...but to be old was very Essex

Some thoughts in the wake of the by-election results in Clacton and in Heywood and Middleton, with the impressive results for UKIP...

One of the joys of posing as a historian is that it kind of absolves you from the need to predict the future - that's someone else's territory. But fortune-telling is all the rage at times like these, so I thought I'd better have a go at it myself. Or rather, I thought I'd dust off some of my previous predictions and see if they still stand up (in my eyes).

After the European elections earlier this year, I said that I thought UKIP had reached its peak level of support at around 4.35 million votes. If you hadn't voted for them on that occasion, I reckoned, you were unlikely to do so in the 2015 general election. I still think that's true. For the last couple of years, UKIP have been enjoying high turnouts while supporters of the established parties have had a tendency to stay at home. This is likely to be reversed in the general election.

But I'd also restate the same proviso that I made in May: UKIP could do a whole lot better if they changed their leader. Nigel Farage has won as much support as he's ever going to; if you've not been convinced by him yet, you won't be in the next six months either. But now - for the first time since the frabjous days of Robert Kilroy Silk - there exists a potential rival for the leadership in the shape of Douglas Carswell. It's too late to change before the election, but I would assume that by this time next year Farage won't be the leader.

(Incidentally, I wish commentators would stop talking about a swing to UKIP in Clacton. Our constituency system is based on the premise - or at least the pretence - that we vote for individuals, not parties. So Carswell's share of the vote went up from 53 per cent to 60 per cent, while he lost 1,750 actual votes.)

My prediction for UKIP in the general election was 2.5 million votes and fewer than five seats. On sober reflection, I now think that might creep up to eight seats, but I still think five more likely. Which would make them the sixth largest party in the House of Commons. I still expect David Cameron to be the prime minister.

But all of this might seem to run counter to another post on this blog two years ago, when I wrote about my conviction that the political system as it stands is unsustainable. 'New political forces will emerge, whether within the existing parties or outside of them,' I wrote. 'It feels to me that there is a parallel with the 1970s, and that things are about to change quite radically.'

That does still seem to me to be the case. The parties as they currently exist are clearly inadequate. But I don't think UKIP are yet a significant element, save perhaps to hasten the change. Under Farage, they're a symptom of uncertain times, not the future. The psephologists I've heard all talk about UKIP's support being disproportionately comprised of the old and the academically unqualified, a finding that chimes with the radio phone-ins to which I listen with such enthusiasm. That's not the basis for a major national party. It's not an image that inspires converts, as Carswell's acceptance speech at Clacton seemed to indicate; he didn't sound overly enthused by the company he's now keeping.

So maybe UKIP do well enough next year that they decide to present a serious challenge. They change their leader, change their identity and become a coherent - if hard-right - party. I still think Cameron can win an outright majority, but if not and he has to cobble together a new coalition that excludes UKIP, there will be unhappy Tory MPs who could defect. And there'd be even more unhappy Tories after a European referendum, when a majority of the country decide that they don't want to be associated with UKIP and vote to stay in the EU. On balance, I think UKIP are likely to recruit more defectors in the next parliament than in this.

It's also perfectly possible that we see the dissolution of the LibDems, with the party effectively being absorbed into a Euro-friendly Conservative Party on the one side and into Labour on the other. Which would result in a new two-and-a-half-party arrangement on the old model, but now with Tory, Labour and UKIP, the centre of politics having moved more decisively to the right

And yet that's not sustainable either, because the country is not moving to the right at all. It feels to me as though there's a strong centre-left consensus waiting to be built.

And in this context, I should be clear that my point about 'new political forces' did not necessarily refer to new parties. I pointed out that the last time there was this much dissatisfaction in the country, it resulted in Margaret Thatcher staging a coup within the Conservative Party. And still, above everything else, the most frustrating thing in modern British politics is that fact that Labour Party have missed so comprehensively their opportunity to articulate a new vision for the party in the same way that Thatcher did for hers.

This is not - not this time - a criticism of Ed Miliband. It's a criticism of Tony Blair. The possibilities that were open to Blair in the late-1990s, before he got into invading other countries, were almost limitless. All squandered, all lost. It'd be nice to think that a new populist party of the left could emerge, but it doesn't seem very likely somehow - the chance has gone.

In short, something's going to change. But I'm a historian and I have no idea what. There's no point coming here looking for predictions.

The shadow lengthens...

Just appeared on the internet is my review for BBC History magazine of the first volume of  Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher. It has its virtues, but I'd recommend Jonathan Aitkens in preference.

The long shadow of Margaret Thatcher

I had the great pleasure on Sunday of appearing with Beatrix Campbell and Richard Weight at the Southbank Centre, talking about the impact and legacy of Thatcherism.

Coincidentally, the previous day my review of Jonathan Aitken's new book on Margaret Thatcher appeared in the Daily Telegraph.

My thanks to Steve Thomas of the Southbank, and to Sameer Rahim of the Daily Telegraph.

Thatcher and the BBC

The new issue of BBC History magazine is out today, a fact which I only mention because it includes my review of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher. It's a bit late, of course, but that's because the book was published so opportunistically as soon as she drew her last breath - magazines have longer lead-in times and can't respond with such indecent haste.

The review isn't available online, but in broad terms: I didn't concur with the other reviews that I've seen. I don't think it's a definitive account of her life and works up to the Falklands War (where this volume stops). I still rate Hugo Young's One of Us as the best account.

One thing I wanted to mention, but didn't have space in the review is the convention of adding a biographical footnote to everyone when they make their first appearance. This is a tendency that can be bathetically entertaining - I still cherish, for example, the reference in Joe Orton's diaries to Joseph Goebbels, where the editor John Lahr added a note to tell us that the Nazi propaganda minister got a PhD from Heidelberg University.

What irritated me in the Thatcher biography is a variation on the same theme: a scrupulous insistence on recording what school everyone went to. Does it really matter that much? Maybe it does to Charles Moore (Eton; Trinity College, Cambridge), but amongst grown-ups I rather feel that there comes a time to put away childish things and to be defined by something a bit more substantial.

Still angry after all these years

A week on, and millions of words having been devoted to the subject, is there anything left unsaid about the late Margaret Thatcher? More pertinently to me right now, is there anything else I want to say about her, given that I've written well over 100,000 words about her and her influence?

Well, here's one thought that I haven't seen expressed. She was born in 1925. That puts her smack in the middle of the Angry Young Men generation of the 1950s. Kingsley Amis and John Braine were born in 1922, Alan Sillitoe in 1928 and John Osborne in 1929.

The archetypal Angry Young Man in fiction is a lower-middle class, provincial, grammar-school educated, Oxbridge graduate who marries above his social station and rails against the establishment and the old boy network. Which sounds familiar, somehow.

In 1977 Kingsley Amis had dinner with Thatcher and wrote to Philip Larkin about his impressions of her: 'I thought her bright and tough and nice, and by God she doesn't half hate lefties. All in all a tonic.'

Margaret Thatcher

To mark the passing of Margaret Thatcher, here’s an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s:

With Keith Joseph ruling himself out of the running, even before the race had started, Thatcher decided to rule herself in, on the grounds that ‘someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand’. In November 1974 she announced that she would be challenging Edward Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

She was not an obvious choice, partly because she, following Joseph, had begun to espouse the unfashionable cause of monetarism, and partly because the policies she had pursued in her previous incarnation as education secretary under Heath had led to her being dubbed by the Sun ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’. In retrospect, given the controversy she subsequently attracted, this was something of an overstatement. Her supposed offence was absurdly innocuous – under pressure from the Treasury, the statutory provision of free milk for schoolchildren was ended on her watch – but the tabloid sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ had a pleasing enough ring, and it lingered long in the memory.

An entry in Kenneth Williams’s diary in January 1972 captured some of the reaction to her time at education, as well as offering a foretaste of future protests: ‘There were barriers at Downing Street and mounted police. It depressed me very much. The bawling long-haired youths shouting “Thatcher Out!” and carrying coffins expressing sentiments like “Maggie Dead” etc was the spectacle of only another form of fascism.’

Mostly, though, Thatcher was an improbable candidate for the simple reason that she was a woman. That was, for the media, the overriding issue, and coverage of her tended to be couched in terms of her appearance, with a particular focus on her headwear. When she was education secretary, the Sunday Telegraph had described her as being ‘sometimes rather pretentious and given to the smart hat and neat pearls favoured by suburban ladies coming to Tory conferences for the first time’, and the image still dominated the declaration of her candidacy.

‘Try to forget her plummy voice and her extravagant hats and her Dresden-shepherdess appearance,’ advised the Daily Mirror. ‘She is the toughest member of the Shadow Cabinet, and even if she doesn’t win the battle for the Tory leadership she may yet be responsible for bringing down Ted Heath.’ But even Enoch Powell, who had as good a claim as any to be her trailblazer, had trouble forgetting these things, insisting that the Tories couldn’t possibly elect her: ‘They wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent,’ he shuddered. It was an image of which she was well aware, describing herself defiantly as ‘a middle-aged lady who likes hats’.

It was noticeable that when she did emerge as Heath’s successor, in February 1975, it was the handful of women Labour MPs who were the first to celebrate the achievement. ‘I am very pleased,’ said Gwyneth Dunwoody, while Joyce Butler went further: ‘Absolutely splendid. I am delighted. It is time we had women in the top jobs.’ And Shirley Williams added, ‘I cannot help admitting privately, as a woman, being pleased to see that in the Tory Party, of all parties, a woman has broken through.’

Thatcher’s victory in the 1975 leadership contest was no great endorsement of monetarism. Indeed it is doubtful how many of those who voted for her in the first ballot (when she defeated Heath), let alone in the second, when she saw off all other challengers, understood or believed her deeply held, if newly acquired, convictions on economics. The support was instead predicated on her courage in volunteering to bell the cat: ‘She’s the only man among them,’ was the phrase going around Westminster.

‘Suddenly Mrs Thatcher stands out among the Tory dwarfs like a life-size Snow White,’ editorialized the Daily Mirror before the first ballot. ‘A very tough Snow White.’ But it warned that if she became leader, the Conservatives would be taking on an image that was ‘Dominatingly middle-class. Suburban. Anti-union. Even more Southern English than it is now.’ It was precisely this image that excited those who sought hope in Thatcher’s election. The Daily Mail leader column that welcomed her arrival put it in the context of the great enemy of the right: ‘The majority of the British people do not want socialism. They do not want Bennery.’ The only question was whether this bold experiment of having a female leader might misfire and inadvertently hand the future to Tony Benn.

 

Janice Atkinson-Small vs Glam Rock

I am, as I've said before, a big fan of Janice Atkinson-Small, a UKIP member who blogs on the Daily Mail's Right Minds site. She's great fun, and there are few more entertaining things in the British media than her single-handed (and single-minded) assault on the English language.

Today, as far as one can discern her meaning, she seems to be rejoicing in Margaret Thatcher's reported dementia: 'For the first time I hope she is somewhere else in her mind when opening her newspapers and does not seek the sick joke of the bad-taste t-shirts sold by the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers' Centre at the TUC conference.'

(I'm reminded of the Bishop of Leicester, whose quote I included in Crisis? What Crisis?: 'I never thought I should give thanks to God for being blind, but since my wife has told me what she has seen in the film, The Devils, I am genuinely grateful that I have been spared that.')

Ms Atkinson-Small goes on to denounce 'the hard left' as: 'A spent force who have to result to shock tactics.' And she reflects that: 'My generation remember the demise the UK car manufacturing industry which as a direct result of union action closed down with the loss of thousands of skilled jobs.' (All syntax, punctuation and vocabulary, incidentally, are taken from the original.)

But then she goes too far, saying that apart from union militancy in the 1970s, 'the only other memorable things about that decade - equally bad - were Heath taking us into Europe and glam rock.'

Now that's just being provocative for the sake of it. The wisdom or otherwise of joining the European Economic Community is a matter of political opinion. But glam rock was - and I speak objectively here - the highest achievement of post-War British popular culture. If she really was around in the early 1970s and doesn't appreciate the beauty of glam, then I can only conclude that 'she is somewhere else in her mind'.

Let Us Now Praise ... Rhodes Boyson

 

The death of Rhodes Boyson, former Labour councillor and long-time Conservative MP, failed to make it onto the news bulletins of Radio 5 Live, though it was mentioned on Radio 4. Perhaps that's inevitable. Boyson has been out of the political spotlight for a long time - when I was writing Crisis? What Crisis? five years ago, I tried to get an interview with him, but he was already too ill by that stage.

Insofar as he is remembered by the general public, it's probably as that strangely old-fashioned, mutton-chopped figure who appeared on Have I Got News for You and who agreed with Ali G that there was something to be said for children getting caned at school. Or, just possibly, there might be memories of him as the right-wing education minister in Margaret Thatcher's government.

In thinking Tory circles, meanwhile, he's still remembered for the Black Papers of the 1970s, in which he lambasted contemporary education theory, and did so from a position of some authority, having been headmaster of Robert Montefiore School and of Highbury Grove comprehensive.

But my interest in Boyson, and the reason I wanted to speak with him, was largely on the strength of a little book he edited, Right Turn (Churchill Press, London, 1970), published shortly after the election of Edward Heath as prime minister. It's a fascinating document, no bigger than a paperback and with just 150-odd pages, but in that space its various contributors - including Ralph Harris, Alfred Sherman and Ross McWhirter - provide a comprehensive blueprint for Thatcherism, half-a-decade before Thatcher came to the same conclusions.

The key contribution, from my perspective, was the introductory essay by Boyson himself. He was later to publish his memoirs, Speaking My Mind (1995), but some of the background was covered in this thirteen-page piece.

He came from a radical family. His grandfather was 'blacklisted for trade union activities in the mills of the late 1880s', his father 'believed that socialism would bring world brotherhood and peace' and was a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and he himself was brought up within the faith. Born in Lancashire in 1925, his education came within the Labour movement, with its traditions of self-education and internationalism: 'The volumes of the Left Book Club were devoured by those of us who grew up in the depressed areas as the first recipients must have read the epistles of Saint Paul.'

His conversion to conservatism came from a belief that socialism, and in particular the Labour Party, had lost its way, had become attached to the state, and in the process had damaged the moral fibre of society: 'It has become destructive of the self-reliance and responsibility which were the pride of the 19th-century nonconformists.'

You don't have to agree with his conclusions, or the policy positions he came to as a consequence, to recognise the power of his story. There were many formerly on the left who came to endorse Thatcher (from Woodrow Wyatt to Paul Johnson), but Boyson's background and experiences lifted him well beyond their shabby ranks. For anyone wanting to understand what happened to the Conservative Party in the 1980s and beyond, there's no better place to start. Because, even more than Enoch Powell, Boyson represented the soul of the Thatcherite revolution.

  

What I Should Have Said on Panorama

My thanks to Adam Shaw and Mark Alden for being so kind to me in the filming and editing of the interview I did for this evening's Panorama. I liked the programme, and it made think further...

Much of what I write is the story of modern British politics, as filtered through popular culture. And the justification for this approach is that I think the changing mood of the nation can be detected through its sitcoms and soaps, pop music and pornography.

I claim to be a historian, rather than a commentator on the present, since my knowledge of contemporary culture really isn't extensive enough. And I'd add that the one thing that can be learnt from history is never to make predictions. But, for the purposes of this blog, let's ignore those two caveats...

It feels to me that the last fifteen to twenty years have seen a fairly major shift in popular culture away from elitism and towards a celebration of the everyday. On television, for example, you can see the trend start with the toe-in-the-water docusoaps of Airport, The Cruise and Driving School, before moving into full-blown reality TV with Big Brother and its derivatives, and on to The Only Way Is Essex.

You can see it in music, with the notion of stardom being replaced by overblown karaoke contests on mainstream TV. You can see it in the British response to American porn. You can see it in the making of Jade Goody into an ersatz star.

And, most of all, you can see it in the rise of the internet, particularly those parts that look like a local radio phone-in writ large.

Running parallel to the democratisation of culture, however, has been the rise of a super-rich elite. Wealth inequality is back to levels not seen since the 1920s, and is widening on a daily basis.

There's an inherent tension between these two forces, which was okay during the long period of growth from 1992 to 2008. But now, with the economy likely to stagnate for years to come, I'm not sure that the current arrangement is sustainable anymore. Self-evidently we are not all in this together.

Politicians, from Tony Blair onwards, have sought to keep up with these developments. But they fall between the two stools, and all they've done is persuade ever increasing numbers to turn away from Westminster politics altogether. They try to use the imagery of mass culture, but fail because they simply don't belong to the same world (the picture of Ed Miliband in Gregg's is hard to forget). In any event, they are inevitably attracted more towards the super-elite.

And there's a problem here. Through the twentieth century, the parliamentary system continued its pretence of being representative, even though it was originally constructed with a far smaller electorate in mind, and with the intention of keeping the power of the monarchy in check. The democractic deficit was made up by the media, which held politicians to account in the name of the people.

Now, politics and the conventional media have effectively merged to form a single class. And it is fast losing its claim to democratic legitimacy.

Where we go from here is a mystery to me. History takes odd, unexpected turns. I don't think it was obvious in the 1970s that the crisis of confidence in politics would have resulted in the oldest and most successful party in the country being hijacked by the entirely alien forces of Thatcherism.

Where we should be now is in a different political landscape altogether.

When Paddy Ashdown was in talks with Tony Blair in the 1990s, he argued for a realignment of parties. What we needed, he thought, was a Eurosceptic Conservative Party, a centre party that included Blair, Kenneth Clarke and Ashdown himself, and a Labour Party that retained its union links. But it didn't happen and instead we have three parties chasing the same, dwindling band of swing voters. And increasing numbers of people feeling disenfranchised.

I don't believe this can continue. New political forces will emerge, whether within the existing parties or outside of them.

As I said, predictions are futile. But it feels to me that there is a parallel with the 1970s, and that things are about to change quite radically.

So, farewell then, Lord Redken

In my memory of the great political war of the first half of the 1980s, the big figures in the Labour Party seem impressively diverse in character and background, if not in gender: Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Eric Heffer, Neil Kinnock, Peter Shore, Derek Hatton, Arthur Scargill, Len Murray, Denis Healey, Gerald Kaufman, Roy Hattersley, Moss Evans - to name just a dozen at random.

And then there was Ken Livingstone, the man who had a more enduring impact than any of them.

Often accused of being a relentless self-publicist, he used the media attention he generated in the GLC days to espouse what was sometimes dismissively known as identity politics. And, despite all the vitriol and venom directed at him, he changed Britain to an extent achieved by very few politicians.

This would be a different country had he not existed. For those who remember the days of the 'loony left' stories, there's something rather ironic in the sight of the Conservative Party advocating gay marriages. As there was about Carol Thatcher losing a BBC gig for using the word 'golliwog'.

In my book on the 1980s, Rejoice! Rejoice!, I cited Livingstone alongside Margaret Thatcher as the political victors of the decade. I still think that's about right: Thatcher won the economic battles, Livingstone won the social struggles.

I voted for Ken as my constituency MP when he was first elected to Parliament in 1987, and I voted for him when he stood as an Independent candidate in the first mayoralty election in 2000. I even voted for him again when he then rejoined the Labour Party.

And now he has announced that he won't contest any more elections, having been defeated by Boris Johnson in the London mayoral election.

I regret that he stood at all this time; it just didn't feel right or dignified. But I regret even more that there was no one else in whose favour he could stand down, and that there still isn't. He was the last leader of the left.

And he's also the last of that great cast from the early 1980s to leave the political stage. It feels like the ending of a personal, as well as a political, era.

Norman St John Stevas

When you hear on the news that someone who used to be well known has died, a standard response is: Good Lord, I hadn't thought about him/her for years.

Curiously that wasn't the case last night when the death was announced of the generously named Norman St John Stevas, or Lord St John of Fawsley as he later styled himself. He had turned up in conversation only last week when I was talking with Giles Radice about the evolution of the parliamentary select committees - a system that had been launched by Stevas back when he was leader of the House.

That was a pretty impressive legacy for such a slight political figure. Because apart from that, he wasn't really to be taken too seriously. This is an extract from my book Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s:

Thatcher’s determination to get her own way, despite the reservations of so many of her senior colleagues, became ever more apparent as 1981 wore on. She started the year by sacking Norman St John-Stevas as leader of the House, much to the horror of the liberal establishment and at the risk of fuelling his own sense of martyrdom.

‘I argued in the cabinet for a human and compassionate Conservatism,’ he pleaded, though in truth her motivation was rooted not so much in ideology as in a desire to reduce the authority of Francis Pym, the most plausible leader of the wets; Thatcher removed Pym from the ministry of defence and, while keeping him in the cabinet, isolated him as leader of the House, with St John-Stevas simply discarded to make room. As the novelist Michael Dobbs, who worked closely with her, noted: ‘She was ruthless when she had to be – and often when she didn’t have to be as well.’

In a way that was to become characteristic of dismissed wets, St John-Stevas was a couple of months later to be found presenting Dizzy: A Man for All Seasons, a BBC2 programme about Benjamin Disraeli, the man who originated the concept of One Nation Conservatism, in what was presumably intended to be a coded signal about where Thatcher was going wrong. And, as was to become equally characteristic, Thatcher ignored him entirely.

A Classless Society

A comment by Tyrone Jenkins on a previous blog entry asks whether I intend to write a sequel to my previous books Crisis? What Crisis? and Rejoice! Rejoice!

And the answer is that I am indeed contracted to produce a third volume in the series, provisionally titled A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s.

This will cover the period from Margaret Thatcher's dethronement in November 1990 through to the re-election of Tony Blair in June 2001. And it'll be the usual chaotic mix of high politics and low culture - though in this instance, the politics were a bit on the low side as well.

Like the previous two volumes, it will be published by Aurum Press, with the same editor - Sam Harrison - that I worked with on my Terry Nation book. It should appear next year, though I'm hoping there'll be an interim piece on the period available for download in March this year.

Idling

This afternoon I watched most of the House of Commons debate on the civil disorder earlier in the week. I'm not sure we got very far - lots of indignation and few concrete proposals. Which is just as well really: the Commons isn't the place for instant wisdom, and as a country we're probably better off with MPs offering platitudes than policies at this stage.

But there's something a bit odd about watching a procession of Labour MPs demanding that the government reverse its proposed cuts to police funding. This, of course, echoes the policy pursued by Margaret Thatcher in her early years; while all other expenditure was squeezed, police pay was increased, an approach that paid dividends when her government wanted tough action taken against dissent.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the Labour Party stealing Tory clothes, if it seems appropriate, but there's a pattern emerging with this and other Labour arguments over the last twelve months: a straightforward objection to any cuts to any area of public spending. And that's reminiscent of another aspect of the 1980s. The Labour Party back then exhausted itself with defending the status quo in the face of Thatcherite reforms, opposing each and every government policy until such time as it proved to be popular. In the process the party managed to look both hidebound and opportunistic at the same time.

Worryingly, it looks as though Ed Miliband is pursuing the same course. And I suspect it'll have the same limited effect. Anyone who's come into contact with, say, their local council over the last decade knows that public services haven't exactly been perfect. Similarly the performance of the police this week - before the cuts - hasn't been spectacularly effective.

There is surely scope for advocating some change, without having to accept the Tories' options. At the moment, David Cameron's accusation, directed this afternoon against a backbench Labour MP, of being 'intellectually idle' seems all too accurate.

Recession - The Queen Speaks

I’ve been immersing myself recently in the 1980s for a book I’m working on. Which means that, while I’m a little out of touch with the details of the current recession, I am at least up to speed on the two Thatcherite recessions.

And in Gyles Brandreth’s excellent volume of diaries, Breaking the Code, there’s a fine passage where he’s trying to make small talk with the Queen in 1990. He mentions the recession, and she replies:

‘We do seem to get them every few years – and none of my governments seems to know what to do about them.’

Plus ça change...

Crisis and Discontent

The title of my book, Crisis? What Crisis?, comes from one of the most celebrated political misquotes of the 1970s (kind of a modern equivalent of ‘Let them eat cake’) as expressed in a Sun headline on 11 January 1979.

The context was the coldest January in Britain since 1963, and a strike by the drivers of oil tankers and lorries. The resultant fuel shortage was raising the forecourt price of petrol by up to 400%, panic buying was creating food shortages, and there were reports that two million workers could be laid off if the situation continued.

Meanwhile Jim Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, was out of the country on a six-day summit meeting on the agreeably warm Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

When he flew back, he told the reporters gathered to greet him that things weren’t as bad as they made out: ‘I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos,’ he said in the reassuring, emollient tones that had served him so well over the years.

And the Sun summed up his comments in that famous headline: Crisis? What Crisis?

He hadn’t actually said that, hadn’t even used the word ‘crisis’, but the expression attached itself to him instantly and came to symbolize the Labour government’s apparent dislocation from reality. And the main reason that it stuck was that it was already in common usage.

The phrase came originally from the 1973 film of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Day of the Jackal (though not from the book). By the winter of that year, during the oil crisis that helped bring down the Conservative government of Edward Heath, it was being used as a headline in the Daily Mail. It even turned up in the Sun itself in 1974, trailing a television programme in which David Dimbleby looked at American portrayals of contemporary Britain. And in 1975 the progressive-pop band Supertramp released a hit album with the title.

In short, the words were already in the air, waiting to be given the killer application.

The other great cliché of January 1979 was ‘the winter of discontent’. And again it wasn’t a new coinage for British politics in the ‘70s. A headline in London’s Evening Standard in February 1974 read: The Winter of Our Discontent. That was during the three-day week that Heath had called in response to industrial action by the miners.

In both cases, then, the phrases ‘crisis? what crisis?’ and ‘the winter of discontent’ were originally employed to refer to a Conservative administration, but went on to become primarily associated with a Labour government. As I point out in the book:

‘Thus did 1978-79 adopt the linguistic imagery – and eclipse the memory – of 1973-74, so that the Labour Party became associated with all the ills of 1970s Britain, as though the pre-Thatcher Tories had never really existed, or rather as though they had been closet socialists all along. In future years the phrase “the winter of discontent” would frequently prompt confused memories of the three-day week, alongside the genuine events of the Callaghan era.’

And the reason I’m prompted to write this blog-entry is that I just came across a page on the BBC website that includes these words:

‘Mrs Thatcher came to power during an especially creative period for UK music in the early aftermath of the punk rock movement which had experienced its first stirrings three years earlier.
‘Set against a backdrop of a three-day week and the winter of discontent, homegrown protest music began to flourish like never before, giving a voice to a young disenfranchised audience.’

You see what I mean? The three-day week was in January-February 1974; its imposition was an act of desperation by a Tory cabinet that included Margaret Thatcher. Nothing to do with what is meant here by the winter of discontent, which occurred five years later under Jim Callaghan.

But it all gets mixed up together. And it shouldn’t, you know, it really shouldn’t.

The Good Samaritan

One of the inexorable laws of writing non-fiction books is that, as soon as you’ve published, new information will turn up that you wished you’d known when you were writing.

A few years back, I wrote a book on the Biba stores and within days of it hitting the shelves, I was contacted by people who’d worked there and who had tales to tell. I even discovered that one of my best friends, the architect and thriller writer Brian Freeborn, had included a rather charming little elegy to Biba in his novel Ten Days, Mr Cain? (Secker & Warburg, 1977).

In the latter instance, I slipped the reference into a subsequent book, Welcome to Big Biba. But even so, it wasn’t until I later re-visited Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (Secker & Warburg, 1975) that I found another wonderful bit about the hero’s wife nipping up to London on a regular basis to spend a dirty weekend with her lover, occasions which she liked to call ‘Biba weekends’, since she’d always visit the shop when in town.

So I put that bit into my most recent book, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, since I figured it was unlikely I’d write a third book on Biba.

Now, however, I find something that should have been included in Crisis? What Crisis? And, in the absence of anywhere else, I thought I’d write about it here.

Towards the end of that book, I suggest that the principal political split in Britain at the end of the 1970s could be summarised by two interpretations of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

On the one side was Margaret Thatcher, who explained the moral of the tale to Brian Walden on Weekend World in her first major TV interview after her election as prime minister in 1979. ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions,’ she remarked; ‘he had money as well.’

And, she said, this confirmed her vision of the society she wished to build, a society that eschewed the socialist obsession with egalitarianism. ‘If opportunity and talent is unequally distributed, then allowing people to exercise that talent and opportunity means more inequality, but it also means you drag up the poor people, because there are the resources to do so.’

On the other side of the political divide, there was the veteran left-winger Ian Mikardo who celebrated in his memoirs (Back-Bencher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988) the frequently derided figure of the political activist, as opposed to the much vaunted silent majority.

These latter he characterized as: ‘the people who stay silent, who don’t utter a word of protest against the fruits of social injustice and deprivation; or against the system which hoards mountains of food in cold stores in rich countries whilst millions starve in the waste-lands; or against the erosion for company profit of the world’s natural resources, and the pollution of its air and its rivers and its oceans; or against the slide towards nuclear war and nuclear winter and nuclear holocaust.’

And, he concluded: ‘The Good Samaritan was an activist: those who passed by on the other side were members of the silent majority.’

(There was yet another interpretation of the Good Samaritan, this time from the one serious student of the New Testament in the House of Commons. Enoch Powell insisted that the story had to be understood in the historical context of those who heard it first, an audience who would have understood the racial relationship of the Jews and the Samaritans: ‘If the parable has a “moral”, it is that Jews and Samaritans should remember that they are not merely neighbours (literally) but kinsmen.’)

Having spent some time exploring this dispute over political interpretations of the teachings of Jesus, I was a little miffed today to find another reference in the popular fiction of the era. So I thought I’d mention it now.

I’ve been reading Anthony Price’s splendid Our Man in Camelot (Victor Gollancz, 1975), undoubtedly the best Cold War espionage thriller with Arthurian overtones I’ve ever read. And in it a CIA agent explains that ‘the moment of gratitude was also the most vulnerable one.’ In other words:

‘Remember what the Good Samaritan probably said to the guy as he rolled on the bandages: “Going down to Jericho, eh? Say, maybe you could give me an introduction to the Chamber of Commerce there?”’

Social networking – that’s the point of charity. Apparently.

Gambling on Gordon

The first bet I ever placed was in 1984, and paid off very nicely when Pebbles romped home to victory in the 1000 Guineas at odds of 16-1. The following year I backed Dennis Taylor at the start of the World Snooker tournament to win the title at 25-1, though a last-minute loss of confidence saw me take the each-way option, to my subsequent regret as he came back from seemingly inevitable humiliation to beat Steve Davis on the final ball of the final frame.

Somewhat predictably, I peaked too early, and my sporadic gambling career has been marked by a series of lost stakes ever since. The sequence of ill-considered punts culminated some eighteen months ago, as Tony Blair was preparing to vacate Downing Street, with what I’ve promised myself was definitely my last bet: twenty quid said that Peter Hain would be the next leader of the Labour Party.

As you’ll have noticed, I was entirely wrong. Hain didn’t get the leadership. He didn’t even get the deputy-leadership. In fact, shortly after coming fifth in a field of six for that job, he was obliged even to step down from the cabinet altogether, after some controversy over campaign contributions.

Despite the loss of the money, though, I still reckon my reasoning was sound. I argued that Gordon Brown was so clearly the wrong man for the job that Labour MPs would see the error of their ways and would decide against an act of collective political suicide.

Obviously the party cards were stacked in his favour, but equally obviously he could never put together the kind of cross-class coalition needed to defeat a Tory Party that was so successfully reinventing itself under David Cameron. Why, then, would Labour MPs vote in a leader almost guaranteed to lose them their jobs at the next election?

As we celebrate the completion of Brown’s first year in office, none of this seems to have been invalidated by events.

Admittedly my endorsement of Hain was less prescient – but it’s hard to see how he could have made a worse fist of being prime minister than Brown has done. My logic said that he was old enough not to stand in the way of younger pretenders for too long, and could have made a decent compromise candidate, taking Labour to probable defeat, but leaving Cameron with a minority government or – at worst – a very small majority.

In any event, the Labour Party evidently wasn’t thinking what I was thinking, and now it’s stuck with a leader who appears destined to emulate Jim Callaghan’s unenviable record of being prime minister without ever winning a general election.

The similarities between Brown and Callaghan are striking. Both followed a prime minister who had proved adept at winning elections (three triumphs for Blair, four for Harold Wilson), but who had lost the support of the party, was considered a bit too shallow and gimmicky, and seemed exhausted by office. In both cases, the new incumbent was a former chancellor who was regarded as a good Labour man, a safe pair of hands with a strong emotional and structural attachment to what used to be known as This Great Movement of Ours.

And yet, once in office, they disappointed their followers, pursuing right-wing economic policies almost indistinguishable from those of the Conservative Party, and finding themselves locked in damaging pay disputes with public sector workers whose support should have been automatic.

Both have been castigated for failing to call an election: Callaghan in autumn 1978, and Brown in autumn 2007. In both cases they would probably have won, Brown by virtue of novelty at least. Callaghan went on to lose to Margaret Thatcher the following year; Brown has the comfort of another two years before time runs out.

Both faced rising enthusiasm for nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. And both were vulnerable to English suspicion for representing constituencies outside England.

The differences between the two men, however, are proving ever more significant as the months pass.

Callaghan was, above all, distinguished by his enormous breadth of experience in office. He had been a minister in the government of Clement Atlee (at the department of transport, he’d introduced cats’ eyes and zebra crossings to the nation’s roads), and apart from being chancellor, had also served as home secretary and foreign secretary. Quite possibly he will prove to be the last ever prime minister to have also held the other major offices of state. And while he hadn’t been a conspicuous success at any of those previous jobs, he did at least know in some considerable detail how government and Whitehall worked.

Brown, on the other hand, spent fourteen years on the opposition benches before being catapulted into Number Eleven. He’s never run – or even participated in running – a spending department. For someone who, unlike Blair, hasn’t shied away from the word ‘socialism’, it wouldn’t have done any harm to have known what it was like to argue for more resources, rather than simply to hold the purse-strings.

Beyond the economy, the difference in style was evident in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election last month, where the Tories celebrated taking their first by-election seat from Labour since Ilford North thirty years ago.

That election, back in 1978, came just weeks after Thatcher’s famous World In Action broadcast in which she successfully appealed to the supporters of Enoch Powell, warning that ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. In the election itself, Sir Keith Joseph built explicitly on this position, with a direct plea to the Jewish vote: ‘Therefore I say that the electors of Ilford North, including the Jews – who are just like everyone else, as the saying goes, only more so – have good reason for supporting Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party on immigration.’

The effect was all that could have been hoped for, and the defeat of Labour’s Tessa Jowell was greeted with dismay on the left: ‘The party is depressed at the apparent success of Thatcher’s exploitation of the race issue,’ noted Benn glumly in his diary

In Crewe & Nantwich it was the Labour Party that was accused of playing the race card, from their slogan for Tamsin Dunwoody (‘One of us’) downwards. Callaghan was not exactly in the progressive vanguard when it came to race and immigration (‘We don’t want any more blacks in Britain,’ he’d told Benn in 1970), but under his leadership, at least Labour didn’t descend to the dog-whistle. To do so, and then to lose, looks like the tactics of desperation.

Then there’s the question of temperament. Callaghan’s public persona was that of Sunny Jim, a cheerful calming presence in times of trouble. His image of unflappable reassurance may have cost him dear in the winter of discontent (prompting the famous ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ misquote in the Sun), but mostly it stood him in good stead and saw him retain a high level of personal support: before, during and after the 1979 general election, he scored higher in opinion polls than did either his party or Thatcher.

Nowadays, Brown trails even Labour’s lowly standing in the polls. And despite all attempts to re-vamp his image and all the encouragement to smile more often, he still looks as though a slightly sulky gloom is his default position. One can’t help but be reminded of P.G. Wodehouse’s comment that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’

Most important of all is the difference between the two men’s assumption of office. Callaghan came through in 1976 as the victor in a contest that saw a host of substantial and weighty challengers: Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland, Tony Benn, Denis Healey and Michael Foot, any one of whom could make a plausible case as a potential prime minister. They were the best and brightest candidates available, and they came from right across the spectrum of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Had Brown faced a similar field a year ago, he would probably still have won, but he would have emerged with the kind of unquestionable authority that he now so patently lacks. It would have been hard for the press to indulge in the promotion of, say, David Milliband’s cause if he’d already been seen off by Brown.

And of course it would have given me at least an outside chance of seeing a return on my stake.

But then again, to return to one of my few successes at the bookmakers, in 1985 Dennis Taylor was eight frames to nil down before he staged that remarkable comeback to snatch victory from Steve Davis. A rotund, uncharismatic figure from the Celtic fringes proved capable of overcoming the golden young star who everyone thought was invincible. And he did it by sheer resilience and a refusal to accept defeat when it was staring him in the face.

Maybe, just maybe, Brown is not the new Callaghan at all; maybe he’s the new Dennis Taylor.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.