Fixing Sixty Six

by Tim Flower

  I pretended I didn’t find his coyness annoying and frustrating. ‘Okay. If you promise to show me “Another Place”.’ Taking the meeting out into the fresh air, with the prospect of seeing Gormley’s installation, had bought him more time.

  After swallowing a large gulp of tea, he got up out of his chair and said, ‘You want to ogle at our naked, iron men, do you?’ Then he winked.

  I couldn’t help rising to it. ‘I thought having a clothed woman gawping at nude men would make a change.’

  He didn’t react. He put on a light jacket that was hanging from a peg near the door, smuggled a piece of paper from the buff folder into its inside breast pocket and politely ushered me out of the front door.

  It was a good day for a walk, dry, bright and seasonably warm in the sun. I could smell Crosby Beach before I could see it: a mix of sand, seaweed and saltwater, with just a suggestion of industrial pollution. When we got there, Harry wanted to stay on the tarmac path, above the vast, beige tidal plain. The sand would be too soft for walking on, he explained. So I had to be content with viewing Gormley’s installation from a distance.

  As I was about to prompt him to tell me why 1966 happened, he stopped and pointed towards the towering cranes ahead, competing for attention with equally tall wind turbines.

  ‘Look. See those cranes? That’s…whatsitsname…the container dock.’

  ‘Seaforth?’ I’d driven passed several signs for it, as I’d approached Waterloo.

  ‘It did for all the old docks here - and the dockers.’ Harry sounded bitter. After a moment’s reflection, he explained, ‘My dad worked at Birkenhead. I grew up in the docklands.’

  I realised Harry was one of that generation of professionals from the north of England who had learnt to disguise their native accents. He only occasionally betrayed his working-class, Merseyside origins, by emphasising the “k” in words like “look”, “dock” and “Birkenhead”.

  ‘Your father was a docker?’

  ‘All his life. A docker and a Red.’

  ‘He was a communist?’

  Harry chuckled. ‘No. He supported Liverpool Football Club.’

  He resumed walking and must have sensed my embarrassment. ‘As it happens, he was also passionate about fairness and equality. He’d often quote Shanks - Bill Shankly: he was Liverpool’s manager then.’ He scrunched up his face in frustration. ‘I used to know it off by heart. It was something about everyone working for the same goal and sharing in the rewards. It finished, “That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.”’ He seemed relieved to have recalled the tagline. ‘And that’s how I was brought up: to believe in football, fair play and the Catholic church.’ He stopped again, looked at me with intense, almost frightened, eyes and said, ‘But that was then. I don’t believe in any of it now.’

  Harry’s cynicism took me aback. I mumbled a platitude whilst I considered how to segue from nihilism to 1966, before deciding to take the direct approach instead.

  Pointing to a weather-beaten bench facing the beach, I said, ‘Why don’t we take a rest there and you tell me your story.’

  Often those with a story to sell are uncomfortable negotiating the price. They beat around the bush. Harry was very straightforward. Unsettlingly so.

  ‘First, I need to know what you’ll pay,’ he retorted.

  ‘I think we should sit down to discuss this, don’t you?’

  ‘If it makes it easier for you to write the cheque.’ He winked and headed purposefully towards the vacant bench.

  After ensuring the seat wasn’t soiled, he carefully lowered himself down onto it and took out his smoking paraphernalia. As he began preparing a pipe, I attempted to explain what I needed to know before I could give him a price. But he quickly interrupted me.

  ‘Look, let’s not mess about. You can have Williegate for five grand.’

  ‘Williegate?’

  ‘That’s what I thought you’d call it. All scandals are called something-gate.’

  Unfortunately, this was true. Since Watergate we’d had, “Camillagate”, “Expensegate”, “Hackgate”, even “Gategate”. None had justified the allusion to the original. Before I was prepared to label Harry’s story anything-gate, I wanted detailed evidence of senior government figures using political dirty tricks in an attempt to subvert a major democracy. That was Watergate. So far, he had given me barely a whiff of this.

  ‘But why Willie-gate?’

  He gave me a suspicious glance. ‘You’ll see.’

  Once a wave of irritation had subsided, I found myself quietly singing the 1966 Lonnie Donegan hit that my father had burned into my brain when I was a kid. ‘Dressed in red, white and blue; He’s World Cup Willie; We all love him too —’

  Harry interrupted me. ‘Please don’t. I hate that song.’ From the grim look on his face, it was clear he meant it.

  ‘I’m sorry. I just realised the relevance of “Willie”. That was the name of the tournament mascot.’

  ‘You know more about football than you think.’ He lit his pipe, before again pressing me on price. ‘Now what do you say to five grand?’

  I was suspicious. This was a small fraction of what the Murdoch press would give if Williegate lived up to its name. Surely he would know that. ‘Is that what you think its worth: five thousand pounds?’

  ‘I could get more from The Screws of the World - or whatever it’s called these days. But I want the public to hear the truth - they don’t get that very often.’

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  Harry continued to look po-faced. ‘Anyway, where I’m going, I won’t need more than that.’

  ‘Where’s that then?’ I asked, expecting him to say he was moving in with a relative.

  ‘Green Valley Care Home. It’s the posh, heaven’s waiting room in Crosby. I’ve been fighting lung cancer, you see, and lost.’

  ‘Oh Harry, I am so sorry.’

  ‘Actually, it would be more accurate to say I’ve thrown in the towel. I couldn’t stand being burned, poisoned or knifed any longer. The symptoms are under control, though, for now. And whilst they are, I can tell my story and save the proceeds to buy a top of the range descent into death.’ Although Harry spoke lightly - as if describing plans for a Caribbean cruise, to compensate for a wet week in Cleethorpes - I sensed his distress and felt it too.

  Over almost forty years working as a journalist, I had developed techniques for protecting myself against the emotional damage that reporting traumatic events can inflict. One such technique was to hurry the conversation into more practical, less affecting, territory and I employed it here.

  ‘Are you sure five thousand pounds will be enough?’

  Harry looked puzzled.

  ‘Sadly my mother suffers from Parkinson’s-related dementia. She is in a care home. It’s nice, but nothing fancy. The local authority covers most of the cost, but I’ve paid way more than five thousand just in top-up fees and that’s —’

  ‘I meant fifty thousand,’ Harry, interrupting, said peevishly.

  ‘Fifty thousand sounds nearer the mark. But I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly commit to anything like that amount without having a publisher on board willing to pay it,’ I said, as compassionately as I could. ‘And no publisher will agree to do that without first being told the whole story.’

  ‘Is that how you freelance nibs work?’ Harry sounded both frustrated and disapproving.

  ‘Nibs?’

  ‘That’s what a former colleague used to call writers: “blunt nibs”. He was a “smudger” - a photographer. One of the best, as it happens.’

  ‘Yes, Harry, it’s the only way any of us could do it. You see, we have to interview the various sources and research the story before we can begin producing an outline to show potential publishers. So I’m unlikely to be in a position to buy your story for some months.’

  ‘Look, you’re an investigative journalist and I’m offering you, on a plate, the most important British political exposé of our time. All I’m asking
for in return is… fifty thousand pounds. The story’s worth much more than that.’

  ‘But Harry, until you tell me what it is, I’ve no way of judging that.’

  He didn’t respond. Instead, he lowered his head and gazed at the sandy tarmac below him.

  ‘You’ve got to give me something concrete. If only the four-par version.’

  He remained head down, gently kicking a discarded cigarette butt back and forth between his feet.

  Eventually, after an awkward silence, he straightened his back and said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you the headlines.’

  Using his pipe’s stem to point to the words of an imaginary banner headline, like a news vendor with laryngitis, he declared, ‘DOWNING STREET CHEATED WORLD FOOTBALL: ‘66 TRIUMPH A TRAVESTY.’

  Despite Harry’s hushed tone, a passing man, in three-quarter length shorts and a football shirt, turned back and looked both disbelieving and disapproving.

  Noticeably perturbed by this, Harry little more than mouthed the sub-headline, ‘WILSON FIXED WORLD CUP TO COVER UP COUNTRY’S CRISIS.’

  ‘Are you seriously saying that England winning the World Cup in 1966 was a fix?’

  Harry shushed me. He looked about and, as if admitting to a capital crime, he nodded shamefully.

  ‘And this was the work of Harold Wilson?’

  He bowed his head and whispered, ‘One of his closest advisers was at the heart of it.’

  ‘Not Baroness Falkender - Marcia Williams as was?’

  This would have been very dangerous territory. Ten years previously she had successfully sued the BBC for libel and was awarded £75,000 in damages.

  ‘No, you won’t have heard of him: he operated strictly behind the scenes. His name was Forsyth. He was fixing things for Labour, when… whatshisname… Campbell was still spinning a top.’

  ‘I didn’t know Prime Ministers had political fixers or spin-doctors in those days.’

  Harry looked over the heads of Gormley’s men and out to sea and said, as if in a trance, ‘There’s so much you don’t know about those days.’

  I allowed Harry to re-light his pipe, before seeking confirmation. ‘You’re saying you witnessed the Wilson administration manipulating the outcome of the 1966 World Cup —’

  ‘Shh!’ In my excitement, I had become too loud for Harry’s liking.

  ‘--to deceive the electorate into thinking Britain was “swinging”, when in fact it was —’

  ‘Sinking, yeah. Going down the toilet. Call it what you like.’ He paused and added, impatiently and almost silently, ‘Will that do you?’

  I had been told some shocking stories before; but no one had ever alleged that an iconic, nation building, era defining event had been rigged - for political gain.

  ‘But you said you were a football reporter. How were you privy to this?’

  He turned his head half towards me and whispered, as if confessing to his priest, ‘I helped make it happen.’

  ‘You yourself were involved?’ The story was becoming more sellable by the second. ‘How come?’

  ‘The Mirror seconded me to Number 10. For five months in 1966, I was a member of Harold Wilson’s political office.’

  Whilst this made Harry an ideal source, it raised another issue. ‘If you knew about it, surely other people at Number 10 did too. Why hasn’t anyone blown the whistle before now?’

  ‘Because they will have been too scared about upsetting the powerful and ending up in prison for breaching The Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘It hasn’t deterred you.’

  ‘No. Because I’m finally free of that threat. I know now the Grim Reaper will get me before the Government can.’

  Death as a “Get Out of Gaol Free Card”. Not even Hamlet, I thought, had considered that angle.

  ‘I presume that means no one else will talk to me, even off the record.’

  ‘Correct. Anyway, only a few had any knowledge of it. And I know for a fact, almost all of them are already dead.’ He puffed on his pipe. ‘So, if you want the story, you’re going to have to make do with me.’

  ‘I see. Okay,’ I said, uncertain of my next step.

  ‘Is that an “okay” I do want it?’

  I did want it. On the face of it, the story was an investigative journalist’s dream. But how could I possibly commit to paying him £50,000 on the basis of nothing more than a teaser?

  ‘It’s an “okay”, I understand what you’re offering. I now need time to consider it,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t got time to give you. I wish I had.’

  ‘I mean an hour or so, nothing more. I just need a little space to look into one or two things and think through how I can make this work.’

  We agreed that he would have a cup of tea at the nearby First Place Hotel (which was evidently his habit), whilst I took a closer look at Gormley’s installation.

  “Another Place” is uncannily evocative of mid-60s Britain. It comprises a hundred powerful looking Caucasian men, each with an exaggerated penis, standing tall on the shoreline with their shoulders back staring imperiously at the world beyond. As I sat down amongst them to review my extraordinary morning, I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  On the face for it, for once, the story fully justified a “gate” neologism. “Williegate” was about the corruption of, not only a FIFA World Cup symbolised by “Willie” the cartoon lion, but also a British government led by Harold Wilson. Nonetheless, it would amount to nothing if Harry proved to be anything less than unimpeachable. “Deep Throat” was a vital source for Woodward & Bernstein; but he was one of many from whom they pieced together the Watergate story. In stark contrast, for Williegate, I seemingly had Harry and only Harry.

  And he would not be the ideal source or an easy interviewee. He was showing symptoms of “chemo brain” (a mild cognitive impairment that had afflicted a breast cancer victim I knew) as well the self-absorption that the frustrations of old age often engender. But these were surmountable obstacles: on their own, they didn’t constitute grounds for rejecting Williegate.

  To my mind, the decision to accept or reject Harry’s offer turned simply on whether I thought Harry was telling the truth. I was confident I could quickly judge that if he started telling me his story in detail. But he appeared unwilling to do that until I had committed to buying it. And I couldn’t buy it without having a publisher willing to fund it, who themselves would need to be satisfied as to the veracity of Harry’s story.

  Whilst I mulled over this conundrum, I searched on my phone for evidence of a 1960’s Labour Party spin-doctor called Forsyth and a Harry Miller or Mullaly working at Number 10. I found none. Then I discovered I still had my subscription to the Daily Mirror online archive, which I had taken out after receiving Harry’s letter. I typed “Harry Miller” in the search box, and it produced a large number of hits. To my delight and relief, his byline appeared in many of the 1966 editions of the paper. He clearly had been, as he had said, a Daily Mirror football writer in the mid-1960s. That much at least was fact.

  Of course, Williegate might still have been an invention. After his Fleet Street days, Harry could have become a fantasist or a fortune-hunter. However, my journalistic “nose” told me he was genuine: an honest man with a story to tell, who sought nothing more than to make the final stage of his life as comfortable as he could. This being the case, as a journalist, I had a responsibility to investigate Harry’s claims and publish the truth of them.

  The problem was, I didn’t have £50,000 or the time to find a publisher who did.

  How could I gain more time, without Harry having to give me it?

  I wandered aimlessly amongst Gormley’s scattered elite, formulating a proposal that would both give Harry the funding he needed for his care and me the means to finance it. What I came up with placed a considerable burden of risk on my shoulders. But it was one I was willing to bear for the prospect of wiping the self-righteous look off the faces of the iron men.

  I arrived at the First Place Hotel to find Har
ry sitting under an awning on the hotel’s terrace, nursing an almost empty teacup and smoking his pipe. An outside heater above his head was inefficiently warming the immediate area. I would have preferred to have sat in the mild sun and not made an unnecessary contribution to climate change. But this wasn’t the time to risk irritating Harry.

  Before I could sit down, he swatted away a keen, young waiter and launched straight in. ‘Well, are you going to write my story?’

  ‘I really hope so, Harry.’ He watched me expectantly as I beckoned the waiter back, ordered a skinny latte and sat down in the surprisingly comfortable, mock-rattan chair next to him. ‘I can’t promise you fifty thousand - but I can get pretty close. In fact, my offer could end up yielding you a great deal more.’

  I proceeded to explain that, if he gave me an exclusive on the story for three months, I would give him fifty per cent of whatever I managed to sell it for in that time. If I couldn’t sell it by then for at least £100,000, he could give it to someone else. If the story was as good as he promised, in my experience it was easily worth £250,000. He would get at least £125,000, which would give him a cushion if he needed to stay at Green Valley longer than he expected.

  ‘What it amounts to, Harry, is that I work on your story for three months and, whatever happens, you’ll have the benefit of that. Assuming it is as marketable as it sounds, you get at least the £50,000 you want, and it could be a great deal more.’

  Harry didn’t comment on my proposal. Instead, he picked up his pipe, and started prodding its contents with his smoker’s tool.

  Walking to the hotel, I had been optimistic that he would accept my counter-offer. I was now having serious doubts. ‘Really, Harry, that’s the best I can do.’

  He took his time re-lighting his pipe and then said, ‘So, if you don’t sell it in three months for… what you said, I can get another blunt nib to do it.’

  I nodded encouragingly. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And you’ll give him…’