Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Afterwards, reporters pored over the details: the TGWU’s decision to back Benn, the abstention of thirty-five MPs who had voted for Silkin and, above all, the sheer closeness of the outcome, which would have been different if just four MPs had changed sides. But in the press room, Edna Healey murmured to herself: ‘Denis has won. Nothing else matters.’ She and her husband decamped to the Old Ship, where the press found them drinking champagne. Benn, meanwhile, took his wife to a fish and chip shop, where Chris Mullin persuaded the photographers to give them some peace. In his diary Benn called it ‘a staggering result with all the media against us, the most violent attacks by the Shadow Cabinet, the full intervention of Michael, the abstention of a group of Tribune Group MPs’. He said much the same to his supporters after getting back from the chip shop. ‘I think everyone here knows’, he declared, ‘that what happened here today was an enormous victory for us. It was a victory because, from the beginning, right through to the end, and we are nowhere near the end, we have won the argument.’ That was Benn to a tee. He was not defeated; he had just won a different kind of victory.38

  Was Benn’s result genuinely a moral victory, though? His support among the activists was certainly spectacular: in the second ballot he won more than 24 per cent out of a maximum of 30 per cent, almost enough to outweigh his weaknesses elsewhere. But in the first ballot he had come a very poor third among the MPs and an even poorer third in the unions, who awarded him less than 6½ per cent of their 40 per cent share. The only reason he had come so close was that the TGWU had ignored its members. Had the TGWU honoured its consultation, Healey would have prevailed by a comfortable margin. But the real irony, as Golding pointed out, is that if Benn had supported the Tribune Group’s formula at the Wembley conference, which proposed to divide the electoral college equally, he would have won. By giving the unions more weight than the constituency parties, he had inadvertently handed victory to Healey – who was by far the most popular candidate in the country anyway.39

  For the left, there were two ominous lessons. First, the results showed that the trade unions were nothing like the militant caricatures pilloried in the Mail and the Express. In fact, the unions were the single biggest force pulling Labour back to the centre ground. Second, the results showed that among Labour’s MPs a gulf had opened up between the hard and soft left. If just four of the sixteen Tribune Group abstainers had voted for Benn, he would have won. Some observers had seen this coming for a while. Six days earlier, the radical journalist Christopher Hitchens had predicted that the Tribune Group might deny Benn victory. If, in the final days, Benn had moderated his tone, distanced himself from his more strident acolytes and worked harder to win the Tribune Group over, he might have prevailed. But that was not his style.40

  The recriminations began immediately. Talking to the BBC, the hard-left MP Reg Race blamed the union leadership, which should have told its members how to vote instead of allowing them to be brainwashed by the media. But other Benn supporters blamed the Tribune abstainers. Some talked of compiling a hit list for deselection, with Kinnock a favourite target. Confronting the Welshman on television, Arthur Scargill insisted that the soft left had ‘betrayed not merely their supporters but the fight that’s taken place over many years’. ‘If anybody lost him that deputy leadership election yesterday,’ Kinnock shot back, ‘it was you by the attitudes you espouse and the people like you who espouse them. We’re not having them in the Labour Party, mate.’ But one young activist from Islington, addressing a fringe meeting alongside Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, insisted that it was time to punish the MPs, who should ‘expect some discomfort from the rank and file in their own constituencies’. His name was Jeremy Corbyn.41

  For Kinnock, the promised discomfort was not long in coming. When he spoke at Wednesday evening’s Tribune rally, hecklers interrupted him with shouts of ‘Judas!’ Chief among his accusers was his fellow MP Margaret Beckett, who had earlier been spotted screaming ‘Traitors!’ at Healey supporters. Now she gave what the Observer called a ‘speech dripping with venom’, clearly aimed at Kinnock, though she could not bring herself to utter his name. Two days later, a young Benn supporter followed Kinnock into the toilets at the Grand Hotel and ‘lashed out at him with his foot’, catching him on the elbow. Unfortunately, the would-be assailant had misjudged his man. As the future Labour leader put it, ‘I beat the shit out of him … there was blood and vomit all over the place.’42

  Kinnock’s little altercation captured the tone of what everybody agreed had been a spectacularly unpleasant occasion. Back in March, Benn had assured Foot that the contest would be ‘quite unifying’. He was right: the contest had unified most of the country in revulsion. A poll for the Observer found that 51 per cent of the electorate said the campaign had made them think worse of Labour, while only 6 per cent said it had improved their opinion. And the contest’s most abiding legacy, for which many of Benn’s colleagues never forgave him, was the devastation wreaked on Labour’s general election prospects. In the summer of 1980, they had been about 5 per cent ahead of the Tories. Even after Foot’s coronation, Labour’s lead had been in double figures, and as late as the summer of 1981 they were still ahead in some polls. But then, as Benn took over the headlines, Labour’s reputation went into free-fall. In December 1980 it had been on 47½ per cent. A year later, it was down to just 23½ per cent, the most dramatic decline for an opposition party in history. Benn blamed Foot, Healey, the Social Democrats, the soft left, the unions and the press. Everybody else blamed Benn.43

  For Benn’s supporters, his defeat was one of the great missed opportunities of modern political history. Had he become deputy leader and then, presumably, leader, perhaps Labour would have done better in 1983. Perhaps a hard-left Labour Party was what the British people wanted. Perhaps he might even have won, taking Britain out of Europe, restoring full employment and reversing the tide of economic change.

  Given the effect of Benn’s campaign on public opinion and his uniquely divisive national reputation, however, a less rosy outcome seems more likely. In reality, Labour would probably have sunk much further and faster. Almost certainly Benn would soon have moved to take the leadership from Foot, triggering an even bloodier bout of factional infighting. Had Benn won again, there would undoubtedly have been more losses to the SDP, with MPs, councillors, party members and probably some trade unions defecting en masse. In Hattersley’s words, ‘thousands of moderates would have deserted Labour’, leaving the party as a ragbag of ‘Trotskyites, one subject campaigners, Marxists who had never read Marx, Maoists, pathological dissidents, utopians and, most dangerous of all, sentimentalists’. And had Benn been leader during the 1983 election, then Labour would almost certainly have come third in the popular vote behind the Alliance, which finished only 680,000 votes behind as it was.44

  In reality, Benn’s campaign brought a decisive shift in momentum inside the Labour Party. Intoxicated by their own enthusiasm, his allies had fatally overplayed their hand. As Shirley Williams put it, this was ‘the moment the soft left woke up’. It was no accident that, just two days after Benn’s defeat, the hard left suffered a stunning setback in the National Executive elections, with five Bennites, including the outraged Margaret Beckett, being ousted by five moderates. Even Benn thought it was a ‘disaster’. But it was a disaster for the SDP, too. To succeed, they needed a Labour Party descending into sectarian extremism, not a Labour Party dragging itself back towards the centre. At the end of the year, Foot even set up an inquiry into Militant, though that unhappy saga would drag on for years. Characteristically, Benn thought he was making a ‘tragic mistake’.45

  Benn had not, of course, gone away. On 10 November he ignited a new storm by telling the Commons that a future Labour government would nationalize North Sea oil without compensation. The next day, white with rage, Foot opened the Shadow Cabinet meeting by reading a long statement denouncing Benn for his total lack of ‘common sense and comradeship’. It was ‘horrible, the atmosphere icy, and Mic
hael was angry,’ Benn wrote afterwards. ‘I am used to it now. The things they said were extreme, but of course they are frantic. After that, it is quite clear that it is the end of me.’ But there was more to come. When Foot asked for loyalty at a meeting of Labour MPs the next day, Benn refused to apologize and wondered if the Shadow Cabinet had the right to ignore party policy. At that, he recorded, there was a lot of ‘shouting … jeering and baying’. He was kicked, recalled a satisfied John Golding, ‘from pillar to post’.46

  To the Conservative press, Michael Foot’s inability to control Tony Benn was a sign of his fundamental weakness as a leader. This is Clive Collins in the Sun, 14 November 1981.

  A week later, Benn’s colleagues voted him out of the Shadow Cabinet. In public, he blamed Foot and the press. In private, he claimed to be ‘glad’. Yet given that in late September he had been on the brink of the deputy leadership, it must have felt like a terrible comedown. A few weeks later, he made one last, disastrous attempt to recapture the initiative. Emerging from a meeting of the party’s National Executive, Benn suddenly announced to the waiting journalists that he was now ‘Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, because of course Denis Healey’s entire majority has now defected to the SDP’. His admirers were mortified; his enemies could barely contain their amusement. Healey wondered whether ‘Benn might next assume some other role such as Pope or even Queen’. Even his wife thought it was time for a rest. ‘Caroline has persuaded me’, Benn wrote that December, ‘that I am so damaged by my single-handed combat against Denis Healey and Michael Foot that I’m a bit of an embarrassment to the left. So I shall pull out a bit and see how things develop.’47

  Michael Foot’s personal ordeal was not over. It had, he recalled, been a year of ‘futility and shame’. Even The Times wondered if there was a ‘sadder figure in British politics today than Michael Foot’, once such a firebrand, now ‘beleaguered and apparently impotent’. But the worst was yet to come. On 8 November, Foot was due to attend his first Remembrance Sunday service as Leader of the Opposition. Knowing his fondness for scruffy old pullovers, his wife had issued him with a new coat, chosen specifically to smarten up his image. But when he reached the Cenotaph, things did not quite go to plan.48

  Afterwards, in a rare diary entry, Mrs Thatcher recorded that it had been a ‘wonderful service’, although ‘it was Michael Foot’s first attendance and he was a little uncertain what to do’. She was being unusually generous. The television footage shows that at one point she virtually had to manoeuvre Foot into place. And while the other politicians gazed firmly ahead, as if contemplating the sacrifice of the fallen, Foot seemed oddly distracted, peering up at the sky, twitching his head oddly from side to side, and appearing generally miserable and ill at ease. Even when it was his turn to lay his wreath, he seemed to shamble forward against his will, like an overgrown schoolboy under the eyes of a formidable headmistress.

  In the next few days, Foot drew unrelenting flak for having worn, of all things, a donkey jacket, as modelled by various burly men warming their hands around picket-line braziers. In fact, his infamous coat was really a dark green, slightly shapeless woollen overcoat, such as a man of advancing years might wear on an outing to Aldermaston. Later, Foot insisted that the Queen Mother had gone out of her way to commend it: ‘Oh, hello, Michael. That’s a smart sensible coat for a day like this.’ Yet taken in conjunction with his tartan tie, scruffy rubber-soled shoes and general air of preoccupied bewilderment, it did look as if Foot had dressed for a car-boot sale. In the Guardian’s words, he looked ‘as if he had just completed his Sunday constitutional on Hampstead Heath’.49

  That was about as kind as it got. ‘An old man with a green donkey-jacket, flapping trousers and casual shoes stood looking vaguely about him, like a bored tourist at a bus-stop,’ wrote Charles Moore in the Telegraph, ‘and when his turn came, he laid his wreath of poppies with all the reverent dignity of a tramp bending down to inspect a cigarette end. This was the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition paying his party’s tribute to the nation’s dead.’ This was perhaps a bit strong, though no stronger than what some of Foot’s colleagues thought. The right-wing Labour MP Walter Johnson, a former serviceman, claimed that Foot looked like an ‘out of work navvy … as if he was taking part in a demo rather than a solemn act of respect’. ‘He seemed to have no inkling’, fumed John Golding, ‘of how important the idea was to working-class people that when you went to church you must wear your best suit and overcoat.’50

  Even after a year of extraordinary drama, the donkey jacket cut through. In the next few days, poor Foot was deluged with letters, some offering vouchers and even money to buy himself a new coat, others more damning (‘You looked, and behaved, like an oaf and a tramp … Why don’t you depart for Russia and join your comrades there?’). One Savile Row tailor, no doubt fancying some publicity, wrote to offer his services as an image-maker. But perhaps the most imaginative response came from the Daily Mail, which printed a double-page spread giving readers the chance to ‘dress your own Michael Foot doll’. Readers were presented with various outfits to cut out, including a pair of underpants with a ‘CND motif’, some bovver boots for ‘fraternal meetings with the extreme left’ and, bizarrely, a top hat and tails, to make him look ‘like the real leader of an actual party. Probably the way Mrs Foot secretly dreams of seeing him.’51

  A few weeks later, Foot went to Hull. Opening a new technology centre, this erudite, civilized and beleaguered man confounded his handlers by crossing the road to congratulate a group of demonstrators, who were protesting about local education cuts. Then he went to the Central Methodist Hall, where he was due to talk about building a ‘tolerant, decent and compassionate Labour Party’. Unfortunately, the Guardian reported, Foot had only just started walking across the stage when he ‘suddenly disappeared. His head and shoulders reappeared between the feet of the platform party, then he climbed out of the organ well and assured would-be helpers that he was all right.’

  It had been that sort of a year. ‘What fools we were’, the left-wing Eric Heffer said, ‘not to vote for Denis.’52

  23

  The March of Death

  I cannot see Thatcher yielding on this. I don’t see the Government backing down … There are ripple effects everywhere and if I were allowed to die there would be a tremendous upsurge of Welsh nationalism.

  Gwynfor Evans, quoted in the Guardian, 1 September 1980

  I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.

  Bobby Sands’s diary, 1 March 1981

  In the early hours of Thursday 13 December 1979, a fire broke out in an empty farmhouse in Llanrhian, between St David’s and Fishguard, just inland from the Pembrokeshire coast. When the fire engines arrived, it was already too late. The house, which belonged to an English couple who had been renovating it for the past eight years, was completely gutted. A few hours later, as the firemen were wearily returning to the station, another call came in. A second house in Llanrhian had just gone up in flames.

  Even as fire engines rushed to the scene, there were reports of two similar blazes some 150 miles to the north. In the remote village of Mynydd Nefyn, on the mountainous Lleyn peninsula looking out towards Anglesey and the Irish Sea, another fire had broken out on yet another converted farm a few hours earlier. And no sooner had the local fire brigade arrived there than a fourth call had come through. This time the target was a holiday house in Llanbedrog, on the same peninsula, where somebody had smashed a window and thrown a primitive incendiary bomb inside. Once again the building was completely destroyed. By dawn, all four were smoking ruins.1

  So began a campaign that was never truly explained. In the next thirteen years there were almost 200 arson attacks on English-owned properties, estate agents and Conservative Party offices, the vast majority of them in North Wales. Fortunately, nobody was killed. At first the police seemed completely at a loss. But in January 1980, after twelve attacks, a letter arrived at the BBC newsroom
at Bangor. It bore the eagle crest of the Free Wales Army, a minuscule paramilitary group that had come and gone in the mid-1960s, and appeared to be written by their successors, the self-styled Cymric Army. According to the letter, they had the support of the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatist group ETA. ‘What the IRA has achieved,’ the letter said ominously, ‘so shall we.’

  To the police, the recent attacks had been so clumsy that it was hard to take the Cymric Army seriously. After an attack on a cottage in Bala, said the Guardian, the sight of ‘paraffin poured through a letter box and an unlit candle left on a doorstep’ suggested an incompetent hoax rather than a terrorist operation. The police thought the first fires had been lit by locals infuriated by the growing number of English-owned holiday homes – at least 25,000 at the last count – at a time when unemployment was surging, interest rates were punitively high and council rents were going up. The later fires, they thought, were probably due to a ‘knock-on effect, the work of imitators unconnected with any organisation’.2

  Yet the attacks kept coming. Late on the evening of 1 February, Angela Southwood, a sculptress who lived just over the border with Shropshire, returned to her cottage to find that somebody had broken in. She called the police, but nothing had been taken. Then, just as she was going to bed, there was an explosion. The burglars had wrapped an incendiary device in her curtains and stuffed them under the stairs. She survived unhurt. Even so, the fact that the arsonists had sprinkled spirits throughout the house, in an effort to intensify the blaze, was terrifying enough.