by Andy Beckett
For all Morris’s gloating, his arguments had some force – and some unexpected supporters. The Daily Telegraph agreed that Ennals, as the minister in charge of NHS pay, made a ‘legitimate target’ for aggrieved NUPE members. Peter Jay was away in Washington as British ambassador but was still closely following events at home. He told me, ‘The Winter of Discontent came from [the desires of] very low-level people. Individuals governed the Winter of Discontent. They were thinking, “Why be restrained in our pay demands? I want to be re-elected as branch secretary.” When I was at The Times, I would often spend the morning with the National Union of Journalists, fighting for a higher pay increase, trying to negotiate the best result we could, and the afternoon writing a leader calling for pay restraint and a national incomes policy.’
Even Margaret Thatcher, faced with the volatile politics of the winter and conscious of the need not just to attack trade unionists but also to win some of their votes at the coming election, and the need to discredit Callaghan, found herself occupying an unexpected position on pay restraint. She opposed the 5 per cent guideline and refused to condemn ‘free collective bargaining’. ‘Although opposition to centrally imposed pay policies meant that we would find ourselves with strange bedfellows, including the more extreme trade union militants,’ she wrote later, ‘the revolt [by unions during the Winter of Discontent] against centralization and egalitarianism was basically healthy. As Conservatives, we should not frown on people being well rewarded for using sharp wits or strong arms … Of course, such an approach was described … as being opportunist … But in fact it was an essential part of my political strategy to appeal directly to those who had not traditionally voted Conservative.’
Over pay, it seemed, she and Jamie Morris were temporarily on the same side. As Ted Heath, Jim Prior and other more cautious Tories pointed out in public and in private over the winter, this was a risky and contradictory stance. Thatcher was loudly chastising unions for their excesses, except when those excesses happened to hurt the Labour government. At the 1978 Conservative conference, the shadow chancellor Geoffrey Howe came up with a cumbersome form of words to summarize the Tory pay policy. In government, he said, the Conservatives would permit not ‘free collective bargaining’ but ‘realistic, responsible collective bargaining, free from government interference’. Yet in fact there was a shrewdness to the piled-up euphemisms: they sounded bland and uncontentious, but gave a future Tory administration plenty of room for manoeuvre against the unions. ‘Free from government interference’ would not be how most would describe British industrial relations in the coming decade.
But in the Westminster, from the 6th to the 8th of March 1979, Ennals remained stuck in bed in his green pyjamas. He read his official papers through thick-rimmed glasses. He looked a little flushed, but he kept his hair neatly parted and managed to smile for the cameras. Nurses who were not NUPE members brought him tea and tidied his locker. Members of the public who had been volunteering in the hospital since the start of the dispute did the same. His tests were carried out. ‘I am being treated magnificently,’ he told the Daily Telegraph, ‘and that includes doctors, nurses, administrators, porters, domestics, volunteers … I have seen no sign of discrimination [against me]. I have seen nothing but professional skill and human kindness.’ In this interview and the dozen others he gave while in hospital, he did not criticize or mention Jamie Morris.
After two days, Ennals left the Westminster in a wheelchair, getting into his ministerial Rover to be driven straight to an official engagement. As a parting gift, the Telegraph reported, he had ‘received a red carnation and a note from Jamie Morris [which] referred to him as Comrade Ennals and asked him to attend, if possible, one of the union’s future branch meetings’. Ennals’ response was not recorded.
Yet soon afterwards a reconciliation of sorts between the minister and the militant was achieved, as it turned out. NUPE’s national negotiator Bob Jones helped effect it. ‘Jamie came to see me,’ he recalled when I met him, retired now, at his house in a quiet south London suburb. ‘Strange fellow. Very young. Wild … but quite serious.’ In early March 1979, Jones already knew all about the situation at the Westminster. ‘There wasn’t another hospital that produced a dispute in quite the same way,’ he said in his soft but exact Scouse voice. ‘The governors of the hospital were inflexible. They didn’t want to let Jamie into the negotiations.’ But the governors were eventually persuaded.
The climactic meeting took place in the boardroom of some borrowed government offices in Paddington, not far from the Westminster. It was a Sunday teatime and the heating was off. ‘It was freezing,’ Jones recalled. ‘We blew all the fuses trying to plug in electric fires. People were huddled in coats.’ Besides Jones and Morris, there was Alan Fisher, the head of the TUC Len Murray, the Westminster’s managers, and a man from the conciliation service ACAS, who was dressed for a dinner that evening. He never got to it; instead, deep into the night, the negotiations spluttered and stalled. At 11 p.m., the TUC gave everyone fish and chips – ‘good piece of organization, that’, said Jones in his armchair, hands across his stomach – but still NUPE and the Westminster’s management were at odds. In the small hours, as a last resort, Ennals was summoned. ‘We got him out of bed,’ recalled Jones with a slow smile. ‘He was properly dressed but he had his pyjamas on underneath. They were poking out. I remember Jamie said, “Look, he’s got his pyjamas on.”’ Did they find it funny? ‘Yes, Jamie did.’ But the minister’s arrival ended the stalemate. ‘Ennals turned up at four. The thing was over by five.’
In the second week of March, NUPE staff at the hospital began working normally again. The government had agreed to give all NUPE members a 9 per cent pay rise, plus an official review of the differing levels of public-and private-sector pay which would publish its findings in August and was likely to award NUPE members between 5 and 10 per cent more. Morris had accepted the deal and convinced his colleagues to do likewise. ‘I have done an about-turn’, he explained to the Sun, ‘simply because I am a realist.’ He told the Daily Mail: ‘Okay, so I have been accused of betrayal but I can take it. Just as I’ve had to take death threats and obscene letters in recent weeks.’ Shortly after the Westminster returned to normal, a motion of no-confidence in Morris as NUPE branch secretary was proposed by some of the hospital’s other shop stewards. Morris survived it by thirteen votes to four. ‘Mr Morris’, the Standard reported, ‘said that his role as NUPE leader at the hospital was coming under fire from militants …’
Soon afterwards, Morris disappeared from the national press. But the revolt he had led enjoyed quite an afterlife. In 1981, the television satire Yes, Minister, a beautifully sustained attack on seventies and early-eighties Whitehall which was one of Friedrich von Hayek’s favourite programmes and was written by Anthony Jay, an associate of the British free-market think tanks, included an episode called ‘The Compassionate Society’. Its plot revolved around an implacable young Scottish hospital shop steward called Billy Fraser, ‘an odious man’ to civil servants, who had shaggy hair and shop-floor clout and kept his hands in his pockets in the presence of ministers. ‘We can bring London’s hospitals to a complete standstill,’ this Morris lookalike warned in his key scene. ‘There will be no cancer treatment, nothing … Until we have brought back the compassionate society.’
The following year, Lindsay Anderson’s even more caustic film Britannia Hospital, a state-of-the-nation piece set in a nightmarishly troubled hospital, featured another shaggy-haired young union official, this time called Ben Keating, with complete power over the ancillary staff and a large appetite for industrial blackmail. Like Morris, Keating wore an open-necked shirt, was fixated on the use of his hospital by private patients, and had a half-hidden traditional streak. At the end of the film he is bought off with an invitation to a royal luncheon. According to the film writer Gavin Lambert’s memoir about Anderson, ‘The idea for Memorial Hospital [Britannia Hospital’s original title] … had occurred after he read a news st
ory about a labour union official who organized a strike … at a nationalized London hospital. Pickets actually refused to admit ambulances… or delivery vans with medications …’ The trade union scenes in the film were based on events in several late-seventies hospital disputes, but Lambert recalls that Anderson specifically researched the Westminster battle.
Anderson was an anarchist, albeit of the rather gilded sort: he disapprovingly watched what he called the ‘increasingly sectarian, increasingly materialist’ behaviour of the unions during the Winter of Discontent from various sunny locations in Australia, India and California. Anthony Jay, meanwhile, was an urbane early Thatcherite. But Jamie Morris seems to have got to both of them.
After the Westminster dispute, Morris followed a more complicated political and personal path than his public image suggested. A few months after the 1979 general election, he got married. In 1980, he bought a wreck of a three-storey Georgian house in Bow in east London and began doing it up. In 1982, he became a father. For a time he stayed at the Westminster, continued as NUPE branch secretary and remained a Labour councillor in the East End. He had a left-wing reputation on the council and, in 1981, with the Labour left at its peak, he was selected for the party’s panel of potential parliamentary candidates. But his political and NHS careers went no further. Labour began to move rightwards. In 1983, he left the health service and the council, citing low pay and bad health. A public row over his property ownership – he was still living in his council flat – may also have contributed to his retreat from politics.
Later that year, he began running an off-licence in Bethnal Green. The East London Advertiser carried a photograph of him behind the counter, still a local celebrity, holding a bottle of champagne, clean-shaven and wearing a jumper with reindeer dancing across it. In 1989, the Sunday Times interviewed him for a tenth-anniversary piece about the Winter of Discontent. Morris was still running his off-licence. ‘I suppose I enjoyed the Winter of Discontent,’ he said. ‘I certainly don’t regret it.’ But the Thatcherite paper happily noted that the scourge of the Westminster now had a Filofax and a house worth £250,000.
Morris did not appear in the press again. In 2006, I tried for several weeks to find him. A television producer who had spoken to him for a documentary a decade earlier told me Morris had been ‘in Liverpool’ in the late nineties. He said Morris was unemployed at the time and living on a council estate, ‘involved with unions still … doing not a lot … lazy but intelligent’. I called some union officials, past and present. ‘Ahhh … Jamie,’ said one former union leader with feeling. But he had no information, and nor did the other union men. The LSE, where Morris had studied, had an old address, and agreed to write to it for me, but nothing came back. I tried hospitals in central London, but nobody remembered him. I went to the Westminster, but it had become a block of flats. ‘Businessmen and a few students with rich parents,’ said the security man. I went to the East End and looked up at Morris’s old tower-block flat. Pebble-dashed and raw, looking out across miles of London’s poor, it was not hard to see how it had turned him from a Scottish Tory into a radical young man.
Finally, I went to his old off-licence. It stood at the foot of another council block: Morris had ended up providing the workers with booze rather than better wages. It was a hot, sapping late-summer afternoon, but eventually I found an Asian couple who ran another off-licence nearby and remembered him. ‘Nice fellow,’ they said with knowing smiles. ‘He was a talker. Very good at talking.’ A slight roll of the eyes: ‘Always talking politics.’
It was not a complete surprise that the accident-prone Ennals should end up helpless before the likes of Morris. It came as more of a shock when Callaghan’s response to the strike wave showed a similar combination of timidity and fixed-smile denial. The denial came first. On 4 January, with the Winter of Discontent still in its relatively early stages and the government’s poll lead still holding, but the overall situation visibly worsening – a road hauliers’ strike was spreading across Britain – the prime minister left the country to attend a summit in the Caribbean.
The gathering was held on the palmy French territory of Guadeloupe and was attended by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany, President Giscard d’Estaing of France and the American President Jimmy Carter. There was plenty for them and Callaghan to talk about. In his memoirs, with the gusto of a former foreign secretary, he devotes almost twenty pages to the issues: Britain’s need for American permission to replace its ‘independent’ Polaris nuclear weapons with Trident; America’s need for Britain and West Germany to approve its possible deployment of cruise missiles in Europe; and the desirability or otherwise of imposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa, another brewing issue. Most urgent of all, there was the situation in Iran, where the Shah’s regime was collapsing, an Islamic revolution was building, and the second oil crisis of the seventies was already starting. Some of these matters would be prominent in global politics through the eighties and, in the case of Iran, far beyond.
‘Guadeloupe was a big, international, slightly glamorous, certainly high-octane summit,’ remembered Tom McNally, who went there with Callaghan. ‘Does the PM go? If he doesn’t, what does that say about the state of Britain?’ The summit had been months in the arranging. Callaghan relished such meetings and usually performed well at them. ‘It seemed OK to go,’ said McNally. ‘We wanted to say it was business as usual. The government must govern.’
So, on 4 January, the prime minister and a small entourage went to Heathrow, the slightly shabby backdrop, in the absence of Maplin, for so many pivotal moments in his premiership. There he found his official jet deep in snow. ‘British Airport Authority men armed with shovels and brooms dug it out,’ the Standard reported. ‘Mr Callaghan himself ventured outside at one point to lend a hand.’ Then he flew off to ‘the sunshine summit … according to the official patter, to achieve closer cooperation in tackling the problems of mankind. Mr Callaghan’s friends [also] saw the excursion hopefully as a good lift for election year.’
From a conventional British foreign-policy perspective, the summit was fruitful. Callaghan talked one-on-one to Carter about replacing Polaris with Trident: ‘[The] cost … I remarked … would be beyond our means. The President responded that he thought it should be possible to work out satisfactory terms …’ In return, Callaghan, in the usual manner of post-war British prime ministers, helped smooth the frictions at the meeting between Carter and the continental European leaders. The sessions lasted two days and took place in a large thatched hut circled by palms, with, Callaghan wrote, ‘staffs kept carefully out of earshot and only the sound of the sea to distract us’. There was a minimum of the paperwork that normally choreographed summit discussions, only one official reception, and no issuing of a communiqué afterwards. The hut was in a commandeered holiday camp, and journalists were kept at a distance. Between sessions the four leaders ‘gossiped on the grass outside our huts, ate together informally … Carter jogged, Giscard played tennis, and I sailed a small dinghy’. Like the other leaders, Callaghan had had a hard seventies and his batteries needed a little recharging.
But his relaxation was only ever partial. Each day after lunch a slight, precise Englishman would come and see him. Sir Clive Rose was a senior civil servant who had recently been a British negotiator in arms talks with the Russians. He was now chairman of the Civil Contingencies Unit (CCU), a drily-named but rather ominous official body set up secretly by Heath in 1972, after Whitehall had been unable to cope with the miners’ strike and Scargill’s victory at Saltley. In fact, the British government had had a machinery for keeping the country functioning during major strikes for over half a century, ever since trade union militancy and the official fear of it had hit one of its periodic peaks in 1919. But the CCU, or the ‘Winter Emergencies Committee’ as Heath revealingly preferred to call it, was a more sophisticated entity, designed to maintain essential supplies and amenities if they were seriously threatened by industrial action, natural d
isasters or nuclear war. It was run by ministers, civil servants and a former brigadier, and met in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, or COBRA, an underground communications centre which, like the CCU, still exists, is periodically used and tends to leave journalists who write about it slightly awestruck. Heath’s CCU divided the country into regions, each overseen by a committee drawn from local councils, the civil service, the military and the police. The CCU’s existence was not officially admitted until four years after its foundation. In many ways the whole set-up was a more concrete, more professional, less publicized version of the volunteer networks for saving the country from the unions that some British right-wingers spent the seventies trying to assemble unofficially.
The CCU had found the Winter of Discontent less of a surprise than other parts of the Callaghan government. ‘It was obvious we were going to have a difficult winter,’ Rose told me. ‘We had had a difficult winter the winter before. Twenty thousand troops had been used in the firemen’s strike.’ By the Guadeloupe summit, the CCU had been fully activated, and Rose was in the Caribbean to keep the prime minister informed. ‘I got a cable from Britain every day,’ Rose remembered. ‘Callaghan would be relaxing after his long mornings at the summit, and I had to turn up with ill news from the home front. Callaghan used to feign anger: “Go away.” But he listened. He took seriously what was happening.’
Unfortunately, back in Britain this conscientiousness did not show in the pictures from the Caribbean. Instead, the photographs showed Callaghan sitting in the sun. The lack of a communiqué to set out the summit’s achievements added to the impression that the gathering had been something of a political luxury. Yet it only lasted two days; greater damage was done by Callaghan’s decision to stay on in the tropics for a further three, for an official visit to Barbados. The island was a former British colony, Callaghan knew the prime minister Tom Adams, Adams had invited him, and there were matters for the two men to discuss. But the leisure element of the stay was more pronounced than in Guadeloupe. Callaghan and his party, including his wife Audrey, stayed at the famous and famously expensive Sandy Lane resort. With even the Financial Times taking an interest in Audrey’s choice of sun hat, the Callaghans’ short holiday felt like a potential disaster from the start. ‘The beach next to the hotel’, McNally remembered, ‘was a kind of rest and recreation place for Belgian hookers. Some of the best-looking girls you’ve ever seen, sunbathing topless.’ Callaghan tried to avoid being photographed beside them, but a tabloid caught him and McNally emerging bulkily from the waves after a swim. When the pictures appeared, ‘I remember him saying, “How on earth have they got this photograph?”’ McNally recalled. ‘I said, “I believe it’s with a camera with a range of 400 metres, Prime Minister.”’
