Plot! Lord Louis and the King Thing
Forty years on, the paranoid atmosphere after only a few years of Wilson’s first administration is hard to credit, but there was a rising conviction among some in business and the media that democracy itself had failed. Cecil King, the tall and megalomaniac nephew of those original press barons, Lords Rothermere and Harmsworth, and the effective proprietor of IPC, which owned the Daily Mirror, was at the centre of the flapping. He had originally supported Wilson, both in Opposition and in the period immediately after the 1964 election, but was deeply offended when Wilson, who had egalitarian convictions, then offered King only the modish life peerage. King was outraged. He wanted a hereditary title, as befitted the boss of a popular socialist newspaper, preferably an Earldom. Wilson, to his credit, refused to budge. To the Prime Minister’s discredit, though, he desperately flattered King, courted him and gave him a string of other baubles, including a damehood for his wife and positions for himself – director of the Bank of England, a seat on the National Coal Board and another on the National Parks Commission, plus repeated offers of junior government jobs and a life peerage. None of it made the slightest impression on the sulking press tycoon, who went round London telling anyone who would listen that Wilson was a dud, a liar and an incompetent who was ruining the country and who should be removed as soon as possible.
King’s theme, not uncommon in business circles, was that Britain needed professional administrators and managers in charge, not dodgy politicians. He insisted that ‘We are coming near to the failure of parliamentary government.’ The politicians had made ‘such a hash of our affairs that people must be brought into government from outside the rank of professional politicians’. His private views came close to a call for insurrection or a coup, to be fronted by himself and other business leaders. This culminated in a clumsily attempted plot. On 8 May 1968, according to King’s brilliant editor-in-chief Hugh Cudlipp, the two of them had a meeting with Lord Louis Mountbatten, whom we have met in his role negotiating India’s independence. As a war hero, former Chief of the Defence Staff and close member of the Royal Family, Mountbatten had a unique role in public life. He stood above politics, though many believed he liked the notion of being thought a man of destiny, and he was much discussed by those who dreamed of an anti-Wilson putsch. He had made his worries about the country known to Cudlipp, though denying he wanted ‘to appear to be advocating or supporting any notion of a Right Wing dictatorship – or any nonsense of that sort.’ Indeed, Mountbatten’s idea of the possible leader of some kind of emergency government supplanting Wilson was…Barbara Castle.
Nevertheless, when King, Cudlipp and Mountbatten met, with the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, the talk was wild. King told the Queen’s uncle-in-law that in the coming crisis, ‘the government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets, the armed forces would be involved’ and asked Mountbatten whether he would agree to be titular head of a new administration. According to Cudlipp, Mountbatten then asked Zuckerman what he made of it. The scientist rose, walked to the door and replied: ‘This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.’ Mountbatten agreed. Later, he recorded that it was he who had told King the idea was ‘rank treason’ and booted him out. King’s account of the meeting is different, though hardly less alarming. He claimed Mountbatten had said morale in the armed forces was low, the Queen was worried and asked for advice. To which the newspaperman replied: ‘There might be a stage in the future when the Crown would have to intervene: there might be a stage when the armed forces were important. Dickie should keep himself out of public view so as to have clean hands…’ Whichever account is more accurate, the meeting certainly took place and Mountbatten then seems to have reported the conversation to the Queen. King, unabashed, unleashed a front page attack in the Daily Mirror on Wilson, headlined ‘Enough is Enough’, and calling for a new leader. He was himself putsched by a board which realized he had become a serious embarrassment, shortly afterwards.
Does any of this matter? There is no evidence that the talk of a coup was truly serious, or that the security services were involved, as has been publicly asserted since. Yet the Cecil King story counts in two ways. First, it gives some indication of the fevered and at times almost hysterical mood about Wilson and the condition of the country that had built up by the late sixties – a time now more generally remembered as golden, chic and successful. A heady cocktail of rising crime, student rioting, inflation, civil rights protests in Northern Ireland and embarrassments abroad had convinced some that the country was ungovernable. Because British democracy has survived unscathed through the post-war period, to suggest it was ever threatened now seems outlandish. Perhaps it never was. There is a lurid little saloon bar of the mind where conspiracy theorists, mainly on the left, and self-important fantasists, mainly on the right, gather and talk. The rest of us should be wary of joining them for a tipple. Yet the transition from the discredited old guard of Macmillan-era Britain to the unwelcomed new cliques of Wilson-era Britain was a hard time.
Wilson was a genuine outsider so far as the old Establishment was concerned, and he ran a court of outsiders. The old Tory style of government by clique and clubmen gave way to government by faction and feud, a weakness in Labour politics throughout the party’s history. Wilson had emerged by hopping from group to group, with no settled philosophical view or strong body of personal support in the party. Instead of a ‘Wilson party’, represented in the Commons and country, he relied on a small gang of personal supporters – Marcia Williams most famously, but also the Number Ten insiders Peter Shore, Gerald Kaufman, George Wigg and for, a while in these earlier years, Tony Benn too. Then there were the outside advisers. Some were brought in from academic life, such as the Hungarian-born economists Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor (popularly known as Buddha and Pest). Some came from business, such as the notorious Gannex raincoat manufacturer Joseph Kagan, or from the law, such as the arch-fixer of the sixties Lord Goodman. Suspicious of the Whitehall Establishment, with some justification, and cut off from both the right-wing group of former Gaitskellites, and the old Bevanites, Wilson felt forced to create his own gang. A Tory in that position might have automatically turned to old school tie connections, or family ones, as Macmillan did. Wilson turned to an eclectic group of one-offs and oddballs, producing a peculiarly neurotic little court, riven by jealousy and misunderstanding.
This anti-court gave easy material to Wilson’s snobbish and suspicious enemies in the press, ranging from Private Eye, which constantly taunted the insiders with foreign-sounding names, to the MI5-connected ‘red conspiracy’ merchants, and even scions of the Fleet Street purple. Many in that old Establishment – the top brass, the City grandees, the clubmen – struggled to accept that Wilson was a legitimate leader of the United Kingdom. Wilson was paranoid but plenty of powerful people were out to get him, or at least to get him out.