Five years on the brink

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When Britain was falling apart in the Seventies I was lucky enough to work in Paris, where a French communist leader it was my job to befriend asked me what the hell was happening. Didn’t we understand that we were a rock of democratic stability in Europe? Apparently not, to judge by Sandbrook’s thousand-page slideshow of the attempted suicide of a nation. Sharply and fluently written, there are entertaining scenes of normal life, though retrospective horror outweighs the lighter moments.

In Northern Ireland, Protestant hard hats went around openly with weapons while their Republican mirror images blew up pubs. At Westminster, a paranoid Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was having four brandies before PMQs and two after, while his in-house conspiracy theorist Marcia Williams complained over dinner about the eyes of whitebait staring up from her plate. Could they have been right? Was there an M15-backed army putsch in the offing? And a plot to make Prince Philip president, as a saucer-eyed Anthony Wedgwood Benn believed?

All tosh, though talk of Reds under beds and communist influence in the TUC proved more plausible. When Jack Jones, the TGWU boss, gave back a £10,000 parting gift from his union at a gala at the Royal Festival Hall, the audience was teary. Though maybe Jones didn’t need it? After all, as we now know, he had been a KGB informant in receipt of Moscow’s money. For his part John Stonehouse, a one-time Labour minister, was working for Czech intelligence.

Denis Healey, himself a reformed communist, took the battle for common sense to the unions, got his emergency IMF loan and, convivial as ever, bashed and bullied about. But Labour still went down in 1979, and as a statesman Healey was flushed and busted.

By their top-down deference to trade union wreckers, Foot and Benn, the Philippe Égalités of the era, did immense damage. Thirty per cent wage increases, the architect of union privilege insisted, were “the going rate”, and Benn drove his Cabinet colleagues crazy with his Yugoslav economics. But ah, such brilliant parliamentarians!

Popular credulity stretched to debonair serial liars such as Jeremy Thorpe. “Everyone’s human,” a lady said when he faced charges of conspiracy to murder his former boyfriend, escaping by the grace of a well-bred judge.

A long-gone era? Well no, because not a few current disasters date from then. Industrial production declined by five per cent between 1974 and 1979, and between them Tony Crosland and Shirley Williams, privately schooled both, helped create our present apartheid system, whereby selection is outlawed for the masses but fine for the rich. Clever girl, Shirl.

Sandbrook includes snippets of pop culture, though fond memories of Monty Python, Morecambe and Wise or Sid Vicious being frightfully naughty about royalty do little to jolly us along at a time when councils were advising ratepayers to bury their own dead. Never mind — now that the tax rate is 45 per cent rather than 70 per cent, many a superannuated rocker can look back on themselves with affection from their country piles.

“Britain should benefit from a fascist leader,” announced David Bowie. Irony? Who cared, when you were high? From his more intellectual standpoint Ken Tynan said the Meridian motorcycle workers’ takeover was “the answer to the collapsing West”. Which did not dissuade Harold Pinter from voting Tory in 1979.

Sandbrook is rightly an admirer of James Callaghan. “I’m not very clever, as you will know from the papers,” said the new Prime Minister in 1976, but compared with Wilson and the upper-crust Labour lefties he was a political colossus, some of whose policies paved the way for the most overdue of Thatcher’s reforms.

Talk about a low, dishonest decade. Yet the book is strangely undepressing, perhaps because the country recovered. By making you quite nostalgic for the present, Sandbrook has done a public service.

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