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As Hercules, in days gone by, took out his mighty club and got his rubber neelo down to give the floors a scrub. So forward, Harold, once again to purge the stable's filth, your tiny mandate in your hand and redistribute the wealth. That was Mrs. Wilson, Harold Wilson's wife, Harold Wilson, the new Prime Minister in March 1974. Dominic, that comes from Private Eye, which is a satirical magazine run by snigering public school boys, isn't it? Oh, no, Tom. That's how it's always described.

Shocking scenes.

They have this ongoing thing, don't they? Where they have maybe a spouse is commenting on the travails and affairs of a Prime Minister. They did it with Mrs. Thatcher. They had Dennis Thatcher. Yes. Writing to Bill Deeds, who was what was either the head of the Daily Telegraph or something. But in this case, this is Mrs. Wilson's diary. And Mrs. Wilson, the whole point about her, so she's an amateur poet, is that right?

She was indeed. Yes, she was a very keen amateur poet, Mary Wilson.

And she had no interest in politics whatsoever. And this is quite a significant factor of the story we're going to be telling today, isn't it? Because in a sense, Harold Wilson has a political wife.

He does indeed.

The degree to which this political wife is fulfilling other marital duties is something we may come on to. But anyway, that's by the by. Yeah. Mrs. Wilson there, and she is urging Harold to get on there. He's got a tiny mandate, but he's got to redistribute the wealth. I guess there's a inherent tension there, isn't there?

There is indeed. There is indeed. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to 1974. The date is Monday, the fourth of March. That's where we ended last time with Harold Wilson returning as Prime Minister after this tumultuous crisis election at the end of February, where Ted Eath lost his great election, Gamble. We were very focused, Tom, on Westminster politics last time. Just to widen it out a bit, I thought it would be fun to talk about what was actually in the papers that day. What was in the newspaper to give you a snapshot of the flavor of national life. If you go through this small print of the papers, in Norfolk, in Norwich, there is an unofficial strike by a railway guard, which means that all the trains are canceled or delayed.

Well, that never happens, though.

In Lincoln, there have been power cuts because police say that teenage snipers with air rifles have been firing on power lines or whatever. The little scabs. In Worcestershire, a rural vicar has made way leaves by complaining that state schools are pagan wildernesses, where what he calls a mild sociology has replaced Christian values. Well, he's not wrong. In Oxford, there has been fighting between different students, student groups, obviously very militant in the '70s, outside the university administration offices, and police have had to separate them, so Tori students and more left wing students.

Tori students? I mean, that is something you don't get nowadays.

Absolutely. Well, a lot of students were Conservatives in the 1970s, actually. In Leeds, two Irish Republicans have been jailed for possessing more than 60 detonators and 700 rounds of ammunition. That's a story that will obviously run through this podcast. Now, there are a couple of sporting stories for Tom. One of them is a cricket story. The England cricket team have just lost in Barbados by 10 wickets. That's a lot. Yes.

For people who know nothing about cricket, that's a very bad result.

One sports reporter wrote, I have never known a more chilly moment on tour. The home truth is inescapable. Batting-wise, this England party is the weakest ever sent overseas, limited in skill, character, and guts. So often, sports is taken as a barometer of the nation's wider fortunes. This is also the case in football. Now, this is a great moment, a very important moment in world history, because Wolverhampton Wanderers this weekend have won the League Cup, Tom, at Wembley.

Well done, Dominic. Well done.

They have beaten Manchester City. A Manchester City star striker, Rodley Marsh, who's one of the few footballers whose name would have been known to lots of people in the 1970s.

Although confusingly, the same name as the Australian wicket keeper.

Most people in England would never have heard of this fellow.

He's got a massive Walrus mustache.

Rodley Marsh, who was very much a Jack the Lad, he had stormed off at the final whistle, and he hadn't waited to collect his silver tanker from the Duchess of Kent. The Daily Mirror, which was the best-selling paper in the country in the early 1970s, said, They doubted if he will ever be totally forgiven for his sour, rancid attitude and his appalling lack of sportsmanship. Marsh spat on a tradition that in this country, the loser is expected to summon up a smile and not run away at the end to sulk and scowl alone.

So Manchester City, popular as ever.

Well, there is a lesson there as well, Tom, for the politician we were talking about last time, Ted Heath, because he is just about to embark on the biggest sulk in history.

Yes. He loves the sulk, doesn't he? The incredible sulk he was called.

He was indeed. So just to recap, at the end of last episode, Ted Heath failed in his attempt to have coalition talks with Jeremy Thorpe. In came Harold Wilson. So as we said before, He's the son of an industrial chemist from West Yorkshire. He was a brilliant prodigy, great mind, statistician, economist. He enjoys Agatha Christie, Gilbert and Sullivan. He has a very, I suppose in a very low-key way, populist style, doesn't he, Tom?

You have a wonderful description of him in Seasons of the Sun, your wonderful book about this, where you describe him as a quick-witted, kind-hearted, unpretentious little man.

Yeah. It's a bit of a self-portrait, to be honest with you, I was wondering about that.

That is high praise in Sandbrooke terms.

Unpretentious is the ultimate word of approbation. Anyway, so Wilson has come back in. He's very tired. He's shopsoiled. He didn't expect to come in. He's got the most horrendous challenge, arguably one of the worst inheritances of any prime minister in modern British history. The miners are out on strike, if you remember from last time. Britain is still on a three-day week, and it's facing this colossal financial and economic crisis with a record trade deficit. They cared a lot about trade deficit in those days because that affected confidence in the pound. The Bank of England has just raised interest rates, their highest rate in recent memory, 13%. The so-called secondary banks, the smaller banks, are in meltdown. The stock market has lost a quarter of its value in just a month, so share price is collapsing. This is a horrendous, horrendous challenge for anybody. The thing is that Wilson, in 1964, when he'd first come in, he was the incarnation of optimism and energy. This time, he's not at all. He is knackered. He keeps telling his advisors that he suffers from something that he describes as the squitters.

Too much detail.

He has all these eye infections. He just seems constantly ill. The other thing is, it is very clear from his AIDS memoirs and diaries that he is drinking a lot. He had been drinking during the election campaign. So Bernard Donogh, who I'll mention quite a lot today and in the next episode, because he was Wilson's policy chief who wrote a really fascinating, brilliant, colorful diary. If you go through the Donogh diary again and Again, he mentions Wilson drinking. When he drinks, says Donogh, he becomes very strange and aggressive. His brow lowers and a very strange look comes into his eyes, hunched and brooding. So he will say, Today, before Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons, Harold drank four Four brandies. He had two more afterwards, 30th of October, he drank five brandies before Prime Minister's Questions. 27th of November, Joe said he was all over the place. He drank too much at this lunch. Then he goes into the House of Commons, gives a terrible performance. This is coming up again and again.

So again, you, in your book, quote a Treasury Minister called Edmund Dell, who thought that his colleagues were like the characters in Jane Austin's novel, sipping tea and flattering their eyelashes while the Napoleonic Wars raged across the channel. But actually, it's worse than that because they're not sipping tea.

No, they're not.

They're sipping brandy whiskey.

Well, I suppose the '70s is the high point, isn't it? The liquid lunch. If you read journalists' accounts, they will go for lunch with a cabinet minister, and the minister would happily drink a bottle of wine, then a couple of snifters afterwards.

And then go off and phone the IMF.

Yeah, just to ease themselves into the afternoon. I think British politics in the mid '70s feels like a very dandra-flect, tired, cynical, and frankly, alcohol-soaked environment. But what's also going on in number 10 under Wilson is this much more baroque soap opera. To give you a sense of this, on the first full day, he has lunch with his aides, Harold Wilson, number 10, and it's all fine. He's very pleased because it's English food. Wilson is a bit of a socialist when it comes to food. He doesn't approve of French cheese, for example. Then the second day, day 2, they go to lunch, and it's all recorded in Bernard Donogh's diary. He says, Terrible lunch. We all go upstairs to the small dining room. We discuss the central policy review staff for an appointment. Suddenly, Marcia blows up, already upset because we were eating white bait. She says she hates them looking at her from the plate. The PM solamente announced that they were from the home for blind white bait, so she need not worry. That broke the tension for a while, but then she blew up over Harold and me having a polite and friendly conversation together.

She said it was disgraceful. She stalked out. Hw, that's Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, followed his meal unfinished. Gloom.

Dominic, Marcia.

Yes.

Who is Marcia?

Marcia Williams is the daughter of a Northamptonshire builder who had started working for the Labor Party in the 1950s. She'd been introduced to Howard Wilson, and they'd become very close, and she basically became his private secretary, his absolutely indispensable right-hand. She's the guardian of access to Wilson. She does his paperwork. She is, I mean, effectively- She is his His political wife. She is his political wife.

So this is the woman that we talked about at the start of the show.

Right. So Mary Wilson hated politics, thought that her husband was going to be an Oxford economics don, and was guttied that he actually went into politics in the first place, and made it very clear that she was never really going to take any interest in it or do anything but the bare minimum. So Wilson, from the '50s onwards, has had almost like this second wife. So they travel as a trio. Marcia is always there in the background. She is the person who sits up late with him at night.

Just to be clear what that means, again, to quote you, Wilson himself once claimed that after a particularly blazing row, Marcia had gone to see his wife, Mary, and announced, I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956, and it wasn't satisfactory.

Well, yes.

Quite an odd relationship.

Yeah, very odd relationship. She would also say to the other aides, when they were having a big row, she would hold up her handbag and tap her handbag meaningfully, and she would say, One call to the Daily Mail and he'll be finished. I will destroy him.

But she never says what the information is.

No, what's in the handbag? Tom, what's in the handbag? No one ever knows. The thing about did they have a physical relationship? I think there is a sense that possibly they did. I mean, this is pure gossip and prurience to speculate whether they did or not, because it doesn't really matter. What matters is the intensity of the emotional relationship, which is undeniable.

But there's something slightly dominatrix about her, isn't there? I mean, again, reading you, she demands submission and obedience from Wilson.

She does. Now, especially to our listeners who are not British or who are younger and don't remember this period at all and have no knowledge of it, all this will sound very weird. But to give you a sense, we talked about day 2 and the white bait bust up. And day 3, there was another massive row at lunch in number 10, Downing Street. At the end of the meal, Marcia walks out in a temper. Hw was clearly upset. She attacked him viciously in front of the waiter. And then she goes straight home, and Donahieu, the policy guy, has to ring her up past midnight and beg her to come back. She's very depressed and neurotic. She says, We're all out for ourselves. We're ganging up against her, and I'm out to replace her. She says she'll retire to her country home and wait for HW to sack us all, and then he'll have to come personally to ask her to return. Now, this may sound madly histrionic, but I can't exaggerate how much time in any given day, Harold Wilson and his chief advisors are spending on this issue. I mean, it comes up again and again.

Dominic, what solution do Wilson's advisors come up with to this problem that Marcia is basically dominating all their concerns in the midst of Britain's worst postwar crisis?

Well, unbelievably, Tom, the opening weeks, so when they've returned in March 1974, much of their time in the opening weeks is spent on very serious top-level negotiations about who will be allowed to have lunch. The agreement is finally reached. She basically says, Wilson must eat lunch on his own. He is not allowed to eat lunch with his aides. She goes mad if she finds out they've eaten lunch with him. There's a wonderful description in Donna Hughes' diary. Harold was pleading for food for sandwiches, but Marcia insisted that he signed her letters before he got his sandwiches. But there was worse. There was far worse. It is mind boggling. If you think Boris Johnson was the first Prime Minister to run a ludicrous and chaotic ship in Downing Street, you'll be very surprised by this. First of all, they've obviously that won the election unexpectedly, and they decide they're going to have a victory party at number 10. Now, Bernard Donyhoe was a lecturer at the London School of Economics, so he has to go back to give one last lecture before he can come in in a Henry Kissinger style way. He's come from academia to politics.

He goes off to give a last lecture thinking the party is this evening at 8:30. He and his wife, Carol, turn up at 8:30 at number 10, Downing Street. But actually, behind He goes back that afternoon, Marcia has canceled the party in a rage. When he and his wife arrive, they're the only people there. Wilson greets them, very sheepish and shamefast, and actually says to them, he says, It's all a pantomime. It's a riot, quite chaotic. Nobody outside would believe it. A total pantomime. I mean, for him to say this about his own administration. Yeah.

Well, at least he's self-aware.

He has a drink with them, and Marcia brings up half-fifth of the evening and gives him a 40-minute rollicking on the phone.

For having a drink?For.

Having a drink with Donahieu.

Is this jealousy of his AIDS?

Yes, jealousy of the other AIDS. But of course, the most eye-catching story, Tom.Yes.So this will have to be bleeped out. We're in the middle of the economic crisis, and she tells Harold Wilson that she wants him to come with her to a reception at the House of Lords. He goes to the reception. This is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But he and his speechwriter, Johaine, sneak off from the reception to get back to number 10, Downing Street to do some work. She comes back to number 10 because she's spotted that he's missing from the reception. In full view of everybody there, the staff, she shouts at him, You little girl, what do you think you're doing? You come back with me at once.

And did he go back with her?

He went back?

Yeah. That does seem quite a psychosexual dominatrix thing going on there.

Joe Haynes, who is his speechwriter, who was a very hard, bitter man, a former newspaperman, he wrote in his memoirs about this, and he said, I was frankly very shocked of this, that you could speak to the Prime Minister like this in front of everybody.

Yeah, well, it is shocking. I mean, it's frankly very odd.

It is very odd. I mean, it's inconceivable that somebody would have spoken like this to Ted Heath.

Okay. All this psychodrama is going on in number 10, I'm monopolizing Wilson's attention. But meanwhile, there is a country in crisis to run. How are things getting on out on the streets, out in the country?

Well, you will remember that the miners were out on strike. The first thing that Harold Wilson does when he comes back is he settles with miners. Within days, the guy who's got to take charge of industrial relations, who our British listeners will recognize the name Michael Foot, a radical pamphleteer, a journalist.

Great enthusiast for Byron.

Great enthusiast for Byron, a very erudite man, but not really one of life's natural administrators. He's been put in because the unions know he'll basically give them what they want. And he does. He gave the miners a wage settlement. You will remember, had asked for 35%, Foucault gave them 32%, a wage settlement worth £108 million. That's double what Ted Heath was offering them. He basically bribes them to go back to work if you were being harsh. Now, what the Labor Party have done is they have a policy called the social contract. Fans of Jean-Jacques Ruso will enjoy this policy. What this involves is they say, Listen, we will give the unions all kinds of goodies, so you'll get improved You'll get improved health and safety, you'll get anti-discrimination laws, you will get better pensions, you will get better sick pay. The quid pro quo is that if we give you all these treats, you will not keep asking for more money. It's a contract, effectively.

Is this a legally enforceable contract?

No. It depends on the unions doing their bit. And also, as we described before, there are hundreds of trade unions, and they're very competitive with each other. They're always trying to outbid each other. Actually, the people who run the union movement or preside over it, so Len Murray, who's the head of the Trade Union Congress, he had said to Wilson, Deep down, actually, we won't really be able to deliver on our side of this bargain. Joe Gormley, the leader of the miners, had said to him, Don't put us in a false position. I quote, Our role in society is to look after our members, not to run the country. But the social contract was good politics. It made it sound like they had a solution to the problem of high inflation.

But also Michael foot is an incredible romantic, isn't he? Yeah. So he really believes it. Yes.

Oh, Michael foot, like a lot of people at that time, he had two things. One was, I would argue, they completely misunderstood the ability of the Trade Union leaders and willingness of the Trade Union leaders to deliver on promises to government. They ignored the Union leaders when the Union leaders said, Don't ask of us something we can't deliver. But secondly, they have this incredibly rose-tinted romantic idea of Trade Unions and all of this thing, which actually people who are closer to the union movement often say, You're being very starry-eyed and silly about this. They are hard-nosed negotiators. They will ask for the best deal possible.

Doesn't one of the Trade Union leaders compare the government to a slot machine in Vegas where they're just pouring money out all the time?

Yeah, the Postman's Leader, Tom Jackson. The Postman's Leader, yeah. A gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that got stuck in favor of the customer. Well, because actually, if you look at what they gave them, the power worker's got a 31% deal, The civil servants got 32%, the doctors 35%, the docker 30%. So wages go up by about a third in the course of 1974. And the weird thing is that each time a given trade union leader would go into number 10, have his beer and sandwiches, actually smoked salmon and white wine. Then he'd come out with this massive pay settlement for his members. He would say on the way out often to the government, You can't keep doing this. I mean, this is mad. You can't keep giving me all this money.

But in private, of course.

Yeah.

Because the oil crisis is ongoing, a bit like we've been going through with Ukraine, there's this massive spike. So inflation is going up everywhere across the world. But is it now starting to go up much further in Britain than anywhere else?

Yes, this is the thing. Every Western European country is facing similar problems. Indeed, every developed country because of the massive spike in oil prices. However, within about a year of the Wilson government coming in as a result of these pay settlements, prices are going up faster in Great Britain than they are in any other European country by a margin of about five times, Tom. Five times? Five times faster in Britain than anywhere else. God. And as a result of this, because the money is pouring into the economy, the prices of goods are going up as well. So sugar, 184%, vegetables, 137%, even little things, tin soup, the price goes up by 54%, orange squash, 51%.

So this is cost of living crisis on steroids.

On steroids?

So worse than the one that we've been going through over the past few years, do you think?

That's a good question. I would say it depends who you are. If you are the power worker who's just got a 35% pay rise-It's brilliant. Well, it's not brilliant, actually.

But you're keeping your head above water.

You're keeping your head above water is what it is. If you're not represented by a trade union, or you're a pensioner on a fixed pension, or you're a student, or you're poor, this is unbelievably painful because nobody is getting you a pay rise, or if your union is weak and doesn't have any clout with the government. It's at this point that you see a real fracturing, a fraying of, I suppose you would say class solidarity or a sense of national solidarity, Because inflation is dividing people into winners and losers.

But also, Dominic, just to say that at this point, class consciousness is really, really important, isn't it? Much more important than it is now, where there are different ways in which identity is understood today. But back then, it's very much working classes, middle classes, upper classes.

Well, I think the language of class, people are much more comfortable with the language of class, and they fall back on it much more quickly. I would argue that in the 1970s, certainly people on the left will use the language of class much more quickly and automatically than they would today. There was much more a sense of the great conflict in British society being one between classes, whereas I think now, Tom, it's between the populists and elite. People didn't really talk that way in the '70s. They much more talked about the bosses and the working man, people in top hats and people in cloth caps. People still use that quite dated language of class.

I guess people on the left today might be ready to talk about race or sexual identity or whatever than class. But those are not issues that are seen as being salient to the same degree back in the '70s. Would that be fair?

I think that's absolutely right. To give you a sense, just before we go to the break, of what else is going on. Wilson's Chancellor, is a guy called Dennis Healey. We talked about him last time. He'd been in the landing, said Anzio. Big eyebrows.

Loves quoting Yates.

Always quoting Yates and talking about Russian literature. He comes in. Healey is, in many ways, a very cynical politician. He says, We're facing a massive economic crisis. On the other hand, we've got a tiny majority. There's going to be another election quite soon. Actually, we'll just-Chut money at the problem. Throw money around.

Throw fuel on the fire.

So massive new spending on things like pensions and food it is and things like this. And that's going to be paid for by taxes on the rich. So we were talking about the PIPs, we can get. So just to give you a sense of what those taxes are, the higher rate of income tax, Tom, as a representative of the rich yourself, I think you'll find this very pain For example, the higher rate of income tax was raised to 83 %. And Tom, I don't know if you have investments, but if you did, the tax rate on the higher rate on your investments would be a very impressive 98 %. Goodness.

So this is when the Rolling Stones are going off to south of France and things, is it? Exactly so.

Exactly.

But not Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney stays and does his patriotic duty.

Oh, that's nice. So Daily Telegraph readers, Middle England, are an absolute and utter meltdown about this. And what's compounding all this is that remember, some of our more attentive listeners will remember that the Labor Party have come to office with an incredibly radical manifesto. They're going to set up a National enterprise to spend billions of pounds a year to buy up British companies and to institute massive state planning. The man in charge of this is Tony Ben, the British Salvador Allende, as he was called at the time. He came in and his own official said to him when he arrived, Well, surely you don't really mean it. You're not really going to do this, are you? He said, Oh, yeah, I'm very committed to this. They started leaking against him, his own official's, a music list of companies that they thought would be soon for the for the government takeover. The Daily Express got this list from Ben's own officials. He was going to take over Woman's Own, Nationalized Woman's Own magazine, Tom, Cougar & Gate, Baby Foods, Bologna's Sausages, Baby Sham, the popular drink, Double Diamond, and the gourmet food emporium, Bernie Inns.

Because Tony Ben is very epstemious, isn't he? Yeah. He likes his tea, but not much else.

I wouldn't have him running Harp and Baby Sham and Double Diamond.

I'm not sure I'd have him running chain of restaurants.

No. I mean, Bernie Inns were terrible as it was.

But he could make them worse.

Yeah. Actually, he has come in, and he really believes that they're going to do this. He's absolutely devoted to this nationalization plan. Actually, in June 1974, some of Wilson's other ministers, so the barons, the power brokers in the Wilson government, are two men. They are Dennis Healey, we mentioned the Chancellor, and they are James Callahan, the Foreign Secretary, who are both on the right of the Labor Party and who are real bruises. Healey and Callahan team up in this period, and they're always going to see Harold Wilson, who's sitting there with his brandy. They're always saying to him, Do this, do that, don't do this, and so on. They go to see him and they give him an absolute roasting and say, You have to control Tony Ben, you can't let him do any of this. I quote, Otherwise, there will be a total collapse of confidence and no investment. Wilson just goes around saying to everybody, Well, I'm not going to let Ben do anything. He's completely mad. I mean, that is the quote, he is completely mad. And he actually briefs the press to say that he thinks Tony Ben is mad and he's not going to allow him to do anything.

So why doesn't he sack him if he thinks he's mad? Because he's weak, Tom.

I like Harold Wilson in lots of ways. I've gone on the record of saying I would like to have him as my next door neighbor. I admire his love of scouting and Gilbert and Sullivan.

His taste in shorts.

Yes, his nice khaki shorts. However, he is quite a weak leader and he won't sack people. But also, he's leading a minority government. So he has no real I mean, Mary, in that poem that you read so beautifully, she mentioned his tiny mandate. I mean, he has no mandate.

He has no mandate at all, does he?

So he's got this minority government. They're totally divided. The atmosphere inside number 10 is bonkers, and they are staggering closer and closer, it seems, to economic disaster.

So, Dominic, in the previous episode, we talked about how many people in Britain were comparing the country to Weimar, Germany, to Iende's, Chile.

Yes.

Both of which, obviously, resulted in one might say, a swing to the right. There is quite a lot of discussion, isn't there? There is. In gentlemen's clubs and so on about what can be done to solve the problem.

Well, the exciting thing, Tom, is that Britain's peniché is waiting in the wings, and not just one of them. There are two.

I think we should take a break at this point. When we come back, let's look at the plans for a right-wing coup. Hello. Welcome back to The Rest is History. We are looking at the Wilson government, the first Wilson government of 1974. And Dominic, we've been talking about psychosexual traumas, imploding economy. And we mentioned at the end of the first half of this episode, mutterings in gentlemen's clubs about a right-wing coup. So is this sense of anxiety that retired colonels and so on are feeling? Is this shared across the whole country Is there a consciousness that everything is going tits up? Or do most people think, actually, it's fine? Space hoppers and rally bikes and all that Sandbrooke stuff.

All right. Is that what that technical term is it?

Yeah, because this is your argument that the headlines are saying chaos, disaster, whatever. But meanwhile, people are getting on with their lives and enjoying new types of chocolate bar or washing machines or whatever, and they don't really notice.

I think there is an interesting divergence here. So If you were paying that 83% rate of tax or 98% on your unearned income, as it was called at the time, if you invest in property, and these are the markets that have collapsed, then you are sitting there and saying, This is Weimar, Germany. This is Chile, 1973.

The pauperization of the middle classes.

The pauperization of the middle classes, exactly. The country is going to hell in a handcart. It's time for the rule of the gun. However, if you're not one of those people, is life terrible? Arguably not. But especially if your income has been protected by your union, don't forget, just under half the country belongs to a trade union, and those people often, they're not doing that badly. Actually, not least because Harold Wilson has sent the miners back to work, the three-day week is over, the state of emergency is over. I think people feel we've got the calmer, quieter life that we want. Now, interesting enough, a lot of Wilson's own ministers don't think like that. They are relatively well off, of course, because they're well paid. Government Minister's salary was comparatively much higher in the mid 1970s than it is today. So they're among the better off people in society. They have gone abroad on holiday, and often the people who have gone abroad on holiday come back and they say, Oh, my God, the contrast is so painful. So Roy Jenkins, who's Wilson's Home Secretary at this period, he says, I know we're heading for catastrophe.

I can't stand by, he says to Barbara Castle, and watch and see us pretend everything is all right.

Pretend.

He would say, Very good, Tom. Very good. That's the forensic- Attention to detail. Detail, yeah. That marks out the truly great historian, I think. Donahieu, Bernard Donahieu, who's this former LSC academic, who is Wilson's head of the policy unit in number 10, He writes in his diary himself. He's gone off for a month's holiday in France. The month's holiday in France that the head of policy is taken tells you something about the grim work ethic at the top of British politics. He comes back and he writes this He says, I can see England a little clearer now. It looks in a terrible mess. It's falling apart socially as well as economically. It seems very frail compared with France, which is becoming a giant again. This is very disappointing, Tom.

This is what the middle classes do, is go to France and complain that it's much better than Britain, isn't it? Yes. Is that anything unusual? They've always done it.

Nelson went to France, Tom. I know, but not Nelson. After the American War of Independence was over, and he said it was awful and very poor compared with Britain. He was middle class, and not every middle class person does it.

Yeah, but to be fair, that was at the beginning of the 19th century.

Yeah.

Even then, you had Fox. He did. Or the Wigs complaining that Britain wasn't like France.

The comparison between Roy Jenkins and Bernard O'Neill here on one hand, and Horacio Nelson on the other. It's not been made often enough, I think, in discussions of the sevenses.

That's what this podcast is all about.

We're talking of ludicrous stuff, actually, the whole Marcia issue is blowing up again in the summer. Brilliant. It's always good to have her back on the scene.

Wilson, presumably, has not gone to France. He's gone to the Silly Islands.

Silly Islands, as always. While he's been in the Silly Islands, this issue has been brewing of slag. The British Watergate, an amazingly banal and ludicrous scandal. It turns out that Marcia's brother, who's a man called Tony Field, don't worry, nobody has to worry really about remembering him. He has been involved with a bouffon hair insurance broker from Wolverhampton.

There's a lot of bouffon hair around in the '70s.

Called Ronald Millhench. Ronald Millhench has a scheme to buy a slagheap.

Holy implausible.

To buy a slagheap near Wiggan and to sell it to some property developers.

This is so like a 1970s comic novel.

It is. Absolutely, it is. Like Reggie Perrin or something. So he's trying to buy the slagheap. Now, the Labor Manifesto has said that they will try to crack down on people buying slagheeps, selling them off.

Is this a big problem?

Not a massive problem, but it's something that they just think is bad. But Millhench produces a piece of paper and he says, Harold Wilson's in on this deal, and he's got Harold Wilson's signature on it. Now, obviously, this is very implausible. It turns out that Millhench, who's a fantasist, has forged Harold Wilson's signature. But Marcia, in particular, because it's her brother who's semi-involved with this, she goes absolutely ballistic. She is, having been very much on the edge since the election, she's now been driven into full-scale histrionics. Donahuit's diary again. Marcia phoned H. W. And screamed at him, saying he was a machine, not a human being. He'd always promised that this wouldn't happen, that he would protect her. She accused him of abandoning her and hiding. She was savage. She threatened to tell everything about him. Then, Harold Wilson is frightened to ring her a few days later. So he gets Berna Donahuit to do it. She is screaming at Donohoe on the phone calling Wilson a king rat. That's what he is, a king rat. To try and please her, he gives her a peerage, and she becomes Lady Falkinder. But the weird thing about this is we see this all through the eyes of the male aides who were there in number 10 who paint her continually.

So we don't have her journals?

No.

What would her take on this be?

I'm going to guess here that her take would be, I'm the only woman. I work with these incredibly patronizing men. They make my life very difficult. They're always laughing me behind my back. They freeze me out. She clearly does think they're trying to force her out and get her away from her. People would just have to read the stuff and make up their own minds.

I get all that about institutional sexism and everything.

But she behaves quite poorly, I think. I think calling him a... Using that particular word.

That word and everything.

To describe him in public is poor form, I think, Tom.

It's not just one guy who's writing this. They're all writing it. Basically, they concur.

From the people who are inside the machine, as it were, they agree. One thing she doesn't know is that they are also... Things get to the state that they're actually, this will surprise some listeners, they're actually planning to murder her. After the slagheep for your Rory, Wilson's personal doctor, who is Joseph Stone, who he later enobles, who becomes Lord Stone, he goes in to see Joe Haynes, the press secretary. I'm going to tell you what Haynes says about this conversation. He says, Dr. Stone asked if we could discuss ways of taking the weight of Marcia off the Prime Minister's mind. Stone explains that he could dispose of her in such a way that it would seem to be from natural causes. He added that he would sign the death certificate and it would not be a problem. Now, the thing is, when Haynes tells this story, it is pretty obvious it's not a joke. I mean, he's describing it in an incredibly deadpan way, like this is the conversation that happened. You think, well, maybe this is a one-off or whatever. But it is clear that when they went to Bonn on a Prime Minister or a visit a few weeks later, Dr.

Stone again floated the of murdering Marcia, poisoning her, to Haynes and Donahoe, because Donahoe writes in his diary something like a very interesting conversation with Joe.

You write, I think, with immense restraint about this, that three of Wilson's most trusted aides seriously discussed murdering his political secretary, speaks volumes about the atmosphere inside number 10 after March 1974, which is, putting it mildly. Yeah. I mean, Boris has got nothing on this.

No.

I don't think he was plotting to murder people, was he? Maybe he was.

I mean, Boris Could he murder somebody?

Dominic Cummings. You could imagine Dominic Cummings, perhaps, plotting to murder people. Yes. I don't know whether that's libelous, and if it is, I retract it unreservedly.

Boris is too disorganized, surely, to murder somebody. I mean, he would put the poison in the wrong drink or something.

No, I just don't think he'd do it. I don't think he's a murder in kind.

He'd forget about it. Yes. So the murder plot then comes back again. December, they went to Paris to renegotiate Tom, Britain's membership of the EEC.

Oh, God. It never stops, does it?

Marcia sent a message to Wilson in the conference room to say she heard her brother was ill and Wilson must come back with her at once to London.

This is the brother who's been hanging out with a bouffon-haired slag guy.

Slag That guy. I mean, imagine, Wilson is sitting around the table with the leaders of Europe, negotiating Britain's place in the EC. At that point, Dr. Stone again says to Donoghue, Listen, we should think about putting her down.

But Haynes, whatever Marcia had done, he wrote earnestly, she didn't deserve that end.

I know. I don't think you would write that if it was all just a great joke. Haynes says very seriously, I couldn't stand Marcia, but I didn't think we should murder her. So yes, this is a pretty extraordinary moment in British politics. Wilson is absolutely shattered. He's miserable. He's getting harangued by everybody. What's also interesting, Tom, is that it's at this point, I think, that Wilson starts to become understandably paranoid. He has always been fascinated by the world of intelligence and the secret services. I mean, he has a little fixation with it. I mean, lots of us are interested in this, right? We like to think of this as a secret world and we're fascinated by it.

Well, it's a a solution, isn't it? If there are shadowy figures in the wings plotting against you, then it might explain why things are going badly.

Now, the thing is, the security services have always been interested themselves in Harold Wilson. We know now that they opened a file on him as early as 1945. He was codenamed Norman John Worthington. What brought him to their attention was that they had heard a civil servant praising him, a Communist civil servant, so they'd opened this file. Then Wilson, when he was President of the Board of Trade in the 1940s, had made a series of trips to Moscow, where he obviously came into contact with Communist officials. Later on, he became consultant to a firm that imported timber. Again, he was meeting a lot of people who were senior Soviet officials, a couple of whom were almost certainly KGB officers working at the Soviet Embassy. That was not massively out of the ordinary at the time, but he also has a very strange coterie of friends. They're often Eastern European Jews, so there's a fair bit of anti-Semitism hanging over all this. They are shady tycoons. There's a guy called Joseph Kagan, who's a raincoat tycoon.

Yes, that's right. And that's the Gamet smack. Yeah, Gamet smacks. We've already mentioned.

The publisher, Robert Maxwell, who will be well known to a lot of our British listeners.

And indeed to American listeners because he's the father of- Oh, Ghislaine. The Prince Andrew.

Epstein associate. Exactly. So Wilson has all these friends, which actually baffle a lot of his political contemporaries. I think Wilson has these friends because they are rich and they pay for him to go on trips and things. They're a very undermanding and sycophantic company because they want him for favors and things. He plays golf with them. He hangs out with them. It's a nice break from hanging around with other politicians. But it does look dodgy. Now, there are some people in the security services who think all this is so dodgy that Harold Wilson is probably something weird going on here. The key man for this is an old friend of the rest of his history, Tom.

The alumnus of your old school.

A fellow old Moulvernian. Yes. Our old friend, Jamie He names Jesús Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief. By the mid 1970s, Angleton, there's a lot of people who've gone mad in this podcast, aren't there? Yeah.

Because he thinks everyone's a spy, right?

Angleton believes that the KGB moles active in Western politics include Harold Wilson, the Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, the Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, Henry Kissinger, he thinks as a Communist agent, as indeed is Jerold Ford.

But Gerald Ford plays golf. He couldn't have been a Communist.

No, he's not a Communist. I'm going to go on the record here, Tom. I don't think Gerald Ford is working for the KGB. Angleton, whenever he goes to Britain, says to people in MI5 and MI6, You've got a Communist as your Prime Minister. Actually, one guy who believes him is a man called Peter Wright, who is this rogue MI5 agent who ended up writing a book in the '80s called Spy Catcher, in which he claims that he and 30 MI5 officers had been conspiring against Wilson in the '70s. Now, when people started to investigate Wright's story, they asked him questions, said, Was it really 30? There were 30 of you. He said, Well, it was more like three. And then he was asked, How many people actively joined you in trying to campaign against Harold Wilson? He said, Well, one I should say. So it's not quite as big a plot as you would think. But the idea that Wilson is a secret KGB agent definitely seeps into Westminister gossip and Fleet Street gossip in the early '70s.

And Wilson is alert to it?

Wilson absolutely is alert to it. Wilson is aware that, for example, Private Eye magazine, which you began with, the satirical magazine- The Sniggering Public School Boys.is every two weeks publishing stories that basically allege that Wilson is working for the KGB. So their diarist, Auburn War, he says explicitly, I've never attempted to hide my belief that Harold Wizzlon, recruited in Moscow and London in 1956 as a Soviet agent.

Yeah, but Dominic, Oberon War, he's the son of evil in war. Yes. I mean, he's a comic writer. That diary, it wasn't serious. No. He used it to have a go at his enemies, which he had many.

I think he put in his biography in Who's Who? Is his hobby? Telling Lies. Yeah. But Tom, it's cumulative. It's not just an Oberon War's diary. It's everywhere in private eye. It is simmering under the surface in all of these slightly paranoid right-wing predictions of a Communist takeover of Britain, the claims that the high tax rates are the beginning of a move towards, you use the expression, the pauperization of the middle classes. That is an absolutely standard right wing theme in mid '70s.

The idea of moles. Yes. Is this when Tinkertaler's Soulja Spy comes out, the Lecarré novel? It is. Which features a mole, doesn't it?

It is. That is the ultimate 1974 novel. It's published in the summer of 1974, so just after Wilson has returned. God save.

It's come out just at this time.

The plot of it is the return of a podgy little man, knackered, aging, clever man in a battered old mac with a complicated marital relationship. It was George Smiley, but he looks and sounds very like Wilson. The portrait of the Secret Service, its morale has been corroded by office politics and budget cuts and this incredibly toxic culture of feuding and suspicion. The descriptions of the headquarters, the Secret Service, the Circus, as John LeCarré calls it, the wallpaper peeling The phone's not working, the lift not working, everything a total shambles, the portrait of London as this dilapidated city. 1974 is also the year that you have David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, James Herbert's The Rats, Martin Amis is writing Dead Babies. J. G. Ballard is writing High Rise. There is this sense that the nation has entered a point of terminal irreversible decline, that Wilson himself is the personification of that. Actually, if you don't get him out, you're sunk.

In a situation like that, if you are very right wing and perhaps with a military background, and prone to hanging out late in a gentleman's club with a brandy, the obvious solution is to stage a coup, right?

Yes, I suppose so. People at the time, by the summer of 1974, you really start to notice this in the winter, the previous winter, during the period of the implosion of the Heath government and the Orshock and the three-day week. But in the summer of 1974, you have, in in the newspapers, loads of talk about ungovernability, law and order breaking down, and the inevitable emergence of a right-wing figure to take over. Now, this now sounds mad to us. A lot of people listening to this will be thinking, well, there was no coup in Britain in the '70s. There was no dictatorship. But at the time, it didn't seem mad, not just because of the precedent we mentioned already of Iende and Pinochet, but actually, there's a very good precedent in Britain for law and order are breaking down and the army stepping in. That is, of course, Northern Ireland. It has happened in part of the United Kingdom. We mentioned before, there have been troops on the streets of Northern Ireland since 1969 because of the sectarian violence between protestants and Catholics. There were, at their peak, more than 20,000 British troops on the streets in this relatively small, underpopulated corner of the United Kingdom.

There are a lot of deaths, 480 in 1972, 255 in 1973 and almost 300 in 1974. They have brought in internment without trial. The Parliament of Northern Ireland was shut down in 1972 because the Heath government thought that it was unable to command the loyalty of the Catholic population. They've replaced it by direct rule from Westminster with the aid of the army. All of that is a very bad precedent. Now, in the final months of the Heath government, Heath, working with the Republic of Ireland, working with the different parties in Northern Ireland, had set up a power-sharing executive, so with elements of both Catholic and Protestant. There was a Council of Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. This was under the Sunningdale Agreement. This was basically the new system that was going to steer Northern Ireland towards peace and prosperity. Actually, what happens is there is an upsurge of loyalist violence against the power sharing executive.

You astonish me.

Then in May 1974, a group that no one had previously heard of called the Ulster Workers Council that was linked to a couple of paramilitary groups, the Vanguard Paramilitary Group, and the largest paramilitary group in the world at the time, which is the Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist group. They called a general strike to shut down the power-sharing executive.

This is the one where Wilson goes and does his broadcast.

Caused them sponges. Yes. Loyalists would wear sponges in their lapels to mock Wilson. They set up barricades in the streets of Belfast, armed men. I mean, this is in the United Kingdom, Tom. In our lifetime, armed men went to factories, shut the factories down, armed men went to shops and shut them down. After two days, the Ulster Workers Council basically shut the whole of Belfast down. They blocked the supermarkets, they controlled the city, they distributed milk, they had taken over the power station, so there were six hour power cuts. The army, I mentioned the army are there. The army do not step in to stop them. Their argument is, if we do that, we will be fighting a war on two fronts. We'll be fighting both the Republican terrorists, the IRA and so on, and we'll also be fighting the loyalists as well. In the middle of all that, there is the single worst attack of the whole troubles. When the Yaltser Volunteer Force set off car bombs in Dublin and on and across the border in the Republic of Ireland. They killed 34 people and injured hundreds more. Absolutely horrific, horrific scenes. That's in the middle of all that.

The strike lasted for 14 days and the paramilitarians and the strikers, one. At the end of May before. The entire power sharing executive resigned. Stormunt was shut down. Britain resumed direct rule over Northern Ireland. You have these scenes of huge bonfires burning in loyalist areas of Belfast. A lot of people, remember we said before, most people in Britain are not actually that bothered about Northern Ireland. They don't really care. But this is one occasion when it is on the front page of every newspaper day after day, and the government lost. They were humiliated. The army humiliated. They did nothing to stop it. As it were, mob violence had completely and utterly prevailed. A lot of people say the conservative classes, they absolutely think this is a preview of what is coming to Britain, mast men with guns.

Because on the right, does the spectacle of what effectively is a militant strike in Ulster, does that blur with their anxieties about what might happen with the unions in Britain?

Exactly. They say, This is how it will happen. This is how the general strike will happen in Britain. Because don't forget, they have had power cuts. They have had the interruption of supplies. They've had all of these things. And they say, My God, this is the template. This is what will happen. And of course, people on the left say, this is the template for a right wing coup. So everybody sees in it something to match their nightmares.

Right. So on the right, people are saying, Tony Ben is Stalin. He wants to bring in five year plans and send people off to reeducation camps. And meanwhile, Tony Ben himself is expecting the army is going to come and arrest him at any minute, isn't he? He is indeed. There's a lot of worry that the army is preparing a coup. So is there anyone in the army preparing a coup? Is there an equivalent in the higher echelons of the British Army of a Peter Wright in the Secret Services.

Okay. So first of all, the army do intervene in British politics multiple times in the '70s. So of course, the army, they're trying to stay out of Northern Irish politics, but they are inevitably embedded in it since they arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969. But in the course of the '70s, the army actually intervened in British industrial disputes on 12 different occasions. The most famous one which older listeners will remember is they drove fire engines towards the end of the decade, the green goddesses, as they were called, when the firemen went out on strike. They provide cover for people who collect bins for ambulance drivers and things. The army are being dragged into politics. In 1971, a guy called Frank Kitz and the Brigadier, who had commanded in Cyprus and Malaya, among other places, and Kenya, and who also commanded troops in Northern Ireland, he actually wrote a blueprint called Low Intensity operations, subversion, insurgency, and peacekeeping.

So a low-intensity operation is very-Yes, chilling.

And he said, We need to prepare people to take part in operations against political extremists here in Britain. We need to have specialist units that will run, railway stations, power stations, sewage works, supervised miners, and all this thing. This is coming. To be clear, this is not a blueprint for a coup. It's not talking about launching a coup. But I guess you could say the germ of the idea of army involvement in everyday political and industrial life is absolutely there and has been since the beginning of the '70s. What they need, if you're in your gentleman's club and you're drinking a brand, saying Wilson is a Communist, what you need is a figurehead. You need the dictator.

So who is that?

Well, there is such a person, Tom. This is the thing. Brilliant. General Sir Walter Walker. General Sir Walter Walker is from a military family. He's in his '60s. His grandfather had been decorated in the Indian mutiny, Tom. His father had been in India. He himself, he was Britain's leading jungle commander. He had led troops in Malaya and Borneo.

So crushing communists.

Crushing communists in the '50s. He's very popular with his men.

Having a crack at the reds.

He ended up as Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, Northern Europe. So he's a big cheese in the military world, but he's guttied that he doesn't get more respect in Britain because, of course, people aren't as interested in the military in Britain in '60s, '70s as they were.

Dominic, does he have a positive attitude towards gay rights?

I knew you'd go for this, Tom. He's a little bit perturbed, it's fair to say, by the social changes of the 1960s as he sees them. So yes, he says that gay people use the main sewer of the human body as a playground, which I think wouldn't go down well in today's much more touchy feely, British High Command.As it were. Yes, as it were. And he also has very strong views on Northern Ireland because he says, I don't know why we're going on so weak in Northern Ireland. We should just go in and crush them.

So we should treat white people like everybody else. Like everybody else. So in a sense, he's a woke. He's a right wing dictator. He is a woke dictator.

He does say he give people warnings. This is about Northern Ireland. I give them a warning so they can get their women and children away before we go in. But we should go in. So God knows where people would get their women and children, too. But anyway, He's become a star turn. The meetings of the Monday Club and these fringe right wing organizations. I imagine the meeting in the vast and underheated dining rooms of Seedy gentlemen's Clubs, St. James's gentlemen's Clubs.

He's backed by somebody called Paul Daniels, isn't he?

The magician.

Not the magician. He's chairman of the British Military Volunteer Force, I'm reading. A tiny group of ex-servicemen who sent volunteers to the Congo and Yemen. He's vague about the nature of Britain's economic problems. But to quote you, thought pornography had something to do with it.

Yeah.

I mean, these do not sound like serious people, really.

No. Although, by the middle of 1974, there were letters and columns in the broadsheets week after week about General Swalter Walker and his plans. He's become associated with a very cranky right wing organization called Unison, which says it's going to be a vigilante group.

Because that sounds like a union.

Well, there is a union called Unison now.

Yeah.

They said, let's set up a vigilante group to fight the inevitable Communist takeover. General Sewell to Walker is always writing these excellent letters to the Daily Telegraph. The Communist Trojan horse is in our midst with its fellow travelers wrinkling their maggoty way inside its belly. He says, Listen, it's coming. Wilson isn't going to be able to turn this around. He's a Communist anyway. The crisis is coming. You're going to have to choose. Un unbelievably, he says, I hope people will choose rule by the gun in preference to anarchy. It's very rare that people say, I'd like the thought of rule by the gun. Yes. That he clearly thinks this is a massive selling point. The terrible thing is, Tom, there might have been a civil war because he had a rival, and his rival was, like you, a Scottish laird.

Right.

So this is a guy called Colonel David Sterling.

Oh, yes. Yes. The founder of the SAS. He was in the BBC drama where they run around the desert slamming music. Really?

Okay. Well, I'll take your word for it. Yeah.

I can't remember what it was called. It was on recently.

Okay. Brilliant detail. Thanks for that. That's what the rogue heroes, Theo says in the chat.

That's it. Yes.

Anyway, David Sterling has set up his own little organization called GB75. And this is leaked to The Guardian. And they interviewed David Sterling about it, and he said, oh, this is basically a group of apprehensive patriots. We've come together because when there's a general strike, when there's this Ulster Workers Council strike happens in Britain, we will take over the power stations to keep everybody's lights on. Now, Sterling, unlike Walter Walker, is actually quite a publicity So he's very embarrassed when this is leaked. Whereas Walter Walker is going mad and telling people that he has 13 million recruits, which is about 12,999,992 many more than he has. David Sterling is very embarrassed, and he goes very quiet after all this comes out. But obviously, in the minds of people, particularly on the left, this hits home. Harold Wilson is always going on about this with his aides. Even a couple of years later, they read a story in the newspapers in number 10 that some British mercenaries have been executed in Angola. Bernadonna, he writes in his diary, he was completely taken up with this question of Angolan mercenaries. He's genuinely petrified of a right-wing coup in Britain using ex-servicemen as the shock troops.

Since there are few troops based in the UK, they could, he believes, carry out a coup d'État. Now, a man in the pub talking about Angolan mercenaries taking over Britain, that happens. The Prime Minister talking about it is disturbing. Actually, what all this is, I think, like all the Tony Ben stuff, like all of this, even to some extent, like the mad histronics about who's having lunch in number 10, all this is clearly a sign a deep political sickness in Britain in the mid '70s. I don't think that's me just projecting my own interpretation onto it. I think you see that reflected. It doesn't matter what people in the opposition think, but people within the government itself. So you Dennis Healey, you're Roy Jenkins, Barbara Castle, Tony Ben, all these people who write diaries and brilliant autobiographies at the time, because they're an exceptionally literate and well-educated group who have taken control of British politics. They think something is seriously deeply wrong. The question is, can it be turned around? And is Harold Wilson remotely the man to do it, especially as he leads a minority government? The tension is mounting and mounting. Then on the 18th of September 1974, Wilson says, Okay, fine.

Let's do this. Let's have a second general election to end the uncertainty and to give the country a definitive direction. He says, I'm We're going to have a fourth showdown with Ted Heath, winner takes all, to decide the future of the country. Tom, an incredible cliffhanger to end the episode.

Will he manage it? Will he end up with a larger mandate in his hand. Only one way to find out, and that is by tuning into our next episode, which will be out either tomorrow or if you are a member of the Restes History Club. You've already got it. So huge excitement.

Yeah, there are two ways to find out. And in fact, I can't believe that anybody listening to that amazing cliffhanger would not join the Restes History Club immediately.

You'd be mad. Yeah, you'd be mad not to.

Not least because one of the great perks of joining the Restes History Club is if you do join, we will train you in how to run a power station in the event of a crippling 1970s style general strike.

So exciting. All right. So next episode, the second election of 1974. Bye-bye.

Bye.