State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In many ways, therefore, the NVALA looks like an early example of the mildly eccentric protest groups that emerged out of the ruin of the Heath government in the mid-to-late 1970s, protesting vociferously about inflation, taxes and the impending triumph of international socialism. Like them, it appealed to provincial middle-class homeowners who felt that their values of entrepreneurship, discipline and thrift were under threat, and that they had been betrayed and abandoned by Heath’s Conservative Party. And yet as Whitehouse’s roots in Moral Re-armament might suggest, there was another dimension to the NVALA. By the standards of the day, she was an exceptionally pious woman: every day began with a Bible-reading in bed, and she said morning prayers before breakfast. And unlike most British women in the 1970s, she was completely convinced of the presence of the divine in her life. When her son Christopher suffered an accident and seemed likely to lose an eye, she telephoned her friends and organized prayers for him, and when the eye was unexpectedly saved, she was convinced that God had intervened. Her work, she later wrote, was about ‘fulfilling God’s purpose’; indeed, a detailed academic analysis of her career published in 1979 concluded that the central aim of the NVALA was ‘to colonise social life for God’. There was more to Whitehouse’s movement, in other words, than the economic and political anxiety of the middle classes; at a very basic level, it was a religious crusade to rescue the embattled Christian family from the ‘left-wing humanists’, a cry of rage by a pious minority against what they saw as the secularization and godlessness of modern British life.62

  And this, of course, was why it failed. Despite the genuine public unease manifested in the Petition for Public Decency, there were just not enough churchgoing Christians left to support a religious revival. Even in 1960, just one in ten people had gone to church every week, and with living standards rising and so many other things to do at weekends, numbers had since continued to plummet. In total, Protestant church membership fell by almost 20 per cent in the course of the 1960s, and by the time Edward Heath became Prime Minister fewer than 2 per cent of adolescent boys were confirmed in the Church of England, while only a minority of babies were baptized. Swelled by immigration from Ireland, the Catholic Church made a better fist of keeping its members, but the Methodists and Baptists saw their congregations fall by up to a third. All in all, just 1.5 million people went to church every week in 1970, and for all Mary Whitehouse’s efforts to rekindle the faith, death, disaffection and sheer indifference had whittled that down to 1.25 million by the end of the 1970s. It is true that Britain was not yet an entirely secular society: the massive sales of, for example, Malcolm Muggeridge’s book on Mother Teresa in 1971 showed that many people were still fascinated by religious questions, and polls consistently showed that about three out of four people believed in God and just under half in life after death. But even if the popular fascination with spiritual questions survived, Britain in the 1970s was what the sociologist Grace Davie calls a society of ‘believing without belonging’, in which religious participation had fallen a long way from fashion. It was hardly surprising that when The Times carried out a survey on power and influence in British life, only 2 per cent of respondents thought the Church of England was ‘very influential’, compared with 33 per cent who named the TUC and 52 per cent who identified Mary Whitehouse’s enemies at the BBC.63

  What baffled Whitehouse, however, was that she could not even count on the support of the Anglican hierarchy. As Archbishop of Canterbury since 1961, the gentle, scholarly Michael Ramsey had steered the Church of England on a notably progressive course. He strongly supported the campaign for the legalization of homosexuality, voted for (and indeed offered to introduce in the Lords) the abolition of hanging, and encouraged the Church to take a more liberal line on divorce reform; on top of that, he vociferously opposed apartheid in South Africa and the war in Vietnam, and even argued for military intervention against the white supremacist rebels in Rhodesia. Other Churches, especially the Methodists, took a similarly liberal course: even the once austerely conservative Church of Scotland, for example, supported the decriminalization of homosexuality and the reform of the divorce laws, and in 1970 its Moral Welfare Committee even welcomed the advent of sexual permissiveness, commenting that ‘the spirit of the age with its new found freedoms, and its healthy intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy, challenges Christians to re-think the implications of Christian morality – not a bad thing to have to do’. To moral conservatives like Whitehouse, all of this was bewildering and unsettling: the explanation, she thought, was that the Churches had been taken over by ‘soft permissives’. Ramsey’s postbag was often full of furious letters from ordinary Anglicans: his secretary never forgot one occasion when Ramsey gently put one letter aside with the words: ‘I don’t think that is of much value as it begins “You lying bastard”.’64

  But to many older parishioners who were not familiar or comfortable with the latest trends in liturgy and theology, Ramsey’s leadership seemed characteristic of a religious landscape that had been infiltrated by bleeding-hearted socialists, happy-clappy weirdos and guitar-wielding hippies, in which all familiar landmarks and conventions had vanished. Even in fiction, respect for the Church seemed to be ebbing away: in television sitcoms of the early 1970s, clergymen are almost exclusively feeble, hand-wringing figures, like the incompetent clowns who run St Ogg’s Cathedral in All Gas and Gaiters, or the ineffectual, effeminate Reverend Timothy Farthing in Dad’s Army. And as congregations dwindled, so a sense of almost inevitable decline seemed to set in. ‘Oh Christianity, Christianity, … are you vanishing?’ asked the poet Stevie Smith, anticipating the collapse of faith into ‘beliefs we do not believe in’. Other poets sounded a similar note: in the Anglican priest R. S. Thomas’s ‘Via Negativa’ (1972), God is ‘that great absence / In our lives, the empty silence / Within …’, while in ‘The Moon in Lleyn’ (1975), Thomas ponders the idea that ‘religion is dead’. Other churchmen were inclined to agree: at lunch with James Lees-Milne in October 1973, the Bishop of Gloucester reflected sadly on ‘the loneliness and desolation of the spirit’ of the modern priest. ‘No clergyman in the Church of England today’, he added, ‘could claim spiritual success. He said that in his city eighty per cent of the inhabitants had never heard of him and didn’t care tuppence for his office.’ Against this background, Mary Whitehouse’s dreams of a Christian renaissance were doomed from the start.65

  In many ways Mary Whitehouse’s career, like the stories of the Festival of Light, the Longford report and the Responsible Society, was a study in failure. For all the enthusiasm of her supporters, indeed for all the widespread disquiet at Britain’s alleged moral decline, polls showed that most people did not want to turn back the clock. Interviewed in 1973, not only did three out of four people agree that adults should be allowed to buy indecent materials if they wanted to, but seven out of ten admitted they had never been seriously upset by an ‘indecent display’. And although the Heath government introduced an Indecent Displays Bill at the end of 1973 to crack down on the visibility of pornography (including, splendidly, measures against the threat of ‘indecent sounds’), it never made it onto the statute book – and the evidence of obscenity trials later in the decade suggests it might not have worked anyway. Time after time, juries acquitted proprietors and producers accused of corrupting public morals. In the most celebrated case, which came to court in 1974, a cameraman called John Lindsay was accused of making twenty-nine indecent films, which included scenes of schoolgirls pleasuring themselves with hockey sticks, nuns masturbating with crucifixes, priests debauching nuns in a convent, and what Lindsay himself called ‘the worst of the lot … a film called Anal Rape in a classroom with a very young-looking blonde girl’. According to the prosecution, these films showed ‘sex in the nastiest, rawest fashion, bestial and perverted, without any question of love or tenderness’, while the judge, Mr Justice Wien, denounced ‘the unnatural and horrible offence of sodomy’, and reminded the jury what had happened to Sodom and Gomor
rah. The jury failed to return a verdict, and after a retrial, Lindsay was found not guilty. So were a couple accused of running a magazine called Libertine from a shop in Leicester, three years later. Once again, anal rape played an oddly central role in the proceedings; once again, the verdict was not guilty. As the triumphant couple left the court, one of the female jurors cheerfully remarked: ‘It’s a lot of old rubbish, isn’t it, my duck?’66

  While the failure to stem the flow of pornography in the 1970s owed as much to the chaos of the obscenity laws as to the relaxation of popular attitudes, what happened to sex education was not so different. As with pornography, there was a great flurry of popular outrage in 1971–2, helping to create what one account calls a ‘new discourse on sexual education’ that anticipated the debates during the Thatcher years. And yet while the Family Planning Association was forced into a series of embarrassing retreats in the summer of 1971 – including the withdrawal of an explicit leaflet for teenagers entitled Straight Facts and the cancellation of fringe events at a ‘New Frontiers of Birth Control’ conference (including a bizarre wheeze to release tens of thousands of condom-themed balloons into the skies above London) – the Responsible Society and its allies never regained control of sex education. The FPA continued to offer increasingly explicit and non-judgemental advice, such as a splendid leaflet from 1973, Too Great A Risk!, which was modelled on a Jackie comic strip and featured a pretty, sexually active teenage girl learning how to avoid getting pregnant. A year later, the FPA launched a new national campaign, Tomorrow’s People Are Today’s Concern, calling for ‘sex education programmes for all schools in the United Kingdom … to undo the layers of shame, fear, ignorance, distortion and misinformation’. Once again there were howls of protest from moral conservatives, and the protesters did win isolated victories: the cancellation of a highly explicit ITV documentary series called Sex in Our Time in 1976, for example, or the censorship of a new Nuffield Secondary Science textbook with explicit diagrams and references to masturbation. But while the sex education war went on, so did sex education itself, reaching an ever wider proportion of Britain’s teenagers. In this respect, too, Whitehouse and her allies had lost.67

  The fact was that, thanks to the decline of churchgoing, the erosion of collective loyalties, the advent of affluence and mass secondary education, the challenge of feminism and homosexuality and the rise of a new kind of populist individualism, there no longer existed an agreed moral consensus around which people could instinctively rally. The ideal of the stable, settled family survived, of course; so too did the ideal of the happy, enduring marriage. In their daily lives, however, growing numbers of people found these ideals impossible to live up to – perhaps partly because of their own exaggerated expectations and their obsession with self-gratification, but also surely because of the increasing economic pressures on the traditional family. As the historian Jeffrey Weeks notes, people still talked of ‘love, honesty, faithfulness’ as fundamental values, and in the world of the imagination the nuclear family remained the norm. Increasingly, however, events in the real world suggested otherwise. The advice columns of just one issue of Woman’s Own from January 1975 told the wider story. A photographer had written to complain that his 16-year-old son ought to knuckle down and get a haircut; his wife, however, objected that they ought not to ‘suppress’ their son’s personality. One woman kept her teenage daughter at home, frightened that meeting boys would lead to venereal disease, pregnancy and abortion; another, the wife of a garage mechanic, wrote that she was happy for her 15-year-old daughter to go on the Pill. There were no longer any binding rules; there were no easy answers.68

  And yet there were limits to popular permissiveness. In 1963, the Profumo sex-and-spying scandal had almost destroyed Harold Macmillan’s government, and even after a decade of social and cultural change, nobody could be certain that the public would look any more kindly on politicians’ sexual failings. And as luck would have it, on 14 May 1973, just weeks before the tenth anniversary of the last great scandal, a relatively obscure government whip sent a panicky handwritten letter to the Chief Whip, Francis Pym, marked ‘Private and Confidential’. In it, Sir John Stradling-Thomas reported that thanks to another Tory MP who had been talking to one of Rupert Murdoch’s PR men, he had got wind of a sensational tale that was apparently poised to destroy the government. ‘Murdoch has a “Profumo” type story on the stocks with photographs,’ he reported ominously, ‘about a junior minister who is involved in sexual orgies with back benchers. The official car is involved. The story is about to break.’69

  The junior minister at the centre of this garbled rumour was by any standards an extraordinarily colourful character. Described by a profile in The Times as a ‘politician, journalist, aristocrat and eccentric’, Antony Lambton had been MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed since 1951. Afflicted since childhood with an eye disease, he always wore dark glasses, giving him an engagingly mysterious air, and he championed an odd combination of reactionary and libertarian causes, from the revival of National Service to the reform of the obscenity laws. His lifestyle was raffish, to say the least: rated as one of the best three shots in the country, he owned two vast estates in the North of England as well as an elegant London townhouse, and was well known for his generosity, sardonic wit and appreciation of the female form. In 1970, Heath had made him Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence with responsibility for the RAF, but Lambton was best known for a bizarre and protracted squabble over his title. On the death of his father, the fifth Earl of Durham, in the same year, he had disclaimed his peerage so that he could stay in the Commons, but insisted that he should still be known as Lord Lambton. Most of his fellow MPs, as well as numerous constitutional experts, thought this was absurd. But Lambton took it oddly seriously. The battle over the title had ‘become an obsession with him’, an MI5 officer reported after Lambton’s fall, ‘to the extent that he was no longer able to read – and he had been a great reader – and he sought to forget his obsession in frantic activity. He had for example become an enthusiastic and vigorous gardener. Another example of this frenzied activity was his debauchery.’70

  Whatever his motives, by the end of 1971 Lambton had become a regular client of a high-class escort agency run by London’s ‘leading madam’, the aptly named Jean Horn. There his particular favourite was an attractive 26-year-old Irish-born prostitute called Norma, who had set herself up in an expensive Regency flat in Maida Vale and claimed to earn an astonishing £2,500 tax-free a week. By Norma’s own account, the man she called ‘Mr Lucas’ had interesting tastes, often asking her to procure other girls or to watch him having sex with another man. His anonymity did not last long, however: with typically careless insouciance, Lambton used to pay her by personal cheque, so she soon realized that he was a government minister. What made this reckless behaviour even more dangerous, however, was the fact that in late 1972 Norma married a shady ‘cab driver’ (although he never seemed to drive any cabs) called Colin Levy, who was determined to make some money from his wife’s connections. At the end of the following April, Levy installed a hidden camera in his wife’s wardrobe and a listening device in the nose of her giant teddy bear, already a somewhat incongruous addition to the decor. On 5 May, he offered the recordings of Lambton and his wife to the News of the World, but the quality was deemed substandard. Instead, the newspaper installed its own equipment in the flat, with sensational results. On 9 May, they recorded Lambton asking Norma if she could get him drugs; the following day, a News of the World photographer hid inside the wardrobe, snapping away through a two-way mirror while Lambton enjoyed himself with Norma and a black prostitute. Inexplicably, however, executives at the News of the World got cold feet and decided to shelve the story. So Levy offered it instead to the Sunday People – who promptly passed the material to the police.71

  This was not the first time that the police had heard about Lambton’s extramarital adventures. Like Christine Keeler before her, Norma Levy found it hard to keep her mouth shut
, and as early as 2 May the Home Office had asked MI5 to investigate ‘security doubts’ about Lambton and two other ministers rumoured to be using prostitutes. The Security Service reported back that there was ‘no adverse information’ about any of them in their files, but by this stage Heath and his senior ministers were becoming distinctly anxious. In this context, Stradling-Thomas’s letter about the ‘ “Profumo” type story’ was deeply worrying, and on 18 May Heath himself convened a meeting of his chief aides and ordered another MI5 investigation. Three days later, Lambton was formally interviewed by the police and admitted that ‘a photograph showing a man on a bed with two women was of him and that the cigarette which he was smoking in the photograph was of cannabis’. A few hours later, he went to see Francis Pym, told him the whole story and added that the police had searched his flat and found more cannabis and amphetamines. Nobody had attempted to blackmail him, he pointed out; but the drugs alone made his position untenable. That night, Lambton resigned. ‘All that has happened is that some sneak pimp has seen an opportunity of making some money by the sale of the story and secret photographs to the papers at home and abroad,’ read his remarkably honest statement the next day. ‘I have no excuses whatsoever to make. I behaved with incredible stupidity.’72

  Lambton’s resignation was the cue for what the Mirror called ‘a day of sensation’. Within hours of the announcement, the police had re-interviewed the fallen minister, even asking him to strip to his red flannel underwear so that they could check for heroin injection marks. Meanwhile, Heath had been handed an MI5 report identifying a second minister who regularly visited call girls: the Leader of the House of Lords, Earl Jellicoe, who had patronized Mayfair Escorts since 1970. Poor Jellicoe had no connection with either Lambton or the Levys, and MI5 thought that the ‘risk of indiscretions’ was ‘negligible’. But Heath felt he could not afford to take chances. That evening Jellicoe was intercepted as he and his wife were leaving the Royal Opera House and whisked to Downing Street, and by the next morning he was out too. Since he was enormously popular with his fellow peers, the outcry was immediate. The Labour leader in the Lords, Lord Shackleton, declared that ‘we and the country have suffered a grievous loss’, while the former Labour minister Richard Crossman wrote that the government had lost ‘one of [its] bravest, ablest, most decent members’. Even Lambton sardonically remarked that ‘the way things were going it will soon be clear that Heath is the only member of the government who doesn’t do it’. In fact, behind the bravado Lambton was devastated by the scandal. In public, however, he kept up a characteristically insouciant front. When Robin Day asked him on Panorama why on earth he had done it, Lambton’s reaction was priceless. ‘People sometimes like variety,’ he remarked. ‘Surely all men visit whores?’73