State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  On the surface the Lambton affair – and especially the resignation of Jellicoe, who, as almost everybody recognized, had been extremely unlucky – was a testament to the lingering conservatism of popular attitudes. Lambton’s fall was not merely a question of ‘security’, an outraged P. A. Carnwath of London W8 wrote to The Times, for there was ‘a moral case for the resignation of a minister who is publicly known to have been involved with a call girl’. And as J. W. M. Thompson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, saw it, Lambton’s fall was a sign that the baleful influence of the 1960s had penetrated far less than many conservatives feared. ‘The new morality of sexual free-for-all has been assiduously propounded,’ he noted, ‘transforming the general idea of what is free for public consumption by way of entertainment or information.’ And yet the scandal demonstrated that ‘the full gale of permissiveness still belongs only in the realm of the media, or among that minority of the population who constitute the fashionable consensus. The tolerance of the majority does not imply anything approaching unqualified approval when the new morality is translated from words (or pictures) into action.’74

  And yet what is so striking about the general reaction to the fall of Lambton and Jellicoe is that it was so unlike the censorious outrage that had greeted the Profumo scandal ten years previously. The Profumo affair, after all, had come close to destroying Macmillan’s government. But although the Lambton scandal dominated tabloid front pages for days with a similar mixture of sex, sensation and security, it never posed a serious threat to Edward Heath. Inside the Commons, the mood was very different from the hysteria of the summer of 1963. ‘This time’, as Bernard Levin noted, ‘Lord Wigg and the other leading Labour politicians who rose so enthusiastically into battle with “security” embroidered on their banners have not been heard from.’ Indeed, the only Labour MP who spoke out against Lambton, James Wellbeloved, was promptly dismissed by the Liberals’ John Pardoe as a ‘sanctimonious creep of the first order’. And far from rounding on Lambton and Jellicoe as their predecessors had turned on Profumo, most politicians and peers struck a notably compassionate note. ‘Is it not time that we grew up?’ the sociologist Lady Wootton of Abinger wrote to The Times. ‘Everyone knows that such affairs are common in all walks of life. There is no law against them and they do not by any means always result in divorces.’ Lambton’s critics, agreed the Labour MP Alex Lyon a few days later, were ‘hypocrites and bigots’. In the Bible, he recalled, Jesus had asked an adulterous wife’s accusers who would cast the first stone. ‘Do you feel like aiming at Lord Lambton and Lord Jellicoe?’ Lyon asked.75

  In the editorial columns, the overwhelming tone was one of sympathy for both Lambton and Jellicoe. ‘A chamber of 630 members entirely free from human frailty, or deep-dyed in the conviction that they are entirely free from human frailty, would be a hard and tyrannical House,’ wrote David Wood in The Times. ‘Politics is a trade that notoriously damages family relationships and sometimes breaks up marriages. Allowances must be made.’ Even the Daily Express, usually one of the most strident voices of moral conservatism, lamented that ‘in this modern so-called permissive age a splendid [parliamentarian] and junior minister have been cast into the wilderness … Can we really afford to discard men of talent, wit and patriotism because their personal lives fall short of blameless perfection?’ And to the evident surprise of visiting journalists, Lambton’s reputation in his rural, sleepy constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed remained ‘remarkably undiminished’ by the revelations. ‘We still think he’s a perfect gentleman,’ said one of the five gamekeepers working on his estate. Among ‘shoppers in the streets and the men in the pubs’, wrote one reporter, ‘serious feelings of outrage or even anger are hard to find’. ‘Shame for his family,’ was the best he could get out of female passers-by, while most of the men confined themselves to a mere ‘Bad luck, mate.’76

  While Lambton’s fall superficially testified to the limits of permissiveness, therefore, closer examination suggested a very different story. At a moment when abortion and homosexuality were legal, thousands of marriages were collapsing every year and the West End seemed awash with pornography, few people seemed genuinely shocked or even surprised by the former peer’s misbehaviour. It was ‘heartening to be able to say without doubt that things are better now than they were in 1963’, wrote Bernard Levin in the most thoughtful contemporary analysis of the affair. In 1963, Harold Macmillan had been ‘very nearly brought down, not because he was himself in any way involved, but simply because he was Prime Minister’. But as Levin noted, ‘no “Heath must go” campaign is likely today’. The reason, he thought, was that for all the outrage of Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse, Britain now had a ‘calmer attitude’ where sexual morality was concerned. Perhaps this was going a bit far: although what Levin called the ‘fanaticism and intolerance’ of 1963 were evaporating, the success of Whitehouse’s decency petition just a few weeks earlier suggests that many people did not feel calm at all. All the same, he felt confident enough in the pace of change to risk a prediction. ‘It is exactly ten years since the last political dépit amoreux in Britain. If another decade should elapse before the next one, the compromised minister will stay in office.’ He was wrong about the details: ten years later, Cecil Parkinson failed to survive the revelation of his affair with his secretary Sara Keays, although the fact that he had fathered and abandoned a daughter made Lambton look like a pillar of moral rectitude. But in the long run, in a society in which Mary Whitehouse’s dream of stemming the tide of permissiveness had long since failed, Levin was right.77

  12

  No Surrender

  The typical Protestant worker’s reaction was expressed by one labourer in a Belfast pub last week when he said, ‘I wish it had been 1,300 of the bastards.’

  – Time, 14 February 1972

  On 5 January 1972, BBC1 devoted three hours of evening television to a painstaking debate about The Question of Ulster. In the days beforehand, discussion of the programme had reached hysterical levels: the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, had even threatened to ban it, while Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister Brian Faulkner flatly refused to take part and urged his fellow Ulster Unionists to boycott the panel. In the event, the programme took a serious and worthy look at the issues behind the conflict in Northern Ireland, soliciting contributions from a range of politicians all the way from Ian Paisley to Bernadette Devlin. Almost two-thirds of the population of Northern Ireland were reported to have tuned in, although half of them lost interest as midnight approached. But the programme came up with no answers, no solutions for the troubled province. For with communal trust destroyed and almost every day’s headlines announcing more casualties, Northern Ireland seemed on the brink of all-out bloodshed. When a representative of its tiny Labour Party visited Tony Benn in London, he reported that ‘the Catholics were now living in sort of tribal encampments with the barricades removed and the houses around them burned. When the whistle blew, the Protestants would just march in and murder them by the thousands and there would be the most appalling civil war.’1

  Even at Stormont, any remaining illusions had disappeared. When Brian Faulkner flew to London to brief Edward Heath on the deteriorating situation in October 1971, he gloomily reported that after reviewing ‘the economic and social position’, his officials thought that ‘a breakdown in government might occur in a matter of weeks’. Heath warned him that the position was ‘grave socially, economically and politically, and the British public was losing patience’. Yet still he shrank from the prospect of suspending Stormont and imposing direct rule. According to a Ministry of Defence report, ‘in the event of direct rule, the co-operation to be expected from the civil service, the public utility services, et cetera, would be less than has hitherto been assumed in London. This renders the direct rule option even less palatable than we have always supposed.’ Direct rule, the report gloomily concluded, might well involve the army ‘fighting both sides in the middle of a civil war’, which ‘quite apart from
its military implications, [would] be very difficult to sustain in British political terms’. It was little wonder that the Defence Secretary Lord Carrington told his staff that he was ‘even more impressed than before with the importance of keeping Mr Faulkner in power as the only apparent alternative to direct rule’.2

  The truth was that Heath had found himself trapped in a quagmire from which there was no obvious escape. Unilateral British withdrawal – the panacea often recommended by critics on the far left, as well as by ordinary people sick of seeing the conflict in the headlines – was unthinkable; quite apart from the fact that it would mean abandoning part of the United Kingdom in which a majority saw themselves as British, it would almost certainly spark massive sectarian bloodshed and full-scale civil war, sucking the Republic of Ireland into the conflict. (If the British withdrew, Irish defence chiefs reported to Dublin in the summer of 1971, the result would be ‘grave peril for the country as a whole’.) From the Labour benches, Harold Wilson talked vaguely of Irish unity, but even he admitted it would take fifteen years. And although there was talk of a new power-sharing government, it ran the enormous risk of provoking a loyalist rebellion. There seemed, in short, to be no way out.

  On top of all that, Northern Ireland was not even the government’s main priority. Not only was Heath already overloaded by rising unemployment, strikes and the torturous progress of the Industrial Relations Act, he also had to contend with surging inflation and the parliamentary battle over Britain’s entry into the EEC. Even if he had wanted to spend all day thinking about Belfast politics, he simply did not have the time. In the meantime, even senior ministers responsible for the province’s security seemed to have run out of ideas. When a group of community relations advisers went to see Maudling in November 1971, they found him sprawled in an armchair by a roaring fire, apparently utterly exhausted and uninterested in what they had to say. When they met again the next morning, he asked wearily: ‘What do we do? Arm the Protestants and get out?’3

  For the ordinary soldiers struggling to keep the peace on the streets of Belfast, the conflict had taken on the proportions of a nightmare. Some could barely believe what they were seeing: when one young officer with the Royal Green Jackets flew into Belfast for the first time in August 1971, he was stunned by the sight of the entire city apparently ablaze. ‘You could see roads that had been blocked and barricaded,’ he re-called. ‘You could see fires, from bonfires, burning cars and burning houses. I was shocked.’ As he drove past the shattered shop fronts, the piles of rubble and glass, the smouldering barricades, he could hardly believe ‘that all this was happening in a city of the United Kingdom’, a city with ‘red telephone boxes and red letter boxes’.4

  Far from being hailed as saviours, the troops themselves, their numbers increased from 7,000 to more than 15,000, had become part of the immensely complex, tortured mosaic of sectarian politics. A heavy fog of fear had settled over Belfast’s streets, and not even the army was immune. In 1971, IRA snipers shot and killed forty-two British soldiers; in 1972 they killed sixty-four. As the bounds of civility frayed and snapped, the news of each dead soldier brought cheers in nationalist pubs and homes. Visiting a grey, burned-out Belfast estate in the hot summer of 1972, Kevin Myers watched a teenage IRA gunman open fire on a British foot patrol. As one soldier bled to death in the middle of the street, Myers heard children cheering, their young voices raised in mockery of the dying man. Even those soldiers lucky enough to escape gunfire could expect a hail of missiles and abuse when they visited Catholic areas. ‘They did not want to be there. They had no axe to grind,’ a brigadier said later.

  Yet they were under constant verbal abuse, spat at, stoned from men, women and kids, all the time, and at risk from snipers and bombs. They saw their friends killed, shot, blown to pieces … and the locals gathering round to sneer or cheer when the British dead were cleared away. This was supposed to be a part of Britain but this was not how decent British people behave, or decent Irish people either, come to that.5

  Under the circumstances, Myers – born and bred in England, but the son of Irish Catholic parents – thought that ‘the forbearance and good cheer of the average squaddie, despite the direst provocation, were extraordinary’. There are plenty of underreported tales of soldiers showing astounding compassion and chivalry, for example in saving the lives of IRA men whom they themselves had wounded, or administering first aid to people who had been shooting at them only moments before. But they were not superhuman. Many soldiers were in their late teens or early twenties, the products of tough working-class backgrounds on the estates of Britain’s industrial cities; turning the other cheek did not come naturally. One man, ‘Jim’, told the journalist Peter Taylor that most soldiers felt ‘very, very close’ to each other, ‘and when you see these blokes being stretchered out of flats, or dying in gutters in a war which is not classed as a war, it makes you bloody bitter. It makes you angry, you know, and it fills you with hate. I hated the people in those flats and the people in those areas with an intensity that used to make me feel almost physically sick when I heard them speak.’ Jim and his mates got their revenge ‘by getting into their houses and breaking their telly sets and breaking their windows. If they were signalling on the ground with dustbin lids to let people know where we were, then we would break their windows, kick their doors in, and say, “you cut that out and we’ll cut it out”.’ The inevitable result, however, was that by the end of 1971 the British army was seen as a hostile occupying force, a tool of unionist oppression. To ordinary Catholic boys on the streets, the security forces were the ‘agents of a state intent on attacking their neighbourhoods’. Throughout nationalist areas, reported The Times in September 1971, ‘the army is now regarded with corrosive hate’.6

  Relations between the army and the local community were particularly raw in the province’s second city, Londonderry, where the Catholic majority bitterly remembered their treatment at the hands of the RUC in the Battle of the Bogside two years earlier. The scars from that conflict had not yet healed: shops and offices still stood vacant and charred, while almost thirty massive barricades prevented even the army’s one-tonne armoured cars from passing into nationalist ‘Free Derry’, which functioned as a kind of independent enclave, its entrances guarded by local vigilantes. Behind the barricades, both Provisional and Official IRA men posed for journalists wearing balaclavas and carrying guns, while gangs of unemployed teenagers, calling themselves the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’, used the no-go areas as bases for raids into the city centre, looting shops and carrying out nightly arson attacks against Protestant businesses.

  Despite the army’s attempts to keep a low profile, there was a powerful sense in the second half of 1971 that they had lost control. Londonderry’s Protestant business leaders estimated that bombings and arson had cost them more than £4 million worth of damage, and were furious that British troops seemed reluctant to intervene. What seemed to sum up the situation were the daily confrontations at ‘aggro corner’, on the edge of the Bogside, where at teatime every afternoon local youths would hurl stones and bricks at the army patrols just outside. To more hawkish observers, it seemed unbelievable that the army never cracked down on its attackers. To Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, the commanding officer of the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, it was totally unacceptable. ‘They just stood there in the road like Aunt Sallies and never went forward,’ he said later. ‘It was quite horrifying … We did not carry shields. We did not wear cricket pads. As far as I was concerned, it was not a game of cricket that we were engaged in.’7

  Not only did Derry’s business leaders share Wilford’s view, but so did Major General Robert Ford, the new commander of the British land forces in Northern Ireland. For General Ford, the black line on British military maps dividing ‘Free Derry’ from the rest of the city was an embarrassment to the army, while the local commanders’ softly-softly policy was putting his men under intolerable pressure and risking their lives in the long run. Even for the
last six months of 1971, the statistics made disheartening reading: the army in Derry had lost seven men killed and fifteen injured, while the IRA had fired almost 2,000 rounds, thrown 180 nail bombs and set off more than 200 explosions. On 14 December, Ford warned other senior officers that détente was breaking down: his men now faced perhaps 40 active IRA gunmen and 500 self-styled ‘hooligans’, and he thought only military action would recover the situation. The ‘correct military solution’, he thought, was to launch a thrust across the containment lines, root out the IRA and restore law and order to the no-go areas. Crucially, however, General Ford added that ‘the drawbacks are so serious that it should not be implemented in the present circumstances’. As he explained, ‘the risk of casualties is high and apart from gunmen or bombers, so-called unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers, are certain to be shot in the initial phases. Much will be made of the invasion of Derry and the slaughter of the innocent.’ Instead of recommending a major offensive into the no-go areas, therefore, he suggested keeping to the status quo, albeit with a more assertive attitude.8