Pod Insights The Rest Is History 664. Britain in the 70s: Scandal in Downing Street (Part 3) About this episode With Britain heading towards financial meltdown and paranoia in the air, could its exhausted Prime Minister, Harold Wilson survive? Why were bombs going off in London every few days in the winter of 1975? And, with inflation reaching unprecedented heights, would the government finally act?
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss one of the greatest crisis points in modern British history.
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Transcript 14,359 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.
0:24 Tom Holland? For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.
0:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.
1:04 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
1:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions, and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
1:46 Tom Holland? So they asked over 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
2:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai/restishistory and keep thinking.
2:09 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.
2:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
2:58 Tom Holland? Oh, I'd love to enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, "Well now, what ideas have you got? Show them what to do for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get done." I can't stand people just hanging about.
3:40 Tom Holland? Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God. He was no politician. He was a media artist himself.
4:10 Tom Holland? So that was the rock star David Bowie interviewed in Playboy in September 1976. And the big question, what's going on there? Did he really mean it? Was he playing a part perhaps, as he loved to do in the 1970s, the decade of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin sane? And of course, the part he's playing here is the thin white duke, who Bowie described as a very Aryan fascist type. Or was he just completely off his head on coke and speed? So many questions, Dominic. But whatever the explanation, the thing is that he was saying
4:50 Tom Holland? quite a lot of things like that in 1975 and 1976. So here he is being interviewed by the LME in October 1975, where he said, what Britain needs is an extreme right front to come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. He said the coming of the far right would do something positive, at least to cause a commotion in people, and they'll either accept dictatorship or get rid of it. In April 1976, he was telling a press conference that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. And then in May 1976, so the following month, came the most notorious incident of all, when he turned up at Victoria Station in, I think, an open top Mercedes and greeted
5:31 Tom Holland? fans with what was alleged at the time to be a Nazi salute, and which Bowie, Elon Musk style, subsequently said had just been a wave. And then a few weeks later, he gives the interview that I've just cited.
5:47 Dominic Sandbrook? So you can fall down a massive rabbit hole on the internet, looking into all this, because Bowie fans will often say, he was just waving, and he's been very hard done by the press photographers. On the other hand, as you say, there are a lot of such incidents in 1975 and 1976, and it's quite an odd part to choose to play. However, it's a very suggestive part, because this is a period in British history, the mid 1970s, when there's an awful lot of talk about Britain as the new Weimar Germany, about the ravages of inflation, about the rise of political extremism. Dreamers and the decay of the centre and about the possibility, even the probability that Britain will slide into some sort of authoritarianism.
6:28 Tom Holland? And the thing is, Dominic, isn't it, that the genius of Bowie is that he is superb at, you know, his chameleon-esque qualities at finding characters who do reflect the zeitgeist.
6:40 Dominic Sandbrook? You're absolutely right. He does reflect the zeitgeist. And I think a little bit like the Forty Towers rant that you did last week, it's a nice window into the sort of nightmares of the British imagination in the mid seventies.
6:51 Tom Holland? I mean, the thing about Hitler being better than Jagger.
6:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, sort of bonkers. All right. So last week, we talked about the revolution on the right when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory party. We talked about the inertia and the shabbiness of the Harold Wilson government and the popular vote to stay in Europe in Britain's first referendum. And all of this, of course, was against this very bleak backdrop, which obviously informs David Bowie's persona. This is Britain heading towards what looks like a financial meltdown. So very dependent on massive borrowing. The government is handing out all these huge pay deals, 30% here, 31% there to the trade unions. The Wilson government seems utterly becalmed and inflation is heading through the roof. And actually, before we get back into the politics of it, let's just dwell on the culture for a second. So, Tom, I know
7:36 Dominic Sandbrook? you're writing about the Beatles at the moment, aren't you? So, swinging London and the, the, the zany madcap mood of the 1960s is very much
7:45 Tom Holland? Nutty fun.
7:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, very much on your mind. But in the 1970s, so 10 years on, right, we're 10 years on from the first articles in the international press that were celebrating swinging London. You know, Carnaby Street and mini, miniskirts, dolly birds, the sun is shining, all this. It's now 1975. The most popular musical act, this is a sign of how music has evolved since those innocent days, is the Bay City Rollers. And among the number one singles of the year are bangers by the likes of Telly Savalas.
8:18 Tom Holland? Kojak.
8:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Billy Connolly.
8:19 Tom Holland? Amusing Scottish comedian.
8:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Windsor Davis.
8:22 Tom Holland? Played a sergeant major in a now cancelled BBC sitcom about the British in India.
8:27 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, it's insane that he had a number one. And a great friend of yours, actually, Rod Stewart. So you celebrated Rod Stewart's birthday last year with him, didn't you?
8:36 Tom Holland? But I'm not going to go into any more details about that.
8:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that's a story for a bonus episode. Now, among the younger generation of musicians who are coming through, the mood is very, very dark. So this is the bassist and co-vocalist of The Stranglers, Jean-Jacques Burnell, who actually had a history degree. Burnell was interviewed in 1975, and he said, "Everyone is paranoid. There's decay everywhere. We've always lived with the assumption that things were getting better and better, progress all the time. And suddenly, it's like, you hear every day, there's a crisis, financial crisis, things being laid off, people not working. Everything is coming to a grinding halt."
9:12 Tom Holland? No more heroes, Dominic.
9:14 Dominic Sandbrook? No more heroes, exactly. This is the environment that gives rise to punk, which is beginning to stir in 1975. So, we ended last time with the referendum, which was in June. A few weeks later, in August, probably the 23rd, a teenage dropout, very skinny and emaciated with this kind of shock of spiky dyed green hair, goes to a pub on the King's Road in Chelsea to audition for a new band that's been founded by a local boutique owner. And the boy's name is John Lydon, and the band's name is The Sex Pistols. So that was the 23rd of August. Five days later, on the 28th of August, this is a good window, I think, into the sort of the flavour of the time. A bomb goes off outside Selfridges on
9:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Oxford Street, and it injures seven people. The day after that, the 29th, another bomb goes off on Kensington Church Street, and it killed the bomb disposal officer, who'd been sent to deal with it instantly. The 5th of September, there was a bomb at the Hilton on Park Lane that killed two people, injured 63. On the 9th of October, a bomb went off outside Green Park Tube Station on Piccadilly, killed one man and injured 20, some of them children on the night out. And in the rest of October and November 1975, there are bombs in the West End every few days. And these are the work of a provisional IRA cell who were later captured, captured in December in Bulcombe Street near Marybone. So that's why they're called the Bulcombe
10:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Street Gang. And there are seven more bomb attacks in London in 1976. They've slightly been forgotten, I think now. People don't really talk about these. But I mean, there's basically a bomb every few days in the West End in late 1975 and 1976. And then, of course, on top of all that, every day when you opened your newspaper, the breakfast tables, people still did in the seventies, you would read reports of some new shooting or some new atrocity in Northern Ireland. So maybe 500 people killed, more than 500 actually, in the course of 1975 and 1976. That's some of the worst incidents, the troubles happened in those years.
11:16 Tom Holland? So the sense of a country disintegrating into violence.
11:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely, the whole time. And I think the the link between that and the popular culture, I mean, it's obvious. On the one hand, people want very escapist popular culture, or they want nostalgia. So they're looking back to the war, as we were talking about last week. But on the other hand, if you're young, there is a sense of kind of violence in the air, I think, and of a sort of a disintegration and whatnot, which obviously plays a part in the genesis of punk music. So that's the background. But let's get back to the politics. So what has the Prime Minister been doing? Harold Wilson has been on holiday that August. After the referendum is over, he went off to, of course, inevitably, the silly Isles to wear his very short shorts. His chief policy adviser, Bernard Donoghue, has been on holiday in France. When Donoghue gets back, he writes this unbelievably searing
12:04 Dominic Sandbrook? diary entry about the state of the nation. He says, I've been in France, I've come home, and I've been forced to realise that this nation is in sad decline. And he says, because Harold is in the silly Isles, he just doesn't get it. He's completely isolated from the remorseless relative decline of this country. And then this extraordinary passage. Britain is a miserable sight, a society of failures, full of apathy, aroused only by envy at the success of others. Meanness has replaced generosity, envy has replaced endeavour, malice is the most common motivation. This is the social personality of a loser. Fascism could breed in this unhealthy climate.
12:42 Tom Holland? When he says that a society arrives only by envy at the success of others, I mean, that's quite a right wing perspective, isn't it? The politics of envy and all of that.
12:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, completely. And this is the result, I think, of having been in Downing Street and having, you know, Donny Hugh has been there all the time when the different union leaders have come in to demand a particular deal for their members and they would literally say, I mean, there were some fantastic sort of accounts, they would say, I'm the leader of the railwayman. I noticed the postman got 30%. I have to go back to my, you know, my members and say that I've got better than the postman. Yeah, this is how it is. And this is, and this sort of competition, this, I think a lot of Labour ministers found this incredibly depressing, that they're basically being forced into this constant game of giving out bigger and bigger deals.
13:30 Tom Holland? So you think he's specifically thinking about union leaders when he says that?
13:33 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't know that he's necessarily specifically thinking about it, but I think there's a general sense of mean spiritedness in politics at this point and in public life and a sense of kind of national solidarity breaking down.
13:42 Tom Holland? And also, Dominic, those awful enormous kipper ties and the brown suits and the very thick glasses frames. I mean, it's really depressing. Do they have those in France? I don't think so.
13:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Um, no, I think they do, actually. I think there's some terrible fashions in France. I mean, it's important to remember that through all this period, these people are eating 1970s food. So imagine how depressing that is.
14:04 Tom Holland? Yeah, Black Forest Ghetto.
14:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, they're eating Black Forest Ghetto, but also drinking enormous quantities presumably of Blue Nun and Black Tower. Uh, what else would they be drinking? Sort of wine in elaborate buckles with a kind of lattice on the outside.
14:15 Tom Holland? However, on the positive side, as you remind us in your wonderful books, children do have space hoppers. So it's not all bad.
14:21 Dominic Sandbrook? They do have space hoppers, yeah, and rally chopper bikes. So every, we've, we've, we've literally ticked every box there, every 70s box. So anyway, Donny Hugh's rant is typical of the crisis. Confidence at the top and this is obviously reflecting the state of the economy. So as we've said, inflation's out of control. They're actually giving out all these pay deals that the union leaders themselves think are a little bit bonkers. So it's the union leaders' job to defend their members, so they have to keep asking for more. But they are very conscious that this kind of free for all is sending the economy towards the abyss. So as we said last time. Inflation in Britain at this point is rising five times faster than in any other comparable European country. You know, if you're a shopper, if you're Margaret Thatcher pretending to be an ordinary housewife.
15:06 Dominic Sandbrook? The price of sugar has gone up by 200% in 12 months, electricity by 66%, coal by 47%. The price of milk has doubled. If you're old, if you're living off your savings or a pension, it's being eaten away every week by inflation. If you're self-employed, if you belong to a much smaller and weaker union or no union at all. You are in real trouble and even Labour papers by this point are hammering the government on this issue. And what really alarms people is that the government just seemed completely powerless to do anything. I mean, there is a definite sort of Keir Starmer. Feel to all this. The Economist says Britain's dream of apocalypse is horribly close to coming true. The Sunday Mirror, a Labour paper.
15:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Why are we waiting? Isn't it obvious that the government must act against inflation, that we can't go on like this? So Harold Wilson is obviously the head of the government, he's the prime minister.
15:56 Tom Holland? But he's depressed and torpid.
15:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and he's drinking his brandy and Marcia is giving him a hard time. The person who has primary responsibility for dealing with all this is the Chancellor, Dennis Healy. And we haven't seen much of him since the 1974 series that we did two years ago. And it's important to remind people that he is an absolutely tremendous man.
16:17 Tom Holland? History's greatest eyebrows.
16:19 Dominic Sandbrook? He's got history's greatest eyebrows, exactly. So he came from West Yorkshire. He went to Bailyo College, Oxford, to run his feet. He fought with great courage in North Africa and in Italy. He was the military landing officer for the Allies at Anzio. So, you know, really put himself in harm's way. Then he became an MP on the right of the Labour Party. And as you say, Tom, he is best known for his enormous eyebrows. But he's also very, I mean, he's famously clever and he loves to advertise his cleverness.
16:49 Tom Holland? Yeah, he doesn't hide his eyes under a bushel, does he?
16:52 Dominic Sandbrook? He doesn't. He's very arrogant. He's exceedingly rude. He's a passive bruiser. He despises a lot of his fellow Labour MPs. And the people, and he much prefers, as he will always tell you, Emily Dickinson, Flaubert, Tajineff, all these kind of people.
17:10 Tom Holland? So this is his hinterland.
17:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:12 Tom Holland? Politicians should have a hinterland.
17:14 Dominic Sandbrook? You're never allowed to mention Dennis Healy without mentioning the fact that he, he had a hinterland. And actually, he wrote a book, which I have, all about his hinterland, which is a brilliant thing to do. He basically wrote a book called My Secret Planet, which is basically a book about how clever he was. It was basically a list of his favourite poets, his favourite authors. The more raconte and obscure, the better. Just so he could show off. And every now and again, there'd be a moment in this book where he'd say, Roy Jenkins, of course, had never read Dostoevsky in the original, or whatever it might be.
17:45 Tom Holland? Because also the other thing is, he's incredibly easy to impersonate. And this is the golden age of beige impersonations, as featured by Mike Yarwood, who coined the phrase silly Billy, that Dennis Healy's always meant to be saying, but doesn't. And then Dennis Healy does actually take it up and starts using it.
18:04 Dominic Sandbrook? And to his massive credit, Dennis Healy also used to go on the Dame Edna Everidge show a lot. Did you see this? He went on once with Roger Moore and they both had, Dame Edna made them both wear badges. His said den. Roger Moore said Rog, and they had to perform, they had to perform a song and dance number with Dame Edna. I think Healy had only just like stepped down as Chancellor or something. It was an extraordinary thing to do. So Healy had been Chancellor since 74, and in 74, he had thrown money around with gay abandon in order to win the October election. But then in January 75, its Treasury officials came to him and they said enough, like you've got to stop this. This is mad. You've got to change direction. And because Healy is actually
18:48 Dominic Sandbrook? a very clever man, and he's intellectually self-confident, he's self-confident enough to listen to them and to say, okay, fair enough, I will change. And it's very rare that a Chancellor does that, actually. It's one of the signal examples in modern British history of a Chancellor starting off as one thing and then turning into something else. So he then reinvents himself as something of a monetarist, as somebody who is basically going to use monetary targets to bring inflation down. And in the first half of 1975, what you have is Healy going to all these meetings with the other Labour ministers, and he says to them again and again, look, this social contract that we've got with the unions is a complete joke. It's a complete failure. We should stop borrowing so much money. Inflation is the be all and end all, and we absolutely have to get it down. And if you're on the
19:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Labour left and you're sitting here and Healy, in his sort of very rude, arrogant way, is telling you this, you're very upset and offended by it, because you hate the thought of making any cuts. So Tony Benn, who we talked about last time, Tony Benn's not really that bothered about borrowing money and about inflation. What he wants to see is more spending, loads of new, you know, social programmes, more egalitarianism, all of this kind of thing. So by the sort of middle of 75, you have clearly a very big row brewing between the two wings of the Labour Party. And as if that's not bad enough, as the summer goes on, the economic news is getting worse and worse. So two weeks after the referendum, the European referendum on the 20th of June.
20:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Healy gave the Cabinet this kind of apocalyptic warning, which Barbara Castle, one of his colleagues, recorded in her diary. Inflation, he said, was terrifying. Borrowing could stop overnight. Anything could trigger off a disastrous run on the pound and force us into one billion pounds' worth of public expenditure cuts this year. There was not a minute to waste. But of course, they are specialists in waiting minutes because they've got their tiny majority. Wilson is so anxious about provoking the left that he'd rather do nothing. He'd rather carry on sliding than cause a split in his party. Anyway, Healy was quite right. Ten days later, on the 30th of June, the pound started to slide,
20:58 Dominic Sandbrook? and it slides and slides, and in four hours, it fell from $2.23 to $2.17. And at that stage, that was the quickest fall in the pound's value in history.
21:09 Tom Holland? But presumably, this is seen on the left of the Labour Party as the names of Zurich kicking in, international finance doing its worst.
21:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly right. So if you're on the left of the Labour Party, if you're Tony Benn, you look at this and you say, well, there's international capitalism conspiring against British socialism. You know, you basically say, why should we listen to what foreign speculators and bankers want us to do? We just plough on, you know, and if necessary, we put up tariff, we come on to Tony Benn's programme. We, if necessary, put up huge tariff walls and protectionist barriers and stuff, and we seal ourselves off.
21:45 Tom Holland? It's the argument that Andy Burnham makes about, you know, don't be in hock to the capital markets, and Zach Polanski's saying it as well. So it's a kind of a perspective that's coming back into fashion now.
21:55 Dominic Sandbrook? So I'm going to portray my hand here. I think it's a very good argument to make when you're not actually in hock to the capitalists, to the capital markets, you don't need to borrow any money. I think if you're trying to borrow enormous sums of money, in my experience...
22:12 Dominic Sandbrook? You have to listen to the lender, otherwise they won't lend you the money. Anyway, there is this huge row inside Downing Street about what to do, and they finally hammer out a sort of deal with the unions, a kind of informal deal. The unions promised that they will cap all wage increases at six pounds a week. And actually, that's quite a big concession from them, because it means that even though wages is then still rising at about 14% a year, prices are going up much more than that. So if you're an ordinary working man, you're taking a little bit of a hit in your spending power and living standards.
22:46 Tom Holland? Yeah, it's austerity.
22:47 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, this is what Tony Benn would definitely say. And in the long run, actually, this will catch up with the Labour government right at the end of the decade, when union members rebel against it. Anyway, for the time being, it's enough. The pressure on the pound eases a bit, and actually, Britain has been very lucky. You could say Britain was incredibly lucky to have got away with its kind of profligacy for as long as it did. And one reason is that when the Arab oil nations made their great, you know, when they got their winnings after the oil shock of 1973, a lot of them put their money into sterling. They invested it in sterling. And they didn't do this because they thought that Britain was a great going concern. They actually just almost did it out of sort of sentimental traditionalism. Britain is the banker of the world. Obviously, when you've got loads of money, you put it into the pound.
23:31 Dominic Sandbrook? But as one of Dennis Hede's Treasury colleagues, I could Edmund Dell, who wrote a brilliant book about all this, as Dell said in his book, you know, it was only a matter of time before the Arabs basically realised this was a terrible place to put their money. And once they took it out, we were going to be in massive trouble. And by the autumn, surprise, surprise, the pressure is going again. And the Bank of England, and this will be a theme all this week, the Bank of England was spending hundreds of millions of pounds in its currency reserves to basically buy up sterling and to defend the exchange rate.
24:02 Tom Holland? And is that done for economic reasons or for kind of prestige reasons?
24:05 Dominic Sandbrook? I think they're linked. So the prestige reasons. For what some listeners may think are silly reasons, people like to think that their currency is really valuable and worth something. They don't like to see their currency being debauched. And to devalue your currency is seen as a national humiliation. But there's a very good economic reason why you don't want the pound to fall. And that is, the more that the pound falls, the more expensive foreign imports are to buy. And so inflation goes up. Yeah, if you're 70s Britain, and you're buying more and more Japanese washing machines, and German cars, and so on and so forth, then if your pound, if the pound falls, and you're spending much more on these things, then you've got massive inflation
24:46 Dominic Sandbrook? and a hit in the standard of living. And so no government wants to see that. Why aren't the Labour government listening to Dennis Healy? Why isn't the Prime Minister forcing them to do anything about it? Well, this brings us to the main character in the story, who is Harold Wilson. So as we saw last time, Wilson is knackered, he's ill, he's increasingly reliant on the brandy bottle. He says to Bernard Donoghue at one point, the trouble with me now is I only have the same old solutions for the same old problems. And then a few weeks after that, so this is in the sort of late summer of 75, he has a massive argument with his press chief and speechwriter, Joe Haynes. Wilson has written himself a draft speech, and Haynes says to him, I mean, this is extraordinary, the way they used to speak
25:29 Dominic Sandbrook? to the Prime Minister. Haynes says to him, this is absolutely useless. He says, it's full of your old cliches. It's got whole paragraphs repeated from previous speeches. And Wilson snaps at him and says, well, I don't have anything new to say, do I? And Haynes said, well, you might put some of your old ideas and new words. Why don't you try doing that? And this sort of sense that Wilson is, he's definitely on the downward slope. So he's getting, he used to have a brilliant, brilliant memory, but he's getting things wrong in meetings. He's actually skipping meetings. He's making excuses to skip meetings. Says he's got a cold, says he's got a stomach upset. He's an increasingly sad figure. And the moment that I think captures this really nicely, it's December 1975, they're having a meeting, surprise, surprise, about cuts with Dennis Healy. And somebody says, well,
26:14 Dominic Sandbrook? you know, we can't really decide. We'll have to have a meeting of the full cabinet tomorrow on Friday to discuss it. And Wilson, the Prime Minister, says, well, I can't make Friday. And Bernard Donoghue writes in his diary that in full view of everybody else, Healy turned to him and said, it might be better for all of us if you weren't there. And Wilson pretended not to hear this and then he went out to the toilet and Bernard Donoghue followed him out and found him in the toilet with kind of with his head in his hands absolutely crushed and Wilson and just said very weakly, I'm so exhausted, I'm so tired. And he just, he basically allowed himself to be insulted in this way by his
26:56 Dominic Sandbrook? own Chancellor in front of everybody. He did nothing at all about it. And he is, as Donoghue writes a month later, privately, we know he's blown, he's no more interest, no more ideas, no appetite for power. So it is quite a sad story, I think.
27:11 Tom Holland? Yeah, very sad because he was, he was some such a brilliant, able, go getting white heat technology kind of guy, wasn't he in the sixties?
27:18 Dominic Sandbrook? He was. I know that the sheen has worn off the Gannicks' plastic raincoats.
27:23 Tom Holland? Yeah, Gannett, they'll be turning up again later.
27:25 Dominic Sandbrook? They will, yeah.
27:26 Tom Holland? Shop-soiled is the, the word that's always used, isn't it?
27:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I think I use that word a lot with Harold Wilson. I mean, you say always used, no, nobody else writes about Harold Wilson, to be honest. So what lies behind this? We talked about all the business with Marx here and all that last time, but actually, Wilson by now has decided to walk away. For years, he'd been saying to people, if I ever got back into power, I'd probably only do two more years. But people didn't believe him because they thought, oh, he's so ambitious and so wily, he'd never walk away. But in the summer of 1975, he said to Joe Haynes, I want to go sooner rather than later, I'm very tired. And, and he also said, I am totally fed up with the Labour Party and I find its behaviour intolerable. And probably that summer, late that summer, he tells the Queen.
28:12 Tom Holland? And the Queen loves him, doesn't she? He's her favourite.
28:15 Dominic Sandbrook? He was a proper monarchist. He's a sort of, um, he's quite, they talk probably about, I bet they talk about Agatha Christie or something.
28:21 Tom Holland? Yeah, and they'd bond over the Tupperware.
28:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, they absolutely would. So the way he tells her is so sort of, um, it's so fitting. They were staying on Balmoral, him and Mary, and they went to, there was some sort of cottage on the estate in Balmoral, and the Queen drove them there in a Land Rover. And they went to this cottage, and it's almost like Marie Antoinette at Le Petit Trionon, whatever. The Queen Made tea for Harold Wilson and Mary and then started doing the washing up. And while she was doing the washing up, Wilson came and talked to her at the sink and said, I'm going to resign.
28:54 Tom Holland? So it's a kitchen sink drama.
28:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Very good, Tom. Now, at first he thought he might go that autumn. But basically Marcia persuades him to stay on. She doesn't want him to go because then she'll lose all her, you know, all her power and stuff.
29:06 Tom Holland? I mean, the new prime minister's not going to take her on, is he?
29:09 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no, no, no. And Donoghue and Haines knew that he was going to go. And he kept telling them, you know, I'll go in before Christmas or something and then he would postpone it. And they were very frustrated by this because they they thought, you know, he's run out of ideas, he probably should go. And as Donoghue said, it's a sign of his weakness, he should take a decision and stick to it. By the beginning of seventy six, there are lots of rumours going around Whitehall and Westminster. But most people don't really believe them because they think of Wilson as so wily and so cunning that this is another of his schemes to hold on to power a bit longer. At last he decides on a departure date. Well, on an announcement date, I should say. He will announce his departure on Thursday, the 17th of March, nineteen seventy six, which is his sixtieth birthday.
29:55 Dominic Sandbrook? But then fate takes a turn. Because as we said, confidence in the British economy is at a very, very, very low ebb. And it won't take much to trigger another run on the pound. On the fifth of March, that's a week before Wilson is planning to make his announcement. The Bank of England decides to cut interest rates to try and give the economy a little bit of a boost. And the markets don't like this at all. And people start rushing to sell sterling. And quite soon, the rush turns into a stampede. So by the evening of the following day, the sixth, the pound has now fallen to one dollar ninety eight. Remember, it was two dollars twenty three a few minutes ago. It's now one dollar ninety eight, the lowest level in its history.
30:37 Dominic Sandbrook? And the Bank of England panics and it starts desperately buying up sterling. And in total, in the next two weeks, it spends a billion dollars to buy up pounds to try and preserve the value of the currency. But it's no good, the pound just keeps sliding. So by the 10th, it's down to one dollar ninety two. And of course, as a result of all this, you know, as the pound falls, the danger is that inflation will start to rise.
31:03 Dominic Sandbrook? So that night, so the 10th, the Commons voted on yet more Dennis Healey cuts. And to the government's horror, the Labour left rebel and the government loses by 28 votes, a massive humiliation.
31:16 Tom Holland? Can I just ask, the Tories aren't voting for these cuts?
31:19 Dominic Sandbrook? No, the Tories will always vote against the government.
31:20 Tom Holland? Okay, but they would presumably be in favour of these cuts.
31:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
31:23 Tom Holland? They're putting party ahead of country.
31:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, I mean, that's just not how politics works, Tom. You're in the opposition. Your duty is to oppose.
31:29 Tom Holland? I mean, basically, Mrs Sacha agrees with Dennis Healey's diagnosis, right?
31:33 Dominic Sandbrook? She does, but I mean, they would say, I mean, the opposition, any opposition in this circumstance says, this government is, you know, should be turfed out, we should get rid of them and get a new government in, and we vote against them. I mean, it would be unheard of, really, for the opposition to vote with the government on part of the government's own economic agenda. That would be very bizarre.
31:52 Tom Holland? But if the government wins the vote with, in a kind of Tory right wright of the Labour Party alliance, then that's very bad for the government. I'm just playing four dimensional chess here, in a way that clearly Mrs Sacha wasn't.
32:04 Dominic Sandbrook? That is four dimensional. I think if you were Howard Wilson and the Tories were always going to vote with you on your economic plans, you'd probably take it because it means you can have a, you know, you can have a nice lie in or something. You don't have to worry about whipping all your elderly MPs into the, into the voting lobby anymore.
32:20 Tom Holland? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, he may have got the top economics degree at Oxford in its history, but he's not as shrewd a political operator as me.
32:26 Dominic Sandbrook? No, clearly not. Howard Wilson isn't there for this crucial vote. He's at Marcia's birthday party. So anyway, the next day is the 11th and it's Howard Wilson's birthday and he doesn't make the announcement after all. I mean, to be fair to him, it would be crazy to make the announcement in the middle of this kind of sterling crisis. And instead, a cabinet, when he was going to make the announcement, the cabinet sing happy birthday to him instead, led by Shirley Williams. And you know what Tony Benn wrote about it in his diary? He said, "It was odious." So that evening, so Wilson's birthday, he doesn't have a fun birthday evening because it's a vote of confidence in his government. And it's an incredibly fractious debate. Basically, it's sink or swim for the government. Healey
33:09 Dominic Sandbrook? leads for the government, the Chancellor, and he spends most of his time actually hammering the left, not the right. So he says, "The left are going to betray the whole of our Labour movement to its enemies if they don't vote for us." And as they all go to vote, there is a massive row. Now, these are in the days before. Politics before Parliament was televised, in fact, before Parliament was even broadcast on the radio. So you could get away with all kinds of behaviour. And Healy actually gets into a brawl, a punch-up, a punch-up.
33:39 Tom Holland? So he's literally a bruiser?
33:41 Dominic Sandbrook? He is literally a bruiser. And with some of the left-wing MPs, and one of them said to The Times, I think it was the next day, complained, he said, "The Chancellor's verbal behaviour was unprincipled and obscene in the extreme. He came across like a drunken oaf."
33:54 Tom Holland? What did he say, Dominic?
33:55 Dominic Sandbrook? He said, and Callum will have to get his bleeper ready, he said, "Go and [bleep] yourselves, you [bleep]ers." He shouted this at the Labour left, left of his own party.
34:03 Tom Holland? Is it in Hansard?
34:04 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't think it is in Hansard, no. No, it's not in Hansard, because it says they're going out. Anyway, at one level it works, because the rebels fall into line and the government survives. But Dennis Healy unwittingly has shot himself in the foot because this is going to be a leadership contest, which there clearly is, and he doesn't know it. He will not be well-placed, having just shouted this at half of his own party. So Wilson spends the next weekend at Chequers, his country house, with his wife Mary. When he comes back to London on the Monday morning, the 15th, he listens to the news in his car, and the news says the markets have opened and they're actually pretty calm. And when he gets to number 10, he says to his civil servants, "All systems go. Let us do this." So the next day is the Tuesday, it's the regular cabinet meeting, all his ministers
34:47 Dominic Sandbrook? come in, and Wilson takes two of them aside beforehand. First of all, he takes Jim Callaghan aside, the Foreign Secretary. Callaghan is Wilson's oldest rival, and he's been part of his government since 1964. So they've always been sort of slightly wary of each other.
35:03 Tom Holland? Frenemies, do you think?
35:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Frenemies, exactly. They're like old prize fighters. And Wilson calls him upstairs, and Callaghan comes down, and he comes down, he's described as looking winded. And when Joe Hayne says, "Good morning, Jim," to him, Callaghan just says, "Is it?" And then Wilson takes Healy aside, takes him into the toilet. And Wilson, being Wilson, he probably puts on all the taps to make sure they're not being listened to by MI5. We'll come back, we'll come back to this. Healy emerges impassive and he doesn't give anything away. And then they all sit round the cabinet table. Wilson reads this prepared statement. He says, "I've been Labour leader for 13 years. I've decided to step down, give other people a chance, chime for fresh ideas, all of this." Some of them started crying.
35:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Callahan, who now has this sort of glint in his eye of somebody who's fancying a shot at the top job, he delivers this tribute and he says, "Thank you so much, Harold, for all you've done for us" and all this kind of thing. The meeting breaks up, they're all in shock. Wilson goes off to ring the trade union leaders. That's a sign of where power lies in Britain, actually. And then he goes up and, of course, he has to have lunch on his own because of Marcia's prescriptions. So, the news is travelling fast. Just before we get to the break, The Times sent a man on to the streets of London to gauge people's reactions that afternoon after the news broke. And some of, most people were absolutely amazed that Wilson was going. Kind of unheard of to walk away with no warning in your pomp. But there were some very funny responses.
36:30 Dominic Sandbrook? An old man in a cardigan said, "You can't control a government with people going against you. I'm a Labour man. I have to be because I come from Durham. I say the trouble with the party is there's too many of those left wingers in it." And then the other man, whose contribution I enjoy, who was a 78-year-old man in a flat cap who used to work for the local council, and he absolutely, he said, he hated the left, he said it was the left's fault. "They were always having a go at him. There's only so much a man can stand. I hate those left wingers. I despise them."
36:58 Tom Holland? And are these representative? Or have you just cherry picked them?
37:01 Dominic Sandbrook? No, cherry picked them, of course. Of course I'd cherry pick them.
37:04 Tom Holland? Because there must be some people who...
37:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
37:06 Tom Holland? Particularly they're working for that council from Durham. There must be some people in, in, working in councils in Durham who like the left.
37:13 Dominic Sandbrook? I suppose it was fresh in people's minds because Wilson had just had this huge battle with the left. There'd been this stuff, business in the House of Commons.
37:19 Tom Holland? Okay, fair enough.
37:20 Dominic Sandbrook? So, it's all up for grabs now. Who will the Labour Party pick as the new Prime Minister? Is there perhaps a secret scandal behind Harold Wilson's resignation? And Tom, a scandal involving MI5 bugs in Downing Street, the South African secret police, some lavender notepaper, and a blind man on the corner of the Charing Cross Road.
37:45 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
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40:01 Tom Holland? Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest Is History where Harold Wilson has resigned. British politics is in tumult. What happens next, Dominic?
40:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, there's all kinds of mystery and all kinds of exciting espionage and sexual scandal details to come. The general reaction at the time is that there must be some sinister explanation for all this. So, most people thought Harold Wilson is so shifty, he would never just walk away. The Sunday Times called it yet another characteristic confidence trick. Wilson's friend Barbara Castle wrote in her diary, she said, "I wonder what exactly Harold is up to. More than meets the eye, I have no doubt."
40:40 Tom Holland? It's like, is it Metternich when Talleyrand died? He said, "I wonder what he means by that." It's that kind of order, isn't it?
40:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So, the most common rumour at the time, which goes around Westminster and has never really gone away, to be honest, is that he was being framed by the security services over some hideous financial or sexual scandal. And we will come on to this later on because Wilson himself does a lot to fuel these rumours. Anyway, he has his farewell dinner on the 22nd of March and it's a very, very miserable, and we mentioned 1970s food. It's a very desultory occasion. The only highlight is when a waiter accidentally poured hollandaise sauce all over Dennis Healy.
41:19 Tom Holland? Accidentally?
41:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Maybe it's somebody who's got investments and is paying 98% in tax on his investments or something. Tony Benn said in his diary afterwards, "The pathetic thing about tonight," Tony Benn is so harsh about Harold Wilson, "the pathetic thing about tonight is that nobody is sad that he was going. He hasn't inspired any affection. He's fudged every issue, dodged every difficulty, but kept us in power, kept us together and ground out the administrative decisions."
41:46 Tom Holland? But someone's gonna miss him, right?
41:47 Dominic Sandbrook? The Queen? Well, the Queen, actually. So, the Queen comes the next day for dinner at Number 10. And this is a signal honour. The Queen only did this, I think, for Churchill when he resigned. So, for Winston and for Harold Wilson. So, she really, I mean, she thinks of Harold Wilson as a leader on the, on the scale of Churchill.
42:05 Tom Holland? Yeah, the two titans of 20th century politics.
42:08 Dominic Sandbrook? That's, I'm sure, our international listeners. I mean, people, people probably study Wilson, don't they? In like schools in Australia and America and stuff. He's one of the great men of history.
42:16 Tom Holland? Yeah. I imagine that's why we're not shedding listeners to this episode in any way in the Sydney and New York.
42:22 Dominic Sandbrook? So, there's then a hiatus while they wait for the Labour MPs to elect a new leader. And that takes another two weeks. At the end of March, there was a sign of trouble to come. Joe Haynes says to his friend Bernard Donoghue that he has seen, and I quote, "50 names for peers and knighthoods, all in Marcia's handwriting, on a sheet of lavender-coloured notepaper, simply ticked by Harold Wilson." We will come back to this. So remember this lavender notepaper. Wilson finally leaves on the 5th of April, when the Labour MPs have finally picked a successor. We'll tell you who the successor is at the end of the episode. There was a last lunch for his wife and all his aides. Surprise! They have to stand around for 45 minutes waiting for Marcia to join them.
43:06 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, one last little power play from Marcia. And Donoghue says in his diary afterwards, he says, "It was an embarrassing way to go out, but fitting. Harold Wilson went out as he came in, a remarkable man, but too often humiliated and made shabby by this sad association."
43:20 Tom Holland? And the sad association is with Marcia?
43:22 Dominic Sandbrook? With Marcia. But this is not quite the end of the story, because that lavender-coloured list. So this was Wilson's resignation honours list.
43:33 Dominic Sandbrook? For our overseas listeners, when you resign as Prime Minister, you have one last kind of little chance to dole out patronage to, you know, your cronies and to people, you know, who have helped you and all this kind of thing. And this has never before been an issue for an outgoing Prime Minister, but in Wilson's case, it's toxic for his reputation. For weeks, for the last couple of weeks, Inside Number 10, there had been gathering rumours this was going to be a massive problem. Some of Wilson's civil servants had complained to him that the list was bonkers, that it was full of people in the media who had promised to pay him money for books or for TV series and things. And it's very clear from Donoghue's diary,
44:17 Dominic Sandbrook? "The person they thought had drawn up the list was Marcia Williams. It's Marcia's last chance to influence honours, and she is going for the lot." And he and Joe Haynes had some massive rows with Wilson in the final days, begging him to change the list. He is not, he is not prepared to listen. He is suicidal. He doesn't seem to care about the reaction to this final and scandalous use of patronage. He just wants to be rid of the whole thing and to buy some peace with Marcia.
44:42 Tom Holland? Do you think it's the onset of dementia?
44:44 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it's not caring. I think it's, uh, Wilson was always incredibly weak when it came to Marcia. Um, I think, you know, that the, some of the quotes from the first half of the episode where Donoghue says, you know, he just, he's tired, he's, he's blown, he's, he doesn't care. I think it's that actually. I think he just basically thought, yeah, why not? You know, who cares?
45:06 Tom Holland? I just wonder whether it's expressive of a kind of mental decline as well.
45:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, there's no doubt that there is a mental decline. How much that is to do with the dementia that basically is consuming him by the beginning of the 1980s? Or how much this is just exhaustion, drinking, the stress? It's, it's hard to distinguish those two things. And I think-
45:25 Tom Holland? He's not a well man.
45:26 Dominic Sandbrook? He's not a well man at all. No, exactly. Then there's a long delay. The list isn't published. And the reason is that the Bank of England, the Home Office and the Inland Revenue have complained about some of the names on the list. And Haynes said to Bernard Donoghue, um, there are people on that list that Scotland Yard might in due course wish to interview, which is not a good sign. And then finally, at the end of May, the list is published and the reaction is a complete meltdown. So there are 42 names on the list. And actually, most of them are pretty standard. They are like the staff at Downing Street, the housekeepers at Checkers, this kind of thing. But some of the names are inflammatory. So Wilson's publisher, George Widenfeld, he gets a peerage. A property developer called
46:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Eric Miller gets a knighthood. Corporate raiders, James Goldsmith, later of the, was it the referendum party?
46:17 Tom Holland? Yeah. And, um, father of Jemima.
46:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, and Zach.
46:21 Tom Holland? And Zach and Ben.
46:22 Dominic Sandbrook? So James Goldsmith, he gets a knighthood. Another corporate raider called James Hanson gets a knighthood. Uh, the man who had made, uh, Wilson's raincoats. So the, the Ganex raincoat tycoon, Joseph, already Sir Joseph Kagan, he gets a peerage.
46:40 Tom Holland? You see, I love a topic on The Rest is History where you get to have the phrase, Ganex raincoat tycoon.
46:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
46:47 Tom Holland? Not that many.
46:48 Dominic Sandbrook? No, there are that many.
46:49 Tom Holland? You get that with Hannibal.
46:50 Dominic Sandbrook? No, you don't at all. Even Samuel Johnson didn't have a raincoat tycoon, did he? So these are not traditional Labour people. In fact, a lot of them don't even vote Labour. They are friends of Marcia's. So Eric Miller, the property developer, he'd been very close to her. He'd possibly been her lover. There were claims that he had bought her a Muse flat in the West End. James Goldsmith, there were claims that he had promised to make her a director of his firm and that he was paying her son's private school fees. And all the newspapers said this was absolutely appalling. The Times. By his last act of patronage, Harold Wilson has succeeded in reducing himself and not only himself, he has demeaned the office of Prime Minister.
47:34 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, Labour MPs were appalled by this.
47:37 Tom Holland? So what about Tony Benn?
47:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Tony Benn? Well, I mean, what's he? He said it was odious when they sang Happy Birthday to Wilson. So he's not going to be best pleased by this. That he should pick inadequate buccaneering sharpshysters for his honours was disgusting. It was unsavoury, disreputable, and it just told the whole Wilson story in a single episode. And Haynes and Donoghue go around everywhere and they say to everybody, this is Marcia's list. She wrote it on a lavender notepaper. Wilson is an absolute weakling of a man. And he just handed it in. Now Marcia and Wilson denied this. Wilson said this is sexism and Marcia said this is snobbery because you don't like the people on the list. And actually, the row that followed lasted for another, I'm just doing the maths, more than 35 years.
48:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Because Marcia was so angry about this that she was still suing people well into the 21st century.
48:30 Tom Holland? To what effect?
48:31 Dominic Sandbrook? She would win. You couldn't prove that she had done it and she would say, she generally, I think, won the case.
48:36 Tom Holland? And so what's the consensus now?
48:37 Dominic Sandbrook? She definitely did it.
48:39 Tom Holland? All right, okay.
48:40 Dominic Sandbrook? The BBC did a drama in the late 2000s called, I think, The Lavender List. And she basically forced them to apologise and to withdraw it. She said, you know, there's no evidence, this is a lie, this is, you know, all of this kind of thing. Emily, who is our head of written content, says there are extraordinary. Carry BJ parallels. So listeners can read into that what they will, but she's not wrong. Right. I mean, the idea that there's a sort of a prime minister who's handing out a departing prime minister handing out sort of bounty to his cronies and actually there's some sinister female in the background who is pulling the strings. I mean, that's the sort of Lady Macbeth figure. I mean, you could argue, I suppose, that this is sexism, but in this case, I'm not
49:23 Dominic Sandbrook? sure that it is. And what's disastrous for Wilson is the two of the people on the list, Scotland Yard does wish to interview them. So Eric Miller, who was the guy who had supposedly bought Marcia a flat. A year later, he was charged with fraud, theft and forgery and he shot himself. Oh, no. So that looked very bad for Wilson.
49:43 Tom Holland? And what about the Gannex raincoat tycoon? How does he bear up?
49:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, no, this is a terrible story. The Gannex raincoat tycoon, Joseph Kagan. I mean, he's the sort of poster boy for Harold Wilson's resignation on his list. He was charged with tax evasion in 1978. He was charged bizarrely with stealing barrels of dye from his own raincoat company. Wow. What was he doing with it? I don't know. Maybe secretly dying, making rival raincoats, making his own raincoats. Who knows?
50:12 Tom Holland? Dying them lavender.
50:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. He ended up in prison where he literally sewed mailbags and he lost his knighthood, but not his peerage. And he returned to the House of Lords and became a campaigner for penal reform. But this is not the only blow to Harold Wilson's reputation. We are moving fast towards that blind man on the Charing Cross Road. So in the 1974 series, we described how Wilson had been increasingly paranoid that he was being spied on by the security services. He thought MI5 was stealing his tax documents. He told his ministers that there was a bug in the cabinet room ceiling and he was also convinced that there was some sort of listening device hidden inside a portrait of Gladstone.
50:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, there is actually a degree of truth in this, as we talked about in 2024. In the 1940s, Wilson, as a trade minister, had visited Moscow and ever since then, MI5 had kept a file on him under the name Norman John Worthington.
51:12 Dominic Sandbrook? And some of the, at least one of the people on that list had links to the KGB. Joseph Kagan, the Gannex raincoat tycoon, used to go and I think played chess with a KGB man from the Soviet Embassy. And the claim is that maybe this was because he had family back in Lithuania, but also it could be more dodgy. Also, there were bugs in Number 10. They had been installed under Harold Macmillan in the 50s. The official history of MI5 by Christopher Andrews says they were defunct and no longer maintained. And to be honest, most of Wilson's own aides and ministers thought he was bonkers about all this. They thought he was paranoid. So when Tony Benn brought all this up with James Callaghan, Wilson's successor, Callaghan told him the story about the Gladstone portrait, but Callaghan didn't tell it as in, gosh, maybe
51:57 Dominic Sandbrook? there is a bug in the portrait. Callaghan told it as a joke against Wilson, to say Wilson's, you know, lost the plot. But Wilson believes all this and it's compounded by 1976 by a scandal that we talked about in the early days of the rest is history. It's great to welcome back to the show, fan favourite Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the tiny Liberal Party. So the Liberals, for context, have only 13 MPs. Now, just a month after Wilson left office, Thorpe resigned as leader of the Liberals. And the reason, we did an episode on this in the early days of the show. It turned out that Thorpe had once had an affair with a former stable groom called Norman Scott. Scott held a grudge against him because he believed that Thorpe had stolen his National
52:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Insurance card. They could never forgive this. Anyway, Scott eventually comes out and he says, Jeremy Thorpe had this affair with me. He stole my National Insurance card and what is worse, he plotted to have me murdered by an airline pilot on a moor. And I wasn't murdered, but my dog, Rinca, was murdered and that's terrible. Thorpe, first of all, said this was a lie. He said, I'm being framed by the South African Security Service boss.
53:08 Tom Holland? Not called Boss.
53:10 Dominic Sandbrook? They're called Boss. That was what they're called. B O S S.
53:13 Tom Holland? That's so seventies.
53:14 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm being framed by Boss because I'm anti apartheid. And Wilson believed him. He completely believed him. In February nineteen seventy six, Wilson made Donoghue stay behind after work for three hours to discuss it. And I quote, he is absolutely convinced that the South Africans are behind it. The PM is loving it all. Since it appeals to all his obsessions with plots, spies, leaks, conspiracies, et cetera. Wilson's confidence by and large said to him, please don't pursue this. You know, this is mad from you. So in March, Barbara Castle, one of his ministers, had lunch with him. And he said to her, I and Marcia, or was he called her Detective Inspector Falkender, because she's now Lady Falkender. Uh, we have looked into this and we have conclusive proof that it is a South African plot.
53:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Castle said to him, please don't pursue this. This is insane. Why would Boss, the South African security service? Why would they pick on the Liberal Party, which has only thirteen MPs? Why would they go to all this? Effort to bring down a man that basically nobody outside Britain has ever heard of.
54:15 Tom Holland? I mean, I suppose the South African government hates Liberals.
54:18 Dominic Sandbrook? It does hate Liberals. It hates anti apartheid campaigns, which Thorpe was. But really, you're gonna, well, the problem is Castle also says, also Jeremy Thorpe was having an affair with this bloke.
54:29 Tom Holland? How did she know that?
54:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you know the person who's looked into it for her?
54:32 Tom Holland? Who?
54:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Jack Straw, the future Blairite Home Secretary, who worked for her. Looked into it, did some digging and found out basically, I don't know how they found it out, but it was, it basically was common knowledge by this point. Wilson just wouldn't listen. He was deaf to reason. That same day that he had the lunch with Barbara Castle, he went to the Commons. He said to the Commons. Thorpe is being targeted by South African intelligence. They are using massive reserves of business money and private agents of various kinds. He said it publicly. Anyway. We've now moved on to May after Wilson's resignation. On the ninth of May, the Sunday Times published letters that showed that Thorpe had been having an affair with this bloke.
55:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Uh, it's that the letters, Tom, if you may recall, that have the telltale and damning phrase. Bunnies can and will go to France.
55:21 Tom Holland? Spoken very, very entertaining by Hugh Grant in the dramatization of this story.
55:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. You have to imagine that being said with enormous amounts of suggestiveness. The next day, Thorpe resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, but Wilson just will not give this up. He is still convinced that Thorpe is being framed. And so two days later, Wilson rang a BBC journalist, a young journalist called Barry Penrose. He'd basically picked him out of a telephone book or something and said, "Come to my flat in Westminster. I've got a story for you." So Penrose roped in this mate of his called Roger Courtney, who was a researcher at the BBC. And they both go along to Wilson's flat in Lord North Street. When they get there, they find Wilson there, is puffing on a cigar. And Wilson says to them, "I think democracy as
56:11 Dominic Sandbrook? we know it is in grave danger." He says, "The British security services were out to get me for years. They spread rumours that I was running a communist cell in Downing Street." And these BBC blokes can't believe this. I mean, this guy was Prime Minister just a few weeks ago. And then he's very calm, he's still puffing on his cigar. He says, "They were saying that I was tied up with the communists. The link was Marcia. She was supposed to be a dedicated communist." And he goes on to say, he says, "Norman Scott, this stable bloke, is a South African agent, and he's part of a wider conspiracy with MI5." He says, "I want you two to crack the case. If you can crack the case, you'll be the Woodward and Bernstein of British journalism. This is
56:51 Dominic Sandbrook? the British Watergate." And then he reaches this mad peroration. He sort of looks them in the eye, puffs on his cigar, and he says, "I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I'm asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally, when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man might tell you something, might lead you somewhere." And they leave. And I mean, obviously, they're like, you know, I can't, they're in their twenties or early thirties or something. They cannot believe that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, from just a few weeks earlier, is telling them this stuff about being a spider in the Charing Cross Road.
57:37 Dominic Sandbrook? And they believe it. And they spend months following his leads. And the irony is, they follow this mad cul-de-sac about South Africa, and they completely miss the truth that Jeremy Thorpe was not a terribly good person and was trying to kill Norman Scott. Which is a madder story really than the one they investigate. Eventually, the BBC lost patience and said to these guys, Penrose and Courtney, enough of this now, they shut the investigation down. They then sold the story to the newspapers and the Daily Mirror splashed it under the excellent headline, Wilson feared Marcio was being lured into a sex orgy.
58:15 Dominic Sandbrook? This is an absolute disaster for Wilson's reputation. He and Marcio immediately published statements and they said, oh, that he was just joking about being a spider. He was just joking about the blind man on the Tarrington Cross Road. But obviously, everybody who knew him in Westminster said, this does sound like the kind of thing Harold would say. He's been saying mad stuff like this for the last few years. And Marcio has been going around telling everybody that boss are out to get her and Jeremy Thorpe, with whom she was quite friendly. Most people at this point just conclude that he's a fantasist. So when Tony Benn again asked James Callaghan about it, Callaghan said, oh, Harold is just a Walter Mitty, i.e. somebody who's just making up mad stuff in his head. And actually, that sets the tone for Wilson after he's left office, because the next few years bring a very sad decline.
59:00 Dominic Sandbrook? He'd never had many close friends in politics and he seems to vanish really after 1976. So, within a year or so, there are clear signs, I think, that the Alzheimer's is beginning to claim him. In December 1978, Donoghue had a drink with Wilson's former driver and the driver, who was called Bill Howiston, said, nobody visits him, he has no friends. It's very sad. He still drinks much too much and his memory is completely going. He can't remember where he's going in the evening. And he had one last turn in the limelight, which people can see bits of on YouTube. It is excruciating. He was invited to be the guest presenter on a BBC chat show called Friday Night, Sunday Morning. It's in October 1979.
59:42 Dominic Sandbrook? It's like a sort of nightmare that you have, that you're playing Hamlet and you haven't done, you know, you haven't learned the lines. Because he's sitting there and he's interviewing Pat Phoenix, the actress from, I think, Coronation Street. And he interviews Harry Seacombe and he runs out of questions. There are long pauses, it's really awkward, he stumbles over his words, he can't read the autocue. Even the short clips on YouTube are actually quite a painful watch. And after that, he pretty much vanished. And the mad thing is really, he had, he had been the defining politician of the sixties and seventies in Britain. So when he resigned in 1976, all the obituaries, sort of political obituaries, said, this will be remembered as the Wilson
1:00:27 Dominic Sandbrook? era. But actually, nobody ever uses that phrase. Nobody talks about Wilsonism. And as early as 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, it was as though he'd never existed. He just was completely absent from the political conversation. Some historians since then, I mean, not that many people write about the Wilson government, to be honest. Some historians, because historians probably tend, academics tend to be slightly more left-leaning, they're keener to rehabilitate him. They say, well, there were the liberal reforms of the sixties.
1:00:56 Tom Holland? He kept Britain out of the Vietnam War, didn't he?
1:00:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing he's praised for most. And I think it's a reasonable thing to praise him for. He refused to get involved with the Vietnam War. But it's a negative achievement, rather than a positive one. And I think when he came in in 1964, he would have dreamed of being remembered for much more sort of substantive things.
1:01:15 Tom Holland? I mean, you said he was brilliantly clever, but I guess it just shows that being clever isn't everything.
1:01:20 Dominic Sandbrook? It's not everything. Yeah. I mean, I think my verdict on him in my book, Seasons in the Sun, was he was one of the cleverest and kindest men ever to inhabit Number 10. But sadly, he was also one of the weakest. Yeah, he used the weakness almost as an asset, because it meant that he never upset his party. He was brilliant at keeping his party together. But he also, he did that by deferring decisions and sort of not doing anything. So in Bernard Donoghue's memoirs, Donoghue, who worked for him as his policy adviser, like his senior adviser, said of him, you know, we wasted our time in Downing Street, completely failed to tackle Britain's economic and industrial weakness. And basically, all of this left an open goal for Margaret Thatcher in the eighties. And Denis Healy, who obviously was his chancellor, gave an interview in the 2000s. Someone said, what do you think of Harold Wilson? Denis Healy
1:02:05 Dominic Sandbrook? said, he was a terrible prime minister, which is kind of harsh when you've been his chancellor. Anyway, he's gone now. So someone's got to replace him. Now, the seventies was a saner time than today because they didn't allow activists any role in picking the leader, it was just the MPs. Anyway, this contest to succeed Wilson in some ways has been going on for more than a decade. So, starting really when the first Wilson government ran out of trouble in 1966, people had speculated about who would succeed him. And for a lot of that period, that intervening period, the favourite had been a man called Roy Jenkins, who was the Home Secretary and Chancellor in the sixties and is now Home Secretary again.
1:02:46 Dominic Sandbrook? And Roy Jenkins was the son of a miner. He went to Baidew College, Oxford. He has this smooth, urbane, very wig-ish style. He can't pronounce his Rs properly. He is the darling of the sort of society hostesses, of the high-minded.
1:03:07 Tom Holland? He's a rest his politics man, isn't he?
1:03:08 Dominic Sandbrook? He's so rest his politics, he completely is. He loves Europe, he loves sensible people, moderation, claret, all of this kind of stuff. All of this actually means that he has now fallen out of favour with the Labour Party, which has moved to the left.
1:03:26 Tom Holland? Because it's all horny-handed sons of toil.
1:03:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, there's a good story told by Neil Kinnock, that one of Jenkins's acolytes went canvassing in the House of Commons tea room and he came up to the table that Kinnock was out with a load of other Labour MPs. And he said, will you be voting for Roy Jenkins? And a Yorkshire MP said, no lad, we're all Labour here.
1:03:43 Tom Holland? Very good.
1:03:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Very good, great repartee. So there's Roy Jenkins. Another candidate is Jenkins's former best friend and possibly former lover, Anthony Crossland, who he'd been mates with at Oxford. So they'd been very, very close. Crossland had sort of matinee idle good looks that has now, he's now turned into a lounge lizard, I think, when you Google him. He's the Environment Secretary. He had been the party's great intellectual in the fifties. He was a big football fan. He took Henry Kissinger to watch Grimsby Town play Gillingham.
1:04:14 Tom Holland? Did Kissinger enjoy it?
1:04:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And after Kissinger left office, after Gerald Ford fell from power.
1:04:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Crossland took Kissinger to watch Chelsea versus Wolverhampton Wanderers.
1:04:26 Tom Holland? And did Wolves win?
1:04:27 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't actually know. I should, that's stupid of me not to look that up. But well, listeners, it's good to let the listeners do a little bit of work, I think. So there's Jenkins and this is ex-pal Crossland, who's a very long shot. There's one other candidate on the right, really, and that is Dennis Healy. Yeah, Dennis Healy, he's gone around punching people in the face and quoting Emily Dickinson to them.
1:04:49 Tom Holland? That's not the way to win votes, is it?
1:04:50 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no, no. He's never going to win, but he throws his hat in the ring anyway. So there's the right wing candidates, then we've got the left wing candidates. So we've got Tony Benn from last time, talking about how much he loves the unions, how much he hates Europe, hates NATO, hates capitalism, all of that.
1:05:03 Tom Holland? He hasn't been stung on the penis yet by a wasp, has he? But that's to come.
1:05:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Not yet. The other candidate on the left is Michael Foot, and he is the sort of sentimental party favourite. He's a brilliant speaker, he's a brilliant essayist, he's a fan of Jonathan Swift and of Byron and all of these kind of 18th century writers. He looks a million years old, like he looks older than he is.
1:05:27 Tom Holland? Very long white hair, hasn't he?
1:05:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:05:29 Tom Holland? And he dresses scruffily, and that's something that will come back to bite him in due course.
1:05:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, he wears an ill-advised coat.
1:05:36 Tom Holland? Donkey jacket, I believe.
1:05:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Remembrance Day service. He looked like an out of work navy. He was my favourite newspaper verdicts on Michael Foot. Anyway, he's Employment Secretary and his job is to suck up to the trade unions and he's going to be the other left wing candidate. And then that leaves the middle of the party and the candidate at the centre. And this is the great titan of British history, Jim Callaghan. And I'm delighted to say we'll be talking a lot more about Jim Callaghan in the next episode.
1:06:03 Tom Holland? So he's the Sandbrook candidate.
1:06:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I like Dennis Healy as well, to be fair. Callaghan, just to give you a slight sense, we'll get more into him next time. He's the son of a Royal Navy petty officer from Portsmouth. He left school at 17, he never went to university. He rose through the ranks of the unions and the Labour Party. He's already been Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, so he's done the hat trick.
1:06:24 Tom Holland? I'd say, Dominic, if he, if he becomes Prime Minister, he will be the only person in British history who's ever done that, right?
1:06:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. The Grand Slam. Massive achievement, massive stakes. His nickname is the keeper of the cloth cap because he is seen as having this sort of mystical link to the working classes. He's this big bloke, he's avuncular. Everyone always says avuncular, by law you have to use that word when you're talking about Jim Callaghan. He's a bit of a bully, but he's quite sort of solid and reassuring.
1:06:52 Tom Holland? He has the definitive 1970s kind of glasses.
1:06:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I know.
1:06:57 Tom Holland? Kind of like Ronnie Barker and Smiley and he's just the embodiment of 1970s spectacles wearing man.
1:07:08 Dominic Sandbrook? He is. And the other thing he does in the, he wears his trousers incredibly high. So he has very, very high rise trousers. Anyway, he's been plotting for the leadership for more than a decade. And unlike the other people standing, he doesn't give any interviews, he doesn't publish any policies, he doesn't even appear on TV. He says, everybody knows where I stand. He has brilliant connections with the Labour MPs. He thinks, I don't need to really bother with a public campaign. They know where I stand. Let's see if I can do this. They have the first ballot on the 25th of March. It's all a bit less dramatic than the Tory business with Margaret Thatcher. It's a sign of just how exhausted and how kind of grey and threadbare they all are really.
1:07:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Of the also-rans, Crossland comes bottom, he gets 17, Healy gets 31, Jenkins with his, can't pronounce his R's. He gets 56, which is a really poor showing from him, given that he had been the favourite a few years earlier. It's a sign of how his Euro enthusiasm has hamstrung him. So he's going to go off to Europe actually and run the European Commission. On the left, Tony Benn does much worse than you might expect. He gets 37 votes. And that's because a lot of MPs, as we discussed last week, they say, you know, he's very polite and he's very courteous and he's charming, but I hate him.
1:08:23 Tom Holland? They're voting on the personality, not the issues.
1:08:25 Dominic Sandbrook? I think exactly what he would despise. And Michael Foot goes, is way ahead of him on 90. Michael Foot gets 90 with his long white hair and his love of.
1:08:35 Tom Holland? Yeah, he has it.
1:08:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. He's the front runner at this stage.
1:08:40 Tom Holland? God, I mean, imagine if they let Michael Foot as leader of the Labour Party. That would be mad.
1:08:44 Dominic Sandbrook? They'd never do that, surely.
1:08:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Callaghan is, is just behind him on 84 and that's fine because basically he knows he'll hoover up all the votes of the other right wing people. Second ballot, they've all pulled out, although also Rand's pulled out except for Healy. Healy fights on out of just bloody mindedness and being difficult. Callaghan's now narrowly in the lead, 141 to 133 for Foot. And the third ballot, Healy finally drops out. So Callaghan picks up most of his votes. And Callaghan on Monday, the 5th of April is having lunch on his own in his Commons office. And the chairman of the parliamentary party, Cledwin Hughes, comes and knocks on the door. And he says, we've got the results. You have beaten Michael Foot by 176 votes to 137.
1:09:31 Dominic Sandbrook? And Callaghan had this hard man image, but he actually starts crying at this. And he says very slowly and very revealingly, I think, Prime Minister of Great Britain. And I never went to a university. And Hughes says to him, well, you're in good company. The two greatest prime ministers of the century didn't go to university, Lloyd George and Churchill. And then Callaghan's aides come in to congratulate him. And again, he harps on the same theme. He says to one of them, there are many cleverer people than me in the Labour Party, but they're there and I'm here. You can see the chip on his shoulder. Anyway, he then goes and addresses all the Labour MPs. He gives them a nice unity speech. He says, you know, clean slate after all the fighting of the Wilson years. And then he gets in the car to take him to Buckingham Palace.
1:10:16 Dominic Sandbrook? And that night, he addresses the British people for the first time as Prime Minister. And his aides prepared him a speech, but interestingly, he tweaked it because he wanted to emphasise the theme of restoring traditional values. And he says, you know, priorities to fight inflation, we've got to stop borrowing so much money. We've stopped going deeper and deeper into debt. No one owes Britain a living, he says.
1:10:40 Tom Holland? I mean, this is the kind of speech that Mrs Sacha could have given.
1:10:43 Dominic Sandbrook? You're not wrong, because if you look at the rest of it, we've got to stop appeasing the greedy and graspy and selfish. He wants an end to vandalism and violence. The family is at the heart of the battle for our national survival. Parents should stand firm in defence of old fashioned morality. And above all, he wants a national effort to uphold our values and our standards. And Tom, this is top Sandbrook Daily Mail column bingo, isn't it? And it's a sign that Callaghan is going to be a very different kind of Prime Minister from Harold Wilson. So you might think everything is looking great for Britain and for Big Jim, but no. On his first full day as Prime Minister, one of his junior ministers called Brian O'Malley
1:11:28 Dominic Sandbrook? died after a brain surgery in hospital. On his second day as Prime Minister, another Labour MP, a disgraced Labour MP called, this is very hard to explain in one sentence, but basically a disgraced Labour MP called John Stonehouse, who had faked his own death on a beach in Miami and then turned up in Melbourne and was arrested as a fraudster. He quits the, he's returned to British politics, he quits the party and he says there should be an immediate general election. So now Callaghan has no majority at all after just a couple of days. He's got 314 seats. All the others put together have got 316 seats.
1:12:08 Dominic Sandbrook? And to survive, he has to rely on the votes of two Northern Irish nationalist MPs called Gerry Fit and Frank Maguire. So that's pretty bad. He's got no majority. And then just a few days after that, the governor of the Bank of England comes to see him and says, I've got terrible news. I've got really, really, really bad news. The pound is collapsing once again. We are running out of money. Britain is staring into the abyss of bankruptcy. And it seems that Jim Callaghan's premiership is doomed before it has even properly begun.
1:12:42 Tom Holland? What will Dominic's great hero do? You can find out in the thrilling climax of this epic series. And on that thrilling climax, we will also be welcoming on to the Rest is History for the first time, the Sex Pistols. So Rest is History Club members can hear that episode right now. And to join them, of course, you know what we've got to do. Head to therestishistory.com. If not, you just have to wait. But we will be back with the Sex Pistols. Goodbye.
1:13:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Goodbye.
1:13:16 Tom Holland? We have an absolutely thrilling announcement to make.
1:13:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, Tom, this is probably the most thrilling announcement we've ever made on The Rest Is History because we have a very special bespoke Rest Is History t-shirt available to celebrate a new series about Britain in the 1970s. These were great years. Crazy scenes, of course, behind the door number 10. Britain had to go, I believe the technical term is cap in hand, to the International Monetary Fund for a record bailout. And of course, Tony Benn was funding factories that made both car radiators and orange juice. And what you're probably thinking, Tom, is how can I get a t-shirt that somehow captures the spirit of those tremendous years?
1:14:02 Tom Holland? So what we have done is to commission Graham Johnson, who is one of our beloved Athelstans, to come back with another stunning design. And this time, this is so brilliant, must be the only t-shirt ever to feature the heads of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. And if you're not British, I mean...
1:14:30 Dominic Sandbrook? What's wrong with you?
1:14:31 Tom Holland? This will be the most exclusive, the most exclusive t-shirt design ever. Imagine walking the streets of Peoria with your James Callaghan t-shirt. Unmissable. So Dominic, here's the question. How can people go about getting their hands on one of these unbelievable items?
1:14:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Just head to therestishistory.com and go to our merch page.
1:14:55 Tom Holland? And for our wonderful club members, do keep an eye out for this week's newsletter, which will include a special discount for friends of the show and an even more exciting discount for our ever beloved Athelstans. And you can use this code on all of the Rest Is History merch.
1:15:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, if you're not yet a member of the show, you're probably thinking... I really want one of these T-shirts. I'm desperate for a discount. I'm missing out on all the unbelievable benefits that you get through club membership. Well, here's the thing. Now is the time to sign up. You can go, just as Britain went to the International Monetary Fund.
1:15:31 Tom Holland? Cap in hand.
1:15:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Cap in hand. Go to therestishistory.com to sign up and you will get, I mean, even more largesse than Britain got from the IMF in 1976. It'll be absolutely brilliant. So please go to therestishistory.com and sign up. You'll get all the discounts. You can buy your merch. You can get all the tremendous benefits that you get from being a member and you'll never, ever be happier and you will never, ever regret it.
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