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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       THREE

       Going Underground

       The accusation of ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’ no longer has the negative meaning it used to have. It has acquired a new clothing, a new colour. It does not divide, it does not discredit; on the contrary, it represents a centre of attraction. Today, to be ‘violent’ or a ‘terrorist’ is a quality that ennobles any honourable person.

      Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969)

      Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay, checked his watch just after 9 a.m. on 8 January 1971. If he waited for his wife to finish her morning bath he’d be late for a meeting at the Embassy, and Jackson was a stickler for punctuality. He dashed into the bathroom to kiss her goodbye (‘I remember that her lips were wet’), promising to be home for lunch. More than eight months passed before they saw each other again.

      Although the action began on 8 January, when Jackson was kidnapped en route to the Embassy in Montevideo, the mise en scène had been quietly playing out for almost a year. From early 1970 he began to sense that unknown enemies were observing him, as odd coincidences and anomalies multiplied. On leaving for work he often noticed a young couple on a motor-scooter, ‘skirmishing round the vicinity of the residence, then showing up as my car was parking by the chancery offices’. In the public park across the street from his residence, families suddenly seemed to be having picnics СКАЧАТЬ