Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen
‘Enoch Powell on heraldic language’, ‘Gyles Brandreth’s “Spectator Sport”’ and ‘Benny Green on Trollope at Westminster’. In his column, headed ‘Could the Army Take Over?’, Cosgrave explained why he thought the question should be asked. One day the previous week he had attended ‘an entertaining lunch’ at which the conversation was dominated by the prospects of a military regime in Britain. Returning to Westminster, he spotted the name of an army officer on one of the press gallery noticeboards, ‘against which a Fleet Street wag had scribbled a suggestion to the effect that, being in charge of the London area, this soldier might be the man to take over in the event of, presumably, our present crisis reaching an intolerable pitch of intensity or of a total government collapse’. That evening, drinking in one of the bars at the House of Commons with a gaggle of journalists and politicians, he heard a lobby hack suggest that ‘we had seen our last general election, since from now on the Prime Minister would merely need to continue to prolong various states of emergency and elongate the life of this parliament’. He then recalled a recent article by the historian Alistair Horne, who drew ‘disturbing parallels’ between Britain’s predicament and ‘the Chilean experience’ that had led to the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s elected government three months earlier. Could it happen here? ‘No coup will take place in this country until it is one that would be welcomed or quietly acquiesced in by a majority or a very large minority of the people,’ Cosgrave concluded. ‘But, in my judgment, we have gone measurably down the road to such acceptance in the last decade, and we have travelled very quickly along it in the last year.’
While I skimmed through his apocalyptic analysis on the concourse of Charing Cross station, this was what struck me most forcibly: although the magazine’s political pundit reckoned that Britain was ‘already ripe for a coup’, the editor didn’t think it merited more than a passing mention on the cover. As Britain prepared for the three-day week, the unthinkable had become commonplace. Armed police and army tanks surrounded Heathrow Airport on 6 January, following an intelligence tip-off that Palestinian terrorists were planning surface-to-air-missile attacks on aircraft as they came in to land. Gerry Healy immediately increased the print run of his newspaper, Workers’ Press, to alert the nation to ‘the danger of police-military rule as in Chile’. Tony Benn also suspected that the real purpose of the mobilisation at Heathrow was ‘to get people used to tanks and armed patrols in the streets of London’ and thus deter any riotous resistance to Heath’s state of emergency. A survey commissioned by the Observer concluded that the three-day week would bring the country to a standstill within weeks. Lord Bowden, a mild-mannered academic who had served briefly as an education minister in 1964, wrote that ‘the government’s plan for a three-day week has produced chaos on a scale which does not seem to be understood in Whitehall … Politicians have asked if the country is becoming ungovernable. At this moment I think it is … I think we are witnessing the collapse of the government’s administrative machine.’ Under the headline ‘Countdown to catastrophe’, a Guardian editorial warned that a two-day week would be inevitable if the miners’ strike lasted for more than a month: ‘For many firms, it would simply not be worth continuing production. The fall in living standards, the damage to the industrial structure, the utter social chaos that would follow create a situation beyond rational contemplation.’
Heath’s heckler-in-chief supplied his familiar running commentary. ‘The supposed issue in the conflict which bids fair to divide the nation today is a wholly bogus issue,’ Enoch Powell said, ‘a figment of the fevered imagination of politicians in a tight corner of their own manufacture.’ Fevered imagination? Powell didn’t know the half of it. For all his rudeness and obstinacy, Heath was at heart a shy, conciliatory man who might have been better suited to the civil service than to the rough and tumble of politics. (Henry Kissinger thought him in some respects similar to Richard Nixon – a moody, unclubbable loner whose struggle to reach the top from humble beginnings had left him introverted, self-reliant and suspicious.*) Britain’s chief civil servant, Sir William Armstrong, was by contrast a flamboyant performer whose evangelical showmanship, derived from his Salvationist parents, would have served him well on the political hustings. ‘As an officer of the Salvation Army he had a message to proclaim and he proclaimed it,’ Armstrong said of his father. ‘He would do that either at the Cenotaph, shortly after it was put up, or in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace or on a white horse going down Plymouth Hoe. I suppose I’ve inherited a certain amount of that from him.’ Heath and his senior colleagues – genial squirearchical buffers such as Jim Prior and Willie Whitelaw – had been brought up on the old Tory dictum that the mineworkers were the labour movement’s equivalent to the Brigade of Guards, and that no sane minister would ever pick a fight with them. While they dithered and agonised it was left to Armstrong to stiffen the sinews and rally the ranks – so much so that during the winter of 1973–74 he was often referred to by those in the know as the deputy prime minister. ‘Armstrong’s influence,’ wrote the Whitehall historian Peter Hennessy, ‘was quite extraordinary for a civil servant.’ In the words of Reginald Maudling, who had been at Oxford with him in the 1930s: ‘Wherever Armstrong’s name is on the door, that is where power will be.’
The burdens of power eventually crushed him. On 26 and 27 January 1974, while waiting for the result of the miners’ ballot on an all-out strike, Armstrong and other grandees attended a weekend seminar at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, discussing abstract principles of government with a group of visiting American congressmen. ‘The atmosphere was Chekhovian,’ Douglas Hurd wrote. ‘We sat on sofas in front of great log fires and discussed first principles while the rain lashed the windows. Sir William was full of notions, ordinary and extraordinary.’ Although Hurd diplomatically refrained from giving further details, Campbell Adamson of the Confederation of British Industry recalled a lecture from Armstrong ‘on how the Communists were infiltrating everything. They might even be infiltrating, he said, the room he was in. It was quite clear that the immense strain and overwork was taking its toll.’ On 31 January, Sir William sought out his namesake Robert Armstrong, the PM’s principal private secretary, and said they must talk in a place that was ‘not bugged’. Robert Armstrong led him to the waiting room, where Sir William stripped off his clothes and lay on the floor, chain-smoking and expostulating wildly about the collapse of democracy and the end of the world. In the middle of this hysterical sermon, as the naked civil servant babbled about ‘moving the Red Army from here and the Blue Army from there’, the governor of the Bank of England happened to walk into the room. According to Robert Armstrong, he ‘took it all calmly’.
At a meeting of permanent secretaries the next day, Sir William told them all to go home and prepare for Armageddon. There was a long silence; then the Treasury mandarin Sir Douglas Allen took him by the arm and led him away. Robert Armstrong had the task of ringing the Prime Minister, who was out of London, with the news that the head of the civil service had been admitted to a mental hospital. Heath seemed unsurprised, saying that he ‘thought William was acting oddly the last time I saw him’. Sir William Armstrong was sent off to convalesce in the Caribbean (as Anthony Eden did when he cracked up after the Suez crisis in 1956), and never returned to Downing Street. Instead, after a decent interval, he became chairman of the Midland Bank.
At the height of Britain’s worst peacetime crisis since the General Strike of 1926, the most powerful man in Whitehall had gone off his rocker. Who can blame him? Armstrong’s talk about Red Armies and Blue Armies was no wilder than much of the chatter that had been heard in Westminster bars and corridors for months, though only he saw fit to lie naked on the floor while delivering it. As Tony Benn wrote, ‘in January 1974 the Tories and the whole Establishment thought the revolution was about to happen’. Heath’s environment secretary, Geoffrey Rippon, feared that Britain was ‘on the same course as the Weimar government, with runaway inflation and ultra-high unemployment at the end’. Anthony Barber, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a hysterical speech claiming that if the Tory government lost the next general election it would be replaced by a Communist regime. On the day that Armstrong was led away by Sir Douglas Allen, the Spectator’s editorial alluded again to the fate of Salvador Allende’s government. ‘Britain,’ it warned, ‘is on a Chilean brink.’