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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ