History of England 1-6

Rarely has one speech had such an influence. In its aftermath, South Africa fulfilled the ugliest expectations of the world first by committing the Sharpeville Massacre and next by withdrawing from the Commonwealth altogether. By the end of Macmillan’s tenure, the fourteen colonies of Africa had been granted independence and reduced to four. Macmillan had won many friends for Britain abroad – in the United States, the UN and in Africa itself.

And Macmillan needed all his friends, for the ranks of his critics were swelling. Recalling a broadcast by the prime minister, Malcolm Muggeridge observed unkindly:

He seemed, in his very person, to embody the national decline he supposed himself to be confuting. He exuded a flavour of mothballs. His decaying visage and somehow seedy attire conveyed the impression of an ageing and eccentric clergyman who had been induced to play the prime minister in the dramatized version of a Snow novel put on by a village amateur dramatic society.

Nevertheless, Macmillan could boast of many admirers. While his cabinet was composed overwhelmingly of public schoolboys and while his family connections stretched from Westminster to Chatsworth House, he had a fan in a tall, saturnine young student with a fondness for sweaters by the name of Peter Cook. With Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, Cook formed the ‘Beyond the Fringe’ group. Unlike the Goons before them, they derived their humour not from caricature but from observation. They performed with almost no set beyond a piano. The target appeared to be what was becoming known as ‘the establishment’, and yet their humour had always a samizdat quality in its ironical deference. In one sketch of 1961, Peter Cook played the prime minister in a spoof party-political broadcast. His meandering, deadpan delivery was uncanny. Such satire was addressed at a persona, of course, but this persona was itself a role that Macmillan assumed. It was a success. Intransigent foe and improbable allies were to be swayed by it.

Macmillan, who was dubbed ‘the most radical politician’ in Britain by Attlee, was in fact a ‘soft’ socialist, and the economic policies he urged upon his chancellors reflected this. In times of dearth, demand must be stimulated. Thus was inaugurated a period of ‘stop-go’ economics; government spending was increased to ensure growth, and then curtailed in order to stanch inflation. The result was ‘stagflation’, a monster sired by spending and bred upon austerity.

By the spring of 1962, Selwyn Lloyd, the upright, talented, but unimaginative chancellor of the time, was the target of ever more hostile feeling. The Orpington by-election of March, where the Conservatives were heavily defeated by the Liberals, was only one sign of a wider disaffection. Leicester was also lost, to Labour. Called to the cameras, Lloyd was unrepentant. The important thing, he maintained, was that the chancellor do ‘the right thing’, regardless of by-elections or popular feeling in general. Yet his sharp, fluent delivery was belied by his hands, which swayed and jerked like those of a puppeteer. Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, was not alone in feeling that the malaise sprang from the leader rather than from the chancellor. He wrote to Macmillan, claiming that ‘the party had lost its sense of direction and its sense of conviction, and this was due to neglect from the centre’.

Macmillan was unmoved. While he felt respect, affection and even pity for his brilliant but troubled chancellor, he had grown dissatisfied. The country had turned against the Tories, and it would not be long before it turned against Macmillan himself. Lloyd, he wrote in his diaries, was ‘finished’. There were fears that the government might tumble. Iain MacLeod, Conservative party chairman, privately urged the prime minister to remove Lloyd, and events moved swiftly. A leak to the Daily Mail suggested that Macmillan was intending a radical reshuffle. The source was never named, but all knew that Rab Butler was responsible. When Macmillan summoned Lloyd for a talk, the chancellor was at first perturbed and then astonished; Macmillan seemed ‘flustered’ and upset, staring at the floor. The affable, imperturbable grandee babbled about mysterious ‘plots’. At last, Macmillan broke the news. A ‘less tired’ mind was needed in the Treasury. Outwardly, Lloyd remained cheerful, but Jonathan Aitken, the sole remaining member of his staff, recalled, ‘He was broken by it, shattered … He walked up and down our croquet lawn for five hours.’

As Butler put it, ‘A prime minister has to be a butcher, and know the joints.’ Other ‘joints’ would now be severed, in what became known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. On 13 July, Charles Hill, the housing minister, Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor and an early supporter of Macmillan against Butler, Percy Mills, Sir John McLeigh, Harold Watkinson and David Eccles were all informed that they must step aside. Macmillan later claimed indeed to have felt greater pain than the men he had removed, yet his reaction was not surprising. Macmillan’s grandson observed that even before giving away prizes at a prep school, Macmillan would be ‘sick and quivering’. There had been no plot, of course, and the only result of this professional butchery was a widespread loss of faith in Macmillan. ‘Supermac’ became ‘Mac the Knife’ and then ‘Supermacbeth’.

But two more victories awaited him. Both were in his dealings with the United States, in the contested field of nuclear defence. Macmillan had long urged the need for Britain to possess an independent nuclear capacity. The Americans were sympathetic, but there was one difficulty: why should Britain feel the need for a deterrent of its own, the ‘Europeanists’ at the White House enquired, just when it was seeking admission to the protective pale of Europe? And what would the Europeans themselves feel about this? Macmillan believed that without a deterrent of its own, Britain would lose stature. Moreover, surely the strength of Britain’s proposed marriage to the Community lay in its substantial military dowry? First, the Skybolt missile was proposed, but, after endless wranglings and misunderstandings, the scheme was dropped. With weeks to go before negotiations with the EEC were to begin, Polaris was substituted. Britain was now a true nuclear power. The arrangement had been smoothed by the warm personal relations between Macmillan and President Kennedy. While their subordinates bickered, the two war veterans quietly took matters in hand at Nassau. It seemed that the ‘special relationship’ had been triumphantly reaffirmed. One cloud crossed the bright, hopeful sun. When, in a telephone conversation, Macmillan recalled the glory days of Nassau, the president was oddly distracted and unresponsive. ‘When was that?’ asked a puzzled Kennedy. ‘The Nassau meeting,’ answered Macmillan. ‘Oh yes – very good.’

But if relations with the United States had now warmed, those with the European nations were floundering. Among the six original nations of the Community, France, led by de Gaulle, was the paramount power. His hostility to his former benefactors had always rather slumbered than slept; the knowledge that Britain possessed an independent nuclear capability yet seemed unwilling to share it with its continental neighbours pricked it awake. But now, it seemed, mighty Albion wished to join the European Economic Community. Neither de Gaulle nor Adenauer, his German counterpart, was minded to make the process easy.

‘I don’t believe in abroad,’ Quentin Crisp once wrote. ‘I think that all foreigners speak English behind our backs.’ Crisp’s words would have had resonance for many in England. Now many felt that the United Kingdom was about to wander into the same crevasse as its predecessors, at unfathomable cost. Thus the Labour politician George Brown remarked on Britain entering the Common Market: ‘It is not the price of butter which in the end really matters. It is the size, stability, strength and political attitude of Europe that matters. We have got to have a new kind of organisation in Europe…if we don’t succeed, I doubt whether there will be much of a Britain for our children’s children.’

Yet even so ardent a Europhile as Brown believed that Britain could, and should, enter the fold as its shepherd. The new chancellor, Reginald Maudling, was forthright on the question when he confessed that ‘the French do not want us in Europe at all. The Community of the Six has become a Paris/Bonn axis’. This complaint would echo down the decades, though with Berlin in place of Bonn. In opposition, Harold Wilson invoked a fear that entry into the Common Market would be a betrayal of the Commonwealth: ‘If there has to be a choice, we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Düsseldorf.’ Gaitskell, though in many ways sympathetic, was also realistic. Many Labour members saw Britain being ‘sucked up in a kind of giant capitalist Catholic conspiracy … unable to conduct any independent foreign policy at all’.

It is salutary to remember that at its inception, the European project was what we might call ‘faith-based’. Purely practical considerations came later, when the aftermath of the Second World War made trade cooperation a matter of overwhelming urgency. But now negotiations for Britain’s entry had begun, led by the chief whip, one Edward Heath. He spoke for many of his generation when he recalled what he had seen at the Nuremberg trials: ‘We were surrounded by destruction, homelessness, hunger and despair. Only by working together had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation. Reconciliation and reconstruction must be our task.’

Heath was a magnificent negotiator, whose talent for detail, doggedness and deep love of all things continental raised him above any previous British minister. However, he had to deal with the hostile de Gaulle and the suspicious Adenauer. On 29 January 1963, France announced that it would veto the British application. Familiar objections were advanced: Britain was an insular nation with maritime interests and had too close and dependent a relationship with the United States. But de Gaulle went further: ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘there would appear a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and leadership which would soon swallow up the European Community.’

It was hard for the British delegates to determine which was the more demoralizing, the veto itself or the hypocrisy with which it was sauced. De Gaulle, for all his swagger, was simply frightened at the thought of the British crashing into his pond. He acquired infamy as a man who could neither forget nor forgive a benefit. Macmillan himself, who had supported de Gaulle during the war in defiance of his superiors’ doubts, felt less bitterness than grief. The mass of the people were either delighted or, more worryingly for their leaders, indifferent. The success of Macmillan’s ‘stop-go’ economic policies was also under increasing question, as was his continuing fitness for rule. But it was neither incompetence nor senescence nor nemesis which brought down this wily innocent.

John Profumo, the minister for war, was respected in the Commons. He had a modicum of talent, an easy charm and a weakness shared by many men in power. At a party at Cliveden House, then owned by Lord Astor, Profumo had met a model named Christine Keeler, the protégée of one Stephen Ward, osteopath and socialite. Initially cool, Keeler was nonetheless an impressionable teenager and soon began an affair with Profumo that lasted just under a month, and there the matter might have rested. But Keeler had also made the acquaintance of ‘Eugene’, a Soviet attaché and spy. Periodicals picked up on the increasingly insistent hum of rumour, and Keeler herself began to blab.

Profumo denied any impropriety to the House and even sued the relevant newspapers. But when the case came to court and both Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies testified, he was left helpless. He resigned and vanished into the East End to do penance by helping the poor. Meanwhile, Keeler went to prison for perjury, the largely innocent Ward committed suicide, and Mandy Rice-Davies contrived an elegant skip from notoriety to fortune. The leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, knew better than to exploit the scandal for its sexual content. Instead he stuck to the question of national security, leaving Macmillan diminished and lame. At last the prime minister resigned, for reasons of ill health, protesting his innocence of the whole affair. He had presided over boom and bust, prosperity and uncertainty, had restored, or perhaps even created, the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, had rescued his party from the disaster of Suez and overseen the end of empire. Who then was to replace this splintered colossus?

The Establishment Club in particular, set up by Peter Cook to continue the tradition of Beyond the Fringe, mourned his loss: he had been prodigal meat for satire. But while the satire boom was only scotched by television, the Establishment Club was killed by it. The vein of alternative comedy was by no means exhausted, however. Private Eye was founded in 1961, produced by a very different crowd from that of Beyond the Fringe. They were more acerbic and less funny, but the venture flourished.

With the airing in November 1962 of That Was the Week That Was, the new comic movement moved to the television. After the show was cut to a watchable length, its fans were treated to the growing presence of household names on the screenwriting credits. Keith Waterhouse was one. Above all, there was David Frost, flat and uninspiring but a television ‘natural’. But the show’s appeal soon waned. It became, of all things, pompous: wit descended to invective, harmless joshing to self-important malice.

In The Other England, the journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse attempted a survey and analysis of England as a whole. It was published in 1964 as a kind of sequel to Priestley’s English Journey, although ‘corrective’ might be the more fitting term. Moorhouse begins by referring to an article entitled ‘The Condition of the North’. It was written by George Taylor, chief education officer for Leeds, who commented that

it is fairly safe to assert that the Northern child will receive his education in an old, insanitary building planned on lines wholly inappropriate for contemporary teaching, his teachers will be too few in number, probably inexperienced, possibly unqualified, and constantly changing … If he attends a grammar school, its children will be, like him, drawn entirely from the local workingclass community.

The assumption that grammar schools catered for the working class is one Moorhouse challenges. The grammar schools were intended primarily for the industrious working class, but they somehow abandoned an ethos of intellectual endeavour for one of material advantage. He went on to add, ‘I would suggest that one of our Englands today is a circle whose perimeter is approximately one hour’s travel by fast peak-hour train from the main London termini; the other England is the whole of the country outside that circle.’ In short, the Home Counties represented a hallowed pale of wealth and opportunity.

An anonymous article written in the early Sixties by a resolutely southern author for a national newspaper, and quoted by Moorhouse, sums up best what was wrong with the metropolitan mind: ‘I was eating a moussaka in Bolton the other day which (though nice) was made of potato, and it suddenly made me realise how little you can take aubergines for granted out of town.’ The inadvertent comedy is of course twofold: the sneer is ostensibly directed at the north, but it also reveals how little the author knows of what most Londoners ate. For Moorhouse, the real divide is between the Home Counties and everywhere else. Yet for all his affection for the regions he knew, Moorhouse was ready to cheer on the wrecking ball and the bulldozer; in this he was typical of the cognoscenti. ‘I, too, should hate to see these [customs] go because they mark a people still in touch with their roots. But if they represent the price to be paid for making Lancashire cleaner, less dilapidated, and generally more wholesome, then I’m afraid I should be on the side of those who are prepared to pay it.’ It may be suggested that this approach has fallen foul of history.

It was no longer true that ‘Britain’s bread hangs by Lancashire’s thread’, as the slogan put it in the Fifties. Most of the cotton mills still remained at the beginning of the Sixties, but they were scarcely the source of the nation’s prosperity. Nonetheless, the looms rattled on; in the third quarter of 1963, they numbered 123,400. As a cultural or political force, however, Manchester was in hibernation. In 1963, the United States closed its consulate there, and the Manchester Guardian was the Guardian by the early Fifties.

Manchester Grammar remained the leading light in preuniversity scholarship, however, putting the public schools to shame. The city even had its own answer to the ‘London Peculiar’ – the phenomenon known as ‘Darkness at Noon’, the great canopy of soot that occluded the city.

39

Elvis on a budget

Religious differences could still linger. In the early Sixties, the Scottish community, anxious to preserve Liverpool as a bastion of the Reformed faith and the Tory party, cried out in a pamphlet: ‘Romanism is the greatest enemy of our civil and religious liberty and if we lose these inestimable privileges for a mess of Socialist pottage we shall indeed be unworthy of the heritage won for us by our grand Protestant sires.’ However, such conflict began to ease when the slums were cleared and new houses built; the communities were no longer sequestered. Those of different confessions were obliged to cooperate.

Then there were the football fans who were, as Moorhouse observed, Liverpool’s most controversial export. ‘A strange, alien people they were, too,’ he wrote, ‘who swore more fluently and often than we did and who openly relieved themselves on the Bolton terraces, which didn’t go down at all well in that continent town.’ The Cavern Club on Mathew Street also had little to recommend it to the non-specialist. Yet it was to acquire a certain cachet and even piety of a kind.

The bouncer on the door disapproves of unexpected visitors. ‘This place,’ he observes gently, ‘is becoming a bloody shrine.’ And so it is. There are CND symbols and other daubs of paint crudely applied around the entrance. Half-way down the steep wooden staircase you find yourself stumbling into an atmosphere which is thick, sweet, almost tasty. In the Cavern something like a couple of hundred youngsters are compressed together under three low barrel-vaulted ceilings separated by stubby, arched walls … The walls are running with condensation. No one seems to notice the acute discomfort of being there.

This ‘foetid ill-ventilated hole’, as Moorhouse puts it, was an unlikely ‘shrine’ to what was soon known as ‘the Mersey Sound’.

The well-attested but elusive link between delinquency and a lack of education had long preoccupied all the major parties. In October 1963, the Robbins Report on higher education led to a flowering of new universities. These were not ‘red-brick’, in colour or in connotation. Rather they were of plate glass. They won many awards but few devotees. Yet they were quite as rigorous in their demands upon the students as any that preceded them. It was surely no accident that the iconic quiz show University Challenge was aired on TV just as the building of ‘plate glass’ reached its apogee in 1963, nor that the first university to win the challenge was the humble University of Leicester.

On 19 October 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home became prime minister, to the dismay of Rab Butler’s supporters, who felt that the natural successor had been passed over in favour of a desiccated Scottish nobleman. For its own part, the opposition was delighted. Here was a prime minister whose very appearance ran counter to their vision of a nation gleaming and galvanized. But though cadaverous, aged and out of touch, Douglas-Home had a thorough mind and was helped in his role of physician to social grievances by a courtesy and warmth rare in politics and rarer still among the aristocracy.

The inevitable election fell, and was won by Labour – the only surprise lay in the narrowness of the victory. ‘Be prepared’ is the Boy Scout’s watchword, and Harold Wilson – who had assumed the leadership of the Labour party after the death of Gaitskell – adhered to it throughout his political life. Even in the presence of the queen he could not restrain himself from harking back to his days as a Scout. Like Enoch Powell, he had spent his time at Oxford indulging in what was still considered a rather eccentric pursuit – learning. Those who had observed his intimidating capacity for work chose to recall him as a plodder, forgetting his formidable intelligence. Yet he was a member of that surprisingly common breed, the unreflective prodigy. Grand political creeds held scant appeal for him and even at university he had shown little interest in politics. He was also genuinely benign, wanting the best for everyone as long as not too much was required in the way of moral courage. In short, he was almost as kind as he was genial and almost as genial as he was clever.

Wilson was vastly aided in his work at Number Ten by his wife’s indifference, which left him free to spend the necessary hours closeted with aides and ministers. Mary Wilson, reclusive, devout and devoted to her husband, took little part in parliamentary life. Instead of doing the rounds, she composed poetry. One of her volumes sold 75,000 copies on its first print run. Whether explicitly religious or simply expressive of a vague but poignant yearning, her poems are suggestively titled: ‘The Virgin’s Song’, ‘If I Can Write Before I Die’, and a piece that might have been named by one of her husband’s more ardent critics on the left: ‘You Have Turned Your Back on Eden’.

Still, Harold Wilson needed a helpmeet. Though Marcia Williams was strictly only Wilson’s political officer, she soon became his confidante, imposing her will in matters that lay far beyond her remit and openly challenging ministers of the crown. Predictably, hints of a dalliance sometimes surfaced, but for all Wilson’s lapses into political infidelity, he was devoted to Mary. He was also a northerner, quick-witted, seemingly phlegmatic and reassuring. In this he had his luck to thank, for the north had already come to prominence with a speed that none could have predicted.

‘Did you have a gramophone when you were a kid?’ asked an American interviewer of George Harrison, lead guitarist of the Beatles. The answer came in the amused, undulating tones of Liverpool. ‘A gramophone? We didn’t have sugar.’ It was a classic Liverpudlian tease, and of a piece with Harrison’s character.

Liverpool was not quite in the doldrums suffered by Manchester, but it was scarcely a cultural hub, at least not so far as London was concerned. For all its racial and religious diversity, and its accomplishments in trade, it seemed, in the words of a contemporary, ‘utterly unglamorous’. And yet in one vital respect, Liverpool was blessed. It had access to the sea, which meant access to records and American music.

Boredom can awaken the sleepiest creative urge. The banality, as much as the poverty, of post-war Britain inspired the musical bloom of the Sixties. For there was little or nothing to do when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and the Davies brothers grew up, little at least in the way of leisure. The family could provide music, fun and a hearth, but this triad is itself suggestive that England had not only declined but contracted. Beyond the home, the world of pleasure was thin. The music halls were in retreat and the cinema was a minnow beside the whale it had been in previous years. Rationing was still in force. Children still played in bomb craters, often finding toys sturdier than any to be glimpsed in shop windows.

For those in their teens, the world was scarcely brighter. Simple pleasures, furtive transgressions, sporadic and apolitical violence were the recreational prospects to hand. The young men brought up amidst the ruins of the Blitz had nothing but a promise of freedom offered from abroad. And one could always improvise: having nothing, the young had to make. As we have seen, however much rock ’n’ roll might be worshipped, loved and danced to in England, it could not easily be emulated in its most glamorous form. Even guitars were almost a luxury item. As for drum kits or amplifiers – these items might as well have been the golden fleece. How could anyone follow Elvis on a budget of shillings?

Liverpool had a proud, if murky, past but no observable future until, as if by magic, there appeared four saviours. The Beatles arrived at the Cavern Club via a long and winding road. In the late Fifties, John Lennon, an artistic maverick of workingclass stock and middle-class upbringing, had established a skiffle group called the Quarrymen. When the polite Paul McCartney offered to play, Lennon was confronted with a choice. The younger man’s obvious talent was clearly a threat, yet it would enrich the band immeasurably. Later, George Harrison, a friend of McCartney’s, joined, with nothing but a slow, wise wit and ‘the dogged will to learn’ to recommend him. The future Beatles lacked only a drummer. Indeed, the search for a permanent drummer, one who moreover would be a true ‘Beatle’, was to exercise them for almost three years. During those years, the Beatles had served in Hamburg. Their career had been undistinguished to date. One rival even complained of the impresario Alan Williams’ decision to recruit ‘a bum group like the Beatles’. But it was in Hamburg that they became the Beatles. Forced to contend with nightly bar fights, they learned that playing music was about pleasing others, or else. When they returned to Liverpool in 1961, they were hardened and fast. The songwriting partnership forged between Lennon and McCartney seemed to later commentators a gift from the gods: a minor lyrical genius (Lennon’s) was smelted with a major musical talent (McCartney’s). Now they needed only a manager far-sighted enough to see this.

He appeared in the shape of Brian Epstein, a charming, gifted salesman, who owned a record shop in Liverpool, and was, moreover, homosexual. Invited to the Cavern, he found himself entranced by the group and offered his services as their manager. ‘All right then, Brian,’ said the typically gracious Lennon. ‘Manage us.’ ‘Guitar groups, Brian,’ said one unimpressed producer. ‘They’re on their way out.’ And so it seemed. The record labels were unimpressed by the Beatles’ music, and still more by their caustic humour. Decca, the biggest corporation of all, turned them down. But there was still Parlophone, which had George Martin, a classically trained musician who was used to orchestras and the occasional novelty act. He recognized their talent and, having recently worked with the Goons, was amused by their irreverence. When, at the end of one session, he asked if there was anything they didn’t like, Harrison observed, ‘Well I don’t like your tie, for a start.’

They had to do the rounds of cover versions, of course, but then they presented Martin with a song of their own, ‘Love Me Do’. It was pronounced an ‘odd little dirge-like thing’ by Martin. When Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones first heard it, he felt ‘physical pain’, and he cannot have been alone. It was not much of a song by later standards, but it reached number seventeen in the charts and was a respectable achievement.

‘How Do You Do It?’ would, in George Martin’s words, ‘make the Beatles a household name’. But they were unimpressed – they had grown bored of performing others’ work. They had a song of their own, they said. This was ‘Please Please Me’. When they had finished, George Martin spoke over the tannoy. ‘Congratulations, gentlemen,’ he pronounced, ‘you have just made your first Number One.’ And so it proved. From its opening notes, the song is a cascade of ebullience, with the inimitable harmonies that would soon emerge as the Beatles’ trademark. Written largely by Lennon, it was sung in the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent used by all British performers at the time. The chords, too, were American-inspired, and yet it was clearly English. The harmonica ‘riff’ which opens this rock song almost precisely replicates that most English of sounds, the peal of church bells.

The oyster had been prised open at last. ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ all went to number one. And the sound at their concerts was ‘one of incessant screaming’ from delirious fans. Having seduced the United Kingdom, they conquered the United States, and the phenomenon known as ‘Beatlemania’ was born. It has been said that the British bands of the Sixties were simply offering the Americans American music, stripped of any ugly political associations. But they were also offering the United States a version that was distinctively English, with rhythms, tunes, traditions and frustrations peculiar to England. By now any musician from Liverpool was hunted, then feted. The Mersey Sound was succeeded by Brumbeat, and the Tottenham Sound. There was hope for everyone. The Beatles were followed by the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Troggs, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals – all both singing and composing.

For those of a certain age, the history of this English music is well known. Where once it was surprising it is now familiar, but the music and lyrics seem fresh. That was their contribution, to the Sixties and beyond.

The Stones and the Beatles were friends, uneasily sometimes, but the Kinks were not friends with either. Prickly and intense, they did not make friends easily. Gerry and the Pacemakers had known the Beatles since the beginning. The Who didn’t know anyone. But the point was not friendship so much as fruitful competition.

Where the Beatles were influenced primarily by rock ’n’ roll, the Stones were a blues band, and never strayed very far from those roots. And between the Beatles and the Stones lay a tiny but crucial age gap. Lennon and McCartney had both been ‘Teds’, while Jagger and Richards were part of a new breed peculiar to the Sixties, the ‘Mods’.

The term itself derives from ‘modernist’; unlike the Teds, the Mods saw themselves as the heirs to the American ‘beatniks’. They were, in short, of the middle class. Not that they advertised the fact. Rather, they followed the trend established in the previous decade for aping the manners and mannerisms of the street. They wore their hair long, in imitation of bygone Chelsea artists. The accent, however, was all their own, comprising a nasal drawl – in this respect, Mick Jagger was the exemplar. In the words of one radio journalist, his cadences were imitated ‘by almost every middle-class public schoolboy in the land’.

In respect of violence, however, the Mods stood proudly in the Teddy boy tradition. Sentencing a Mod, George Simpson JP offered a denunciation worthy of Cromwell: ‘These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums … came to Margate with the avowed intent of interfering with the life and property of its inhabitants.’

The Stones had been in no real sense ‘rivals’ to the Beatles. Under the leadership of Brian Jones, they were undoubtedly talented and distinctive, but they were also derivative, and seemed content to rework the forgotten classics of the Mississippi Delta. Their new manager Andrew Loog Oldham had other plans for them. They must become the ‘anti-Beatles’. ‘The Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to burn your town!’ and ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ were among the slogans he coined. Above all, he had plans for Mick Jagger. It was the frontman, not the leader, who caught his attention. Brian Jones would or could not write songs in the new style, which he despised as chintzy and commercial. Loog Oldham saw that his protégés would disappear if they didn’t follow the Beatles in songwriting. By the mid-Sixties, most of the major bands were writing their own material – there was simply no choice. The Beatles had not only opened the gate for others, but inadvertently chivvied them through. Neither Jagger nor Richards was an instinctive or natural songwriter. But with ‘Satisfaction’ this was to change. It had its origins, so legend has it, in a dream. The opening guitar instrumental, or ‘lick’, is ominous, funereal, even threatening. In its harsh rise and fall it seems to growl that ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’

40

This sporting life

It is most unlikely that Harold Wilson sympathized with this new musical aesthetic, for all his extolling of youth. But he felt some allegiance to his fellow northerners. This led him to propose that the Beatles be awarded MBEs for services to export. The queen approved, and in 1965 John, Paul, George and Ringo received their small gold crosses. Of Her Majesty herself, they said: ‘She was great, just like a mum to us.’ One disgruntled old soldier sent back his own MBE, protesting that the honour had been awarded to ‘vulgar nincompoops’. And even those who were more sympathetic must have agreed with Geoffrey Moorhouse: ‘One day it will all be over,’ he wrote. ‘We shall have worn out our records of “She Loves You”’.

In politics, as in music, nothing is ever certain. Given his five-seat majority, Wilson could not embark on the restructuring of Britain to the extent that he desired. His wishes, however, were Olympian. The rush of provision between 1964 and 1965 for the most vulnerable now seems uncanny in its beneficence. In 1965, redundancy payments were introduced. Council homes increased from 119,000 in 1964 to 142,000 in 1966. The Protection from Eviction Act ensured that tenants need never fear a rap on the door in the early hours. The Industrial Training Board provided for generations of workers to come. The Trade Disputes Act of 1965 restored the legal immunity of union officials. And the Race Relations Act made it an offence to discriminate against any on the basis of race. Most revealingly, widows’ pensions trebled in 1966. It was as if a sacred well had overflowed into a river of gold. The government’s majority needed all the support it could muster, yet the goodwill of Wilson and his colleagues was beyond question; it was their deep intent to unfurl the canopy of the welfare state far wider than Beveridge and even Bevan could have conceived. By 1965, the sociologist T. H. Marshall could speak of a new consensus in the belief that it was the business of the state to look after the people.

It was education that had brought Wilson from Huddersfield to Downing Street, and he wished that advantage for all. Under his aegis, the percentage of GNP spent on education outstripped that on defence. Thirty new polytechnics were built. There were free school meals for children. The number of teachers in training vastly increased and the student population grew by 10 per cent each year. Every citizen, Wilson hoped, would soon be assured of some form of tertiary education. In 1969 the Open University was inaugurated; if you still could not go on to higher education, it would come to you. The dream of universal education was not as radical as it appeared, yet it was not to be. Instead, Wilson was to be credited for a step over which educators, politicians and parents have been at war ever since.

On 12 July 1965, Anthony Crosland assembled plans for a fully comprehensive system of secondary education, one that would do away with the divisive eleven-plus. Many had received a grammar-school education superior to that of the best public schools; but for those who failed the eleven-plus, the experience of a secondary modern had only served to dig a deeper sense of inferiority. Wilson’s own attitude was hard to gauge. Outwardly, he gave Crosland his familiar support, while privately he felt corralled by the Labour Left. He had even been heard to declare that grammar schools would go ‘over my dead body’. The problem grew more urgent as Labour’s tiny majority fell to one. The balance of payments, moreover, was revealed to be the worst since the war. The government had to go to the country.

The prevailing mood in the government and party was sleepy, unhurried and even bored. It was another sign of Wilson’s infectious self-belief, which the obvious unpopularity of the opposition’s new leader, Edward Heath, buffed to brilliance. Where Wilson came across as easy-going and confident, Heath seemed awkward, intense and uninspiring. And who, after all, could have expected an election less than two years after the previous one? Richard Crossman recalled the mood on the day of his own re-election, a day of ‘steady, perfect electioneering weather … Now it is we who are on the top of the world.’ The public agreed, and the Labour party resumed government with over a hundred more seats in the Commons.

It had been a beautiful morning, but there were ominous signs. Jim Callaghan, the chancellor, now faced a storm-tossed pound, and for the first time a forbidden word began to be whispered – devaluation. Just as this new threat emerged, an old one, union militancy, rose up from a long slumber. The NUS, the seamen’s union, walked out over weekend shifts. A shipping strike could do nothing but damage British maritime trade, perhaps catastrophically, and it would also make a nonsense of George Brown’s voluntary incomes policy. He had set the rate of wage increases at 3.5 per cent, while the workers were asking for 17 per cent. In a furious bid to break the impasse, Wilson spoke of ‘politically motivated men who … are now determined to exercise backstage pressures, forcing great hardship on the members of the union and their families, and endangering the security of the industry and the economic welfare of the nation’.

Blaming communist agitators worked and the strike was called off, but the victory came at an almost prohibitive price. It did nothing to help the pound and it sapped Wilson’s popularity among the backbench left and even within his own cabinet. This, in turn, led to a stillborn coup against Wilson, known as the ‘July plot’. The nation would never have accepted the erratic George Brown as a replacement for Wilson, but nonetheless it had been an enervating few weeks, and Wilson was ready to accept any distraction.

Since the Edwardian period, organized sport had acquired increasing prominence in national life. But it was cricket that dominated the early half of the century. Football was a local affair and inspired fierce loyalties, but the success or failure of the national team usually evoked little more than well-disposed apathy. With the growth of television, however, popular sympathies began to shift. Football was exciting to watch, but gentle on people’s attention span. A ninety-minute game was perhaps preferable to a five-day test match. Nonetheless, the news that the 1966 World Cup would be hosted by England caught the nation unprepared. It was hard for his aides even to make Wilson understand that football might stretch further than his native Huddersfield Town. As ever, he quickly adapted. But after a dispiriting series of failures, few imagined that England could win the tournament.

Alf Ramsey could imagine it, however, and he set out to ensure it. Ramsey was a scion of the respectable working classes; football was not a game to him, and his players were encouraged to understand that. While it would be unfair to suggest that England sleepwalked through the first three matches, theirs was not a game to inspire the faithful. But with the match against Argentina, all was changed. The England players might have been less skilful than their opponents, but they were dogged and relentless. Towards the end of the game, a header by Geoff Hurst won the game for England.

The Argentines took the defeat badly, despite having bent the rules to breaking point, and Ramsey’s inflammatory words after the game did not help matters. He used the term ‘animals’ to describe the defeated South Americans, and much of the world sympathized openly with them. The formidable Portugal side then lost to the English in the semi-final, in another result that confounded expectation. England was now in the final, and on home turf. At last the public was stirred and ‘football fever’ born.

The opponents in the final were West Germany. Joshing in the press about two other recent conflicts could not conceal the lack of real anti-German animus in the population – if anything, the German economic miracle of the post-war years had attracted admiration. The two sides were similar in many respects, tending to persistence rather than flair. The Germans scored first, a setback that served only to prick the torpor of the England side. England first equalized, then drew ahead. In the last frenetic ten minutes, the game became a true contest. The Germans drew level with one minute to go, and then the whistle blew. The English players were almost despairing, but Ramsey recalled them to their duty during extra time. ‘You’ve won the World Cup once,’ he told them. ‘Now go out and win it again.’ What followed proved one of the most controversial goals in history. The ball ricocheted between the German goalposts and at last the goal was given, to huge German protests. There was no debate about the next one, however: with seconds to go, Geoff Hurst lashed the ball into the German net. 4-2. England had won the World Cup.

The players collapsed, wept and embraced. The sun blazed brighter, the fans roared, and Bobby Moore, having wiped his hands before greeting the queen, held aloft the World Cup. The austere Ramsey, delighting in his players’ happiness, doffed his usual reserve and kissed the trophy.

With its new mandate, and despite a deeply unpopular austerity programme, Wilson’s government could at last begin its social programme in earnest. And so, after a long and often bitter battle, the efforts of Wolfenden, Lord Acton and their colleagues were at last vindicated. In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act legalized homosexual relations conducted in private between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one. Amidst the relief, joy and outrage, the act also provided some light comedy. In later years, a cartoon appeared, showing two middle-aged men in a bed, in the open air. Beside them, a police officer remarks: ‘Over 21 you are, consenting you may well be, but I question the privacy of Berkeley Square.’

41

Old lace and arsenic

It is in a sense ironic that 1967 should be remembered as the ‘Summer of Love’; the previous year had produced rather more of that commodity, for it was in 1966 that London had come to flower. The realms of drama, film, art and music glittered with palaces and blazed with gardens. It was the year of Lesley Hornby, a tiny, huge-eyed ghost of a girl better known by her family’s affectionate nickname, ‘Twiggy’. Led, or misled, by her example, young girls strove for a shape that later generations would regard as emaciated.

Twiggy herself was only the newest petal on an unprecedented bloom of English fashion. Indeed, by 1966, even Italy was prepared to offer an only slightly ironic bow to English efforts. Mary Quant was hailed as ‘the queen of the miniskirt’ by Epoca, while boutiques such as ‘Lady Ellen’ and ‘Lord Kingsay’ were to be found in Milan itself. Like many of a Welsh background, Mary Quant had recast herself as English almost at the moment she arrived in London. Her mission was simply ‘to open a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories … sweaters, scarves, shifts, hats, jewellery, and peculiar odds and ends’. This was hardly enough to distinguish her from many other designers, but she went further. She wanted, as she put it, ‘clothes that were much more for life, much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in … clothes to move and run and dance in’. It was to have huge repercussions, not so much for the country itself as for others’ perception of it. The young were the new market, and youth was all. From the King’s Road in Chelsea to the United States, her clothes – bright in colour, sharp in outline, endlessly adaptive – spread over continents. Rightly was Quant named the ‘Queen of Fashion’.

She had imagination and could tease out the silken quality in gingham, tartan, flannel and even PVC, the delight of fetishists. For her, there were no marriages of convenience between material and shape, only love matches. By 1966, she had been awarded the OBE, her companies bringing in more than £6 million a year, and five hundred designs soaring from her sewing machines annually. The boutique style also took off elsewhere, with Carnaby Street as the leader. The new clothes swirled around a new type, and indeed created it: this was the ‘dolly bird’, skinny, girlish, sexually assured and affluent. For despite the gushing of Quant and others, the new trends in fashion lay far beyond the reach of ‘dockers’ wives’. Twiggy herself was unimpressed. ‘Bazaar in the King’s Road,’ she said, ‘was for rich girls.’

It was likely, too, that the theatre was for rich patrons. The dominant item on the early-Sixties stage was still the kitchen sink. The dark, the ‘gritty’, the consciously inelegant, were paramount, just as affluent audiences expected and required. When a shift occurred, it did so teasingly.

Joe Orton was born plain ‘John’, of immaculately workingclass stock. After training as an actor, he met Kenneth Halliwell, an aspiring novelist. When Orton and Halliwell appeared in her office to discuss their joint novel, their prospective agent, Peggy Ramsay, was left with one clear impression. ‘Kenneth was the writer, John was basically his pretty and vivacious boyfriend.’ Yet it was the consort who was ultimately to wear the crown. Unlike his lover, Orton had never particularly wanted to be a writer, and this lack of vocation counted in his favour. It was writing rather than being a writer that appealed to him.

His first play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, appeared to owe much to the kitchen sink drama of the Fifties. It was set in a dank suburban household, with little in the way of glamour and a large rubbish tip outside. Kath and Ed, siblings in middle age, live with their father, Kemp. Enter Mr Sloane, a young workingclass man to whom both brother and sister find themselves irresistibly attracted. Kemp is suspicious and hostile, with some justification, for the callow ingénu of the first act soon reveals himself to be a cool, manipulative sociopath. Having impregnated Kath, he goes on to beat Kemp to death when the latter identifies him as the murderer of his former employer. Although the death is strictly manslaughter, Kath and Ed succeed in blackmailing Sloane, and he is forced to let them ‘share’ him. The unforgiving austerity of the plot is, however, belied by the play’s idiom. The flat cadences of the early scenes recede and a puckish, Wildean note intrudes. When Sloane asks whether he can be present at the baby’s birth, Ed assures him: ‘I think to be present at the conception is all any reasonable man need ask.’

Buoyed by the generosity of Terence Rattigan, the play performed well and profitably. Only a few days after the opening night, however, the papers received a letter from one ‘Edna Welthorpe (Miss)’. Indignant at the ‘filth’ displayed, she concluded that ‘today’s young playwrights take it upon themselves to insult the ordinary, decent public … the ordinary, decent public will shortly strike back – now!’ The solecism at the end was the master touch, for of course Miss Welthorpe was none other than Joe Orton himself. The forename was offered in tribute to Rattigan, who always maintained that ‘Aunt Edna’ was his ideal audience member.

Loot, Orton’s next performed work, was a black farce in which Inspector Truscott, a cheerfully corrupt policeman, investigates a burglary, only to pocket much of the titular loot before sending an entirely innocent widower to jail. The kitchen sink had yielded centre stage to the coffin, where the casket holds the stash. When faced with the proposition that it is the business of the police to protect the honest and decent, Truscott remarks, ‘I don’t know where you get these slogans, sir. You must read them on hoardings.’ This Wildean strain dances with still greater abandon in Orton’s later plays. What the Butler Saw was performed posthumously. Orton’s finest work, depicting the gradual unravelling of sanity and justice in a psychiatric ward, it ends with the cast, traduced, abused, ravished and raving, ascending a stair into the light, carrying the ‘missing parts’ of a statue of Winston Churchill. Every kind of ‘perversion’ is gleefully displayed for the audience’s disgust and delectation.

The play was jeered and heckled at its opening. Sir Ralph Richardson, who played the charming, sinister and palpably insane Dr Rance, was advised from the stalls to ‘give up your knighthood!’ Orton’s penchant for ‘black farce’ had its counterpart in what has been called the ‘comedy of menace’. Where theatre was concerned, black was a tone that leaked into the brightest palettes of the time. Harold Pinter gave tacit approval to the expression ‘comedy of menace’, but the comedic quality was not always easy to discern. He had begun to write in the late Fifties, but it was in the Sixties that his reputation began its true ascent. The Caretaker was performed in 1960, and The Homecoming six years later. In The Homecoming, the tale springs from the common motif of two strangers coming to town. In the course of the plot a husband returns from America to his workingclass family, all male, with a woman he announces as his wife. She behaves in a remarkably unwifely manner, proceeding to seduce two of his brothers in front of him. It soon becomes clear that the brothers and paterfamilias want to keep her, as sister, as mother, and as something else – a something hinted at in the word ‘business’. The husband departs for America, leaving his willing wife in the hands of his father and brothers, who comprise a brood as clinging as it is predatory. Pinter’s gift to the theatre of the Sixties was his willingness to carve in negative space, to saturate the pause and the silence with generally malevolent intent. Asked what his plays were concerned with, even what they were about, he replied, ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.’

As if in harmony, the dystopian strain in English fiction returned. Anthony Burgess composed A Clockwork Orange, ‘being the adventures of a young man whose principal hobbies are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven’. Set in a not-too-distant future, it lays out a society at once authoritarian and feckless, in which the untrammelled young have adopted an argot called ‘nadsat’. The intent behind the devising of this patois, a kind of thieves’ cant of the future, was to render the book ageless. It incorporates English, Romany, and cockney rhyming slang, but above all, Russian. In a West that had heard Khrushchev’s grandiose threat ‘We will bury you!’, it was all too plausible that Russian should become the language of power.

The young man, Alex, has nothing to complain of. He is clearly of the middle class, and as clearly a sociopath. There is no reason behind his savage quest for unending self-gratification – indeed, it is his lack of obvious criminal motivation that makes him so unsettling, particularly to those who look for some ‘trauma’ to explain the existence of evil. He leads a gang of three ‘droogs’ on night-time escapades which reliably end in careless and sickening violence. When not with his pals, he is given to the casual rape of underage girls, and to Beethoven. When the gang turns against him, he finds himself in prison. There he is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, a kind of extreme aversion therapy which renders the patient incapable of violence or lust. When he is released into the world, his former victims, finding that he is helpless, beat, humiliate, abuse and incarcerate him. At last Alex is given the opportunity to reverse the treatment, an opportunity of which he happily avails himself. In the last chapter (omitted from the American version), a sedate and subdued Alex realizes that the lust for destruction has ebbed from him. Rather than remaining a ‘clockwork orange’, he may find the will to rejoin the human race.

Of the many people anxious to let wholesome light into this dark world, Mary Whitehouse, a Warwickshire housewife, was the most vociferous. Spurred on by what she considered the moral cowardice, even treachery, of the BBC, she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in the early Sixties. From the pens of the bespectacled, redoubtable Whitehouse and her followers poured a steadily swelling torrent of complaint. Once, asked whether she had actually seen a programme that had so offended her, she replied with mocking disdain: ‘I have too much respect for my mind!’ When it was insinuated, in an interview with Johnny Speight, that her views were fascist, Whitehouse successfully sued the BBC. It was one of several private prosecutions she mounted – few had the same success, though many proved influential.

Those who disagreed with her were apt to do so in satirical fashion. Soon after the Speight affair, Till Death Us Do Part, a television series written by Johnny Speight which depicted the comically hapless struggle of Alf Garnett against the forces of progress, had Garnett reading one of her works and cheering every line. Whitehouse had objected to the repeated use of the word ‘bloody’ on that programme; in that episode, the ‘bloody’s flowed without cease.

To her supporters, Whitehouse was a brave, decent Christian, attempting to reverse a contagion that had spread from the world of entertainment and into the English household. To her detractors she was a bigot intent on halting and even reversing any increase in freedom of expression and social progress. The truth is perhaps more subtle: she seemed convinced that to be a Christian entailed being a theocrat. Yet her influence proved greater than her supporters dared hope. Her campaign ‘The right of a child to be a child’ led many years later to the passing of the Protection of Children Act.

In her conviction that wild flowers are never more than weeds, she often aimed at the most seemingly innocuous TV programmes. Violence, as much as sex, disturbed her deeply, and when a show she wrongly understood to be for small children depicted a humanoid plant throttling one of the characters, she felt bound to lodge a protest. This was a pity since she and the protagonist of Doctor Who had much in common. Both were outsiders, rebels who saw themselves as healers, and both sought to interfere as much as they could in matters they felt to be of moral consequence.

A man finds himself trapped in an alien and primitive environment. His craft, which had once traversed many lands swiftly and fluently, now creaks and shudders. So far, the traditional motifs need no introduction. Here, however, a curious anomaly is introduced. The man’s ship alters its shape to suit its environment, but something has gone wrong, and the ship is stuck in the shape of a Sixties police box. His story begins in inconvenience, and what else is a story but a succession of inconveniences? Doctor Who had a difficult birth. First broadcast in 1963, it struggled to crawl from script to screen, but by the late Sixties it amounted to a national addiction, with production values best described as homely and a central figure who was old, eccentric and unglamorous. England’s answer to Superman looked, and thought, rather like Bertrand Russell.

It was part of a wider trend, discernible even in A Clockwork Orange, in which ‘white heat’ forged only monsters of metal. This is most apparent in the figures of the Daleks. With their pepperpot armour, spindly weapons, lavatory plunger eyes and, above all, their voice – like the bark of a cockney sergeant – the Daleks should have been comic. Instead they were terrifying, for under the metal exterior lurked the loathsome result of an experiment in eugenics. In this dreadful parody of humankind lay, it was hinted, our common fate if science were ever given the power to rule. Time and again, the Doctor must confront the prejudices of frightened races whose leaders have told them that the gods will punish them if they do not obey. Miracles are then revealed as scientific trickery, with gods shown to be mere computers. The Doctor thus acted as a kind of corrective to the missionaries of the Victorian period, urging the primacy of facts over faith.

His other great enemy was imperialism. The mass will to conquer and devour was outmanoeuvred again and again by the Doctor’s courage and wisdom, but never finally defeated. On the screen, as in the world, evil recuperates as if by reflex. But the Doctor was no superhero. Aside from his longevity, his only weapons were his intellect, his trench humour, his pluck and his sometimes quixotic compassion. The Doctor, in short, was a profoundly English creation, in manners, accent and wit. It is tempting to hear in his tones an echo of what one journalist referred to as ‘benevolent post-war paternalism’: Britain no longer ran the world, but it could perhaps heal it. This was an unarguable manifestation of the Sixties spirit.

The visual art of the Sixties was the result of schooling in the Fifties. Its roots had been planted in 1957, and from then on the plant grew as swiftly as willow. In the decade of the consumer, art had become public. As the critic Robert Hughes observed, in any clash between pop culture and art, art could not possibly win. Very well, then art would become pop; buildings, album covers, advertising logos and theatre sets all evinced the new spirit.

The world of colour, so long occluded, found its greatest exponent in David Hockney. A true child of the grey moorland, he caught the rising sun and like a sunflower bent towards it. Coming to prominence in 1963, he went on to dominate the Sixties with paintings of swimming pools, beautiful men, sun and sea. In his paintings, colour and light, exuberant splashes and clean, crisp lines are composed in a manner that lifts the most cynical heart. In many ways, modern art had begun as an act of retreat rather than of advance. With the fashionable efflorescence of photography, it was widely predicted that figurative art would wither and perish. Yet the remarkable flourishing of art in the Sixties is best known for being shamelessly figurative in character, largely in its subverting of images familiar from popular consciousness. The ‘Situation’ exhibition in 1960 established a paradox: the primacy of all things American and the distinctiveness of all things British. The contributing artists were keen to identify with all things American, from ‘action paintings’ to Dacron suits.

But the American influence can be exaggerated. English artists did not follow the American lead in art any more than in politics. In fact, the relentless succession of stars and soup tins across the ocean found little favour in Britain. Even when they used such images, the instinct of the artists was to subvert rather than merely replicate. Peter Blake’s Self-Portrait with Badges (1961) embodied the paradox with charm and delicacy. A short and unprepossessing Englishman in middle age, standing in a suburban garden, looks flatly at the viewer, his clothes adorned with badges from America. His eyes seem to say: ‘I’m trying to look American. It isn’t working, is it?’

As much of this art reveals, the decade was increasingly exercised by the rapidly growing influence of psychotropic substances. Cannabis had been available for years, if you knew where to look. The houses and tenements of the West Indian community were widely supposed to be thick with resinous smoke, but like all such racial totems this was largely a myth. What cannot be denied is that by the mid-Sixties, a few hours of ‘ease’ was cheaper and more accessible than ever it had been before. However, cocaine was the toy only of the rich, heroin was scarcely heard of, and ‘magic mushroom’ could be found only in the less salubrious markets of the capital. To be sure, the pills known as ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ were widely used, but they had been in circulation for years.

The peculiarly Sixties offering was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Its origins were innocent enough. When LSD was developed in the late Fifties, it was hailed in some quarters as balm for hurt minds. This reaction derived from LSD’s unique property among hallucinogens: it provoked what was called ‘synaesthesia’. While under the influence of ‘acid’, the subject found that his senses swapped their functions: sounds could be seen, smells heard. This was followed by a state in which the senses simply elided, leaving the subject in a state of whimsical ecstasy.

No less an authority than Aldous Huxley had praised its curative powers. More significantly still, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had tried acid and declared it beneficial, a remarkable endorsement from one understandably suspicious of altered states. The problem, as so often, was that the recreational user could never be sure that the acid he had bought was quite what it appeared. It was not long before acid was ‘cut’ with strychnine, producing a state of agitation and fury. Sometimes substitute hallucinogens were sold and these offered only horrible visions, lasting sometimes for days. LSD had sunk into the mire by the end of the decade, leaving little trace.

Like so many trends of the Sixties, this largely metropolitan habit scarcely grazed the consciousness of most people, yet the wider effect, as filtered through the arts, was incalculable. Michael English and Nigel Waymouth composed posters and album covers that at first recalled art nouveau, but which belonged in temper and in subject only to the Sixties. Wild images, extravagant lines, colours that refused to cooperate, swirled about and about within a fantastical vision that came to be known as ‘psychedelic’.

42

The new brutalism

Brandy apart, the prime minister himself did not indulge in mindaltering substances, though few could have blamed him. For three years, the government had been attempting to fulfil its social and strategic commitments while placating its creditors. It had even resorted to borrowing from the IMF, a humiliating position for a supposedly great power. Now there was nothing for it, it seemed, but to devalue the pound.

While Wilson’s government had hugely increased welfare provision, the difference in economic outlook between Labour and Conservative was still one of degree rather than of kind. Wilson had largely followed his Conservative predecessors, who in turn had largely followed Attlee. The post-war consensus had yet to be challenged on any scale. It is hard to see how any one party, let alone any individual, was to blame. This thought cannot have greatly consoled the prime minister as he faced the cameras on 27 April 1967. With a smile that seemed almost a plea for mitigation and in a voice that sought rather than offered reassurance, he told the nation that ‘From now the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or your purse or in your bank, has been devalued. What it does mean is that we shall now be able to sell more goods abroad on a competitive basis.’

It was a gift to the opposition, and Edward Heath was scathing: ‘Having denied twenty times in thirty-seven months that they would ever devalue the pound, they have devalued against all their own arguments.’ The image of Wilson as a political eel was now fixed in the minds of parliamentarians, while his reputation among the public for amiable bluntness suffered accordingly.

Once again, however, it is hard to see how things could have been better managed. The clue lies in Wilson’s preamble to the announcement. He had said that the ‘decision to devalue attacks our problem at the root’. Later economists might have observed that the ‘problem’ lay not in the root but in the branches – overladen, overextended and caught in a mass of tangles. The Labour government of the late Sixties, like the Macmillan government before it, had committed itself to a programme in which a hundred irreconcilable aims jostled for priority. Nor could the effects of the six-day war on oil prices have been predicted. The current account for the balance of payments did recover, however, and its recovery lasted until 1970. It would be left to another generation to address the problem of money supply, the ‘root’ problem.

The spring had been dour indeed; what hope then for the summer? The Beatles had conquered America, but the joys of live performance had started to pall. ‘One more hotel, one more stadium, one more run for your life,’ was their summing up of the experience. The disillusion had begun after a carelessly provocative remark by John Lennon that ‘Christianity will die, it will vanish and shrink. We’re more popular than Jesus now.’ Lennon’s startled apology in the wake of public protest did nothing to mollify the deeply religious states of the American South and Midwest. And when crowds began burning Beatles paraphernalia, the Beatles began to sense that their popularity was not after all unassailable. The coup de grâce, however, came with their visit to the Philippines. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos had arranged a meeting with them, but due to an administrative glitch they failed to appear. It is never prudent to snub a despot, and when they were assaulted by the very guards assigned to protect them, the Beatles fled. Touring, they decided, had lost its charm. Instead they closeted themselves in their studio, writing, composing, editing and, above all, experimenting. When asked what magnum opus they were assembling, they were uncharacteristically coy.

In the world of fashion, a dual trend of nostalgia and mysticism became apparent. The seeds had been laid in 1964, when Barbara Hulanicki set up Biba, a fashion boutique whose ethos was quite different from that of Mary Quant or Carnaby Street. In 1965 she remarked, ‘I love old things. Modern things are so cold. I need things that are lived.’ It soon became obvious that her taste was widely shared. The clothes marketed were voluminous, richly coloured, and just decadent enough to excite without offending. The ‘Belle Époque’ of the early twentieth century was everywhere evoked but at affordable prices. In this, as in every other respect, Biba broke with its predecessors. By 1967, its store on Kensington High Street, with its Egyptian columns and stained-glass windows, was drawing as many as 100,000 customers a week.

Biba set the pattern for the era, and its influence was to last deep into the Seventies. It was more prophetic than countercultural, but those who came to be associated with its bedizened, opulent style stood defiantly against the prevailing culture. From 1967, the more troubled current of youth found a tributary that ran into tree-tangled Middle-earth. Their proclaimed values were those of peace, brotherhood (and sisterhood), universal (and free) love, and recreational use of the softer drugs. The hippy trend was without obvious precedent. The Mods and the Teds could boast of an inheritance of bloodiness, but the hippies turned away from it. The cult had many limitations and absurdities, but its devotees forswore the fist or the broken bottle; the object was peace.

At first, they were instantly recognizable. The body was swathed in scarves, beads, kaftans, voluminous trousers. The word ‘hippy’ is of uncertain provenance, but it seems to have had its origins in black American ‘jive’ in the early twentieth century. It signified ‘with it’, or ‘cool’. Neatly inverting the circumstances of the pop invasion, here was a largely American stem grafted onto English roots. The 400,000 who gathered for the Isle of Wight Festival in 1967 were imitating American models, yet they were at one with their sisters and brothers in the United States in invoking English masters: Gerrard Winstanley, the English interregnum anarchist, Aleister Crowley, the early-twentieth-century mage and visionary, William Blake and J. R. R. Tolkien were held to be the prophets of the movement. Later, the hippies began to assimilate the influences of the East, and the ‘hippy trail’ from Istanbul to India became a fixture of their lifestyle. In this practical orientalism, they took their lead from the Beatles.

On 1 June 1967, the Beatles’ long-awaited album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released. The cover alone was a feast. The Beatles, dressed as Edwardian bandsmen, stood against a vast collage of famous or esoteric figures, while to their right stood the effigies made in their honour by Madame Tussauds. The album was arranged as to give the impression of a concert in the grand old style of the village pavilion. In some of the songs, like ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, this impression was reinforced. Over others, like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, a silken, starry cape of psychedelia spread. Paul McCartney sang of workingclass parting in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, and of the unsuccessful wooing of a meter maid in ‘Lovely Rita’. No one song resembled another. Sgt. Pepper was not perhaps the Beatles’ best album, but like the Beatles themselves it was greater than the sum of its parts. Its example inspired musicians of the later Sixties both to further heights of creativity and to further depths of pretension.

The expression ‘British architecture’ had become almost oxymoronic by the mid-Sixties. The eager acolytes of Le Corbusier dominated the Royal Institute of British Architects, and were austere in their attitude to anything that smacked of native sentimentality. Le Corbusier himself had declared that cities were ‘far too important to be left to their citizens’; to the English, this was not so much heresy as blasphemy. The lawn, the flower bed, the garage and the tumbledown house stood for the spirit of homely self-reliance that the English have always imagined to be their birthright.

There could be no denying the impact of brutalism, on individual lives and on the English skyline. The Sixties marked the apogee of the ‘high-rise’ building. Its benefits seemed obvious. Unlike the new towns, which ate into the countryside at a rate that appalled many in the countryside and suburbs, tower blocks trespassed only on the territory of birds. Considerations of safety and even practicality counted for little. Ian Nairn, one of the most far-sighted of architectural writers, made the point baldly: ‘The outstanding and appalling fact about modern British architecture is that it is just not good enough. It is not standing up to use or climate, either in single buildings or the whole environment.’ British brutalists were trying to ape continental models while ignoring continental standards.

The poet John Betjeman showed himself the true heir of Chesterton in his fulminations against soulless modernity. He was to save St Pancras station and countless other examples of Victorian architecture from demolition. But it was the proposed abolition of nature that angered him most. We will never know the extent to which Betjeman and others saved the English landscape from being ‘improved’ beyond recognition, but it is unlikely that the mass supplanting of families from their homes could have long continued. The tower block and the new town were both going the way of all fashions by the end of the Sixties, although the latter was to have a brief and undistinguished revival in the Eighties. The compound failures of the brutalist experiment had led by the late Sixties to a resurgence in softer, older traditions. After a long enchanted sleep, art nouveau had begun to stir, in housing as much as in fashion. Wallpaper in the William Morris style was pasted on walls; the beams on Tudor houses were uncovered.

In October 1967, a private member’s bill by the Liberal MP David Steel became law. Although it concerned the contentious matter of abortion, it was proposed in the same spirit as the Sexual Offences Act as a compassionate means of ending distress. The bill enjoyed broad cross-party support, allowing trained doctors to perform what had hitherto been the preserve of unscrupulous and often unqualified backstreet practitioners. In the Sixties film Alfie, the eponymous workingclass lothario, played by Michael Caine, gives a girl he has seduced some ‘help’, as it was termed, in the form of a shifty doctor. When Alfie later goes into the room where the abortion has taken place, his face contorts in a daze of horror. Many such films dealt with the question, few so powerfully; the image must have swayed many to the belief that no woman should have to suffer such conditions or such shame.

On 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell, the honourable member for Wolverhampton, gave a speech in the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. His audience was the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre and his subject was immigration. The audience was expecting edification and even entertainment; what they witnessed was an eruption of lava from a suburban lawn. With his jaw clenched, his voice caught between a bark and a snarl, and eyes which, in the words of Kingsley Amis, suggested someone ‘about to go for your throat’, Enoch Powell was never biddable and seldom diplomatic. Ever willing to hector, to argue, he could not steel himself to woo or placate. This quality brought him to high office but rendered negligible any chance of his retaining it.

Powell had been a brilliant classicist at university, a superb organizer during the war, a fiercely meticulous minister, and a conscientious MP, his ear ever open to the concerns of his constituents – whatever their origins. He had a command of fourteen languages and was able to canvass in six of them. If he had shown concern over the rate of Commonwealth immigration in the early Sixties, he was scarcely alone. And it should be noted that when the more extreme elements of the anti-immigration lobby asked for his support in the late Fifties, they were met by cold reproof or icy silence. He was thus a plausible demagogue, but an improbable racist. As the speech gathered in pace and hyperbole, the moustachioed, methodical public servant became a bearded John Knox. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily heaping up its own funeral pyre … Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

The so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech earned Powell immediate dismissal from Heath, lasting opprobrium in the House of Commons and the warm endorsement of 74 per cent of the electorate. He was to be remembered as the man who had deliberately stirred a sleeping dragon, but Powell had only himself to thank for this. His speech was not just inflammatory, but mendacious. He had cited unnamed constituents feeling afraid in their own homes. He had spoken of ‘excreta’ being shoved through the letter box of an elderly white woman. A man was quoted saying that ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. It is probable that these mysterious constituents never existed. All the tokens of a mind warped by passion were in place. His friend Michael Foot, as far from Powell in political outlook as he was close to him in patriotism and intellect, reflected that ‘It was a tragedy for Enoch … a tragedy for all of us.’

Powell scorned the notion that one race could be ‘superior to another’, but logic compelled him to follow his reasoning wherever it led. His premises, however, were not universally shared. For him the object of politics was the coherence of the state and society, and many might have agreed. Many, too, would have accepted his notion of a realm united under a queen, with parliament as sovereign. But he considered this coherence or unity to be as necessary in town and village as it was in Westminster and believed that if it should be threatened, bloodshed would follow. As he never tired of asserting, it was not for him a question of colour. However that may be, his speech destroyed his chances of ever again attaining high office. It did not, however, curtail his influence on politics. Although his more apocalyptic predictions came to nothing, in the field of economics he was to prove the prophet of the movement that would become known as monetarism.

43

The soothing dark

For members of the ‘commentariat’, the early Sixties had been heavy with pessimism, even of fatalism. The Economist had noted that ‘All the political parties are going into their annual conferences with plans … to put Britain right by bringing it up to date; each promises that, like a detergent, it will wash whiter. The British have become, suddenly, the most introspective people on earth.’ It was not alone. Nonfiction presses ran almost dry with laments for the ‘state of the nation’. One of the most influential was Suicide of a Nation (1963), edited by Arthur Koestler. In this book, Malcolm Muggeridge articulated an ominous thought. ‘Each time I return to England from abroad the country seems a little more run down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier; its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier … and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’ This mood had lifted in the second half of the decade, but it was to reassert itself. It cannot have helped that, in 1967, de Gaulle had for the second time vetoed Britain’s joining the Common Market. The Wilson administration seemed dazed and bewildered in the face of continental obduracy.

But, as ever in the Sixties, the people had their diversions. Watching the television had become something of a national sport in itself, and by the end of the decade, all but the poorest homes had their own set. And the small screen accommodated every taste – one could be stirred by The Avengers, comforted by The Forsyte Saga or amused by Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son and a gentle but brilliantly observed comedy about the Home Guard called Dad’s Army. Certainly, there was little to draw people to the larger screens. British cinema comprised scarcely more than Bond, pop art pretension and camp comedy. It could hardly be otherwise: by the late Sixties, funding for British films came almost exclusively from the United States, and when the quality of British film began to wane, the flow of money stopped.

One fine Sixties innovation, however, was the so-called ‘caper movie’. The greatest, and silliest, example of this genre was The Italian Job, released in 1969. Here, a plausible crook named Charlie Croker steals 4 million pounds’ worth of bullion from under the noses of the Mafia, aided by a team of very English criminals. They manage to get their stash up into the Alps when disaster strikes. The film ends with their bus leaning over a vast gulf, and Croker (played by Michael Caine) assuring the gang that he has ‘a great idea’, with somewhat frayed confidence.

For all the film’s virtues, it might have vanished had it not so winningly caught a particular brand of Englishness: amateurish, sunny and yet quietly implacable. And it represented, too, a reversion to the spirit of the early Sixties. This was not the slick, self-assured world captured in the Bond films. The times were less certain and so was the culture reflecting them; perhaps, in spite of the empty promises of statesmen, the dulled diamonds of flower power and the disappointments of technology, there existed the conviction that ordinary, traditional pluck might see the nation through. In any case, the end of American funding was not the disaster it might have been. For one thing, it led to the success of the Hammer studios. Towards the end of the Sixties and deep into the Seventies, films about Dracula and Frankenstein, witches and werewolves were devoured avidly by audiences and excoriated eagerly by critics.

Then there were the Carry On films, which in the Sixties took a turn for the bawdy. Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor and, on occasion, Frankie Howerd, starred in films where no sacred cow was left unmolested. From the hospital to the camping field, from ancient Rome to imperial India, the Carry On team titillated and tickled the audience. In a very English eschewing of the erotic, they brought back a spirit of holiday fun, with brassieres popping and zips jamming.

For those with money or taste, the theatre could still offer distraction and even intellectual challenge. Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born ‘university wit’ who had never gone to university, began to bewitch audiences with plays of punishing erudition, unabashed persiflage and broad comedy. Less ostentatious in his erudition but no less lyrical was the young Peter Shaffer, whose The Royal Hunt of the Sun reimagined the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the perspective of the compromised Incas. Such interpretations were to become his unchallenged demesne.

The great pop bands of the early Sixties were scarcely in retreat, but the hysteria surrounding them was spent and a long-delayed scepticism could at last be felt. Fleet Street, once the Beatles’ most ardent well-wisher, was beginning to roll its eyes at what seemed their growing perversity. Why couldn’t they just stick to playable tunes? Why all this cleverness? Satirists, too, were again sharpening their knives.

The musical invasion of the Sixties had been an invasion of groups. Just as the United States was the arena of individual endeavour, so it tended to be the cradle of the solo artist. Britain, comparatively more communal in its approach, represented the land of the band. Thus there were the Who, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, and in the latter half of the decade, the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Certain patterns emerged: the upper-or upper-middle-class manager, full of enthusiasm but short on experience, the predominantly workingclass origin of the band members, the American influence and its subsequent jettisoning.

Of all the bands, the Kinks were the most distinctively English. Towards the end of the Sixties, they began to compose wistful elegies and biting eulogies for the country, its vistas and its customs. Like many of their contemporaries, they had begun as a rhythm and blues band, but by the end of the decade they celebrated and satirized contemporary life in the cadences of the music hall and the folk song.

The ‘beautiful people’ did their best to quiet the warring world through ‘flower power’, yet the hippies and musicians of England were less strident in their anti-militarist stance than those of the United States. It was not, after all, the sons of the English who were fighting in Indochina. For all the mockery he suffered, Wilson was by no means the poodle of Washington. He refused, for example, to allow British troops to serve in Vietnam. The pop songs of the time often seemed to celebrate or advocate a certain kind of liberty, but the singers themselves were rarely revolutionaries by conviction. A sometimes forgotten bond between the various groups was art school. Nowadays considered a middle-class institution, it was, for those coming of age in the Sixties, a wardrobe through which the aspirational working class could enter the Narnia of the arts.

The role of a British group had been to learn from the American masters and then offer them the ultimate homage of a cover version. But to write your own songs? Could it be done? Was it not a hubristic betrayal of the masters to try to improve upon them? While classical music is, of all the forms, the most rooted in individual genius, pop music had been authorless. In that it resembled, of all things, the music of the sacred. With the advent of the Beatles and their followers, this had changed. In previous eras, the music and dance of the working class had either been adapted for polite society or dismissed; now it stood alone, unadorned and unapologetic. This had wider consequences. During the Sixties, the aspirational impulse that drove many to speak ‘posh’ began to recede. In interviews, a young musician whose stage name was Cat Stevens spoke in the languid tones of bohemian Chelsea. Middle-, let alone upper-class, tones were to be flattened or expunged.

This new grit flew everywhere, changing accents and idioms. Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud had been known to rehearse in evening dress, but this was not the Sixties way. The working class had always exerted a deep influence on film and the theatre, but in this decade the influence was actively celebrated. Michael Caine, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp and a flock of others gave the working class not respectability, but glamour.

By the late Sixties, recreational drugs, previously a minority interest even among the wealthy, were impinging upon popular consciousness. Rates of cocaine and heroin addiction had tripled by 1970. The embedding of a drug habit was in some ways easier then, and the reason seems clear: government had forbidden without informing, and no one knew exactly why these delightful diversions should be proscribed. As Mick Jagger put it: ‘We didn’t know about addiction then; we thought cocaine was good for you!’

44

In place of peace

Industrial relations had been cordial for much of the Sixties, at least by comparison with many of Britain’s neighbours. But by the end of the decade, ‘strife’ was again apparent, and Wilson and Barbara Castle, the new employment secretary, could feel in the nation a growing unease. Castle took to the task of taming the unions with something akin to despair; as a member of the party’s left, she knew better than most what the harvest would be. Nonetheless, her northern persistence and native ardour drove her on. After a lengthy period of consultation, on 16 January 1969 the White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ was published. The tenor of the document was simple. The unions must restrain their brood or government would declare them unfit parents and act accordingly. In detail, this included the right of the employment secretary to demand a strike ballot if she felt that the national interest was imperilled, a twenty-eight-day period of mandatory work in the event of a stalemate in negotiations, and, crucially, the establishment of an Industrial Board which would have the power to bind and to loose in any confrontation between unions. Its decision would be legally enforceable. This was of particular importance since the most intractable union ‘troubles’ tended to arise not between employers and employed but between unions competing for the highest wages. Much of this would have seemed unexceptionable, but for the contingencies the White Paper envisaged. A threat crouched over all; financial penalties awaited if the unions refused to comply, and, if these too were flouted, prison.

It is perhaps surprising that even then most Labour voters and MPs were generally supportive of these radical proposals. But neither MPs nor voters counted beside the unions who funded the Labour party. Moreover, a new breed of union leader had come to power; he was a militant, as often as not a Marxist, whose only care was to fence his members’ rights in a girdle of barbed wire. And he had an ally in cabinet: the home secretary, James Callaghan. Callaghan had been an undistinguished, if tenacious, member of the cabinet. At once instinctively loyal and quietly ambitious, of the Left but never a Marxist, he was above all a union man. Callaghan disliked Barbara Castle, partly on the dubious grounds that she was somehow less workingclass than himself and partly because she was university educated. His time would soon come.

The bill announced by ‘In Place of Strife’ was swiftly put to the test. In February 1969, a strike broke out at the Ford Motor Company. It was in some ways a textbook case of irreconcilable interests. Management had drawn up a plan whereby, in exchange for forswearing any unofficial action, members would be awarded a generous pay rise and larger holiday benefits. Having initially approved the plan, union leaders swiftly altered course when their members, unmollified, walked out. The impotence of adjudicators was further emphasized when a court injunction in favour of the offer fell on deaf ears.

Those on the parliamentary back bench would have none of the White Paper’s provisions, the press was divided, the unions scornful, and many formerly amenable MPs increasingly disillusioned. Still worse was to come. On 26 March, the NEC (the National Executive Committee of the Labour party) gathered to discuss Castle’s proposals. Fifteen colleagues had already proclaimed their opposition to the paper when Callaghan joined their number, with arm uplifted. ‘In Place of Strife’ limped on for a few weeks, but Callaghan’s blow had struck it to the heart and soon it collapsed. In its place the unions accepted a ‘solemn and binding’ commitment to keep its members within the bounds set by government. That stirring, utterly vacuous expression was to rumble through the next decade.

The increasing malaise of 1969 was only slightly offset by the news of a glorious collaboration between French and English designers: the supersonic aeroplane, Concorde. If there were any notably high spirits, however, these were occasioned chiefly by the spectacle of Tony Benn at the airport in Toulouse quite literally worshipping the great sleek vulture of steel beside him. Technology was, he explained, his religion.

When the last election of the decade was announced, in 1970, Labour’s mood could not have been more buoyant. The balance of payments seemed healthy, and the disappointments of the past few years were matters on which the government chose not to dwell. After all, much good had been done. Labour could point to its care for the disadvantaged, for the young, even for the elderly – though for many in the Sixties, England was no country for the old. It could boast of its international standing, and it could claim that the young had never been so fully or richly educated, the poorest never so well provided for. Yet there seemed no need to dwell on the past when the future too would surely be Labour.

There were moments of farce to enliven what otherwise promised to be a cosily predictable result. George Brown went so far as to punch a student who had heckled him. He was to lose his seat, alas, to the surprise of none. Crossman was uneasy, however. ‘We have given [the electorate] three years of hell and high taxes. They’ve seen the failure of devaluation and felt the soaring cost of living.’ Yet all the auguries suggested not only that Labour would win but win comfortably. The superstitious Wilson was convinced that, as in 1966, the World Cup would prove his biggest asset. It was perhaps unwise, however, to indulge too close an association between Labour’s success and that of the national team; on Sunday, 14 June, England was kicked out of the tournament by West Germany. Some felt that the tide had turned.

Ted Heath, dour and unpersonable though he might be, was pulling his considerable weight in his party’s cause, to great effect. When he spoke on television, many were struck by his urgency and clarity. By contrast, Wilson came across as complacent and superior. Then arose the worry that Labour voters might not turn out in the numbers needed. It took all too little to tip the scales – a shift of no more than 5 per cent. The Conservatives won 46 per cent of the vote and 330 seats; Labour 43 per cent and 288 seats; while the Liberals had to make do with six.

Wilson contrived to remain phlegmatic; perhaps he knew that his era had not quite ended. He bequeathed to his successor a balance of payments rather less than projected, and a nation rather less optimistic than it had been some six years before. Indeed, among the many swansongs for the Sixties, a gentle ballad by the Stones perhaps best captures this mood: ‘No Expectations’.

45

Bugger them all

When Edward Heath received applause, it was with an open-mouthed beam. It was as if, beneath his carapace of surly self-reliance, he could not quite believe his good fortune. But this smile was seen after concerts he had conducted, not after his electoral win. The expression he wore when he walked into Downing Street was more sombre – there was work to be done. It has been said that the choicest prey for nemesis is the man with too many talents, and this was certainly true of Heath. A skilled yachtsman, conductor and musician, he was also a far abler politician and prime minister than many allowed at the time or have conceded since. His failure, if such it was, was a table of misfortunes ready-laid for him. Then he had his own nature with which to contend. More than any prime minister before him, he was convinced of his self-sufficiency.

Douglas Hurd recalled the moment when he realized that the election had swung to the Conservatives: ‘The car radio persisted in telling us extraordinary good news … Extraordinary to me, but not to Mr Heath. To him it was simply the logical result of the long years of preparation, and of the fact that the people of Britain, like the people of Bexley, were at bottom a sensible lot.’ Heath had planned for power, and his appointments reflected this. Many of the old guard were to remain, and others to be promoted. It was a ‘young’ cabinet, with forty-seven the average age. His ‘power base’ was to be formed of those who owed everything to Heath himself. His mood may be inferred from an uncharacteristic instance of vulgarity: ‘Bugger them all,’ he is said to have exclaimed. ‘I won.’ ‘They’ were the naysayers, the sneerers and jeerers of the Tory right and of the press. However, they were not yet routed, whatever Heath may have hoped.

It was unfortunate that Heath’s premiership should have coincided with a miners’ strike in January 1972 followed by a dockers’ strike in July of the same year, both of them ominous auguries. Nor did matters improve when the government, having so loudly proclaimed its compassion and commitment to ‘fairness’, announced that it would be renewing sales of arms to South Africa. This, and the Rhodesia question, would sour relations with the Commonwealth for years to come. But, as Heath never wearied of explaining to the nation, there was work to be done. The dockers’ strike led to the proclamation of the first state of emergency. Four more were to follow.

Of all the relations that concerned the people, particularly after the compromises and failures of the previous government, those with the unions loomed largest. On television, Heath was challenged on the question. ‘Would you face a general strike?’ ‘Yes. I have always made it plain. I have said we are going to carry out a thorough reform of industrial relations.’ He promised, too, a ‘quiet revolution’. Such revolutions rarely set the public aflame, and this was to be no exception.

In any case, there was no real revolution. Heath’s chief object was to contain the forces of organized labour, rather than to undermine them. Indeed, he always proclaimed a steadfast admiration for the TUC in particular and the unions in general, however opaque this regard often seemed to the public. Union leaders usually found him both responsive and affable. Jack Jones was to recall Heath’s willingness to give his opponents a sensitive and respectful hearing, a judgement that would have surprised those who saw only the unsmiling face or unbending rhetoric. He was not to be the last prime minister betrayed by his affection for organized labour.

Heath had long been convinced that politics was a matter for specialists, and so he began to invite businessmen into the business of government. Like so many of his ventures, it was well-intentioned, but he had Whitehall to reckon with. His Programme Analysis and Review was an attempt to bring a degree of specialist knowledge to questions of policy and reduce the need for bureaucracy. Whitehall’s response was polite and inexorable. It was noted by a Whitehall observer, Peter Hennessy, that ‘their first step was to remove it from the grasp of Heath’s businessmen … and to draw it into their own citadel in Great George Street from which it never emerged alive’. It was to become a familiar story: Heath’s attempts to reduce bureaucracy more often than not added to it. In this instance, the number of civil servants increased by 400,000.

It was Heath who coined the expression ‘think tank’, to describe a body chosen to advise the cabinet on policy. A scion of the Rothschild clan headed the first of these bodies, but its warnings of an oil crisis went unheeded. Most importantly perhaps, Lord Rothschild had identified the enemy: ‘that neo-Hitler, that arch-enemy, inflation’. Inflation, long recognized as a hindrance, was now the foe-in-chief.

A further strike by miners in February 1974 led to a second state of emergency. The willingness of Heath to resort to such a measure under conditions that rarely justified the title ‘emergency’ revealed much about his attitude to opposition. Beneath the granite self-confidence could often be heard the slam of a childish foot on a floorboard. And yet it was a time for which the expression ‘U-turn’ might have been coined. Rolls-Royce, in trouble over engines to be supplied to American ‘Lockheeds’, had to be rescued, in clear defiance of Heath’s election promises. But what could he do? It would not be true to suggest, as some have, that Heath despised or underrated America’s contribution to world prosperity or world peace. There can be little doubt, however, that he viewed the ‘special relationship’ as a hindrance to his European ideal. That the United States had consistently supported Britain’s attempts to join the bloc was a circumstance that Heath contrived to ignore. Henry Kissinger put it thus: ‘His relations with us were always correct, but they rarely rose above a basic reserve that prevented – in the name of Europe – the close cooperation with us that was his for the taking.’ As ever, it was not that Heath had no ear for advice or public opinion, merely a poor nose for changes in the wind.

On the question of the swelling war between India and Pakistan, Heath’s rejoinder to Kissinger could not have been clearer:

What they wanted from the special relationship was to land Britain in it [the war between India and Pakistan] as well … and I was determined not to be landed … Did we lose anything by it? No, of course not. We gained an enormous amount. I can quite see that it’s rather difficult for some Americans, including Henry, to adjust themselves to this, but it’s necessary for them to do it. Now, there are some people who always want to nestle on the shoulder of an American president. That’s no future for Britain.

In this, as in so many respects, Heath wished to place himself in opposition to Wilson. As Kissinger put it, ‘There was a nearly impenetrable opacity about Heath’s formulations which, given his intelligence, had to be deliberate … [He] could not have been more helpful on diagnosis or more evasive on prescription … He wanted Europe to formulate answers to our queries: he was determined to avoid any whiff of Anglo-American collusion.’

Heath went further: the nine countries of the EEC should henceforth act as one in their dealings with the United States. The irony, of course, was that his relentless cold-shouldering of the United States compromised the very advantage that Britain was supposed to be bringing to the EEC. But Heath supported Nixon over Vietnam, and it is one of the more curious ironies of the age that Wilson was accused of sycophancy in his dealings with America, while Heath, who actively supported her when times were propitious, was accused of obduracy. In any case, it was clear to all by now that Heath’s priority was to gain Britain entry into the Common Market. His love of the EEC did not lie in the tradition of pragmatism characteristic of most British Europhiles, and it owed little even to the earnest talk of ‘supranationalism’ characteristic of Thirties and Forties intellectuals. His Europhilia was patriotic in origin – he believed that Britain must shrink to become great again.

Heath had been the chief negotiator during the failed application of 1963. For all his vigour, intelligence, attention to detail and Europhilia, the French had vetoed Britain. But Heath would never give up, and the experience gave him the clue to a solution; he saw that it was France, not the smaller nations, which must be wooed. He turned what powers of charm he possessed to the seduction of Georges Pompidou, the new president. One difficulty presented itself even before negotiations began. This was the Common Agricultural Policy, clearly designed to advance French agriculture. If Heath recognized that France was the chief beneficiary of European largesse, with Germany as the patient provider, he determined to overlook the fact. A greater difficulty was the demand that sterling, as the world’s paramount currency, be removed as a precondition for European monetary union.

The public was to prove itself ambivalent, as was the opposition, with opinion polls suggesting resistance to entry was as high as 70 per cent. As for the opposition, it was deeply divided. On the one hand, Labour under Wilson had also attempted to join the Common Market. On the other, ordinary members and MPs were for the most part highly suspicious, on both socialist and patriotic grounds. The EEC was capitalism incarnate, and a threat to Britain’s sovereignty. It did not help that even with the urbane and benevolent Pompidou at the French helm, negotiations remained halting and ponderous. Once again, Heath determined to deal with matters himself. In conversation with Willy Brandt, Heath pressed the British case with almost messianic urgency: ‘The world will not stand still. If Europe fails to seize this opportunity, our friends will be dismayed and our enemies heartened. Soviet ambitions of domination would be pursued more ruthlessly. Our friends, disillusioned by our disunity, would more and more be tempted to leave Europe to its own devices.’

For the climactic meeting with Pompidou, Heath prepared himself by drinking tea in the park, and receiving the opinions of experts. It was all suitably English. Pompidou himself put the European case, politely but clearly, when interviewed by the BBC. ‘The crux of the matter,’ he said, ‘is that there is a European conception or idea, and the question to be ascertained is whether the United Kingdom’s conception is indeed European. That will be the aim of my meeting with Mr Heath.’ However, the European idea represented, in practice, a French one. Perhaps recognizing this, Pompidou went on to disavow federalism, and thus was the issue of the ‘European conception’ left to slumber. Its reawakening in later years was a reversal that Heath would not live to see.

The meeting was almost uncannily successful. The two men liked each other, and, more significantly, understood one another. It took a mere two days to reach agreement. Nothing was yet official, but nothing needed to be. When Heath spoke before the Commons, a still, small voice raised an objection on the minor matter of sovereignty. Would the prime minister please clarify the nation’s status as a member of the EEC? Heath’s reply was brusque and dismissive. ‘Joining the Community does not entail a loss of national identity or an erosion of essential national sovereignty.’ The first stage had been passed, with the Commons advised merely to ‘take note’ of the terms.

Like it or not, Heath was meanwhile obliged to give his attention to some outstanding matters which the country considered to be of more pressing concern. The first was the continuing issue of industrial relations. For many who grew up in the Seventies, ‘the union’ was a creature of vague menace, endowed with preternatural abilities. By night, it hung ‘closed’ signs on shop doors. It gobbled food from supermarket shelves. It had only to lift its trident and traffic would stop. It was popularly supposed to have power even over the weather; when the union leaders shook their heads, snow would fall in endless, spirit-crushing showers. Nothing could be expected of the world while ‘the union’ was supreme. This dragon was neither red nor white, but grey, its polyester suit defying sword and lance alike.

1970 had been a punishing year for industrial relations, with more days devoured by this dragon than at any time since 1926. Heath’s response was the Industrial Relations Bill. He said, ‘I do not believe for one moment that the unions are likely to put themselves in breach of the law. They will not choose to act in such a way as to risk their funds … in ill-judged and unlawful actions.’ However, he would be disappointed. The bill achieved the remarkable feat of being rejected by the TUC even before its provisions had been published. Barbara Castle, herself carrying the bruises from her attempts to reform the unions, was unimpressed and asserted that ‘We shall destroy this bill!’ In fact, it promised little more than had Castle’s own paper ‘In Place of Strife’, but the unions could hardly treat a Conservative government with greater latitude than they had shown a Labour one. Jack Jones, the head of the TGWU, foresaw difficulties ahead for all sides. The unions had little choice but to man their palisades against a government that refused to compromise.

The act was passed on 5 August 1971, but its weakness soon became apparent. As the unions swiftly realized, a way out of the provisions was to obey only one of them: that which gave them the right not to register. Most unions did just that, and those that did register – notably the electricity union – were suspended. The bill was not killed, but merely atrophied from disuse until it was given its quietus by the next, Labour, administration.

So if the unions themselves were as mettlesome as ever, what of the incomes policy by which the government had set so much store? In principle, inflation would still be kept at bay by nonstatutory wage restraint. For a long time, it represented one of the government’s quiet victories. But it was not to last. In a speech at Eastbourne, Heath trumpeted the achievements of the government by 1971. ‘Our strength is not just figures on a balance sheet, although we have those too, our strength is not just courage in adversity, although we have shown that time and time again … We never know when we are beaten and that way we are never beaten. We know no other way than to win … For too long we have walked in the shadows. It is time for us now to walk out into the light to find a new place, a new Britain in this new world.’ The platitudes rolled out, all the more dispiriting for their hollowness. The fact remained that the government could not honour its electoral promise to leave industry to its own devices.

The same was true of its attempt to sell council houses to their tenants. A mere 7 per cent of council housing was sold during the Heath years. Nor could Labour councils be blamed – Conservativerun councils were quite as unwilling to sell valuable stock. Other misadventures occurred. It is perhaps not surprising that the notion of a Channel Tunnel was first advanced under Heath, but this too proved elusive. It should be remembered that few of Heath’s projects wilted entirely; rather, they needed different gardeners and better weather.

The appointment of Keith Joseph to the Department of Health and Social Security was perhaps paradigmatic both of Heath’s strengths and of his weaknesses. At first glance, Joseph was the ideal choice. Insatiably compassionate and ferociously able, he was a man whose intentions could not be faulted, but the result of his efforts to reduce bureaucracy was a remarkable multiplication of officials. It was in many ways a tragedy, yet Heath was determined to follow his vision. He felt, as many Tories felt, that the time had come to prioritize. The elderly, and large families on low incomes, were consistently neglected and he felt bound to redress this. In a speech, he also made clear his conviction that the welfare state was acting as a crutch to healthy limbs. ‘Unless we are prepared to take on more of the responsibilities for the things we can do for ourselves, then the State itself will never be able to do properly the jobs which genuinely demand community action.’ Nye Bevan could never have accepted this, and nor could his successors.

Meanwhile, the comprehensive boom had acquired an unstoppable momentum, despite the efforts of the new education secretary, Margaret Thatcher, one of Heath’s many promising protégés. She found herself presiding over the creation of more comprehensives than any such minister before or since, and she showed herself willing to adopt and even extend socialist programmes when she felt the need. Her saving of the Open University was a case in point, though her decision to abolish free milk for primary school children chilled many, and earned her the sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher’. Perhaps her gender counted against her, as it would do on future occasions. Other initiatives met with similar obloquy. When Heath decided that museums should charge visitors an entry fee, there was mass protest. The justification, that people appreciate more what they must pay for, seemed shallow beside the imperative to offer the poor opportunities for nourishment that they would otherwise be denied.

Strikes had been a feature of the Heath premiership from the beginning, but rarely had they imperilled the nation’s basic needs. In 1972 they did. The mining industry was in the last stages of senescence, with 600 miners leaving every week. Pits which at the turn of the twentieth century had dominated skylines, villages and lives were progressively abandoned. But moribund or not, the industry still provided the one fuel upon which people could safely rely. So when the government was faced with a demand for a 47 per cent rise in wages, to be spread out over the different jobs at the pit, it was in a quandary. The amount asked was surely prohibitive. But there were two factors that countered this. The people were solidly behind the miners, and secondly, coal stocks were not as high as they might have been. The resources lay with the miners.

Even as they had seen the wages of their fellow labouring groups rise inexorably throughout the Sixties while their own remained static, even as the number of pits halved during that decade, they had uttered barely a murmur. Their working conditions were abominable. The heat was such that Kentish miners frequently worked naked. Flooding claimed many lives, and the dust was not merely a daily torment but a constant cause of early death. Visibility in the mines was extremely poor and the shifts long. Miners had been hailed as heroes of the home front, renowned for their loyalty to the twin Victorian virtues of self-reliance and solidarity. For these reasons alone, they could count on a deep reservoir of support and sympathy among the general public. Until 1972, however, the true extent of their grievances was little understood.

It was the Yorkshiremen, already known as the most politicized among the miners, who raised their heads above the parapet. In July 1971, their call for an overall pay rise of 47 per cent was approved by the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers). Given their patience over the previous decade, the claim was scarcely exorbitant, but it ran directly counter to government policy. The Heath administration had committed itself to a pay ‘norm’ of 8 per cent for all manual workers. Only thus, it was felt, could inflation be kept down.

Joe Gormley, the head of the NUM, did not approve of unions attempting to guide government, let alone subvert it, and he had no time for communists, who were increasingly unabashed in proclaiming their allegiance. But the days when a union leader could count on the unqualified support of his nearest subordinates were nearing an end. The generation below Gormley had grown weary of acquiescence, and in any case he still had his members’ interests to protect. After fruitless bargaining with the Coal Board, a ban on overtime was declared, to be followed, on 8 January 1972, by a general strike.

The press, the public and the politicians were united in at least one conviction: the strike was doomed. Coal stocks were healthy and the industry was not the indispensable artery it once had been. Besides, it was argued, the nation surely had enough oil. But the optimists were taking far too much for granted. Initially, the miners had been lukewarm in their support for a strike, but once the ballots were filled the decision could not be rescinded. Although the press saw the strike as hopeless, it believed it to be just. Nor were coal stocks quite as full as many wished to believe, or the power stations as invulnerable. And as for oil, many seemed to have forgotten that it had quadrupled in price.

What is more, the miners had a new weapon. Both law and tradition had long accepted the right of strikers to surround the disputed workplace and dissuade any of their fellows from entering to resume work, but Arthur Scargill, a young Marxist from Barnsley, had developed a refinement in the ‘flying picket’. If local numbers were insufficient to dissuade the potential ‘scab’, the answer was to bus in striking miners from elsewhere. Moreover, he knew that for the strike to be effective, it must not merely shut down the pits, but render the entire network of energy inoperable. He was quite frank in his aims. ‘We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies … We had to declare war on them and the only way you could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points … we wished to paralyse the nation’s economy.’

It was one of the many tragedies of Heath’s tenure that he was obliged to combat a group that he greatly admired. He had been heard to proclaim that the trouble with the unions was that they were not ‘too strong, but too weak’, but such scruples gained him little sympathy in this struggle. So the coal pits lay idle, and the nation began to suffer. An unofficial three-day week began. Candles disappeared from shop shelves and the mood among the public grew darker. But the miners could count, for the time being, on its support. For its part, the government was bewildered and desperate. Robert Carr, employment secretary, confessed that ‘there was no doubt about it, our intelligence about the strength of opinion within the miners’ union generally was not as good as it should have been. We just didn’t know the miners.’

There was one vast coke plant in Saltley, a suburb of Birmingham, which still held out. Here the lorries defied the strike, passing through the gates every day unhindered, and Arthur Scargill saw his opportunity. The police were there, of course, but it was not long before they were hopelessly outnumbered. Yet the so-called ‘Battle of Saltley’ on 10 February 1972 was in most respects a peaceable affair, with what violence there was emerging from scuffles between miners and lorry drivers.

Scargill still lacked the numbers he needed, however. He addressed the workers of Birmingham itself with the appeal that ‘We don’t want your pound notes … Will you go down in history as the working class in Birmingham who stood by while the miners were battered, or will you become immortal?’ The call reached deep and far. What happened next began with a banner appearing on the top of a hill. Behind it was a mass of people. And then a ‘roar’ was heard from the other side of the hill. They had come in their thousands. In the crowd were last-minute reinforcements, the weak fired with the passion of warriors. As a result, the Battle of Saltley seemed a peasants’ revolt bedecked with the colours of chivalry; indeed, it was as ‘King Arthur’ that Scargill was to be commemorated.

It is idle to observe that the victory was largely a symbolic one; as so often happens, the symbol had become a sacred ritual which struck those who did not observe it. ‘We looked absolutely into the abyss,’ said Willie Whitelaw. Thus a strike that most thought would die within days paralysed the nation. A council of state announced a third state of emergency. Victoria Graham caught the mood of many of her generation when she observed to a friend: ‘When we were suffering for the nation’s survival during the war the task was easy, but now we seem to be silently suffering, as we watch the country brought to its knees.’ For her, as for many others, the miners’ struggle evoked tyranny. Douglas Hurd expressed the prevailing mood in government from the standpoint of the defeated: ‘The government was now wandering vainly over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time.’

A new blackout seemed to beckon. The sombre truth was that the nation needed fuel and could no longer afford oil. The stocks of coal could not be used, and power stations were running at 25 per cent capacity. Nurses were forced to care for their patients by candlelight. A nation without electricity was, it was said, only weeks away. It was time to lay down arms and sue for peace. The truce, for such it was, was ignominious. Lord Wilberforce, who presided over an inquiry into the strike, gave the miners almost everything they wanted; and, where he did not, Heath himself obliged, sullenly and desperately. On 19 February, he granted everything the NUM demanded, conceding more than even the Wilberforce Report had suggested.

Characteristically, Heath appealed to the country. Appearing on television, he conceded none of his adversaries’ claims. No one had won, he stated. All had lost. Without naming the unions directly, he made clear his view that the world had changed, and for the worse, and that if the spirit of unity were abandoned, there would be further trouble. For his part, Arthur Scargill had learned that the ‘unions united can never be defeated’. Perhaps he had not heard of the error of Stoicism: the fallacy that you have only to succeed once to succeed always.

46

The first shot

It was the fate of the Heath administration to know no respite. The strongest city will fall when attacked from all sides and ‘Heathco’ faced a ceaseless barrage. Principal among its vicissitudes was the unrest in Northern Ireland. For years, the Province had been held in fief by the Protestant majority. The Catholic minority was disadvantaged in most ways that free citizens might be expected to resent, in matters such as housing, employment and even the electoral register. Thus far Martin McGuinness was correct in calling the Province ‘a unionist state for a unionist people’ – its borders had been fixed to ensure that an otherwise narrow Protestant majority would be a decisive one.

The Unionists had their own resentments. When they looked south of the border, they saw not the benign nation recognized by the English, but a predatory theocracy determined to lash them to the mast of Rome. Their chief spokesman in the Seventies was the Reverend Ian Paisley MP. He was feared by many in the north as a fanatical and bigoted zealot, but in truth he was neither. Though he detested the papacy and feared the Republic, he won warm plaudits from his Catholic constituents as a fair-minded and considerate MP. Similarly, he never lent his name or support to the Protestant paramilitaries, and he was to oppose the policy of internment. Those who knew him best were wont to ascribe his public stance less to fanaticism than to irresponsibility. He was a show-off rather than a demagogue, and in this he resembled another staunch defender of the Province’s integrity, Enoch Powell.

The ‘Troubles’ began in the late Sixties. Unionist wrath had been aroused by a series of incidents and, as a result, Catholics now stood in fear of their lives. Hundreds of families were driven from their burning homes until it seemed that little less than a pogrom was under way. In 1969, frantic appeals to the government both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland at last bore fruit when Callaghan agreed that troops must be sent in. The army was greeted with tea, cakes and chips in a carnival of relieved gratitude, but the honeymoon soon waned. Loyalists had drawn first blood, although this was soon forgotten. The Ulster Volunteer Force killed a barman, for no better reason than that they were drunk and he was Catholic. Although IRA atrocities were more frequent and larger in scale, Loyalists showed from the first a penchant for elaborate sadism. The IRA justified its deeds as acts of war, the Loyalists as demonstrations of ‘loyalty’. Both sides proclaimed that they were protecting their own communities, and neither respected sex, age, or civilian status. The innocent were killed on the basis of supposed complicity with the foe, and dead civilians were passed off as combatants. Indeed the conflict in Northern Ireland was above all one in which the civilian was placed in the front line.

The IRA always maintained that the English were at fault; in a sense they were, for one Englishman can certainly be blamed for much of the havoc and misery that blighted the Province during the Heath years. Sean Macstiofain’s life was a tragicomedy of self-reinvention. He was baptized John Stephenson; his father was an English solicitor and his mother was born in Bethnal Green, rendering their son rather less Irish than most of his enemies. Nonetheless, his mother early imbued him with a keen sense of his supposed Irishness, and in this certainty was incubated a fierce nationalism. Those who adopt a cause are often far more zealous than those born to it, and so it proved here.

Until 1969, there had been only the Official IRA. Its leadership, however, increasingly drew away from Irish nationalism and towards theoretical Marxism. Both bullet and ballot were considered bourgeois distractions. Its stated goal now was to ‘educate’ the workers of Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, to the point where they would, of their own volition, throw off their economic oppressors. However, Macstiofain and other romantic nationalists hungered for flesh. The result was a split from which arose the Provisional IRA, formed to protect and avenge Catholic communities, fight the army and subvert British rule. Its time soon came. The honeymoon of the British army and the Catholic population had long soured when, in the summer of 1970, a detachment of troops entered the Falls Road in search of a cache of weapons. When they re-emerged it was to a street filled with men and women in a mood of raging protest. After all that had been endured, this was too much. The troops came under attack and soon had to call for reinforcements. The best they could achieve was a stalemate. On 3 July 1970, a curfew was imposed on the Falls Road. The Troubles had taken wing.

The English were for the most part indifferent. Given that the Province was a problem that would not go away, would it not be sensible to send it away? Why not withdraw from Northern Ireland altogether? After all, the terrorists had struck only those people across the sea, and misery and violence were felt by many to be the birthright of the Irishman. Let him get on with what he knew best, as long as he didn’t bring his baggage over here. But then in 1971, the IRA detonated a bomb at the military camp in Aldershot. Five people were killed, all of them civilians. Among the dead were two elderly cleaning ladies and a Catholic priest.

With Belfast soon subject to a bombing campaign, with almost daily reports of murder, and children dismembered by shrapnel, Brian Faulkner, the Northern Irish prime minister and a bastion of the Unionist establishment, begged Heath for powers of internment. On 5 August, Heath granted them, with the proviso that such internment must not target the Catholic community alone. On 9 August, the army burst into the homes of almost four hundred Catholic families, destroying sacred statues and tearing up family photographs all on the basis of useless intelligence. Many of those ensnared had little or no connection with militant republicanism and, of those that did, one had last been active during the Easter Rising. The IRA leadership was quite untouched, and now had a host of new volunteers.

As if all this were insufficient to crack the last foundations of trust, there was also the nature of internment itself. The notorious five techniques of interrogation were used, which included subjecting the internees to ‘white noise’ and sleep deprivation. Beatings and forced confessions were commonplace. Such techniques seemed only to vindicate the IRA’s central premise that this was indeed a war against imperialism. Internment was a disaster, not least because, in defiance of stated government policy, the vast majority of suspects were Catholic. It scarcely helped that this debacle was presided over by Reginald Maudling, a minister temperamentally and morally unfit for the task in hand.

With internment exposed as a moral and political failure, social cohesion in a state of haemorrhage and the two communities terrified of one another, another option began to drift into political discourse. It needed only a crisis for it to take flesh. Derry (or Londonderry, as the British called it) was the Province’s second city, and for months the army had attempted to ensure order there with the minimum of intervention. However, sniper attacks upon soldiers were a weekly occurrence, and the Protestants had begun calling for a curfew. By August 1972, civil rights marches had been banned. One group, peaceable in intent, decided to call one regardless. Paratroopers were sent in with orders to halt or at least redirect the march. Nervous, resentful and with a tradition of toughness to defend, they were not perhaps the ideal choice.

Even today, no one knows who fired the first shot or why. The paras later claimed that they had only opened fire when they were shot at. However that may be, a peaceful demonstration became a rout, as screaming people fled the soldiers’ bullets. By the end of the day, thirteen Catholics lay dead. No direct IRA involvement was ever proven, and the houses from which the soldiers saw firing were later shown to have held neither snipers nor weapons of any kind. And yet it is scarcely conceivable that trained men would have opened fire with no provocation whatever. The truth may never be known. For the time being at least, ‘Bloody Sunday’ stripped the British government of any moral authority: for those in the Catholic community, the Republic and many in the wider world, it had the burning brand of imperialism. Only two years before, the army had been admired for the tolerance and good humour it had usually displayed. Now what was left of that reputation was gone.

It was the end of the Northern Ireland parliament, and Direct Rule at last took shape. The government proclaimed it was left with ‘no alternative to assuming full and direct responsibility for the administration of Northern Ireland until a political solution for the problems of the Province can be worked out in consultation with all those concerned’. Whatever decision was to be made regarding the future of the Province, it was clear that the Republic must in some way be involved. Given that such a proposal would have been quite unacceptable to the Unionists, there was only one man who had a chance of presenting it: William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw. Genial, loyal and boundlessly benevolent, he could charm the claws from a tiger.

Whitelaw and others forged a national executive at Sunningdale, composed of all parties, including representatives from the South. In later years it would be seen as the precursor to the Anglo-Irish and Good Friday Agreements. Had goodwill prevailed it might perhaps have succeeded, but it was stillborn. Scarcely had the necessary antagonisms been aired when Whitelaw was summoned back to England to deal with the second miners’ strike. If only he had stayed to chair the executive, if only the Unionists had been more tractable, if only the Nationalists had seen the other side’s point of view: but it was not to be. In any case, the more zealous in the Protestant community saw the agreement as nothing more than an attempt to subvert the clear will of the majority. The Province fell victim to a general strike, and worse was to follow. Belfast was taken over by Loyalist paramilitaries, while the army stood by and the RUC colluded. The rule of law had been replaced by the rule of a faction. The options remaining to the government were martial law or capitulation, and they chose the latter. There was a further political price to be paid; the Unionists never forgave Heath for the Sunningdale Agreement, which they regarded as an attempt to subvert what they saw as their ancient rights, and their foes saw as their unjust privileges.

47

The fall of Heath

Amidst what can seem only a forest of white flags, some undoubted victories for Heath’s government may be discerned. The Family Income Supplement was one. An early piece of legislation, it helped countless poor couples to raise families on very little. Other laws to help the disadvantaged were legion. That Heath had turned his political energies in that direction was a source of puzzlement to many of his foes.

But perhaps this humanitarian impulse showed itself most clearly in Heath’s decision to allow the Asians of Uganda to enter Britain as refugees. Expelled by Idi Amin, these people still held British passports granted by Macmillan, and now looked to the mother country for succour. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that there should have been the slightest resistance to such a plea, but concerns about immigration were still alive. The meat porters of Smithfield came to parliament in a crowd of 500 to show their support for Enoch Powell. He had declared that the question of passports was ‘a spoof’, and maintained that ownership of one conferred no right of residence. In the circumstances, it was an ugly and specious argument, and the government crushed it. Heath himself never wavered; the refugees arrived, and the country showed itself at its best. Government help aside, Asian communities were quick to offer shelter, food and housing, as were other groups. It was perhaps Heath’s noblest hour; his grandest was still to come.

Having wooed and won the French, Heath had now to persuade parliament; while it had approved the decision to enter the European Community, it had yet to examine the terms. Ominous growls of future dissent could already be heard. The first difficulty lay in the sheer bulk of the papers involved. The task of reducing the terms to a digestible length fell to, among others, the future chancellor, Geoffrey Howe. Howe had a thoroughly, even oppressively, academic mind, and the arranging or clarifying of minutiae was perhaps his greatest gift. The result was a triumph, with the rolling ribbons of barely comprehensible directives cut down to a simple set of clauses. At one level, this could not but backfire, for with all obfuscation now removed, the full extent of the EEC’s new powers stood open to the naked eye. One clause in particular was prominent. Clause Eleven stated unambiguously that EEC law would prevail over British law and be ‘enforced, allowed and followed accordingly’.

None could ignore this, and Michael Foot, for one, had no intention of doing so. He had been dissatisfied by the whole process of simplification, calling it no more than ‘a lawyer’s conjuring trick’. But Clause Eleven deeply dismayed him. He and Enoch Powell did their best to filibuster, but the Speaker would not budge. He apologized for the fact that the House had not had the opportunity to consider the protocols more fully, but such was the hour. The House was assured that ‘a thousand years of English Parliamentary history [was] not about to be supplanted by the Napoleonic code’. Despite this, there was never any doubt as to the outcome. Although ‘full-hearted consent’ to the terms of entry was notable by its absence, a clear majority of MPs voted through the last of the legislation. And thus, on 17 October 1972, royal assent for entry was granted. On 1 January 1973, Britain entered the EEC.

The birth pangs of membership had only just begun – in little over two years’ time the whole issue would be subjected to the first of two plebiscites – but for now, Heath, Howe, Whitelaw and Pompidou could congratulate themselves on a duty well performed. Besides, the angry and the ignorant would surely see sense once the benefits of membership had become apparent. It was as well that Heath had realized his deepest dream, for as the year unfolded he had once more to face a recurring nightmare.

Over a billion pounds had been poured into the mining industry since the last miners’ strike, a clear reversal of previous policy. The miners, most assumed, were not spoiling for a second round. But their wages, though healthier than they had been, were not enough to draw more young men into the pits; an estimated 600 men were still leaving the industry every week. Then there was the renewed question of oil. Prices had been high enough two years previously, but now, after the Arab–Israeli war, they had quadrupled. In the miners’ gradual progress towards a second strike, there was no element of malice or greed. Their case was simple and even innocent in its way. They were going to ask for a further 35 per cent because they knew they were likely to get it. And so, once again, the cogs of negotiation creaked into movement. Heath was determined that the miners should stay within the bounds of his celebrated ‘stage three’ (a wage bracket which included some 4 million manual workers), while the miners and their leaders were equally determined to move out of it.

It was oil that proved decisive. The nation now relied upon it for 50 per cent of its energy. This in turn led one ‘little man’, who had been hanging back during one of the negotiations, to offer an observation. ‘Prime Minister,’ he asked, ‘why can’t you pay us for coal what you are willing to pay the Arabs for oil?’ It put Heath in a false position. Friends and colleagues noted a new lassitude in him, a weariness that cloyed his usually agile movements. What few of them realized was that Heath had physical as well as political handicaps with which to contend. An underactive thyroid gland had rendered him sluggish in thought and movement. The affliction could not have struck at a worse time.

Just when most, if not all, seemed lost, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress issued a remarkable minute. ‘The General Council accept that there is a distinctive and exceptional situation in the mining industry. If the Government are prepared to give an assurance that they will make possible a settlement between the miners and the National Coal Board, other unions will not use this as an argument in negotiations in their own settlements.’ Such a statement amounted to a hitherto unimaginable concession. The TUC seemed to be offering its sacred cow to the knife. Was it, many wondered, too good to be true?

Alas, it was. In a pattern that had become depressingly familiar, each side blamed the other for the failure of the agreement. As far as the unions were concerned, Heath rejected the offer, and as far as he was concerned, the fault lay with his subordinate, Tony Barber. But it is unlikely in any case that an agreement could have been reached: the government was too suspicious and the TUC was in no case to honour its resolution. In later years, some union leaders still insisted that ‘we could have made it stick’, but Gormley was always dubious. Len Murray, already a leading light in the union movement, even claimed that the government had the unions ‘over a barrel’: ‘If [Heath] had taken the offer and it had failed to work, and other unions had broken through, he would have been home and dry with all his anti-union policies – Industrial Relations Act and incomes policy. If it had worked, it would have been his great political triumph, showing he could bring the unions to heel.’

But Heath was not the man for such politicking. He was weary, and his capacity for optimism was running low. For months negotiations limped along, but after two years of economic U-turns, and with a defeat still fresh in his memory, Heath could scarcely surrender now. On 13 December 1973, he announced the three-day week. Another such had been put in place less than two years earlier, with ruinous runs on candles, but this one was official. It came into force on 1 January 1974. Unsurprisingly, the measure was resented, but the resentment sprang not merely from the inconvenience; it was felt to be premature and therefore politically futile. Against the advice of Whitelaw, Heath decided that the impasse with the miners could be broken only by going to the country. William Rees-Mogg of The Times agreed, though for reasons Heath was unlikely to have welcomed. ‘The Government’s policies have changed so much since 1970,’ observed Rees-Mogg, ‘that there is ample constitutional justification for an immediate election.’ But Heath had not called the election to defeat the miners; for him, the issue was broader and deeper. In a political broadcast, he summarized his stance. ‘The issue before you is a simple one … Do you want a strong Government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed? Do you want Parliament and the elected Government to continue to fight strenuously against inflation? Or do you want them to abandon the struggle against rising prices under pressure from one particular group of workers?’

As we have seen, Heath was broadly sympathetic to the unions, having himself risen from a scarcely privileged background. Ever assiduous, he had made it his business to understand the struggles and complexities of workingclass reality. But he could never bring himself to endorse the principle of collective bargaining, and without that he could make no headway with the unions. He stated his objection with customary frankness: ‘We have all seen what happens in that situation. The strongest wins, as he always does, and the weakest goes to the wall.’

And so, weakened in body and morale, Heath called an election, and a minute but telling swing to Labour was noticeable from the first. Still he soldiered on – there was work to be done, if only he could be given just a little more time. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Wilson returned to the attack, cheery and confident, the friend of the unions and the tribune of the people. When the results of the February election came through, it was clear that Heath’s attempts to balance the budget while satisfying the unions had left the country unmoved.

But Wilson’s victory was not yet complete. His was a minority government, and it would take a further election in October to secure power. Heath fought for time and a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals. To his sad and undignified fall, the Spectator played both raven and cockerel. ‘The squatter in No. 10 Downing Street has at last departed … Mr Edward 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 power.’ It was sadly suggestive of Heath’s tenure that the most vitriolic of the attacks upon him should have come from a conservative periodical. And there was one more humiliation to come, from a quarter he could never have suspected; it was the work of one of his own protégés, and, more shocking yet, a woman.

When he took over government in June 1970 he had little idea of the tribulations which were to beset him. The faltering economy, the disintegration of Northern Ireland, two coal strikes and the exploding price of oil during the Arab–Israeli war were to leave him with the demeanour of a waxwork. His attempts at a corporate exercise in state affairs ended in failure, largely because the trade unions refused to participate, but this was only one of many disappointments that afflicted his premiership. The worst was the one which lingers in historians’ memory. Before the gruesome climax of the second miners’ strike he had reversed his policy of noninterference in industry, losing much authority in the process. He was in many respects a hapless figure, rendered more powerless by the first miners’ strike. The miners were carefully arranged to make the maximum impact, and the ‘flying pickets’ increased the strike’s efficiency. The miners won their case and climbed the ladder of industrial pay, while at the same time trumping other workers. The leaders of richer unions such as power workers and the dockers set their feet on the government’s rickety incomes policy, snapping it. The CBI, the TUC and the government could go on no more. The parlous state of Northern Ireland only thickened the brew.

Even his greatest achievement, Britain’s acceptance by the EEC, was not greeted with great celebration. Many felt indifferent, hostile or bored by any closer relationship to the adjoining land mass; it brought pizza parlours and wine bars, but it was not enough to change anyone’s way of life. It was certainly not enough to persuade the Labour party to embrace the European Community. The party was in any case in such disarray that it was almost impossible to know what was happening.

Yet to close with such a sweeping catalogue of failure would be as unjust as it would be unfeeling. Heath began with a solid majority and the warm wishes of press and public behind him. He was highly able and formidably diligent; and there could be no denying his patriotism. Unlike the expansive Wilson, he was uneasy before camera and microphone. The English love an underdog, and he had his ardent sincerity and sense of mission to recommend him. However, a leader must inspire courage in others, and Heath had not the skill to do so.

Harold Wilson did not expect to reoccupy Number Ten so soon after his recent eviction, and nor, it seemed, did he greatly want to. On the steps of Downing Street, on 10 October 1974, he announced: ‘Well, there’s a job to be done, and I’m going to go in and start on it now.’ As rhetoric, it was scarcely Churchillian. From that statement alone, it should have been clear that his white heat had cooled to grey ash.

The miners’ strike was swiftly resolved, to the benefit of the miners; there seemed little choice. Other matters outstanding were to prove soluble, after the fashion of the time. The Labour party had promised a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EEC, for the reason that the Tories had mishandled the negotiations, conceding too much too soon. Behind this palpable window dressing were sharper concerns. One was that the Labour movement as a whole remained unconvinced of the benefits of EEC membership. Most pressing of all, the new government needed a distraction from what Wilson himself admitted to be ‘the same old solutions to the same old problems’.

The ‘divine right’ of kings in England had been replaced by the ‘supremacy’ of parliament, but the proponents of British membership of Europe knew well that this supremacy was now limited; there was the overriding authority of the EEC to be reckoned with. This presented a democratic anomaly: how could the laws of parliament be at once sovereign and contingent? The government had no answer to this, so the problem was handed over to the people. Of the two main parties, it was the Conservatives who were the more ardent in the cause of continued participation. As the opposition, they would not have to face any adverse consequences for some time yet; furthermore, most of them sincerely believed that the Common Market meant just that – a sisterhood of capitalist nations, with no governess to answer to.

Before the Seventies, there had been little native entertainment for children on the television, and none in colour. With the growing availability of colour televisions, parents might have expected a rainbow of wholesome family fun, but it proved otherwise. Instead, the children of the decade opened a doll’s house and found that it was haunted. The Seventies were the heyday of what has been termed ‘shoestring fright’, when horror could be expressed from floodlights and cardboard. However, while the new programmes were not invariably dark – there was much in the way of comedy and whimsy – they had an eeriness that later decades could not emulate. Doctor Who, already perhaps the greatest single influence on this new demographic, entered what has been called its ‘Gothic phase’.

And so in this period the pre-teens of Britain were cowering behind their sofas. The ghostly music of Children of the Stones left even adults reluctant to linger near the television. The Feathered Serpent had human sacrifice and unholy resurrection. In Escape into Night, a young girl’s attempts to recreate reality beget only nightmares. Adults, sitting through the trials of Crossroads, must often have felt a wistful envy.

And the worlds to come could be quite as forbidding. In Timeslip and The Tomorrow People, the future imagined was at once authoritarian and apocalyptic. In Blake’s 7, England’s somewhat straitened offering to the science fiction genre, ‘the Federation’ is a vicious, dictatorial oligarchy that, like the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seeks to replace memory and warp identity. And so, caught between these pincers, the childish imagination was offered a homely, if gritty, version of the real in Grange Hill, a series based upon the trials of a suburban comprehensive school. Here we were introduced to benignly anarchic ‘Tucker’ Jenkins, the vicious ‘Gripper’ Stebson, and the long-suffering Mrs McCluskey, high-minded and well-meaning but doomed to grapple with the intractable perversity of adolescence.

On the older medium of the radio, the English were offered a comedy series for adults that could have been sheltered only under the quietly crumbling cliff face of the time in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent had imagined an ordinary day beckoning, before remembering that his house is to be demolished. His friend Ford Prefect, in reality an alien from Betelgeuse Seven, informs him that something rather greater than his house is soon to be destroyed; from far above mankind hears: ‘People of earth, your attention please … As you are no doubt aware, the plans for the development of the outlying regions of the western spiral arm of the galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star-system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.’ Oh dear.

48

The slot machine

The aliens who have come to destroy the earth, the sadistically dutiful Vogons, happiest when disgruntled, could only have been conceived by an Englishman of the Seventies. Later in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we are introduced to two philosophers who have gone on strike in protest at the creation of a computer designed to solve the ultimate question of ‘life, the universe and everything’. The computer, for them, is trespassing on their territory. ‘You’ll have a national Philosophers’ strike on your hands!’ ‘Who will that inconvenience?’ asks the computer, Deep Thought. ‘Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience, you box of blacklegging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!’

That last assertion, of course, is somewhat improbable, hence the bite of this topical lampoon. For on the one hand, strikes hurt the people a good deal; on the other, the usefulness of the work withheld was not always clear. At any rate, it was between the two elections of 1974 that the Labour government made peace with the unions, but on the unions’ terms – no other choice seemed available. For this was the era of the Social Contract, by which parliament guaranteed the rights of the working man and received, in theory, the goodwill of the unions. It was never a formal or legal arrangement, and no statute of that name was ever enacted. It was Michael Foot, the scion of Fabian idealism, who prepared the acts with which this high-minded but hazy concept will always be linked. ‘The Parliamentary Labour party and the unions are linked as never before!’ he asserted.

Michael Foot was born in Plymouth into an overtly political family of Liberals, who naturally held the ascendancy in the West Country. Since his father, Isaac Foot, was elected MP for Plymouth on two separate occasions and subsequently became the city’s lord mayor, it would be fair to assume that the young Foot had inherited the mantle of influence. He was a clever child; his headmaster declared that ‘he has been the leading boy in the school in every way’, and he naturally took the familiar path to Oxford and then moved on to the presidency of the Oxford Union. This was a time of political transition, as the Liberal party slowly gave way to the burgeoning Labour party. Foot soon identified himself as a socialist, in part under the influence of Stafford Cripps, the father of a close friend, and in part propelled by the poverty of Merseyside and Liverpool, of which he had been previously unaware – there had been no such sights in Plymouth. He learned the reality as a shipping clerk in Birkenhead immediately after leaving Oxford. He also read voraciously to bolster his newfound beliefs: Bennett, Wells, Shaw, Russell and others were all on his new curriculum.

Foot began his political career in journalism, moving from the New Statesman to Tribune and then to the Evening Standard, of which at the age of twenty-eight he was appointed editor. He went on to the Daily Herald, a fully paid-up organ of the Labour party, and then reverted to Tribune, in January 1937. He had a thorough understanding of the left-wing press in England, and equally knew the spite and prejudices of right-wing proprietors like Northcliffe, who dominated the political debates of the day.

Along with two colleagues, he wrote a tract entitled Guilty Men attacking the appeasement of the Chamberlain government, before becoming the most celebrated of the anti-war journalists. He became an integral part of the English dissenting Left and a close ally of Aneurin Bevan, the greatest and most eloquent of workingclass politicians. Foot’s political rise reached its first summit in 1945 with his election as Labour MP for Devonport.

He lost the election of 1955 by just one hundred votes and renewed his editorship of Tribune at the time of Suez. On the issue of the enveloping nuclear fear of that decade, Foot and Bevan were at odds, with Bevan veering towards the nuclear option so as to avoid ‘going naked into the conference chamber’. Nevertheless, Foot was strongly supported by committed unilateralists like Frank Cousins. After his return to parliament in 1960, representing Bevan’s old constituency, he embarked on another phase of his life with his membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In its first years it was a national phenomenon but gradually it began to lose support. Gaitskell pledged to ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love’ against unilateralism, and the ragtag procession of activists began to seem less relevant in the changing world. There were many in CND who hated the Labour party, and there were many in Labour who were indifferent to the issue of nuclear disarmament. So his return to the Labour party was fractious and troubled, but his abiding pleasure came in his representation of Ebbw Vale, which was equivalent to going home.

By 1974, when he was sixty-one, Foot had become a member of the cabinet in Harold Wilson’s government. As secretary of state for employment, his primary purpose was to administer the Social Contract, with no fewer than six bills for the purpose of uniting the trade unions with the Labour party. Two of the major proposals were the establishment of ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) and the Employment Protection Bill, to defend the rights of workers. He was the most prominent socialist in the cabinet and believed he had every right to stand as the leading left-wing leadership candidate, after the resignation of Harold Wilson. He did not succeed but did sufficiently well to become in effect deputy prime minister under James Callaghan. It was a time of pacts and alliances, and Foot led the way to a ‘Lib–Lab’ pact late in the spring of 1977, though it fell apart in the following year.

After Callaghan’s defeat in 1979, Foot returned to the opposition. Then, with the political demise of Callaghan, a vacancy revealed itself. Three candidates stepped forward – Denis Healey, Peter Shore and Jon Silkin – but each exhibited an Achilles heel, and Foot emerged as leader in late 1980. It cannot be said that he was a natural leader, though he was not helped by the split between the Labour party and the SDP at the beginning of 1981.

But Foot remained the stalwart and self-confident exponent of the socialist creed. He was the living embodiment of left-wing values in the twentieth century, to be compared with Russell and Orwell. He was, according to his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘an utterly committed symbol of permanent opposition, a rebel, a maverick, in eternal conflict with authority’. He was an orator and not a politician. Perhaps most importantly, he maintained the role of public culture and civic discourse at a time when they seemed to be fading away. He was, in many ways, the last of the great Labour intellectuals and deserves an honoured place in the history of the twentieth century.

The Social Contract was reached between the TUC and the Labour government from 1974 to 1977. The premise on which it was founded now seems quixotic; the unions would show restraint if the government worked with them – in other words, if the government was prepared to accept every union demand for the protection of its members. ‘Please play nice,’ was the government’s hopeful exhortation. It was thus a corporatist experiment, and far more radical than the post-war consensual politics with which it is sometimes confused.

Beneath the Social Contract lay a basic ambiguity in the power relation between employee and employer, and, later, between employees and government. It was also predicated on the assumption that the unions would act as one, but they were effectively in competition with each other. The only certain effect was that, by 1976, it was as if the unions had discovered, according to Tom Jackson, leader of the postal workers, ‘a gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that had suddenly got stuck in favour of the customer’.

The unions were led not merely by old-fashioned workingclass socialists, but often by men who had fought against Fascism. When they had begun their crusade, the most basic workers’ rights were still to be attained, but the new generation had gained a degree of prosperity. The union leaders, however, often applied their ‘street-fighting’ mentality to contemporary conditions; capital was still the enemy and the union member was still the underdog. But by the late Seventies even the most ardent union leaders had begun to fear that their members’ demands had become unsustainable. Jack Jones spoke of ‘fair for all, not free-for-all’, and Hugh Scanlon openly expressed doubts about the country’s ability to cope. By this stage, however, a shift, so slow as to be almost imperceptible, had begun; the old guard was losing control over an increasingly ‘individualist’ membership. And so the late Seventies were marked by a discontent that was more petty capitalist than socialist.

But this still lay some way off. By 1976, there were few instances of industrial action. The unions had, after all, got almost all they wanted. But with prices rising and the pound falling, Wilson felt it was time to honour his promise to give the people a referendum on Europe. Previous polls suggested that only a minority supported Britain’s membership. The advocates of a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum set for 1975 should have had no grounds for complacency, yet their mood on the campaign trail was buoyant. Unexpected alliances coalesced: Conservatives offered their canvassing skills to Labour; Labour members lent Conservatives their buses. A festival atmosphere prevailed.

The mood in the ‘no’ camp was quite different. Although the government of the day had given equal funding to both sides, the ‘yes’ campaign could count on the support of big business – the ‘no’ campaign was a humble pile of pea-shooters beside the cannon of their rivals. Like their opponents, they came from seemingly incompatible positions; unlike them, these positions appeared to be those of the radical fringe. The National Front and the British Communist party, for example, were Eurosceptic. And so, as Enoch Powell and Tony Benn hectored the people from the same platform, many wavering voters saw only division and demagoguery. How could a nation that so obviously looked askance at Europe listen so warmly to the Europhiles? Across the Channel lay the Continent, where an ordinary family could now take its holidays; there was the Common Market, which made those holidays possible; and then the EEC, which surely had nothing to do with either holidays or the Common Market, was not regarded as having designs on English liberty.

The prime minister’s attitude to the EEC was informed by cheerful ignorance. Wilson knew little of Europe and cared even less. The Scilly Isles were his preferred holiday destination and he considered champagne a poor substitute for beer. For Wilson, the referendum represented little more than an opportunity to steer the nation’s attention away from more proximate concerns. For his part, Callaghan was unconvinced. His apathy was apparent in a television interview where he refused to say whether the people should vote for or against remaining in the Common Market, even though his own government theoretically supported it. Yet even the government’s indifference counted in favour of the vote for ‘yes’. When the votes were counted, the referendum showed a majority of over 60 per cent in favour of remaining. The matter, for the moment, was closed. Now remained the question of failing exports, and other commitments which extended beyond the power of any single government to address, let alone resolve.

Harold Wilson had planned to resign at sixty, yet there was little to suggest that he would give up what power he had. However, there were no policies that were likely to come to fruition, and no garlands left to win. One civil servant recalled that Wilson seemed to be ‘living through one day to the next’, and there were more disturbing tokens of decline. His paranoia grew more acute as the Seventies progressed, and he saw spies everywhere. So fearful was he of the supposed influence of BOSS, South Africa’s infamous Bureau of State Security, that when rumours were brought to him about a dark conspiracy to murder Jeremy Thorpe, his friend and rival, he contrived to assure even parliament that BOSS was behind it. He was convinced that Number Ten was being bugged.

In the course of one remarkable interview he went further yet, to the brink of sanity itself. ‘I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room,’ he informed two journalists. ‘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 in the corner. That blind man might tell you something, lead you somewhere.’ He began to delegate, and to drink, more and more. His once unassailable memory had begun to totter. The cabinet had not known of his plans to resign and, when the announcement came, it took everyone, even Callaghan, by surprise, and shock overwhelmed feelings of relief or regret. In March 1976, at a farewell party at Chequers, a photograph of the outgoing prime minister showed a little old man with wandering eyes and a vacant smile.

49

Let us bring harmony

After the surprise of his departure, Wilson was largely forgotten. But he had deserved better. In terms of his electoral record, he was the most successful prime minister in history. He had united a party whose constituent elements were never at ease with each other; he had presided over the golden age of the welfare state; and he had shown himself an unsurpassed political tactician. But he had outstayed his day.

In previous years, Roy Jenkins had been the favourite to succeed him, at least among members of the press. But as a passionate Europhile with tastes to match, he could never command the allegiance of the Left, while Michael Foot would never woo the Right. And Denis Healey, for all his brilliance, was simply too rebarbative. In any case, Wilson had picked his successor. In the event, ‘Big Jim’ Callaghan won the leadership by 176 votes to Michael Foot’s 137. The result was a clear endorsement, yet, for those on the right, an unsettling augury; Foot’s hour would come. Callaghan had long dreamed of the moment when he would kiss the sovereign’s hand. ‘Prime Minister,’ he was heard to murmur, ‘and never even went to university.’ The queen herself had been puzzled and disturbed by Wilson’s decision, but she acquiesced with her habitual grace.

During the Sixties, the Labour government had tried desperately to ensure full employment while keeping down inflation. Wilson had attempted a six-month price and pay freeze, but it had not answered. Between 1964 and 1979 there had been no fewer than eight incomes policies, and all had run aground. The centre could not hold when the periphery was under assault. Healey’s attempted rescue of the economy was testament to his remarkable agility and persistence. Thanks to his efforts to curb public spending, deeply unpopular though they were, inflation fell from 29 per cent to 13 per cent in under nine months. The fragility of sterling, however, was a matter that none could ignore. The government employed every resource to prevent its collapse, but the world was unconvinced. Appearances were still against the pound. The Bank of England spent almost all its reserves in propping it up, but it seemed set to equal the dollar. What could be done? There was the eccentric proposal offered by Tony Benn that Britain become a ‘siege economy’, placing tariffs on imports yet somehow still able to export freely. Other members of the cabinet knew that there was no recourse left but an appeal to the highest financial authority in the world, the International Monetary Fund. The crisis came when Denis Healey, arriving at Heathrow to fly to the United States, was told of the pound’s collapse. His place, he saw, was at home. He drove back to Westminster. And so the United Kingdom, once the world’s banker, had to doff its pride and beg money of its allies.

For that is what it amounted to. The IMF was funded largely by the United States and Germany, which made absurd the suggestion of Anthony Crosland that it could be blackmailed by threats of Britain withdrawing its foreign military commitments. Britain was in no place to make demands. The IMF team, when it arrived on 1 November 1976, was composed of several nationalities, but there could be no disguising the fact that the spirit informing their mission was American. It was clear to the IMF that Britain would not only need a thorough spring clean; it would have to throw out many objects of sentimental value. It had been usual for such loans to be renewed indefinitely, but no such latitude was extended to the feckless British. A December date was fixed and a rigorous programme of spending cuts demanded. For a loan of almost £4 billion, it seemed to the IMF scarcely unreasonable. And yet the British proved to have some fire in their bellies still. At a moment of seeming impasse, Callaghan picked up the telephone in front of the chief negotiator, and threatened to call the president if no leeway was offered. Was it pure bravado? Perhaps, but it had the desired effect and the loan was agreed.

Despite the fact that matters turned out remarkably well, it was a sombre prime minister who addressed the Labour party conference in 1976. He had begun to undergo a change of heart, one too subtle and incremental to be called a conversion, but it must have seemed a shift of tectonic proportions to the delegates in Blackpool. After paying tribute to Harold Wilson, who perked up from a somnolent doze when he heard his name, Callaghan began to dismantle the post-war consensus. ‘Mr Chairman and comrades,’ he said. ‘No one owes Britain a living, and … we are still not earning the standard of living we are enjoying. We are only keeping up our standards by borrowing and this cannot go on indefinitely.’

Amidst all the agonizing about inflation, deflation and disinflation, Callaghan had found the wound. Those to the left of the party, like the young Dennis Skinner, were aghast that questions of ‘productivity’ could be mooted at all, but Callaghan was unmoved: Britain had been singing for its supper rather than earning its keep. Here was an old socialist speaking, and he was impatient of fecklessness. The world the people of Britain had known could no longer be justified: ‘That cosy world is gone.’ His tone was dull and gravelly; he relished the words no more than did his listeners.

It is hard to appreciate the extent to which inflation exercised the finest minds. In Seventies Britain, ‘push’ and ‘pull’ on supply and demand worked simultaneously; with increased wages, spending power grew, and prices rose. A largely unionized nation responded by asking for higher wages, and employers had to raise prices to cover their costs, which in turn led to higher wage demands. If you were affiliated to a union, the spiral need not inconvenience you, but if you were not so affiliated, or were not a wage earner at all, you could find yourself unable to afford anything beyond the absolute necessities. There were other factors too. For example, the problem was exacerbated by the unions’ fondness for ‘free collective bargaining’ for wages, but that can only work where they have similar traditions, where their interests do not intersect, where the nation has no other commitments, and where there is money in the collective pot. These conditions could not be met. Small wonder that Roy Jenkins likened the role of government in this period to that of the mountaineer on a wild and unpredictable upland. ‘The bigger [beasts] were known as union leaders and the smaller ones as constituency parties, and … when they did come down, they must on no account be enraged.’

Certainly Bill Bryson, an American observer, found this to be so. While working for a UK newspaper, he found himself having to deal with the print checker. This man looked through the proofs at his leisure, if at all, and was not averse to using force to prevent anyone, however important, from crossing the line into his office; for this of course represented a breach of ‘demarcation’. When Bryson himself attempted to proffer the proofs, the man retorted, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m eating pizza!’ The print unions were run on lines that recalled medieval guilds or Masonic lodges: each union had its ‘chapel’, and each chapel had its ‘chapel father’. If miners had their ‘pit villages’, so the printers had what we might call ‘print families’: it was not so much a cartel as a family concern. Other unions could boast similar traditions.

It was all a far cry from the world envisaged by Barbara Castle, who in February 1975 had reflected in her diary: ‘To me socialism is not just militant trade unionism. It is the gentle society in which every producer remembers he is a consumer too.’ And Callaghan himself felt bound in 1978 to remark that ‘Society today is so organized that every individual group almost has the power to disrupt it. How is their power to be channelled into constructive channels?’ The question was never to be resolved in his political lifetime.

1976 had been the hottest year in recorded history and one of the most scorching in the world of British politics, so it was with relief that the government and the nation welcomed the celebrations for the queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. It seemed as if every house had its bunting, every street its party. Callaghan, as firm a believer in monarchy as he was in every traditional institution, was delighted to be called up by the queen to share the accolades. But once the bunting was taken down, the nation was once again revealed as poor, shabby and, above all, discontented. The punk band the Sex Pistols had released ‘God Save the Queen’, a less than reverent celebration of her role in which she was described as being a ‘moron’. It was banned by as many radio stations as could keep up with its popularity, but reached number one in the charts.

Callaghan had established a cap on wage increases of 5 per cent in order to hold down inflation. It was audacious for the time, but it held, more or less, until 25 September 1978, when the Ford workers agreed to strike. With inflation standing at 8 per cent, 5 per cent was not enough, they argued. Their action took immediate effect. From then on, strikes sprang up like toadstools after rain. Most damagingly, the public sector unions, many of them representing the least affluent, felt bound to join in. Callaghan saw his pay policy unravel almost daily, and Michael Foot, who had done so much to champion the unions and had the most right to feel betrayed, unleashed a speech of unprecedented fury at the Labour party conference. The delegates were reminded with biting sarcasm of the kind of pay policy they could expect under the Tories – it was known as ‘unemployment’.

But the unions were unmoved. Indeed, with such awards dangling in front of their members, they had little choice. By the late autumn of 1978 the expression ‘Winter of Discontent’ was on everyone’s lips. People lay unburied in coffins, with the bereaved families turned away. Lorries bringing in emergency supplies were attacked, hospitals were picketed and refuse built up into stinking slag heaps in Leicester Square, while pickets proclaimed that it was not ‘a question of whether the country can afford to pay us, but of whether they can afford not to’. All of this and more contributed to a sense that the unions were fast becoming enemies of the people. It was never, of course, a general strike – most unions did not participate – but the effects hurt the public materially and emotionally, as striking became known abroad as ‘the English disease’.

Towards the end of the crisis, Callaghan agreed to an interview with the political journalist Llew Gardner. Callaghan’s voice was, as usual, reasonable and reassuring, his soft Hampshire accent enlivened by occasional flickers of hauteur. But his eyes were cold and furtive behind his spectacles, his finger jabbing at an imaginary chest. He had a message for the unions: ‘You can’t get more out of the bank than there is in it!’ Asked what happened to sour relations so terribly, he answered: ‘Too much responsibility has been devolved from the centre onto local shop stewards who do not fully comprehend the basic tenets of trade unionism.’ ‘Wasn’t 5 per cent an unrealistic figure?’ Gardner asked. ‘The realistic figure,’ barked the prime minister, ‘is the one the country can afford! Not the one people conjure out of their heads.’ Gently prodded on the question of talks with the trade unions, Callaghan remarked, ‘There is a time for reticence.’

Reticence was the keynote in other respects. The notion of a secret ballot had already been mooted by Margaret Thatcher. Surely, she maintained, union members must be allowed to vote without fear of reprisal. Callaghan expressed an openness to this thought, but not, he emphasized, if it was made a legal requirement. And there perhaps lay the crux. For Callaghan, a union man still, the law should stay away from organized labour. Besides, he hinted, the unions were above the law, and had the means to retain that position. Moss Evans, the new head of the TGWU, did as much as anyone to ensure Callaghan’s downfall, yet he understood this predicament. His message to the government was itself a melange of defiance and helplessness: ‘I won’t and I can’t restrain the stewards.’ Among the general public, meanwhile, the expression ‘Social Contract’ had become a swear word. ‘I don’t give a Social Contract about that!’ was a retort commonly heard.

That the Conservatives had a quite different policy from the unions was obvious, but even the Labour party and the unions, despite their symbiosis, had separate agendas. Though people spoke of Labour as the parliamentary wing of the trade unions, they had to govern and the trade unions had to protect their members – the two programmes were bound to conflict sooner or later. In any case, although the most contentious quarrels lay between Labour and Conservative, the most bitter rivalry lay between different unions. Britain’s unions were the oldest, and the most diverse, in Europe. By 1960, there were still 180. The English trade union tradition was local and particular, an inheritance, perhaps, from the medieval guilds and later from the friendly societies. Each trade, however small, had its union, and the difficulty lay in the fact that one union would find itself in inevitable competition with another. So it was that the conditions established under the Attlee consensus, and extended under the Wilson government, enabled the various unions to compete, with no legal checks upon them.

Douglas Hurd, who had been an adviser to Heath during the miners’ strike, summarized the question thus: ‘In a public sector dispute, the employee barely suffers. Any temporary loss of income is usually covered by the union and is in any case quickly recouped out of the eventual settlement. The employer, the actual administrator of the public concern, does not suffer at all, for his salary is secure. It is the public, and only the public, which suffers, first as consumer and later, when the bill comes in, as taxpayer. The public picks up the tab for both sides.’ Paul Johnson, the historian and journalist, put the matter more vividly yet: ‘[The unions] did not plan the victory … [and] they do not know what to do with it now that they have got it. Dazed and bewildered, they are like medieval peasants who have burnt down the lord’s manor.’

But surely it need not have come to this. Was there not North Sea oil, discovered in the late Sixties, to look forward to? The promise of it was to become a sticking point for the left wing of the Labour party. In the run-up to the IMF bailout they asked why the government needed to squeeze wages when North Sea oil was almost, as Tony Benn put it, ‘running up our shores’. It was in this context that the far Left held the IMF responsible for the meltdown of the late Seventies. However that may be, Callaghan found himself in parliament facing a noconfidence vote and lost by a tiny margin.

And so the parties went to the country. Callaghan had personal appeal, but nothing else to offer. Thatcher might be less likeable, but she had a plan. Perhaps no one in her position could have lost. In later years she would pay tribute to Callaghan, saying that in happier times ‘he would have been a very successful Prime Minister’. She even admitted that he often worsted her in the House of Commons. Still, the nation had had enough, and the Conservatives came to power, though with a surprisingly modest majority. On her way to Buckingham Palace, Margaret Thatcher addressed the nation in the words attributed to St Francis: ‘where there is discord, may we bring harmony’. In years to come it became apparent that it was the working class and not the bourgeoisie that had ignited the Thatcher revolution. There had been money in union membership; there was still more in becoming an entrepreneur.

50

Here she comes

The grocer’s daughter had worsted the carpenter’s son; more significantly, the shopkeeper had triumphed over the shop steward. There would be no more rule by union fiat. For all its seeming goodwill, Thatcher’s invoking of St Francis would have misled few who heard it. The nation knew well that it had elected a terrier with a burning torch gripped in her teeth. Not for Thatcher ‘the orderly management of decline’ that Sir William Armstrong had suggested was the real business of twentiethcentury governance.

She began as Methodist and became an Anglican, a change of emphasis that affected her political personality. Her accent, which in moments of anger or stress betrayed the cadences of her native Lincolnshire, first hardened and then softened into the genteel warble of a suburban nanny. Although her origins were theoretically lower-middle-class, she managed to obscure the fact by marrying a highly successful businessman, Denis Thatcher. She found her personality partly by identifying with others and partly by play-acting.

Thatcher had entered parliament in 1959, three years after the Suez crisis, but she had to live with that failure all the same. The English political class, according to one historian, ‘went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing’. If she ever contemplated such a thought, she quickly cast it aside. The journey from Grantham to Oxford was the first stage of her political maturity. She fought implacably to become the MP for Finchley, and once she had attained that position she solidified it with hard work and slowly made her ascent. She first became a parliamentary undersecretary, and in 1967 she joined Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet, as minister for fuel and power. In October 1969, she made another leap and became shadow education minister. After the Conservative victory in 1970, she became a minister in her own right, as secretary of state for education and science. Her liberal or free-market supporters, however, might not have been particularly enthusiastic about this term of her office, in which she sanctioned 3,286 comprehensive schools and rejected 328. It could be said that she was following her statutory duties, but she performed them with a vengeance.

There began in 1971 another series of struggles between the government and the public sector unions, with Heath beginning to give ground to Rolls-Royce and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. In turn came the National Union of Mineworkers. These were the conditions for the irresistible rise of Mrs Thatcher. During the campaign for the Conservative party leadership she maintained her composure, but there was a large element of ambition in her remorseless advance. None of her colleagues yet knew of what material she was made. Certain traits, however, were becoming clear. Defeatism was the plague against which she fought relentlessly. Pessimism was the second curse. And Ted Heath was, in her eyes, the embodiment of both.

When it became apparent that after two defeats Heath could no longer lead the party, Thatcher expected her friend and colleague Keith Joseph to put himself forward. Ever diffident, he declined, leaving Thatcher to uphold and defend the new creed known as ‘monetarism’. It remained to inform Heath of her decision; legend has it that he offered her the blunt retort ‘You’ll lose!’ The truth was that he heard her out and said simply, ‘Thank you.’ On her victory for the party leadership, knocking out Heath, Whitelaw, Prior and Peyton, Thatcher remarked that ‘I almost wept when they told me. I did weep.’ Plenty more tears would follow.

On 4 May 1979, Thatcher drove to Buckingham Palace, and so began one of the more unusual periods of English history. The economy was turbulent, but she had an instinctive conviction that her financial policies were correct. This was confirmed and encouraged by her more or less permanent dissatisfaction with, and distrust for, the nascent European Community. ‘They are much cleverer than us,’ she said; ‘they will run rings around us.’ But she was also guided by what many considered to be old-fashioned nationalism. She had been happy to support the ‘Common Market’ when it was still referred to as such, but the creeping federalism within Europe came to unsettle and even enrage her and she referred to VAT payments to Europe as ‘our money’ or ‘my money’.

Above all, Thatcher saw Conservatism as an ideal, not merely as a political stance. It was precisely the notion that Conservatism could be something as vulgar as a crusade that so displeased the patricians of the party, but it was to be her distinctive contribution to a party that had spent the post-war years in broad agreement with Labour. Another of her particular skills was sensing the mood of the nation, at least in her early years. ‘I think,’ she said in a television interview in 1978, ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ The remark caused intense outrage among the ‘media’, but not perhaps among the population as a whole.

She faced a nation directed by the fluctuations of the stock market and by the relentless drive of materialism, by the energy of popular music and the colourful panorama of television. Because of the latter medium, the nature of news and comment had an instantaneous visual impact that supplanted analysis and reflection. The country shone with screens, with flickering images lasting for no more than a few seconds. Thatcher was the ideal embodiment of such a world – if ever an ascending prime minister was willing to act as chameleon, it was she. Under the auspices of the PR consultant Gordon Reece, she doffed the faintly ridiculous hats which reminded too many of the Mothers’ Union. She underwent voice training. The playwright Ronald Millar provided her with mantras: ‘Let us be cool, calm – and elected’ was the first. Laurence Olivier himself assisted in her voice coaching sessions. The singer Lulu and the comedians Kenny Everett and Ken Dodd were all happy to be associated with Thatcher. This was to change – in the years to come, no self-respecting ‘artiste’ would dream of giving succour to the lady from Grantham.

Employment in the early Eighties became of paramount importance, with lists of the most significant redundancies read out on the television news as if they were casualties in a war. But for Thatcher, these casualties were the price to be paid if inflation was to be conquered. She had inherited a tax system that could be described as either ‘confiscatory’ or ‘redistributive’ according to personal conviction. The upper rate of tax was set at 83 per cent, but it began at £20,000; it was not levied only upon millionaires. Thus it seemed as if Labour had taxed the rich to feed the poor, only to render everyone poor. It is within this context that Thatcher’s ‘Franciscan’ exhortation should be understood.

The Labour government had proved itself unable to contain the divisions within the nation; with the Conservative government, there would be no more juggling of incompatible priorities. This was the true ‘Thatcher revolution’, at least in principle. Inflation was the great danger, and it must be crushed before any reforms could be contemplated. So far as she and her chancellor Geoffrey Howe were concerned, the solution was to control the money supply and let the market adjudicate in matters of price. Monetarist theory had at its heart a dictum that was simple enough: government should not spend what it did not have, and what it spent must be worth something. Thatcher and Howe had only to be thrifty, but the ‘dismal science’, as economics had become known, was young and inexact. They soon found themselves dismayingly close to the position of their predecessors, cramped and hobbled by circumstance. The monetarist drive in Howe’s first budget ran counter to election promises that could not lightly be cast aside. To honour the latter, and to support the hundreds of thousands left unemployed by the new policy, the government found itself pouring millions more into social benefit than was sustainable under monetarism. The result was recession.

Had it all been a costly and ghastly mistake? The human price was already apparent: unemployment had reached 2 million by 1980 and was climbing. Three hundred and sixty-four economists had written to the press to testify that this revolution had no basis in sound economics. Many were predicting a U-turn, a challenge to which Thatcher offered a celebrated retort at a Conservative party conference: ‘You turn if you want to; the lady’s not for turning.’ Caught off guard when the conference was invaded by activists protesting at job cuts, she rose to the occasion, observing that ‘It’s wet outside, I expect they wanted to come in … It’s always better where the Tories are.’ Although she lacked a sense of humour, she was quite capable of wit.

Naturally, no U-turn was forthcoming. In other fields, matters were more auspicious. The ‘Right to Buy’, the policy by which the Tories promised council tenants the opportunity to purchase their homes, had been the jewel of the Tory manifesto, and it was set in place. The pledges to restrict secondary picketing and to establish secret ballots were likewise in the manifesto, but it would be a while before they could be tested. The top rate of tax was reduced from 83 per cent to 60 per cent, the European average. In the eyes of many, the previous rate had been one of the chief causes of the country’s relatively poor economic performance. The rich could always seek other climes.

The cost of the war on inflation mounted ever higher, and its casualties began to protest. Riots broke out in the early Eighties, motivated in part by the insensitive ‘sus’ laws, later known as ‘stop and search’, and in part by mass unemployment in the black communities. They began in the depressed district of St Paul’s in Bristol in April 1980, and spread to Brixton in London the next year, with burning buildings, tear gas, police charges and mob attacks. The frenzy was contagious, and riots took place in at least 58 British towns and cities. The Times reported that fears about the breakdown of law and order were being widely expressed in foreign centres, no doubt laced with schadenfreude. Some commentators went perhaps too far. ‘The extinction of civilised life on this island,’ wrote E. P. Thompson, ‘is probable.’ It was an opportune moment for dismay: at the end of March 1982, there was a strong warning that the Argentinian navy was about to invade the sovereign territory of the Falkland Islands.

51

The Falklands flare-up

Neil Kinnock, later leader of the Labour party, said of Thatcher that she had ‘the greatest gift: the right enemies’. Certainly General Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina was an ideal enemy. He had come to power in a coup and had ensured that some 20,000 of his compatriots ‘disappeared’. Now the Falkland islanders were next on his list of internal undesirables.

It had the makings of a great naval adventure, but it played out in the eyes of a world looking for disasters. Many wanted to see the back of Thatcher and cheered on the Argentinians. Others wanted to retain Britain’s influence and cheered the British contingent. It was a small turf war, but it had momentous consequences for Britain. Was it about to decline into a third-rate power? A genuine fear of failure invaded the military, as well as the diplomatic contingent, Westminster and the public at large.

As early as 1976 there had been negotiations between Britain and Argentina about the sovereignty of the islands. In early 1982, the Argentinian government formulated plans for a military solution, and the possibility of confrontation came closer when it was proposed to withdraw HMS Endurance from its hydrographic work in the vicinity – to the Argentinians, it appeared like the prelude to a more general withdrawal.

An Argentinian invasion fleet sailed on 28 March, with the instruction to protect the lives of the island population. Its presence became known to the British authorities by 2 April, and five days later the first stage of the ‘task force’ was under way. Diplomatic initiatives, led principally by the Americans, now became vital. It was not militarily or financially feasible, the British Foreign Office suggested – it would be better to back down or to reach an accommodation. But Thatcher would have none of it: ‘They wanted us to negotiate. You can’t negotiate away an invasion! You can’t negotiate away that the freedom of your people has been taken … by a cruel dictator. You’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to have the spine to do it!’

For their part, the British people confined their protests to hurling cans of corned beef at the windows of the Argentine embassy, while a BBC broadcaster conveyed something of the spirit of the time as he signed off with ‘Let’s just hope we win,’ his tone at once gently patriotic and grimly wistful. The BBC was not always a friend to Thatcher, but here, perhaps for the last time, she found in it an ally.

The United Kingdom was not quite the lone wolf of journalistic imagination. American ‘Sidewinders’ proved crucial in the race for air supremacy, for example, as did the collaboration of France in sharing intelligence. Yet the odds were heavily against her. After several failed missions, the British military operation began on 1 May, when a ‘total exclusion zone’ had been imposed around the islands. One of the principal objects of attack was ARA General Belgrano, an Argentinian light cruiser that posed a serious threat to the British. A submarine was dispatched and the Belgrano sank, with the loss of more than 300 lives. The furore was immeasurably increased when it was discovered that it had been sailing away from the ‘total exclusion zone’. Retaliation was swift: HMS Sheffield was attacked by an Exocet missile, and Argentinian anti-aircraft batteries injured three Harriers. More mediation followed under the guidance of the Peruvians, but it came to nothing. In Britain, Tony Benn claimed that not only had the Belgrano been torpedoed, but with it any chance of a settlement. He cannot have known that Galtieri could afford to climb down no more than could Thatcher. His regime, too, was at stake.

There seemed little option but to mount an armed invasion against the islands, with all the risks that the intervention implied. The landing itself was deemed to be a success. There was some confusion in the Argentinian High Command, which meant that their attacks on the British were still sporadic. But Argentinian naval intelligence was nevertheless effective and a container ship, the SS Atlantic Conveyor, went down, as did six Wessex, one Lynx and three Chinook helicopters. The reaction in Britain was one of shock and incredulity. Could the nightmare materialize, and the power of Britain be threatened? Many believed in any case that Britain had become restless, irresolute and essentially weak. Could this be an apocalypse that might destroy the reputation of the nation? For the prime minister it was an ordeal by fire that could only have one conclusion. The national mood, if not exactly summoned by drums, was sounding a fiercer note.

The Battle of Goose Green was a British success, and the British moved on to Stanley with high hopes. The final assault was on 13 June, and the Argentine forces signalled their surrender on 15 June. It was a victory with many difficulties along the way and largely dependent on chance. A different season of the year, a different set of political circumstances or more reliable Argentine bombs, and all could have changed. Nonetheless, it could be claimed that English gallantry was still alive. One man to receive the Victoria Cross posthumously was Colonel ‘H’ Jones who, holed up by a long line of Argentine machine-gunners, roared to his men, ‘Come on, A Company, get your skirts off!’ and rushed out to take the enemy position, alone and in the teeth of their fire. His death gave heart to his men and dismayed the Argentines, who quickly surrendered. But the war had shown other sides to the nation, as well as to Thatcher herself. She wrote letters of condolence to the families of every British soldier killed, yet was angry to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury mentioning the Argentine bereaved as proper subjects for prayer. Her powers of sympathy were often stunted by a lack of imagination.

For Thatcher, it had been a time of constantly strained nerves, arguments and tears. She had stared national humiliation in the face and had not flinched. She kept her will intact, and faced down those who predicted failure. It was a great national and personal victory. If she had become indomitable, it could only reflect brightly on her political future.

52

The Big Bang

The prime minister realized that it would be opportunistic to call an election on the merits of the victory in the Falklands War, but there were other ways of taking advantage of the situation. In the words of her new chancellor, Nigel Lawson, ‘she came to believe in the media presentation, and to act in a quasi-presidential style’. Norman Tebbit, though fiercely loyal, had to admit that ‘she could be merciless’. Her bullying rose to the surface, with the gentle Howe as its chief victim. They had once been allies, sharing a methodical rigour and an insatiable appetite for work. Perhaps she saw him as her true rival in diligence. Almost supernatural qualities began to be ascribed to her. It was rumoured that she subsisted on coffee and vitamins alone, and that she bathed in an electric bath. The writer Iain Sinclair suggested half-facetiously that she was a latter-day witch.

It was in this period that Thatcher began to espouse the imprecise notion of ‘Victorian Values’. There were already signs of intrigue against her. A leak from the Central Policy Review Staff suggested large budget cuts, but her landslide victory in 1983 did nothing to mitigate her zeal. Steady privatization was maintained without much comment. The sale of British Telecom was continued, and local government spending came under scrutiny. Her victory in the Falklands had increased her confidence. Her opponent, Michael Foot, had been committed to a manifesto of socialist retrenchment so radical that it was dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. At the beginning of 1984, she stripped the unions at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of their rights, imposing upon them the secret ballot and a prohibition on secondary picketing.

In the same year, she began yet another confrontation. Three years ago, she had been forced to back down in the face of a miners’ strike. Now another threatened, and the National Union of Mineworkers saw nothing to suggest that they should not win again. Moreover, their leader was now Arthur Scargill, who had so triumphantly routed Edward Heath. For Thatcher, it was a fight between democracy and militant trade unionism, against an attempt to ‘substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law’. For Scargill, the aim was not merely to win, but to ‘roll back the years of Thatcherism’. For Tony Benn, perhaps the only Labour politician fully to back the miners, it was Thatcher’s war on the strongest union. If it was won, then the others would be cowed.