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ABSOLUTE CHAOS TONIGHT – OFFICIAL

London Evening Standard headline, 7 March 1973

In the autumn of 1970 a chubby thirteen-year-old chorister named Francis Wheen was selected from that year’s intake of young squits at Harrow School to sing the new boy’s solo at the annual Churchill Songs. I was delighted, for about ten minutes. Then my suffering began. No one had warned me that whoever won the auditions was instantly nicknamed ‘the school eunuch’ and taunted for the rest of term as a sexual retard whose voice hadn’t broken. I had one consoling promise to keep my spirits up: Lady Churchill, Sir Winston’s darling Clementine, always brought a distinguished guest with her, and the distinguished guest always gave the young soloist a £5 note after the concert. Given that my termly pocket money was two quid, this prospect of riches – enough for two LPs – helped to numb the pain of the blows and raillery that my fluting treble voice had earned me. I spent many happy hours, while nursing my wounds, deciding which albums to buy. The Who’s Live at Leeds had to be one, surely. And maybe Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, or Neil Young’s After the Goldrush, or even Al Stewart’s Zero She Flies, so I could play along to them on my guitar. Then again, it was hard to resist The Groundhogs’ Thank Christ for the Bomb, whose title track I’d heard on John Peel’s Radio One show. My politics at the time were inchoate (‘wishy-washy liberal’ was how I defined myself if asked), but I was enough of a hippy – insofar as one could be a hippy at a school where short hair was obligatory and the dress code included straw hats and tailcoats – to know that the Bomb was a bummer, man. It amused and puzzled me that three hairy scruffs in an electric blues band were singing in praise of nuclear deterrence and the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, rightly known as MAD, and implying that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn’t been all bad: ‘Since that day it’s been stalemate,/Everyone’s scared to obliterate./So it seems for peace we can thank the Bomb …’ If I bought the LP and listened to it every evening on my Dansette portable gramophone with the requisite brow-furrowed intensity, I’d deconstruct its meaning sooner or later. Was ‘Thank Christ for the Bomb’ somehow ironic, in a fashion beyond my teenage comprehension? Or so robustly conservative that it could be added to the Harrow School songbook without any parent – not even Margaret Thatcher, then the Secretary of State for Education – having a fit of the vapours?

Winston Churchill loved his old school songs. During the Second World War many of them had extra verses added in his honour, which we still sang a quarter of a century later:

Nor less we praise in sterner days the leader of our nation, And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim from each new generation. While in this fight to guard the right our country you defend, sir, Here grim and gay we mean to stay and stick it to the end, sir!

The man invited by Churchill’s widow as her escort on 4 December 1970 was the latest leader of our nation, Edward Heath, who had won a most unexpected victory in the general election that June. I remember wondering, during rehearsals, if he too would win acclaim from future generations. It seemed rather unlikely on his performance so far. Still, give the man a chance. Who could tell what wonders this plodding galoot might yet accomplish by staying grim and gay and sticking it to the end?

There were two things everyone knew about Ted Heath: he was a great sailor and a talented orchestral conductor, or at least so he thought. At Churchill Songs he insisted on taking the baton for a while, though thankfully not while I sang my new boy’s solo: ‘Five hundred faces and all so strange./Life in front of me, home behind./I felt like a waif before the wind,/Tossed on an ocean of shock and change …’ Then he made a short speech, in which he confessed that he’d felt nervous about conducting the school orchestra – ‘far less confident than the young Mr Wheen, who sang so beautifully’. All most gratifying, but where was my fiver? Perhaps no one had told him what was expected, or perhaps (as I concluded) he was a graceless and ungenerous oaf. Either way, the Prime Minister scuttled back to 10 Downing Street leaving the school eunuch penniless.

Which is a pretty fair summary of what he did to the rest of the country over the next three years or so, as he and his ministers struggled like waifs before the wind, tossed on an ocean of shock and change. In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970, when British economic policy followed the neo-Keynesian route known as Butskellism,^* a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five. The first occurred within a month of his election. Another came in December 1970, soon after his visit to Harrow School songs, when a go-slow in the electricity supply industry gave Britons their first experience in a generation of regular power cuts, soon to become indelibly synonymous with the Heath era. (Rather enjoyable they were, too, for those of us still at school: an unimpeachable new excuse for late homework.) The national miners’ strike of January 1972 – the first since 1926 – brought yet another state of emergency, though this time the Prime Minister dithered for a full month before imposing it. What eventually panicked him into action was the closure of the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham on 10 February after a six-day struggle between eight hundred police and fifteen thousand ‘flying pickets’ led by a bolshie young Lenin from the Yorkshire coalfields, Arthur Scargill. ‘We took the view that we were in a class war,’ Scargill said. ‘We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in ’26. 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.’

As usual at times of crisis, everything seemed to be happening at once. A few months earlier Heath had introduced internment without trial in Northern Ireland, hoping to thwart the renascent IRA by rounding up its commanders, but intelligence on the terrorists was so erratic that dozens of innocent people were caught in the net as well. Appalling stories soon began to emerge. The civil rights leader Michael Farrell described being kicked and thumped as he and other prisoners were made to run between two lines of baton-wielding soldiers. Some internees had to stand on a tea chest and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, and were beaten if they refused; others were attacked by military guard dogs. Eleven suspects, known as the guinea pigs, were subjected to ‘disorientation techniques’ which the British Army had developed during colonial wars in Kenya and Aden, and which would be revived more than thirty years later by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. ‘All were blindfolded by having a hood, two layers of fabric thick, placed over their heads,’ the Sunday Times revealed in October 1971. ‘These hoods remained on their heads for up to six days. Each man was then flown by helicopter to an unknown destination – in fact Palace Barracks. During the period of their interrogation they were continuously hooded, barefoot, dressed only in an over-large boiler suit and spread-eagled against a wall … The only sound that filled the room was a high-pitched throb … The noise literally drove them out of their minds.’

The insanity was contagious. British forces were clearly out of control, as were the British politicians who had sent them to Northern Ireland. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver, chief of the general staff, recalls ‘a legal luminary in the Cabinet’ proposing that his troops should shoot everyone – even unarmed civilians – who got in their way, since these people were ‘the Queen’s enemies’. When Carver warned Ted Heath that ‘I could not, under any circumstances, order or allow a British soldier to be ordered to do such a thing because it would not be lawful,’ the Prime Minister replied that his legal advisers ‘suggested it was all right’.

Heath himself was by now incapable of thinking rationally. The purpose of internment had been to placate Ulster unionists and snuff out militant republicanism, but it achieved just the opposite: declaring that mere detention without trial couldn’t contain the threat, the Rev. Ian Paisley set up a fifteen-thousand-strong vigilante group called the Third Force; other loyalists created a new paramilitary army, the UDA. Meanwhile, the round-up and torture of their fellow Catholics outraged the nationalist population and gave a huge recruitment boost to the Provisional IRA. On Sunday, 30 January 1972, in defiance of an official ban on demonstrations, anti-internment protesters marched through Derry under the banners of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Thirteen of them were shot dead by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment; another died from his injuries four months later.^* ‘Bloody Sunday’ provoked condemnation of Heath’s government around the world and riotous scenes nearer home: a furious crowd in Dublin burned down the British Embassy; the nationalist MP Bernadette Devlin punched the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, in the chamber of the House of Commons. (Maudling can scarcely have been surprised. On his first visit to the province, the previous summer, he made it plain that he wished to have as little as possible to do with Northern Ireland, telling army officers that it was their job to ‘deal with these bloody people’. On the plane home he turned to an aide: ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!’) The Stormont government in Belfast resigned soon afterwards, in protest at Heath’s decision to transfer its security powers to Westminster. After fifty years of Unionist rule, Northern Ireland would now be governed from London.

Less than a fortnight after Bloody Sunday, Scargill’s flying pickets won the battle of Saltley. Heath’s political secretary, Douglas Hurd, wrote in his diary that the government was ‘now wandering vainly over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time’. Brendon Sewill, special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, witnessed the panic in Whitehall: ‘The lights all went out and everybody said that the country would disintegrate in a week. All the civil servants rushed around saying, “Perhaps we ought to activate the nuclear underground shelters and the centres of regional government, because there’ll be no electricity and there’ll be riots on the streets. The sewage will overflow and there’ll be epidemics.”’ According to Sewill, ‘many of those in positions of influence looked into the abyss and saw only a few days away the possibility of the country being plunged into a state of chaos not so very far removed from that which might prevail after a minor nuclear attack…. It was fear of that abyss which had an important effect on subsequent policy.’ The immediate effect was that Heath had to pay up for the miners, while pleading for ‘a more sensible way to settle our differences’.

Buying his way out of trouble became a habit for the man who couldn’t even spare me a fiver. Heath had come to office in 1970 promising to jettison many of the statist traditions of Butskellism such as incomes policies and industrial subsidies: lame ducks would be left to drown, pay rises would be set by collective bargaining rather than ministerial diktat. In 1972, with a million people unemployed and inflation at 14 per cent, he decided to jettison his manifesto instead. A new Industry Act gave the government wide-ranging powers to dish out money to firms that were in difficulties, while the Chancellor, Anthony Barber, announced ‘a further boost to demand’ with simultaneous tax cuts and hefty increases in public spending, to be paid for by printing more money. The amount of money in circulation grew by 28 per cent in 1972 and 29 per cent in 1973. ‘There is no doubt what this means,’ said Enoch Powell, Heath’s severest critic on the Tory backbenches. ‘Inflation.’

After the brief experiment with market forces it was back to business as usual – tripartite pow-wows in Downing Street at which ministers, unions and employers struck deals over beer and sandwiches. Heath sat down with the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry in the autumn of 1972 to negotiate a voluntary agreement on prices and incomes. But beer and sandwiches were no longer enough. He offered to keep price increases below 5 per cent if the trade unions would restrain wage rises to £2 a week; the unions refused to accept anything less than a complete price freeze. Very well, said the Prime Minister, but only if you enforce a pay freeze as well. The talks broke down on 2 November, and four days later he introduced a statutory incomes policy, starting with a ninety-day pay freeze. At the end of Heath’s statement in the House of Commons, Enoch Powell intervened to ask: ‘Has he taken leave of his senses?’

To most Conservative pundits, it was Powell who seemed unhinged.^* ‘We can see no evidence,’ The Times commented, ‘that inflation can be controlled simply through the money supply without abandoning full employment as an objective. Nor is Mr Powell willing to state the price in unemployment we would have to accept.’ The Economist reported that Heath ‘looks much more like any other Conservative prime minister’, which was intended as a compliment. ‘To the mainstream Tories his new pragmatism on wages and prices is reassuring. The Conservatives are a party of government and they are used to pragmatism.’ Who could have imagined that by the end of the decade Powell’s monetarist theories would be the official policy of The Times, The Economist and the Conservative Party?

Heath’s emergency freeze was succeeded in the New Year by a formula known as Stage Two, which limited pay rises to £1 a week plus 4 per cent. Speaking to the Institute of Directors in the summer of 1973, the Prime Minister explained that he was applying a lesson he’d learned in ocean racing: when sailing in rough water over submerged rocks, either ‘you tack and go off, losing direction and the race; or you go through and come out on the other side’. He was fearlessly setting his course straight over the rocks, and he might even have lurched through somehow but for the sudden military attack on Israel by both Egypt and Syria on 6 October 1973, the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. Enraged by American support for Israel, the Arab oil-producing states cut production and hiked prices – from $3 a barrel to $5 in October, and then to $11.63 two months later.

By the time Heath launched Stage Three of his ‘counter-inflationary strategy’, two days after the start of the Yom Kippur war, it was already holed below the waterline. He had known since the summer that the National Union of Mineworkers was limbering up for another confrontation over pay, but had hoped to navigate through the storm by burning oil instead of coal. No chance of that now, as the NUM was quick to appreciate: it refused to budge from its demand for a 40 per cent pay rise. Some of Heath’s colleagues suggested he could allow the miners a large increase without breaching the pay policy by treating them as a special case and designating some of the money for ‘threshold payments’ or ‘unsocial hours’ or even ‘bathing and waiting time’. There was no chance of that either. The electricians’ leader Frank Chapple, who had already signed up to Stage Three, rang the coal minister Tom Boardman: ‘If those buggers get one farthing more than me, then all bets are off. And I could stop the country in forty-eight hours. It’ll take them forty-eight weeks, you know.’

Heath was marooned. At the end of November, two weeks into their overtime ban, he called the NUM leaders to 10 Downing Street and begged them to abandon it in the national interest. ‘What is it you want, Mr McGahey?’ he pleaded with the union vice president Mick McGahey, a gruff Scottish Communist. ‘I want to see the end of your government,’ McGahey growled. There was nothing more to be said. After the union leaders had departed, Heath announced that from 2 January 1974 all workplaces would be restricted to a three-day week to conserve coal supplies. The energy minister Patrick Jenkin urged patriotic citizens to brush their teeth in the dark; camping stores reported a stampede of shoppers wanting butane lamps and stoves; a snuff-making firm in Sheffield switched its production from electricity to a water-wheel first used in 1737; a candlemaker in Battersea announced that he had quadrupled production to one million candles a day to cope with demand. His most popular items were wax effigies of Ted Heath.^*

‘Had lunch with Roy Wright, the deputy chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc, who was very gloomy,’ Tony Benn, the shadow energy minister, wrote in his diary on 29 November. ‘He said, “Of course, we are heading for a major slump. We shall have to have direction of labour and wartime rationing.” In the evening, had a drink with [Labour MP] John Silkin who thought it was just possible that there could be a coalition … Most interesting.’ Four days later Benn dined with Wilfred Brown, chairman of the Glacier Metal Company, ‘who also believes we are heading for a slump and food riots and there must be a national government … At the Commons I saw [Tory MP] John Biffen, who told me: “Enoch Powell is waiting for the call.”’

The excitable Benn may have found all this giddy volatility ‘most interesting’, but for Ronald McIntosh it was agony. He had recently been appointed director-general of the National Economic Development Council (known as ‘Neddy’), a tripartite body under whose auspices the leaders of trade unions, big business and the government met every month to ‘develop a consensus’ on how to improve the country’s economic performance. Ronnie McIntosh seemed the ideal man for the job, a cheerful civil servant who got on with everybody, from captains of industry to union militants, and felt sure that all problems were soluble if only they kept talking to one another. Alas for him, he took charge of Neddy – and started keeping a diary – just as the post-war consensus was falling apart. The second entry in his diary, for 29 November 1973, sets the tone: ‘Lunch at the Pearson Group, hosted by the chairman, Lord Cowdray. We soon got into a discussion about our present industrial troubles. Roger Brooke [a Pearson director] foresaw a right-wing regime “with tanks in the streets”. I argued that this was a poor way to run things.’ A fortnight later his lunch companion was Fredy Fisher, editor of the Financial Times: ‘He thinks there is a real risk of a right-wing authoritarian government next year.’

Or a government of the far Left, perhaps? The ruling class was in a state of such teetering instability that anything seemed possible. It was an auspicious moment for the premiere of The Party, a play by Trevor Griffiths about the coming British revolution. Six months earlier the Royal Court had staged Howard Brenton’s Magnificence, which had the same theme, but Kenneth Tynan thought it too timid by half: ‘Like many similar plays, [it] spends 90 per cent of its time explaining how neurotic, paranoiac and ineffective revolutionaries are, and only 10 per cent demonstrating why revolution is necessary; but it seems that no English playwright can face the derision that the critics would pour on any writer who made that his priority.’ As literary consultant to the National Theatre, Tynan was in a position to test his theory by commissioning Trevor Griffiths to write a big bold drama which assumed that a left-wing revolution in Britain was essential, and that the only point worth debating was precisely how and when it would be achieved.

From a modern vantage point it seems incredible that the National Theatre should stage an earnest three-hour Trotskyist seminar, led by no less a figure than Laurence Olivier, but according to Tynan his colleagues received the script of The Party with unanimous enthusiasm. ‘Peter Hall likes it; John Dexter wants to direct it; and Larry [Olivier] not only likes it but wants to play the part of the old Trotskyite, Tagg. John has given him various basic revolutionary texts to read as background. Larry confesses to me that Trevor’s play has for the first time explained to him what Marxism is about.’ Tynan’s only doubt was whether Olivier had the ‘passionate and caring political intensity’ to make the audience warm to his character. If Olivier played Tagg with the cold-heartedness he had displayed in Richard III or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the Trotskyist hero would come across as ‘a hard and demonic monster – not as a man of feeling – and this would be disastrous’.

Disastrous for agitprop purposes, but it would have been a fair representation of the man on whom Trevor Griffiths based the character of Tagg. Gerry Healy, leader of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), was a squat, bullet-headed thug whose favourite pastimes were raping his female subordinates and beating up comrades in whom he detected the taint of ‘revisionism’ or ‘pragmatic deviation’. Not that there was any hint of this in the script. Healy had many acolytes in left-wing theatrical circles at the time, and although Griffiths wasn’t a fully paid-up Healyite he nevertheless portrayed this paranoid and megalomaniac psychopath as a weighty political intellectual who might very well lead the British revolution when capitalism reached its final crisis, as it surely must before long.

It wasn’t only Marxist zealots who believed that Britain was now ripe for insurrection. ‘I’ve been expecting the collapse of capitalism all my life, but now that it comes I am rather annoyed,’ the historian A.J.P. Taylor grumbled. ‘There’s no future for this country and not much for anywhere else … Revolution is knocking at the door.’ Harry Welton of the Economic League, a secretive right-wing outfit which monitored militants in the workforce, wrote that ‘the fomenting of new subversive groups in Britain can almost be described as a growth industry … Revolutionary and kindred groups are more numerous than at any previous time.’ So numerous, indeed, that the famous Marxist bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, Collet’s, could no longer accommodate all their publications. ‘Left-wing journals proliferated to such an extent,’ the manager explained apologetically, ‘that we found ourselves with more than 150 on display.’

With Heath’s government buffeted and battered by militant labour, hitherto tiny groupuscules on the far Left started flexing their muscles. ‘The objective pre-conditions for a victorious socialist revolution in Britain are ripening fast,’ the International Marxist Group announced. ‘Seldom in European history have there been more favourable relations between the classes for such a victorious revolution: decay, potential division and confusion in the ruling class and its allies.’^* Tariq Ali, the group’s best-known member, published a book called The Coming British Revolution (1971) which predicted that ‘we shall once again see [workers’] Soviets in Europe in the Seventies … To those who demand detailed blueprints of the future society we can only say: we are not utopians who spend our time preparing blueprints while history passes us by.’ The investigative journalist Paul Foot resigned from Private Eye in 1972 to take on a full-time job editing Socialist Worker, the weekly paper of Healy’s arch-rivals, the International Socialists. ‘Our little organisation had grown from zero to perhaps two thousand members by 1972,’ he recalled. ‘All through ’72 and ’73 it was an upward curve all the way. We would get these cheques in. [One] was from a student in York for £17,000 saying, “Today I have received my inheritance.” Stop. New paragraph. “I renounce my inheritance and I declare myself for international socialism.”’ In later years, when the Trotskyist tide had receded, Foot often thought about how bitterly the student must regret handing over his windfall. At the time, however, it seemed the obvious thing to do. As Foot said: ‘Many of us started to believe that … instead of it being a hobby, which it was, there was a possibility of a real revolutionary party.’

Gerry Healy thought so too. In March 1972 his SLL hosted a reception at the Empire Pool, Wembley, to greet Right to Work campaigners who had marched from Glasgow to London as a protest against youth unemployment. According to the heroic account given by Healy’s official hagiographers, Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman, the marchers entered the Empire Pool amid ‘a sea of red flags and banners to the tumultuous applause of 8,500 people. The rally ended with a concert put on for free by top rock bands, including Slade, Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks.’ In the opinion of the American Trotskyist Tim Wohlforth, a frequent transatlantic visitor, ‘Gerry Healy was, without question, the world’s foremost radical showman. He put on demos, rallies, pageants and conferences with a finesse that would have made P.T. Barnum jealous.’ Maybe the casting of Laurence Olivier wasn’t so surprising after all.

Healy had another chance to demonstrate his talents as a whip-cracking ringmaster that summer when a thousand youngsters – including several foreign delegations – descended on a big field by the Blackwater estuary in Essex for the SLL’s ‘international youth camp’. Wohlforth chartered a plane and brought over a hundred Americans, many of them young blacks and Puerto Ricans who had never been out of New York City. ‘Healy gave these kids a real scare,’ Wohlforth wrote, ‘when, in one of his more flamboyant speeches, he suggested that the entire country might close down in a general strike, thus preventing our delegation from returning home. Such a strike, Healy claimed, could be the opening gun of the revolution itself.’ Instead of being thrilled that they might soon, like John Reed and Louise Bryant, be witnesses to an actual uprising, the kids from New York were aghast at the prospect of being trapped in the flat-lands of Essex indefinitely. Wohlforth did his tactful best to reassure them – no easy task if he was to avoid the grave political crime of ‘underestimating the depth of the crisis’ – but as if to confirm the correctness of Healy’s assessment the Daily Telegraph published an aerial photo of his tented village on its front page and described it as a training camp for armed insurrection.

Veterans of Gerry Healy’s annual summer camps soon discovered that there was always some sort of crisis during the week – a knife fight between fractious youths from Glasgow, perhaps, or a denunciation of some luckless camper as an agent of the CIA or MI5. ‘If one doesn’t develop naturally,’ he boasted, ‘then I create one.’ This taste for the dramatic explains why his sect had such a disproportionate appeal to the theatrical profession. The actor Corin Redgrave, who was already a member, took his sister Vanessa to meet the great leader early in 1973, and after being treated to a long lecture on the importance of working-class struggle she offered her support. Healy turned triumphantly to Corin: ‘So now Mary Queen of Scots has joined us.’^* Within weeks she was singing a cabaret skit titled ‘Tories are a Girl’s Best Friend’ at a rally in Manchester organised by the All Trade Union Alliance, one of Healy’s front organisations. In March, ten thousand people attended an anti-Tory rally organised by the SLL at Wembley, which featured a ‘Pageant of Labour History’ performed by Vanessa and other Healyite actors and musicians. ‘It was the largest and most successful rally held by the socialist movement for fifty years,’ Healy’s hagiographers record with pride. ‘Its success confirmed the revolutionary nature of the period and provided the impetus for the transformation of the SLL from a league into a party.’

That November, while the League was rebranding itself as the Workers’ Revolutionary Party to take advantage of the ‘historic situation’ developing in Britain, the cast of The Party had their first read-through in a rehearsal room. Kenneth Tynan was ecstatic: ‘Larry in tremendous form as John Tagg, the Glasgow Trotskyite: his long speech at the end of the first act will be the most inspiring call to revolution ever heard on the English stage. How ironic – and splendid! – that it should be delivered by Larry from the stage of the NT!’ Olivier had an irony of his own to add to the pungent stew. During the reading he passed a note to John Dexter, the director: ‘May I go about 12.45 to stand outside Russian embassy on account of the Panovs, please (in this mature capitalist society)?’ The phrase ‘mature capitalist society’ came from The Party; the Panovs were Russian-Jewish ballet dancers who, because they wanted to emigrate to Israel, had been denied exit visas and sacked from the Kirov company. As Tynan acknowledged, ‘Larry is obliquely saying that at least mature capitalism permits me the right of public protest.’

The play opened on 20 December 1973, less than a fortnight before the start of the three-day week. Peter Hall, the theatre’s new director, was accosted during the interval by an unhappy member of his board, the lawyer Victor Mishcon. Was it right, he asked, that the National Theatre should ‘deal with subjects which are critical of politics and of the British way of life and in some sense are revolutionary, even anarchist?’ Hall defended the production: ‘I said I thought it was essential for the National Theatre to deal with such subjects if good dramatists dealt with them … Wasn’t it, I said, a sign of a mature society that its theatre should ask questions?’ While happy to celebrate the crisis of capitalism on stage, however, Hall was rather less cheerful about its actual manifestations beyond his theatre. ‘Bad news all the time,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘An economic slump threatens. The bomb scares go on. The miners continue their go-slow. The trains are in chaos. Meantime the nation is on a prodigal pre-Christmas spending spree.’

It was a last knees-up before the lights went out, a final drink before closing time. ‘It was leaden gray and wet in London today, and at the annual carol service in St Paul’s Cathedral the dimmed lights barely tinged the drizzle yellow,’ an American correspondent reported. ‘For Britons on this Christmas Eve, nonetheless, it seems to be a case of eat, drink and be merry … The Christmas shopping spree has been as intense as ever. Though prices have risen sharply, Londoners stocked up heavily on turkey, ham, sausage, wine, cake, candy and everything else that goes on the holiday table.’ Musical accompaniment to the festivities was provided by Slade, who had entertained Gerry Healy and his cadres at the Empire Pool the previous year. Their ubiquitous new single, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, topped the charts for five weeks, its raucous optimism defying the grey monochromatic gloom that suffused every headline and every high street. ‘Everybody’s having fun!’ Noddy Holder screeched. ‘Look to the future now/It’s only just begun!’

Few others could see any prospect of fun beyond the New Year. The Sunday Times predicted disease and famine. Ministers warned that if coal stocks fell below the danger level and power failed, sewage would rise out of the pipes – with the electric pumps silent – and drown the cities. (‘To an island-bound people whose level of consumption has steadily risen,’ the New York Times commented, ‘fear of accumulating wastes no doubt occupies a particularly nightmarish corner of the collective unconscious.’) On Christmas Eve the national press carried full-page government advertisements spelling out – in heavy black headlines – the desperate need to save electricity. Postal workers, always busy at Christmas, had the extra burden of distributing ration books in preparation for possible petrol rationing while also watching out for the IRA’s letter bombs and parcel bombs, several of which exploded in sorting offices – prompting the surreal headline ‘Scotland Yard Warns of Christmas Card Danger’. Some of the bombs came in calendars from a series called ‘Wonderful London’.

Heath’s Cabinet colleague John Davies spent the festive season at home in Cheshire, ‘and I said to my wife and children that we should have a nice time, because I deeply believed then that it was the last Christmas of its kind we would enjoy’. Kingsley Amis vented his frustrations in a ‘Crisis Song’ that reached much the same conclusion:

It’s one more glass of poisonous wine,

And one more pint of beer

Made out of stuff like malt and hops:

Drink it while it’s here,

And one more cut off the round of beef –

You’ll be scoffing snoek next year …

Yes, relish the lot, and collar the lot

In a terminal spending spree,

But one thing you can forget, because

Of this firm guarantee:

There’s going to be stacks of bloody salt

– Mined by you and me.

The Queen drafted a last-minute postscript to her annual Christmas message expressing ‘deep concern’ at the ‘special difficulties Britain is now facing’, only to have it vetoed by the Prime Minister for being too alarmist. When Her Majesty obediently toned down her comments (‘Christmas is so much a family occasion that you would not wish me to harp on these difficulties’) the PM still refused to budge, deeming any allusion to the crisis bad for morale. Viewers of the Queen’s broadcast were treated to a selection of Princess Anne’s wedding photos instead.

Tony Benn was full of foreboding, as much about his own fate as that of the nation. While visiting a Labour Party bazaar in Derbyshire at the end of November he had met a fortune teller named Madame Eva, who gazed into her crystal ball and predicted that ‘You are going to have a great shock in February, a terrible shock. You are going to get the blame for something you haven’t done.’ Her words preyed on him for the rest of the winter. After speaking in a Commons debate on 18 December, he confessed to his diary: ‘I felt somehow … that this would be the last speech I would make for a very long time in Parliament. It was probably that silly old fortune teller in Derbyshire but somehow, the whole day I felt obsessed with the worry, which did nothing for my speech.’

Why was a senior politician more perturbed by the witterings of a weird sister than by the genuine torments and afflictions that beset the country? Perhaps because quotidian chaos had now become such an inescapable fact of life that most people received each new bulletin without comment or surprise: they were inured to failure and disaster. ‘Things no longer shock us quite as much as they used to,’ an angry Labour right-winger complained. ‘We are beginning to get used to bombs in our cities, to strikes which turn off our electricity, to spectacular corporate failures and to the daily information of national decline … Of course political leaders talk of crisis, indeed about little else, but the word “crisis” has long since lost its urgent meaning.’ Ronald McIntosh described a lunch with Peter Wilsher, the Sunday Times’s business editor: ‘He talked a lot – and well – about Germany in the 1920s and thinks that we may well be on the edge of some kind of collapse or revolutionary change. He seemed unperturbed by this.’

Was the country slumping into that fatalistic lethargy identified by R.H. Tawney as a characteristic of the British – ‘the mood of those who have made their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without reopening the deal’? Some pundits said so, usually in the comment pages of The Times, but more sentimental observers cited the national nonchalance as proof that one of the sceptred isle’s most precious attributes, the stiff upper lip, was still as proudly immobile as ever.^* During the winter of 1973–74 an American correspondent in London paid tribute to ‘the remarkable equanimity that has characterised much of British reaction to the crisis’, and Tony Benn’s diary entry for 23 December exemplifies the stoicism: ‘I overslept and had a day at home. Three more IRA bombs in London. I tidied the office and wrapped Christmas gifts … The oil price was doubled again, the second doubling since September.’

When I left home to join the alternative society, four days later, I paused at the news-stand on Charing Cross station and noticed a cover-line on the Christmas issue of the Spectator: ‘A military coup in Britain? See Patrick Cosgrave’s Commentary.’ It was easy to miss, set in surprisingly small type and tucked away in a corner by the masthead almost as an afterthought – certainly far less conspicuous than the magazine’s other cover-lines, which included ‘Enoch Powell on heraldic language’, ‘Gyles Brandreth’s “Spectator Sport”’ and ‘Benny Green on Trollope at Westminster’. In his column, headed ‘Could the Army Take Over?’, Cosgrave explained why he thought the question should be asked. One day the previous week he had attended ‘an entertaining lunch’ at which the conversation was dominated by the prospects of a military regime in Britain. Returning to Westminster, he spotted the name of an army officer on one of the press gallery noticeboards, ‘against which a Fleet Street wag had scribbled a suggestion to the effect that, being in charge of the London area, this soldier might be the man to take over in the event of, presumably, our present crisis reaching an intolerable pitch of intensity or of a total government collapse’. That evening, drinking in one of the bars at the House of Commons with a gaggle of journalists and politicians, he heard a lobby hack suggest that ‘we had seen our last general election, since from now on the Prime Minister would merely need to continue to prolong various states of emergency and elongate the life of this parliament’. He then recalled a recent article by the historian Alistair Horne, who drew ‘disturbing parallels’ between Britain’s predicament and ‘the Chilean experience’ that had led to the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s elected government three months earlier. Could it happen here? ‘No coup will take place in this country until it is one that would be welcomed or quietly acquiesced in by a majority or a very large minority of the people,’ Cosgrave concluded. ‘But, in my judgment, we have gone measurably down the road to such acceptance in the last decade, and we have travelled very quickly along it in the last year.’

While I skimmed through his apocalyptic analysis on the concourse of Charing Cross station, this was what struck me most forcibly: although the magazine’s political pundit reckoned that Britain was ‘already ripe for a coup’, the editor didn’t think it merited more than a passing mention on the cover. As Britain prepared for the three-day week, the unthinkable had become commonplace. Armed police and army tanks surrounded Heathrow Airport on 6 January, following an intelligence tip-off that Palestinian terrorists were planning surface-to-air-missile attacks on aircraft as they came in to land. Gerry Healy immediately increased the print run of his newspaper, Workers’ Press, to alert the nation to ‘the danger of police-military rule as in Chile’. Tony Benn also suspected that the real purpose of the mobilisation at Heathrow was ‘to get people used to tanks and armed patrols in the streets of London’ and thus deter any riotous resistance to Heath’s state of emergency. A survey commissioned by the Observer concluded that the three-day week would bring the country to a standstill within weeks. Lord Bowden, a mild-mannered academic who had served briefly as an education minister in 1964, wrote that ‘the government’s plan for a three-day week has produced chaos on a scale which does not seem to be understood in Whitehall … Politicians have asked if the country is becoming ungovernable. At this moment I think it is … I think we are witnessing the collapse of the government’s administrative machine.’ Under the headline ‘Countdown to catastrophe’, a Guardian editorial warned that a two-day week would be inevitable if the miners’ strike lasted for more than a month: ‘For many firms, it would simply not be worth continuing production. The fall in living standards, the damage to the industrial structure, the utter social chaos that would follow create a situation beyond rational contemplation.’

Heath’s heckler-in-chief supplied his familiar running commentary. ‘The supposed issue in the conflict which bids fair to divide the nation today is a wholly bogus issue,’ Enoch Powell said, ‘a figment of the fevered imagination of politicians in a tight corner of their own manufacture.’ Fevered imagination? Powell didn’t know the half of it. For all his rudeness and obstinacy, Heath was at heart a shy, conciliatory man who might have been better suited to the civil service than to the rough and tumble of politics. (Henry Kissinger thought him in some respects similar to Richard Nixon – a moody, unclubbable loner whose struggle to reach the top from humble beginnings had left him introverted, self-reliant and suspicious.^*) Britain’s chief civil servant, Sir William Armstrong, was by contrast a flamboyant performer whose evangelical showmanship, derived from his Salvationist parents, would have served him well on the political hustings. ‘As an officer of the Salvation Army he had a message to proclaim and he proclaimed it,’ Armstrong said of his father. ‘He would do that either at the Cenotaph, shortly after it was put up, or in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace or on a white horse going down Plymouth Hoe. I suppose I’ve inherited a certain amount of that from him.’ Heath and his senior colleagues – genial squirearchical buffers such as Jim Prior and Willie Whitelaw – had been brought up on the old Tory dictum that the mineworkers were the labour movement’s equivalent to the Brigade of Guards, and that no sane minister would ever pick a fight with them. While they dithered and agonised it was left to Armstrong to stiffen the sinews and rally the ranks – so much so that during the winter of 1973–74 he was often referred to by those in the know as the deputy prime minister. ‘Armstrong’s influence,’ wrote the Whitehall historian Peter Hennessy, ‘was quite extraordinary for a civil servant.’ In the words of Reginald Maudling, who had been at Oxford with him in the 1930s: ‘Wherever Armstrong’s name is on the door, that is where power will be.’

The burdens of power eventually crushed him. On 26 and 27 January 1974, while waiting for the result of the miners’ ballot on an all-out strike, Armstrong and other grandees attended a weekend seminar at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, discussing abstract principles of government with a group of visiting American congressmen. ‘The atmosphere was Chekhovian,’ Douglas Hurd wrote. ‘We sat on sofas in front of great log fires and discussed first principles while the rain lashed the windows. Sir William was full of notions, ordinary and extraordinary.’ Although Hurd diplomatically refrained from giving further details, Campbell Adamson of the Confederation of British Industry recalled a lecture from Armstrong ‘on how the Communists were infiltrating everything. They might even be infiltrating, he said, the room he was in. It was quite clear that the immense strain and overwork was taking its toll.’ On 31 January, Sir William sought out his namesake Robert Armstrong, the PM’s principal private secretary, and said they must talk in a place that was ‘not bugged’. Robert Armstrong led him to the waiting room, where Sir William stripped off his clothes and lay on the floor, chain-smoking and expostulating wildly about the collapse of democracy and the end of the world. In the middle of this hysterical sermon, as the naked civil servant babbled about ‘moving the Red Army from here and the Blue Army from there’, the governor of the Bank of England happened to walk into the room. According to Robert Armstrong, he ‘took it all calmly’.

At a meeting of permanent secretaries the next day, Sir William told them all to go home and prepare for Armageddon. There was a long silence; then the Treasury mandarin Sir Douglas Allen took him by the arm and led him away. Robert Armstrong had the task of ringing the Prime Minister, who was out of London, with the news that the head of the civil service had been admitted to a mental hospital. Heath seemed unsurprised, saying that he ‘thought William was acting oddly the last time I saw him’. Sir William Armstrong was sent off to convalesce in the Caribbean (as Anthony Eden did when he cracked up after the Suez crisis in 1956), and never returned to Downing Street. Instead, after a decent interval, he became chairman of the Midland Bank.

At the height of Britain’s worst peacetime crisis since the General Strike of 1926, the most powerful man in Whitehall had gone off his rocker. Who can blame him? Armstrong’s talk about Red Armies and Blue Armies was no wilder than much of the chatter that had been heard in Westminster bars and corridors for months, though only he saw fit to lie naked on the floor while delivering it. As Tony Benn wrote, ‘in January 1974 the Tories and the whole Establishment thought the revolution was about to happen’. Heath’s environment secretary, Geoffrey Rippon, feared that Britain was ‘on the same course as the Weimar government, with runaway inflation and ultra-high unemployment at the end’. Anthony Barber, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a hysterical speech claiming that if the Tory government lost the next general election it would be replaced by a Communist regime. On the day that Armstrong was led away by Sir Douglas Allen, the Spectator’s editorial alluded again to the fate of Salvador Allende’s government. ‘Britain,’ it warned, ‘is on a Chilean brink.’

* A hybrid from the names of two centrist politicians, the Tory Rab Butler and Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell.

* This is one of the longest shadows cast by the 1970s in Britain. The initial investigation into Bloody Sunday, headed by Lord Widgery, was widely scorned as a whitewash. Tony Blair’s government set up a new one in 1998, chaired by Lord Saville. By the time Saville wrote up his findings, more than a decade later, he had interviewed more than nine hundred witnesses and run up a bill of over £150 million, making it the longest and most expensive inquiry in British legal history.

* But not to many disgruntled Conservative voters, who regarded Powell as the lone voice of robust common sense. ‘Let’s try Enoch for a bit, I say,’ the poet Philip Larkin wrote to a friend. ‘Prison for strikers,/Bring back the cat,/Kick out the niggers – /How about that?’

* Heath himself entered into the spirit of national austerity, as he revealed when Jean Rook of the Daily Express pointed out to him that he was getting rather fat. ‘Yes, I must say I am,’ he sighed. ‘The trouble is I don’t get any swimming now. We had to turn off the pool heating at Chequers – it’s oil.’

* While celebrating these splendid ‘objective pre-conditions’, the IMG alluded regretfully to the one subjective obstacle: the ‘deep-rooted influence of reformism, electoralism and parliamentarism (combined with social chauvinism) inside broad layers of the working class’. What was needed was not so much a revolutionary vanguard as a ‘vanguard of a vanguard’ – four-star generals such as the IMG leader Tariq Ali, presumably – who could spur these blinkered proletarian dobbins into a gallop.

* Redgrave had been nominated for an Oscar in 1970 for her performance in the title role in the film Mary, Queen of Scots.

* ‘While everything, all forms of social organisation, broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives, as if nothing fundamental was happening. It was amazing how determined, how stubborn, how self-renewing, were the attempts to lead an ordinary life.’ – Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

* The big difference is that Heath’s resentments were usually manifested in petulance rather than paranoia. For Nixon, the remorseless pursuit of ‘leakers’ was a daily duty; Heath’s habitual response to newspaper leaks was a sulky shrug of his burly shoulders. He’d learned his lesson from a farcical episode in February 1972, when he asked his private secretary to find out which Cabinet minister had given the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, an inaccurate story about a new peace initiative in Northern Ireland. Heath thought it ‘undesirable, and contrary to the rules laid down in “Questions of Procedure”, that ministers should discuss future Cabinet business with a newspaper editor’. After a ten-day investigation, the private secretary reported his findings to the PM: the minister who told Rees-Mogg about the Northern Ireland initiative, over lunch at the Goldsmiths’ Company, was none other than Heath himself.