When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies Read online

  His infrequent walkabouts had something of the same quality. His stride was a little too fast, his smile a little too fixed, his handshake a little too brisk. For a politician with a liking for consensus he had a striking ability to enrage. On the night of the election result, a Labour supporter infiltrated the crowd outside Conservative Central Office in London and stubbed out a cigarette on Heath’s thick, tanned neck.

  For much of the campaign Heath was protected from such gestures. After his morning press conference and his daily television engagements he would take off each lunchtime in a private plane with staff and journalists to travel to a rally outside London with a selected audience. Electioneering by air was intended to be efficient and to look modern – key Heath preoccupations. Wilson campaigned by train; Heath did not like trains. But his faith in technology, not for the last time, proved over-optimistic. ‘The weather was hot,’ recalled Heath’s then parliamentary private secretary Jim Prior. ‘The plane journey generally bumpy, the whole affair was extraordinarily tiring and likely to make anyone tense.’ Hurd recalls: ‘On 8 June we sat miserable in fierce sunshine on the tarmac at Heathrow [waiting] for the appearance from the airline’s catering department of the packed lunches on which we and all the accompanying journalists had relied. Those cross, hot and hungry moments were a low point of the campaign.’

  Electioneering always has its frictions, yet even the Conservatives’ tiniest ones were taken as significant this time, because almost everyone thought Heath was losing badly. In Britain, the opinion polls had correctly predicted the outcome of every general election since the Second World War. For most of the Wilson government between 1966 and 1970, which had been punctuated by crises, the Conservatives had been comfortably in the lead despite Heath’s shortcomings. In July 1969, with a general election due in less than two years, the Conservatives were ahead by an average of over 19 per cent: a crushing victory at the next election looked possible, a comfortable one better than probable. But then the government’s difficulties started to abate, and the Conservative lead disappeared. By April 1970, Labour were ahead – the strongest sustained surge in the polls that had ever been recorded. In early May, the party gained hundreds of seats in local elections, a rare feat for a government in its latter stages. A few days later, Wilson announced the date of the general election, which was almost a year earlier than it needed to be – the sign of a confident prime minister. The same month, the pollsters Gallup put Wilson’s personal ratings lead over Heath at 21 per cent.

  Labour’s advantage over the Conservatives was actually much slimmer – an average of 3 per cent in mid-May – but the momentum seemed to be with them. During the campaign, their lead in the polls held, and in some surveys grew. The bookmakers Ladbrokes lengthened their odds on a Conservative win from 11/10 in early June to 6/1 in mid-June. Then they stopped taking bets on a Labour victory altogether. The mood of the press was similar. ‘It was unnerving’, wrote Hurd, ‘to travel through this campaign in the company of highly intelligent journalists who were convinced that we had already lost. They were polite, even sympathetic, but they knew the answer, and it was not ours. Two of them were already writing a book during the campaign to explain how we had lost.’

  On 13 June, for its final issue before the election The Economist put a photograph of the prime minister and his chancellor Roy Jenkins on the cover. The accompanying headline – ‘In Harold Wilson’s Britain’ – avoided direct predictions, but it suggested that the Labour leader was the British politician who mattered, not least by making no mention of Heath at all. And the photograph underlined the message. Wilson and Jenkins were pictured walking side by side in the sunshine along a spotless pavement, by the look of it somewhere in Whitehall, with elegant iron railings to their right and solid old buildings in the distance. Wilson was grey-haired and watchful, his head like a great silver cannonball; Jenkins, four years younger, a little less solid around the waist, had a hint of a smile playing across his broad, amused mouth. The two of them were walking perfectly in step, shoes gleaming, official papers in their hands, gaits unflustered but purposeful. With their matching dark suits and old-fashioned parted haircuts they still had a strong air – as did much of Britain in 1970 – of the fifties or even the thirties. And they looked like members of a ruling establishment with quite a few years to run.

  This sense of the government’s impregnability infected many Conservatives. ‘Most of us – including myself – thought that we would lose,’ wrote Margaret Thatcher, then the shadow education secretary. ‘The gloom steadily deepened during the campaign.’ Hurd remembers: ‘The opinion polls were hypnotic.’ Six days before the election, he helplessly watched a journalist inform Heath of a new poll giving Labour a lead of 12.4 per cent and then ask the Conservative leader for his reaction. ‘I cannot remember his reply, but I can remember the blank look on his face.’

  In the run-up to the campaign and throughout it, there were murmurs in Conservative circles that Heath was about to be ousted. Even for the Conservatives, with their famous lack of squeamishness about replacing unsatisfactory leaders, this was a sign of panic. The coup never materialized, but on election day itself Heath was left in no doubt about how the party’s feelings towards him were running. ‘At lunchtime,’ he remembers in his autobiography, ‘there was an unexpected visit from Peter Carrington [the influential shadow defence secretary]. After congratulating me on the fight, he told me that, should we lose, I would be expected immediately to stand down.’

  On 18 June, the polling stations closed as usual at 10 p.m. Wilson went with journalists and his retinue to the place he customarily received good news on general election night: the grand old Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, a few miles from his constituency. The day before, the minister for technology Tony Benn, at this stage a Wilson ally and protégé, reflected the prevailing Labour view of the coming result in his diary: ‘We should win by a large majority, certainly with a working majority.’

  Heath was not even sure of getting a majority in his own constituency. At the last general election, his victory margin in Bexley in Kent, a semi-detached south London suburb with a Labour-voting past, had fallen to a vulnerable 2,333. This time, to make things worse, Heath faced a potentially damaging additional rival candidate: a campaigner against the European Common Market, which Heath wanted Britain to join, who had changed his name by deed poll to Edward Heath. On election day in Bexley, Conservative activists had to stand outside polling stations with placards warning people against voting for the wrong Heath. That evening, the Conservative leader waited in the constituency for news of his local and national fate. ‘I always remained confident,’ he insists in his autobiography. But the star Guardian writer Terry Coleman, who spent the last two days of the campaign with him, gained a different impression:

  He believed, even to the end, that he had lost. It was late at night [on 17 June] in the headmaster’s study of a grammar school at Bexley … Mr Heath was alone, without his aides, and without his Central Office girls, who had all gone home. He poured himself half a tumbler full of whisky … and for the first time that day forgot to sit up straight, and for the first time let his suit sag around him … I asked some question about a biographer who had attributed to him … a belief that he was a man of destiny. Was he? … He mumbled something I couldn’t catch, said after a while that the man who had talked about his feeling for destiny hadn’t seen him for thirty-five years …

  At the Adelphi, Wilson chatted happily to the reporters for half an hour or so after the polling stations closed. The usual election-day survey conducted by Labour Party headquarters in London of how the voting had gone had found nothing to disturb his confidence. But then came the first puzzling tremor. News arrived of a more independent and concrete survey, of people coming out of the polling booths in Gravesend in Kent, traditionally a revealing constituency. There appeared to have been a swing from Labour to the Conservatives of over 4 per cent. If this exit-poll figure proved correct and was repeated across Britain, a
ll the pre-election polls may as well have been conducted on Mars. The Conservatives would win.

  A few minutes later, at around 11 p. m., the first actual result came in. In Guildford there had been a swing to the Conservatives of 6 per cent. Wilson, who had retreated to his suite to see the results on television, like almost 20 million other Britons, reportedly said: ‘I don’t like the look of that swing.’ Benn’s reaction, as he watched in his Bristol constituency, was less understated: ‘In a fraction of a second, one went from a pretty confident belief in victory to absolute certainty of defeat.’

  His sudden pessimism was justified. By the time all the results were in, the Conservatives had a majority of thirty. In the early hours of 19 June, Heath was driven into London from Bexley, the results flowing like his favourite champagne from the car radio. He struggled deliciously through the cheering crowd of supporters and party workers outside Conservative Central Office, retired temporarily to his smart bachelor flat in Albany, an exclusive nineteenth-century enclave off Piccadilly, and there received a congratulatory phone call from the Conservative chief whip, his close ally Willie Whitelaw. Whitelaw told the London Evening Standard that Heath, who never usually showed his deeper feelings, was so emotional he could not speak. Later that day, after sleeping and accepting more calls, Heath set off from his flat for Central Office again. In his autobiography, published twenty-eight years later, he recalls what followed as if he still cannot quite believe it:

  The [Albany] porter told me that there was a vast crowd waiting for me in Piccadilly. As soon as I appeared, the crowd surged across the road, stopping traffic and requiring a great deal of police activity to clear it away. Everyone looked remarkably pleased, cheerfully shouting congratulations and waving, without any sign of a hostile protester.

  That evening, he was welcomed for the first time by the staff of 10 Downing Street. A photograph of the scene appears in the book. Heath’s small eyes are tiny with delight. His big white smile looks genuine for once, almost sharkish with triumph. ‘The experts, the know-alls, and the trend-setters had been confounded,’ Hurd wrote of Heath’s victory. Now Heath just had to confound them again – by reviving the country.

  The notion of British decline had been around for over a century. In 1835, the British economic reformer Richard Cobden wrote after visiting the United States: ‘Our only chance of national prosperity lies in the timely remodelling of our system, so as to put it as nearly as possible upon an equality with the improved management of the Americans.’ At the time, Britain was the dominant economic, military and imperial power in the world – and would remain so for almost another fifty years. Cobden’s worries could be dismissed as the sort you heard in any country with a degree of national self-consciousness and a past against which the present could be anxiously measured.

  Yet his alarmism did contain an insight: the prospect of decline was built into Britain’s nineteenth-century pre-eminence like the rust-prone metal on a battleship. Firstly, all superpowers lost their supremacy eventually; secondly, Britain had a modest population and resources; and thirdly, as the first country to have an industrial revolution, Britain was always going to see its lead slip economically when other countries enjoyed their own transformations. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, America, Germany and other close competitors emerged, just as Cobden had feared. In the first five decades of the twentieth, Britain’s position was further eroded by two costly world wars and too many overseas commitments. From 1945 onwards, the issue of Britain’s decline changed from a matter for intermittent public debate into a major and growing preoccupation of political life.

  The decline was seen as having diverse symptoms – not just military and territorial but moral, cultural, spiritual and physical. The centuries-old British empire was dismantled in a couple of decades. In the late forties, the ‘brain drain’ began, as promising scientists emigrated in search of better prospects. The national birth rate peaked in 1964 and then fell every year for the rest of the decade. Britain’s cities, overcrowded to bursting in the Victorian boom years, emptied out. The population of Greater London dropped by 600,000 between 1961 and 1971. Many of the urban Britons who remained lived in landscapes spotted with decay: prematurely aged post-war housing estates, emptying docksides, bombsites unrepaired and lost to weeds, decades after the German air raids. The energy and colour of British popular culture during the sixties and early seventies – the peacock rock stars, the outrageous boutiques – could not disguise the fact that much of everyday life took place on streets of worn-out brown and grey.

  Some of these symptoms of decline were deceptive, the products of social change – suburbanization, contraception – not social entropy. Other portents favoured by newspaper columnists and other professional declinists were ambiguous. Did the drug experiments of the Beatles or the unashamed randiness of On the Buses represent decadence or progress? It depended on your morals. There was one set of national symptoms, however, that seemed less subjective and more measurable, and which, as a result, was watched with a near-continuous intensity in post-war Britain. This was the state of the economy.

  Between 1950 and 1970, the country’s share of the world’s manufacturing exports shrank from over a quarter to barely a tenth. Between 1950 and 1964, the British gross domestic product grew at an annual average of 3 per cent, while in Germany, France, Italy and Japan it grew at an average of at least 5 per cent. Between 1950 and 1976, British productivity grew at an annual average of 2.8 per cent, while in Germany it grew at 5.8 per cent and in Japan it grew at 7.5 per cent. There were other economic totems during these years: the value of the pound against the American dollar; the inflation and unemployment rates; the balance of payments. Such figures, in fact, can both distort and be distorted. Dates can be chosen to give a particular impression. Different national contexts – the contrasting economic positions of Britain and continental Europe at the end of the Second World War, for example – can be omitted from international comparisons. The precise definition of productivity, unemployment or inflation can be debated indefinitely. All economics is, to some degree, a construct, and the economic indicators given prominence in a particular era reflect that era’s assumptions. Yet, despite these drawbacks, it is hard for such indicators to lie completely when considered together.

  So it proved in Britain between the election of Clement Attlee in 1945 and the election of Heath in 1970. Over that period, Labour and Conservative governments were responsible for the economy to an almost equal degree, with Labour in office for twelve years, and the Conservatives for thirteen. Both parties had their successes. Labour rescued the economy from the damage and exhaustion of the Second World War. The Conservatives facilitated Britain’s first mass consumer boom in the fifties. Both parties kept unemployment and poverty very low compared to the era between the First and Second World Wars – and compared to now. Britain in 1970, for all its economic anxieties, remained a rich country that was getting richer. The British Household in the Seventies, an authoritative marketing survey published in 1975, found ‘a rising standard of living throughout the [post-war] period and, until 1973, no slowing down [in the rate of improvement] in spite of economic difficulties’.

  But a country’s material well-being, like a country’s sense of its more cosmic trajectory, is partly relative. Between 1945 and 1970, many Britons were not doing as well economically as their counterparts in comparable countries, and neither of the main parties seemed able to do much about it. Booms lasting a year or two, often just before general elections, were followed by lingering recessions. At least once a decade, the pound fell disastrously on the international currency markets as foreign investors lost faith in Britain’s prospects. Chancellors came and went, leaving office after a few years either having obviously failed or having deftly handed on their difficulties to their successor. With each stage of the whole jittery cycle, the more ominous indicators – inflation, unemployment – edged a little higher.

  Changes in the structure of
the British economy made it seem more vulnerable. The post-war nationalization of large areas of heavy industry, itself partly an attempt to transform British business, made the success or failure of enterprises such as British Leyland a matter of patriotic importance. Meanwhile, the fashion in the private sector for joining companies together into large conglomerates created other economic virility symbols. In the protracted run-up to the 1964 general election, books such as Michael Shanks’s The Stagnant Society and Arthur Koestler’s Suicide of a Nation? caught the declinist mood. Wilson exploited it expertly. At the 1963 Labour conference, he described Britain as ‘a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players’, with an economy enfeebled by ‘restrictive practices’ and ‘outdated methods’ that only a ‘revolution’ in government economic policy could sweep away. He won the election narrowly. In 1966, he called another and increased his majority to ninety-seven, big enough to be truly radical.

  Over its two terms, the Wilson government of the sixties treated the economy as its central priority, creating a new Department of Economic Affairs to augment the Treasury. In 1965, a national plan was devised, ‘covering all aspects of the country’s development for the next five years’. The plan set a target for Britain’s economic growth: an increase of almost a third. Wilson himself was a trained economist; as his chancellor he had first Callaghan, a revered political operator, and then Jenkins, one of the ablest economic ministers since the war. The government had an unusual number of other significant talents, including the intense young Roundhead Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, the country’s first potent female minister, and Tony Crosland, the leading British philosopher-politician of the post-war period.