The Rest Is History - 419. Britain in 1974: Countdown to a Coup (Part 3)

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Following a tumultuous election in February 1974, Labour’s Harold Wilson has been re-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Wilson, an unpretentious, kind man, has inherited a nation in crisis: train strikes in Norfolk, students fighting in Oxford, inflation, an ongoing oil crisis, a terrible cost of living crisis, striking miners, and weekly IRA terrorist attacks. He’s further hindered by his divided minority government, and the dysfunctional environment in Downing Street, in part due to his strange relationship with his private secretary and “political wife”, the frenzied Marcia Williams. What’s more, Wilson is suspected of being a KGB agent by the security services, and increasingly succumbs to paranoia. Is a right wing coup brewing, to put an end to industrial action? Will Wilson really be the man to drag Britain out of these trying circumstances? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the first Wilson government of 1974, featuring imploding economies, psycho-sexual dramas, communist conspiracies, madness-inspired nudity, baying unions, and attempted murder…  *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. As Hercules in days gone by took out his mighty club and got his rubber Nilo down to give the floors a scrub. So forward, Harold, once again to purge the stable's filth, your tiny mandate in your hand and redistribute the wealth. So that was Mrs. Wilson, Harold Wilson's wife, Harold Wilson, the new prime minister in March, 1974. And Dominic, that comes from Private Eye,

which is a satirical magazine run by sniggering public schoolboys, isn't it? Oh no, Tom. That's how it's always described. Shocking scenes. And they have this kind of ongoing thing, don't they, where they have maybe a spouse is commenting on the travails and affairs of a prime minister. So they did it with Mrs. Thatcher. They had Dennis Thatcher writing to Bill Deeds, who was what was he, the head of the Daily Telegraph or something. But in this case, this is Mrs. Wilson's diary. And Mrs. Wilson, the whole point about her, so she's an amateur poet, is that right? She was indeed. Yes,

she was a very keen amateur poet, Mary Wilson. And she had no interest in politics whatsoever. And this is quite a significant factor of the story we're going to be telling today, isn't it? Because in a sense, Harold Wilson has a kind of political wife. He does indeed. And the degree to which this political wife is fulfilling other marital duties is something we may come on to. But anyway, that's by the by. Yeah. Mrs. Wilson there, and she is urging Harold to get on there.

He's got a tiny mandate, but he's got to redistribute the wealth. And I guess there's a kind of inherent tension there, isn't there? There is indeed. There is indeed. So hello, everybody. Welcome back to 1974. So the date is Monday, the 4th of March. That's where we ended last time with Harold Wilson returning as prime minister after this tumultuous it would be fun to talk about what was actually in the papers that day. What was in the newspapers to give you a sort of snapshot of the flavour of national life. If you go through the sort of small print of the papers,

in Norfolk, in Norwich, there is an unofficial strike by railway guards, which means that all the trains are cancelled or delayed. Well, that never happens now. In Lincoln, there have been power cuts because police say that teenage snipers with air rifles have been firing on power lines or whatever. The little scabs. In Worcestershire, a rural vicar has made waves by complaining that state schools are pagan wildernesses, where what he calls a mild kind of sociology has replaced Christian values. Well, he's not wrong.

In Oxford, there has been fighting between different students, student groups, obviously very militant in the 70s, outside the university administration offices, and police have had to separate them. So Tory students and more left-wing students. Tory students. I mean, that is something you don't get nowadays. Absolutely. Well, a lot of students were conservatives in the 1970s, in leeds two irish republicans have been jailed for possessing

more than 60 detonators and 700 rounds of ammunition and that's a story that will obviously run through this podcast now there are a couple of sporting stories for you tom so one of them is a cricket story the england cricket team have just lost in barbados by 10 wickets so that's a lot yes for people who know nothing about cricket that's a very bad result and uh one sports reporter wrote i have never known a more chilling moment on tour the home truth is inescapable batting wise this england party is the weakest ever sent overseas limited in skill character character and guts. And so often sports is taken as a kind of barometer of the nation's wider fortunes.

And this is also the case in football. Now, this is a great moment, a very important moment in world history, because Wolverhampton Wanderers this weekend have won the League Cup, Tom, at Wembley. Well done, Dominic. Well done. And they have beaten Manchester City. And Manchester City's star striker, Rodney Marsh, who's one of the few footballers whose name would have been known to lots of people in the 1970s. Although, confusingly, the same name as the Australian wicketkeeper.

I mean, most people in England would never have heard of this fellow. He's got a massive walrus moustache. So Rodney Marsh, who was sort of very much a Jack the Lad, he had stormed off at the final whistle and he hadn't waited to collect his silver tankard from the Duchess of Kent. And the Daily Mirror, which was the best-selling paper in the country

in the early 1970s, said, they doubted if he will ever be totally forgiven for his sour, rancid attitude and his appalling lack of sportsmanship. Marsh spat on a tradition that in this country, the loser is expected to summon up a smile and not run away at the end to sulk and scowl alone. So Manchester City, popular as ever. Well, there is a lesson there as well, Tom, for the politician we were talking about last time, Ted Heath, because he is just about to

embark on the biggest sulk in history. Yes. He loves the sulk, doesn't he? The incredible sulk, he was called. He was indeed. So just to recap, the end of the last episode, Ted Heath failed in his attempt to have coalition talks with Jeremy Thorpe. In came Harold Wilson. So as we said before, he's the son of an industrial chemist from West Yorkshire. He was a brilliant prodigy, great mind, statistician, economist. He enjoys Agatha Christie, Gilbert and Sullivan. He has a very kind of, I suppose, in a very low key way, a kind of populist style, doesn't he, Tom? You have a wonderful description of him in Seasons of the Sun, your wonderful book about this, where you describe him as a quick-witted, kind-hearted, unpretentious little man. Yeah. It's a bit of a self-portrait,

to be honest with you, Tom. I was wondering about that. That is high praise in Sandbrook terms. Unpretentious is the ultimate word of approbation. Anyway, so Wilson has come back in. He's very tired. He's shop-soiled. He didn't expect to come in. He's got the most horrendous challenge, arguably one of the worst inheritances of any prime minister in modern British history. The miners are out on strike, if you remember from last time. Britain is still on a three-day week, and it's facing this colossal financial and economic crisis with a record trade deficit. They cared a lot about trade deficits in those days because that affected confidence in the pound. The Bank of England has

just raised interest rates to their highest rate in recent memory, 13%. The so-called secondary banks, the smaller banks are in meltdown. The stock market has lost a quarter of its value in just a month. So share price is collapsing. So this is a horrendous, horrendous challenge for anybody. And the thing is that Wilson, in 1964, when he'd first come in, he was the sort of the incarnation of kind of optimism and energy. And this time, he's not at all. He is knackered.

He keeps telling his advisors that he suffers from something that he describes as the squitters. Yeah, too much detail. He has all these eye infections. He just seems constantly ill. And the other thing is, it is very clear from his AIDS memoirs and diaries that he is drinking a lot. And he had been drinking during the election campaign. So Bernard Donoghue, who I'll mention quite a lot today and in the next

episode, because he was Wilson's policy chief, who wrote a really fascinating, brilliant, colourful diary. If you go through the Donoghue diary again and again, he mentions Wilson drinking. When he drinks, says Donoghue, he becomes very strange and aggressive. His brow lowers and a very strange look comes into his eyes, hunched and brooding. So he will say, you know, today before prime minister's questions in the commons, Harold drank four brandies. He had two more afterwards. 30th of October, he drank five brandies before prime minister's questions. 27th of November, Joe said he was all over the place. He drank too much at this lunch. And then he goes into the house of commons, gives a terrible performance. So this is coming up again and again.

So again, you in your book quote a treasury minister called Edmund Dell. Yes. Who thought that his colleagues were like the characters in Jane Austen's novel, sipping tea and fluttering their eyelashes while the Napoleonic Wars raged across the channel. But actually it's worse than that because they're not sipping tea. No, they're not. They're sipping brandy and whiskey. Well, I suppose the 70s is the sort of high point, isn't it?

The liquid lunch. Yeah. And there are all these, you know, if you read journalists' accounts, they will go for lunch with a cabinet minister and the minister would, you know, they'd happily drink a bottle of wine and a couple of snifters afterwards. And then go off and phone the IMF. Yeah, just to ease themselves into the afternoon. So I think British politics in the mid-70s feels like a very dandruff-flecked, tired, cynical, and frankly, alcohol-soaked environment.

But what's also going on in number 10 under Wilson is this much more sort of Baroque soap opera. So to give you a sense of this, on the first full day, he has lunch with his aides, Harold Wilson, number 10, and it's all fine. He's very pleased because it's English food. Wilson is a bit of a nationalist when it comes to food. He doesn't approve of French cheese, for example. Then the second day, day two, they go to lunch and it's all recorded in Bernard Donoghue's diary. He says, terrible lunch. We'll go upstairs to the small dining room. We discussed the central policy review staff and appointment. Suddenly Marcia blows up, already upset because we were eating whitebait. She says she hates them looking at her from the

plate. The PM solemnly announced that they were from the home for blind whitebait, so she need not worry. That broke the tension for a while, but then she blew up over Harold and me having a polite and friendly conversation together. She said it was disgraceful. She stalked out. H.W., that's Harold Wilson, the prime minister, followed his meal unfinished. Gloom. So Dominic, Marcia. Yes.

Who is Marcia? So Marcia Williams is the daughter of a Northamptonshire builder who had started working for the Labour Party in the 1950s. She'd been introduced to Harold Wilson and they'd become very close. And she basically became his private secretary, his absolutely indispensable right hand. She's the guardian of access to Wilson. She does his paperwork. She is, I mean, effectively- Well, she is his political wife. She is his political wife.

So this is the woman that we talked about at the start of the show. Right. So Mary Wilson hated politics, thought that her husband was going to be an Oxford economics don, and was gutted that he actually went into politics in the first place and made it very clear that she was never really going to take any interest in it or do anything but the bare minimum. So Wilson, from the 50s onwards, has had almost like this sort of second wife. So they travel as a trio. Marcia is always there in the background. She is the person who sits up late with him at night. Right. And so, I mean, just to be clear what that means, again, to quote you, Wilson himself once claimed that after a particularly blazing row, Marcia had gone to see his wife, Mary, and announced, I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn't satisfactory.

Well, yes. Quite an odd relationship. Yeah, very odd relationship. She would also say to the other aides, when they were having a big row, she would hold up her handbag and tap her handbag meaningfully. And she would say, one call to the Daily Mail and he'll be finished. I will destroy him. But she never says what the information is. No, what's in the handbag? Tom, what's in the handbag?

No one ever knows. And the thing about did they have a physical relationship? I think there is a sense that possibly they did. I mean, this is pure gossip and prurience to speculate whether they did or not, because it doesn't really matter. What matters is the intensity of the emotional relationship, which is undeniable. But there's something kind of slightly dominatrix about her, isn't there? I mean, again, reading you. Yeah.

She demands submission and obedience from Wilson. She does. Now, especially to our listeners who are not British or who are younger and don't remember this period at all and have no knowledge of it, all this will sound very weird, but to give you a sort of sense. So we talked about day two and the white bait bust up. On day three, there was another massive row at lunch in number 10 Downing Street. At the end of the meal, Marcia walks out in a temper. HW was clearly upset. She had attacked him viciously in front of the waiter. And then she goes straight home, and Donoghue, the policy guy, has to ring her up past midnight and beg her to come back.

She's very depressed and neurotic. She says, we're all out for ourselves. We're ganging up against her, and I'm out to replace her. She says she'll retire to her country home and wait for HW to sack us all, and then he'll have to come personally to ask a return. Now, this may sound madly histrionic, but I can't exaggerate how much time in any given day Harold Wilson and his chief advisors are spending on this issue. I mean, it comes up again and again. And so, Dominic, what solution do Wilson's advisors come up with to this problem that Marseille is basically dominating all their concerns in the midst of Britain's worst post-war crisis? Well, unbelievably, Tom, the opening weeks,

so when they've returned in March 1974, much of their time in the opening weeks is spent on very serious top-level negotiations about who will be allowed to have lunch. And the agreement is finally reached. She basically says, Wilson must eat lunch on his own. He is not allowed to eat lunch with his aides. She goes mad if she finds out they've eaten lunch with him. There's a wonderful description in Donoghue's diary. Harold was pleading for food, for sandwiches, but Marcy insisted that he sign her letters before he got his sandwiches. But there is worse.

There is far worse. It is mind-boggling. If you think Boris Johnson was the first prime minister to run a ludicrous and chaotic ship in Downing Street, you'll be very surprised by this. So first of all, they've obviously won the election unexpectedly. And they decide they're going to have a victory party at number 10. Now, Bernard Donoghue was a lecturer at the London School of Economics. So he has to go back to give one last lecture before he can kind of come in, in a sort of Henry Kissinger style way. He's come from academia to politics. So he goes off to give a last lecture, thinking the party's this evening at 8.30. And he and his

wife, Carol, turn up at 8.30 at number 10 Downing Street. But actually behind his back that afternoon, Marcia has canceled the party in a rage. So when he and his wife arrive, they're the only people there. And Wilson greets them, very sheepish and shamefaced, and actually says to them, Oh, hello. He says, it's all a pantomime. It's a riot, quite chaotic. Nobody outside would believe it.

A total pantomime. I mean, for him to say this about his own administration. Yeah. Well, at least he's self-aware. And he has a drink with them. And Marcia brings up half-fifth of the evening and gives him a 40 minute rollicking on the phone. For having a drink? For having a drink with Donoghue. And is this kind of jealousy of his aides? Yes. Jealousy of the other aides. But of course, the most eye-catching story, Tom. Yes. So this will have to be bleeped out.

So we're in the middle of the economic crisis, and she tells Harold Wilson that she wants him to come with her to a reception at the House of Lords. He goes to the reception. This is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But he and his speechwriter, Jo Haynes, sneak off from the reception to get back to Number 10 Downing Street to do some work. She comes back to Number 10 because she's spotted that he's missing from the reception.

And in full view of everybody there, the staff, she shouts at him, you little, what do you think you're doing? You come back with me at once. And did he go back with her? And he went back. Yeah. That does seem quite a kind of psycho sexual dominatrix kind of thing going on there. So Joe Haynes, who is his speechwriter, who was a very kind of hard-bitten man, a former newspaper man, he wrote in his memoirs about this and he said, you know, I was frankly very shocked at this, that you could speak to the Prime

Minister like this in front of everybody. Yeah, well, it is shocking. I mean, it's frankly very odd. It is very odd. I mean, it's inconceivable that somebody would have spoken like this to Ted Heath. Okay. So all this psychodrama is going on in number 10 and monopolizing Wilson's attention. But meanwhile, there is a country in crisis to run. So how are things getting on out on the streets, out in the country? Well, you will remember that the miners are out on strike. So the first thing that Harold Wilson does when he comes back is he settles with the miners.

So within days, the guy who's got to take charge of industrial relations, who our British listeners will recognize the name, Michael Foote, a sort of pamphleteer, radical pamphleteer, a journalist. Great enthusiast for Byron. Great enthusiast for Byron, a very erudite man, but not really one of life's natural administrators. He's been put in because the unions know he'll basically give them what they want. And he does. He gave the miners a wage settlement. You will remember, it asked for 35%. Foot gave them 32% wage settlement worth 108 million pounds. So that's double what Ted Heath was offering them. He basically bribes them to go back to work if you were being harsh. Now, what the Labour Party have done is they have

a policy called the social contract. So fans of Jean-Jacques Rousseau will enjoy this policy. What this involves is they say, listen, we will give the unions all kinds of goodies. So you'll get improved health and safety. You'll get anti-discrimination laws. You will get better pensions. You will get better sick pay. And the quid pro quo is that if we give you all these treats, you will not keep asking for more money. It's a contract, effectively. And is this a legally enforceable contract? No. No. It depends on the unions doing their bit. And also, as we described before, there are hundreds of trade unions. They're very competitive with each other. They're always trying to outbid each other. So actually, the people who run the union movement or sort of preside over it, so Len Murray, who's the head of the Trade Union Congress, he had said to Wilson, you know, deep down, actually, we won't really be able to deliver on our side of this bargain. Joe Gormley, the leader of the miners, had said to him, don't put us in a false position.

And I quote, our role in society is to look after our members, not to run the country. But the social contract was good politics. It made it sound like they had a solution to the problem of high inflation. But also Michael Foot is an incredible romantic, isn't he? Yeah. So he really believes it. Yes. Oh, Michael Foot, like a lot of people at that time, he had two things. One was, I would argue, they completely misunderstood the ability of the trade union leaders and willingness of the trade union leaders to deliver on promises to government. They ignored the union leaders when the union leaders said, don't ask of us something we can't deliver. But secondly, they have this incredibly rose-tinted romantic idea of trade unions and all of this kind of thing, which actually people who are closer to the union movement often say, you're being very starry-eyed and silly about this. They are hard-nosed negotiators. They will ask for the best deal possible. Doesn't one of the trade union leaders compare the government to a slot machine in Vegas where they're just pouring money out all the time?

Yeah. The postman's leader, Tom Jackson. The postman's leader, yeah. A gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that got stuck in favor of the customer. Well, because actually, if you look at what they gave them, the power workers got a 31% deal. The civil servants got 32%. The doctors, 35%. The dockers, 30%. So wages go up by about a third in the course of 1974. And the weird thing is that each time a given trade union leader would go into number 10, have his beer and sandwiches, actually smoked salmon and white wine, and then he'd come out with this massive pay settlement for his members. He would say on the way out often to the government, you can't keep doing this. I mean, this is mad. You can't keep giving me all this money.

But in private, of course. Yeah. Right. And because the oil crisis is ongoing, a bit like we've been going through with Ukraine, there's this massive spike. So inflation is going up everywhere across the world, but is it now starting to go up much further in Britain than anywhere else? Yes, this is the thing. Every Western European country is facing similar problems. Indeed, every developed country because of the massive spike in oil prices. However, within about a year of the Wilson government coming in, as a result of these pay settlements, prices are going up faster in Great Britain than they are in any other european

country by a margin of about five times tom five times five times faster in britain than anywhere else god and as a result of this because the money is pouring into the economy the prices of goods are going up as well so sugar 184 percent vegetables 137%. Even little things, sort of tin soup, the price goes up by 54%. Orange squash, 51%. So this is cost of living crisis on steroids. On steroids. So worse than the one that we've been going through over the past few years, do you think? That's a good question.

I would say it depends who you are, right? So if you are the power worker who's just got a 35% pay rise. It's brilliant. Well, it's not brilliant, actually. But you're keeping your head above water. You're keeping your head above water is what it is. Yeah. If you're not represented by a trade union, or you're a pensioner on a fixed pension,

or you're a student, or you're poor, this is unbelievably painful because nobody is getting you a pay rise, or if your union is weak and doesn't have any clout with the government. So it's at this point that you see a real kind of fracturing, a fraying of, well, I suppose you would say kind of class solidarity or a kind of a sense of national solidarity because inflation is dividing people into winners and losers. But also, Dominic, just to say that at this point, class consciousness is really, really important, isn't it? Much more important than it is now, in the 1970s, certainly people on the left will use the language of class much more quickly and automatically than they would today. And there was much more a sense of the great conflict in British society being one between classes, whereas I think now, Tom, it's between the

populists and the elite. People didn't really talk that way in the 70s. They much more talked about the bosses and the working man, people in top hats and people in cloth caps. People still use that quite dated language of class. I guess people on the left today might be ready to talk about race or sexual identity or whatever than class, but those are not issues that are seen as being salient to the same degree back in the 70s. Would that be fair? I think that's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. So to give you a sense, just before we go to the break, of what else is going on, Wilson's chancellor is a guy called Dennis Healy. We talked about him last time. He'd been in the landings at Anzio.

Big eyebrows. Loves quoting Yeats. Always quoting Yeats and talking about Russian literature. He comes in. Healy is, in many ways, a very cynical politician. He says, we're facing a massive economic crisis. On the other hand, we've got a tiny majority and there's going to be another election quite soon. So actually, we'll just- Yeah, chuck money at the problem. Throw money around. Throw fuel on the fire. So massive new spending on things like pensions and food subsidies and things like this. And

that's going to be paid for by taxes on the rich. So we were talking about the pips squeaking. So just to give you a sense of what those taxes are, the higher rate of income tax, Tom, as a representative of the rich yourself, I think you'll find this very painful. The higher rate of income tax was raised to 83%. And Tom, I don't know if you have investments, but if you did, the tax rate on the higher rates on your investments would be a very impressive 98%. Goodness. So this is when the Rolling Stones are going off to South of France and things, is it? Exactly so. Exactly. But not Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney stays and does his patriotic duty. Oh, that's nice. So Daily Telegraph readers, sort of Middle England, are in absolute and utter meltdown

about this. What's compounding all this is that, remember, some of our more attentive listeners will remember that the Labour Party have come to office with an incredibly radical manifesto. They're going to set up a national enterprise board to spend billions of pounds a year to buy up British companies and to institute massive state planning. And the man in charge of this is Tony Benn, the British Salvador Allende, as he was called at the time. And he came in and his own officials said to him when he arrived, well, surely you don't really mean it. You're not really going to do this, are you? And he said,

oh yeah, I'm very committed to this. And they started leaking against him, his own officials, amusing lists of companies that they thought would be soon for the government takeover. The Daily Express got this list from Ben's own officials. He was going to take over Woman's Own, nationalized Woman's Own magazine, Tom, Cow and Gate baby foods, Beaulieu sausages, baby Sham, the popular drink, Double Diamond, and the gourmet food emporium, Bernie Innes.

Because Tony Benn is very abstemious, isn't he? Yeah. He likes his tea, but not much else. I wouldn't have him running Harp and Baby Sham and Double Diamond.

No. I'm not sure I'd have him running a chain of restaurants. No. I mean, Bernie Innes were terrible as it was. But he could make them worse. Yeah. And actually, he has come in and he really believes that they're going to do this. He's absolutely devoted to this nationalization

plan. And actually, in June 1974, some of Wilson's other ministers, so the barons, the power brokers in the Wilson government, two men, they are Dennis Healy, we mentioned the chancellor, and they are James Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary, who are both on the right of the Labour Party and who are real bruisers. And Healy and Callaghan kind of team up in this period, and they're always going to see Harold Wilson, who's sitting there with his brandy. And they're always saying to him, you know, do this, do that, don't do this, and so on. And they go to see him, and they give him an absolute roasting and say, you have to control Tony Benn. You can't let him do any of this. And I quote,

otherwise there will be a total collapse of confidence and no investment. And Wilson just goes around saying to everybody, well, I'm not going to let Benn do anything. He's completely mad. I mean, that is the quote. He is completely mad. And he actually briefs the press to say that he thinks Tony Benn is mad and he's not going to allow him to do anything. So why doesn't he sack him if he And he actually briefs the press to say that he thinks Tony Benn is mad and he's not going to allow him to do anything. So why doesn't he sack him if he thinks he's mad? Because he's weak, Tom. I like Harold Wilson in lots of ways. I've gone on the record of saying I would like to have him as my next door neighbour. I admire his love of scouting and of Gilbert and Sullivan. His taste in shorts. Yes, his nice khaki shorts. However, he is quite a weak leader and he won't sack people but also he's leading a minority government yes so he has no real i mean mary in that poem that you read so

beautifully she mentioned his tiny mandate i mean he has no mandate he has no mandate at all does he so he's got this minority government they're totally divided the atmosphere inside number 10 is bonkers and they are staggering closer and closer, it seems, to economic disaster. So Dominic, in the previous episode, we talked about how many people in Britain were comparing the country to Weimar Germany, to Allende's Chile, both of which obviously resulted in, one might say, a swing to the right. And there is quite a lot of discussion, isn't there? There is. In gentlemen's clubs and so on about what can be done to solve the problem.

Well, the exciting thing, Tom, is that Britain's penichet is waiting in the wings and not just one of them. There are two. So I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, let's look at the plans for a right-wing coup. 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 the Wilson government, the first Wilson government of 1974 and Dominic we've been talking about psychosexual dramas, imploding economy. And we mentioned at the end of the first half of this episode, mutterings in gentlemen's clubs about a right-wing coup. So, I mean, it's this sense of anxiety that kind of retired colonels and so on are feeling. Is this shared across the whole country? Is there a kind of consciousness that everything is going tits up or do most people think actually you know

it's fine space hoppers and rally bikes and yeah all that kind of sandbrook stuff all right is that what that technical term is it yeah because this is your argument that the headlines are saying chaos disaster whatever but meanwhile people are getting on with their lives and enjoying new types of chocolate bar or washing machines or whatever, and they don't really notice. I think there is an interesting divergence here. So if you were paying that 83% rate of tax or 98% on your unearned income, as it was called at the time, if you invest in property or any of these other markets that have collapsed, then you are sitting there and saying, this is Weimar Germany, this is Chile, you know, 1973. The pauperization of the middle classes.

The pauperization of the middle classes, exactly. You know, the country's going to hell in a hand cart. It's time for the rule of the gun. However, if you're not one of those people, is life terrible? Arguably not, especially if your income has been protected by your union. Don't forget, just under half the country belong to a trade union. And those people, often, they're not doing that badly. So actually, not least because Harold Wilson has sent the miners back to work, the three-day week is over, the state of emergency is over. So I think people feel we've got the calmer, quieter life that we want. Now, interestingly enough, a lot of Wilson's own ministers don't think like that. So they are relatively well off, of course, because they're well paid. Government minister

salary was comparatively much higher in the mid 1970s than it is today. So they're among the better off people in society. They have gone abroad on holiday. And often the people who've gone abroad on holiday come back and they say, oh my God, the contrast is so painful. So Roy Jenkins, who's Wilson's home secretary at this period, he says, I know we're heading for catastrophe. I can't stand by, he says to Barbara Castle, and watch and see us pretend everything is all right. Pretend.

He would say pretend. Very good, Tom. Very good. That's the kind of forensic is all right. Pretend. He would say pretend. Very good, Tom. Very good. That's the kind of forensic- Attention to detail. Detail, yeah, that marks out the truly great historian, I think. And Donoghue, Bernard Donoghue, who is this former LSE academic, who was Wilson's head of the policy unit in number 10,

he writes in his diary himself, he's gone off for a month's holiday in France. The month's holiday in France that the head of policy is taking tells you something about the grim work ethic at the top of British politics. And he comes back and he writes this diary. He says, I can see England a little clearer now. It looks in a terrible mess. It's falling apart socially as well as economically. It seems very frail compared with France, which is becoming a giant again. This is very disappointing, Tom. I mean, this is what the middle classes do, is go to France and complain that it's much better than Britain, isn't it? Yes.

Is that anything unusual? I mean, they've always done it. Nelson went to France, Tom. I know, but not Nelson. After the American War of Independence was over, and he said it was awful and very poor compared with Britain. And he was middle class, and not every middle class person does it. Yeah, but to be fair, that was at the beginning of the 19th century. Yeah. And even then you had kind of Fox and- He did.

All the Whigs complaining that Britain wasn't like France. The comparison between Roy Jenkins and Bernard Donaghy on one hand and Horatio Nelson on the other has not been made often enough, I think, in discussions of the 70s. That's what this podcast is all about. Well, talking of ludicrous stuff, actually, the whole Marcia issue is blowing up again in the summer. So it's always good to have her back on the scene. So Wilson presumably has not gone to France.

He's gone to the City Islands. City Islands, as always. And while he's been in the City Islands, this issue has been brewing of slag. The British Watergate, an amusingly banal and ludicrous scandal. So it turns out that Marcia's brother, who's a man called Tony Field, don't worry, nobody has to worry really about remembering him. He has been involved with a bouffant-haired insurance broker from Wolverhampton. There's a lot of bouffant hair around in the 70s.

Called Ronald Millhench. And Ronald Millhench has a scheme to buy a slag heap. Holy implausible. To buy a slag heap near Wigan and to sell it to some property developers. I mean, this is so kind of like a 1970s comic novel. It is. Absolutely it is. Like Reggie Perrin or something.

Yeah. So he's trying to buy the slag heap. Now, the Labour Manifesto has said that they will try to crack down on people buying slag heaps, selling them off. Is this a big problem? Not a massive problem, but it's something that they just think is bad. But Milhench produces a piece of paper and he says, Howard Wilson's in on this deal and he's got Howard Wilson's signature on it.

Now, obviously, this is very implausible. And it turns out that Millhench is a fantasist, has forged a Howard Wilson's signature. But Marcia in particular, because it's her brother who's sort of semi-involved with this, she goes absolutely ballistic. And she is, having been very much on the edge since the election, she's now sort of been driven into full-scale histrionics. Donoghue's diary again. Marcia phoned HW and screamed at him saying he was a machine, not a human being. And he'd always promised that this wouldn't happen and he would protect her. She accused him of abandoning her and hiding. She was savage. She threatened to tell everything about him. And then Howard Wilson is frightened to ring her a few days later. And so he gets Bernard Donoghue to do it. And she is screaming

at Donoghue on the phone, calling Wilson a king rat. That's what he is, a king rat. And to try and please her, he gives her a peerage and she becomes Lady Falkinder. But the weird thing about this is we see this all through the eyes of the male aides who were there in number 10, who paint her continually. So we don't have her journals? No. So what would her take on this be? I'm going to guess here that her take would be, I'm the only woman. I work with these incredibly patronizing men. They make my life very difficult. They're always laughing at me behind my back. They freeze me out.

She clearly does think they're trying to force her out and get Harold away from her. I mean, people would just have to read the stuff and make up their own minds. I mean, I get all that about kind of institutional sexism and everything. Yeah. But she behaves quite poorly, I think.

I think calling him a... Yeah. Using that particular word. That word and everything. To describe him in public is kind of poor form i think tom and it's not just kind of one guy who's writing this they're all writing it basically they concur yeah from the people who are inside the machine as it were they agree one thing she doesn't know is that they are also yes things get to the state that they're actually

this will surprise some listeners they're actually planning to murder her. So after the slag heap furor, Wilson's personal doctor, who is Joseph Stone, who he later ennobles, who becomes Lord Stone, he goes in to see Joe Haynes, the press secretary. And I'm going to tell you what Haynes says about this conversation. He says, Dr. Stone asked if we could discuss ways of taking the weight of Marcia off the prime minister's mind. Stone explains that he could dispose of her in such a way that it would seem to be from natural causes. He added that he would sign the death certificate and it would not be a problem. Now, the thing is,

when Haynes tells this story, it is pretty obvious it's not a joke. I mean, he's describing it in an incredibly deadpan way, like this is the conversation that happened. So you think, well, maybe this is a one-off or whatever. But it is clear that when they went to Bonn on a prime minister visit a few weeks later, Dr. Stone again floated the idea of murdering Marcia, poisoning her, to Haynes and Donoghue. Because Donoghue writes in his diary something like a very interesting conversation with Joe. You write, I think, with immense restraint about this, that three of Wilson's most trusted aides seriously discussed murdering his political secretary,

speaks volumes about the atmosphere inside Number 10 after March 1974, which is, putting it mildly, I mean, Boris has got nothing on this. No. I mean, I don't think he was plotting to murder people, was he? Maybe he was. I mean, Boris, could he murder somebody? Dominic Cummings. You could kind of imagine Dominic Cummings, perhaps, plotting to murder people. Yes. I don't know whether that's libelous, and if it is, I'll retract it unreservedly. Boris is too disorganized, surely, to murder somebody.

I mean, he would put the poison in the wrong drink or something. No, I just don't think he'd do it. I don't think he's the kind of murdering kind. He'd forget about it. Yes. So the murder plot then comes back again in December. They went to Paris to renegotiate, Tom, Britain's membership of the EEC. Oh, God. It never stops, does it?

Right? Yeah. Marcia sent a message to Wilson in the conference room to say she heard her brother was ill and Wilson must come back with her at once to London. This is the brother who's been hanging out with the bouffant-haired slag guy. Slag guy. I mean, imagine, you know, Wilson is sitting around the table with the leaders of Europe negotiating Britain's place in the EC. And at that point, Dr. Stone again says to Donoghue, listen, we should think about putting her down. But Haynes, whatever Marcia had done,

he wrote earnestly, she didn't deserve that kind of end. I know. And I don't think you would write that if it was all just a great joke. Haynes says very seriously, I couldn't stand Marcia, but I didn't think we should murder her. So yes, this is a pretty extraordinary moment in British politics. Wilson is absolutely shattered. He's miserable. He's getting harangued by everybody. And what's also interesting, Tom, is that it's at this point, I think, that Wilson starts to become understandably paranoid. So he has always been fascinated by the world of intelligence and the secret services. I mean, he has a little sort of

fixation with it. I mean, lots of us are interested in this, right? We like to think of this as a secret world and we're fascinated by it. Well, it's a kind of a solution, isn't it? If there are shadowy figures in the wings plotting against you, then it might explain why things are going badly. Now, the thing is, the security services have always been interested themselves in Harold Wilson. So we know now that they opened a file on him as early as 1945. He was codenamed Norman John Worthington. And so what brought him to their attention was that they had heard a civil servant praising him, a communist civil servant, so they'd opened this file. And then Wilson, when he was president of the Board of Trade in the 1940s, had made a series of trips to Moscow, where he obviously came into contact with communist officials. Later on, he became consultant to a firm that imported timber. And again, he was meeting a lot of people who were senior Soviet officials, a couple of whom were almost certainly KGB officers working

at the Soviet embassy. That was not massively out of the ordinary at the time, but he also has a very strange coterie of friends. So they're often kind of Eastern European Jews. So there's a fair bit of antisemitism kind of hanging over all this. They are sort of shady tycoons. So there's a guy called Joseph Kagan, who's a raincoat tycoon. Yes, yes, that's right. And that's the Ganex Max. Yeah, Ganex Max. Yeah, we've already mentioned.

The publisher, Robert Maxwell, who will be well known to a lot of our British listeners. And indeed to American listeners, because he's the father of- Oh, Ghislaine. The Prince Andrew- Epstein associate. Exactly. So Wilson has all these friends, which actually baffle a lot of his political contemporaries. I think Wilson has these friends because they are rich and they pay for him to go on trips and things. And they're very

undemanding and sycophantic company because they want him for favors and things. So he plays golf with them. He hangs out with them. It's a nice break from hanging around with other politicians. But it does look dodgy. Now, there are some people in the security services who think all this is so dodgy that Howard Wilson is probably something weird going on here. And the key man for this is an old friend of the rest of his history, Tom. The alumnus of your old school. A fellow old Malvernian. Yes.

Our old friend, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief. Yeah. So by the mid-1970s, Angleton, there's a lot of people who've gone mad in this podcast, aren't there? Yeah. Well, because he thinks everyone's a spy, right? Angleton believes that the KGB moles active in Western politics include Harold Wilson, the Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, the Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, Henry Kissinger, he thinks is a communist agent,

as indeed is Gerald Ford. But Gerald Ford plays golf. He couldn't have been a communist. No. Well, he's not a communist. I mean, I'm going to go on the record here, Tom. I don't think Gerald Ford was working for the KGB. So Angleton, whenever he goes to Britain, says to people in MI5 and MI6, you know, you've got a communist as your prime minister. And actually, one guy who believes him is a man called Peter Wright, who is this rogue MI5 agent who ended up writing a book in the 80s called Spycatcher, in which he claims that he and 30 MI5 officers had been conspiring against Wilson in the 70s.

Now, when people started to investigate Wright's story, they asked him questions and said, was it really 30? There were 30 of you. He said, well, it was more like three. And then he was asked, how many people actively joined you in trying to campaign against Harold Wilson? He said, well, one, I should say. So it's not quite as big a plot as you would think. But the idea that Wilson is a secret KGB agent definitely seeps into sort of Westminster gossip and Fleet Street gossip in the early 70s. And Wilson is alert to it? Wilson absolutely is alert to it. So Wilson is aware that, for example, Private Eye magazine, which you began with, the satirical

magazine. The Sniggering Public School Boys. Is every two weeks publishing stories that basically allege that Wilson is working for the KGB. So their diarist, Auburn Waugh, he says explicitly, I've never attempted to hide my belief that Harold Wislon, recruited in Moscow and London in 1956 as a Soviet agent. Yeah, but Dominic, Auburn Waugh, he's the son of Evelyn Waugh. Yes.

I mean, he's a comic writer. Yeah. That diary, I mean, it wasn't serious. No. He used it to have a go at his enemies, of which he had many, but- I think he puts in his biography in Who's Who is his hobby, telling lies. Yeah. But, Tom, it's cumulative.

It's not just an Auburn Waugh's diary. It's everywhere in Private Eye, and it kind of is simmering under the surface in all of these slightly paranoid right-wing predictions of a communist takeover of Britain, the claims that the high tax rates are the beginning of a move towards, you used the expression, the pauperization of the middle classes. That is an absolutely standard right-wing theme in mid-70s. So the idea of moles. Yes.

Is this when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy comes out, the Le Carre novel? It is. Which features a mole, doesn't it? It is. And that is the ultimate 1974 novel. It's published in the summer of 1974. So just after Wilson has returned. Oh God, so it's come out just at this time. The plot of it is the return of a sort of podgy little man, sort of knackered, aging, clever man in a battered old Mac with a complicated marital relationship.

It was George Smiley, but he kind of looks and sounds very like Wilson. The portrait of the Secret Service, its morale has been corroded by office politics and budget cuts and this incredibly toxic culture of feuding and suspicion. The descriptions of the headquarters of the Secret Service, the circus, as John le Carré calls it, the wallpaper peeling, the phones not working, the lift not working, everything a total shambles. The portrait of London as this dilapidated city. 1974 is also the year that you have David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, James Herbert's The Rats, Martin Amis is writing Dead Babies, J.G. Ballard is writing High Rise. There is this sort of sense that the nation has entered a point of terminal irreversible decline, that Wilson himself is the personification of that. And actually, if you don't get him out,

you're sunk. So in a situation like actually, if you don't get him out, you're sunk. So in a situation like that, if you are very right wing and perhaps with a military background and prone to hanging out late in a gentleman's club with a brandy, the obvious solution is to stage a coup, right? Yes, I suppose so. So people at the time, by the summer of 1974, you really start to notice this in the winter, the previous winter during the period of the implosion of the Heath government and the oil shock and the three-day week. But in the summer of 1974, you have in people's diaries, in the newspapers, loads of talk about ungovernability, law and order breaking down, and the inevitable emergence of a right-wing figure to take over. Now, this now sounds mad to us, right? So a lot of people listening to this will be thinking, well, there was no coup in Britain in the 70s. There was no dictatorship. But at the time,

it didn't seem mad, not just because of the precedent we mentioned already of Allende and Pinochet, but actually there's a very good precedent in Britain for law and order breaking down and the army stepping in. And that is, of course, Northern Ireland. It has happened in part of the United Kingdom. So we mentioned before, there have been troops on the streets of Northern Ireland since 1969 because of the sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics. There were, at their peak, more than 20,000 British troops on the streets in this relatively small, underpopulated corner of the United Kingdom. There are a lot of deaths, 480 in 1972, 255 in 1973, and almost 300 in 1974. They have brought in internment without

trial. The Parliament of Northern Ireland was shut down in 1972 because the Heath government thought that it was unable to command the loyalty of the Catholic population. And they've replaced it by direct rule from Westminster with the aid of the army. So all of that is a sort of a very bad precedent. Now, in the final months of the Heath government, Heath, working with the Republic of Ireland, working with different parties in Northern Ireland, had set up a power sharing executive. So with elements of both Catholics and Protestants, and there was a Council of Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, and this was under the Sunningdale Agreement.

And this was basically the new system that was going to steer northern ireland towards peace and prosperity and actually what happens is there is an upsurge of loyalist violence against the power sharing executive you astonish me and then in may 1974 a group that no one had previously heard of called the ulster workers council that was linked to a couple of paramilitary groups the vanguard paramilitary group and the largest paramilitary group in the world at the time, which is the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist group. They called a general strike to shut down the power sharing executive. Oh, and this is the one where Wilson goes and does his broadcast.

Caused them sponges. Yes. And loyalists would wear sponges in their lapels to mock Wilson. So they set up barricades in the streets of Belfast, armed men. I mean, this is in the United Kingdom, Tom, in our lifetime. Armed men went to factories, shut the factories down. Armed men went to shops and shut them down. After two days, the Ulster Workers' Council had basically shut the whole of Belfast down. They blocked supermarkets. They controlled the city.

They distributed milk. They had taken over the power station, so there were six-hour power cuts. The army, I mentioned the army are there. The army do not step in to stop them. Their argument is, if we do that, we will be fighting a war on two fronts. We'll be fighting both the Republican terrorists, the IRA and so on, and we'll also be fighting the loyalists as well. In the middle of all that, there is the single worst attack of the whole troubles when the Yalster Volunteer Force set off car bombs in Dublin and monaghan across the border in the republic of

ireland they killed 34 people and injured hundreds more absolutely horrific horrific scenes so that's in the middle of all that the strike lasted for 14 days and the paramilitaries and the strikers won at the end of may 1974 the entire power sharing resigned. Stormont was shut down. Britain resumed direct rule over Northern Ireland. And you have these scenes of huge bonfires burning in loyalist areas of Belfast. And so a lot of people, remember we said before, most people in Britain are not actually that bothered about Northern Ireland. They don't really care. But this is one occasion when it is on the front page of every newspaper day after day and the government lost. They were humiliated. The army

humiliated. They did nothing to stop it. As it were, mob violence had completely and utterly prevailed. And a lot of people say the conservative classes, they absolutely think this is a preview of what is coming to Britain. Masked men with guns. Because on the right, there's the spectacle of what effectively is a kind of militant strike in Ulster. Does that blur with their anxieties about what might happen with the unions in Britain? Exactly. They say, this is how it will happen. This is how the general strike will happen in Britain. Because don't forget, they have had power cuts. They have had the interruption of supplies. They've had all of these things. And they say, my God, this is the template. This is what will happen. And of course,

people on the left say, this is the template for a right-wing coup. So everybody sees in it something to match their nightmares. Right. So on the right, people are saying, Tony Benn, he is Stalin. He wants to bring in five-year plans and send people off to re-education camps. And meanwhile, Tony Benn himself is expecting the army is going to come and arrest him at any minute, isn't he? He is indeed. There's kind of a lot of worry that the army is preparing a coup. So is there anyone in the army preparing a coup? Is there an equivalent in the higher echelons of the British army of a Peter Wright in the Secret Services?

Okay. So first of all, the army do intervene in British politics multiple times in the 70s. So of course the army, I mean, they're trying to stay out of Northern Irish politics, but they are inevitably embedded in it since they arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969. But in the course of the 70s, the army actually intervened in British industrial disputes on 12 different occasions. I mean, the most famous one, which older listeners will remember, is they drove fire engines towards the end of the decade, the green goddesses, as they were called, when the firemen went out on strike. They provide cover for people who collect bins, for ambulance drivers and things. So the army are being dragged into politics. And in 1971, a guy called Frank Kitson, a brigadier who had commanded in Cyprus and Malaya, among other places, and Kenya, and who also commanded troops in Northern Ireland, he actually wrote a blueprint

called Low Intensity Operations, Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping. So a low intensity operation is very... Yes, chilling. And he said, we need to prepare people to take part in operations against political extremists here in Britain. We need to have specialist units that will run railway stations, power stations, sewage works, supervised miners, and all this kind of thing. This is coming. So to be clear, this is not a blueprint for a coup. He's not talking about launching a coup.

But I guess you could say the germ of the idea of army involvement in everyday political and industrial life is absolutely there and has been since the beginning of the seventies. What they need, I mean, if you're in your gentleman's club, right? And you're drinking a brand, you know, saying Wilson is a communist, what you need is a figurehead. You know, you need the dictator. So who is that? Well, there is such a person, Tom. This is the thing. Brilliant. General Sir Walter Walker. So General

Sir Walter Walker is from a military family. He's in his 60s. His grandfather had been decorated in the Indian mutiny, Tom. His father had been in India. He himself, he was Britain's leading jungle commander. So he had led troops in Malaya and Borneo. So crushing communists. Crushing communists in the 50s. He's very popular with his men. Having a crack at the Reds. He'd ended up as commander-in-chief, Allied forces, Northern Europe. So he's a big cheese in the military world,

but he's gutted that he doesn't get more respect in Britain. Because people aren't as interested in the military in Britain in the 60s, 70s as they were. And Dominic, does he have a positive attitude towards gay rights? I knew you'd go for this, Tom. He's a little bit perturbed it's fair to say by the social changes of the

1960s as he sees them so yes he says that gay people use the main sewer of the human body as a playground which i think is um right wouldn't go down well in today's you know much more touchy feely uh british high command were. Yes, as it were. And he also has very strong views on Northern Ireland because he says, I don't know why we're going on so weak in Northern Ireland. We should just go in and crush them. So we should treat white people like everybody else.

Like everybody else. So in a sense, he's a woke right-wing dictator. He is a woke dictator. He does say he'd give people warnings. This is about Northern Ireland. I give them a warning so they can get their women and children away before we go in, but we should go in. So, I mean, God knows where people would get their women and children to, but anyway. right-wing organizations. I imagine the meeting in the vast and underheated dining rooms of seedy gentlemen's clubs, St. James' gentlemen's clubs. And he's backed by somebody called Paul Daniels, isn't he? The magician.

Not the magician. He's chairman of the British military volunteer force, I'm reading. A tiny group of ex-servicemen who sent volunteers to the conga in the yemen and um he's fake about the nature of britain's economic problems but to quote you thought pornography had something to do with it yeah so i mean these do not sound like serious people really no although so by the middle of 1974 there were letters and columns in the broadsheets week after week about General Swalter Walker and his plans. He's become associated with a very cranky sort of right-wing organization called Unison, which says it's going to be a vigilante group. Because that sounds like a union. Well, there is a union called Unison now. Yeah.

So they said, let's set up a vigilante group to fight the inevitable communist takeover. And General Swalter Walker is always writing these group to fight the inevitable communist takeover. And General Sir Walter Walker is always writing these excellent letters to the Daily Telegraph. The communist Trojan horse is in our midst with its fellow travelers wriggling their maggoty way inside its belly. And he says, listen, it's coming. Wilson isn't going to be able to turn this around. And he's a communist anyway. The the crisis is coming you're going to have to choose unbelievably he says uh i hope people will choose rule by the gun in preference to anarchy it's very rare that people say i'd like the thought of rule by the gun yes yes he clearly thinks this is a massive selling point the terrible thing is tom there might have been a civil war because he had a rival and his rival was uh like you a scottish laird

right so this is a guy called uh colonel david sterling oh yes yes the founder of the sas yeah he was in the bbc drama where they rush around the desert uh slamming music really okay well i'll take your word for it yeah i can't remember what it was called. It was on recently. Okay. Brilliant details. Thanks for that. Rogue Heroes, Theo says in the chat. That's it.

Yes. Anyway, David Sterling has set up his own little organization called GB75. And this is leaked to The Guardian. And they interviewed David Sterling about it. And he said, oh, this is basically a group of apprehensive patriots. We've come together because when there's a general strike, when there's this Ulster Workers' Council strike happens in Britain, we will take over the power stations to keep everybody's lights on. Now, Sterling, unlike Walter Walker, is actually quite publicity shy. So he's very embarrassed when this is leaked. Whereas Walter Walker is going mad and telling people that he has 13 million recruits, which is about 12,999,099, too many, more than he has. David

Sterling is very embarrassed and he goes very quiet after all this comes out. But obviously, in the minds of people, particularly on the left, this hits home. So Harold Wilson is always going on about this with his aides. Even a couple of years later, they read a story in the newspapers in number 10 that some British mercenaries had been executed in Angola. And Bernard Donaghy writes in his diary, he was completely taken up with this question of Angolan mercenaries. He's genuinely petrified of a right-wing coup in Britain using ex-servicemen as the shock troops. Since there are few troops based in the UK, they could, he believes, carry out a coup d'etat. Now, a man in the pub talking about Angolan mercenaries taking over Britain, that happens. The prime minister talking about it is sort of disturbing. And actually,

what all this is, I think, like all the Tonyony ben stuff like all of this even to some extent like they're mad histrionics about who's having lunch in number 10 all this is clearly a sign of a deep political sickness in britain in the mid 70s and i don't think that's me just projecting my own interpretation onto it i think you see that reflected. I mean, it doesn't matter what people in the opposition think, but people within the government itself. So your Dennis Healy's, your Roy Jenkins's, Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, all these people who write diaries and brilliant autobiographies at the time, because they're an exceptionally literate and well-educated group who have taken control of British politics. They think something

is seriously, deeply wrong. And the question is, can it be turned around? And is Howard Wilson remotely the man to do it, especially as he leads a minority government? And so the tension is sort of mounting and mounting and mounting. And then on the 18th of September, 1974, Wilson says, okay, fine, let's do this. Let's have a second general election to end the uncertainty and to give the country a definitive direction. So he says, I'm going to have a fourth showdown with Ted Heath, winner takes all, to decide the future of the country. Tom, an incredible cliffhanger to end the episode.

So will he manage it? Will he end up with a larger mandate in his hand? Only one way to find out. And that is by tuning into our next episode, which will be out either tomorrow, or if you are a member of the Restless History Club, you've already got it. So huge excitement. Yeah. There are two ways to find out and in fact i can't believe that anybody listening to that amazing cliffhanger would not join the rest is history club immediately you'd be mad yeah you'd be mad not to not least because one of the great perks of joining the rest is history club is if you do join we will train you in how to run a power station in the event of a crippling 1970s-style general strike. So exciting.

All right. So next episode, the second election of 1974. Bye-bye. Bye. 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.