by A. N. Wilson
He had held three of the most senior offices of state. In 1964, as Chancellor of the Exchequer he began to borrow at reckless levels to stabilise reserves (there was the traditional run on the pound after any change of Labour leadership) and to finance unaffordable levels of public expenditure. He resigned when the pound was forced to devalue. He was also the Chancellor who approved of the joyless change from pounds, shillings and pence to a decimal currency, though this was not brought in until February 1971 by the relentlessly modernising Heath. As Home Secretary, Callaghan had brought in the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, a typical fudge, seen by those who wished to limit immigration as entirely inadequate; liberal opponents, such as Ian Gilmour, Tory owner and editor of the Spectator, saw it as a measure to ‘keep blacks out’–which it was. It was an Act which had the Callaghan hallmarks of being both inefficient and unenlightened. As Foreign Secretary, he had made no mark at all. No great enthusiast for the EEC, he had nonetheless led the campaign within the Labour Party for the Yes vote in 1975 which guaranteed continued British Membership of the European experiment.
Callaghan as party leader and Prime Minister was elected because he believed, rightly, that he could hold together the warring factions of left and right in his party, rather than because he would make a distinguished Prime Minister. Being possessed of no observable beliefs or principles, he found it easy to negotiate deals between left and right. Denis Healey, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had the task of balancing the books. This was no easy undertaking, with a world recession in progress, the trades unions continuing to make crippling wage demands, the left of the Labour Party continuing to resist any ‘cuts’ in public expenditure and the Keynesian liberals in the party such as Antony Crosland, Foreign Secretary, being unsupportive of Healey for personal reasons. It took only a few months for the economy to unravel. Healey, like the finance minister of some emergent African nation, was obliged to go to the International Monetary Fund to secure a loan of $3.9 billion, without which Britain would have gone bankrupt. ‘The disaster at Suez had revealed that without its Empire, Britain was no longer a major power except in the minds of its leaders. The IMF loan application suggested that the pioneer of the Industrial Revolution had become a charity case.’4
Healey it was, therefore, who, three years before Margaret Thatcher came into office, was compelled by financial pressure to adopt a strictly monetarist policy. The IMF loan came in three instalments, conditional upon £2 billion of cuts in public expenditure. A further £500 million was raised by selling most of British Petroleum shares, thereby effectively privatising BP.
Neither the Keynesians in the Cabinet such as Shirley Williams or Antony Crosland (who disliked Healey’s bullying manners) nor the left-wingers such as Peter Shore or Michael Foot, could accept the reality of things, even after the IMF debacle. Figures such as Wedgwood Benn, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, continued to believe that what Britain in its desperate economic plight most needed was more socialism. In 1974, Benn had pushed the Cabinet to accept investment in a workers’ motorcycle cooperative in Meriden, a Midlands town near Coventry. The factory had been part of the Norton-Villiers-Triumph conglomerate and was doomed to closure until the workers formed their co-op. The civil servants who costed the enterprise could see that it was unviable, and said so in their reports. Benn, however, and his wife, Caroline, paid a visit to Meriden in 1974. ‘It was a fantastic spectacle,’ he told his diary. ‘There was the freshly-painted factory with an old picket tent and brazier on the gate and a couple of bikes out front.’5 When he went round the factory, Benn found it was ‘just like going round a Chinese factory–they were speaking with such confidence about their own skill and their work and how they wouldn’t need many supervisors and so on’. When Benn left, the men sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, sentiments which, in time, the majority of Benn’s countrymen came unaccountably to share. A few years later, Benn’s successor Keith Joseph, in a Conservative government, wrote off the co-op’s debts and the factory closed. It could not compete with its Japanese competitor Yamaha, which was producing motorcycles not with bands of happy Chinese-style workers, but with robots.6
The nation which had not only invented the Industrial Revolution but had also, in the 1840s, unleashed the triumphs of free trade upon a global economy, following the repeal of the Corn Laws, had forgotten its past. Trade and Industry was not in the hands of a man who showed the smallest glimmering of understanding that, with Japanese, and later Malaysian, and later still Indian and Chinese competition, the European labour markets would have to revolutionise their attitudes. Far from seeing the IMF as a warning signal, as a chilling message of realism, the British trades unions and their political allies continued to press for more wages, more public services, more welfare.
The so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978–79 doomed not merely Callaghan and his wretchedly undistinguished government, but also socialism in Britain as a viable option for any of the major parties. The socialists did not go away, but their attitude was well summarised by a young militant in the Brent constituency, Ken Livingstone, who in 1987 wrote If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.7
While Healey and Callaghan tried to impose a 5 percent wage rise, the winter saw strikes among rubbish collectors, gravediggers and hospital orderlies. In all the bigger towns, the garbage formed huge mountains, metaphors of what Callaghan and his cohorts had made of Britain. The dead lay unburied. Schools could not be opened because the caretakers were out on strike, as were cleaners, coal suppliers and cooks. In the post-war era there can never have been a time, even during the three-day week imposed by Edward Heath, when Britain felt closer to anarchy. Returning from an economic summit in Guadeloupe, Callaghan was asked at the airport, ‘What is your general approach, in view of the mounting chaos in the country at the moment?’ His answer was, ‘Well, that’s a judgement that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you’re taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don’t think that other people in the world share the view that there is mounting chaos.’ That very week, the lorry drivers achieved a pay rise of 20 percent. Public sector unions such as NUPE and NALGO called for a twenty-four-hour general strike.8
The Sun newspaper, recently acquired together with The Times by the American-Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch, summarised this waffly speech in the devastating headline: CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? After a no-confidence debate in the House of Commons, Callaghan lost by one vote. He went to the country and if ever there was a feeling of retributive justice in a British election result it was on 3 May 1979 when Callaghan’s disgraced government was removed from office and replaced by the Conservative administration of Margaret Thatcher.
The defeat of Callaghan, however, had one unfortunate consequence for Britain. His young Foreign Secretary, David Anthony Llewellyn Owen (born 1938), had been in the job scarcely two years. Owen had been appointed Foreign Secretary at less than forty years of age, following the sudden death of Antony Crosland.
This death left at large Crosland’s simpering American wife, Susan, who continued to write prying, spiteful articles in the Sunday newspapers about other people’s private lives. Crosland’s death, however, enabled his Minister at the Foreign Office, David Owen, to take over. Owen was a world statesman. He, for example, was one of the first world leaders to see the dangers of a radicalised Islam, and he had supported the Shah of Persia against the Islamic revolutionaries. He had managed to negotiate peace in Rhodesia, and bring the nationalists to a negotiating table with the illegal white government. He had powerful charisma, high intelligence and real skills. Sadly, the Labour Party was no place for the likes of Owen. Inevitably, when Roy Jenkins and the others left to form the Social Democratic Party, Owen joined them, a disastrous career mistake. Had he stayed in the Labour Party, or crossed sides to the Conservatives, he had all the makings of one of the truly great Prime Ministers. He immediately saw that it had been a mistake to get mixed up with the likes of Shirle
y Williams and Roy Jenkins, and when they joined up with the Liberal Party, Owen ploughed his own lonely furrow, in the end being the only member of the Social Democrats–or possibly one of two since Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, used to say that he continued to regard Owen as his party leader.9
Altogether, 1979 was an eventful year. It saw, for example, the dramatic murder of Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900–79). It also saw a Privy Councillor put on trial for murder: Jeremy Thorpe, who, only a few years before, had been wondering whether to accept the Prime Minister’s offer of a place in the Cabinet.
The Rt Hon. Jeremy Thorpe, with his hats at jaunty angles, his double-breasted, watch-chain-adorned waistcoats, and his crinkly, oily dark hair and shifty dark eyes was an allusion to an earlier age of English raffishness. ‘The Card’ and ‘Gilbert the Filbert’ were outmoded phrases which his appearance evoked. He looked like an Edwardian actor, on the verge of seedy, trying to exemplify those other obsolete words, rotter, scoundrel, cad. He was also a charmer. He was an Etonian and an Oxford man, ready with quips. It was he who had set the House of Commons in a roar, when Harold Macmillan sacked a handful of dud Cabinet Ministers, with the quip, ‘Greater love hath no man, that he lay down his friends for his life.’ It was a joke which returned to haunt him. For, laying down a friend–not to put too fine a point on it, having the friend killed in order to save his own political life–was what, to the Crown Prosecution Service, Thorpe had appeared to have done. He would be acquitted of the charge. But what did it say about England, that so many of his friends, fans and admirers appeared, whether he was found guilty or not, to condone the preparedness to commit a murder? The Thorpe affair revealed a certain amount about the life of Jeremy Thorpe. But it also revealed that many English people believed that it was permissible for public school-educated men to silence their more embarrassing former friends and lovers by any means at their disposal, including murder. If a classless weirdo threatened an Etonian, then Eton must be allowed the final say and the weirdo must be humiliated and his words distorted and his character, if not his body, assassinated. Whatever the truth of the case, it was a dazzling example of how, when an Old Etonian finds himself in the soup, the other public school boys were prepared to close ranks and protect him, whatever the truth of the charges brought against him.10
The General Election of 1979 was held on 3 May. Jeremy Thorpe, Privy Councillor, formerly leader of the Liberal Party, and a man who, during the heady period of the Lib-Lab pact had been offered the post of Home Secretary by Harold Wilson, did not spend the day electioneering. He had stood down as a parliamentary candidate. With three other men–very rum coves all–he was in the dock of Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey, charged that ‘on divers days between 1 January 1973 and 18 November 1977 in the county of Devon and elsewhere they conspired together and with others unknown to murder Norman Scott’. Thorpe was also charged ‘that between 1 January 1969 and 30 March 1969 he unlawfully incited David Malcolm Holmes to murder Norman Scott’.
It was a curious case. During the committal proceedings at Minehead Magistrates Court the previous November, the country had been gripped by the full newspaper accounts of the prosecution case. The key witness was the alleged murder victim himself, Norman Scott, known previously as Josiffe. He had told the magistrates that he first met Thorpe before the changes in the law which allowed consensual sex between adult males. At the time of their first meeting, according to Scott, he was still a minor, which would have made Thorpe guilty of at least two serious offences at the very time when he was beginning his rise to political fame. When they met, Scott was working as a stable boy for a man whose real name was Norman Vater, but who styled himself the Honourable Brecht van de Vater. Vater was a friend of Thorpe’s. Thorpe was already a Member of Parliament, and he is supposed to have told Scott on this occasion that if he ever needed help, he should get in touch. Not long afterwards, the stable boy had what was described as a nervous breakdown, and on leaving the clinic where he was treated, he called on Thorpe at the House of Commons. Scott alleged that he had had sexual relations in Thorpe’s room at the Commons. And in a vivid, unforgettably graphic piece of evidence, he described being taken to spend a night in the house of Thorpe’s mother, where he was given James Baldwin’s gay novel Giovanni’s Room to read in his camp bed, and then buggered on repeated occasions through the night. Later, he received a letter from Thorpe referring to his nickname, Bunny, which told him to clear off: ‘Bunnies can and will go to France.’
On 24 October 1975, Scott had met one Andy Newton, who shot Scott’s dog, a Great Dane named Rinka. This Newton, a professional hit man, was imprisoned for two years and charged with the unlawful possession of a gun with intent to endanger life.
When Scott went further, alleging that Newton had been hired by Thorpe, or, rather, by a strange gang of men on behalf of Thorpe, first to frighten him off, and then to kill him, the matter came to court. For the duration of the trial at the Old Bailey, in May 1979, the nation was gripped by the daily newspaper accounts. Thorpe gave no evidence, and never once spoke in the course of the proceedings, except to give his name. The prosecution, led by Peter Murray Taylor QC, took the jury through the story which was already familiar to newspaper readers who had, agog, read the committal proceedings–namely that Thorpe, having had a homosexual relationship with Scott in the early 1960s, became frightened that this would damage his political career, and took steps to shut Scott up. David Holmes, the sometime deputy treasurer of the Liberal Party, became convinced that the only way to achieve this end was to kill Scott. Through John Le Mesurier, not the widely loved comic actor of that name but a carpet dealer from South Wales, and George Deakin, a dealer in fruit machines, Holmes met Andy Newton, an airline pilot who was prepared to earn £10,000 as a hit man. The defence was conducted by George Alfred Carman QC, a tiny, chain-smoking heterosexual, domestically violent and much agitated man, who lived on his nerves. He had been at Cambridge with Thorpe and subsequently developed a high reputation for his skills at the Bar. Even Carman’s skills, however, would not have been able to persuade the jury to acquit, had they not been more or less directed to do so by the judge, the Honourable Sir Joseph Donaldson Cantley. ‘Remember, I have the last word.’
Thorpe was acquitted. At the time of the Stephen Ward trial, and suicide, in 1962, the public had seen the Establishment in the mode of attack. Under threat of exposure as a result of the indiscretions of Ward, and of the young women in his circle, the Establishment had savaged someone, destroyed his life, in an act of murderous hypocrisy which had sickened the public. In 1979, the Establishment was seen once again to be protecting its own, this time in defence mode. Lord Goodman issued a statement after the trial in which he said, ‘In view of the observations from the learned judge and leading counsel relating to the individuals whose names were brought into the case without being parties or witnesses, it would be quite unnecessary for any further statement to be made by me except to reaffirm that there is not a scintilla of truth in any of the allegations that have been aired.’ This statement, apart from provoking the obvious epistemological question–how would a scintilla of truth differ from the whole truth?–sat oddly beside the fact that everyone in Britain had heard, night after night on the television news, the statements of the witnesses and of the prosecution: viz. that Thorpe had siphoned off money given to him for Liberal Party funds to give to a professional hit man, who had shot Scott’s dog and who alleged, together with some of Thorpe’s former friends and colleagues called to the witness stand, that the intention had been to kill the unfortunate Scott. These allegations might or might not have had a scintilla of truth in them, but the interesting thing was that Carman did not produce any evidence to contradict them. They were passed over in silence until the judge effectively told the jury to acquit Thorpe.
It had been a lively year, since in addition to the Thorpe trial the public had also feasted on the excitement of Lord Mountbatten’s assassination.
Mountbatten was regarded
by the Royal Family, and especially by the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, as a fount of authority and wisdom. To ‘Uncle Dickie’ they turned in a crisis. But this elderly popinjay, with his offensively arrogant manners and his fondness for naval ratings, was not popular with the public. If they had to stomach Mountbatten at all, they preferred him in the fictitious film version of his Second World War exploits, In Which We Serve. In this moving picture, his sometime lover Noël Coward portrayed Mountbatten as a gallant sea captain. There was some truth in this, and the central incident of the film, in which Mountbatten lost his ship, HMS Kelly (called in the film HMS Torrin), is substantially true. Coward’s laughably implausible attempt to play the happily married man with Celia Johnson was viewed with as much derision as was Mountbatten’s improbable pretence to do the same with his wife, Edwina. Both had been promiscuous adulterers, sometimes, it was alleged, with the same man–e.g., Nehru.
It was a great pity that Antony Lambton never published his biography of Mountbatten, but he did publish a prolegomenon, which went into the question of Mountbatten’s ancestry. Although he arrived as a boy cadet at Osborne Training College in May 1913 with a trunk inscribed, ‘His Serene Highness the Prince Louis of Battenburg’, Mountbatten was a very distinctly minor, not to say ‘shabby genteel’, royal personage. Heiligenberg, near Judenheim, a few miles south of Darmstadt in Hesse, was the closest thing his father ever had to a country house (they had no English seat). It has been described by Lambton as ‘two bald houses opposing each other across a court, joined up by an ugly ballroom and other uninteresting buildings’–scarcely the romantic Schloss in which Mountbatten liked to pretend he had grown up. His closest claim to real grandeur in childhood was that an uncle by marriage, Prince Henry, was the brother of the Kaiser.