State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  On Monday night, Labour made its final televised appeal. As always, the broadcast emphasized the theme of teamwork, with one shadow minister after another – Michael Foot, Denis Healey, Shirley Williams – explaining how they would put Britain ‘on the road to recovery’, before Harold Wilson made some characteristically anodyne remarks about national unity: ‘Trades unionists are people. Employers are people. We can’t go on setting one against the other except at the cost of damage to the nation itself.’ By contrast, the Conservative broadcast on Tuesday evening was classic man-of-destiny stuff, opening with a montage of film clips and photographs while a narrator described Heath as ‘an extraordinary man. A private man. A solitary man. Perhaps single-minded sums it up … This is a man the world respects. A man who has done so much and yet a man who has so much left to do.’ Speaking woodenly but earnestly into the camera, Heath addressed the charge that he was too stubborn:

  Is it stubborn to fight and fight hard to stop the country you love from tearing itself apart? Is it stubborn to insist that everyone in that country should have the choice and the chance to take his life and make of it what he can? Is it stubborn to want to see this country take back the place that history means us to have?

  If it is – then, yes, I most certainly am stubborn …

  I love this country. I’ll do all that I can for this country. And isn’t that what you want too? We’ve started a job together. With your will, we shall go on and finish the job.29

  It was the same kind of patriotic appeal he had made in his final broadcast almost four years before, when he had been facing apparently certain defeat. Then, the polls had been wrong. This time, Heath had to hope they were right.

  The Election Day headlines made encouraging reading for Conservative supporters. ‘It’s Heath By 5%’, said the Express, while the Mail predicted ‘A Handsome Win For Heath’. Neither paper mentioned that the polls had been quietly narrowing over the last few days, or that the Tory lead was now within the margin of error. In any case, all the major polling groups had Heath ahead by between 2 and 5 per cent. Among Tory insiders, the real question was not whether they would win, but the size of the victory, which would be crucial in claiming a new mandate: most reckoned they might get a 40- to 50-seat majority. Among Wilson’s aides, meanwhile, the great hope was that somehow they might deny Heath an overall majority, allowing them to claim a moral victory against the odds. Their mood was ‘sombre’, Bernard Donoughue remembered. Wilson himself seemed decidedly pessimistic: even as people were streaming out to vote, he told Donoughue that after his own Huyton constituency count he would tell the press that he was going back to the Adelphi Hotel, his traditional haunt on election night, but would in fact slip away to the Golden Eagle in Kirkby. There, Wilson said, he would watch the results. Then, early in the morning, he would leave by plane for London but secretly land at an airfield in Bedfordshire, from where he would drive to his Buckinghamshire farmhouse or some other rural retreat. Donoughue listened in total bewilderment, and then the penny dropped. ‘I suddenly realised what was behind all these bizarre plans,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘HW was preparing to lose! He was preparing his getaway plans. Unwilling to face the press, as anybody when beaten.’30

  Election Day had dawned clear and bright, but by midday the weather was already changing, the dark clouds drawing in, the first drops of rain beginning to fall. At Conservative Central Office in London, the mood was nervous but still optimistic; in Liverpool, Donoughue walked with Marcia Williams along the Mersey waterfront, watching worriedly as the fog rolled in, looking at his watch and praying that the rain held off. ‘Every half-hour matters,’ he thought. Williams was so nervous that she had developed blisters, but Mary Wilson, never a great fan of politics, seemed completely unperturbed and spent the afternoon calmly reading the new Oxford Book of Poetry at their hotel. Heavy winds and snow were forecast in the north, yet reports indicated turnout was high: well up, indeed, on 1970.

  In the Adelphi, the Labour team ate an early dinner of steak and chips, and Wilson again brought up his elaborate escape plan, which was now ‘too complicated to follow’, with ‘trains and diversionary cars as well as the airplane’. Donoughue was so confused that he lost track of ‘which hotel I am staying in or how I am going back to London if at all’. Wilson seemed a bit chirpier, however, and at 8.30 his young aide accompanied him on a last tour of his Huyton constituency. It was a grim, dreary scene. For two hours, Donoughue recorded, they trudged the streets, ‘in rain and sleet, very dark, totally lost in miles of council house estates’. The party offices and clubs were deserted: most Labour activists were still out canvassing. Reporters and police followed at a distance, but seemed barely interested. Wilson was yesterday’s man. ‘I sensed that everybody saw him as a loser, finished, who could soon be just an old back-bench MP,’ Donoughue noted. ‘At times we walked in the rain, just the two of us, HW and myself, rather lonely figures lost in anonymous wet streets.’ Trying to cheer them both up, Donoughue suggested that it was going to be like the election of 1964, Wilson’s first victory, ‘when we just scraped home. He agreed.’31

  At ten the polls closed. Heath was now in Bexley, his constituency for so many years, waiting for the count with his closest allies. In Liverpool, Wilson and his team were huddled around the television in his hotel suite, clutching large glasses of whisky. Marcia Williams was ‘trembling with nerves’; Joe Haines was ‘tense and silent’. Donoughue detected their ‘concern, almost terror, that this will be a repeat of last time’. And then, one by one, the results started coming in. Guildford: a comfortable Tory win. Salford: a boost to Labour’s majority. Wolverhampton North East – Powell country – a swing of 10 per cent to Labour. Just as they had done four years before, the first results were turning all the predictions on their heads. ‘We can’t lose now,’ Donoughue murmured, as though willing himself to believe it. ‘It may be very close, but we won’t lose.’

  Close was hardly the word: by midnight, the BBC’s computers were predicting a dead heat. When Wilson left his suite there were suddenly hordes of policemen around him, holding the doors, watching the stairs, ushering him into the lift. Downstairs, Donoughue noted, ‘the press is bubbling and crowd around him and wish him good luck. They know he might win and suddenly the police care and the press change sides.’ At the count, Mary Wilson and Marcia Williams uncorked a bottle of champagne. And at Huyton Labour Club afterwards, the room erupted with screams of delight when Wilson walked in. ‘Everybody singing and chanting,’ Donoughue wrote. ‘Packed. Woman next to me had tears streaming down her face and was shouting, “I love him, I love him.” ’32

  Hundreds of miles to the south, the mood was very different. When Heath arrived for his Bexley count just after midnight, his face seemed pale and taut, his smile forced, his eyes glassy. After his result had been confirmed, he confined himself to a few bland remarks of thanks and was then whisked away to his car. Back in Downing Street, he stared at the television in silent disbelief as the results continued to flow in, like a man in deep shock. He had got it all wrong, he told his friend Lord Aldington, and silently the tears of self-pity streamed down his face. But not all Conservatives felt similarly heartbroken. Enoch Powell declined to watch the results, but spent the evening at his London home with his wife and children. The next morning, when he went down at seven o’clock to collect The Times from the letterbox, the headline stared up at him: ‘Mr Heath’s General Election Gamble Fails’. For Powell, it was the sweetest of moments. He went straight back upstairs, ran himself a bath and loudly sang the ‘Te Deum’. ‘I had had my revenge’, he said later, ‘on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom.’33

  The result of the election was both extraordinarily close and bewilderingly inconclusive. In terms of the total vote, the Conservatives had won 37.9 per cent, Labour had won 37.2 per cent, the Liberals won 19.3 per cent and the various nationalist parties won the remaining 5 per cent. But the picture in terms of seats was much more complicat
ed. Labour was the biggest party, with 301 seats but no overall majority, the Tories had 297 seats, and the Liberals, punished by the electoral system, had just 14. In Wales, Plaid Cymru did less well than they had hoped, their share falling to just over 10 per cent even though they won two seats. In Scotland, however, the Scottish Nationalists were delighted with their haul, picking up 22 per cent of the vote and six new seats to add to the one they already had. And in Northern Ireland, the results were a devastating blow not just to the cause of power sharing but to Heath’s chances of holding onto power, as the pro-government Unionists were completely blown away and replaced by anti-Heath hardliners under the aegis of the United Ulster Unionist Council. And if anyone doubted that the old two-party system was in deep decay, here was the proof. Both the Conservatives and Labour had suffered blows unprecedented in their history, the Tory vote collapsing by 8 per cent and Labour’s by 6 per cent. Never again would the two major parties command nine-tenths of the vote; from February 1974 onwards, at least one in four people would choose to cast their votes elsewhere.34

  For the Conservatives, the results naturally seemed a disaster. No government had suffered a bigger electoral collapse since 1945, and what was particularly disturbing was that the party seemed to have lost touch with its core affluent middle-class voters, 16 per cent of whom had defected to the Liberals. The biggest regional collapse, predictably enough, had come in the Black Country, where the Powell effect saw a swing to Labour of between 5 and 10 per cent, well above the national average. (In Wolverhampton, the swing was even bigger, a massive 12 per cent.) Yet there was an obvious silver lining for Tory supporters. Although Labour crowed that they had won the election, their electoral performance had been almost as poor. Their biggest gains had come among the middle classes – teachers, lecturers, clerical workers and so on – but they had lost votes among manual workers and even trade union households. Indeed, far from improving since 1970, Labour had actually lost half a million votes, the worst performance by an opposition party in modern times. There was certainly no mandate for Labour’s policies: exit polls showed that only a minority of the electorate supported its commitments to more nationalization, the repeal of the incomes policy and the abolition of the industrial relations apparatus. Indeed, 71 per cent told pollsters that they were disappointed with the election results, and only 34 per cent had any faith that a Labour government could succeed. It was hardly a vote of confidence. Yet one of the biggest mistakes Labour ever made was to treat the February 1974 election as a great victory, and to ignore the deeper reality that it was steadily haemorrhaging support.35

  The day after the election, Heath cut a very disconsolate figure. With the results so close, he still had a tiny chance of remaining as Prime Minister, but as he dined with friends on Friday night he seemed ‘shell-shocked’, barely seeming to notice as he shovelled down two dozen oysters they had ordered from his beloved Prunier’s. Many people thought he had only himself to blame: Douglas Hurd believed that if Heath had only called the election earlier, for 7 February rather than 28 February, then they would have won. But there is no evidence that any date would have given him the majority he needed, and even if he had scraped home on the 7th, a narrow victory would have solved nothing. Looking back, many senior Conservatives thought that they should have settled with the miners after all, taking the TUC’s offer and pleading exceptional circumstances to the public. Months later, Willie Whitelaw told Ronald McIntosh that his great regret was not settling with the miners before Christmas. Even Margaret Thatcher told ITV’s Brian Walden in 1977 that she was ‘sorry’ the government had not followed up the TUC’s ‘very responsible proposal’ on 9 January. Given her legendary loathing for Heathite appeasement, it is surprising to think that she would have taken the deal and ducked the confrontation. But then Mrs Thatcher was always much more flexible than her reputation suggests – and unlike Heath, she never lost sight of her political self-interest.36

  For Harold Wilson, the night of 28 February should have been one to remember, a night of champagne, laughter and sweet satisfaction. In fact, he spent the hours after his count scuttling off to his bolt-hole in Kirkby: ‘a small, miserable hotel’, Donoughue recalled, ‘with poky modern rooms and no atmosphere whatsoever’. Even the receptionist was surly and unfriendly: ‘clearly Tory’, Donoughue thought, although given the standards of hotel service in the mid-1970s, she probably thought she was treating them like honoured guests. In any case, since Wilson had defied the odds, the fact that he was still going through with his convoluted escape plan seemed utterly preposterous, especially as the press soon found out where he was and started shouting and clamouring downstairs. ‘What are we doing here?’ Donoughue wondered. ‘We are winning, not losing … Unhappy to be at this dismal hotel. No place to celebrate a marvellous victory. We should be at the Adelphi, with the Labour crowds celebrating, putting up two fingers to the press. This is wrong.’ But as even he admitted, they could hardly go back there now: ‘That would be too bizarre, to run away from two hotels in one night.’

  On Friday morning, Wilson’s party flew back to London. Rain and sleet were pouring down, but Donoughue felt that they all shared ‘the feeling of a job well done’. Only Mary Wilson seemed less than delighted: as the plane descended towards the capital, she remarked that she was not looking forward to life back in Number 10, and would have preferred a quiet retirement with the family. When they landed, however, it was still not clear that she was going to Downing Street. Nobody seemed to have the latest results, and when Donoughue rang Transport House from Heathrow, he was amazed to find that ‘nobody there seemed to know, or was particularly interested to help their party leader find out’. In the end, he had to get the results by phoning the Daily Mirror, who told him that Labour were clearly going to be the biggest single party, but that an overall majority was touch and go. There was nothing to do but wait; if Heath could stitch together a coalition, they might yet be denied the prize. And so they waited, killing time at Wilson’s house in Lord North Street, their elation turning into tiredness and irritability. Morning became afternoon; afternoon stretched into evening. In public, Wilson presented a calm, unruffled front. In private, he was weary and ill-tempered, snapping at his aides, even ringing Jim Callaghan and asking him to issue a statement that they were being cheated. Callaghan refused. ‘We are all tired,’ said Marcia Williams, announcing that she was off to bed.37

  The constitutional picture was intensely complicated. Was the Queen morally obliged to invite Wilson, as the leader of the single biggest party, to form the next government? Or should she allow Heath, as the incumbent Prime Minister, to try to form a government with the Liberals, sending for somebody else only if he failed? ‘The Queen could only await events,’ was the message from her Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, on Friday morning. ‘She would not be called upon to take action unless and until Mr Heath tendered his resignation, and if and when he did so it would then be her duty to send for Mr Wilson.’ This gave Heath one last chance to hang on to office. As he admitted to his Principal Private Secretary, Robert Armstrong, it was bound to invite accusations that he was a bad loser, clinging on to power by his fingertips. But Heath was nothing if not stubborn, and, as he saw it, there was a happy coincidence between his personal self-interest and the well-being of the nation. A Labour government, Armstrong recorded, would be committed to such big spending increases that it would put the nation’s economic recovery in severe jeopardy, and it was much ‘less likely to command the degree of confidence overseas which would be required if the sterling exchange rate was to be held and the expected balance of payments deficit financed’. And when Heath’s Cabinet met at six on Friday afternoon, tired and miserable after the shock of the night’s results, they agreed that they should at least try to strike a deal with the Liberals, on the grounds that ‘there was a large anti-Socialist majority which supported both an incomes policy and Britain’s continued membership of the European Community’. Late that night, Armstrong telephoned
Jeremy Thorpe and asked him to come to London.38

  Britain awoke on Saturday morning to a situation of utter deadlock and confusion. Outside Downing Street, radical demonstrators gathered to chant for Heath’s resignation, led by a group of International Socialists and the freelance protester Tariq Ali. A few minutes’ walk away, Wilson’s Georgian terraced house on Lord North Street stood silent and empty. Yielding to his advisers’ suggestions, the Labour leader had decamped to his farmhouse at Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where he presented a typically confident and jaunty image, kicking a ball about in the cool spring sunshine with Paddy, his gigantic Labrador. Behind the scenes, however, Wilson was not relaxed at all: indeed, he phoned Bernard Donoughue several times to vent his fury that the Liberals were going to snatch victory away from him. In his darker moments, he even fantasized about striking directly at Jeremy Thorpe, whose murky involvement with the stable boy Norman Scott had come to the attention of MI5 – and therefore to the government – during the 1960s. Wisely, however, Wilson held back from using this ultimate weapon, and simply waited for events to play themselves out. And by the time Barbara Castle rang for a chat on Sunday morning, he was in much better spirits, joking about the strange situation and mulling over his plans for the new Cabinet. There would be ‘no more of those off the record discussions of what the Government is going to do’, he told her; he wanted a calmer, wiser, less hysterical government this time. ‘Some of his old spirit seems to have come back,’ she noted afterwards. ‘Certainly Harold is the only man for this tricky hour. It could be that he has really learned the lessons of last time.’39