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The coach left from Chalton Street, Manchester, just after eleven on Sunday evening, picking up speed as it reached the M 62. It was packed with servicemen and their families, young men telling jokes under their breath, young wives trying to get some sleep, children snoring or staring out of the window, who had spent the weekend with friends and relatives in Manchester and were now heading back to their barracks in cataract and Darlington. Normally, they would have taken the train, but of course there were no trains because of the strike that had crippled the railway network since December. So the army had booked a North Yorkshire coach company to pick them up. As it happened, the driver, Roland Hanley, was the director of the firm and knew the route well. By midnight, he had almost reached Leeds, making excellent time along the motorway, and behind him, many of the passengers were fast asleep. And then it happened. One moment the coach was cruising smoothly and effortlessly through the night, the next there was an almighty, heart stopping bang. So, Dominic, that's from your book, State of Emergency the way we were Britain, 1970 to 1974, and tell us what's happened.

So the date is the 4 February 1974. And this is one of the most devastating attacks launched by the IRA, the Irish Republican army, on british soil. So what has just happened to that coach, packed with servicemen and their families, is that 25 pounds of high explosive have gone off in one of the luggage lockers. The whole rear of the coach was torn apart. Roland Hanley, from the reading, was one of the directors of the coach company. He somehow managed to, God knows how, to steer the rest of the coach towards the side of the road. He had been in the RAF, in, you know, he'd seen stuff, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he got out. Because he gets out and he sees that the whole of the back of the coach is kind of blackened wreckage. It has literally been shredded by the bomb. There are bodies all over the motorway. There are people staggering off the coach covered in blood. In all, twelve people were killed that night. Eleven of them immediately, and one later 50 were injured. A whole family was killed. The Houghton family. Corporal Clifford Houghton, who was 23.

People got married much younger in the 70s than they do today. So he was 23 and he had two children, a five year old and two year old, and his wife Linda was traveling with them and all four of them were killed. So this was one of the worst attacks up to that point on british soil of the troubles. And it is a reminder, Tom, of something that will run through this whole week, which is this terrible saw, I guess, of the violence in the political conflict in Northern Ireland, which, as we said last time, had kicked off in the late 1960s. It's absolutely worthy of a rest is history series on itself. But what has happened is that after years of terrible violence in Belfast, in particular, the provisional IRA have decided to bring their campaign to what they see as the heart of the enemy to Britain itself. And so from March 1973, they've been detonating bombs at various points, particularly in London or in Birmingham. And this is one of the worst so far.

And their strategy for doing this is basically because even though people are dying in huge numbers in Belfast and Northern Ireland, most people in Britain, they're aware of it, of course, as background noise.

Yes.

But they just wish it would go away.

Absolutely.

And so the aim is partly to force the government to negotiate and hopefully withdraw from the IRA's point of view, but also just to kind of rouse public opinion in Britain against Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom.

Exactly. It's almost, I suppose, to sort of bludgeon british public opinion into pressing for british withdrawal. Yes. I mean, some of our listeners from Ireland or Northern Ireland may be surprised to hear you say that it's background noise. But all the opinion polls, all the survey evidence shows that actually most people in England, Scotland and Wales, they'd never crossed the Irish Sea, they'd never been to Northern Ireland. They didn't understand it. And frankly, terrible thing to say. In some ways, they didn't care. They found it confusing and they were depressed by the news, but they didn't really understand it and they didn't devote an enormous amount of thought to it.

And the same is true of the government. You say in state of emergency that Northern Ireland was not even the government's main priority. So effectively a civil war within the fabric of the United Kingdom. And it's not their main priority because, as we heard in the first episode, Edward Heath has a load of other things on his plate.

Well, Edward Heath is struggling with lots of different things. I mean, by the way, the government do spend, particularly somebody like Willie Whitelaw, who's Heath's lieutenant in Northern Ireland, they spend a lot of time on Northern Ireland trying to solve it, and they consider all options. So redrawing the border, giving Northern Ireland more autonomy, giving it less autonomy, even withdrawing from Northern Ireland is an option that's very much on the table in the mid 1970s.

And the thing that I hadn't realized, but was reminded, reading your books again, is that actually, in a way, most people might think that it's Britain that wants to keep Northern Ireland and it's the Republic of Ireland that wants to get it. But actually, it's the other way around. Certainly in the early 1970s. I mean, the irish foreign minister is hassling Kissinger to lean on the british government.

Not to withdraw, not to get out. Yeah, not to get out.

Amazing.

Extraordinary. I know. And we should definitely go into that in greater detail when we come to a series on the troubles. But for the time being, it's just worth saying, because this is a podcast series about british politics in 1974, that throughout the rest of the year, there is an IRA bombing pretty much every week in Britain. So on the 13 February, for example, what is it? Just nine days after the M 62 bombing, there is a bomb in Latimer, Buckinghamshire, at the National Defense College. Ten people are hurt, but nobody is killed. So there is that. There was also the attempts of the british authorities to try and find the culprits. So with the example of the M 62 bombing, they effectively coerce a confession out of a mentally ill woman called Judith Ward. A confession that proves to be completely erroneous. And it's not the last time it will happen.

A bomb attack in 1974.

Bomb attacks and then terrible miscarriages of justice that follow.

And also just to say that, of course, this is a coach that is taking people from the army.

Yes.

So, from the point of view of the IRA, the army are a particular target, but they are also letting off bombs that will target civilians in London.

Department stores, shops, restaurants, and, as we.

Will see in due course, pubs as well.

And pubs, as we will see. Exactly. So this is the background to the election that we ended the last episode with, the February 1974 election, which Ted Heath calls three days after the m 62 bombing. So, as we said, britain literally feels like a dark place. It's the three day week. Street lights turned off, no floodlighting, electric, sort of neon adverts turned off.

You say in your book, nobody could remember an election in grimmer circumstances.

Well, nobody can. There's never been an election in people's memory in which the stakes seem higher or the context seems gloomier or the.

Chance of a positive outcome just seems.

Impossible, just seems more remote.

Because, again, you quote the Nuffield study of the election that was written after the election. You say it was an unpopularity contest between two contenders widely seen as incompetent on the major issues.

Yes.

So thank goodness that's never happened again.

No, that would never happen again in british politics. Exactly. Definitely won't be happening this year. Right, let's start with Heath. So, Heath has called the election and the message of his campaign. It's the perfect example, this story of what was later to happen to Theresa May in 2017. You call an election on one issue, and actually, you find the public want the election to be on a whole load of other issues and you don't control the narrative. But anyway, he believes he will control the narrative. His theme is going to be that he's the man of destiny, the yachtsman steering the nation, Tom, through choppy waters towards the rocks. He has this manifesto that basically says, labor and the unions are far left, they are dangerous, they are a threat to the nation.

Union barons is the phrase.

The union barons, yeah. The union barons was absolutely the Daily.

Express phrase du jour over mighty subjects.

Yes. So that's what Heath aides want. Young men who are writing Heath's manifesto. Monarch Nigel Lawson, Douglas Hurd, people who would become ministers later for Margaret Thatcher. Heath himself is actually quite uneasy with all this, because he, as we said last time, is a corporatist by instinct, kind of a paternalist, a technocrat. And actually, they will send him out to go and give speeches and they'll say, go and get people really excited about how terrible the unions are and stuff. And actually, he'll just revert to his default and start talking to getting around the table. Moderation, sensible people and stuff. So his advisors are slightly kind of pulling their hair out. However, the good news for them is that they're not the Labor Party, because the Labor party, which is the opposition, seem to be in a terrible state. And this is where we should introduce a tremendous character in this week's podcast. Who is Harold Wilson? Heath's rival. Yeah, exactly the same age. Born in 1916, his father was an industrial chemist from Huddersfield, and he'd gone off to Oxford and he'd been an absolute intellectual star at Oxford. He's supposedly. Tom got the highest mark ever in his economics papers and became an economics don at Oxford when he was about 1210.

Yes. And then became a kind of government statistician, a backroom boy. He became a big rising star in Clement Atley's labor government. Everyone says of Harold Wilson, he's very cunning. You can't completely trust him, but he's a very decent man, Wilson, in some.

Ways, he's kind hearted, isn't he?

Kind hearted? I always say, wilson is the man you want as your neighbor. He's the man that your lawnmower is broken. You want to borrow a lawnmower, Harold Wilson will lend you his lawnmower with a cheery smile if you don't give it back straight away. That's fine. You can go around and have a drink with him a few days later, take the lawnmower back, have a lovely time. He's quite suburban, Harold Wilson, so all his Labor colleagues slightly despise him because.

He has tin salmon, doesn't he?

His tin salmon? Well, he claims to prefer tin salmon to smoked salmon.

You imply that he genuinely did.

I think he probably there is a pooterish side to him. So he likes Agatha Christie, he likes playing golf.

He's a very sandbrookian figure.

Thanks. I don't play golf.

No, but these are your people, Dominique. Yeah, well, they're the heroes of your books. They're the kind of people who are making modern Britain and who often get written out of the narrative.

Theo has texted in the chat. He loves the garden center. And that's absolutely right.

Well, I tell you what he really loves. Of course, he loves a boy Scout, and I mean that not in a sinister way.

Tom. Wow. What a revelation.

I mean, you say that he's inspired by scouting far more than he is by socialism. And there are always extraordinary photos of him wearing unbelievably tight shorts, Boy scout.

Style shorts, because he goes on holiday to the silly isles off the coast of Cornwall every year, which is a.

Very, very kind of Britain in 1974 kind of destination.

It is. And he will wear these shorts, sort of car key shorts, and he'll tuck his shirt into the shorts very tightly and smoke his pipe and sit on the rocks with his boys. That's absolutely horrible.

He was supposedly the Queen's favorite prime minister, wasn't he?

Yeah, because of all this, because of the garden center and also Tom.

But he's kind and he's funny, as well as having a certain animal cunning.

He wins four out of five elections that he fights. So actually, the british people would look at Wilson. I mean, some people despised Wilson, sort.

Of businessman and stuff, and indeed, members of the security services, as we'll find out.

Exactly. But I think a lot of ordinary people not interested in politics looked at Wilson. They thought, ah, good old Harold. He's like me. He's not really interested in politics. Great. Good for him.

And of course, I mean, his greatest achievement, to give the Beatles MBEs.

Yes. And to keep Britain out of Vietnam.

Two great achievements, anyway.

Poor old Harold Wilson, who had won power in 1964 as the man who was going to modernize Britain, wearing sort of Macintosh plastic Mac.

What's it, a gamix?

Ganex. Ganex Mac. The white eater technology. He is very shopsoiled by 1974. He's knackered. He looks like he's sort of aged a thousand years. He's really bruised from having been defeated in 1970 by Heath. But he's somehow managed to cling on.

To the labor leadership, and in due course, he will succumb to Alzheimer's.

He will do. Yes.

And are there not theories that even at this point he is starting to suffer memory loss, or do you think not?

I think probably not memory loss at this point. But it is certainly true that the people who are around him, who are closest to him. So there's his press secretary, Joe Haynes, his policy advisor, Bernard Donahue, who've written very detailed memoirs and diaries about this period. They would know he's not what he was. He's tired. He doesn't always do his homework. He sort of sometimes does forget things. He drinks too much, all this kind of stuff. Now, whether this really is prefiguring the Alzheimer's or whether this is merely the exhaustion and the sort of the weariness that come from a long career in politics, it's hard to say.

And which Heath also is suffering from.

Which Heath is also suffering from, of course. Exactly. I think it's a sign of the pressures of the 70s. What's happened, though, is that, though, when labor left office, the party had swung, as so often, it had swung well, to the left. And in those days, the direction of the party was determined not so much by the leader, but by the national executive committee and by the party conferences. They would decide the policies and they would decide the manifesto, whether the leader liked it or not. So, actually, when Heath calls that election Labor, which is a party becoming increasingly torn apart between its sort of more middle class, high minded parliamentary representatives and the union leaders and the ordinary activists.

So this is the classic division that you've often mentioned before. Between the prune juice drinking sandalwears.

Yes.

And the horny handed sons of toil.

Exactly. So it is becoming more and more sort of pulled apart.

Not to stereotype in any way.

No, but I mean, yeah, it is a division. These are stereotypes that people used a lot of the time. And it's got a manifesto that has been drawn up by the left of the party, that commits the labor party, formerly technocratic, under Wilson, the fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favor of working people and their families. So this famous line and the Tribune.

For this is a man called Tony Ben, who will be familiar to regular listeners of the podcast because he was the winner of the second historical love island, wasn't he?

He was. Who did he win it with?

Mary Fisher. She was a top Quaker. So it was a very earnest pairing.

He's very earnest, Tony Ben. He was formerly Vykat Stansgate. He renounced his peerage, and he's reinvented himself as the tribune of the plebs. He walks around in a kind of park, an Iraq, shaking hands with shop stewards and with people on picket lines and saying he can't wait to basically nationalize everything. Indeed, he does want to nationalize everything. So Tony Ben has got this staggering plan. Labor, when they get in, are going to create something called the National Enterprise Board and the National Enterprise Board, which sounds very boring. What it will actually do is it will force all of industry to sign planning agreements with the government. So five year plans and stuff. Ben wants to have an emergency powers act and an emergency industrial act that will allow him to take over the top 25 companies in Britain and effectively run them himself from Whitehall. And a lot of his own labor colleagues think this is absolutely bonkers. So my favorite line, which would be completely lost on our overseas listers, Dennis Healy, who is the shadow chancellor, said to him, yeah, what a brilliant idea. Why don't we nationalize Marks and Spencer's to make it as good as the co op?

Because Marks and Spencer is slightly top end, the co op isn't.

And Tony Ben was very offended by this and said, this shows that Dennis is actually very right wing and capitalist running dog and all this sort of stuff. But this is the plan that Labor are going to the public with. They're going to nationalize loads of things. They're going to force companies to sign planning agreements. This in the context of the massive inflation and the credit crisis and all of that stuff. But also, Tom, they're going to have a referendum on leaving the european common market madness. And Britain's only been in for a year. Yeah. Tony Benko, they say, no, this is a terrible capitalist plot. It's a capitalist plot by pampered european fat cats.

Well, I mean, he's not entirely wrong. The European Union, as it becomes, is very capitalist, isn't it?

I suppose it mean.

So Jeremy Corbyn, who in a way is Tony Ben's kind of political heir, almost certainly.

I'm sure.

Pretty sure voted to leave in the more recent referendum.

Yes, exactly right. Tom, so if you're a pro european, the thought of labor winning power on this kind of agenda is quite worrying. It was genuinely very worrying. And, of course, this is the most radical agenda that anybody has really gone to the public with since, what, 1945? Arguably even longer, because terminite Tony, Ben seems to the press to be a Bolshevik, a sort of somebody who is going to turn Britain into a North Korea. All this stuff that you see in the newspapers.

Well, Warsaw Pac country, kind of East Germany or.

East Germany. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

But isn't ironically, the figure in the Labor party who comes up with the phrase that articulates this sense of dread on the part of the middle classes and so on, is actually Dennis Healy, who made the joke about Marx and Spencer, because he comes up with a famous phrase that his aim is to squeeze the rich and make the pips squeak. Yes, and it's that phrase making the pips squeak that kind of gets written up by. It does the Daily Mail. Daily Express. Telegraph.

Exactly. So Dennis Healy, who actually is going to turn out to be a much more pragmatic chancellor and arguably much more sort of right wing than anybody anticipated. What's happened is that the sort of left wing mood has sort of seeped into the rhetoric of even people on the right of the Labor party. Actually, what he says is we're going to squeeze property developers until the pips squeak. But that, as you say, is written up as they're going to squeeze the rich and the middle classes. Oh, no. What a disaster. Of course, this is at a time when taxes are very, very high, so the highest rate of income tax is 83%. Tom.

And so Dennis Healy, he kind of storms the beaches at Anzio.

Yes.

Friend of Edward Heath, as you said in the first part. Always boasting about his hinterland, always kind of dropping poets into conversations.

Yeah, he'll talk about flow bear or togania for something and annoy people by doing that.

And I was startled to learn from your book that one of his favorite things to do at weekends was to answer the phone in the broken english of a chinese laundry proprietor. Yes, that was unexpected.

So, Dennis Healy is one of my favorite people, Tom, I've ever lived.

Huge eyebrows.

Massive eyebrows. He went to the same Oxford college as Ted Heath and you and me, and indeed Rory Stewart from the rest is politics. So all good. He's a great family man. He does spend all his time hanging around in the House of Commons. He likes to go home and be with his family, which I admire, like Tony Ben. Also very luxurious, like Tony Ben. But unlike Tony Ben, he's an enormous bully. So he's extremely rude to other Labor mps. He'll deliberately drop in conversation. References to Tolstoy.

Quotes from Yates.

Quotes from Yates. Exactly. He does exactly what Dennis Healy does. But then he'll also try to have fights with. Know he's a bruiser. He'll effing blind at them. I just think he's an absolutely splendid man. Dennis Healy is the man I would like to be, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I can see that, Dominic. I can see that.

So, anyway, that's the Labor Party. They've got their tremendously efforting manifesto. Nobody thinks they're going to win, really, but people are terrified in the city, in business and so on. They're absolutely terrified about the prospect if they do. So if you are rich in February 1974, if you work in the City of London, if you own a business, things are looking very, very bleak for you. Taxes are very high, inflation is through the roof. There's been a property bubble that has now burst. There has been a banking bubble which has also burst. So there are all these secondary banks in the City of London, the value of which has dropped in some cases by a third or half in the last few months. The news is full of bombings and stuff. The press is absolutely hysterical. I mean, people moan about newspapers now on social media. People will laugh at what they see as newspaper exaggerations and things. But if you had read the papers in February 1974, you would genuinely think that there was either a communist revolution or a kind of Weimar style meltdown, probably happening on Monday.

So you print some of the cartoons from this election campaign in state of emergency, one of which is Tony Ben, as an SS member, carrying a whip, which I can't imagine anyone doing now, that kind of thing.

No. Very full on kind of cartoons. Or there's one in which Tony Ben is drawn with his plans for industry and taking over businesses. He is drawn. There's no way of sugarcoating this. He's drawn as a rapist, dragging a woman by her hair. The woman is Britain or british industry, and the woman is saying, no, no. And Tony Ben is saying, it's all for the good of the nation, or something like this. I mean, just an extraordinarily incendiary cartoon. Right? But in the context of early 1974, absolutely par for the course. People didn't even complain.

Okay, so basically, things are absolutely terrible, for which clearly heath bears a massive responsibility because he's been in power for the previous four years. But the argument is that Labor would make it even worse.

Exactly.

That's essentially the position of the press.

Even people within the Labor party, high command of the Labor party, think they're going to lose and actually don't really want to win. So Roy Jenkins, who had been Wilson's chancellor, yet another university friend of Ted Heath, he just thinks we're going to lose and we deserve to lose. We don't have any sensible plans other than basically bribing the miners to go back to work. We don't have any answer to the crisis that we're in. So on the one hand, you have some of these people on the left of the Labor party who are seized with this kind of real sense of excitement. They want to rebuild Britain and they've got these great plans to do it on the right of Labor party. People are very depressed. Howard Wilson himself is terribly hang dog. He's sort of doing these tours of working men's clubs and sort of places in the north of England and stuff, and he's like an old musical comedian.

My dog's got no nose.

Yeah.

How does it smell?

Take my mother in law. Oh, go on, take her. So he's sort of doing his last routines and then he'll go off into retirement.

Right. So basically, it looks as though the Conservatives are going to win, that his scamble is paying off. There seems very little prospect of a Labor victory. But, ladies and gentlemen, is that actually the case? We will find out after the break.

What a cliffhanger you. Hello.

Welcome back to the rest is history. We are looking at 1974, the worst year in modern british political history, according to top historian of the period, Dominic Sandbrook. And, Dominic, we're looking at the first election campaign of 1974, and things seem to be going well for Edward Heath and the conservatives, despite the fact that they've messed everything up. Are there any kind of chinks of light that might give Harold Wilson and Labor any encouragement at all?

Tom? There are other. So the polls are pretty much. They're vaguely neck and neck. The Tories are normally ahead, so sometimes the tourists ahead by 5% or so. And Heath strategists think people don't place as much store by opinion polls in the early 70s as they do today.

And presumably they're not as common.

They're not as common and they're not as accurate, frankly. So Heath's advisors are pretty confident that by the time the public vote, they will get a margin of victory, 5%, maybe 10% that they will do it. And almost everybody in the press thinks that. However, there are, as you say, chinks of light for Harold Wilson. First of all, there is another party, Tom, that we haven't mentioned. Our old friends, the liberal party, led.

By very much a friend of the show, Jeremy Thorpe, dog killing.

We did a podcast about Jeremy Thorpe's bizarre. I don't know how to describe it because it's so baroque. He'd had a relationship with a stable hand called Norman Scott, who thought that Jeremy Thorpe had stolen his national insurance card. Jeremy Thorpe then conspired to have him.

Murdered by a fruit machine salesman.

Yeah, by fruit machine salesman and carpet salesman. They were either going to drop him down a mineshaft, they were going to have him fed to Alligators in the Florida Everglades, or they were going to poison him in the pub, remember, and he was going to fall off his bar stool in the pub. They didn't do all that. They ended up murdering his dog instead. They got an airline pilot to murder.

His dog and it went to trial and Thorpe got off. But this is all later, and you can hear it in, I think, the first episode we did on british politics in the think.

That's right, yeah.

It's a fabulous episode.

So, anyway, at this point, Jeremy Thorpe, he's a bounder, isn't he, Tom? Yeah, he is an absolute. A cad and a bounder in a very amusing way.

He's a kind of captain Hook style etonian.

Right. Except he has two hands and he's.

Not the one who's being chased by large reptiles with huge teeth.

No, he plans to set reptiles on other people. And he's also not a pirate, but he's the leader of the liberal party.

Well, although, I mean, he's fond of a sea going vessel, isn't he? Because in the second election, he's a great enthusiast for hovercraft.

He is.

The parallels, I think, are not far fetched.

Uncanny. So he leads the liberal party. He's very jolly, he's very amusing, as you say. He's very drolled and wry. He'd been in Oxford with all these other people. Exactly. At the same time. Bizarrely or not bizarrely, I mean, that's how Britain works. And he leads the liberal party, which kind of don't really stand for anything. They stand for Europe, portional representation and sort of being generally nice.

Being nice?

Yeah, being nice.

Apart from the murdering stablehead side.

Yeah. On all the time during this election, their ratings are steadily going up day after day after day.

Well, because if you think Heath's messed everything up, Wilson's going to mess everything up. Who else do you have to vote for? I guess.

Exactly right. Exactly. Now, as we said, another chink of light for Harold Wilson is the three day week has not turned out as sort of melodramatic as people envisaged. So a lot of firms, they've made it work. They're using candles and all this kind of thing. The weather is much milder. And so people think maybe it was really unnecessary and maybe the election is unnecessary as well. Heath's being very annoying. I'm sick of Heath. Yeah.

So there's your Teresa May parallel again.

There's your Teresa May parallel.

She went to the country early as well.

Yes. Then a bombshell, Tom. We love a bombshell on the rest of its history. Metaphorical bombshell, not a real one. On the 21 February, the pay board, which is one of these Heathite corporatist bodies, reports, and it actually says, you know what, actually, the miners are a bit underpaid. Probably should give the miners more money.

That's helpful for Heath.

So that's incredibly unhelpful. That couldn't be less unhelpful. Anyway, they get to the end of the penultimate week. So we get to the weekend of the 23rd, 24 February, the election is going to be on the 20 eigth, and Heath is still very optimistic, the polls still putting him 5% clear. And then we have an intervention. I mean, british politics in the. Full of such bonkers characters. And now we have perhaps certainly the most controversial and one of the most interesting characters of all, and that is the member of parliament for the great city. Not that it was a city then, of Wolverhampton. Wolverhampton Southwest. A man of Birmingham, Tom, like the Holland family ancestors, I believe, and the Sandbrooks. Right, well, we're more black country, to be honest. And this is Enoch Powell, so.

Enoch Powell, yeah.

How'd you explain Enoch Powell, Tom?

So, Enoch Powell, probably best known as a translator of Herodotus, youngest professor of.

Greek in the British Empire.

Yes, great scholar of Herodotus. But then went on to become a very significant figure in the Tory party, didn't he?

He did.

And actually, I mean, it's a joke. He's not really best known for herodous. He's best known for his rivers of blood speech, where he predicted that the result of immigration into Britain would be kind of race war.

Yes, exactly. Right. In 1968. So he was kicked out of the Tory.

He sacks him immediately, doesn't he?

He did indeed. And he becomes an implacable opponent of Heath.

But he's also free marketeer, isn't he?

He's a free marketeer.

So all the kind of corporatist thing. When Heath introduces that, Powell is very, very withering about it.

Totally withering in introducing a compulsory control.

Of wages and prices in contravention of the deepest commitments of this party. Has my right honorable friend taken leave of his senses?

That's Enoch Powell.

That is Enoch Powell.

It's like he's in the room.

That's not bad, is it?

It's not bad. I don't think it's as boring as that.

Oh, he does. He talks in a low monotone.

It is, but it's quite a hypnotic, compelling monotone. Tom.

I don't think he's actually as Brummy as that.

He's turned it a noddy holder there. That's a generic 70s. No, he talks like that through gritted teeth. Anyway, Enoch power has this massive following among kind of some Tory grassroots, but also people who are not interested in politics but actually are interested in immigration.

Yes.

They don't like it.

Enoch was right.

The Enoch was right. Yeah. There's a populist side to Powell, I think. Yeah, it's a fascinating character because on the one hand, he is by far one of the most cerebral members of the Commons. He's always kind of reading housemen, speaks Urdu, doesn't he? Has taught himself Erdu, and is sort of writing learned treatises about Herodotus or about the Bible. But on the other hand, a lot of people, they think he's pandering to the worst instincts of the streets by stoking up antipathy to immigrants and to immigration. So Powell gives a speech on Sunday, the 23 February, the last Sunday of the campaign, the excitingly glamorous surroundings of the Mecca dance hall in the bull ring, Birmingham. So if you remember the bull ring in the 70s, probably the worst place on the planet.

Well, unless you're Telly Savalis, in which case it's his kind of city.

That's right. Telly Savalis did an advert for Birmingham. This whole podcast must be so obscure to so many people listening to it. Anyway, he goes to the ball ring, which is terrible, this dreadful, brutalist building. He gives this speech and he says the question is whether Britain will remain a democratic nation with its own parliament or a province in a european superstate.

So he's the prophet of Brexit, isn't he?

He is the prophet of Brexit. And he basically accuses Heath. Heath has sold out our rights and freedoms to Europe, which is exactly what a lot of people in the Labor party, like Michael Foote, his friend, his good friend Michael Foote, are saying, or Tony Ben. And he says, I'm not standing for reelectionist campaign because it's a false campaign. And he says, you should not vote for the Conservatives for my party. You should vote for the only party that will give you a referendum on Europe, which is the. I mean, this totally dominates the headlines for the next few days. There's an extraordinary moment, which you can see on YouTube, where Powell goes to Shipley, I think it is. And there are thousands of people, there are thousands locked out of the hall. And he's giving a speech again saying, get rid of Heath. Wilson is better than Heath. And somebody shouted him, Judas. It's like Bob Dylan.

Judas was paid. Judas was paid. I'm making a sacrifice.

He doesn't say like. He says it much more in an animated way. So Judas was paid. Judas was. I am making a sacrifice. And anyway, again, massive headlines. Huge, sort of, is this going to be a big gift for Wilson? Is he not going to other working classes? The Tory working class is going to desert Heath and go for Wilson. Wilson doesn't think so. So Wilson is very despondent while all this is going on. He's very hang dog. His chief policy advisor, Bernard Donahue, in his diary, describes him slumped, tired, sour, scowling, his eyes dead as a fish.

But that could be just as readily used as description of Heath, couldn't it?

Well, not this bit. He snarled at Joe about his speeches being too sophisticated. He drank brandy heavily.

Right, okay, not that bit. No, not that bit, but the other bit. But both of them are just shot.

They're knackered, they are depressed. Wilson, I think, particularly because he thinks he's going to lose.

And doesn't he set up a kind of weird thing where he's so confident that he's going to lose, he kind of arranges for dummies to go on different cards so that he can't be tracked and he's going to end up in a farmhouse in the middle of the country.

It's not quite dummies, but yet, basically. We'll get into that in just a sec, Tom. It's a great story. So, the last few days of the campaign, Wilson makes a final broadcast. Very anodyne. Just says, you know, I mean, it's actually terrible. Trade unionists are people, employers are people. We can't go on setting one against the other, just meaningless.

Centrist gibberish.

The rest is politics, basically. Then Heath gives his final broadcast on the Tuesday. And this is absolutely ludicrous. There's footage of Heath on his boat, and the narrator says, an extraordinary man, a private man, a solitary man, perhaps single minded, sums it up. This is a man the world respects, a man who has done so much, and yet a man who has so much left to do. So you've got a choice of Wilson saying nothing, or Heath on his boat on a yacht. Yeah, exactly. Election day, Thursday. All the papers say. I mean, the headlines are, it's Heath by 5%. A handsome win for Heath. Nobody's actually voted yet, so this is literally counting the ballots before they've been cast. Wilson, as you said, tom, he thinks he's going to lose. He tells his aides they're staying at this place, the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, where he always stays on election night. But actually he's going to trick the media. He's going to sneak out while everybody's watching the results out of a back door and take a car to another hotel, the golden eagle in Kirkby. Then he will fly to London, but the plane will be diverted and he will secretly land in Bedfordshire and he will drive to his house.

Great stuff.

And when he says all this to his advisors, they're like, what? Also, this is Britain, so these places are often, like, 30 miles apart, just completely mad. And then why is he doing this? And they realize this is basically a getaway plan, because he thinks he's going to lose and he wants to throw the press off. The sense he doesn't want anyone to track him down when he's lost.

And also, if he loses, then he will lose the leadership of the Labor Party.

That's the end of his political career, Harold Wilson. So it's a gloomy afternoon, foggy rain is falling, the british people are out voting.

But, Dominic, how does it turn out? What's the result?

Well, all day, the tension mounts, Tom. That evening, Wilson goes out on the last tour of his constituency. And it's an extraordinary scene, told by his advisor, Bernard Donogue, in his diary. And he says, they go out, it's foggy, it's miserable, the streets are deserted. He says, we walked in the rain, just the two of us, Harold Wilson and myself. Lonely figures lost in anonymous, wet streets. I sensed everybody saw him as a loser, finished, who would soon just be an old backbench mp. Just the mood is so funereal.

Yeah.

They get back to the hotel. Wilson pours himself a stiff drink and they sit down to watch the results. And at midnight, the results start coming in. And you know what? It's obviously going to be really, really close. The Tories are winning all their seats, Labor are winning all theirs. The toss up seats, there's only a few hundred votes in it off them. And it's not until dawn really is broken the next morning, Friday morning, that the result is clear. And what has happened is this. Heath has not got his 5% and he has definitely not got his 10% mandate. The Tories have won 37.9%, labor have won 37.2%, and the Liberals, led by top bounder Jeremy Thorpe, have won a staggering 19.3% and virtually no seats. And the nationalist parties.

So the SNP, pet Cymru in Wales.

Yes. So basically, lots of people have deserted the Tories and Labor for the Liberals and the nationalist parties.

And isn't this a kind of seismic moment? Because up until now, basically, it had been binary. It was either labor or conservative. And from this point on, the kind of duopoly has been broken.

The duopoly has been broken. Exactly that. Now in seats, because of Britain's political system, the picture is even more complicated. So the Liberals, with their 19%, they've actually got fewer seats than they have percentage points. They have 14 seats and almost a fifth of the vote.

Tremendous. That's first pass.

The post is its best because we.

Should explain for non british listeners that the parliamentary system in Britain is pretty brutal. Not for the large parties.

Exactly. If you finish a close second in every village and town in the country, you'll have no mps. That's the way it works. That's just life. It's tough. So labor have 301 seats, the Tories have 297.

So despite having more votes, a higher percentage of the vote, they have fewer.

Seats and the Liberals 14. And what that means is that Heath can stay in power if he does a deal with the Liberals. So for the next few days, everything is chaotic and in flux. Harold Wilson has gone through with his bizarre escape plan.

So he held up in a few.

Smuggled himself out of one hotel into another hotel. There was talk of smuggling himself out of the other hotel. And actually he's gone back to his farm in Buckinghamshire and he's holed up there waiting to see what happens. Heath is clinging on and one reason he's clinging on, his justification, is going to be Europe to some degree, Tom, because the Tories and the Liberals are both nominally pro european parties and they don't believe in a referendum to get out of the common market.

But presumably it's a measure of the fact that membership of the common market hasn't yet become the salient issue that it, for instance, has been in Britain over the past decade. Because I guess in that situation, if it happened now, the Liberal Democrats, who were the heirs of the Liberals, would definitely go into coalition with a party that was pledged to keep Britain in the EU.

Yes, I guess they would.

But back then, it's not the deal breaker.

No, because I think in most people's minds, the issue of the unions, the economy and indeed the Heath government's performance, they loom much larger.

So why does Thorpe say that he's not going to go into coalition with Heath?

Well, he doesn't straight away. So he also has an elaborate escape plan. People loved elaborate escape plans in the 70s. He sneaks out of his house in Devon in wellies. He trudges over some fields, then gets a train or a lift to go and talk to Heath in London. Thorpe actually loves the idea of going into coalition personally. He would be home secretary Tom, so that would allow him to preside over his own trial for murder. Excellent. But it doesn't happen because for two reasons. One, the sort of high minded people who inhabit the liberal party, they hate Heath, they hate the confrontation. They think, why can't we just get around a table with the unions and give the miners what they know? They're sort of wooly people. They don't like Ted Heath. And also, they really want a reform of the voting system. They think that voting system that has penalized them is unfair. Shockingly.

Which was the price that they demanded for going to coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.

Yes, with Cameron. Now, the difference is that in 2010, the Tories were desperate to get into government and they also thought that they would win the referendum on changing the voting system, which they did. Heath and the Tories, then, they don't really want to let the Liberals in. They're knackered. They don't want to change the voting system and their heart's not really in it. So on the Monday, Thorpe rings Heath and he. You know, your guys don't really want it. My people really don't want it. It's not going to happen. We're not going to do this deal. And a very, very miserable Heath, who, as we've said, has been colossally unlucky, but has also played his hand, I think it's fair to say, with extraordinary ineptitude, political ineptitude. I mean, he's very well meaning Heath, but he's been so insensitive to the political pressures, I think, on other people. And he's been so inflexible.

Well, you say by conventional standards, his government had been a total failure.

Yeah, I think in lots of ways. So, for example, he didn't solve Northern Ireland. He passed all this industrial relations legislation that completely fell apart.

He stoked a boom that then went to bust.

Yeah, he stoked a boom that entered in total disaster. His heart is so obviously in the right place, and where he wants to get Britain to seems so obviously reasonable, more modern, more efficient, and all these things. But he just went about it in such a cack handed way, Tom, so I'm quite torn about Heath. Right.

So you also say if his administration was a failure, it was not an ignoble one.

No, he's not an ignoble person. He's definitely not an ignoble person. But maybe if he'd been a little bit more ignoble, he'd have been more successful.

Yeah, okay.

If he'd been a little bit more ruthless. Well, Harold Wilson has a very sort of cunning, conspiratorial side to him, as we'll discover next time. And if Heath had a bit of that, he'd be more successful. Anyway, he goes off to Buckingham palace with one of his civil servants, Robert Armstrong. He doesn't know. He's just silent. He's utterly shell shocked. He's miserable. Wilson, meanwhile, has got a house at Lord North street in Westminster. He's waiting there with all his aides, and they're all bickering furiously. This is a prelude of what is going to happen. They're all squabbling and fighting. They're all tired and fractious. At 07:00 that Monday, the 4 march, he gets the call, would you come to the palace to meet the queen? So he goes. They all go in a rented Daimler. His aides are all stuffed into the back of the car. He and Mary, his wife, go up to meet the queen. The aides sit downstairs. They're miserable because the palace heating has been turned off because of the three day week, and no one's offered them a drink, so they're all grumpy. And then Wilson comes out, gets in the car.

He goes off to Downing street. When he was a little boy, maybe about nine or ten or something, I mean, he's talked about his love of shorts, and he was wearing colossal shorts then.

Do you think they were the same ones?

And they just kind of possibly, possibly.

Continued to wear them throughout his life?

His parents had photographed him, Tom as a little boy on the steps of number ten, because you could walk right up to it in those days. And now he gets out of the car and he's such a shabby looking figure, kind of disheveled, gray crumpled suit, tired, colossal bags under his eyes. And he stands there outside the door, the photographer's bulbs are kind of popping. And he says, we've got a job to do. We can only do that job as one people. And I'm going right in to start that job now. But what follows, Tom, is more bizarre, comical and baroque.

Yeah. So I've read all your books and I have to say that what is following is the weirdest and most darkly funny chapter in all your books. So if you are a member of the rest is history Club union, then you can join us for beer and sandwiches in number ten, as Dominic put it yesterday, to hear the absolutely insane story of Harold Wilson and Marcia Williams. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. But if you don't want to do that, that's fine. You can join us on Thursday when we will be continuing the story of Britain in 1974. Thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.

Bye bye.