To run it, Livingstone appointed the ultra-Bennite Valerie Wise, the youngest of his close associates. Even Livingstone admitted that ‘with her Lancashire accent and huge glasses’, Wise came across as ‘too serious by half’, though she later proved to have a remarkable appetite for photo opportunities. The tone was set on 11 May, when Wise kicked off the first meeting by asking to be called ‘chair’ rather than ‘chairman’, which even the Guardian thought outlandish. Because there were few women GLC councillors, she had to co-opt eight extra members, and at first somebody suggested that all eight should be black. That fell by the wayside (‘tokenism’, said Wise), but then somebody else suggested that all eight must be Labour members. That caused even greater argument, and was also dismissed. Within weeks, however, they had set up seven working groups, covering the core issues of health, industry, planning, childcare, violence against women, black women and lesbians. At just £332,000, the budget was tiny by GLC standards. But the potential for publicity – which meant outrage – was enormous.52
What really exercised the press about Wise’s committee was its enthusiasm for doling out public money. Under the Local Government Acts, authorities were allowed to support community groups as they saw fit, and at Livingstone’s prompting more than a dozen GLC committees seized the opportunity. Contrary to myth, the sums involved were pretty small: even at their peak in 1985, when the GLC handed out almost £80 million, this was no more than 2 per cent of the authority’s total budget. And despite later controversies about the handouts to, say, Babies Against the Bomb, the Black Female Prisoners Scheme or the Lesbian Feminist Writers Conference Planning Group, most grants went to mainstream groups such as the British Judo Association, Save the Children or the Town and Country Planning Association.
Yet even at a very early stage the tabloids’ knives were out. In February 1982, under the decidedly non-right-on headline ‘Red Ken Hands out Cash with Gay Abandon’, the News of the World complained that the GLC had given £8,000 to Women Against Rape and £750 to Lesbian Line. The Mail warned that taxpayers’ money was going to ‘militant lesbians, babies for peace, Irish and black extremists, prostitutes’ collectives, left-wing theatre groups and revolutionary “creators” of all kinds’. The Sun, meanwhile, told its readers that the GLC had become a ‘handout machine for the feckless and freaky’.53
Had Livingstone been merely an opportunist, he would never have pursued a strategy guaranteed to attract so much abuse. But his radical commitments were not merely for show. ‘It is impossible to spend any time with Livingstone’, wrote his biographer John Carvel, ‘without being convinced that he does indeed boil with outrage at the record of British colonialism in Ireland, at the racism he sees around him in London, at the intolerance shown to gays and lesbians.’ The problem, though, was not just that these causes were deeply unpopular with millions of voters. It was the way Livingstone pursued them, dramatic, divisive and confrontational to the point of recklessness. Today his efforts on behalf of black and gay Londoners look ahead of their time. Yet even some of his admirers thought he preferred self-indulgent posturing to patient coalition-building. Not only did he pander to his most strident supporters, he deliberately baited his critics by handing out public money to fringe groups. In essence he was a superannuated teenage rebel, forever kicking against the Establishment. The title of his autobiography, You Can’t Say That, says it all.54
Nothing captured this better than his attitude to Northern Ireland. Almost any other Labour politician would have learned to downplay his personal convictions. But Livingstone just could not hold back. Even as the IRA bombed Oxford Street, Knightsbridge, Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, he continued to parade his support for the republican cause. In December 1982 he became embroiled in a fresh storm after the GLC organized a letter inviting Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison to London for ‘fraternal’ talks about how they could secure ‘British withdrawal and a united Ireland’. On the night the letter was made public, terrorists detonated a bomb at a packed disco in Ballykelly, County Londonderry, killing eleven off-duty soldiers and six civilians, three of them teenagers, as well as badly injuring thirty others. Immediately Livingstone came under pressure to cancel the invitation. One Conservative MP was so outraged that he got hold of debris from the explosion – a girl’s white dancing shoe, a smashed disco light and the sleeve of the record playing when the bomb went off – and personally delivered them to Livingstone’s office.55
Eventually the government let Livingstone off the hook by banning Adams and Morrison from entering mainland Britain under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. All the same, the publicity was terrible. Denis Healey described Livingstone’s behaviour as ‘grotesque’; the Mirror’s front page deplored ‘An Insult to the Memory of IRA Victims’; the Sun called him simply ‘the most hated man in Britain’. Even his admirers thought he had been criminally insensitive, while most commentators thought he had shown a total lack of moral perspective. Yet he remained unrepentant, writing an article for The Times denouncing the ‘hysteria whipped up by the press’. And he did get his meeting eventually. In February 1983 he flew to Belfast as the guest of Sinn Fein. Five months later, he managed to return the favour, inviting Gerry Adams, who had since been elected as MP for Belfast West, to London. The visit’s co-sponsor was his old friend Jeremy Corbyn.56
So the controversies went on. In February 1983 Livingstone reluctantly withdrew a proposed £53,000 grant to the Troops Out movement after an incandescent Michael Foot personally ordered him to scrap it. And a few months later, he returned to one of his favourite analogies, telling an Irish radio station that ‘what Britain has done for the Irish nation, is, although it is spread over 800 years, worse than what Hitler did to the Jews’. The only difference, he said, was that Hitler’s activities had been ‘compacted into a short period of time’, which made them look worse.
The reaction at home was unbridled outrage. Until now, said the Express, Livingstone had been treated with the ‘humorous contempt normally reserved for amiable eccentrics’. But these ‘despicable’ remarks put him ‘beyond the pale’. Among senior Labour politicians, Roy Hattersley told the press that he found the Nazi analogy ‘both absurd and offensive’, while Peter Shore said the GLC leader had brought ‘shame on the whole Labour Party’. But Livingstone never dreamed of apologizing. He had meant every word.57
25
Attack of the Sloanes
They tell us the British economy is declining. Well, if it is, the British certainly know how to go down in style.
Japanese bank official, quoted in The Times, 30 July 1981
It is hard to believe that only five years ago it was smart to look poor. Frayed jeans, peasant patchworks and Third World hand weaves have now been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of rich velvet, ritzy brocade and grand glitter.
It is now fashionable to look very, very rich.
Suzy Menkes, The Times, 10 November 1981
A few days after Ken Livingstone had taken control of the Greater London Council he was invited to a wedding. On 29 July Prince Charles was due to marry Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral, and the great and the good would be out in all their finery. Livingstone did not hesitate: he turned it down. He had ‘better and more important things to do’, said one of his allies, than to attend the wedding of the heir apparent. But on Radio Four, Livingstone tried to strike an emollient note. A fervent republican, he claimed to respect the affection most people had for the Queen, but had no desire to dress up in a ‘funny suit’. ‘No one elected us to go to weddings,’ he said. ‘We were elected to run the buses.’
If he had stopped there, he might have got away with it. But Livingstone being Livingstone, he could not leave it at that. ‘I would like to see the abolition of the monarchy,’ he went on. ‘Some of the characters who are hangers-on and living off public expense are really quite revolting.’ Who could he possibly have in mind? ‘What earthly use the country gets out of Princess Anne, I really do not know. She comes over as a ho
rribly arrogant person. And some of the other characters around there … no way can you justify those being paid out of the public purse.’ So he would be spending the day at work, ‘looking after the unemployed, the homeless, the disadvantaged and the traffic’ – this last a marvellously bathetic touch. ‘A more churlish piece of manners’, said the Express, ‘you would be hard-pressed to find.’1
Ever since February, when Buckingham Palace had announced the engagement, public anticipation had been mounting. For years Prince Charles’s marital future had been the subject of intense speculation, with gossip columnists linking him to a succession of European aristocrats and upper-class debutantes. But from the perspective of the press, Lady Diana was perfect. At only 19, pretty, shy and fresh-faced, she looked like a princess from a children’s story. The daughter of the Queen’s former equerry, Earl Spencer, she had grown up in aristocratic comfort but was not entirely cocooned from life’s realities. Her parents had divorced when she was 7; she had twice failed her O-levels, worked as a teaching assistant in a Pimlico nursery school and shared a flat with three friends in Earl’s Court. And for the first few months the newspapers presented her as a timid, blushing country girl, an ‘English rose’ to whom ordinary people could relate. ‘She’s a Shy, Nervous Girl with Very Pretty Eyes’, the Mirror said, describing her as a ‘thoroughly nice, civilised, non-snooty young girl’, such as ‘one often meets at smartish London parties’.2
As on every major royal occasion since Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973, the newspapers were full of gloomy predictions that Diana’s big day was going to be a flop. When reporters visited King’s Lynn, near Sandringham, a few days before the wedding, they found that souvenir shops had slashed prices on their mugs, medallions and biscuit tins to get rid of their stock. As always, though, public interest surged in the last few days. The tipping point came on the Sunday before the wedding, when the Oxford Street Association threw ‘the world’s longest street party’, attracting an estimated 200,000 people, with thousands of schoolchildren treated to ten tons of free food on trestle tables along the mile from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road. The ‘sight of black children dancing in rings with policemen, policewomen and police cadets’, said the Guardian, was a reminder that the recent riots did not reflect the entire picture of life in the capital.
By Monday 27th, London was so crowded that the pavements in some areas were impassable. Keen monarchists, armed with flasks and sleeping bags, were already staking their claim to prime spots along the route to St Paul’s. On Ludgate Hill, hundreds had turned their spots into ‘personal sanctuaries guarded by elbows, Union Jacks and bonhomie’. One ‘large lady squeezed into a frail aluminium chair’ said this was the first time she had slept in the street since the wedding of the Queen and Prince Philip, more than three decades earlier. ‘People were very friendly and they felt that it all mattered,’ she said. ‘I am glad it still seems to be the same now.’
The Mirror interviewed a mother and daughter from Guernsey, who had arrived three days early specifically to get a good spot. ‘I was never very interested before but since Lady Diana has come on the scene the Royal Family have sort of come alive for me,’ said 18-year-old Rosemary Harrison. ‘Lady Diana seems so natural and young, you can identify with her in a way. You feel you could go up and say something quite normal to her.’ But her mother, 54-year-old Avril, had always been a fan of the Royal Family. ‘And I think everyone likes a wedding,’ she said. ‘There’s so much misery going on with all the riots and unemployment. This is just what we needed to cheer us up.’3
By Tuesday, it was obvious that the big day was not going to be a flop after all. The Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, published a remarkable wedding ode:
I’m glad that you are marrying at home
Below Sir Christopher’s embracing dome …
Blackbirds in City churchyards hail the dawn,
Charles and Diana, on your wedding morn.
A friend explained that Betjeman was ‘not very well’. But his poem was positively tasteful compared with the interview the happy couple gave to the BBC and ITN on Tuesday evening. Watching Charles and Diana sitting there, so stiff and awkward, a sceptic could have been forgiven for assuming that they had only just met. Diana said she was ‘looking forward to being a good wife’ and praised her fiancé as a ‘tower of strength’. Charles, though, seemed much more interested in the music: ‘I have always longed to have a musical wedding … I shall, I think, spend half of the time in tears.’
But few people were in the mood for scepticism. That night, in front of an estimated half a million people in Hyde Park, Charles lit a colossal celebratory beacon, the first in a chain of 101 bonfires reaching all the way to Balmoral. That was the cue for what one paper called the ‘most elaborate firework display of the century’, costing some £65,000 and funded by television companies from Australia to Brazil. To gasps from the crowd, it culminated with a giant Catherine-wheel sun, blazing with the monograms of Charles and Diana and the message VIVAT. The show had apparently been modelled on the spectacle in 1749 that marked the end of the War of Austrian Succession. On that occasion, one spectator died after falling out of a tree, while another fell into a pond and drowned. This time there were loud complaints about ‘inadequate exits and a lack of signposts’, while dozens of people injured themselves trying to climb over the fences. Still, nobody died, so that was something.4
The wedding day dawned warm and bright. ‘Happy Britain Greets Our New Princess’, gushed the Express’s wraparound cover. ‘DIANA, THIS IS YOUR DAY’, read the front-page headline. The Times, too, was, in its own way, thoroughly overexcited. ‘The marriage of princes has always been the stuff of fairy tales and politics,’ said an editorial, hoping that the day’s festivities, ‘symbolic of the nation’s unity’, would lift ‘the spirits of a people depressed by persistent economic malfunctioning’ and by the ‘shocking and mysterious outbreaks of street violence this summer’. Yet the paper found space for a contrary view from the travel writer Jan Morris. ‘I would like to put on record in The Times of July 29, 1981,’ she wrote, ‘one citizen’s sense of revulsion and foreboding at the ostentation, the extravagance and the sycophancy surrounding today’s wedding of the heir to the British throne.’5
Morris was not, of course, alone in her distaste for the pageantry of the day. Tony Benn watched the proceedings on television, steadfastly ignoring the reporters banging on his door. ‘The image presented to the rest of the world’, he recorded, ‘was of a Britain about as socially advanced as France before the French revolution! … It was feudal propaganda, turning citizens into subjects.’ As promised, Ken Livingstone spent the day working at a deserted County Hall, where he advised the press that there was ‘always the possibility of the right-wing military element using royalty to justify a coup’. Meanwhile, a group of more than a hundred left-wing activists, among them such dangerous Bolsheviks as the young Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, took a cross-Channel ferry to Boulogne, where the local mayor fed them on cheap wine and steak frites. To the amusement of the accompanying journalist Frank Johnson, many of them spent the crossing attacking one another as sell-outs, a particular target being the organizer, the Labour MEP Richard Balfe, apparently ‘an opportunist, a careerist and a creep’. As so often, Johnson thought, ‘one of the most refreshing things about Labour activists who believe in the brotherhood of the human race is that they seldom speak well of any particular member of it’.
But most of the day’s anti-royalist activities proved lamentably unsuccessful. The dampest squib of all came in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, which had been regarded as a socialist hotbed since the early 1970s, when local councillors had defied the law and refused to increase council-house rents. The council leader, Labour’s Cliff Fox, had promised to organize a Republic Day, explaining that the House of Windsor was a ‘bloody parasite on the backs of the working class’. Amid an intense backlash, one man suggested that Councillor Fox should be ‘hauled to the top of his Red Flag pole t
o show that only a minority of local people were mad’. And when a reporter from the Guardian pitched up, he found plenty of patriotic bunting, no evidence of republican sentiment and Councillor Fox missing, presumed on holiday in Blackpool. At the Red Lion, the Guardian’s envoy asked what the people of Clay Cross really thought of the Royal Wedding. The landlord pointed at the hundreds of Union Jacks hanging from the ceiling and the scores of customers in red, white and blue outfits. ‘Just look around you,’ he said.6
The epicentre of the national celebrations was, of course, the capital. With fears of the IRA running high, armed police had been guarding St Paul’s for days, while the procession route was lined with policemen every four steps and soldiers every six steps. But by mid-morning, when the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles left Buckingham Palace for the City, the patriotic excitement had banished any anxieties. The crowds were colossal: at least a million strong, some observers said, though nobody knew for sure. As early as eight in the morning, they had been so thick from Trafalgar Square to the Mall that ‘it was impossible to move’, yet the mood was ‘a riot of colour, good humour and fun’. ‘Every square inch of pavement, balcony, step, wall, tree and even telephone kiosk roof was occupied,’ reported the Guardian. Yet most people loved it. ‘I’m hoarse with singing, dancing, laughing and eating,’ a Yorkshirewoman from Thirsk told The Times. ‘If I had known it would be as good as this,’ agreed her sister, ‘I would sit on a pavement every time I went on holiday.’7
Who Dares Wins Page 86