State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  While the killings went on, Whitelaw was desperately trying to broker a deal between Faulkner’s Ulster Unionists and Gerry Fitt’s SDLP on a power-sharing executive. The negotiations dragged on, and on, and on. But at last, after Whitelaw had melodramatically summoned his helicopter to wait outside Stormont Castle and threatened to fly back home, the deal was done, giving the Unionists six seats on the executive, the SDLP four, and the non-sectarian Alliance one seat. And two weeks later, at the Civil Service Staff College in Sunningdale, Berkshire, representatives of the three parties joined Heath and the Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, for the first full Anglo-Irish talks on Northern Ireland since the early 1920s. For Faulkner to be sitting around a table to discuss his province’s future with the leader of the Republic of Ireland was an extraordinary spectacle, and the occasion was not without tension. Night after night the talks dragged into the small hours, and it took all Heath’s bulldozing energy to keep them on track. But on 9 December, the conference ended in success. Cosgrave agreed that ‘there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change’, while Heath promised that Britain would ‘support the wishes of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland’. Meanwhile, Faulkner gave his consent to the new Council of Ireland, which had seven Northern and seven Southern ministers, a consultative body made up of thirty Irish TDs* and thirty members of Northern Ireland’s assembly, and a small permanent secretariat. It had taken a lot of hard bargaining to get there, but they were there all the same. As the chief delegates assembled for the cameras, an exhausted Heath still sucking pastilles to soothe his talked-out throat, there was no mistaking the euphoria. In the House of Commons the next day, even Harold Wilson offered generous congratulations.42

  Sunningdale was not only a testament to the vision and commitment of Heath and Whitelaw; it anticipated many of the breakthroughs of the following decades, from the Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration of the 1980s and 1990s to the Belfast and St Andrews Agreements of the 2000s. The tragic irony, however, was that if anything its architects were too visionary. Sunningdale promised too much, too soon. While a more cautious approach might have yielded small but concrete results, one historian calls Sunningdale ‘an unmitigated disaster for Faulkner’s standing in the unionist community’. Already his power base was badly fractured: after the deal on the executive in November, five Unionist MPs at Westminster had publicly announced that they had lost confidence in him. On the very first day of the Sunningdale conference, 600 delegates from the Orange Order, the Ulster Unionist constituency associations, Craig’s Vanguard movement and Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party had agreed to set up a United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC), pledged to defeat power-sharing and the Council of Ireland. Paisley even started calling Faulkner a ‘Republican Unionist’, and charged that he had been ‘out-flanked, out-manoeuvred and out-witted’. Even more moderate observers thought that Faulkner should have driven a harder bargain at Sunningdale, for as the unionist population saw it, he had given the Republic and the SDLP everything they wanted. To Protestants whose fears of Irish Catholicism had been whipped into a frenzy by the Provos’ bombs and Paisley’s bombast, the Council of Ireland was an outrageous provocation. Even at the time, Whitelaw confided to the Irish Foreign Minister Garret FitzGerald that Brian Faulkner was ‘perhaps further ahead of his party than was quite wise for him’ – and so it proved.43

  On New Year’s Day 1974, buoyed by messages of goodwill from across the world, the power-sharing executive took office. The goodwill lasted just three days, long enough for the Ulster Unionists to vote by 427 to 374 to repudiate the Sunningdale agreement. For Faulkner it was a shattering blow; although he remained as head of the executive, he immediately resigned as Ulster Unionist leader to set up his own party. At the press conference afterwards, noted The Times, he seemed ‘pale and drawn’, and when he insisted that he would not alter his principles, a Unionist supporter by the door heckled: ‘Then we’ll alter them for you!’ And when the Assembly reconvened on 23 January for the first time since Sunningdale, any pretence of serious debate soon collapsed into unimaginable chaos and absurdity. When the Speaker tried to open the session after prayers, he was shouted down by loyalist members chanting ‘No, no, no’, orchestrated by the hulking figure of Ian Paisley. While some loyalists clambered onto benches and desks, waving and shouting like monkeys in a zoo, the Vanguard member for South Antrim, Professor Kennedy Lindsay, rushed to the Speaker’s table and tried to climb on top of it. Unfortunately (and laughably) he failed at his first attempt, sending glasses of water flying everywhere; on his second, however, he made it. ‘Amid wild cries from other Assemblymen he stood up and shouted “This has gone far enough” and “The temples have been cleansed,” ’ reported Robert Fisk. Meanwhile, ‘Mr Paisley was seen building a barricade of chairs.’

  As a kind of climax, another Democratic Unionist member, North Antrim’s James Craig, made a dash for the Speaker’s table and grabbed the Mace, which he passed to another DUP man just as a doorman was about to collar him. Up and down the aisle the chase flowed, until finally a security guard managed to wrestle back control of the Mace. In the meantime, the police were desperately struggling to restore order, including dragging loyalist members from the Speaker’s chair. Ian Paisley was ‘red-faced and breathing heavily’, Fisk noted, while John McQuade was dragged out shouting: ‘I’ll fix you, you’re murdering me, you’re killing me.’ Even Paisley’s wife Eileen got in on the act, ‘insisting on her right to a frontbench seat by sitting briefly on the knee of Mr Robert Cooper, Minister for Manpower’.44

  Behind the farcical scenes, however, was a grim political reality. Sunningdale was a noble bid to achieve consensus, but in the context of almost daily bombings and sectarian assassinations, the necessary trust and conciliation simply did not exist. ‘We are opposed to a united Ireland! We will not have a united Ireland!’ Ian Paisley roared to enthusiastic Belfast crowds. ‘I say to the Dublin government: Mr Faulkner says that it will be hands across the border to Dublin. I say that if they do not behave themselves in the South, it will be shots across the border!’ And although Faulkner had once commanded the loyalty of the unionist population, his failure to stem the violence and his supposed surrender to Dublin had badly corroded his support in working-class Protestant households. Like Edward Heath, he was also horribly unlucky. For when Heath called a general election a few weeks later, it came at precisely the wrong time for Faulkner, just weeks into his new Executive’s tenure, when passions were running high and his political base seemed most fragile.45

  The results on 28 February were a disaster for the cause of power-sharing. While the moderate parties – the Faulkner Unionists, the Alliance, the SDLP and Northern Ireland’s Labour Party – competed against one another for votes, the loyalist UUUC parties agreed to pool their resources and run one candidate in each constituency on the simple slogan ‘Dublin is Just a Sunningdale Away’. In some constituencies, the power-sharing candidates won more votes combined than their rejectionist opponent, but in a first-past-the-post system, that was no consolation. For when the votes were counted, the UUUC had swept the board, winning all but one of Northern Ireland’s twelve Westminster seats. Only in West Belfast, where the SDLP’s Gerry Fitt won a narow victory on the back of the heavy nationalist vote, was there a glimmer of light for the moderates. Everywhere else, the voices of consensus were blown away.46

  The Assembly and the Executive soldiered bravely on, but as the Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office reported to London a few days later, ‘Mr Faulkner was somewhat shaken and somewhat fearful.’ He was right to be afraid. Three months later, a general strike organized by Protestant shipyard workers and loyalist paramilitaries brought the province to its knees and the Executive to the brink of collapse. On 28 May, less than six months after he had taken office, Faulkner resigned. By then Heath and Whitelaw were powerless bystanders, unable to intervene. But even if they had still be
en in power, the result would surely have been the same. The extremists had won, and the war went on. It became routine, a terrible but almost unremarkable element of daily life in Northern Ireland, where the morning papers on any day of the week might bring news of a shooting, a bomb, a family heartbroken, a community devastated. The terrible irony was that it was all for nothing.47

  13

  The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

  PATRICK: The pursuit of money is a force for progress.

  CURLY: It’s always been the same.

  PATRICK: The making of money.

  CURLY: The breaking of men.

  – David Hare, Knuckle (1974)

  Midway between Crawley and Tunbridge Wells, the nondescript commuter town of East Grinstead, with its quiet streets of identikit inter-war semis, is not exactly one of the world’s most glamorous destinations. When the suburban seducer Norman in Alan Ayckboun’s comic trilogy The Norman Conquests (1973) announces that he has booked a dirty weekend in East Grinstead, the other characters’ open hilarity speaks volumes about the town’s decidedly unromantic reputation. But East Grinstead does have one small claim to fame. On the rural edge of the town stands a squat building that for a brief moment in the early 1970s found itself in the headlines of every major newspaper in the country. With its brick and glass façade, its flat roofs, its stains of damp and rot, it might be a science block in some under-funded comprehensive school. In fact, it was a dance theatre: to be precise, the Adeline Genée dance theatre, the pet project of the Home Secretary’s wife Beryl Maudling, and a symbol of a virulent financial and political cancer at the heart of British public life. And as he contemplated the wreckage of his political career, Reginald Maudling must have wished he had never heard of it.1

  When Maudling resigned as Home Secretary in July 1972, the consensus was that he was an honourable man brought down by sheer bad luck. During the mid-1960s, he had agreed to serve as chairman of an export company owned by a successful Yorkshire architect called John Poulson. In return, Poulson promised to help with the financing of Beryl Maudling’s beloved theatre project, a ‘Little Glyndebourne for Ballet’ on the edge of East Grinstead. As a teenage ballet prodigy, Beryl dreamed that the Adeline Genée theatre would help to bring dance to the masses, and she was delighted when Poulson offered a financial covenant that would bail out the troubled scheme. So work on the theatre went ahead, and in January 1967 it opened its doors with a gala performance attended by Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and Dame Adeline herself, a former ballet dancer now in her nineties. But then disaster struck. Despite his air of success, John Poulson was a rather less adept businessman than he seemed, and in January 1972 he was forced to declare bankruptcy. When investigators looked into his murky finances, they found some very mysterious donations to civil servants and politicians, as well as the details of the covenant to Beryl Maudling’s theatre. As the Attorney General reported to the Cabinet on 13 July 1972, not only was Poulson himself possibly guilty of fraud, but at least two Members of Parliament, ‘several civil servants and various individuals in public life in the north of England’ might also have to face ‘charges of corruption’.2

  All of this left Maudling in a distinctly tricky spot. As Home Secretary, he would nominally be in charge of any investigation, but since he and his wife had benefited from Poulson’s largesse, he could hardly claim to be unbiased. He had to leave the Cabinet Room while his colleagues were discussing the issue, which must have been excruciatingly embarrassing, and there were isolated calls from Liberal MPs for him to step down. Even so, colleagues and commentators alike were astonished when, on Tuesday, 18 July, Maudling suddenly resigned as Home Secretary. He had, he explained, done nothing wrong himself, but ‘it would not be appropriate’ to continue in office while the Poulson case was rumbling on. Maudling was a popular figure on both sides of the House; even as Heath was reading out his resignation letter, there were gasps of shock and cries of ‘Shame!’ Maudling had ‘acted in the best traditions of the public service of this country’, said Labour’s deputy leader Ted Short, while the former Home Secretary Jim Callaghan jumped to his feet to condemn the ‘witch-hunt’ against his Tory successor, even adding that Heath should not have accepted his resignation – an extraordinary statement coming from the Opposition front bench. In private, Callaghan was even angrier. Grabbing one of Maudling’s junior ministers by the lapels afterwards, he said: ‘You’ve let him down. He’s a good man and he shouldn’t have gone.’3

  At a time when public affairs seemed infected by greed and self-interest, the Home Secretary’s self-sacrifice was a rare and inspiring moment. ‘There can be little wrong with public life,’ said the Daily Express, ‘when a man in Mr Maudling’s position resigns as a matter of honour.’ The Sun’s editorial hailed ‘Maudling, man of honour’ and called it ‘one of the most sensational personal political tragedies of the century’. The Mirror agreed that he ‘could not have acted more honourably’. And The Economist even suggested that at a time when investigative journalists were uncovering corruption scandals in everything from local government to the Metropolitan Police, Maudling’s resignation should mark a turning point. It was ‘time now for everyone in public life, politics and journalism to consider where the line should be drawn between responsible criticism and irresponsible, even if unwitting, support to the gravediggers of parliamentary democracy’. For it had been ‘a bleak week in British politics. A few MPs, and rather more Pharisees in the press, have contrived to bring down a fine politician. In doing so they have shocked the country, and some of them may even have shocked themselves.’4

  These were fine and noble sentiments. The only problem was that Maudling was deeply, irredeemably guilty.

  The roots of the Poulson scandal lay in the unprecedented moneymaking opportunities presented by the redevelopment of Britain’s urban landscape. Many cities, such as London, Birmingham, Coventry and Hull, had been badly scarred by German bombing raids in the war. Some ripped out acres of slum housing and moved their inhabitants to new high-rise housing blocks; others demolished parts of their central areas to make way for brand-new motorways and dual carriageways; and still others tore down their Victorian buildings out of sheer utopian modernism, believing that only clean lines, concrete surfaces and Brutalist austerity would present an appropriately up-to-date image. Labour and Conservative local authorities alike agreed that, as The Times put it, ‘smart typists and skilled young workers will not put up with Victorian by-law streets any longer’, and by 1965 at least 500 different redevelopment schemes were being considered across the country. Since regulations were lax, however, more than a few planners and architects took the opportunity to feather their own nests. In Bradford, an investigation at the end of the 1960s uncovered an extraordinary saga of corruption, expenses-fiddling and municipal kickbacks. In Wandsworth, the police found that the head of the council’s Labour group, Sidney Sporle, had pocketed thousands of pounds from developers in return for contracts to replace Victorian terraces with system-built flats. And in one of the most egregious cases, Newcastle’s swashbuckling leader T. Dan Smith came up with a sweeping scheme of flyovers, shopping precincts and high-rise blocks while simultaneously acting as a paid consultant to the Crudens building company, who unsurprisingly won a lot of contracts in the North-east. He also happened to be a consultant to John Poulson, who specialized in big public commissions in the North of England.5

  On the surface, Poulson seemed an unlikely candidate to become the incarnation of corruption. A blunt, narrow-minded, even moralistic man, the son of a Methodist preacher, Poulson never actually qualified as an architect but nevertheless set up his own Pontefract practice in 1932, when he was just 22. He was not a particularly talented architect – one of his rivals commented that he ‘couldn’t design a brick shithouse’ – and was regarded as an impatient and unfeeling boss, once sacking an employee merely for having a beard. But he was a man of enormous ambition and enterprise, and after the war he realized that he could cut costs an
d attract much greater business by adopting the new concrete system-building methods and by combining architectural, surveying, engineering and valuation services under one roof, giving clients an all-in-one service. His other great insight was that not only could he cash in on the redevelopment boom in the North of England, but he could also make money abroad by winning big public contracts in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Steadily his business grew and grew, and by the late 1960s it was the biggest in the country, employing more than 700 people, most of them in Pontefract but others dispersed across the North and some even in Beirut and Lagos.

  Outwardly, Poulson was a highly respectable man, a Commissioner of Taxes whose wife chaired the Yorkshire Women Conservatives, his business raking in a reported £1 million a year. But there was a dark side to his success. While some of his architects were highly talented, there were murmurs that his buildings were often cheaply and hurriedly put up. Even his best-known constructions were heartily loathed by many residents, and buildings such as London’s Cannon Street station and Leeds’s International Swimming Pool and British Railways House became bywords for dreary Stalinist concrete-and-glass austerity. Critics also muttered that he won contracts only through his vast network of local politicians and council officials, among them T. Dan Smith, on whom he lavished expensive presents. Indeed, for a supposedly shrewd businessman, Poulson was remarkably cavalier with money. His employees often wondered why, given that they worked so hard and completed so many contracts, the firm always seemed to be short of cash. The explanation was that Poulson was paying out so much money in bribes, retainers and kickbacks – a total of at least £334,000, according to some estimates, although it may well have been much more.6