The Rest Is History - 418. Britain in 1974: The Crisis Election (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Three days after one of the most devastating IRA attacks launched upon British soil, the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath called an election, in circumstances that had never been more dire. Running against him was the veteran Labour leader, Harold Wilson, now as tired and beleaguered as his rival, and whose party was increasingly divided by internal conflict. Jeremy Thorpe, the charming but reckless leader of the liberal party, had also thrown his hat into the ring. As the election drew closer, the parties were neck and neck, and with the sense of national hysteria and economic chaos rising, escalated by a baying press and the likes of Enoch Powell, the stakes had never been higher. Could the longstanding Labour and Conservative duopoly finally be broken? Join Dominic and Tom for the second part of their series on 1974, one of the most disastrous years in British history, as they discuss the terrible circumstances surrounding the seismic February election, and its momentous outcome.     *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The coach left from Chorlton Street, Manchester, just after 11 on Sunday evening, picking up speed as it reached the M62. It was packed with servicemen and their families, young men telling jokes under their breath, young wives trying to get some sleep, children snoring or staring out of the window, who had spent the weekend with friends and relatives in Manchester and were now heading back to their barracks in Catterick and Darlington. Normally, they would have taken the train, but of course there were no trains because of the

strike that had crippled the railway network since December. So the army had booked a North Yorkshire coach company to pick them up. As it happened, the driver, Roland Hanley, was a director of the firm and knew the route well. By midnight, he had almost reached Leeds, making excellent time along the motorway, and behind him many of the passengers were fast asleep. And then it happened. One moment, the coach was cruising smoothly and effortlessly through the night. The next, there was an almighty, heart-stopping bang. So Dominic, that's from your book, State of Emergency, The Way We Were, Britain, 1970 to 1974. And tell us what's happened.

So the date is the 4th of February, 1974. And this is one of the most devastating attacks launched by the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, on British soil. So what has just happened to that coach, packed with servicemen and their families, is that 25 pounds of high explosive have gone off in one of the luggage lockers. The whole rear of the coach was torn apart. Roland Hanley, from the reading, was one of the directors of the coach company. He somehow managed to, God knows how, to steer the rest of the coach towards the side of the road. He had been in the RAF in Cyprus, so he'd seen stuff, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he got out. Because he gets out and he sees that the whole of the back of the coach is kind of blackened wreckage. It has literally been shredded by the

bomb. There are bodies all over the motorway. There are people staggering off the coach covered in blood. In all, 12 people were killed that night, 11 of them immediately and one later. 50 were injured. A whole family was killed. The Houghton family, Corporal Clifford Houghton, he was 23. People got married much younger in the 70s than they do today. So he was 23 and he had two children, a five-year-old and a two-year-old, and is this terrible sore, I guess, of the violence in the political conflict in Northern Ireland, which as we said last time,

it kicked off in the late 1960s. It's absolutely worthy of Arrested History series on itself. But what has happened is that after years of terrible violence in Belfast in particular, the provisional IRA have decided to bring their campaign to what they see as the heart of the enemy, to Britain itself. And so from March 1973, they've been detonating bombs at various points, particularly in London or in Birmingham. This is one of the worst so far. And their strategy for doing this is basically because even though people are dying in huge numbers in Belfast and Northern Ireland, most people in Britain, they're aware of it, of course, as background noise.

But they just wish it would go away. Absolutely. And so the aim is partly to force the government to negotiate and hopefully withdraw from the IRA's point of view. But also just to kind of rouse public opinion in Britain against Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom. Exactly. It's almost, I suppose, to sort of bludgeon British public opinion into pressing for British withdrawal. Yes. I mean, some of our listeners from Ireland or Northern Ireland may be surprised to hear you say that it's background noise, but all the opinion polls, all the survey evidence shows that

actually most people in England, Scotland and Wales, they'd never crossed the Irish Sea. They'd never been to Northern Ireland. They didn't understand it. And frankly, terrible thing to say in some ways, they didn't care. Yeah. They found it confusing and they were depressed by the news, but they didn't really understand it and they didn't devote an enormous amount of thought to it.

And the same is true of the government. You say in State of Emergency that Northern Ireland was not even the government's main priority. So effectively a civil war within the fabric of the United Kingdom and it's not their main priority. Because as we heard in the first episode, Edward Heath has a load of other things on his plate. Well, Edward Heath is struggling with lots of different things. I mean, by the way, the government do spend, particularly somebody like Willie Whitelaw, who's Heath's lieutenant in Northern Ireland. They spend a lot of time on Northern Ireland trying to, as it were, solve it. And they consider all options.

So redrawing the border, giving Northern Ireland more autonomy, giving it less autonomy, even withdrawing from Northern Ireland is an option that's very much on the table in the mid-1970s. And the thing that I hadn't realised, but was reminded reading your books again, is that actually, in a way, most people might think that it's Britain that wants to keep Northern Ireland and it's the Republic of Ireland that wants to get it. But actually, it's the other way around, certainly in the early 1970s. I mean, the Irish foreign minister is hassling Kissinger to lean on the British government not to withdraw. Not to get out. Yeah, not to get out. Amazing. Extraordinary, I know. And we should definitely go into that in greater detail when

we come to a series on the Troubles. But for the time being, it's just worth saying, because this is a podcast series about British politics in 1974, that throughout the rest of the year, there is an IRA bombing pretty much every week in Britain. So on the 13th of February, for example, what is that? Just nine days after the M62 bombing, there is a bomb in Latimer, Buckinghamshire, the National Defence College. Some people are hurt, but nobody is killed. So there is that. There was also the attempts of the British authorities to try and find the culprits. So with the example of the M62 bombing, they effectively coerce a confession out of a mentally ill woman called Judith Ward, a confession that proves to be completely erroneous. And it's not the last time it will happen.

A bomb attack in 1974. Bomb attacks and then terrible miscarriages of justice that will follow. And also just to say that, of course, this is a coach that is taking people from the army. Yes. So from the point of view of the IRA, the army are a particular target. Yeah. But they are also letting off bombs that will target civilians in London.

Department stores, shops, restaurants. And as we will see in due course, pubs as well. And pubs as we will see, exactly. So this is the background to the election that we ended the last episode with, the February 1974 election, which Ted Heath calls three days after the M62 bombing. So as we said, Britain literally feels like a dark place. It's the three-day week, streetlights turned off, no floodlighting, electric sort of neon adverts turned off. You say in your book, nobody could remember an election in grimmer circumstances. Well, nobody can. There's never been an election in people's memory in which the stakes seem higher or the context seems gloomier. Or the chance of a positive outcome.

Yeah. Just seems impossible. Just seems more remote. Because again, you quote the Nuffield study of the election that was written after the election. You say it was an unpopularity contest between two contenders, widely seen as incompetent on the major issues. Yes. So thank goodness that's never happened again. No, that would never happen again in British politics. Exactly. Definitely won't be happening this year.

So, right, let's start with Heath. So Heath has called the election and the message of his campaign it's the perfect example the story of what was later to happen to theresa may in 2017 you call an election on one issue and actually you find the public want the election to be on a whole load of other issues you don't control the narrative but anyway heath believes he will control the narrative his theme is going to be that he's the man of destiny the yachtsman steering the nation, Tom, through choppy waters. Towards the rocks. He has this manifesto that basically says, Labour and the unions are far left. They are dangerous. They are a threat to the nation. Union barons is the phrase.

The union barons. Yeah. The union barons was absolutely the uh the daily express phrase du jour over mighty subjects yes so that's what he says once you know young men who are writing heath's manifesto and more on nigel lawson douglas heard people who would become ministers later for margaret thatcher heath himself is actually quite uneasy with all this because he as we said last time is a corporatist by instinct a kind of a paternalist a technocrat and actually they will send him out to go and give speeches and they'll say go and get people really excited about how terrible the unions are and stuff and actually he'll just revert to his default and start talking about you know to get around the table moderation

sensible people and stuff so his advisors are slightly kind of pulling their hair out. However, the good news for them is that they're not the Labour Party, because the Labour Party, which is the opposition, seem to be in a terrible state. And this is where we should introduce a tremendous character in this week's podcast, who is Harold Wilson, Heath's rival. Yeah. Exactly the same age, born in 1916. His father was an industrial chemist from Huddersfield, and he'd gone off to Oxford, and he'd been an absolute intellectual star at Oxford. He's supposedly, Tom, got the highest mark ever in his economics papers and became an economics don at Oxford when he was about 12.

Yes. And then became a kind of government statistician, a backroom boy. He became a big rising star in Clement Attlee's Labour government. Everyone says of Harold Wilson, he's very cunning. You can't completely trust him,

but he's a very decent man, Wilson, in some ways. He's kind-hearted, isn't he? Kind-hearted. I always say, Wilson is the man you want as your neighbour. He's the man that your lawnmower is broken. You want to borrow a lawnmower. Harold Wilson will lend you his lawnmower with a cheery smile.

If you don't give it back straight away, that's fine. You can go round and have a drink with him a few days later. Take the lawnmower back. Have a lovely time. He's quite suburban, Harold Wilson. So all his Labour colleagues slightly despise him. Because he has tinned salmon, doesn't he? His tinned salmon, what he claims to to prefer tinned salmon to smoked salmon.

You imply that he genuinely did. I think he probably, there is a pooterish side to him. So he likes Agatha Christie. Yeah. He likes playing golf. He's a very Sandbrookian figure. Thanks. Thanks. I don't play golf. No, but these are your people, Dominic. Yeah.

Well, they're the heroes of your books. They're the kind of people who are making modern Britain and who often get written out of the narrative. Theo has texted in the chat, he loves the garden centre. And that's absolutely right. Well, I tell you what he really loves, of course, he loves the Boy Scout. And I mean that not in a sinister way. Tom, wow, what a revelation.

I mean, you say that he's inspired by scouting far more than he is by socialism. And there are always extraordinary photos of him wearing unbelievably tight boy scout star shorts. Because he goes on holiday to the silly isles off the coast of Cornwall every year. Which is a very, very kind of Britain in 1974 kind of destination. It is. And he will wear these shorts, sort of khaki shorts, and he'll tuck his shirt into the shorts very tightly and smoke his pipe

and sit on the rocks with his boys. That's absolutely how it was. He was supposedly the Queen's favourite Prime Minister, wasn't he? Yeah, because of all this, because of the garden centre. And also, Tom... But he's kind and he's funny, as well as having a certain animal cunning.

He wins four out of five elections that he fights. So actually, the British people would look at Wilson. I mean, some people despise Wilson, sort of businessman and stuff. And indeed, members of the security services, as we'll find out. Exactly. But I think a lot of ordinary people not interested in politics looked at Harold Wilson. They thought, ah, good old Harold. He's like me. He's not really interested in politics. Great. Good for him. And of course, I mean, his greatest achievement to give the

Beatles MBEs. Yes. And to keep Britain out of Vietnam. Two great achievements. Anyway, poor old Harold Wilson, who had won power in 1964 as the man who was going to modernise Britain, wearing a sort of Macintosh, plastic Mac. Is it a Gamix? Gamix. Gamix. Gamix Mac. The white-eater technology. He is very shop-soiled by 1974.

He's knackered. He looks like he's sort of aged a thousand years. He's really bruised from having been defeated in 1970 by Heath, but he's somehow managed to cling on to the Labour leadership. And in due course, he will succumb to Alzheimer's. He will do, yes. And are there not theories that even at this point, he is starting to suffer memory loss? Or do you think not?

I think probably not memory loss at this point. But it is certainly true that the people who are around him, who are closest to him, so there's his press secretary, Joe Haynes, his policy advisor, Bernard Donoghue, who have written very detailed memoirs and diaries about this period. They would say, you know, he's not what he was. He's tired. He doesn't always do his homework. He sort of sometimes does forget things. He drinks too much. All this kind of stuff. Now, whether, you know, this really is prefiguring the Alzheimer's or whether this is merely the exhaustion and the sort of the weariness that come from a long career in politics, it's hard to say. And which Heath also is suffering from. Which Heath is also suffering from, of course. Exactly. I think it's a sign of the pressures of the 70s what's happened though is that when labour left office the party had swung you know as so often it had swung well to the left and in

those days the direction of the party was determined not so much by the leader but by the national executive committee and by the party conferences they would decide the policies and they would decide the manifesto whether the leader liked it or not. So actually, when Heath calls that election, Labour, which is a party becoming increasingly torn apart between its sort of more middle-class, high-minded parliamentary representatives and the union leaders and the ordinary activists. So this is the classic division that you've often mentioned before between the prune juice drinking sandal wearers.

Yes. And the horny handed sons of toil. Exactly. Exactly so. It is becoming more and more sort of pulled apart. Not to stereotype in any way, but... No, but I mean... Yeah, it is a division. These are stereotypes that people used a lot of the time.

Yeah. And it's got a manifesto that has been drawn up by the left of the party that commits the Labour Party, formerly technocratic under Wilson in the 60s, to a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families. So this famous line. for this is a man called Tony Ben, who will be familiar to regular listeners of the podcast because he was the winner of the second historical Love Island, wasn't he? He was. Who did he win it with? Mary Fisher. She was a top Quaker. So it was a very earnest

pairing. He's very earnest, Tony Ben. He was formerly Viscount Stansgate. He renounced his peerage and he's reinvented himself as the Tribune of the Plebs. He walks around in a kind of parka and a rack, shaking hands with shop stewards and with people on picket lines and saying he can't wait to basically nationalize everything. Indeed, he does want to nationalize everything. So Tony Benn has got this staggering plan. Labour, when they get in, are going to create something called the National Enterprise Board.

And the National Enterprise Board, which sounds very boring, what it will actually do is it will force all of industry to sign planning agreements with the government. So five-year plans and stuff. Ben wants to have an Emergency Powers Act and an Emergency Industrial Act that will allow him to take over the top 25 companies in Britain. And effectively run them himself from Whitehall. And a lot of his own Labour colleagues think this is absolutely bonkers. So my favourite line, which will be completely lost on our overseas list, is Dennis Healey, who is the shadow chancellor, said to him, yeah, what a brilliant idea. Why don't we nationalise Marks and Spencers to make it as good as the co-op? Because Marks and Spencer is slightly top end and the co-op isn't.

And Tony Benn was very offended by this and said, this shows that Dennis is actually very right wing and capitalist running dog and all this sort of stuff. But this is the plan that Labour are going to the public with. They're going to nationalise those things. They're going to force companies to sign planning agreements. This in the context of the massive inflation and the credit crisis and all of that stuff. But also, Tom, they're going to have a referendum on leaving the European common market. Madness. And Britain's only been in for a year.

Yeah. Tony Benko, they say, oh, this is a terrible capitalist plot. It's a capitalist plot by pampered European fat cats. Well, I mean, he's not entirely wrong. The European Union is, as it becomes, is very capitalist, isn't it? I suppose it is. I mean, so Jeremy Corbyn,

who in a way is Tony Benn's kind of political heir, almost certainly, I'm pretty sure, voted to leave in the more recent referendum. Yes, exactly. Exactly right, Tom. So if you're a pro-European, the thought of Labour winning power on this kind of agenda is quite worrying. It was genuinely very worrying.

And of course, this is the most radical agenda that anybody has really gone to the public with since, what, 1945? Arguably even longer, because someone like Tony Benn seems to the press to be a Bolshevik, you know, a sort of somebody who is going to turn Britain into a North Korea. All this stuff that you see in the newspapers. Well, Warsaw Pact country, kind of East Germany or... East Germany, exactly. Exactly. But isn't, ironically, the figure in the Labour Party who comes up with the phrase that articulates this sense of dread on the part of the middle classes and so on, is actually Dennis Healy, who made the joke about Marks and Spencer.

Because he comes up with the famous phrase that his aim is to squeeze the rich and make the pips squeak. And it's that phrase, making the pips squeak, that kind of gets written up by the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Telegraph. Exactly. So Dennis Healey, who actually is going to turn out to be a much more pragmatic chancellor and arguably much more sort of right wing than anybody anticipated. What's happened is that the sort of left wing mood has sort of seeped into the rhetoric of even people on the right of the Labour Party. Actually, what he says is, we're going to squeeze property developers until the pipsqueak. But that, as you say, is written up as, they're going to squeeze the rich and the middle classes. Oh no, what a disaster. Of course, this is at a time when taxes are very, very high. So the highest rate of income tax is

83%, Tom. And so Dennis Healey, he kind of storms the beaches at Anzio. Yes. Friend of Edward Heath, as you said in the first part. Yeah. Always boasting about his hinterland. Yeah. Always kind of dropping poets into conversations. Yeah, he'll talk about Flaubert or Turgenev or something and annoy people by doing that. And I was startled to learn from your book that one of his favourite things to do at weekends was to answer the phone in the broken English of a Chinese laundry proprietor.

Yes. That was unexpected. So Dennis Healy broken English of a Chinese laundry proprietor. Yes. That was unexpected. So Dennis Healy is one of my favourite people, Tom, I've ever lived with. Huge eyebrows. Massive eyebrows. He went to the same Oxford College as Ted Heath. And you. And me.

And indeed, Roy Stewart from the rest of politics. So all good. He's a great family man. He does spend all his time hanging around in the House of Commons. He likes to go home and be with his family, which I admire. Like Tony Benn. Also very uxorious. Like Tony Benn. But unlike Tony Benn, he's an enormous bully. So he's extremely rude to other Labour MPs. He'll deliberately drop in conversation, references to Tolstoy.

Quotes from Yeats. Yeah, quotes from Yeats. Exactly. He does exactly what Dennis Healy does. Yeah. But then he'll also try to have fights with them. You know, he's a bruiser. He'll F and blind at them. I just think he's an absolutely splendid man at top. Dennis Healy is the man I would like to be, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I can see that, Dominic. I can see that. So anyway, that's the Labour Party. They've got their tremendously left-wing manifesto. Nobody thinks they're going to win, really, but people are terrified in the city, in business and so on. They're absolutely terrified about the prospects if they do. So if you are rich in February 1974, if you work in the City of London, if you own a business, things are looking very, very bleak for you. Taxes are very high.

Inflation is through the roof. There's been a property bubble that has now burst. There has been a banking bubble, which has also burst. So there are all these secondary banks in the city of London, the value of which has dropped in some cases by a third or half in the last few months. The news is full of bombings and stuff. The press is absolutely hysterical. I mean, people moan about newspapers now and on social media, people will laugh at what they see as newspaper exaggerations and things. But if you had read the papers in February, 1974, you would genuinely think that there was either a communist revolution or a kind of Weimar style meltdown probably happening on Monday. So you print some of the cartoons from this

election campaign in state of emergency, one of which is Tony Benn as an SS member carrying a whip, which I can't imagine anyone doing now, that kind of thing. No, very full on kind of cartoons. Or there's one in which Tony Benn is drawn with his plans for industry and taking over businesses. He is drawn. There's no way of sugarcoating this. He's drawn as a rapist dragging a woman by her hair. The woman is Britain or British industry.

And the woman is saying, no, no, no. And Tony Benn is saying, it's all for the good of the nation or something like this. I mean, just an extraordinarily incendiary cartoon. But in the context of early 1974, absolutely par for the course. People didn't even complain. Okay. So basically things are absolutely terrible for which clearly Heath bears a massive responsibility because he's been in power for the previous four years. But the argument is that Labour would make it even worse. That's essentially the position of the press.

Even people within the Labour Party, the high command of the Labour Party, think they're going to lose and actually don't really want to win. So Roy Jenkins, who had been Wilson's Chancellor, yet another university friend of Ted Heath. He just thinks we're going to lose and we deserve to lose. We don't have any sensible plans other than basically bribing the miners to go back to work. We don't have any answer to the crisis that we're in. So on the one hand, you have some of these people on the left of the Labour Party who are seized with this kind of real sense of excitement. They want to rebuild Britain and they've got these great plans to do it. On the right,

they were part of people who were very depressed. Harold Wilson himself is terribly hanged dog. He's sort of doing these tours of working men's clubs and sort of places in the north of England and stuff.

And he's like an old musical comedian. My dog's got no nose. Yeah. How does it smell? Take my mother-in-law. Oh, go on, take her. So he's sort of doing these last routines and then he'll go off into retirement. Right.

So basically, it looks as though the Conservatives are going to win. Yeah. That his scamble is paying off. There seems very little prospect of a Labour victory. But, ladies and gentlemen, is that actually the case? We will find out after the break. What a cliffhanger. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are looking at 1974, the worst year in modern British political history, according to top historian of the period, Dominic Sandbrook. And Dominic, we're looking at the first election campaign of 1974, and things seem to be going well for Edward Heath and the Conservatives, despite the fact that they've messed everything up. Are there any kind of chinks of light that might give Harold Wilson and Labour any encouragement at all? Tom, there are.

There are. Are there? So the polls are pretty much, they're vaguely neck and neck. The Tories are normally ahead. So sometimes the Tories are ahead by 5% or so. And Heath's strategists think, you know, people don't place as much store by opinion polls in the early 70s as they do today. And presumably they're not as common. They're not as common and they're not as accurate, frankly.

So Heath's advisors are pretty confident that by the time the public vote, they will get a margin of victory, you know, 5%, maybe 10% that they will do it. And almost everybody in the press thinks that. However, there are, as you say, chinks of light for Harold Wilson. First of all, there is another party tom that we haven't mentioned our old friends the liberal party led by yeah very much a friend of the show jeremy thorpe dog killing yes yeah we we did a podcast about jeremy thorpe's bizarre i don't know how to describe it because it's so Baroque.

He'd had a relationship with a stable hand called Norman Scott, who thought that Jeremy Thorpe had stolen his national insurance card. Jeremy Thorpe then conspired to have him murdered by a fruit machine salesman. Yeah, by a fruit machine salesman

and carpet salesman. They were either going to drop him down a mine shaft. They were going to to drop him down a mine shaft. They were going to have him fed to alligators in the Florida Everglades. Or they were going to poison him in the pub. Remember, he was going to fall off his bar stool in the pub. Yeah. They didn't do all that.

They ended up murdering his dog instead. They got an airline pilot to murder his dog. And it went to trial and Thorpe got off. But this is all later. Yeah. And you can hear it in, I think, the first episode we did on British politics in the 70s. I think that's right. Yeah. It's a fabulous episode. So anyway, at this point, Jeremy Thorpe, he's a bounder, isn't he, Tom? Yeah. He is an absolute... A cad.

A cad and a bounder in a very amusing way. He's a kind of Captain Hook style Etonian. Except he has two hands. And he's not the one who's being chased by large reptiles with huge teeth. No, he plans to set reptiles on other people. And he's also not a pirate. But he's the leader of the Liberal Party. Well, although, I mean, he's fond of a sea-going vessel, isn't he? Because in the second election, he's a great enthusiast for hovercraft.

He is, he is. The parallels, I think, are not far-fetched. Uncanny. So he leads the Liberal Party. He's very jolly. He's very amusing. As you think, are not far-fetched. Uncanny. So he leads the Liberal Party. He's very jolly. He's very amusing. As you say, he's very droll and wry. He'd been at Oxford with all these other people exactly at the same time, bizarrely.

Or not bizarrely. I mean, that's how Britain works. And he leads the Liberal Party, which kind of don't really stand for anything. They stand for Europe, proportional representation, and sort of being generally nice. Being nice. Yeah, being nice. Apart from the murdering Staplehand side. Yeah.

And all the time during this election, their ratings are steadily going up, day after day after day. Well, because if you think Heath's messed everything up, Wilson's going to mess everything up. Who else do you have to vote for, I guess? Exactly right. Exactly. Now, as we said, another chink of light for Harold Wilson is the three-day week has not turned out as melodramatic as people envisaged. So a lot of firms, they've made it

work. They're using candles and all this kind of thing. The weather is much milder. And so people think maybe it was really unnecessary. And maybe the election is unnecessary as well. Heath's been very annoying. I'm sick of Heath. Yeah. So there's your Theresa May parallel again. There's your Theresa May parallel. She went to the is unnecessary as well. Heath's being very annoying. I'm sick of Heath. Yeah. So there's your Theresa May parallel again. There's your Theresa May parallel. She went to the country early as well. Yes.

Then a bombshell time. We love a bombshell on the rest of history. A metaphorical bombshell, not a real one. On the 21st of February, the pay board, which is one of these very Heathite corporatist bodies, reports and actually says, you know what? Actually, the miners are a bit underpaid. We probably should give the miners more money. That's helpful for Heath. So that's incredibly unhelpful.

That couldn't be less unhelpful. Anyway, they get to the end of the penultimate week. So we get to the weekend of the 23rd, 24th of February. The election's going to be on the 28th. And Heath is still very optimistic. The polls are still putting him 5% clear. And then we have an intervention. I mean, British politics in the 70s

is full of such bonkers characters. And now we have perhaps the most, certainly the most controversial and one of the most interesting characters of all. And that is the Member of Parliament for the great city, not that it was a city then, of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton Southwest, a man of Birmingham, Tom, like the Holland family ancestors, I believe. And the Sandbrookes, right?

Well, we're more black country, to be honest. And this is Enoch Powell. So Enoch Powell. Yeah. How do you explain Enoch Powell, Tom? So Enoch Powell, probably best known as a translator of Herodotus. The youngest professor of Greek in the British Empire. Yes. Great scholar of Herodotus, but then went on to become a very significant figure in the Tory party, didn't he?

He did. And actually, I mean, it's a joke. He's not really best known for Herodotus. He's best known for his Rivers of Blood speech, where he predicted that the result of immigration into Britain would be kind of race war. Yes, exactly right. In 1968. So he was kicked out of the Tory. So he sacks him immediately, doesn't he? He did indeed. And he becomes an implacable opponent of Heath. But he's also a free marketeer, isn't he? He's a free marketeer. So all the kind of corporatist thing, when Heath introduces that, Powell is very, very withering about it.

Totally withering. In introducing a compulsory control of wages and prices in contravention of the deepest commitments of this party, has my right honourable friend taken leave of his senses? That's Enoch Powell. That is Enoch Powell. It's like he's in the room. That's not bad, is it? It's not bad.

I don't think it's as boring as that. Oh, he does. He talks in a low monotone. It is, but it's quite a hypnotic compelling monotone tom i don't think he's actually as brummy as that he's turned into a naughty holder there um yes that's a generic 70s no he talks like that through gritted teeth anyway enoch power has this massive following among kind of some tory grassroots but also people who are not interested in politics, but actually are interested in immigration. They don't like it.

Enoch was right. The Enoch was right. Yeah. There's a populist side to Powell, I think. Yeah. It's a fascinating character because on the one hand, he is by far one of the most cerebral members of the commons. You know, he's always kind of reading Houseman.

Speaks Urdu, doesn't he? Has taught himself Urdu and is sort of writing learned treatises about Herodotus around the Bible. But on the other hand, a lot of people, they the 23rd of February, the last Sunday of the campaign, at the excitingly glamorous surroundings of the Mecca Dance Hall in the Bullring, Birmingham. So if you remember the Bullring in the 70s,

probably the worst place on the planet. Well, unless you're Telly Savalas, in which case it's his kind of city. That's right, Telly Savalas did an advert for Birmingham. This whole podcast must be so obscure to so many people listening to it.

Anyway, he goes to the Bullring, which is terrible, this dreadful, brutalist building. He gives this speech and he says, the question is whether Britain will remain a democratic nation with its own parliament or a province in a European super state. So he's the prophet of Brexit, isn't he? He is the prophet of Brexit. And he basically accuses Heath.

Heath has sold out our rights and freedoms to Europe, which is exactly what a lot of people in the Labour Party, like Michael Foote, his friend, his good friend, Michael Foote, are saying, or Tony Benn. And he says, I'm not standing for re-election in this campaign because it's a false campaign. And he says, you should not vote for the Conservatives, for my party. You should vote for the only party that will give you a referendum on Europe,

which is the Labour Party. And this is, I mean, this totally dominates the headlines for the next few days. There's an extraordinary moment you can see on YouTube where Powell goes to Shipley, I think it is, and there are thousands of people, there are thousands locked out of the hall. Oh, yes. And he's giving a speech again saying, you know, get rid of Heath. Wilson is better than Heath.

And somebody shouted at him, Judas. It's like Bob Dylan. Judas was paid. Judas was paid. I'm making a sacrifice. He doesn't say it like that. He says it much more in an animated way. He said, Judas was paid.

Judas was, I am making a sacrifice. And anyway, again, massive headlines, huge sort of, is this going to be a big gift for Wilson? Is he not going to, are the working classes, the Tory working class is going to desert Heath and go for Wilson? Wilson doesn't think so. So Wilson is very despondent while all this is going on. He's very hang dog. His chief policy advisor, Bernard Donoghue, in his diary describes him slumped, tired, sour, scowling, his eyes dead as a fish. But that could be just as readily used as a description of Heath, couldn't it? Well, not this bit. He snarled at Joe about his speeches being too sophisticated.

He drank brandy heavily. Right. Okay. Not that bit. No, not that bit. But the bit but the other bit but both of them are just shot they're knackered they are depressed wilson i think particularly because he thinks he's going to lose and doesn't he set up a kind of weird thing where he's so confident he's going to lose he he kind of arranges for dummies to go on different cars so that he can't be tracked and he's going to end up in a farmhouse in the middle of the country. It's not quite dumb, but yes, it's basically. We'll get into that in just a sec, Tom.

It's a great story. So the last few days of the campaign, Wilson makes a final broadcast, very anodyne, just says, you know, I mean, it's actually terrible. Trade unionists are people. Employers are people. We can't go on setting water against the air. They're just meaningless babbles.

Centrist gibberish. The rest is politics, basically. Then Heath gives his final broadcast on the Tuesday, and this is absolutely ludicrous. There's footage of Heath on his boat, and the narrator says, an extraordinary man. A private man. A solitary man. Perhaps single-minded

sums it up. This is a man the world respects. A man who has done so much and yet a man who has so much left to do so you've got a choice of wilson saying nothing or heath on his boat on a yacht exactly yeah election day thursday all the papers say i mean the headlines are it's heath by five%, a handsome win for Heath. Nobody's actually voted yet. So this is literally counting the ballots before they've been cast. Wilson, as you said, Tom, he thinks he's going to lose. He tells his aides they're staying at this place, the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, where

he always stays on election night. But actually, he's going to trick the media. He's going to sneak out while everybody's watching the results out of a back door and take a car to another hotel the golden eagle in Kirkby then he will fly to London but the plane will be diverted and he will secretly land in Bedfordshire and he will drive to his house great stuff and when he says all this to his advisors they're like what i mean this i mean yeah also this is britain so these places are often like 30 miles apart it's completely mad yeah and then why is he doing this and they realize this is basically a getaway plan because he thinks he's going to lose and he wants to throw

the press off the sense he doesn't want anyone to track him down when he's lost. And also if he loses, then he will lose the leadership of the Labour Party. That's the end of his political career, Harold Wilson. So it's a gloomy afternoon, foggy, rain is falling. The British people are out voting. But Dominic, how does it turn out? What's the result? Well, all day the tension mounts, Tom. That evening, Wilson goes out on the last tour of his constituency, and it's an extraordinary scene told by his advisor Bernard Donoghue in his diary. He says, they go out, it's foggy, it's miserable, the streets are deserted. He says, we walked in the rain, just the two of us, Harold Wilson and myself,

lonely figures lost in anonymous wet streets. I sensed everybody saw him as a loser, finished, who would soon just be an old backbench MP. Just the mood is so funereal. Yeah. They get back to the hotel. Wilson pours himself a stiff drink and they sit down to watch the results. And at midnight, the results start coming in. And do you know what?

It's obviously going to be really really close the Tories are winning all their seats Labour are winning all theirs the toss-up seats there's only a few hundred votes in it of them and it's not until dawn really is broken the next morning Friday morning that the result is. And what has happened is this. Heath has not got his 5%, and he's definitely not got his 10% mandate. The Tories have won 37.9%. Labour have won 37.2%. And the Liberals, led by top bounder Jeremy Thorpe, have won a staggering 19.3% and virtually no seats. And the nationalist parties... So the SNP, Montgomery in Wales.

Yes. So basically lots of people have deserted the Tories and Labour for the Liberals and the nationalist parties. And isn't this a kind of seismic moment? Because up until now, basically it had been binary. It was either Labour or Conservative. And from this point on, the kind of duopoly has been broken. The duopoly has been broken. Exactly, exactly that. Now in seats, because of Britain's political system,

the picture is even more complicated. So the Liberals, with their 19%, they've actually got fewer seats than they have percentage points. They have 14 seats and almost a fifth of the vote tremendous that's first place the post is his best because we should explain for non-british listeners that the parliamentary system in britain is pretty brutal yeah for you know not for the large parties exactly if you finish a close second in every village and tower in the country you'll have no mps yeah that's the way it works. That's just life.

It's tough. So Labour have 301 seats. The Tories have 297. So despite having more votes. A higher percentage of the vote, they have fewer seats. And the Liberals 14. And what that means is that Heath can stay in power if he does a deal with the Liberals. So for the next few days, everything is chaotic and in flux.

Harold Wilson has gone through with his bizarre escape plan. So he's holed up in a farmhouse. He's smuggled himself out of one hotel into another hotel. There was talk of smuggling himself out of the other hotel. And actually, he's gone back to his farm in Buckinghamshire and he's holed up there waiting to see what happens. Heath is clinging on. And one reason he's clinging on is justification is going to be Europe to some degree, Tom, because the Tories and the Liberals are both nominally pro-European parties. And they don't believe in a referendum to get out of the common market.

But presumably, it's a measure of the fact that membership of the common market hasn't yet become the salient issue that it, for instance, has been in Britain over the past decade. Because I guess in that situation, if it happened now, the Liberal Democrats, who are the heirs of the Liberals, would definitely go into coalition with a party that was pledged to keep Britain in the EU. Yes, I guess they would. But back then it's not the deal breaker. No, because I think in most people's minds, the issue of the unions, the economy, and indeed the Heath government's performance, they loom much larger.

So why does Thorpe say that he's not going to go into coalition with Heath? Well, he doesn't straight away. So he also has an elaborate escape plan. People loved elaborate escape plan people loved elaborate escape plans in the 70s he sneaks out of his house in devon in wellies he trudges over some fields then gets a train or a lift to go and talk to heath and london thorpe actually loves the idea of going into coalition personally he would be home secretary tom so that would allow him to preside over his own trial for murder. Excellent. Later on. Yeah.

But it doesn't happen because, for two reasons. One, the sort of high-minded people who inhabit the Liberal Party, they hate Heath. They hate the confrontation. They think, why can't we just get around a table with the unions and give the miners what they want? They're sort of woolly people. They don't like Ted Heath. And also, they really want a reform

of the voting system they think that voting system that has penalized them yeah is unfair yeah shockingly which was the price that they demanded for going to coalition with the conservatives in 2010 yes with cameron now the difference is that in 2010 the tories were desperate to get into government and they also thought that they would win the referendum on changing the voting system, which they did. Heath and the Tories then, they don't really want to let the liberals in. They're knackered. They don't want to change the voting system. And they basically, their heart's not really in it. So on the Monday, Thorpe rings Heath and he says, listen, your guys don't really want it. My people really don't want it. It's not going to happen. We're not going to do this deal. And a very, very miserable Heath, who, as we've said, has been colossally unlucky, but has also played his hand, I think it's fair to say, with extraordinary ineptitude, political ineptitude. I mean, he's very well-meaning, Heath, but he's been so insensitive to the political pressures, I think, on other people.

And he's been so inflexible. Well, you say by conventional standards, his government had been a total failure. Yeah, I think in lots of ways. So for example, he didn't solve Northern Ireland. He passed all this industrial relations legislation that completely fell apart. He stoked a boom that then went to bust. Yeah, he stoked a boom that entered in total disaster. His heart is so obviously in the right place and where he wants to get Britain to seems so obviously reasonable, more modern, more efficient and all these things. But he just went about it in such a cack-handed way, Tom. So I'm quite torn about Heath.

Right. So you also say if his administration was a failure, it was not an ignoble one. No, he's not an ignoble person. He's definitely not an ignoble person. But maybe if he'd been a little bit more ignoble, he'd have been more successful. If he'd been a little bit more ruthless. Well, Harold Wilson has a very sort of cunning, conspiratorial side to him, as we'll discover next time. And if Heath had had a bit of that, he'd be more successful. Anyway, he goes off to Buckingham Palace with one of his civil servants, Robert Armstrong. He doesn't speak. You know, he's just silent. He's utterly shell-shocked. He's miserable. Wilson, meanwhile, has got a house at Lord North Street

in Westminster. He's waiting there with all his aides, and they're all bickering furiously. This is a prelude of what is going to happen. They're all squabbling and fighting. They're all tired and fractious. At seven o'clock that Monday, the 4th of March, he gets the call, would you come to the palace to meet the Queen? So so he goes they all go in a rented daimler his aides are all stuffed into the back of the car he and mary his wife go up to meet the queen the aides sit downstairs they're miserable because the palace heating has been turned off because of the three-day week and then no one's offered them a drink so they're all grumpy and then wilson comes out gets in the car he goes off to downing street when he was a little boy

maybe about nine or ten or something i mean he goes off to Downing Street. When he was a little boy, maybe about nine or 10 or something, I mean, he's talking about his love of shorts and he was wearing colossal shorts then. Do you think they were the same ones and they just kind of- Possibly, possibly. Continue to wear them throughout his life. His parents had photographed him, Tom,

as a little boy on the steps of number 10 because you could walk right up to it in those days. And now he gets out of the car and he's such a shabby looking figure you know kind of the shoveled gray crumpled suit yeah tired colossal bags under his eyes and he stands there outside the door the photographer's bulbs are kind of popping and he says uh we've got a job to do we can only do that job as one people. And I'm going right in to start that job now. But what follows, Tom, is more bizarre, comical and Baroque.

Yeah. So I've read all your books and I have to say that what is following is the weirdest and most darkly funny chapter in all your books. So if you are a member of the Restless History Club Union, then you can join us for beer and sandwiches in number 10, as Dominic put it yesterday, to hear the absolutely insane story of Harold Olsen and Marcia Williams. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. But if you don't want to do that, that's fine. You can join us on Thursday when we will be continuing the story of Britain in 1974. Thanks so much for listening.

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