by Robert Lacey
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ shouted Labour MP Dennis Skinner as he shook his fist at Edward Heath. ‘You’re better fitted to cross the Channel and suck President Pompidou’s backside!’569
Threatened simultaneously by unemployment, taxation and a fall in the value of the pound in their pocket, British workers turned increasingly to trades union protection and solidarity. In 1968, 43 per cent of the national workforce were union members. By 1978 this figure had risen to 54 per cent,570 and in the three years 1969–72 there were more strikes than at any time since 1919. In 1970, 11 million working days were lost to industrial action, the highest since the General Strike of 1926, and in 1972 this figure more than doubled to 24 million days – ten million of which were due to the first ever national strike by the National Union of Mineworkers.
The chaos started even as Heath entered No. 10. By the autumn of 1970, a ‘dirty jobs’ strike by local council workers was paralysing London. Strikes by pumping station staff caused sewage to fill up the Thames, killing thousands of fish, and school days were lost when caretakers walked out. As rubbish piled up in Leicester Square, Heath moved to invoke the first of five national ‘states of emergency’ that his government would call in their three and a half years in power. Through the Depression and the Second World War British governments had only resorted to such measures, created in 1920, some 12 times – increasing the impression that Heath’s Britain was ungovernable.571 Constitutionally, the calling of a state of emergency is a matter for the monarch’s prerogative, so Elizabeth had to summon four Councils of State during Heath’s premiership – with the fifth, on 9 February 1972, being presided over by her mother, since Elizabeth herself was then touring in the Far East.
In January 1972, the seven-week miners’ strike brought Britain to the very brink, plunging the country into unpredictable power cuts. Conventional wisdom was that the miners could not win. ‘Rarely have strikers advanced to the barricades with less enthusiasm or hope of success,’ wrote Woodrow Wyatt, the former Labour MP, in the Daily Mirror. ‘Miners have more stacked against them than the Light Brigade in their famous charge.’572
But early in February 1972 mass pickets gathered round a fuel storage depot at Nechells near Birmingham which was crucial to industry in the West Midlands – up to 700 vehicles a day collected coke there for neighbouring factories. As the queues of lorries built up for miles, Birmingham police sent hundreds of officers to keep the depot gates open. The miners responded by themselves travelling from all over the country, along with other unionised workers, so that by 10 February there were upwards of 15,000 pickets around the plant, as well as the nearby Saltley Gas Works.
In the interests of public safety, Sir Derrick Capper, the local Chief Constable, ordered the depot to close its gates and keep them closed – a massive victory for the strikers that became known as the Battle of Saltley Gate. Heath had no choice but to surrender to the wage demands of the NUM following a cabinet meeting held by candlelight thanks to a power cut.
Matters got even worse. On 6 October, 1973 – Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, which happened also to fall that year during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan – a coalition of Arab states launched an attack against Israel in Sinai and the Golan Heights. Though taken by surprise, Israel fought back with remarkable success, marching to within 60 miles of Cairo and 20 miles of Damascus, before being persuaded to halt at the behest of the United Nations. Blaming their defeat on the West’s massive military and financial support to Israel, OAPEC, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, imposed an oil embargo on the United States, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. As a result, the price of crude oil rose in a matter of weeks from $2 to $7 a barrel in December 1973, with Britain’s rate of inflation increasing consequently to over 9 per cent.573
On 12 November 1973, with their recently improved pay packets having fallen right back to where they had started the year, the mineworkers and electricity Workers began an overtime ban in support of another significant pay increase, and Edward Heath felt he had to invoke his fifth national state of emergency. On 13 November, the day before Princess Anne’s wedding, he announced a programme of daily power cuts, with street lighting to be reduced by half, along with a 10.30pm curfew on TV programming – after which all screens were to go blank.
‘SOS – Switch Off Something now,’ read government advertisements in the newspapers, with the atmosphere of economic apocalypse made worse by the continual IRA bomb scares. The much-ridiculed President Idi Amin of Uganda took the chance to get his own back by announcing a Save Britain Fund ‘to assist our former colonial masters’.574 Then on 13 December Edward Heath went on television (before the 10.30pm shutdown) to announce that, starting on 2 January next year, all industry would be restricted to working a three-day week.
Horrified by this succession of disasters, Elizabeth felt that she had to inject some note of sympathy for ordinary Britons’ plight into her Christmas message that year – so she asked Martin Charteris to notify Heath that she planned to conclude her broadcast with an acknowledgement of the ‘difficulties … of deep concern to all of us as individuals and as a nation’, together with a reminder and plea that ‘what we have in common is more important than what divides us’.575
The words were hardly inflammatory, but at her audience the next day Heath bluntly instructed the Queen not to mention the crisis at all. Undaunted, Charteris came back later with a shortened version which he had worked out with the Queen – only for Heath to baulk again. The Prime Minister instructed Robert Armstrong, his private secretary, firmly to ‘dissuade’ Her Majesty, and Elizabeth finally felt she had no choice but to comply.
The remorseless succession of domestic and foreign crises in the years 1970–74 finally broke Edward Heath – both physically and mentally. When the Prime Minister delivered his notorious televised address to announce the Three-Day Week, he had barely slept for four days, and it showed. ‘Ted Heath seemed to match his anagram – “the death”,’ remarked the broadcaster Michael Cockerell.576 Putting on weight from a thyroid condition that was only diagnosed later, Heath was growing increasingly tired and indecisive, given to long, morose silences in cabinet, and in February 1974 he decided to call a general election using the challenging slogan, ‘Who governs Britain?’
The answer to his challenge came on 28 February as a clear ‘Not you, mate!’. Labour had won marginally more seats than the Conservatives around the country, and after the failure of some inconclusive attempts to create a coalition government with Jeremy Thorpe and the Liberal Party, Heath resigned on 4 March, to be replaced by a minority Labour government. As we shall see in the next chapter, Harold Wilson made his way back to the Palace …
The 1970–74 ‘Imbroglio’ of Edward Heath turned out to be a double-edged sword for the British monarchy. On the one hand, the unforgiving and almost continuous atmosphere of political crisis reinforced the crown’s position as a symbol of stability. Celebrations like Elizabeth and Philip’s silver wedding anniversary in November 1972, and Princess Anne’s marriage to Mark Phillips the following November, helped to generate a certain up-tick in public morale – and they certainly promoted a sense of national unity.
December 1973 – Edward Heath announces the Three-Day Week
On the other hand, widespread economic hardship placed royal rank and privilege under fiercer scrutiny than ever before. May 1971 saw the first ever deliberations of parliament’s ‘Select Committee on the Civil List’ which initiated open public debate about the monarchy’s value for money – with Princess Margaret, and to some extent the Queen Mother, facing criticism for their extravagant lifestyles and lack of work ethic. In December 1971 The Sun devoted a two-page spread to royal finances, claiming that four out of five readers opposed a ‘royal pay rise’.577 The cost of Anne’s 1973 wedding to Mark Phillips raised further concerns, with widespread criticism that the newlyweds should be given the use of the Royal Yacht Britannia with its crew of 21 offi
cers and 250 sailors for their honeymoon.578
Throughout the crisis of the power cuts and the Three-Day Week, no one doubted that the Queen herself was personally frugal, with apocryphal stories circulating of how she would stalk the Palace corridors at night switching off superfluous electric lights – and at the end of 1973 it emerged that she would be digging into her private funds to find the £200,000 needed to carry out modernisations on her Norfolk estate at Sandringham.
That Christmas Her Majesty made a point of cancelling the usual showy procession of royal limousines to the parish church. Instead she travelled with her guests in a single minibus from Sandringham House in order to provide an example of petrol-saving – only to find assembled a record post-war crowd of 10,000 people, virtually all of whom had driven to the village in their petrol-powered cars.579
The crowds had come to see Prince Charles stepping out with his first major post-Camilla girlfriend, Lady Jane Wellesley, the daughter of the Duke of Wellington. For some British motorists, it seemed, the monarchy remained as popular as ever – and certainly when it came to the latest details of the family’s love life.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘CRI DE COEUR’
AUGUST 1973–JUNE 1977
‘In days of disillusion,
However low we’ve been,
To fire us and inspire us,
God gave to us our Queen …’
POET LAUREATE SIR JOHN BETJEMAN’S SILVER JUBILEE HYMN was greeted with derision when it was published in February 1977 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne. ‘Worse than this we cannot go,’ complained The Guardian – never a fervently royalist voice, of course. The normally loyalist (and wine-loving) Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn sniffed at Betjeman’s couplets as ‘crude, vin ordinaire “plonk”’, while the Poetry Society dared to denounce their Laureate for propagating ‘nursery-rhyme gibberish’.580 Humbler critics, however, rather appreciated the sentiment. ‘Days of disillusion? Right on, Sir John!’ Most ordinary Britons had suffered more than a few ‘days’ of disillusion in their recent lives, and for all Elizabeth’s caution and conservatism (with a small ‘c’), their monarch had manifestly stood by her bench. ‘It’s only fallen apart,’ comments Princess Margaret towards the end of this episode, ‘if we say it has.’ That summer of 1977 millions of loyal ‘subjects’ trooped out into the streets of London, and all over Britain, to acknowledge the Queen as someone who had both fired them and inspired them – a stubborn and defiant cry from the heart.
Peter Morgan’s title for Episode 310, Cri de Coeur, has several connotations – starting with Harold Wilson’s resumption of power and his two-year premiership from 1974 to 1976. It was quite a triumph for the Labour leader to step in and make a success of the minority government situation created by Edward Heath’s ‘Who Rules Britain?’ campaign of 28 February 1974. Wilson himself had no majority, holding just 301 seats out of 635 – 17 votes shy of security, in the only stalemated House of Commons since 1929. That summer Simon Hoggart of The Guardian described the Westminster situation as a ‘Hung Parliament’ – coining the phrase for the first time on the basis of the American expression ‘hung jury’.581
In these precarious circumstances the Labour leader relied on the fact that neither of the other main parties – Tory or Liberal – wished to fight another election, nor had the funds to do so. For the moment Wilson carefully postponed controversial issues and rolled out a succession of calming policies to undo the damage of Heath’s ‘Three-Day Week’. Then he called an election at a time of his choosing – on 10 October 1974 – and secured 319 seats, giving him a bare working majority of three.
In right-wing eyes, however, Labour’s ‘calming’ policies were simply a surrender to the subversive left-wing forces that Edward Heath had vainly tried to combat. Wilson’s remedy to end the power cuts of the Three-Day Week, for example, was essentially to pay the mineworkers whatever they would settle for. ‘For some Establishment cold warriors,’ wrote the Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie, ‘Wilson back in Downing Street was like having Stalin back in the Kremlin.’582
Chapter Eleven, ‘Olding’, laid out many of the ambivalent Soviet suspicions that had hung around Harold Wilson since the 1950s. Across the Atlantic, the CIA’s spy-hunting Director of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, had absolutely no doubt that Wilson took his orders from Moscow, and his suspicions were echoed in Britain by the equally obsessive Peter Wright, an assistant director of MI5. Wright ran his counter-espionage team on the assumption that his ultimate boss, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet spy – even believing that the KGB had contrived the death of Labour’s previous leader Hugh Gaitskell to get their own man into power.
In the mid-1970s the journalist Chapman Pincher, whose expertise lay in espionage, was leaked a copy of an extraordinary MI5 surveillance report showing how Harold Wilson had been the object of ‘active surveillance’ by British intelligence while he was leader of the opposition early in 1974. ‘Several pages long,’ wrote Pincher, ‘it listed details of how he had been watched and followed, with the times in and times out of places he had visited and names of people he had contacted.’583
Moving on to Downing Street, the report expressed concern that Wilson’s new socialist government ‘might increase trade with Russia, leading to greater opportunities for KGB activity in Britain’. Evidence for this was that ‘Wilson had previously refused to reduce the number of KGB agents posing as diplomats and had criticized the Heath government for expelling 105 of them’.584 From Wright’s perspective, Wilson could also be seen as pro-Soviet because he was planning reductions in the Secret Service as part of his government’s programme of spending cuts.
It must be emphasised that the embittered and unstable Peter Wright, later the author of the bestselling Spycatcher, was very much a lone wolf. Anxious MI5 enquiries subsequently made clear that Wright’s search-and-smear campaign, with which he hoped eventually to blackmail Wilson into resigning, was essentially a freelance operation. Once Wright’s activities were discovered, they were shut down immediately.
But Wright – and Angleton in America, who was forced out of the CIA in 1975 when his own excesses came to light – were not the only enemies with motives for undermining the Labour Prime Minister. Wilson’s steadfast opposition to apartheid and his support for sanctions against the white government of South Africa had aroused the animosity of BOSS, the South African Bureau for State Security. And then there was the suspicion that Wilson’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause had earned him the enmity of Israel’s counterintelligence service, Mossad.
Mossad? MI5? The CIA? BOSS? Take your pick to explain what happened next. Between the two elections of 1974, in February and October, a burglary at Wilson’s home in Lord North Street saw the loss of his personal tax papers, copies of which later turned up in the hands of the satirical magazine Private Eye – who, to their credit, declined to publish them. Somehow other thieves (or the same thieves?) then discovered that the Prime Minister stored some of his personal papers in a room in Buckingham Palace Road and these were also burgled – specifically tax documents, personal letters, along with photographs and tape recordings of his dealings with President Nixon and the Rhodesian premier, Ian Smith. In that same year Bernard Donoughue, Wilson’s chief policy adviser, was burgled three times, and there were two further break-ins at the offices of Wilson’s friend, adviser and lawyer, Lord Goodman. Later, Goodman stated that the intruders had been searching particularly ‘for documents that might in some way incriminate Harold Wilson’.585
The catalogue continues … Early in 1974 there was a burglary at the home of Marcia Williams, the head of Wilson’s political office, along with two break-ins at her country home at Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. In the same period, there was a break-in at the offices of Joseph Kagan, Wilson’s Lithuanian-born friend who manufactured the famous Gannex raincoats so favoured by the Prime Minister. Nothing was stolen, but documents relating to W
ilson were photocopied – while there were also burglaries at the home of Labour Environment Secretary Tony Crosland, Wilson’s late personal private secretary Michael Halls, Labour Deputy Leader Edward Short and Labour aide John Allen, who said that he experienced several break-ins.586 As Geoffrey Goodman, head of Downing Street’s Counter Inflation Unit, put it to Tony Benn after suffering three burglaries himself in 1976, ‘Something strange is going on’.587
In the absence of definitively proved conclusions from the multitude of investigative articles and books inspired by this curious sequence of events, one can only explain the mystery in terms of Cold War fever. In the early seventies James Angleton was believed by many in the CIA when he maintained that Lester Pearson and Willy Brandt, respectively the democratically elected leaders of Canada and West Germany, were Soviet agents like Wilson.588 Angleton was an extreme example of the paranoia that the Cold War produced at its height, so extreme that it would have been almost laughable – if in Britain, at least, its real-life consequence had not been to inspire disturbing paranoia in its victim …
‘Look! That’s where they’ll come,’ a senior civil servant recalls Wilson suddenly exclaiming during a briefing in the Cabinet Room, pointing at the French doors leading to the garden of No. 10. ‘They’ll come through there.’
‘Who, Prime Minister?’ asked the civil servant.
‘Them,’ replied Wilson. ‘When they come to take over the government.’589
Talking to the thrice-burgled Bernard Donoughue, Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary, recalled how one day he had been discussing strategy with the Prime Minister when Wilson silenced him with a finger to his lips. ‘He walked over to the portrait of [William] Gladstone [Prime Minister for 12 years under Queen Victoria], raised it and pointed to the wall behind. He was clearly indicating that the room was bugged. He whispered … “We will have to go for a walk in the open”.’590