellectual mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, had just begun that cultural revolution, denouncing all previous Tory governments in their lifetime (even those in which they had both served) as paper tigers. The City reactionaries were impressed.* However, Labour had been re-elected only the previous October, and there might not be another general election until 1979. Could the country survive another four years? Even Mrs Thatcher’s devoted acolyte Nicholas Ridley feared that it couldn’t.
Here again, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is as good a guide as any to the feverish forebodings that seized these apprehensive patriots. In one episode Reggie is astonished to find that his clod-hopping brother-in-law, Jimmy – a man incapable of organising a picnic lunch (‘Whoops, sorry, bit of a cock-up on the catering front’) let alone a military coup – keeps a small arsenal of rifles in a chest under his bed. ‘For when the balloon goes up,’ he explains, inviting Reggie to join his private army. ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ Reggie sniggers, ‘who are you going to fight against when this balloon of yours goes up?’ Poor dim Jimmy takes this as a serious enquiry. ‘Forces of anarchy,’ he begins, ‘wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby-pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists, foreign surgeons, headshrinkers who ought to be locked up, Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue-sniffers, “Play For Today”, squatters, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, Up Jenkins, up everybody’s, Chinese restaurants – why do you think Windsor Castle is ringed with Chinese restaurants?’ It’s a fair picture of the teeming cast of ghouls who invaded the nightmares of right-wing army officers and businessmen in the mid-1970s. ‘All over the country,’ Margaret Drabble wrote in her novel The Ice Age (1977), ‘people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong – the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody: only a few were stunned into honourable silence.’
Sir Val Duncan knew whose fault it was, and what should be done. As the chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ) he had transformed a two-bit Spanish mining company into a multinational conglomerate, and he was not going to have his plump and prosperous child shoved back into penurious obscurity by whey-faced politicians who were too stupid or timid to confront the neo-Trotskyists and short-haired weirdos. In May 1975, a few days after Eric Sevareid’s broadcast, he hosted a dinner at his company’s London flat in Carlton House Terrace. An invitation was sent to Harold Evans, the editor of the Sunday Times, but the prospect of an evening with boring right-wing industrialists was more than he could bear, so he passed it to his colleague Bruce Page, a brilliant Australian expat who had led the paper’s investigation into the Thalidomide scandal. Page, a man of insatiable curiosity, agreed to go in Evans’s place and report back. On arrival he was introduced to a cabal of squiffy businessmen, including Lord Robens and Hector Laing; also present were the more familiar figures of Bill Deedes, the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Mike Molloy, assistant editor of the Daily Mirror, and Peter Hardiman Scott, the man in charge of the BBC’s political coverage. A couple of old soldiers who had served under Field Marshal Montgomery completed the party.
‘The country is in trouble – it’s time to tighten our belts,’ Sir Val announced, even as his guests loosened their own belts to accommodate the vast platters of food and gallons of fine wine being served by liveried waiters. ‘What we need is a coalition, a government of national unity.’ Mike Molloy pointed out that anyone who knew the first thing about politics should be aware that the Labour government was itself a coalition, but Sir Val ignored him. ‘When anarchy comes,’ he told the journalists, ‘we are going to provide a lot of essential generators to keep electricity going, and we invited you, the editors, to tell us if you can maintain communications to the people. Then the army will play its proper role.’ Hardiman Scott promised to ‘do his part’; Bill Deedes murmured that it was all ‘most interesting’. Like so many conspirators of the time who spoke of the need for competent administration, however, Sir Val was laughably incompetent: two of his chosen propagandists, Page and Molloy, were supporters of the party whose government he proposed to overthrow. They made their excuses and left. At the Sunday Times office the next day, Page gave Harold Evans a summary of Duncan’s treasonous tirade. ‘I said to Harry this is all a bit ridiculous. He said keep an eye on it. But we couldn’t do much at the time. Apart from anything else, they were all obviously drunk.’ The only public allusion to Sir Val’s plan was a tiny item in the Daily Telegraph a few days later, planted by Deedes, noting cryptically that ‘as well as supplying uranium, copper and other metals, Rio Tinto Zinc is also in a position to furnish a coalition government should one be required’.
Actually, a coalition was not required. What most of these schemers wanted was a junta on the South American model, minus the jackboots and thuggery. The managing director of the Cunard shipping line, John Mitchell, told Harold Wilson that he had been asked by ‘army and secret service people’ to lend them the QE2 as a floating prison for the Cabinet. Cecil King, the deranged former proprietor of the Daily Mirror, toddled down to the officer training school at Sandhurst and urged the top brass to march on Downing Street. ‘I had no doubt,’ said one of those present, the military historian John Keegan, ‘that I was listening to a treasonable attempt to suborn the loyalty of the Queen’s officers.’ Tony Benn learned from the commander of the National Defence College, Major-General Bate, that ‘there was a movement called PFP – [Prince] Philip for President. The Paras were supposed to be involved, and some movement of troops in Northern Ireland was contemplated.’
Conservatives in Europe and the US who had applauded the Chilean coup of 1973 watched with even greater admiration as General Pinochet gave his country a course of economic ‘shock treatment’ prescribed by the Chicago economist Milton Friedman as the cure for hyper-inflation – deregulation, privatisation, cuts in tax and in social spending. It was what Margaret Thatcher later applied to the UK, and even before her election to the Tory leadership in 1975 some proto-Thatcherites decided that this was the remedy for the British disease: an unfettered free market combined with an authoritarian government, though preferably without the other shock treatment that Pinochet’s henchmen meted out in their torture chambers. Brian Crozier, a right-wing British trouble-shooter financed by the CIA, became a regular visitor to Chile, where he drafted a new constitution for Pinochet after the coup, and to the military regimes in Uruguay and Argentina. ‘In all three countries,’ he claimed, ‘my main concern, when addressing the armed forces or advising the security services, was to advocate the use of some of the non-violent, psychological techniques with which we had been experimenting in Europe.’ When not bestowing the gift of European psychological techniques to Latin America, back in Britain he gave military audiences the lesson they should learn from the Southern Cone:* that the raison d’être of the armed forces was to defend the nation against its enemies – both external and internal, including pusillanimous politicians. Crozier boasts that ‘during this critical period of 1975–8, I was invited several times, by different Army establishments, to lecture on current problems. These invitations were not, to my knowledge, concerted. But the fact that they came from different places during that period did suggest some kind of malaise within our armed forces.’ After a lecture to the Staff College at Camberley on the ‘possible need for intervention by the army’, Crozier had an eye-opening letter from the Commandant, General Sir Hugh Beach. ‘Action which armed forces might be justified in taking, in certain circumstances, is in the forefront of my mind at the moment,’ Beach revealed, ‘and I do hope we may have the chance of carrying the debate a stage further.’ Crozier was gratified by this apparent confirmation that ‘the possibility of military intervention to save the threatened realm was not a fantasy’. There’s another interpretation which seems not to have occurred to him: that it was a fantasy, but one which he and many other despairing Englishmen of a certain age and attitude found so consoling that they clung to it rather as one sometimes clings to a dream on waking, reluctant to be parted from the delicious delusion. How else could they endure the ghastly daylit reality of ‘the threatened realm’?
For the danger of a Soviet-ruled Britain was real and present, of that they were certain; and all the more menacing because so many people refused to acknowledge it. ‘The ancient King of Persia, Mithridates the Great, had so conditioned himself to resist poison that his attempted suicide failed and he had to order a soldier to kill him,’ Crozier wrote in his introduction to ‘We Will Bury You’: A Study of Left-Wing Subversion Today (1970). ‘We might well envy such inurement. For with ideological toxins the process appears to work in reverse: the more one is subjected to them, the less resistant one becomes. In the end all defences fail and we are ready for the takeover. Today, the bombardment of our minds with subversive poisons of one kind or another has become so massive and so constant that many have long ceased to be aware that it is taking place.’
This funereal fugue became one of the decade’s theme tunes, repeated in abbreviated form every month or so by the Times columnists Bernard Levin and Lord Chalfont, and given a full-length performance in works such as The Collapse of Democracy, which was written by Crozier’s young protégé Robert Moss to mark the launch of the National Association for Freedom (NAFF) in November 1975.* Moss predicted that within ten years, at most, the nation would be a ‘proto-communist’ state. According to Lord Chalfont, however, that state was already upon us. His ITV documentary Who Says it Can Never Happen Here?, broadcast in January 1976, ended with Chalfont standing by Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery, clipboard in hand, announcing that seven of the ten main demands in The Communist Manifesto had already been met. The political scientist Stephen Haseler, a former Labour parliamentary candidate, joined the chorus a few months later with his book The Death of British Democracy, warning that only ‘a supreme act of political will’ could now prevent a takeover by an authoritarian Marxist regime which would ‘isolate Britain from the rest of the world and drive her into the Soviet orbit, silence dissenting views, force its will on the majority and abolish freedoms, in the classic totalitarian pattern’.
Variations on this theme supplied the plotlines for political thrillers, some given an extra dash of verisimilitude by the fact that their authors were ex-spooks. In The Special Collection, written by the former army intelligence officer Ted Allbeury, the KGB tried to destroy British democracy by infiltrating trade unions and fomenting industrial chaos. It came with an endorsement from Lord Chalfont: ‘I hope … people who read it will not regard it entirely as fiction.’ Another Soviet-backed coup in Britain – this time involving a terrorist gang with a nuclear weapon – was the subject of A Single Monstrous Act by Kenneth Benton, who spent thirty years in MI6 before embarking on his literary career. ‘A left-wing revolution in England, conducted by graduates of the urban guerrilla school with radioactive weapons?’ one reviewer wrote. ‘Already it seems less improbable than it might have done a few years ago. A Single Monstrous Act demonstrates exactly how it could happen.’ When not writing thrillers about Russian-backed university lecturers holding the country to ransom, Benton worked with Brian Crozier at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, producing reports on the Soviet threat.
Whether in fact or fiction, the syllogism was much the same: British democracy is injured and bleeding; the only beneficiary of this is the Russian bear, licking its whiskery lips at the sight of a wounded prey; anyone in Britain who has some responsibility for the nation’s enfeebled state must therefore be a Soviet agent. In George Shipway’s steamingly paranoid thriller The Chilian Club, four retired soldiers decide to save dear old England by assassinating everyone who is secretly working for Moscow. (‘Excellent!’ the Sunday Express critic rejoiced. ‘It has four heroes – and I mean HEROES!’) It’s a Herculean labour, however, because there are so many of the blighters – student leaders, shop stewards, politicians, black activists, even the director of programmes for the BBC:
Used to be involved with the production, in dingy theatres, of squalid avant-garde plays which the critics fulsomely reviewed and no one bought tickets for. Joined the BBC, climbed quickly to the top, was appointed Programmes Director. We soon saw the results of that, Curtis thought sourly: a persistent, pervading left-wing slant. Everything was tainted – the news, discussions, interviews, plays. All protests met a bland refusal to disseminate opposite views. A communist takeover … of the nation’s broadcasts, a continuous brain-washing inflicted on the people, directed by a man in Soviet pay, whose numbered account in Geneva was beyond provenance.
Fantastical enough, but not half as fantastical as what passed for reality in the minds of men (and they were mostly men) who kept a gun under the bed just in case the Red Army should invade Godalming in the wee small hours. The politician at the helm of this sinking ship of state, contentedly puffing on his pipe while waves flooded the engine room, was the same Harold Wilson who had made several visits to Moscow in the late 1940s as President of the Board of Trade – and then several more, when out of office in the early 1950s, as an adviser to Montague Meyer, who imported timber from the Soviet Union. Suppose that on one of those trips the KGB recruited Wilson, either as a willing volunteer or as the blackmailed victim of a honeytrap. Now consider what happened a decade later. Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, died suddenly and inexplicably in January 1963 just after visiting the Soviet Embassy to collect his visa for a trip to Moscow. Harold Wilson replaced him as leader, won the 1964 general election and took up residence in 10 Downing Street. Had someone at the Embassy slipped a pill into Gaitskell’s coffee to clear the way for a Manchurian Candidate?
Decades later, there is still no jot of evidence that the KGB had Harold Wilson on its payroll. But right-wing conspiracists found the theory so beguiling that proof was not required. It explained everything – his paranoid style, his reluctance to confront union militancy, his insouciance about inflation, his inclusion of dangerous Reds such as Tony Benn in his Cabinet. And, of course, his deference to Marcia Williams: if she knew of his secret allegiance, and perhaps even shared it, one could at last understand why he never dared to disobey her. It was a fantasy worthy of Kenneth Benton or George Shipway, but one for which many Establishment figures would willingly suspend their disbelief. In country-house drawing rooms and City dining rooms, plummy-voiced men would pour another whisky and wink confidingly: ‘Have you heard about the Communist cell in No. 10?’ Wilson himself heard of the rumours in 1974, when a guest at a shooting party in Hampshire was so outraged by the wild talk he heard over lunch that he wrote to the Prime Minister. ‘They were saying that I was tied up with the Communists and that MI5 knew,’ Wilson recalled. ‘The arch link was my political secretary, Marcia. She was supposed to be a dedicated Communist!’
It was tosh, but tosh with a classy pedigree. For the sources of these clubland murmurs were Peter Wright, an assistant director of MI5, and James Jesus Angleton, a chain-smoking, obsessive, brilliant and slightly deranged character who ran the CIA’s counter-intelligence division between 1954 and 1974. Early in his career Angleton had failed to spot that his English friend Kim Philby was a Soviet spy, and for the rest of his life he tried to expunge that sin by seeing Reds everywhere. ‘Angleton had a special view of the world,’ said his former colleague Hank Knoche. ‘You almost have to be 100 per cent paranoid to do that job. You always have to fear the worst. You always have to assume, without necessarily having the proof in your hands, that your own organisation has been penetrated and there’s a mole around somewhere. And it creates this terrible distrustful attitude.’
In 1962 Angleton began debriefing the defector Anatoli Golitsyn, a middle-ranking KGB officer from the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, who quickly understood that feeding his paranoia was the best way of earning his trust. ‘After a while,’ said another CIA officer who dealt with Golitsyn, ‘he came to realise he didn’t necessarily have to tell the truth to get attention.’ He spoke of a ‘master plot’ against the West involving Soviet moles at the very highest levels of the French government, the British security service, even the CIA itself. While Angleton set off on a molehunt, Golitsyn was dispatched to London for questioning by two MI5 interrogators, Peter Wright and Arthur Martin. He arrived just after Hugh Gaitskell’s death in January 1963, and during their conversations Martin aired his theory that Gaitskell might have been assassinated. Golitsyn knew nothing about that, but a KGB commander in northern Europe had once vaguely mentioned a plan to kill ‘a Western leader’. Seeing how well this was received, he joined the dots: ‘Your best leader on the socialist side … Gaitskell was eliminated.’ Egged on by Wright and Martin, he then confirmed the final part of their syllogism: ‘The KGB would carry out such an intervention in only two circumstances: first, if Wilson was their man, or, second, if someone in Wilson’s entourage was their man.’
By the time he returned to America in July for more interviews with Angleton, Golitsyn had convinced himself that Harold Wilson was a KGB asset – and that he’d known it all along, rather than having it put in his head by the promptings of Messrs Wright and Martin. ‘The first pressings from a defector almost always have the most body,’ the wine-loving MI6 chief Maurice Oldfield once remarked. ‘The third pressings are suspect.’ The sessions in the summer of 1963, coming after Golitsyn’s initial debriefing at Langley and his trip to London, were very much the third pressing. Yet Angleton seems not to have asked himself why Golitsyn was telling him the sensational news about Wilson only now, more than a year after his defection.
It was Angleton who coined the phrase ‘wilderness of mirrors’ to describe counter-intelligence, and the Harold Wilson fantasy is a perfect example of how even the flimsiest spectre, when reflected and re-reflected at convex angles, can assume a monstrous solidity. After Labour’s victory in the 1964 general election, Angleton paid a special trip to London to pass on ‘some very secret information’ to Martin Furnival Jones, MI5’s director of counter-espionage: that the new Prime Minister was a Soviet agent. Peter Wright gives a disingenuous account of the affair in Spycatcher (1987): ‘The accusation was wholly incredible, but given the fact that Angleton was head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division, we had no choice but to take it seriously … Angleton’s approach was recorded in the files under the codename Oatsheaf.’ Wilson was still alive when Spycatcher appeared and, though in poor health, would probably have sued had Wright admitted the truth: that from 1964 he was more convinced than ever of Wilson’s treachery, since it had been confirmed by America’s top spycatcher. All he really saw in the mirror, however, was the reflection of his own suspicion – passed on to Golitsyn, and then to the CIA, and then back to England with the imprimatur of James Jesus Angleton.
Wilson’s return to power in 1974 horrified Peter Wright. How could he alert the nation to the Communist cell in Downing Street? His first idea was to go public, revealing the existence of MI5’s file on Harold Wilson (code-named ‘Henry Worthington’), but he had second thoughts after his friend Lord Rothschild pointed out that whether or not such a stunt brought down Wilson, it would certainly lose Wright his job – and his pension, a dismaying prospect for a man only a couple of years from retirement. The spycatcher then decided on a more discreet approach. With the help of ‘eight or nine colleagues’ who shared his conviction, he would steal the Worthington file from the director general’s safe, take it to No. 10 and ‘show Wilson that we had it. We wanted him to resign. There would be no publicity if he went quietly … I honestly think Wilson would have folded up – he wasn’t a very gutsy man.’ Nor, as it transpired, were his eight or nine colleagues: they got cold feet and forced him to abandon the blackmail scheme. But they still felt that something must be done. ‘Wilson’s a bloody menace,’ one said, ‘and it’s about time the public knew the truth.’ Couldn’t they discredit the Prime Minister without confronting him directly or raising their own heads above the parapet? ‘The plan was simple,’ Wright recalled. ‘MI5 would arrange for selective details of the intelligence about leading Labour Party figures, but especially Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic pressmen. Using our contacts in the press and among union officials, word of the material contained in MI5 files and the fact that Wilson was considered a security risk would be passed around.’
In Spycatcher, Wright says that although the proposition tempted him at first (‘I felt an irresistible urge to lash out. The country seemed on the brink of catastrophe. Why not give it a little push?’), once again Lord Rothschild persuaded him to reject it. He may even be telling the truth: fear of a lost pension can concentrate the mind wonderfully. But the younger malcontents in MI5 – ‘the boys’, as Wright called them – had no such inhibitions. In the summer of 1975 he was invited to dinner by his friend Maurice Oldfield, the new head of MI6, who asked what MI5 thought of Wilson:
‘Most of us don’t like him [Wright replied]. They think he’s wrecking the country.’
Maurice was clearly preoccupied with the subject, because he returned to it again and again.
‘You’re not telling me the truth,’ he said finally.
‘I’m not with you, Maurice …’
‘I was called in by the Prime Minister yesterday,’ he said, his tone suddenly changing. ‘He was talking about a plot. Apparently he’s heard that your boys have been going around town stirring things up about him and Marcia Falkender, and Communists at No. 10.’
He trailed away as if it were all too distasteful for him.
‘It’s serious, Peter,’ he began again. ‘I need to know everything. Look what’s happening in Washington with Watergate. The same thing will happen here unless we’re very careful.’
Which, of course, was just what the boys wanted: to drive an unfit ruler from office. In watering holes such as the Lansdowne Club and the City Golf Club they whispered scandal into the ears of trusted journalists, hoping that at least some of it would percolate into the media. They sent large packages of anonymous documents to Private Eye – too large for the magazine’s tiny editorial staff to digest. ‘It was a story, even then, on a vast scale,’ the Eye journalist Patrick Marnham recalled, ‘stretching back over thirty years and moving from London to Moscow to East Berlin to Bucharest to Tel Aviv. It would have tested the resources of a national newspaper, and it was well beyond the powers of Private Eye to investigate it as thoroughly as it deserved.’ The reams of typewritten, single-spaced text roamed far and wide – from the Attlee government’s ‘Groundnut Scheme’ to the Leipzig Trade Fair and the opening of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London – but the subtext was clear enough. Although Marnham couldn’t do much with this head-spinning epic, which read as if ghostwritten for MI5 by Thomas Pynchon, his colleague Auberon Waugh sometimes dropped little hints in his Eye column. In September 1975, the publication of Henry Kissinger, Soviet Agent made him wonder how many other Western statesmen were Soviet agents: ‘Certainly, I have never attempted to disguise my belief that Harold Wislon [sic] is one, recruited in Moscow and London in 1956–8, although I have no evidence to support this apart from intuition.’
Ironically, the KGB was one of the many intelligence services – MI5, the CIA, the South African BOSS – that Wilson suspected were out to get him. On his annual summer holiday in the Scilly Isles he became convinced that Russian intelligence ships disguised as trawlers were lurking off the coast, listening to the radio walkie-talkie which kept him in contact with the police while he was strolling on the beach. After returning to London he told his private secretary to ask the Ministry of Defence if it had noticed ‘unusual activity’ by Soviet vessels off the islands during his stay. The MoD reported that one Soviet trawler had come within thirty miles of the coast, but that was not unusual. ‘The vessel’s patrol when the Prime Minister was in the Scilly Islands was not, therefore, a new departure. In short, we are not aware of any indications to suggest that Soviet vessels attempted to intercept communications with the Prime Minister.’ Wilson thought otherwise, as Tony Benn recorded after lunching with him on 10 September 1975:
He told me that the Russians always have a submarine or trawler off the Scillies when he is there and they can even pick up the walkie-talkie. ‘Last summer, the zip on my trousers broke and I told my inspector to radio back to the police at the house to tell them. I thought that might be misunderstood by the Russian captain so I just said into the walkie-talkie: “British prime minister to Russian trawler. When I say my zip is broken, I mean that my trouser button has come off. There are no flies on the British prime minister.”’
This is a rare and endearing glimpse of the old Wilsonian perkiness. There was little else for either Wilson or Benn to laugh about that autumn and winter. An IRA bomb exploded outside the post office in Kensington Church Street, a few minutes’ walk from Benn’s house in Holland Park, killing a bomb-disposal man. A bomb at the Hilton hotel – which killed two people and injured sixty-nine – went off only ten minutes after Benn had left. His adviser Frances Morrell, normally the soul of jollity, warned him to keep an eye out for MI5 and CIA agents: ‘You are a prime target. There is a real chance you might be leader of the Labour Party and they’ll put their top people on to you.’ At breakfast time on 23 October Benn and his wife heard an enormous explosion. He guessed it was a bomb attack on the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s house nearby, but after dashing outside he saw a wall of flames outside the house of Hugh Fraser, a Tory MP: the Provisional IRA had put a thirty-pound bomb under his Jaguar. (One of Fraser’s neighbours, the oncologist Professor Gordon Hamilton Fairey, was blown to smithereens as he walked past.) Ross McWhirter, the co-editor of the Guinness Book of Records and founder of the National Association for Freedom, was gunned down on his front doorstep on 27 November, a few days after offering a £50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the IRA’s London cell. In the first week of December, having been spotted and pursued by police through the West End, the four men responsible for McWhirter’s murder burst into the flat of John and Sheila Matthews in Balcombe Street, keeping them hostage for six days. Government drivers were ordered to take a different route home every night while the stand-off continued, in case the IRA tried to kidnap a minister and trade him for the besieged terrorists. Benn rang his wife ‘to tell her to bolt the front door and close the shutters and not let anyone in. What an extraordinary time.’
On the Sunday before Christmas, Benn tried to distract himself by watching television. He caught the end of The St Valentine’s Day Massacre, a film about Al Capone. Then came a news bulletin on the latest murders in Northern Ireland and the kidnapping of eleven OPEC ministers in Vienna by Carlos the Jackal, the playboy terrorist who had Benn on his hit list. Finally there was The London Programme, reporting on black violence in South London. ‘At the moment 38 per cent of school leavers are unemployed, and 4 per cent of black youngsters are criminals,’ he noted. ‘The police are trying to enforce law and order in a pretty aggressive way and this is creating a lot of trouble. By then it was midnight and I had seen enough to set my mind racing.’
At least Benn still had a mind that could race ten furlongs without throwing its jockey or inadvertently galloping into the car park. The decline of Wilson’s nimble wit and encyclopaedic memory was now distressingly apparent to his closest colleagues, and all the more distressing because of the great height from which they fell. This was a man whose first-class degree from Oxford was said to have been the best of the century; someone who, in his prime, could unhesitatingly recite Huddersfield Town FC’s results from the 1920s or coal production statistics from the 1940s. Whether or not he recognised the symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s, he knew that something was wrong. Joe Haines describes a car journey to Northolt airport, en route to Hamburg for a meeting with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt:
On the way there, for want of something to do and hoping to stop him pumping pipe smoke into the confined space every few seconds, I pointed out a magpie to him in a nearby field. Wilson sat bolt upright. ‘Only one?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘That’s unlucky,’ he said, and slumped back gloomily in his seat. I was astonished. I had been with him for six years and had never before been aware that he was superstitious. A minute or two later he sat upright again. ‘Look over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘There’s a white horse. That means everything’s OK.’
It wasn’t: Wilson had a miserable time in Hamburg. He struggled to understand the questions from German reporters, though they spoke impeccable English. ‘All he wanted to do,’ Haines observed, ‘was to get away.’
‘There is a very strong rumour that Harold Wilson is about to retire,’ Tony Benn wrote on 7 March 1976. ‘Nobody knows where it comes from except some funny things have evidently been happening. There is a possibility that some papers which were stolen from Harold’s desk may envelop him in some way in a scandal.’ Wilson gave formal notice of his intention to quit at the Cabinet meeting on 16 March, five days after his sixtieth birthday – whereupon a torrent of conspiratorial incredulity gushed through Whitehall and Fleet Street. What was Harold up to? For Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express, it was ‘the biggest mystery of post-war politics’.
The real mystery is why so many people were mystified. Before the election of February 1974 Wilson had told Joe Haines, Marcia Williams and several other friends that he didn’t want to serve beyond the age of sixty. His subsequent mental and physical deterioration, and the strain of steering a minority government through crisis after crisis while under fire from both the Tories and his own left-wingers, made him all the more determined to keep this promise to himself. Benn must have noticed the waning of Wilson’s old flair and inspiration – his baggy-eyed exhaustion was apparent to any half-attentive TV viewer, even through the customary clouds of pipe smoke – yet he resisted the obvious reason for retirement. ‘Why has he suddenly gone?’ he asked himself. ‘What is it all about?’
One can put it down to the paranoid style of the time; but since Wilson himself was an exemplar of that style, Benn shouldn’t have been surprised. Wilson’s publisher, George Weidenfeld, had flown to America in February to deliver a letter from the Prime Minister to Senator Hubert Humphrey which asked for ‘enlightenment concerning the general extent of CIA activities in Britain in recent years’, and in particular for information about an American doctor who had become friendly with Marcia’s sister, Peggy Field; unable to find the man in any medical directory, Wilson suspected that he was a CIA plant. Humphrey showed the letter to the Agency’s new director, George Bush, who hastily rushed over to London to assure Wilson that the US government would never dream of sending undercover agents to seduce Lady Falkender’s sister.
On 9 March, in the House of Commons, the PM turned his attention to South African spooks, whom he accused of spreading rumours about Jeremy Thorpe’s affair with Norman Scott – pretty rich coming from the man who had planned to expose Thorpe if he dared form a coalition with Ted Heath in 1974. ‘Anyone in this House concerned with democracy will feel revolted with the fact that we have to face this sort of thing in so far as the leaders of any party or all parties are concerned,’ Wilson said, implying that he was as fearful for himself as for Thorpe.
He left 10 Downing Street for the last time on 5 April, the day on which Labour MPs elected Jim Callaghan to succeed him. Barely a month later, a young BBC reporter named Barrie Penrose was watching a wood pigeon in his back garden, wondering if he could take a pot at it with his shotgun without annoying the neighbours, when he received a phone call inviting him to come for a drink at Harold Wilson’s house in Lord North Street that evening. Penrose was baffled. He had met Wilson only once, while doorstepping him on the night of the general election in October 1974, and it hadn’t been a friendly encounter. Almost crushed in the throng of journalists and camera crews, Penrose had yelled out a question about the narrow margin of victory. ‘I have nothing to say to the press at the moment,’ Wilson replied. When Penrose persisted, he turned and glowered: ‘I don’t know who you are, but don’t you speak English?’
At first Penrose thought the call must be a hoax. But when he rang Wilson’s office at Westminster he heard the same voice that had issued the invitation a few minutes earlier. He sought advice from Roger Courtiour, an old schoolfriend who was now a BBC colleague. ‘Want me to come along?’ Courtiour asked. The two journalists arrived at 5 Lord North Street just as Big Ben struck six, and Wilson himself answered the door. ‘Do come upstairs, we must talk,’ he said urgently. In the first-floor drawing room, after pouring whiskies for the reporters and a sherry for himself, he got straight down to business: ‘Did you read my speech to the parliamentary press gallery today?’ He pulled a sheaf of typewritten notes from his pocket. ‘I said frankly that democracy as we know it is in grave danger … I think you as journalists should investigate the forces that are threatening democratic countries like Britain.’ He brandished a Churchillian cigar. ‘I think you will find an investigation rewarding. I will help you although for the time being I cannot speak too openly.’ He listed some of the groups which he suspected of conspiring against British democracy – South African intelligence, the CIA, a right-wing faction in MI5. It was, he believed, a British Watergate. If the two BBC men were willing to be Woodward and Bernstein – ‘Pencourt’, by analogy with ‘Woodstein’ – he would be their Deep Throat. ‘I see myself,’ Wilson murmured, ‘as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.’
Pencourt’s enquiries over the next eighteen months led everywhere and nowhere. The big fat spider advised them to start by finding out what had happened to Norman Scott’s social security file, which had gone missing in 1974. ‘Chelsea,’ he said. ‘A DHSS office somewhere in Chelsea. You’ll find it.’ They went to Waterford House in Chelsea, but the manager shooed them away with a reminder that personal files were confidential. ‘Speak to Barbara Castle,’ Wilson then advised. ‘She was at the DHSS when the file went missing.’ But she too seemed unwilling to help. ‘I cannot talk about the matter. Whatever we did, we did on higher authority.’ In a hilariously overwrought account of their adventures, The Pencourt File, the two sleuths describe their astonishment:
Who was ‘higher authority’? The Lord Chancellor? The Foreign Secretary perhaps, or the Home Secretary? And why the alarm in Mrs Castle’s face which was now noticeably blanched from the abrupt turn in the conversation?
They found out soon enough. Castle rang Wilson to protest at having reporters set on her, reminding the former Prime Minister that the higher authority who asked for the Scott file was himself.
Wilson’s mind was by now such a simmering goulash of half-remembered incidents and unexplained mysteries that it was impossible to tell how the ingredients had ever come together. He told Penrose and Courtiour about the man in Bickenhall Mansions who found a stolen handbag belonging to Marcia’s sister. (‘He could not rule out the possibility that if the sisters had gone to collect the handbag in person they might have been entering a well-laid trap … Lady Falkender and Peggy Field, he said, might have been thrown into a room where an orgy was taking place and photographed.’) The reporters interviewed the man in question, the porter at Bickenhall Mansions, who seemed innocent enough. Wilson urged them on regardless: ‘How did the bag end up inside Bickenhall Mansions and not in the gutter or the river? Was the theft part of a more complicated plot?’ When they mentioned that they had spoken to Paddington CID, he nodded knowingly: ‘Marcia had trouble before with Paddington. There was a girl at Number 10 who was living with, or engaged to, a supposedly right-wing fascist policeman …’ Most deplorable: but how was this linked to a South African smear campaign against Jeremy Thorpe, or army exercises at Heathrow airport, or rumours of a Communist cell in Downing Street? The Pencourt File turned out to be not a spider’s web but a shaggy-dog story. The authors could find no single grand plot – though on the final page, as if to justify wasting all that shoe leather, they hinted that it might yet reveal itself. ‘The story would not be “laid to rest” yet. For the time being the file would remain open …’
For the big fat spider, however, it was not enough to acknowledge that there had been many rum goings-on and morbid symptoms in recent years: everything must be connected.* When Jim Callaghan was asked in Parliament about Wilson’s allegations, he said that anyone acquainted with his predecessor ‘will know that he has a great capacity for illuminating the truth long before it becomes apparent to other people’. A charming put-down, but not quite accurate. If the narrative of The Pencourt File is true to the dizzyingly disjointed character of the Seventies, Wilson’s refusal to accept its conclusion – or, rather, its inconclusiveness – represents a common reaction to that character. After all, who would have believed that the President of the United States, and all the President’s men, would conspire to hide the truth about a break-in at an office in Washington? But it happened. As we shall see in the next chapter, the quest for a key to all conspiracies in the Seventies – especially in America – would take Wilson’s fellow explorers to destinations even more exotic than the Chelsea social security office.
* The only fictional inspiration that Stonehouse acknowledged was Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal, from which he learned how easy it was to obtain a passport in the name of a dead man.
* Ah, Canada! Britons sneer at the country when all is well at home, but in times of crisis we imagine it as a Happy Valley of wholesome contentment. Arriving in Toronto to supervise a production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce in January 1979, Peter Hall wrote in his diary: ‘I was sad to leave an embattled England about to seize up with strikes and come to a place which is clean, well-organised and efficient. God, the tattiness of England now. We seem to be presiding over the collapse of decency and integrity without the energy even to realise what’s happening.’
* Even Eric Sevareid of CBS News was seduced: on her first visit to America after becoming party leader he abandoned his prepared script for that night’s news programme, on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, to rave about Mrs Thatcher’s ‘combination of dignity and the common touch’ and her ‘storybook complexion’. Britons were looking for a break, he said, ‘and she may be it’. His only misgiving was that her chance might come too late, when the British malaise had become incurable.
* The southernmost part of South America, including Uruguay, Chile and Argentina.
* And often exploited for comic effect by Auberon Waugh in his Private Eye diary, as in this entry from June 1974: ‘As the storm clouds gather and the threat of proletarian dictatorship looms ever nearer, many of my neighbours in Somerset have been building machine-gun emplacements and investing in anti-personnel landmines for their parks and parterres. This puts me in something of a dilemma, as I do not want a bloodbath but obviously can’t leave my dear wife and children completely unprotected against the day the working class marches up my drive to take possession of my marbled halls. Probably the best thing would be to invite them in and poison them with paraquat.’
* ‘First Wilson gets burgled then, two days later, John fucking Stonehouse vanishes,’ says a reporter in David Peace’s novel 1974, downing pints with his colleagues in the Leeds Press Club. ‘Everything’s linked. Show me two things that aren’t connected.’ Gaz from the sports desk rises to the challenge: ‘Stoke City and the League fucking Championship.’