Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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