State of Emergency: the Way We Were Read online

  The most common class theme of 1970s sitcoms, though, was not the tension between working class old and new, or even between middle class and working class, but between two different kinds of middle-class identity: the difference between the conservative Leadbetters and the enviromentalist Goods in The Good Life, for instance, or between the aspirational Rigsby and the student Alan in Rising Damp, or even between old and new money in To the Manor Born. But the best example, albeit one transposed to the 1940s, is the rivalry between Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army. One is a fiercely patriotic and no doubt unerringly Conservative bank manager, a self-made man impatient with privilege, his pomposity a cover for his social insecurities. The other is a languid upper-middle-class patrician, educated at public school, with no appetite for hard work and a slightly disreputable love life. And when Mainwaring loses his temper – ‘You know where I went, don’t you? Eastbourne Grammar! … I had to fight like hell to go there … You never fought for anything in your life! Brought up by a nanny, father in the City – all you had to do is just sit back and let everything come to you!’ – it is not difficult to imagine Margaret Thatcher nodding with appreciation.67

  By far the most celebrated sitcom of the decade, voted the best programme in television history by the British Film Industry in 2000, was Fawlty Towers, which was written by John Cleese and Connie Booth and ran for two series in 1975 and 1979. At the time, many critics saw it as an unadventurous hotel farce: the Evening Standard called it ‘thin and obvious’, the Listener thought it ‘pretty hollow’, and the Mirror’s verdict, infamously, was ‘Long John Short on Jokes’. But of course the coincidences and misunderstandings so familiar from traditional farces were only one element in the show’s charm. Few programmes captured so well the nuances of the class system, from the lower-middle-class, highly ambitious Sybil, with her elaborate hairdos, golfing habit and machine-gun laugh, to the snobbish, tweedy Basil, with his military moustache, Korean War wound, fondness for Brahms and atrocious grasp of foreign languages. And in Basil’s determination to ‘build up a higher class of clientele’, his fawning attitude towards the fraudulent ‘Lord Melbury’, and his distaste for foreigners, the young and the working classes, Cleese and Booth brilliantly captured the neurotic mood of Middle England at a time of economic and political crisis. ‘It sits there for months, and when you actually have a fire, when you actually need the bloody thing, it blows your head off!’ Basil explodes after a fire extinguisher goes off in his face. ‘I mean, what is happening to this country? It’s bloody Wilson!’68

  But it was not just in the character of the frenetic, frustrated Basil that Fawlty Towers seemed to capture the national experience in the mid-1970s. The hotel itself, with its genteel façade, peeling wallpaper and underheated rooms, could hardly have been a better metaphor for Britain’s economy and industry during the Wilson and Heath years. Its only reliable guests are two dotty old ladies and a retired major with pronounced views on strikes, foreigners and immigrants (‘No, no, the niggers are the West Indians. These people are wogs’); the food is barely fit for human consumption (‘I assure you, they were absolutely fresh when they were frozen’); and the service culture is almost non-existent (‘Dinner? Well, it is after nine o’clock’). Almost unbelievably, however, it was based on a real hotel, the Gleneagles in Torquay, where Cleese had stayed while filming Monty Python. But it was not the only terrible fictional accommodation of the 1970s. There is Rigsby’s freezing, decrepit boarding house in Rising Damp, which his local Tory candidate calls ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ and threatens with demolition. There is the seedy Paddington hotel where Smiley stays in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), a ‘firebowl of clashing wallpapers and copper lampshades’; or there is the noisy motel he visits later in the same novel, with its yellow chairs, yellow pictures and yellow carpet, its orange paintwork and ‘candlewick bedspread’. And as for bad food, there is the Oxford college breakfast consumed by the hero in Kingsley Amis’s novel Jake’s Thing (1978) – ‘sausages that went to coarse powder in your mouth, electric-toaster toast charred round the edges but still bread in the middle, railway butter and jam, and coffee tasting of dog fur’ – or his meal in an ‘authentic old-fashioned’ hotel later in the book, where ‘all the dishes were firmly in the English tradition: packet soup with added flour, roast chicken so overcooked that each chunk immediately absorbed every drop of saliva in your mouth … soggy tinned gooseberry flan and coffee tasting of old coffee-pots.’ By these standards, perhaps Fawlty Towers was not such a bad place to stay after all.69

  In an unguarded moment, Ted Heath once confided that he had ‘a hidden wish, a frustrated desire to run a hotel’. The mind boggles at the prospect of Heath the hotelier: while he might have run a tight ship, surely even Basil Fawlty would have seemed warm and gregarious by comparison. But as Number 10’s black door closed noiselessly behind him on his first night as Prime Minister, he was soon to find that not even Downing Street rose very far above Fawlty Towers’ standards of service.70

  After meeting his new staff, Heath closeted himself with his lieutenants Willie Whitelaw and Francis Pym in the Cabinet Room, where they began to sketch out the new administration. At eight, Heath suggested that they should break for supper, and pressed the bell to summon his Principal Private Secretary, Sandy Isserlis. But when Isserlis finally appeared, he brought bad news. ‘There’s no food here,’ he said, ‘and no staff, so it’s impossible to get you anything to eat. Everyone left with Mr Wilson and there are no supplies here.’ Heath impatiently suggested that Isserlis go out and find some sandwiches, and the civil servant duly disappeared. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the half-open door and Isserlis stuck his head through the gap. ‘Grub’s up!’ he shouted cheerfully, indicating a pile of sandwiches, pork pies and beer bottles – good ploughman’s fare, no doubt, but hardly the ideal sustenance for a conquering national leader. Willie Whitelaw could hardly believe his ears. ‘How can anyone behave like that?’ he burst out to Heath. ‘He must be sacked at once.’71

  As it happened, Isserlis was indeed sacked a few weeks later, although the fact that he had been Harold Wilson’s appointee probably mattered more than the unveiling of the pork pies. His replacement was Robert Armstrong, a talented young Treasury official, whose father Sir Thomas, the former principal of the Royal Academy of Music, had known and conducted the young Heath during his Oxford days. As a music lover himself, Robert Armstrong was expected to get on well with the nation’s bachelor leader, and eventually did so. But when he arrived for his first day at Number 10, it was to a frosty welcome. ‘Oh. You’re here,’ Heath said, when he walked in. ‘It’s going to be very hard work, you know.’ He meant it just as the usual gruff masculine banter. But not even the new Prime Minister could have guessed just how hard it would be.72

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  Heathco

  When someone remarked [that] the new Prime Minister’s Steinway had already been installed in the drawing room, Heath sat down at the keyboard and began to play. After he had completed an entire Beethoven sonata, he stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but, gentlemen, when I start something, I always finish it.’

  – Time, 9 November 1970

  The stark truth now appears. Grocer the waxwork, like Frankenstein’s monster before him, has run amok.

  – Auberon Waugh, in Private Eye, 30 July 1971*

  On Edward Heath’s first full day as Prime Minister, a woman threw red paint at him. He could hardly have known it at the time, but the incident was an uncanny preview of what was coming in the next few years. But he did not allow it to distract him from his immediate priority: banishing all memories of the hated Harold Wilson. He wasted no time in cancelling Wilson’s Downing Street television rental, and arranged for a removal firm to bring over the furniture from his flat in the Albany, the trappings of his rich bachelor lifestyle: the black leather chairs, the marble tables, the oriental carpets, the collections of old glass and porcelain, the gleaming
stereo equipment, the specially built clavichord and, of course, the piano. Meanwhile, he had already made plans for Number 10 to be completely renovated. Out went the chintzy patterns installed by Dorothy Macmillan; in came supposedly ‘masculine’ gold, brown and beige. In the corridors, the dark red carpets were ripped up and replaced with old gold ones; on the walls, workmen put up sheets of white and silver patterned paper. In the Cabinet Room, the dark green leather blotters, the worn leather of the chairs, the patchy green felt on the Cabinet table, were all torn out and replaced with ‘a symphony of muted browns’: fawn baize on the table, light brown leather for the blotters, new brown leather for the chairs. Even the paintings of great old statesmen were taken down, with French pastoral scenes mounted in their place. Admirers told Heath that it looked modern and masculine. But when the former Labour minister Barbara Castle laid eyes on it four years later, she was horrified. ‘Gone was the familiar functional shabbiness,’ she wrote. ‘Instead someone with appalling taste had tarted it up … It looked like a boudoir.’1

  Banishing the memory of Harold Wilson, even down to the Downing Street wallpaper, was something of an obsession for Heath. To the new Prime Minister, his rival was a trickster and a cheat, the incarnation of the cheap, squalid compromises and half-measures that were holding Britain back. Even when they met socially, colleagues remembered, Heath would freeze with ostentatious distaste. But now that Wilson was yesterday’s man, the new Prime Minister could apply himself to the task of which he long dreamed, dragging Britain into the brave new world of the 1970s. His had been a very personal victory; and his, he determined, would be a very personal government, a far cry from the feuding and faction-fighting that had blighted Wilson’s years in office. From the very first meeting of his new Cabinet, at eleven o’clock on Tuesday, 22 June, it was obvious that Heath intended to be the boss, the clipped and businesslike captain running a tight, well-disciplined ship. Far more than any of his predecessors, he saw himself as a dynamic, modernizing chief executive, hired to turn around a vast but struggling corporation.2

  At that first meeting, Heath told his assembled ministers that he expected ‘a new style of administration’ and ‘changes in the machinery of government’. That was classic Heath; having briefly been a civil servant after the war, he was an unrepentant machinery man. Colleagues often thought that he would have made an excellent civil service mandarin, such was his obsession with efficiency, rationalization and problem-solving. A taciturn and withdrawn man himself, he had never seemed comfortable with political passion or emotion; what mattered was the application of reason to sort out difficult issues. If the committee structure worked properly, ‘with the help of dispassionate and largely apolitical policy analysis,’ wrote his aide William Waldegrave, ‘previously intractable problems could be rationally solved.’ At Heath’s very first Tuesday evening audience with the Queen, his agenda began with ‘the formation of the government, civil service matters and the place of businessmen in the work of government’. But even his aide Douglas Hurd, one of his most loyal admirers, reflected that they had placed rather too much emphasis on how the government worked, on endless boards and commissions and councils, rather that what it was actually going to do. Heath, he thought, ‘tended to exaggerate what could be achieved by new official machinery’. But if the chief executive of Heathco, as Private Eye dubbed him, thought that Britain’s problems could be solved merely with the creation of another board or two, he was heading for disappointment.3

  In that first Cabinet meeting of Heath’s premiership, there were already signs of some of the troubles that would define his era. The third item on the agenda concerned Heath’s plan to apply for British membership of the Common Market, which had long been an obsession for him. Within days, he told his ministers, his representatives would be meeting European officials to launch the application. Meanwhile, the new Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, reported that the chief military commander in Northern Ireland had asked for five more battalions to help contain the demonstrations expected during the July marching season. This met with general agreement, although Heath added that ‘a fresh political approach to the problem of Northern Ireland was urgently needed’. And there were problems closer to home, too. The new Chancellor, Iain Macleod, reported that while Britain’s balance of payments was in a decent state, inflation was a growing concern, thanks to recent ‘sharp increases in earnings and prices’. And the new Employment Secretary, Robert Carr, warned that trouble loomed in the docks, where the unions had threatened to walk out in pursuit of a higher minimum wage. Carr hoped to persuade the employers to ‘conduct the negotiations as far as possible on their own responsibility, without leaning too heavily on Government assistance’. Unfortunately for Heath, however, the strike quickly got so far out of hand that just two weeks later, he was forced to declare a state of emergency – the first of a record five in less than four years.4

  In the hot summer of 1970, many people expected the new government to take a radical right-wing approach to public affairs. After all, when the Tories had picked Heath as their new leader five years before, he had been the candidate of change: ‘thrusting, pugnacious, aggressive’, as Panorama had called him, ‘the man for those Conservatives who think the party needs “a tiger in its tank” ’. Since then, grass-roots activists had been disappointed by his moderation, especially over issues such as immigration, on which he had been outflanked to the right by Enoch Powell, the tribune of white working-class resentment and free-market prophet in the wilderness. But in January 1970, Heath had apparently decided on a genuinely radical approach after a Shadow Cabinet strategy meeting in the magnificent Selsdon Park country hotel, near Croydon. Harold Wilson had even nicknamed him ‘Selsdon Man’ (after ‘Piltdown Man’), warning that the meeting heralded ‘not just a lurch to the right’ but ‘a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality’, while The Economist hailed the new ‘Stainless Steel Tories’. In fact, Wilson’s phrase rather backfired, giving the Selsdon meeting a sense of coherence and a public impact it never deserved. Much of the discussion had been vague and inconclusive: far from lurching to the right, Heath’s economic policy remained a bit of a fudge, especially where inflation and incomes policies, the two burning issues of the moment, were concerned. But Heath went along with the Selsdon Man image. Even though it gave a misleading impression, it at least made him look decisive and coherent, a tough leader promising radical free-market solutions. And if nothing else, it bought him some credit with the right wing of his party, who now thought that the Messiah had come at last. The only problem, of course, was that he had aroused expectations on which he could not possibly deliver.5

  With Selsdon Man in mind, many commentators interpreted Heath’s victory as the end of the consensus that had governed British politics since the late 1940s. Even though the consensus is often exaggerated – the two parties had very different aims, often talked different political languages, and enjoyed a bitter rivalry – there was still a sense in which political and economic life in the 1950s and 1960s fell between universally accepted limits. Both parties, for instance, were committed to the Cold War and retreat from empire; both agreed that the government had a responsibility to ensure social welfare, based on the structures created in the 1940s; both believed in full employment; both recognized and respected the role of the trade unions; and, crucially, both believed that it was the role of government to ensure steady economic growth through managing demand, taking inspiration from the arguments of the great inter-war economist John Maynard Keynes. Unfortunately, although the economy had boomed during the 1950s and 1960s, allowing Tory and Labour governments alike to push through vast increases in social spending, the consensus felt distinctly tired, even threadbare by the time Heath came to power. Even in the early 1960s, there had been a torrent of criticism that Britain had failed to modernize, and that, beneath the superficial prosperity, the rot was setting in. In 1964, Harold Wilson had come to power promising to build a ‘New Britain’ in the ‘wh
ite heat’ of the technological revolution. But he had been sucked into a long, debilitating and ultimately misguided attempt to prop up the pound, which ended in defeat with devaluation in November 1967. Even Wilson’s keenest admirers, of whom there were very few, could not disguise the fact that his administration had been a disappointment. Between 1964 and 1970, inflation had doubled, while unemployment rose from 1.6 to 2.5 per cent (small by future standards, of course, but seen as distressingly high at the time). Above all, despite Wilson’s promise of ‘planned, purposive growth’, the oxygen had gone out of the economic boom. From a healthy 5.4 per cent in 1964, growth was down to just 1.8 per cent in 1970. It was no wonder that there was such a pervasive sense of disillusionment and betrayal: as the Labour MP David Marquand later put it, ‘few governments have disappointed their supporters more thoroughly’.6

  Behind this, however, lay a deeper problem. For while Britain was clearly much more affluent than in the days when Heath had been growing up, there was also an increasing sense that the country was falling behind its overseas rivals. Some of this showed symptoms of what the historian Jim Tomlinson calls ‘declinism’, a morbid obsession with economic decline that was often politically motivated and overlooked the fact that for most people, life was getting considerably better, not worse. And yet, even though it was inevitable that Britain would eventually lose the competitive lead it had established after the Second World War, there was an overwhelming sense of alarm at the speed with which it seemed to be slipping. In 1950, Britain had commanded a share of about 25 per cent of the world trade in manufactures. By 1960, this had slipped to less than 17 per cent, and, by 1970, barely 10 per cent, just half that of West Germany. In the league table of GDP growth, meanwhile, Britain fell from ninth in 1961 to thirteenth in 1966 and fifteenth in 1971, on its way to a miserable eighteenth in 1976. What was particularly striking was the gulf between Britain and the countries of Europe’s Common Market, which made rather a mockery of the government’s arrogant decision to stay out in the 1950s. By almost every measure, from investment and productivity to the rate of GDP growth per head and the growth of average real earnings, the Common Market countries were ahead. It was no wonder that in the early 1960s, critics had asked ‘What’s Wrong with Britain?’ ‘For the past 25 years or more the United Kingdom has been in a state of chronic crisis … a British disease,’ wrote Lord Shawcross in July 1970. The public needed to face facts: ‘this country is not, and for a long time has not been, sufficiently competitive in world markets.’7