Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Der Spiegel magazine (1974)

  In the ’70s is there a different mood? My arse there is!

  Pete Townshend (1970)

  Harold Wilson was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1916, which meant that he grew up in the glory days of his home-town football club. As he wrote on the very first page of his autobiography: ‘When Huddersfield Town won the League Championship three years running and the Cup Final in two of those years, we felt we were the Lords of Creation.’ Unfortunately his sense of grandeur was misplaced. Huddersfield did indeed win three League titles in a row from 1924 to 1926, with a team built by the great manager Herbert Chapman, but they have never in their history achieved the League and FA Cup double.

  For a politician who was so celebrated for his prodigious memory and his obsession with trivial statistics, it’s an intriguing error, suggesting that perhaps, like his fondness for HP Sauce and his public propensity to smoke a pipe rather than his preferred cigars, Wilson’s enthusiasm for football was somewhat calculated, a learned behaviour designed to enhance his man-of-the-people image. Certainly he was aware, as no other politician before him had been aware, of the significance of football in the national psyche of Britain. In 1965 he awarded Stanley Matthews the first-ever knighthood given to a professional player, and he went on to honour in the same way England manager Alf Ramsey, for winning the World Cup in 1966, and Manchester United manager Matt Busby, for winning the European Cup in 1968. (Jock Stein, who had won the latter tournament with Celtic the year before Busby’s triumph, got overlooked, despite lobbying from the Scottish secretary, Willie Ross, reinforcing the perception that Scottish football was less valued than its English counterpart.) And in the aftermath of England’s 1966 victory, Wilson ensured that he accompanied the team onto the balcony of the hotel where they were enjoying a celebration dinner, determined to share their moment of glory as they took the cheers of the crowds gathered below. ‘England,’ he famously and fatuously remarked, ‘only wins the World Cup under Labour.’

  It was no great surprise, therefore, that the 1970 World Cup should be uppermost in his mind when considering how to secure an unprecedented third general election victory in a row for the Labour Party. In March that year he remarked that ‘he had thought about the date for the election for the last four years or more and the conflict with the World Cup had to be considered’. England, going into the tournament as defending champions and with a team that most commentators considered was even stronger than the 1966 vintage, were favourites to win and were certainly expected to reach the final. The election was accordingly called for Thursday 18 June 1970, the day after the semi-final matches, when English euphoria was predicted to be at its height. And, just in case the electorate had forgotten how integral the government was to the nation’s sporting success, Wilson made an appearance on BBC1’s Sportsnight with Coleman in April, ‘ostensibly to comment on the cup final between Chelsea and Leeds United’, though he slipped easily into discussion of the forthcoming international tournament.

  Not knowing quite as much about the vagaries of football as he thought, however, he had made a profound miscalculation: England’s campaign in the World Cup was to be plagued by bad luck and by (metaphorical) own goals, and Wilson himself was among the casualties. With the tournament due to be played in Mexico, the world champions had undertaken a ‘good will’ trip to that country in 1969, a visit on which Alf Ramsey had succeeded in alienating the local press by his perceived arrogance, adding insult to the injuries still nursed in Latin America after the bad-tempered 1966 quarter-final against Argentina (‘not so much a football match,’ wrote journalist Hugh McIlvanney, ‘as an international incident’). In the build-up to the actual competition, captain Bobby Moore was arrested in Bogotá, following a warm-up match against Colombia, and charged with stealing a bracelet, while the host nation was again offended by England’s insistence on travelling with their own bus and their own food, giving every impression of a colonizing force distrustful of local conditions. In the event, neither was a success – the coach broke down and most of the food was confiscated at Customs – but the tone was set, and at the opening ceremony the children who appeared in England team shirts were booed by the spectators. ‘From the beginning,’ reflected centre forward Bobby Charlton later, ‘we got off on the wrong foot and we were unpopular throughout the country. Nobody wanted us to win.’

  On the pitch, things were a little better. In the initial group stage of the tournament, England duly beat both Romania and Czechoslovakia by a goal to nil, but also came up against what is generally acknowledged to have been the best football team of all time, the 1970 incarnation of Brazil, and lost by the same score. (‘The political effect of this can’t be altogether ignored,’ noted Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn.) Qualifying for the quarter-finals, to be played on Sunday 15 June, England were matched again with West Germany, who had been so memorably beaten in the 1966 final. With just over twenty minutes to play, England were 2–0 up and seemingly on course for their destiny, but, with Bobby Charlton substituted and with goalkeeper Gordon Banks sidelined due to a stomach upset, they proved vulnerable to a German counter-offensive, and went down 3–2 after extra time. The England team duly caught the next plane home, having played what turned out to be their last World Cup match not just of that campaign, but of the whole decade.

  1970 was the first World Cup to be televised in colour in Britain and the viewing figures broke all records. The TV audience for the Brazil–England match exceeded that for the 1966 final, whilst the quarter-final was even more successful, attracting 30 million viewers for a game staged in the midday heat of Mexico to ensure prime-time coverage back in Europe. This was despite the fact that the public had been spared the worst excesses of jingoistic hype, thanks to a national newspaper strike that had wiped out coverage of the Czechoslovakia match and the entire build-up to the Germany game. Unfortunately for Wilson, the strike ended the day after the quarter-finals, just in time for the post-match analysis of England’s exit from the competition, and for the full shock of defeat to be registered. And at least one person picked up on the parallels: ‘Thinking of strange reversals of fortune,’ wrote a correspondent to The Times, ‘could it be that Harold Wilson is two-nil up with twenty minutes to play?’

  The analogy was entirely appropriate. Wilson had gone into the election with every confidence. Both before and during the campaign the opinion polls – despite the usual inconsistencies – had suggested that a Labour Party victory was inevitable, and most of the media speculation concerned who would replace Edward Heath as leader of the Conservatives when the electorate rejected him for a second time. All the indications were favourable for Wilson and, to stack the odds still further in his favour, he was expected to be the beneficiary of the extension of the franchise to eighteen-year-olds (following the policies of Screaming Lord Sutch, who had stood against him in 1966 for the National Teenage Party), since it was thought that youth were more likely to vote Labour than Conservative; in fact, the additional 1.8 million voters made very little difference, save to reduce the turn-out to a record post-war low.

  There were, however, dissenting voices. ‘I have a haunting feeling,’ wrote the outgoing employment secretary Barbara Castle in her diary the weekend before polling day, ‘that there is a silent majority sitting behind its lace curtains, waiting to come out and vote Tory.’ And it turned out that she was right and the pollsters were wrong. The Conservatives won a decisive victory, sending Heath into Downing Street and Wilson into confusion: ‘The opinion polls have a lot of explaining to do,’ he declared in the early hours of that Friday, as the extent of his defeat became apparent. Others too were feeling perplexed; typical was Annie Saunders, a fifty-five-year-old voter from Sheffield, who was quoted as saying: ‘I would have voted Labour, but I saw in one paper that the opinion polls gave them a nine per cent lead. I didn’t think, in view of the opinion polls, they would miss my vote. It just goes to show how misleading they can be.’

 
; Apart from the false sense of security engendered by pollsters and the depression (south and east of relevant borders) at the World Cup failure, there were other explanations of what had gone wrong for Labour, mostly concentrating on the way that Wilson had alienated traditional supporters. In 1969 the government had published a White Paper, ‘In Place of Strife’, attempting to curb trade union powers, a move that had been soundly defeated by the lobbying of the unions even before it appeared as a parliamentary bill, but which had soured relations between the political and industrial wings of Labour. It ‘had upset the entire trade union movement,’ wrote left-wing MP Eric Heffer, ‘and it was obvious to me that we would lose votes in the general election’. Also from the left, the newly elected Dennis Skinner cited the budgets of Labour chancellor Roy Jenkins as being too much concerned with appeasing the City of London and too little interested in the party’s heartlands. Then there was the fact that the personal experience of the economy was unsatisfactory; put simply, ‘People were fed up with rising prices and strikes.’

  But above all else there was the complacency of Wilson himself. ‘However tired people may be of me,’ he commented in the run-up to the election, ‘I think that most people will regard me as the lesser of the two evils.’ It didn’t sound much like a rallying cry and it failed to enthuse. The campaign was fought from the Labour side entirely around the figure of the prime minister, with as little discussion of policy as possible, an approach on which the Daily Mirror, loyal as ever to the Labour cause, tried to put a gloss: ‘In an era when the principles of the political parties are not so far apart, the personalities and personal records of the leaders and their henchmen are even more important.’ But it wasn’t enough. (‘What do you think this is?’ demanded Enoch Powell. ‘A contest between a man with a pipe and a man with a boat?’)

  Wilson had been the future once, carried to power in 1964 on the hopes of millions, ending a long period of Tory rule, and promising change in the form of a new socialism, this time forged in the white heat of a technological revolution. Now, though, he looked as though he was slipping into history along with the swinging sixties. Tainted by devaluation of the pound and by his perceived support of American involvement in Vietnam, he represented a mood of optimism that had failed, harking back to a time of suited mods rather than booted skinheads. His fading appeal was symbolized by a photo shoot of Sandie Shaw, a singer who had enjoyed her last-ever top 20 single more than a year before, appearing in a T-shirt designed by her then husband Jeff Banks proclaiming ‘My Shirt’s On Harold’. The message was clear: yesterday’s pop stars were supporting yesterday’s man.

  That Mirror comment, however, has a greater significance. In January 1970 Edward Heath and the Tory shadow cabinet had held a policy meeting in the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon. Out of the weekend’s discussion had emerged a set of proposals that were to become the bones of the Conservative Party’s manifesto, A Better Future: tax reform, law and order, trade union legislation, immigration, a reduction in public spending, no government support for failing industries (so-called lame ducks) and no statutory incomes policy. It didn’t, in truth, amount to a fully coherent philosophical platform, but Wilson was eager to give it that status. ‘Selsdon Man is designing a system of society for the ruthless and the pushing, the uncaring,’ he declared, as though outraged. ‘His message to the rest is: you’re out on your own.’ It was intended as a scare tactic but it had the reverse effect, as the Tory education spokesperson, Margaret Thatcher, was later to note: ‘It gave us the air of down-to-earth right-wing populism.’ Right-wingers were to cite Selsdon Man for years to come as being evidence that Heath’s agenda had prefigured the Thatcherite revolution, while Heath’s own supporters insisted that it was all a figment of Wilson’s fevered imagination.

  That debate and its ramifications were to echo within the Conservative Party into the next decade and beyond, but in 1970 – as the Daily Mirror made clear – few people really noticed. The complaint was not that the Tories had adopted a hard-right position, but precisely the opposite, that there was so little to choose between the parties. The Liberal Party issued a campaign poster that depicted Wilson and Heath as identical twins, asking ‘Which twin is the Tory?’, and underground rock group the Edgar Broughton Band echoed the thought, producing a poster of a cartoon by Ralph Steadman that showed the two men’s faces as a pair of buttocks, and the slogan ‘Why vote? It’s a double cross!’ Delegates to the Labour Party’s post-defeat conference at the end of September returned again and again to the same theme: ‘When people say they could not distinguish between us and the Tories, it is a dreadful indictment, and it is vital that they be left in no doubt next time,’ said one. ‘If we are to get the votes back, we must establish a clearly defined sense of socialist purpose and ensure that the edges between the two parties are no longer blurred,’ added another. Out of this confusion were to be born the moves to the left by the Labour Party and to the right by the Conservatives.

  Meanwhile, the nation was adjusting to its new prime minister. Born just a few months after Wilson, and sharing his grammar school and Oxford background, Ted Heath seemed an extension of the technocratic meritocracy of his predecessor, though somehow even less rooted in a class system. He once admitted that he had ‘a hidden wish, a frustrated desire to run a hotel’, which made some kind of cultural sense: where Wilson self-consciously evoked the Northern humour and warmth of Coronation Street (he visited the set in the run-up to the 1970 election and sang a duet with Violet Carson, who played Ena Sharples), Heath seemed more akin to the soulless anonymity of the Crossroads Motel. He was also a much less familiar face for the general public, largely because his principal job in previous Tory governments had been as chief whip, though he had also led the unsuccessful negotiations to take Britain into the European Economic Community. All that was really known was that he had an interest in classical music and that he was the skipper of the Morning Cloud, which in 1969 became the first British boat to win the Sydney–Hobart race since 1945, an achievement that, he said, had shown Australia that the British were ‘not quite such a decadent people after all’.

  It wasn’t much of an image, but then Heath was apparently little concerned with image, keen instead to distance himself from the populist tendencies of Wilson in the 1960s. Certainly he had no interest in sharing himself with the public. ‘I want to be feared,’ he remarked privately, and he did dominate his cabinet to a remarkable extent, but to the country at large he was anything but fearsome. Rather, in the absence of any clear picture of the real thing, people turned instead to the portrayal of him by one of the rising stars of British comedy.

  Impressionist Mike Yarwood had come out of the Northern clubs to secure his first headline TV series in early 1969, and was to prove a key figure in the political scene of the ’70s. In an era of three TV channels, with very few appearances by politicians and no broadcasting of Parliament, it largely fell to him to present a human face for the sometimes rather remote figures governing the nation. Even so, he tended to play down any great significance to his work: ‘I don’t bear any malice,’ he said. ‘I have political views but I’m not fanatical either way. I don’t do a Private Eye or an Up Sunday.’ The latter reference was to a mostly forgotten satirical series on BBC2 – fronted by Clive James, John Wells and Willie Rushton – and Yarwood’s relationship to the satire boom that preceded him, and that was now running out of steam, was revealing; like Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe, he had impersonated Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s, though without the surrounding controversy, since his were essentially friendly portrayals. By the time he became a regular fixture on BBC1’s Saturday night schedules in 1971, his impressions of Heath and Wilson were mixed with those of TV figures such as Michael Parkinson, Robin Day and both Steptoe and Son, implicitly suggesting that political leaders were no more than part of the broad sweep of light entertainment. ‘The outstanding achievement I had brought off was to give politicians a sense of humour,’ he wrote in his first autobiograp
hy; ‘I have acted as public relations officer for them.’ Ted Heath, in an incarnation that was chiefly notable for shaking his shoulders when he laughed, was the first great beneficiary of this gentle caricaturing, transformed in the public imagination from managerial autocrat to a strangely endearing and jovial uncle.

  A parallel lack of public relations existed in terms of Heath’s policies. His programme of technical reforms – the reorganization of local government, restructuring of Whitehall, reform of the tax system (including the introduction of VAT) – took up vast amounts of parliamentary time, but was of little or no interest to most of the population. Those measures that did resonate tended to be unpopular: changes to industrial relations legislation, adjustments to council house rents and entry into Europe. But beyond all this, his problem was that he simply didn’t hold the initiative; the everyday political world was almost entirely dominated from the outset not by his actions but by those of the trade unions. Even as early as July 1970, less than a month after the election, he was obliged to declare a state of emergency in response to a strike by dockers.

  The autumn of 1970 saw the first real slide into chaos with the so-called dirty jobs strike by local council workers in London. Refuse collectors seeking higher wages were joined by workers at refuse dumps, determined to prevent the public from disposing of their own rubbish, and by sewerage workers. By mid-October more than 60,000 workers were on strike, with solidarity action in the form of overtime bans and one-day stoppages pulling another 75,000 into the dispute. The effects spilled into unrelated areas – schooldays were lost and parks were closed when caretakers and park-keepers walked out – but the real danger came from the action at the heart of the strike. ‘Millions of gallons of untreated sewage poured into the rivers Thames and Avon yesterday,’ reported the press; ‘only volunteers, working up to eighteen hours a day at pumping stations, were preventing serious flooding and the danger of many people being drowned in their homes.’ Fish died in their thousands in the polluted rivers; swarms of flies, breeding in the Deephams sewage works in Enfield, descended on North London; and – as a foretaste of crises yet to come – Leicester Square became a temporary refuse tip, disappearing under a mountain of bin bags. There were even tinny echoes of the 1926 General Strike, as members of the upper classes demonstrated their opposition by symbolic action; one group of volunteers – which included the Duke of St Albans’ daughter, Lady Caroline ffrench Blake – cleared up Downing Street, and their leader, an economist named Patrick Evershed, promised further such measures: ‘Having successfully swept Downing Street the six patriots, plus some more friends, intend to sweep round the Cenotaph in time for the Remembrance service.’ It was, he said, ‘a disgrace that Mr Heath’s visitors who come from all corners of the world should have to wade through debris on the way into No. 10’.