Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen
moment for the premiere of The Party, a play by Trevor Griffiths about the coming British revolution. Six months earlier the Royal Court had staged Howard Brenton’s Magnificence, which had the same theme, but Kenneth Tynan thought it too timid by half: ‘Like many similar plays, [it] spends 90 per cent of its time explaining how neurotic, paranoiac and ineffective revolutionaries are, and only 10 per cent demonstrating why revolution is necessary; but it seems that no English playwright can face the derision that the critics would pour on any writer who made that his priority.’ As literary consultant to the National Theatre, Tynan was in a position to test his theory by commissioning Trevor Griffiths to write a big bold drama which assumed that a left-wing revolution in Britain was essential, and that the only point worth debating was precisely how and when it would be achieved.
From a modern vantage point it seems incredible that the National Theatre should stage an earnest three-hour Trotskyist seminar, led by no less a figure than Laurence Olivier, but according to Tynan his colleagues received the script of The Party with unanimous enthusiasm. ‘Peter Hall likes it; John Dexter wants to direct it; and Larry [Olivier] not only likes it but wants to play the part of the old Trotskyite, Tagg. John has given him various basic revolutionary texts to read as background. Larry confesses to me that Trevor’s play has for the first time explained to him what Marxism is about.’ Tynan’s only doubt was whether Olivier had the ‘passionate and caring political intensity’ to make the audience warm to his character. If Olivier played Tagg with the cold-heartedness he had displayed in Richard III or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the Trotskyist hero would come across as ‘a hard and demonic monster – not as a man of feeling – and this would be disastrous’.
Disastrous for agitprop purposes, but it would have been a fair representation of the man on whom Trevor Griffiths based the character of Tagg. Gerry Healy, leader of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), was a squat, bullet-headed thug whose favourite pastimes were raping his female subordinates and beating up comrades in whom he detected the taint of ‘revisionism’ or ‘pragmatic deviation’. Not that there was any hint of this in the script. Healy had many acolytes in left-wing theatrical circles at the time, and although Griffiths wasn’t a fully paid-up Healyite he nevertheless portrayed this paranoid and megalomaniac psychopath as a weighty political intellectual who might very well lead the British revolution when capitalism reached its final crisis, as it surely must before long.
It wasn’t only Marxist zealots who believed that Britain was now ripe for insurrection. ‘I’ve been expecting the collapse of capitalism all my life, but now that it comes I am rather annoyed,’ the historian A.J.P. Taylor grumbled. ‘There’s no future for this country and not much for anywhere else … Revolution is knocking at the door.’ Harry Welton of the Economic League, a secretive right-wing outfit which monitored militants in the workforce, wrote that ‘the fomenting of new subversive groups in Britain can almost be described as a growth industry … Revolutionary and kindred groups are more numerous than at any previous time.’ So numerous, indeed, that the famous Marxist bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, Collet’s, could no longer accommodate all their publications. ‘Left-wing journals proliferated to such an extent,’ the manager explained apologetically, ‘that we found ourselves with more than 150 on display.’
With Heath’s government buffeted and battered by militant labour, hitherto tiny groupuscules on the far Left started flexing their muscles. ‘The objective pre-conditions for a victorious socialist revolution in Britain are ripening fast,’ the International Marxist Group announced. ‘Seldom in European history have there been more favourable relations between the classes for such a victorious revolution: decay, potential division and confusion in the ruling class and its allies.’* Tariq Ali, the group’s best-known member, published a book called The Coming British Revolution (1971) which predicted that ‘we shall once again see [workers’] Soviets in Europe in the Seventies … To those who demand detailed blueprints of the future society we can only say: we are not utopians who spend our time preparing blueprints while history passes us by.’ The investigative journalist Paul Foot resigned from Private Eye in 1972 to take on a full-time job editing Socialist Worker, the weekly paper of Healy’s arch-rivals, the International Socialists. ‘Our little organisation had grown from zero to perhaps two thousand members by 1972,’ he recalled. ‘All through ’72 and ’73 it was an upward curve all the way. We would get these cheques in. [One] was from a student in York for £17,000 saying, “Today I have received my inheritance.” Stop. New paragraph. “I renounce my inheritance and I declare myself for international socialism.”’ In later years, when the Trotskyist tide had receded, Foot often thought about how bitterly the student must regret handing over his windfall. At the time, however, it seemed the obvious thing to do. As Foot said: ‘Many of us started to believe that … instead of it being a hobby, which it was, there was a possibility of a real revolutionary party.’
Gerry Healy thought so too. In March 1972 his SLL hosted a reception at the Empire Pool, Wembley, to greet Right to Work campaigners who had marched from Glasgow to London as a protest against youth unemployment. According to the heroic account given by Healy’s official hagiographers, Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman, the marchers entered the Empire Pool amid ‘a sea of red flags and banners to the tumultuous applause of 8,500 people. The rally ended with a concert put on for free by top rock bands, including Slade, Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks.’ In the opinion of the American Trotskyist Tim Wohlforth, a frequent transatlantic visitor, ‘Gerry Healy was, without question, the world’s foremost radical showman. He put on demos, rallies, pageants and conferences with a finesse that would have made P.T. Barnum jealous.’ Maybe the casting of Laurence Olivier wasn’t so surprising after all.
Healy had another chance to demonstrate his talents as a whip-cracking ringmaster that summer when a thousand youngsters – including several foreign delegations – descended on a big field by the Blackwater estuary in Essex for the SLL’s ‘international youth camp’. Wohlforth chartered a plane and brought over a hundred Americans, many of them young blacks and Puerto Ricans who had never been out of New York City. ‘Healy gave these kids a real scare,’ Wohlforth wrote, ‘when, in one of his more flamboyant speeches, he suggested that the entire country might close down in a general strike, thus preventing our delegation from returning home. Such a strike, Healy claimed, could be the opening gun of the revolution itself.’ Instead of being thrilled that they might soon, like John Reed and Louise Bryant, be witnesses to an actual uprising, the kids from New York were aghast at the prospect of being trapped in the flat-lands of Essex indefinitely. Wohlforth did his tactful best to reassure them – no easy task if he was to avoid the grave political crime of ‘underestimating the depth of the crisis’ – but as if to confirm the correctness of Healy’s assessment the Daily Telegraph published an aerial photo of his tented village on its front page and described it as a training camp for armed insurrection.
Veterans of Gerry Healy’s annual summer camps soon discovered that there was always some sort of crisis during the week – a knife fight between fractious youths from Glasgow, perhaps, or a denunciation of some luckless camper as an agent of the CIA or MI5. ‘If one doesn’t develop naturally,’ he boasted, ‘then I create one.’ This taste for the dramatic explains why his sect had such a disproportionate appeal to the theatrical profession. The actor Corin Redgrave, who was already a member, took his sister Vanessa to meet the great leader early in 1973, and after being treated to a long lecture on the importance of working-class struggle she offered her support. Healy turned triumphantly to Corin: ‘So now Mary Queen of Scots has joined us.’* Within weeks she was singing a cabaret skit titled ‘Tories are a Girl’s Best Friend’ at a rally in Manchester organised by the All Trade Union Alliance, one of Healy’s front organisations. In March, ten thousand people attended an anti-Tory rally organised by the SLL at Wembley, which featured a ‘Pageant of Labour History’ performed by Vanessa and other Healyite actors and musicians. ‘It was the largest and most successful rally held by the socialist movement for fifty years,’ Healy’s hagiographers record with pride. ‘Its success confirmed the revolutionary nature of the period and provided the impetus for the transformation of the SLL