State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  No election campaign had been attended by more publicity than the contest in February 1974. Both the BBC and ITV ran ‘Election 74’ bulletins several times a day, while the newspapers were dominated by campaign stories. But what was also unprecedented, at least since the war, was the level of sheer partisanship. Only the Guardian refused to commit itself, calling rather limply for a ‘three-way balance’. The Mirror, as usual, backed Labour, but Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, hitherto a Labour paper, urged its readers to re-elect Heath. What was really striking, though, was the sheer intensity of the Conservative papers’ rhetoric, which reawakened memories of the Zinoviev letter and the anti-socialist scares of the 1920s. A Labour government would be ‘complete chaos: ruin public and private’, said the Telegraph, which thought that their manifesto illustrated Wilson’s ‘craven subservience to trade union power’. If he won, agreed the Sun, the result would be ‘galloping inflation and the sinister and ever-growing power of a small band of anarchists, bullyboys and professional class-war warriors’.16

  By contrast, the Daily Mail – which had prepared but did not run a story about Wilson’s murky finances – directed much of its fire at the miners, blaming them for ‘producing the worst inflation in our history’. But it reserved some of its ammunition for Tony Benn, who for the right had become the ultimate demonic stage villain. One Mail cartoon showed Benn as a Gauleiter ordering Joe Gormley to torture the British public with the words ‘ve haf vays off makink you suffer!’ Another showed him as a blacksmith, setting about the pound with a hammer and sickle while hot air pours out of his forehead. And other Tory papers were hardly more generous: on the last day of the campaign, the Evening Standard ran a piece by Kingsley Amis explaining why Benn was ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’. The Evening News, meanwhile, ran an extraordinary article by the retired MI6 officer and hard-right Tory candidate George Young, who claimed that there were ‘40 or 50 Labour MPs for whom the Labour label is cover for more sinister roles’. They formed, he said, a ‘Black Hand Gang’, working alongside the ‘Red Hand Gang’ in the unions.17

  Yet whether commentators favoured Heath or Wilson, almost none doubted that the Prime Minister would win; indeed, many expected a landslide. Bookmakers had the Tories favourites at 2–1 on, a stark contrast with their underdog status back in 1970, and by the end of the first week Harris, NOP, ORC and Marplan all gave them a lead of between 6 and 9 per cent. Now that battle had been joined, Heath seemed unusually relaxed and confident, enjoying the liberation of campaigning rather than governing. ‘Presidential’ was the word that often sprang to mind: one profile even called him ‘the iron man’, stern and authoritative. And as poll after poll forecast a clear Tory lead, a sense of inevitability began to take hold. Irrespective of how they planned to vote themselves, no fewer than six out of ten voters thought that Heath would win the election, compared with just two who expected Wilson to win. ‘The present one-sided picture of a relaxed and “statesmanlike” Prime Minster chastising the militants on behalf of the nation and a rather tired and rattled Labour Party swinging wildly,’ wrote David Watt in the Financial Times, ‘can only produce one result.’18

  The second series of the BBC’s hugely popular Colditz was just starting when Emmwood drew this cartoon for the Daily Mail (7 January 1974). The miners’ president Joe Gormley and the railwaymen’s leader Ray Buckton wield the cudgels, ‘Adolf Benn’ gives the orders, and the public quails in terror.

  In the Labour ranks, all was despondency. Only three days into the campaign, the political scientist David Butler, who co-edited the Nuffield election studies and had been an on-screen expert for the BBC since 1950, warned Tony Benn that he ‘foresaw a Tory landslide [and] was afraid that the Labour Party couldn’t survive’. The next evening, after spending the day touring a Bristol housing estate in the wind and rain, Benn noted that even Labour housewives had been ‘impressed by [Heath’s] arguments about the unions, about the miners, about Communists, about Militants, about strikes and about being fair but firm’. He felt ‘tired, exhausted and rather depressed’. So did Harold Wilson, whose aides worried that at heart he had already given up. In the old days Wilson had loved campaigning, but now Joe Haines, his faithful but acerbic press secretary, thought that his performances were ‘abysmal’, his speeches falling ‘from tired lips on to a leaden audience’. The Sunday Times thought he seemed ‘withdrawn, nervous, tentative, apprehensive, not to say distinctly bored with the whole affair’. He seemed ‘exhausted by the relentless treadmill of the campaign’, wrote his young policy adviser Bernard Donoughue, ‘his voice croaking and his eyes puffy and red-rimmed’. And every night, as Wilson relaxed with a large glass of whisky, he seemed older and more deflated, his faint hopes of victory slipping further away. It was like watching a condemned man, making the last inevitable journey to the scaffold. When Benn accompanied his leader to a rally with only six days to go, he was struck by the fact that Wilson seemed uncharacteristically nervous. ‘I think he does realise’, Benn wrote, ‘that he is perhaps within a week of the end of his political career.’19

  There were, however, two chinks of light for Wilson. The first was the performance of the Liberal Party, whose popularity had been gradually rising since the leadership of Jo Grimond back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1970 the Liberals had won less than 8 per cent of the vote, but since then they had enjoyed considerable success picking up disaffected Tory voters, especially after the Heath government ran into trouble in 1972. Almost beneath the surface of political events, the two-party system, based on class, regional, religious and family loyalties, was beginning to collapse under the impact of affluence and social change, and the Liberals’ reputation as ‘amiable, moderate and relatively harmless’ made them the ideal party of protest. Their by-election victories in late 1972 and mid-1973 confirmed them as a genuine force in British politics: indeed, Liberal candidates won more votes in 1973 than those of any other party, and by August they had broken through the 20 per cent barrier for the first time in polling history. Many observers expected their support to evaporate under the pressure of a general election, especially as their campaign was such a shoestring effort. But far from collapsing, the Liberals seemed more buoyant than ever. Their manifesto, with its promises of devolution and political reform and its impossibly vague economic agenda, evidently appealed to middle-class voters sick of the mudslinging of the other parties and nostalgic for a lost golden age of quiet moderation. And in their debonair leader, Jeremy Thorpe, they had the star of the campaign, a wry, charming television presence who took questions down a closed-circuit link from Barnstaple, making him seem somehow above the fray. In fact, Thorpe had a dark side that would have been entirely unimaginable in his rivals. But nobody knew that then.20

  The other good news for Wilson was that despite the papers’ melodramatic talk of the ‘crisis election’, any sense of crisis seemed to be ebbing away. Although the miners had walked out on 10 February, the NUM shrewdly discouraged mass picketing and there were none of the violent clashes that had horrified the public two years before. Throughout the campaign, the miners kept a low profile, with only six men on each picket: Jim Prior wrote afterwards that they had been ‘as quiet and well-behaved as mice’. The anticipated power emergency, too, failed to materialize. The weather continued to be unseasonably warm, the three-day week seemed to be working, and power stations reported no shortages of fuel. Above all, Heath lifted the late-night television curfew on 7 February so that the election could get proper coverage. But with the schedules having returned to normal, many people took the attitude that the crisis was basically over.21

  As the sense of urgency disappeared, so polls began to show that the miners’ dispute was fading as an election issue. By 15 February, when the latest Retail Price Index showed that prices had increased by a staggering 20 per cent in just twelve months, inflation was beginning to take over as the electorate’s chief anxiety. Concern about the unions began to recede: whereas 40 per cent had named strikes as a major issu
e on 8 February, only 24 per cent thought the same on 23 February – while twice as many were worried about high food prices. One by one, the newspapers that had originally claimed that this was a single-issue, government-versus-miners election changed their tune. From The Times on 12 February and the Telegraph on 18 February to the Sun on 21 February and the Mail on 27 February, they all decided that the ‘real issue’ was inflation after all.* This was good news for Wilson, who urged the voters to kick out ‘Mr Rising Price’, and promised that through a vague and undefined ‘Social Contract’ with the unions, he would be able to end the industrial unrest while still keeping prices down. But it was a disaster for Heath. He had set out to fight a ‘Who Governs’ election, not a referendum on his economic record – which by any standards, whether it was his fault or not, was frankly abysmal. Partly because of his own passivity, partly because of sheer bad luck, he had lost control of the election narrative.22

  On Thursday, 21 February, a week before polling day, there was more bad news for Heath. Just after six that evening, the Pay Board issued its long-awaited report on the miners’ relativities, and it contained a bombshell. Far from being paid more than most manufacturing workers, as the Coal Board had claimed, it seemed that most miners were actually paid 8 per cent less – which obviously strengthened their case for a raise. Heath was furious, Wilson delighted, and the next day’s papers had a field day. ‘THE GREAT PIT BLUNDER’, roared the Mail. As Heath pointed out, the story was not quite as it seemed: it was really all a question of different statistical tables. But the damage was done. At that moment, many Tories later recalled, there was a tiny but palpable sense of the momentum shifting. What was more, some of Heath’s advisers were becoming distinctly alarmed by the Liberal surge, not least because nobody knew how it would affect the electoral map. Indeed, the Liberals’ rise defied all conventional wisdom: having been on just 12 per cent in Marplan’s poll on 10 February, they had surged to a stunning 28 per cent by the final Sunday of the campaign. Many people, it seemed, shared the views of Ronald McIntosh, who recorded that he and his wife had decided to vote Liberal for the first time because ‘if Heath gets back he will draw the moral that he was right all along and that would be quite disastrous … The Liberals have a good manifesto, they are sound on Europe and they are preaching moderation so they seem to us to be well worth voting for.’ Indeed, almost incredibly, four out of ten people now told pollsters that they would vote Liberal if Thorpe had a chance of holding the balance of power, and 48 per cent said they would vote for them if they could be the next government. At the very least, this was a resounding vote of no confidence in the two main parties. ‘Are you voting Liberal to get rid of Mr Heath or Mr Wilson?’ one voter asks another in a Times cartoon published two days later.23

  With the polls still putting him around 5 per cent clear, Heath remained outwardly buoyant. Mulling over the figures at Chequers with his aides on the last Sunday of the campaign, he was reportedly ‘in a mood of high confidence’, the only doubt being ‘the magnitude of his victory’. Wilson, by contrast, seemed to have sunk into total despair. Seeing him in Birmingham that Sunday for a big meeting in the town hall, Roy Jenkins thought that his leader seemed ‘tired, depressed and expecting defeat, keeping going with some difficulty and gallantry until by the Thursday night he would have completed his final throw in politics’. Already Jenkins’s supporters were discussing the possibility of a leadership challenge: with Wilson bound to resign, it would surely mean a fight to the death against Callaghan, Foot and Benn. And on the Monday morning the mood was worse than ever, with a private poll suggesting that Labour were even further behind than they thought, and rumours circulating that the Daily Mail was about to produce its dossier on Wilson’s finances, his political secretary Marcia Williams, and their involvement in a strange land deal in the North of England. That night, Donoughue recalled, ‘the atmosphere was very bad … Wilson sat slumped, tired, sour, scowling, his eyes dead like a fish. He snarled at Joe about his speeches being “too sophisticated”. He drank brandy heavily.’ The next day, Wilson was scheduled to give his last major address in the Fairfield Halls, Croydon, and his aides were delighted to find a huge crowd outside. Only when Wilson walked in to a less than packed house did they realize that only 400 people had been queuing for the Labour leader. The other 1,700 had been waiting to see the film Trams, Trams, Trams in the hall next door.24

  Yet it was not all dark clouds for Wilson. Over the last weekend a long-planned clandestine operation had been put into effect, and at its centre was perhaps the least likely man in Britain to lend his support to the Labour cause. Enoch Powell’s disaffection with his party leadership had been on record for years, but what few people realized was that he had been coming under intense pressure from middle-class Tories in his Wolverhampton constituency. During the fevered early weeks of 1974, his breach with both the leadership and his local association had widened even further. On 15 January, he had even declared that ‘it would be fraudulent – or worse’ for Heath to call an early election when neither the unions nor the miners had broken the law, and when the root of the crisis (as he thought) lay in Heath’s foolish incomes policy. And when Heath did call an election, Powell wasted no time in issuing a statement that sent shock waves through Conservative ranks. The election was ‘essentially fraudulent’, he declared, and ‘an act of gross irresponsibility’. Heath was trying ‘to steal success by telling the public one thing during an election and doing the opposite afterwards’. Powell could not ‘ask electors to vote for policies which are directly opposite to those we stood for in 1970’ – when Heath had, of course, ruled out any kind of incomes policy – ‘and which I have myself consistently condemned as being inherently impracticable and bound to create the very difficulties in which the nation now finds itself’. With regret, therefore, he would not be standing for re-election as a Conservative in Wolverhampton. For Powell, it was a searing emotional moment: he reportedly had tears in his eyes when he went into the Commons that evening. His friend Michael Foot rang and begged him to reconsider, calling his decision ‘courageous, brilliant – but reckless’. But when Powell’s mind was made up, there was no changing it.25

  If Powell’s decision not to stand was a surprise, what followed was one of the biggest political shocks of the decade. Such was his contempt for Heath that party loyalty counted for little: all that mattered was to kick the erring helmsman out of Downing Street and replace him with somebody who might pull Britain out of Europe. A few days later, Powell’s friend Andrew Alexander, a columnist for the Daily Mail, contacted Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines and told him that Powell wanted to issue a broadside against Heath: what would be the best timing for the Labour campaign? And on Sunday, 23 February, when Powell addressed an audience in the forbidding surroundings of the Mecca Dance Hall at the Bull Ring, Birmingham, even experienced commentators were left dumbstruck by his words. The overriding issue in this campaign, Powell said, was whether Britain was to ‘remain a democratic nation, governed by the will of its own electorate expressed in its own parliament, or whether it will become one province in a new Europe super-state under institutions which know nothing of political rights and liberties which we have so long taken for granted’. Under these circumstances, the ‘national duty’ must be to replace the man who had deprived Parliament of ‘its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of the country’. Powell never used the words ‘Vote Labour’. He did not have to. But when one of his listeners asked how they could be rid of ‘that confidence trickster, Heath’, he said calmly: ‘If you want to do it, you can.’26

  Powell’s speech was a sensation. ‘ENOCH PUTS THE BOOT IN’, screamed the Sun; ‘THEY WEPT FOR ENOCH’, countered the Express. It is true that Europe was hardly the most rousing issue; until then it had barely featured in the campaign at all, and most people remained as confused and apathetic as ever. But Powell was still the most admired politician in the country, with an unparalleled ability to make headlines. And two days lat
er at Shipley, where the hall was packed with 1,000 people and a further 3,000 were waiting outside, he was even more explicit. ‘I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory,’ he said, but he nevertheless hoped for a victory by ‘the party which is committed to fundamental renegotiation of the Treaty of Brussels and to submitting to the British people thereafter, for their final yea or nay, the outcome of that renegotiation’ – in other words, Labour. For Heath he had the deadliest insult of all, commenting that where U-turns were concerned ‘Harold Wilson, for all his nimbleness and skill, is simply no match for the breathtaking, thoroughgoing efficiency of the present Prime Minister’. At that, amid the shouting and applause, a heckler yelled: ‘Judas!’ Suddenly it was as though Powell had been connected to an electric current. His eyes blazing, his voice burning with conviction, his finger stabbing the air, he shot back: ‘Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!’27

  For Powell to be making the headlines just days before the election was the last thing Heath wanted. In the Express, Cummings portrayed the Prime Minister as a shipwrecked mariner, desperately scrabbling across a desert island towards the sanctuary of Number 10, while a gigantic black vulture in the shape of Enoch Powell moves in for the kill. But the shocks did not end there. Thinking that he was speaking off the record, the CBI’s secretary general Campbell Adamson told an audience that the Industrial Relations Act was now ‘so surrounded by hatred’ that the next government ought to repeal it and start all over again. Heath was furious and Adamson offered to resign, but the damage was done. More serious still was the news on Monday, 25 February, when the DTI’s latest batch of trade figures made for appalling reading. Back in 1970, a bad set of trade figures, showing a monthly deficit of £32 million, had helped to swing the election to Heath. But how times had changed! Now the figures showed an eye-watering £383 million deficit, the worst in history, thanks above all to the soaring price of oil. Heath insisted that the figures merely confirmed ‘the gravity of the situation’ and the need for a new mandate. But Wilson pounced. ‘On every count,’ he said, ‘the handling of the nation’s economy by this Conservative Government has been a disaster. Today’s devastating trade figures underline their incompetence. No excuse, no defence, no pretence can now hide from the country the fact that the economic crisis is deeper and more fundamental than the Conservatives have ever admitted.’ And as Roy Jenkins wryly remarked, it was very odd for Heath to claim that the atrocious figures somehow strengthened his case: ‘He presumably thinks a still worse result would have given him a still stronger claim.’28