Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But what really did for the Commissar’s reputation was Northern Ireland. There is no reason to doubt that his position was absolutely sincere. Nobody interested only in playing to the gallery would have adopted such a toxically unpopular cause. But like his allies in hard-left London politics, such as the young Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Livingstone believed Northern Ireland was a simple question of right and wrong. The conflict, he thought, was fuelled by racism and colonial exploitation. The IRA were freedom fighters, the Unionists were the running dogs of imperialism and the best thing for everybody would be a united Ireland. And although Livingstone knew these views would horrify millions of voters, he was not going to suppress them for political self-protection. ‘There wouldn’t be one per cent of doubt in my mind about sacrificing the whole of British local government’, he explained, ‘if it meant we got out of Ireland.’34

  To most people, however, anything that smacked of sympathy for the IRA was beyond the pale. So when, on 21 July, Livingstone welcomed Alice McElwee to County Hall, he should have known what was coming. Mrs McElwee’s son Thomas was on the forty-fourth day of his hunger strike. He was serving a twenty-year stretch in the Maze, having planted an incendiary bomb in a clothes shop in Ballymena, County Antrim, in October 1976. When the bomb went off, the proprietor, 26-year-old Yvonne Dunlop, shouted a warning to her 8-year-old son, who managed to escape from a window. But Yvonne was burned to death, leaving three young children. So when, two days before what would have been her birthday, her family saw Livingstone shaking hands with her killer’s mother, they were understandably outraged.

  What was even worse was what he said. ‘The H-block protest’, Livingstone told the Evening Standard, ‘is part of the struggle to bring about a free, united Ireland.’ The hunger strikers, he added, were not criminals but ‘fighters for the freedom of their country … I have been consistently in favour of withdrawal from Ireland and to get away from the idea that it is some sort of campaign against terrorism. It is in fact the last colonial war.’ At a press conference he went further. Successive governments, he said, had pursued in Northern Ireland a ‘campaign of repression the like of which has not existed anywhere else in the world’. Then, donning his Trotskyist spectacles, he looked forward. ‘The eventual freedom and unity of Ireland for the whole working class’, he insisted, would be a ‘major blow against international capitalism and the rulers of our state’.35

  For Livingstone’s public image, the McElwee meeting was a catastrophe. The tabloids were merciless: the Sun declared that Livingstone had ‘proved himself a menace to stability in public life’. Mrs Thatcher even told the Commons that his denunciation of British policy was ‘the most disgraceful statement that I have ever read’. To make matters worse, the furore coincided with a leaked report that Livingstone had warned Labour politicians that the GLC would have to raise rates by a whopping 120 per cent to pay for his manifesto promises. He had been exposed, said the Mail, as a ‘doctrinaire clown’, whose administration was a ‘grotesque portent of things to come; of what could happen to all of us if we let the New Left misrule Britain tomorrow as they are misruling London today’.36

  This was merely the beginning. The day before the Royal Wedding, Livingstone welcomed eight members of the H-Blocks Armagh Committee, who staged a two-day fast on the steps of County Hall. Then, after a fortnight’s holiday, he returned to the fray with a speech to the Harrow Gay Unity Group, assuring them that ‘everyone is bisexual’ and that ‘almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything’. The papers could barely believe their luck. The Sun ran the memorable headline: ‘Red Ken Speaks up for the Gays – I’ll Get Them Jobs and Homes, He Says.’ The Mail, meanwhile, consulted ‘three leading psychologists’ to discover why ‘this weird creature’ would say such outlandish things. One suggested that Livingstone, as an ‘only son’ of working parents, had ‘suffered a lack of attention’ and felt driven to act like a ‘naughty boy’. ‘The desperate need for attention is the hallmark of the hysteric,’ explained Dr Dougal Mackay. ‘Mr Livingstone is in the same category as a punk rocker who wears outlandish clothes.’fn337

  By this stage, almost any other politician, except perhaps Tony Benn, would have realized it was time to keep his head down. Even Livingstone’s GLC colleagues begged him to stop talking. But he just could not stop himself. On 21 August the Unionist mayor of Ballymena arrived in London with Yvonne Dunlop’s three sons. So began a media circus of almost mind-boggling ghastliness. Hearing that Livingstone planned to greet the boys at Victoria station, the GLC’s Tory whips intercepted them at Gatwick Airport and took them for a boat trip down the Thames. Eventually the boys arrived at County Hall, where, bizarrely, Livingstone posed for pictures with his arms around them, like an affectionate uncle. The oldest boy, 13-year-old Denis, told Livingstone that the hunger strikers had a choice whether to live or die, a choice the IRA had denied his mother. But Livingstone was having none of it. When reporters invited him to say something about the IRA, he insisted that he was ‘not going to condemn violence by only one section of the community’. Afterwards, the Tories scooped the boys back up and took them to Hamley’s, before organizing a farewell whip-round. They went home with £5 each.38

  Two days later, utterly unabashed, Livingstone was back in the news, this time after appearing on an LBC radio phone-in. Not content with predicting a military coup and demanding state control of the press, he insisted that Northern Ireland ‘does not exist’ and said it was ‘nonsense’ to call the IRA ‘criminals and murderers’. A few days later, he surfaced on the British Forces’ Broadcasting Service, with a message for ‘everybody who’s got arms and is carrying arms in Northern Ireland, whether they are in the British Army or the IRA … Put those arms down and go back to your home. I think there would be no greater move for peace than if the British Forces just packed up and went home.’ Even the Observer, which broke the story, thought he was sailing perilously close to the wind, while some papers called for his prosecution under the Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934. ‘Nothing seems beyond our Ken – except common sense, that is,’ said the Express. ‘Marriage, bisexuality, homosexuality … and of course his all-time favourite, Northern Ireland. There is hardly a subject on which he has not put both feet in his mouth.’39

  It was against this background that, just six weeks later, Livingstone made his inflammatory remarks on the bombing at Chelsea Barracks. A more tactful, cautious politician would surely have judged that, under such horrifying circumstances, it would be better to play down his private views. But that was not in Livingstone’s nature. He had got this far without being tactful, and he was not going to change now. He also felt, not entirely wrongly, that his remarks had been deliberately exaggerated. ‘I abhor all violence,’ he explained in a letter to The Times. ‘Murder on London’s streets is shocking and it is unacceptable … The point I was trying to make was that to crush the IRA as if they were simply criminals or lunatics will not work. It is the policy that has been tried for generations and still the killing persists.’ A ‘political solution’, he insisted was ‘the only way to bring about lasting peace’.40

  Many people would probably have agreed with some of this. But when it emerged that Livingstone’s GLC colleague John McDonnell had called for talks with the IRA about ‘peace in London’, even many Labour councillors thought they had lost their moral compass. While most people were now ‘hardened to the fact that the man who runs London can be by turns sinister, unpleasant or merely foolish’, said the Evening Standard, this latest blunder was ‘worse than folly. It is criminal.’ The Mail, meanwhile, considered it ‘the behaviour of a man who through Marxist dogma has become an alien in his own country, blind to the IRA’s bloodiest crimes even when committed on his own doorstep. He is certainly not fit to rule Britain’s capital city.’ In the same paper, a cartoon showed a group of villainous-looking men in balaclavas, huddled in a cellar and writing a letter: ‘Dear Mr Livingstone. With the price of nails being what it is, we wondered wheth
er the GLC …’41

  But the most blistering comment came in the Sun, its front page famously branding Livingstone the ‘most odious man in Britain’. That was just the beginning:

  For most papers, Ken Livingstone’s remarks after the Chelsea Barracks bombing crossed a line. In the Sun (14 October 1981), Clive Collins was especially scathing.

  In just a few months since he appeared on the national scene, he has quickly become a joke. But no one can laugh at him any longer. The joke has turned sour, sick and obscene. For Mr Livingstone steps forward as the defender and the apologist of the criminal, murderous activities of the IRA …

  Among the Socialist members of the GLC there must be many who are as outraged and disgusted by Mr Ken Livingstone as the rest of us. While he continues as their leader he is making the name ‘Socialist’ stink in people’s nostrils. They should kick him out. And right this minute.

  Even for somebody with Livingstone’s thirst for attention, the Sun’s attack hit home. Hate mail poured in, a common theme being that he should ‘go back to Russia’. ‘What a slimy hypocrite you are,’ wrote one retired major from the South Coast. The police advised Livingstone to be vigilant, but the day after the Sun’s broadside he was on his way to a talk in the City of London when a man sprayed red paint in his face. A few days later, he was attacked in a pub in Hampstead by skinheads calling him a ‘Commie bastard’.42

  The Chelsea Barracks furore set the seal on a disastrous first six months for Livingstone and the GLC. One poll late that summer found that only 35 per cent of Londoners supported him, with 52 per cent opposed; another found that just one out of five voters thought he was doing a good job. But his stance on the IRA was only part of the story. After coming to power with such high hopes, he had achieved virtually nothing. Among a string of abortive pledges or abandoned promises, he and his Labour comrades had not yet managed to set up a Greater London Enterprise Board, had failed to stop the transfer of GLC council houses to the London boroughs and had failed to block the sale of houses to private individuals. They had even failed to cut the price of school meals.43

  By far the biggest setback, though, was the debacle of Livingstone’s attempt to copy David Blunkett’s public transport policy. By 1981 South Yorkshire’s experiment had won praise from left-wing activists across the country, and during the local elections every big-city Labour group had promised either to freeze or to cut fares. In the capital, some activists argued for the total elimination of Tube and bus fares, allowing poor Londoners to travel for free with ratepayers picking up the bill. But under pressure from the unions, who were worried about bus conductors’ jobs, Livingstone decided that fares should be cut by a quarter and then frozen indefinitely. By the time he had settled into the leader’s office, the inner London boroughs had persuaded him to raise the cut to 32 per cent, which was unveiled to the public under the slogan ‘Fares Fair’. The problem, however, was that this would cost some £117 million, far more than originally planned. So under the government’s new grant system, which heavily penalized councils for overspending, ratepayers faced a £228 million bill.44

  Contrary to what is often thought, Fares Fair was exceedingly unpopular. In August 1981, one poll found that fully 77 per cent of Londoners were against it. But Livingstone pressed on, and on Sunday 4 October 1981 it came into effect. Overnight the cost of short bus journeys fell from 12p to 10p, while maximum bus fares fell from 70p to 40p. Underground fares, meanwhile, were cut across the board, with journeys costing 20p across one zone and 30p across two. The Daily Express claimed that the new fares had turned ‘rush hour into crush hour’, with staff besieged by queues for the new cheaper season tickets. But that was an exaggeration: after the first week, other papers reported that there had been little discernible change.45

  That was not, however, much consolation to the outer London borough councils. Even though their residents were much less likely to use public transport, they had to pay the lion’s share of the higher rates. To Labour activists, this was a textbook example of the redistribution of wealth. But to the Conservatives who ran, say, Bromley Council, it was an outrage. At one public meeting, the Bromley Council leader remembered, there was a mood of ‘mass hysteria’ at the thought of paying higher rates for cheaper fares. But then he and his colleagues spotted a loophole. In the small print of the Transport (London) Act of 1969 was the stipulation that the GLC must try to make the Tube break even. To Livingstone’s disbelief, therefore, Bromley took the GLC to court.

  The case wound its way through the lower courts, and on 10 November the Appeal Court found in Bromley’s favour, with Lord Justice Oliver concluding that, under the law, the GLC was obliged to run London Transport on disciplined business lines. Livingstone promptly appealed to the House of Lords. But on 17 December the five Law Lords agreed that Fares Fair was illegal. For Lord Scarman, the GLC had ‘abandoned business principles’ and committed a ‘breach of duty owed to the ratepayers’. For Lord Diplock, meanwhile, their decision to overspend and incur a massive government penalty was a breach of the ‘fiduciary duty’ they owed the people of London. Fares Fair was dead. On 12 January 1982 the GLC reluctantly voted to obey the law. Livingstone himself, entirely typically, voted against. ‘I think Ken was opportunistic,’ remarked his deputy, Illtyd Harrington, ‘because he knew that the law would have to be obeyed, but he knew other people would see to it that it was done.’ Afterwards, Harrington sarcastically asked what they should do now. ‘We fucking carry on,’ Livingstone said, and slammed his office door.46

  There was a farcical coda to the Fares Fair imbroglio. Outraged by the Law Lords’ judgement, Livingstone’s closest allies launched a ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’ campaign, urging Londoners to hand over protest notes instead of the new, higher fares. But when the campaign kicked off at the end of March 1982, it was a complete flop. When the head of the GLC transport committee, Dave Wetzel, refused to pay the full fare for his bus journey to County Hall, the other passengers and the conductor joined forces in throwing him off the bus. Undeterred, Wetzel claimed that this had been a triumph for democracy, since ‘when I got off all the passengers were talking to each other instead of just reading papers’. As victories go, this was surely very well disguised. Across the network, the vast majority of commuters totally ignored the boycott, with most stations reporting barely a dozen protesters. Of 10,000 people who boarded the Tube at Charing Cross, said the next day’s Guardian, just four refused to pay.47

  Had Livingstone been just another politician, the Fares Fair fiasco might have finished him off. Opinion polls consistently found that most Londoners disapproved of his record in office, regretted voting for him and would not vote for him again. At Westminster, few Labour MPs had a good word to say about him. Even he privately feared he had ‘blown it’. Yet it speaks volumes about his resilience and self-belief that he treated the disaster of his first year as a chance to mount a spectacular comeback. In some ways he was a modern version of the irrepressible Denry Machin in Arnold Bennett’s novel The Card (1911), who rises to become mayor of his local town through a mixture of tricks, gambles and stunts. Another councillor says of Denry that he is ‘identified with the great cause of cheering us all up’. And whatever they thought of his politics, Livingstone often cheered people up. ‘He is a card,’ said a Times profile nearly two years into his tenure, comparing him to an ‘infuriatingly bright schoolboy for whom nothing in the world has yet gone wrong’. Only Livingstone could have emerged from a tense first meeting with the Transport Secretary, Norman Fowler, to tell the press: ‘He asked to see me again. I think he must want me for my body.’48

  Above all, Livingstone was a superb television performer: relaxed, down-to-earth and self-deprecating, with a rare ability to talk to people in language they understood. The more people saw of him, the more they forgave him, and at the end of 1982 he finished second in the BBC’s annual Man of the Year poll, beaten only by the Pope. By the following summer The Times thought him ‘the best-known socialist politician
in the country’, although Tony Benn might have had something to say about that. Even people who loathed his politics found him hard to dislike. The Tory MP Julian Critchley thought him the ‘smiling, jolly face of fairly extreme socialism’; the ultra-reactionary Kenneth Williams, who met him at County Hall in May 1982, found him ‘charming’ and ‘v. attractive’. And after a long chat on a train a month later, the journalist Hugo Young recorded that Livingstone was ‘humorous, decent, open, extraordinarily detached, very committed … A good political analyst. Very adept and knowledgeable with electoral figures … I think he will be leader of the Labour Party before the end of the century.’49

  With his unerring instinct for controversy, however, Livingstone was already beginning to make a mockery of Young’s prediction. After the collapse of Fares Fair he needed a new direction, and he found it in his long-standing commitment to feminism, anti-racism and gay rights. ‘I came into politics because I wish to change society. And that means changing the hearts and minds of people. You start from an unpopular position and you plug away consistently,’ he told one biographer.

  I’ve no doubt at all that by the end of this century, if we continue to fight for it, we will be living in a Britain where there will be complete tolerance towards sexual preference … If the leadership of the party, as one of their standard positions, argue for women’s rights, gay rights and a proper equal opportunities policy for blacks, we’ll eventually change attitudes nationally.50

  Livingstone was as good as his word. In June 1981 he set up the GLC’s first ethnic minorities committee, with a budget of almost £3 million. He pledged to boycott goods from South Africa and instructed the GLC Staff Association to monitor how many women and black people were employed in each department. He even introduced a code of conduct to outlaw racial and sexual harassment. But his most eye-catching innovation came in February 1982, at the moment when his public standing seemed to have reached its lowest ebb. At a meeting on 17 February, he approved what the Guardian called a ‘new wheeze’, a ‘Women’s Committee which will monitor all council activities to check that they are looking at things from a woman’s as well as a man’s point of view’.51