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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ