A Very British Coup

by Chris Mullin

  Perkins had been in the Cabinet for three years when the government started to close down steel mills. He resigned at once to take part in the resistance. The following year he was swept on to the Labour Party National Executive. Three years later he was topping the poll. Looking back, his election as leader of the Labour Party seemed inevitable, but at the time it took everyone by surprise.

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  By the time Harry Perkins became leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Labour had been out of power for a decade. Although the National Unity government had brought inflation under control, it had only done so at the cost of massive unemployment and great social violence.

  The inner city riots which began in the summer of 1981 grew steadily worse as the decade wore on. Shopkeepers began to evacuate. The buses stopped operating after dark when the police said they could no longer guarantee the safety of the bus crews. Brixton High Street became a corridor of estate agents’ fading signs and chipboarded shop fronts smeared with graffiti. “Avenge the Railton Five,” said one in a reference to five West Indian youths killed in Railton Road when police opened fire on a crowd of petrol bombers. Another said simply: “Burn Brixton,” but it had already been overtaken by events.

  Gradually, the inner cities were abandoned to roaming bands of unemployed youths and more and more police were required to stop them breaking out into the suburbs where owner-occupiers with jobs lived. In ten years the police budget had doubled. In Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, Moss Side and the Gorbals police in armoured cars and bullet-proof jackets patrolled the streets. Around the city centres special units of riot police on permanent stand-by sat fidgeting with their new, lethal nightsticks, imported from America.

  In February 1988 Trotskyism had been banned by legislation rushed through Parliament in three days. This had followed the discovery of an arms cache in a derelict house in Islington, said to be used by the International Marxist Group. Some said the guns had been supplied by the IRA, others said they had been planted by the police. No matter, Trotskyism was now illegal. Army camps on Salisbury Plain were filled not only with rioters, but suspected Trotskyists, too. Under the new law only a single witness, usually an anonymous member of the Special Branch, was needed to secure a conviction for Trotskyism.

  The mid-1980s were also the time in which the long struggle between industrial and financial capital was finally resolved in favour of the financiers. For decades successive British governments had pursued policies of high interest rates and manipulation of demand, designed to favour those engaged in speculation rather than production. In these circumstances the only worthwhile investments were short-term ones promising high returns. Even industrial companies already profitable were advised by their accountants to ‘go liquid’ and hold their assets in cash, gold or oil paintings rather than in new plant and equipment.

  As if this were not serious enough, exchange controls (removed by an earlier Tory government) had never been restored thereby making possible what one industrialist, in the privacy of his boardroom, called a ‘scorched earth policy’. As the crisis grew worse, the outflow of capital increased.

  On the Clyde and the Tyne shipbuilding all but disappeared. A few rusting hulks remained in the yards, half completed at the time British Shipbuilders was allowed to go under. Asset strippers, sharp young men who came from London in Rolls-Royces, wandered among the ruins buying up at bargain prices the cranes and any other movables which they sold at large profits to yards in Spain and France. The hulks that remained were decaying monuments to an industry which had consumed generations of engineers, boiler-makers, welders and fitters. Those who were young enough moved south in search of work. Some went to work in Arabia. Those who were too old or too set in their ways to move stayed put and went down with their ships.

  The fishing industry had long since disappeared. In Aberdeen, Fleetwood, Grimsby, Hull and Lowestoft a few rotting trawlers bobbed idly at anchor. They were all that remained of the proud fleets that once roamed the North Sea from the English Channel to the Arctic Circle. One or two more enterprising skippers had converted their trawlers into pleasure boats taking day trippers for rides along the coast during the summer, but it was no way to make a living. The trawler-men blamed the Common Market for their ruin.

  In Yorkshire and Lancashire the textile industry finally succumbed to cheap and inferior imports from Taiwan and South Korea. Calls for import controls, delegations to ministries and mass lobbies of Parliament fell upon deaf ears. Men from ministries on index-linked pensions came and looked at the books. It was, they said, a tough old world. If textile workers in Bolton could not compete with those in Taipei and Seoul they would have to go down the plughole.

  There was some brave resistance. Scattered work-ins, here and there attempts to set up a co-operative, but there was never really any hope. In the end the textile industry followed shipbuilding and fishing into history.

  This did little to damage the political base of the National Unity government. Textiles, ships and fish were the products of Labour strongholds. Elsewhere the belief was widespread that only the inefficient, the idle and the greedy were unemployed, a belief fostered by the popular newspapers. For a time one of Sir George Fison’s newspapers even ran a ‘Scrounger of the Week’ competition, urging people to spy upon unemployed neighbours and offering cash prizes to those who could uncover the most outrageous fiddles.

  The collapse of British Leyland was the beginning of the end. Leyland had been the country’s biggest export earner and largest employer. One November morning the chairman of Leyland had appeared at the Department of Industry to tell the Secretary of State that his company could no longer service its debts, never mind finance further investment. He needed an extra £500 million immediately and probably the same again next year.

  There were emergency Cabinet meetings, a frantic round of negotiations with a Japanese corporation, but in the end the cupboard was bare and most of British Leyland was allowed to go to the wall. The bus and truck company was sold to the Japanese. The Rover plant went to Volkswagen of Germany who promptly turned it into an assembly plant for one of its own models. The collapse of Leyland also triggered off a wave of bankruptcies which swept through components firms in the Midlands. At last the crisis began to lap at the edge of the Unity government’s political base.

  The third element in the disaster which overtook Britain in the late 1980s was that North Sea oil began to dry up. For most of the previous decade Britain had been self-sufficient in oil. This meant that, besides not having to spend precious foreign exchange importing oil, the government also received huge revenue from the taxes on the profits of the oil companies. In a sane world this temporary good fortune might have been used to provide industry with the investment funds so badly needed. However, most of the oil revenue was squandered on tax cuts designed to buy favour with the electorate.

  As domestic oil supplies dwindled Britain was obliged to go back on to the world markets to purchase oil again. It is true that by this time scientists had succeeded in converting sugar cane and other vegetable matter into a substitute for oil, but it was not yet being produced in anything like commercial quantities. Britain’s import bill began to increase dramatically. A balance of payments crisis meant that the foreign holders of sterling would start selling. So too would domestic holders, since they were no longer bound by exchange controls.

  For those engaged in certain forms of non-productive activity life had never been so good. As money poured out of manufacturing industry, more became available for speculation in commodities, property and works of art. Because the supply of these was relatively limited and the amount of cash chasing them was for all practical purposes unlimited, what went up was not supply, but prices. The value of gold soared; coffee, rubber, tin and a host of other commodities fluctuated wildly as fortunes were won and lost by those who could afford to gamble in futures.

  Property boomed, fuelled by the pension funds – the accumulated savings of millions of citizens. The London do
cks were filled in and replaced by skyscrapers bearing names such as Hay’s Wharf Towers and West India House. The names offered the only clues to what had gone before, in the days when Britain had been a trading nation. The 1980s property boom, the craziest of all time, was still in progress when Harry Perkins came to power.

  For most of the decade that preceded the election of Perkins and his government the orgy of speculation which lay at the heart of the British disease was, in the minds of many people, camouflaged by the view that political extremists and greedy workers were to blame. By the end of the 1980s, however, certain weaknesses had become apparent in that line of thinking. Real wages had fallen, public spending had been cut back drastically, the trade unions had been neutered; yet still the slide into ruin continued. By the end of the decade the huge campaign to pin the blame for Britain’s ills on extremists had finally run out of steam.

  The newspapers received the elevation of Perkins with unprecedented hysteria. “Go Back to Moscow,” screamed the Sun, unable to come to terms with the fact that ‘Red Harry’ (as the papers insisted on calling him) had never actually set foot in Moscow. “LABOUR VOTES FOR SUICIDE,” raged the Express, and The Times ran a long leading article which argued that the election of Perkins spelled the end of the two-party system since the British people would never be foolish enough to vote into office a government headed by such a man. Even the Daily Mirror, traditionally loyal to Labour, thought the choice of Perkins was the end.

  Despite their firm belief that a Labour Party led by Perkins stood no chance of winning an election, the press barons took no chances. No one had done more to alert the British people to the perils of extremism than Sir George Fison (indeed, he had been awarded a knighthood for his services in this regard). But the general election of March 1989 was his finest hour.

  Day after day in the run-up to polling Sir George’s newspapers published lists of ‘Communist-backed’ Labour candidates. By way of evidence they offered an article in the Morning Star or a platform shared by a Labour MP and a member of the Communist Party. A week before election day Sir George’s newshounds ‘discovered’ documents purporting to show that four senior Labour leaders were paid-up members of a Trotskyist cell.

  Not to be outdone, the Express took to publishing a picture of Perkins daubed with a Hitler moustache, and words such as ‘mugging’ and ‘terrorism’ began to creep into discussion of what life in Harry Perkins’ Britain held in store. One leading article was headed “Perkins, the demon mugger unmasked.” The Times, now owned by an American computer company, provided its readers with a slightly upmarket version of the same: claiming at one stage to have discovered a plot by Trotskyites to blow up the Cenotaph in the event of a Labour election defeat. Another paper splashed on its front page an internal Labour Party document outlining plans to abolish tax relief on mortgages and confiscate all personal wealth over £50,000. Enquiry revealed that the document was a forgery, but the retraction was tucked away at the bottom of an inside page.

  Only the Guardian and the Financial Times conceded that there were any issues to be debated and even they concluded that the election of Perkins would be a catastrophe. One commentator went so far as to speculate that this could be the last free election which the British people would enjoy for many years. Events were to prove him correct, though for reasons rather different from those inferred at the time.

  But Harry Perkins had no inkling of what was to come as he set out by train for London on his first glorious morning as Prime Minister of Great Britain.

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  Perkins arrived at St Pancras a little after 10 am. He was bearing exactly the luggage with which he had departed for Sheffield on the final morning of the election campaign two days earlier: a British Airways bag containing two shirts and a change of underwear and a rather battered briefcase embossed with his initials – a present from his constituency party on the tenth anniversary of his election.

  He had hoped to occupy the journey down sketching out details of his Cabinet and the host of other appointments he would have to make, but from the moment the sleek Advanced Passenger Train glided out of Sheffield he had been harassed by newspaper men who had chosen to ride down with him. For a while bedlam prevailed as reporters, photographers, camera crews, autograph hunters and assorted well-wishers fought to get near. It was not until the train passed Leicester that the ticket inspector, with the aid of a steward from the dining car, was able to restore some sort of order. Perkins began to realise why Prime Ministers did not travel second class.

  In the end, all he managed was a glance at the newspapers purchased on the platform at Sheffield. They were mainly early editions and although by the time they had gone to press Labour appeared to be winning, the scale of the victory was unclear. Considering the onslaught to which Perkins and his party had been subjected before the election, newspaper treatment of the impending Labour victory seemed almost generous. “IT’S HARRY,” proclaimed the Daily Mirror over a large picture of Perkins casting his vote at Parkside Junior School. “PERKINS BY WHISKER,” said the Express over a report by the paper’s political correspondent predicting a ‘wafer-thin’ Labour majority which, the correspondent added, “should prevent Perkins and his gang from getting up to any of the mischief outlined in Labour’s loony manifesto.” Perkins could not resist a chuckle as he pictured the scene on the Express editorial floor now that the full result was known. The Times tried to set the minds of its readers at rest by recalling the fate which had overtaken previous radical Labour programmes “once the Party’s leaders had to face up to the realities of office”.

  On inside pages the popular press regaled readers with a hurried cuttings job on Perkins’ career from his days as a schoolboy at Parkside Secondary School. The picture libraries had been trawled for a class photograph, taken when he was a weedy, freckled youth of fourteen. There was even a picture of young Perkins, aged five years, taken with his mother and father in the back yard of their terraced house in Brightside just before they were bombed out in the second world war. Where the devil did they rake that up from, he wondered.

  At St Pancras there were more reporters, photographers and television men with lightweight cameras. Everybody was talking at once. How was he feeling? Who was going to be Foreign Secretary? What did he have for breakfast? And so it went on as Perkins pushed through the throng towards the distant ticket barrier, taking care as he went not to tread on prostrate sound recordists.

  After he had fought his way no more than twenty yards, the scrimmage halted. There was a pause and then, as with the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, the ranks of the assembled pressmen suddenly parted to make way for a man in pin-striped trousers and a dark jacket, his cuffs protruding a full three inches from the sleeves and joined by jade links. A silence fell over the assembled multitude, then the man spoke: “Mr Perkins,” he said in a voice that rang with self-assurance, “Mr Perkins, my name is Frederick Porter. I have come to take you to the Palace.”

  Sir Frederick Porter was the King’s private secretary. Perkins had been told to expect him at St Pancras. The previous day Downing Street had been on the line to him in Sheffield and explained the procedure for the transfer of power. At the time the votes had still to be counted, the pundits had still been predicting a Tory victory and yet the man from Downing Street had spoken as though a Labour victory was already a fact. Telepathy? Perkins had wondered. Or just the establishment hedging its bets? In the event Downing Street’s caution had proved justified and now the well-oiled machinery for ensuring a smooth transfer of power was in motion. First there was an audience with the King, morning dress optional. He would ask Perkins to form a government. From that moment on he was Prime Minister and he would be taken from the Palace in a Downing Street car. The outgoing Prime Minister would leave Downing Street by a rear entrance. They would not meet, but it was normal practice for the incoming Prime Minister to make Chequers available to his predecessor.

  Perkins put down his briefcase and advanced to
wards Sir Frederick, hand outstretched. Eton, Balliol and the Guards had taught Sir Frederick to display a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity and as he took Perkins’ hand his face betrayed no trace of his inner anguish.

  “I have a car, sir,” said Sir Frederick, indicating with a sweep of his hand the general direction of the Euston Road.

  “Car?” said Perkins. “What’s wrong with a bus? Number 77 runs down Whitehall from here.” Perkins made a fetish of travelling by public transport. Many were the anxious moments chairmen, presiding over mass rallies, had spent looking at their watches because their Party leader’s bus was running late. Perkins had resolved that even when he was Prime Minister he would stick to public transport.

  For one-hundredth of a second Sir Frederick’s face registered dismay, but when he spoke his voice contained precisely the right blend of firmness and humility. “Sir, His Majesty is waiting.”

  Perkins might have replied that it would do His Majesty no harm to be kept waiting for once. He might even have said that His Majesty could get stuffed. History records, however, that he simply shrugged, handed his bag to the chauffeur and climbed meekly into the back of the car drawn up in the forecourt of St Pancras station.

  They drove to Buckingham Palace in silence. As they passed down Kingsway Perkins reflected wryly that he had suffered his first defeat at the hands of the establishment – and he was not yet Prime Minister.

  The King and Queen breakfasted together in the private apartments in the north wing of Buckingham Palace. The crockery was Doulton. The cutlery, Louis XIV. The marmalade, Rose’s Lime. The Regency windows looked out over verdant lawns. In the distance a gardener crouched planting polyanthus.