Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The next day, the Provisional IRA claimed responsibility for the attack at Chelsea Barracks. They had struck a blow, they said, for the ‘oppressed Irish people … We await the hypocrisy which will undoubtedly follow from British political leaders whose attitude to Irish victims of their violence in our country only strengthens our conviction in our cause and methods.’ But the newspapers did not see it that way. ‘Mrs Field didn’t die in a just war,’ said an editorial in the Mirror. ‘She was the victim of a black wickedness.’ And speaking to the press after taking flowers and chocolates to the wounded children in hospital, the Prime Minister visibly fought back tears. It seemed barely conceivable, Mrs Thatcher said, her voice thick with emotion, ‘that any human being would have wrapped nails round these bombs to inflict maximum damage … The people who did this were murderers, murderers … These people are just criminals without regard for human life and limb. I shall never, never give them political status, never.’2

  Everybody agreed that it had been a uniquely cruel and criminal attack; or rather, almost everybody. Two days after the Chelsea Barracks bomb, the new leader of the Greater London Council was in Cambridge. Although a Labour politician, he had agreed to give a talk to the university’s Tory Reform Group. And when a student asked about his views on the IRA, he did not hold back:

  They are not criminals or lunatics running about. That is to misunderstand them …

  Nobody supports what happened last Saturday in London. But what about stopping it happening? As long as we are in Ireland, people will be letting off bombs in London. I can see that we are a colonial power holding down a colony. For the rest of time violence will recur again and again as long as we are in Ireland. People in Northern Ireland see themselves as subject peoples. If they were just criminals and psychopaths they could be crushed. But they have a motive force which they think is good.

  ‘This Damn Fool Says the Bombers Aren’t Criminals’, said the front page of the Sun the next day. ‘This morning the Sun presents the most odious man in Britain. Take a bow, Mr Ken Livingstone, Socialist leader of the Greater London Council.’

  Livingstone had been in his job for less than six months. A year earlier, few people had heard of him. Now, to the newspapers, he was the ‘most odious man in Britain’, the chief defender of the ‘criminal murderous activities of the IRA’, an ‘alien in his own country’. The paradox was that, as most commentators agreed, he was also a remarkably cunning political operator, with an unmatched thirst for publicity. Not only did he turn the Greater London Council into the single best-known vehicle of opposition to the Thatcher government, he championed a whole series of issues, from anti-racism to gay rights, that were initially dismissed as outlandish but eventually flowed into the mainstream. Unlike most Labour politicians who emerged during the 1980s, he was that rare beast, a genuine national celebrity. The problem, though, was that he could not stop talking.3

  The first thing people noticed about Ken Livingstone was how ordinary he was. With his nasal voice, his enthusiasm for science fiction, his fondness for snakes and salamanders, even his little moustache, he looked like exactly what he was: an affable, cheeky, nerdy man from the capital’s suburban fringe. He was born in Lambeth in 1945. His mother was a former music hall dancer, while his father was a merchant seaman, then a trawler-man, then a window cleaner. The Livingstones were working-class Conservatives who saved to buy a house in suburban West Norwood. As their son recalled, they gave him a ‘clear sense of right and wrong’, but rarely talked about politics or religion. ‘Our neighbours all seemed to be called Henry, George, Albert, Agnes, Gladys or Bessie,’ he wrote, ‘and respectable working-class values were reinforced in our house by the Daily Express.’4

  Young Ken did not seem an obvious candidate for political stardom. Small and shy, he failed his 11-plus and left Tulse Hill Comprehensive with just four O-levels. His real passion was for reptiles and amphibians. By his teenage years, his bedroom was lined on three sides by tanks, which housed ‘bullfrogs, newts, salamanders, snakes, lizards’ and even a small alligator. But after a few years working as a laboratory technician, he discovered an even more eccentric interest: politics. On a hitchhiking trip to West Africa in 1966, he met various left-leaning young volunteers, who talked to him about Biafra and Vietnam. By the time he returned, he was fully committed. In particular, he was passionate about fighting racism, much in the news thanks to the riots in the United States and the impact of Enoch Powell. And in February 1969 he joined the Norwood Labour Party: a ‘rare example’, he remarked, ‘of a rat joining a sinking ship’.5

  Like many London branches in the late 1960s, Norwood’s Labour Party was in a desperately moribund condition, with many younger members having left in protest at Harold Wilson’s refusal to condemn the Americans’ war in Vietnam. At Livingstone’s first meeting there were only twelve people, and he was one of only three who were not pensioners. At his second meeting he was made chairman and secretary of the Young Socialists. At his third he became the Norwood membership secretary and was invited to join the local executive committee. But this was hardly an exceptional story. Labour had been obliterated in the local elections of 1968, clearing out hundreds of older working-class councillors and opening the way for a radical new generation. At the grass-roots level, the party was tipping towards what academics called the ‘new urban left’. More middle-class, better educated and burning with righteous anger, these were Tony Benn’s future supporters, as well as the models for the BBC’s ‘Wolfie’ Smith, the Che Guevara of Tooting.6

  All this reflected a bigger picture. The London that had voted for Herbert Morrison in the 1930s was no more. In ten years after 1964 the capital had lost almost half its manufacturing jobs; in the next ten years the total was halved again. As older working-class families moved out to the suburbs, young middle-class men and women, often working in the public sector or service industries, were moving in. It was in London that the women’s liberation movement had first seriously established itself in the early 1970s; it was in London that feminists had first set up childcare centres, discussion groups and support networks; it was in London that the gay rights campaign had become most vocal and visible. What was more, immigration had changed the very look of the city: by 1981, one in five people in the inner boroughs was black or Asian. After years of relative quiescence, black and Asian Londoners were pressing for change. Against this background, a committed young man, brimming with energy, outspokenly committed to feminism, anti-racism and gay rights, was bound to do well.7

  Livingstone rose quickly. By 1971 he had become a Lambeth councillor. Two years later, he was elected as Norwood’s representative on the Greater London Council, and by 1974 he had become vice chairman of the GLC’s housing committee. By now he was already associated with hard-left sects like the International Marxist Group, the Chartists and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and especially with Trotskyists such as Lambeth’s future leader Ted Knight. Later, Livingstone claimed that he had never read a word by Karl Marx, although he once told The Times that he had read the Communist Manifesto. He was happy to borrow ideas from his Trotskyist allies, which led some papers to mock him as a self-taught ‘paperback Marxist’. But despite the ‘Red Ken’ image, he remained his own man: a free-floating attention-seeker, a troublemaker, a nuisance. ‘“Red Ken” was always a bit of a joke,’ Neil Kinnock told Livingstone’s biographer Andrew Hosken. ‘I don’t think he’s even a Red … He’s a “Kennist”.’8

  Like his Trotskyist friends, Livingstone took it for granted that capitalism was doomed, and had nothing but contempt for traitors such as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan (‘an awful right-wing lot … a disgrace’). At this stage, though, he aimed most of his fire at enemies closer to home. In 1975 he launched a pressure group called Labour Against the Cuts, campaigning against housing cuts and fare increases by the GLC’s Labour administration. And at the end of 1979 he and his friends launched a newsletter, London Labour Briefing, designed to circulate information among har
d-left activists. True to form, it was preoccupied with heretics within Labour’s ranks, identifying councillors who had voted against the left’s prescriptions and revealed themselves as traitors. Later, one of Livingstone’s own advisers described the Briefing team as a ‘vitriolic, sectarian grouping that drove Labour in London to the brink of extinction, the distillation of all that turned the public off about Labour in the eighties’. In principle it was run by an editorial collective. But ‘its guiding spirit’, reported The Times in 1981, ‘is Mr Jeremy Corbyn, aged 31, Briefing’s founder, an official of the National Union of Public Employees’.9

  Even at this stage, Livingstone had a reputation for irresponsible grandstanding. After Livingstone had served briefly as Camden’s housing committee chairman, the borough’s veteran Labour leader, Roy Shaw, accused him of ‘using the position as a platform to get publicity for himself’ and of playing to ‘the left-wing gallery, the trades union gallery, whatever gallery would help him at any particular moment’. Livingstone’s favourite tactic, Shaw said, was ‘to put forward an outrageous proposition, knowing full well that it would not be accepted – not really believing it himself. It would be defeated in the [Labour] group. He could then turn round and say: it’s all the fault of those right-wing bastards; if it had been left to me I would have done so and so.’ But this was clever politics, bolstering Livingstone’s image as the champion of the left. And even his opponents admitted that his impudence made him hard to dislike. ‘To go out for a drink with Ken was a pleasure really,’ said Shaw’s deputy, who once had to fight off a Livingstone challenge for his own job. ‘He was always full of stories and jokes.’10

  For all his bonhomie, Livingstone was a supremely ruthless operator. He once joked that he identified with his collection of poisonous salamanders, and nothing captured his cold-blooded cunning better than the way he seized the leadership of the GLC. In 1977 the Conservatives had won control of the council under the flamboyant Horace Cutler, but by the turn of the decade Labour were overwhelming favourites to regain power. In April 1980 the Labour group had chosen a new leader: Andrew McIntosh, an Oxford-educated academic who lived in Highgate and ran a market research firm. A mild, donnish figure, McIntosh had only beaten Livingstone by a single vote, and was so unworldly that his close colleagues soon regretted their choice. Meanwhile, Livingstone made no secret of his plan to challenge McIntosh straight after the GLC elections. ‘Look, Andrew,’ he told his rival early in 1981, ‘I am going to beat you, however many seats we win; if there is a Labour administration, it will elect me leader.’11

  None of this was lost on Labour’s opponents. The Conservatives’ GLC manifesto claimed that the ‘old Labour Party’ had been taken over by ‘Marxists and extremists’, while Horace Cutler warned that McIntosh would be ditched after the election and urged voters to ‘Keep London out of the Red’. A week before polling day Cutler issued an appeal in the Daily Express, ‘Why We Must Stop These Red Wreckers’, warning that Livingstone was poised to ‘establish a Marxist power-base in London from which support can be given to the wider movement to take over the Labour Party’. And the Express was in no doubt that if Labour won, McIntosh would be dumped for the ‘Bennite’ Livingstone. ‘Vote to keep the Marxists out of your town halls,’ it begged its readers. ‘Vote to keep your rates from soaring out of control. Vote to keep Britain out of the Red.’12

  On 7 May 1981 voters across England and Wales went to the polls. Given the government’s atrocious public standing, everybody knew Labour would do well. When the results were counted, they had gained almost a thousand council seats nationwide, winning control of Greater Manchester, Merseyside, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire, as well as counties such as Derbyshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire. Most attention, however, was focused on London. But to general surprise, there was no landslide; indeed, the Tories held on to many more seats than the polls had predicted. Perhaps Cutler’s warnings had made a difference. Still, the final tally gave Labour fifty out of ninety-two seats, enough for a working majority. At County Hall, where McIntosh held his victory party, Michael Foot raised his glass to offer a toast. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ Foot said reassuringly, ‘because you, Andrew, are in charge, and you know the machine.’

  Given Foot’s recent record, McIntosh should probably have taken that as the cue to clear his office. Yet when he returned to County Hall the following morning, he had no inkling of what was coming. When journalists asked about rumours that Livingstone was planning a challenge, McIntosh said blithely that he was ‘going to win’, because the local elections showed that Londoners ‘wanted a Labour administration of responsible and realistic people’. But then everything began to fall apart. McIntosh expected a quick vote at nine that morning, after which he would get down to business. But Livingstone persuaded the party executive to postpone it until later that afternoon. At 3 p.m. he held a left-wing caucus, where he and his friends agreed a slate for the various committee posts. Then, two hours later, came the showdown.

  With McIntosh completely unprepared, the meeting took only a few minutes. First the councillors voted for the leader, and Livingstone won by ten votes. Then they turned to the committee chairmanships. Since McIntosh, now in a state of shock, had not even prepared a list, Livingstone’s nominees swept the board. It was less a victory than a massacre: of the twenty-nine people who voted for Livingstone, twenty-four were rewarded with senior positions. But for the Labour right, it came as a total, crushing surprise. McIntosh left the room in tears. Later, when a GLC planner saw him with his wife in the car park, he was still crying. ‘People always laugh when I tell them this,’ said Livingstone, ‘but I really felt sorry for Andrew.’ Still, that was the game. He played to win.13

  The sheer ruthlessness of Livingstone’s coup made him a household name overnight. The Sun told its readers that victory for ‘Red Ken’ meant ‘full-steam-ahead red-blooded Socialism for London’; the Mail called him a ‘left-wing extremist’; the Express claimed he had had ‘no proper job’ for six years. But on the left all was jubilation. To his supporters, Livingstone was Tony Benn’s vicegerent in London, laying the foundations for the revolution. And, for the first time, the new left had some real power.

  That weekend they celebrated at a party in the Barbican flat of the hard-left ex-MP Audrey Wise, whose daughter Valerie was one of Livingstone’s closest allies. There, Livingstone recalled, they heard the news that François Mitterrand had won the French presidential election on an unashamedly high-spending, high-taxing socialist platform. History was moving in their direction. ‘As we talked excitedly about our plans for London’, Livingstone wrote, ‘I truly believed that the elections of Thatcher and Reagan would be just a temporary setback in the long march to build a better world.’14

  The obvious thing to say about Ken Livingstone’s arrival as leader of the GLC is that in some ways it was entirely predictable. These might have been troubled times for the Labour Party at Westminster, but they were days of intense excitement among grass-roots activists. Sales of left-wing books and socialist papers were booming, and across the country thousands of idealistic young men and women were devoting their evenings to local community associations, women’s groups and peace committees. And once Margaret Thatcher took office, it was inevitable that at least some councils would swing to the left. Even before most people had heard of Ken Livingstone, the hard-left playwright Jim Allen was already working on a story about a group of Labour councillors in Gateshead, who refuse to impose the government’s welfare cuts and rate rises, provoking a savage police crackdown. It eventually went out on BBC1 as a Play for Today, ‘United Kingdom’, in December 1981. By this point, the looming conflict between national and local government was becoming a familiar theme. ‘Who would say’, mused The Times’s critic, ‘that it could not happen here?’15

  For all Livingstone’s notoriety, he was not the only young left-wing council leader. In May 1980 the West Midlands industrial town of Walsall had elected a hard-left Labour ad
ministration under Brian Powell, a former print worker. Powell’s brand of socialism was very different from Livingstone’s: he described himself as ‘puritanical’, and had little time for feminism, minority interests or middle-class graduates. His chief innovation was a drive to bring local government into the streets, with the council sending 160 officials out to thirty-four ‘neighbourhood offices’ – many of them Portakabins – equipped with new computer terminals containing details of every house owned by the council. According to Powell, this would banish the ‘faceless bureaucracy’ of the past and show working people that the council was working in their interests.16

  Although Walsall’s experiment anticipated later initiatives by other councils, it soon ran into trouble. Council officials were deluged with complaints, the repair and rent arrears bills shot up, and the other parties promised to shut the experiment down. And like Livingstone, Powell was his own worst enemy, provoking outrage by sacking four dinner ladies who had refused to join a union under the council-approved closed shop. In one of his more eye-catching proclamations, he announced that the council would only employ ‘working class applicants’ who supported ‘radical change’, because only people ‘aware of the basic ideals on which socialism is based … can grasp the structural changes that are necessary here’.17

  The local press were horrified, accusing him of trying to build a ‘little Kremlin in the heart of England’. Powell was unrepentant. ‘What we’re trying to do is reverse the capitalist system,’ he insisted, ‘and it’s been there for a sodding thousand years.’ Unfortunately, the people of Walsall did not want to reverse the capitalist system. They just wanted the council to fix the potholes, paint their fences and send somebody round to mend the boiler. In May 1982, after just two years, Powell lost control of the council to a Conservative–Liberal coalition. The dismantling of capitalism would have to wait.18