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- [00:03]
Tom Holland
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
- [00:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Money worries are as old as money itself. You see them in every age. Debt, taxes, bad harvests. The circumstances change, the worry doesn't.
- [00:14]
Tom Holland
And that is still true today. For plenty of people. The start of a new tax year means thinking about money again. What's coming in, what's going out, and whether the sums add up.
- [00:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
The trouble is, financial stress rarely stays in the numbers. It can keep you awake, it affects your mood, and it puts strain on your relationships.
- [00:32]
Tom Holland
And this is where therapy can help. BetterHelp connects you with qualified therapists who can help you talk through the stress or anxiety that money worries can bring and think about ways to manage those worries.
- [00:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
You complete a short questionnaire and you're matched with a therapist who fits your needs. If the match isn't right, you can switch at any time.
- [00:53]
Tom Holland
So when life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Rest is history.
- [01:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's better. H E L p.com restishistory I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool.
- [01:11]
Tom Holland
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
- [01:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
So what's the problem?
- [01:19]
Tom Holland
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.
- [01:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Maybe there's no catch.
- [01:23]
Tom Holland
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [01:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Wow. You need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have. What is this table wood?
- [01:30]
Tom Holland
I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [01:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Car sell without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply right now at the Home Depot. Shop Spring Black Friday savings and get up to 40% off, plus up to $500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung. Get a fridge with zero clearance hinges so the doors open fully, even in tighter spaces in your kitchen and laundry. That saves you time. Like an all in one washer dryer that can run a full load in just 68 minutes. Shop Spring Black Friday Savings plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at the Home Depot April 9 through April 29. US only C store online for details.
- [02:20]
Tom Holland
Oh, I'd love to enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, well, now, what ideas have you got? Show them what to do, for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get done. I can't stand people just hanging about. Television is the most successful fascist. Needless to say, rock stars are fascists too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God. He was no politician, he was a media artist himself. So that was the rock star David Bowie interviewed in Playboy in September 1976. And you know the big question, what's going on there? Did he really mean it? Was he playing a part, perhaps, as he loved to do in the 1970s, the age, the decade of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. And of course, the part he's playing here is the Thin White Duke, who Bowie described as a very Aryan fascist type. Or was he just completely off his head on coke and speed? So many questions, Dominic. But whatever the explanation, the thing is that he was saying quite a lot of things like that in 1975 and 1976. So here he is being interviewed by the NME in October 1975, where he said, what Britain needs is an extreme right front to come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. He said the coming of the far right would do something positive at least to cause a commotion in people and they'll either accept dictatorship or get rid of it. In April 1976, he was telling a press conference that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. And then in May 1976. So the following month came the most notorious incident of all, when he. He turned up at Victoria Station in, I think, an open top Mercedes and greeted fans with what was alleged at the time to be a Nazi salute, and which Bowie, Elon Musk Style, subsequently said had just been a wave. And then a few weeks later, he gives the interview that I've just. I've just cited.
- [05:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
So you can fall down a massive rabbit hole on the Internet looking into all this, because Bowie fans will often say he was just waving and he's been very hard done by. By the press photographers. On the other hand, as you say, there are a lot of such incidents in 1975 and 1976. And it's quite an odd part to choose to play. However, it's a very suggestive part because this is a period in British history, the mid-1970s, when there's an awful lot of talk about Britain as the new Weimar Germany, about the ravages of inflation, about the rise of political extremism, the decay of the center, and about the possibility, even the probability, that Britain will slide into some sort of authoritarianism.
- [05:51]
Tom Holland
And the thing is, Dominic, isn't it, that the genius of Bowie is that he is superb at, you know, his chameleon esque qualities, at finding characters who do reflect the zeitgeist?
- [06:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, absolutely right. He does reflect the zeitgeist. And I think a little bit like the 40 towers rant that you did last week, it's a nice window into the sort of nightmares of the British imagination in the mid-70s.
- [06:14]
Tom Holland
I mean, the thing about Hitler being better than Jagger.
- [06:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, sort of bonkers. All right, so last week we talked about the revolution on the right when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory party. We talked about the inertia and the shabbiness of the Harold Wilson government and the popular vote to stay in Europe in Britain's first referendum. And all of this, of course, was against this very bleak backdrop, which obviously informs David Bowie's Persona. This is Britain heading towards what looks like financial meltdown, so very dependent on massive borrowing. The government is handing out all these huge pay deals, 30% here, 10, 31% there, to the trade unions. The Wilson government seems utterly becalmed and inflation is heading through the roof. And actually, before we get back into the politics of it, let's just dwell on the culture for a second. So, Tom, I know you're writing about the Beatles at the moment, aren't you? So Swinging London and the zany, madcap mood of the 1960s is very much nutty fun. It's very much on your mind. But in the 1970s. So 10 years on, right, we're 10 years on from the first articles and the international press that were celebrating Swinging London. You know, Carnaby street and Mini Miniskirts, Dolly Birds, the Sun Is Shining, all this. It's now 1975. The most popular musical act this is a sign of how music has evolved since those innocent days is the Bay City Rollers. And among the number one singles of the year are bangers by the likes of Telly Savalas, Kojak, Billy Connolly.
- [07:42]
Tom Holland
Amusing Scottish comedian Windsor Davis played a sergeant Major in a now cancelled BBC sitco. Tom, about the British in India.
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Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, it's insane that he had a number one single and a great friend of yours, actually, Rod Stewart. So you celebrated Rod Stewart's birthday last year with him, didn't you?
- [07:59]
Tom Holland
But I'm not going to go into any more details about that.
- [08:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, that's a story for a bonus episode. Now, among the younger generation of musicians who are coming through, the mood is very, very dark. So this is the bassist and co vocalist of the Stranglers, Jean Jacques Bernell, who actually had a history degree. Burnell was interviewed in 1975 and he said, everyone is paranoid, there's decay everywhere. We've always lived with the assumption that things were getting better and better progress all the time. And suddenly it's like you hear every day there's a crisis, financial crisis, things being laid off, people not working. Everything is coming to a grinding halt. No more heroes, Dominic, no more heroes. Exactly. This is the environment that gives rise to punk, which is beginning to stir in 1975. So we ended last time with the referendum, which was in June. A few weeks later, in August, probably the 23rd, a teenage dropout, very skinny and emaciated, with this kind of shock of spiky, dyed green hair, goes to a pub on the Kings Road in Chelsea to audition for a new band that's been founded by a local boutique owner. And the. The boy's name is John Lydon and the band's name is the Sex Pistols. So that was the 23rd of August. Five days later, on the 28th of August, this is a good window, I think, into the sort of the flavor of the time. A bomb goes off outside Selfridges on Oxford street and it injures seven people. The day after that, the 29th, another bomb goes off on Kensington Church street and it killed the bomb disposal officer who'd been sent to deal with it instantly. 5th September, there was a bomb at the Hilton on Park lane that killed two people, injured at 63. On 9 October, a bomb went off outside Green park tube station on Piccadilly, killed one man and injured 20, some of them children on a night out. And in the rest Of October and November 1975, there are bombs in the West End every few days. And these are the work of a provisional IRA cell who were later captured. Captured in December in Bulcombe street near Marylebone. So that's why they're called the Balcombe Street Gang. And there are seven more bomb attacks in London in 1976. They've slightly been forgotten, I think now people don't really Talk about these. But I mean, there's basically a bomb every few in the west end in late 1975 and 1976. And then of course, on top of all that, every day when you opened your newspaper, the breakfast table, as people still did in the 70s, you would read reports of some new shooting or some new atrocity in Northern Ireland. So maybe 500 people killed, more than 500 actually, in the course of 1975 and 1976. And actually some of the worst incidents, the Troubles, happened in those years.
- [10:39]
Tom Holland
So the sense of a country disintegrating
- [10:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
into violence completely the whole time. And I think the, the link between that and the popular culture. I mean, it's obvious on the one hand, people want very escapist popular culture or they want nostalgia, so they're looking back to the war, as we were talking about last week. But on the other hand, if you're young, there is a sense of kind of violence in the air, I think, and of a sort of a disintegration and whatnot, which obviously plays a part in the genesis of punk music. So that's the background. But let's get back to the politics. So what has the Prime Minister been doing? Harold Wilson has been on holiday that August after the referendum is over. He went off to, of course, inevitably, the Scilly Isles, to wear his very short shorts. His chief policy advisor, Bernard Donoghue, has been on holiday in France. When Donoghue gets back, he writes this unbelievably searing diary entry about the state of the nation. He says, I've been in France, I've come home and I've been forced to realize that this nation is in sad decline. And he says, because Harold is in the Scilly Isles, he just doesn't get it. He's completely isolated from the remorseless relative decline of this country. And then this extraordinary passage. Britain is a miserable sight, a society of failures full of apathy, aroused only by envy at the success of others. Meanness has replaced generosity, envy has replaced endeavor. Malice is the most common motivation. This is the social personality of a loser. Fascism could breed in this unhealthy climate.
- [12:05]
Tom Holland
When he says that society aroused only by envy at the success of others, I mean, that's quite a right wing perspective, isn't it? The politics of envy and all of that.
- [12:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, completely. And this is the result, I think, of having been in Downing street and having, you know, Donahue has been there all the time when the different union leaders have come in to demand a particular deal for their members and they would literally Say, I mean, there were some fantastic sort of accounts. They would say, I'm the leader of the railwaymen. I noticed the postman got 30%. I have to go back to my, you know, my members and say that I've got better than the postman. Yeah, this is how it is. And, and this is, and this sort of competition, this. I think a lot of labor ministers found this incredibly depressing, that they're basically being forced into this constant game of giving out bigger and bigger deals.
- [12:53]
Tom Holland
So you think he's specifically thinking about union leaders when he says that?
- [12:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
I don't know that he's necessarily specifically thinking about it, but I think there's a general sense of mean spiritedness in politics at this point and in public life and a sense of kind of national solidarity breaking.
- [13:05]
Tom Holland
And also, Dominic, those awful enormous kipper ties and the brown suits and the very thick glasses frames. I mean, it's really depressing. Do they have those in France?
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Dominic Sandbrook
I don't think so, no. I think they do, actually. I think there's some terrible fashions in France. I mean, it's important to remember that through all this period, these people are eating 1970s food. So imagine how depressing that is.
- [13:26]
Tom Holland
Yeah, Black Forest gateau.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Well, they're eating Black Forest Ghetto. But also drinking enormous quantities, presumably of Blue Nun and Black Tower. What else would they be drinking? Sort of wine in elaborate bottles with a kind of lattice on the outside.
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Tom Holland
However, on the positive side, as you remind us in your wonderful books, children do have space hoppers. So it's not all bad.
- [13:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
They do have space hoppers. Yeah. And rally chopper bikes. So every, we've, we've, we've literally ticked every box there, every 70s box. So anyway, Donahue's rant is typical of the crisis of confidence at the top. And this is obviously reflecting the state of the economy. So as we've said, inflation's out of control. They're actually giving out all these pay deals that the union leaders themselves think are a little bit bonkers. So it's the union leaders job to defend their members. So they have to keep asking for more. But they are very conscious that this kind of free for all is sending the economy towards the abyss. So as we said last time, inflation in Britain at this point is rising five times faster than in any other comparable European country. You know, if you're a shopper, if you're Margaret Thatcher pretending to be an ordinary housewife, the price of sugar has gone up by 200% in 12 months. Electricity by 66%. Coal by 47%, the price of milk has doubled. If you're old, if you're living off your savings or a pension, it's being eaten away every week by inflation. If you're self employed, if you belong to a much smaller and weaker union or no union at all, you are in real trouble. And even Labour papers by this point are hammering the government on this issue. And what really alarms people is that the government just seemed completely powerless to do anything. I mean, there is a definite sort of Keir Starmer feel to all this. The Economist says Britain's dream of apocalypse is horribly close to coming true. The Sunday Mirror, a Labor paper. Why are we waiting? Isn't it obvious that the government must act against inflation, that we can't go on like this? So Harold Wilson is obviously the head of the government. He's the Prime Minister, but he's depressed and torpid. Yeah. And he's drinking his brandy and Marcia is giving him a hard time. The person who has primary responsibility for dealing with all this is the Chancellor, Dennis Healy. And we haven't seen much of him since the 1974 series that we did two years ago. And it's important to remind people that he is an absolutely tremendous man.
- [15:40]
Tom Holland
History's greatest eyebrows.
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Dominic Sandbrook
His greatest eyebrows, exactly. So he came from West Yorkshire, he went to Balliol College, Oxford. Tremendous feat. He fought with great courage in North Africa and in Italy, he was the military landing officer for the Allies at Anzio. So, you know, really put himself in harm's way. Then he became an MP on the right of the Labour Party. And as you say, Tom, he is best known for his enormous eyebrows. But he's also very. I mean, he's famously clever. And he loves to advertise his cleverness. Yeah.
- [16:13]
Tom Holland
He doesn't hide his eyes under a bushel, does he?
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Dominic Sandbrook
He doesn't. He's very arrogant. He's exceedingly rude. He's a massive bruiser. He despises a lot of his fellow Labour MPs, and he much prefers, as he will always tell you, Emily Dickinson, Flaubert to Janeff, all these kind of people.
- [16:33]
Tom Holland
So this is his hinterland. Yeah, Politicians should have a hinterland.
- [16:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
You are never allowed to mention Denis Healey without mentioning the fact that he had a hinterland. And actually, he wrote a book which I have on, all about his hinterland, which is a brilliant thing to do. He basically wrote a book called My Secret Planet, which is basically a book about how clever he was. It was basically a list of his favorite poets, his favorite authors, the More recondite and obscure the better, just so he could show off. And every now and again there'd be a moment in this book where he'd say, roy Jenkins, of course, had never read Dostoevsky in the original or whatever
- [17:07]
Tom Holland
it might be, because also, the other thing is, he's incredibly easy to impersonate. And this is the Golden Age of Beige impersonations as featured by Mike Yarwood, who coined the phrase Silly Billy that Dennis Healey's always meant to be saying, but doesn't. And then Dennis Healey does actually take it up and starts using it.
- [17:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
And to his massive credit, Dennis Healy also used to go on the Dame Edna Everett Show a lot. Did you see this? He went on once with Roger Moore and they both had Dame Edna, made them both wear badges. His said Dennis, Roger Moore said Rog. And they had to perform. They had to perform a song and dance number with Dame Edna. I think Healey had only just like, stepped down as Chancellor or something. It was a extraordinary thing to do. So Healey had been Chancellor since 74, and in 74 he had thrown money around with gay abandon in order to win the October election. But then in January 75, his treasury officials came to him and they said, enough, like, you got to stop this. This is mad. You've got to change direction. And because Healey is actually a very clever man and he's intellectually self confident, he's self confident enough to listen to them and to say, okay, fair enough, I will change. And it's very rare that a Chancellor does that. Actually. It's one of the signal examples in modern British history of a Chancellor starting off as one thing and then turning into something else. So he then reinvents himself as something of a monetarist, as somebody who's basically going to use monetary targets to bring inflation down. And in the first half of 1975, what you have is Healey going to all these meetings with the other Labour ministers and he says to them again and again, look, this social contract that we've got with the unions is a complete joke. It's a complete failure. We should stop borrowing so much money. Inflation is the be all and end all, and we absolutely have to get it down. And if you're on the Labour left and you're sitting here and Healey, in his sort of very rude and arrogant way, is telling you this, you're very upset and offended by it because you hate the thought of making any cuts. So Tony Benn, who we talked about last time, Tony, Ben's not really that bothered about borrowing money and about inflation. What he wants to see is more spending, loads of new social programs, more egalitarianism, all of this kind of thing. So by the sort of middle of 75, you have clearly a very big row brewing between the two wings of the Labour Party. And as if that's not bad enough, as the summer goes on, the economic news is getting worse and worse. So two weeks after the referendum, the European referendum on 20 June, Healey gave the Cabinet this kind of apocalyptic warning, which Barbara Castle, one of his colleagues, recorded in her diary. Inflation, he said, was terrifying. Borrowing could stop overnight. Anything could trigger off a disastrous run on the pound and force us into £1 billion worth of public expenditure cuts this year. There was not a minute to waste. But of course, they are specialists in waiting minutes because they've got their only their tiny majority. Wilson is so anxious about provoking the left that he'd rather do nothing, he'd rather carry on sliding than cause a split in, in his party. Anyway, Healey was quite right. Ten days later, on 30 June, the pound started to slide and it slides and slides and in four hours it fell from 2.23 to 2.17. And at that stage, that was the quickest fall in the pound's value in history.
- [20:32]
Tom Holland
But presumably this is seen on the left of the Labour Party as the names of Zurich kicking in. International finance doing its worst.
- [20:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly right. So if you're on the left of the Labour Party, if you're Tony Benn, you look at this and you say, well, this is international capitalism conspiring against British socialism. You know, that's. You basically say, why should we listen to what foreign speculators and bankers want us to do? We just plow on, you know, and if necessary, we put up tariff. We'll come, we come onto Tony Ben's program, we, if necessary, put up huge tariff walls and protectionist barriers and stuff, and we seal ourselves off.
- [21:07]
Tom Holland
It's the argument that Andy Burner makes about, you know, don't be in hock to the capital markets and Zach Polanski saying it as well. So it's a, it's, it's a, a kind of a perspective that's coming back into fashion now.
- [21:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
So I'm going to give a, I'm going to portray my hand here. I think it's a very good argument to make when you're not actually in hoc to the capitalists, to the capital markets, and you don't need to borrow any Money. I think if you're trying to borrow enormous sums of money, in my experience, you have to listen to the lender, otherwise they won't lend you the money anyway. There is this huge row inside Downing street about what to do and they finally hammer out a sort of deal with the unions, a kind of informal deal. The unions promise that they will cap all wage increases at six pounds a week. And actually that's quite a big concession from them because it means that even though wages is then still rising at about 14% a year, prices are going up much more than that. So if you're an ordinary working man, you're taking a little bit of a hit in your spending power and living standards. Yeah, it's austerity. I mean, this is what Tony Benn would definitely say. And in the long run, actually, this will catch up with the Labour government right at the end of the decade when union members rebel against it. Anyway, for the time being, it's enough. The pressure on the pound eases a bit. And actually Britain has been very lucky. You could say Britain was incredibly lucky to have got away with its kind of profligacy for as long as it did. And one reason is that when the Arab oil nations made their great. You know, when they got their winnings after the oil shock of 1973, a lot of them put their money into sterling, they invested it in sterling. And they didn't do this because they thought that Britain was a great going concern. They actually just almost did it out of sort of sentimental traditionalism. Britain is the banker of the world. Obviously, when you've got loads of money, you put it into the pound. But as one of Dennis Heater's treasury colleagues, a guy called Edmond Dell, who wrote a brilliant book about all this, as Dell said in his book, you know, it was only a matter of time before the Arabs basically realized this was a terrible place to put their money. And once they took it out, we were going to be in massive trouble. And by the autumn, surprise, surprise, the pressure is going again. And the bank of England, and this will be a theme all this week. The bank of England was spending hundreds of millions of pounds in its currency reserves to basically buy up sterling and to defend the exchange rate.
- [23:25]
Tom Holland
And is that done for economic reasons or for kind of prestige reasons?
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Dominic Sandbrook
I think they're linked. So the prestige reasons, for what some listeners may think are silly reasons, people like to think that their currency is really valuable and worth something. They don't like to see their currency being debauched and to devalue your currency is seen as a national humiliation. But there's a very good economic reason why you don't want the pound to fall. And that is the more that the pound falls, the more expensive foreign imports are to buy.
- [23:53]
Tom Holland
And so for inflation goes up.
- [23:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, if you're 70s Britain and you're buying more and more Japanese washing machines and German cars and so on and so forth, then if your pound, if the pound falls and you're spending much more on these things, then you've got massive inflation and a hit in the standard of living. And so no government wants to see that. Why aren't the labor government listening to Dennis Healey? And why isn't the Prime Minister forcing them to do anything about it? Well, this brings us to the main character in the story, who is Harold Wilson. So, as we saw last time, Wilson is knackered, he's ill, he's increasingly reliant on the brandy bottle. He says to Bernard Donahue at one point, the trouble with me now is I only have the same old solutions for the same old problems. And then a few weeks after that. So this is in the sort of late summer of 75, he has a massive argument with his press chief and speechwriter, Joe Haynes. Wilson has written himself a draft speech. And Haynes says to him, I mean, this is extraordinary, the way they used to speak to the Prime Minister. Haynes says to him, this is absolutely useless. He says, it's full of your old cliches. It's got whole paragraphs repeated from previous speeches. And Wilson snaps at him and says, well, I don't have anything new to say, do I? And Haynes said, well, you might put some of your old ideas in new words. Why don't you try doing that? And this sort of sense that Wilson is. He's definitely on the downward slope. So he's getting. He used to have a brilliant, brilliant memory, but he's getting things wrong in meetings. He's actually skipping meetings. He's making excuses to skip meetings. He says he's got a cold, says he's got a stomach upset. He's an increasingly sad figure. And the moment that I think captures this really nicely is December 1975. They're having a meeting, surprise, surprise, about cuts with Dennis Healy. And somebody says, well, we, you know, we can't really decide. We'll have to have a meeting of the full Cabinet tomorrow or on for. On Friday to discuss it. And Wilson, the Prime Minister, says, well, I can't make Friday. And Bernard Donahue writes in his diary that in full view of Everybody else, Healy turned to him and said, it might be better for all of us if you weren't there. And Wilson pretended not to hear this. And then he went out to the toilet and Bernard Donahue followed him out and found him in the toilet with kind of. With his head in his hands, absolutely crushed and will and just said very weakly, I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. And he just. He basically allowed himself to be insulted in this way by his own chancellor in front of everybody. He did nothing at all about it. And he is, as Donahue writes a month later, privately, we know he's blown. He's no more interest, no more ideas, no appetite for power. So it is quite a sad story, I think.
- [26:34]
Tom Holland
Yeah, very sad. Because he was such a brilliant, able, go getting white heater technology kind of guy, wasn't he?
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Dominic Sandbrook
In the 60s, he was. I know that the sheen has worn off the Ganex plastic raincoats. Yeah.
- [26:46]
Tom Holland
They'll be turning up again later.
- [26:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
They will, yeah.
- [26:48]
Tom Holland
Shop soiled is the word that's always used, isn't it?
- [26:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, I think I use that word a lot with Harold Wilson. I mean, you say always used. Nobody else writes about Howard Wilson, to be honest. So what lies behind this? We talked about all the businessman Marcia and all that last time, but actually, Wilson by now has decided to walk away. For years, he had been saying to people, if I ever got back into power, I'd probably only do two more years. But people didn't believe him because they thought, oh, he's so ambitious and so wily. He'd never walk away. But in the summer of 1975, he said to Joe Haynes, I want to go sooner rather than later. I'm very tired. And. And he also said, I am totally fed up with the Labour Party and I find its behavior intolerable. And probably that summer, late that summer, he tells the Queen.
- [27:35]
Tom Holland
And the Queen loves him, doesn't she? He's her favorite.
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Dominic Sandbrook
It was a proper monarchist. He's a sort of. He's quite. They talk probably about. I bet they talk about Agatha Christie or something.
- [27:44]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And they bond over the Tupperware.
- [27:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, they absolutely would. So the way he tells her is so sort of. It's so fitting. They were staying on Balmoral, him and Mary, and they went to. There was some sort of cottage on the estate in Balmoral, and the Queen drove them there in a Land Rover. And they went to this cottage, and it was almost like Marie Antoinette at Le Petit Trianon or whatever. The Queen made tea for Harold Wilson and Mary and then started doing the washing up. And while she was doing the washing up, Wilson came and talked to her at the sink and said, I'm gonna resign.
- [28:17]
Tom Holland
So it's a kitchen sink drama.
- [28:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
Very good, Tom. Now, he, at first he thought he might go that autumn, but basically Marcia persuades him to stay on. She doesn't want him to go because then she'll lose all her, you know, all her power and stuff.
- [28:29]
Tom Holland
I mean, the new Prime Minister's not gonna take her on, is he?
- [28:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, no, no, no. And Donoghue and Haynes knew that he was going to go, and he kept telling them, you know, I'll go in before Christmas or something, and then he would postpone it. And they were very frustrated by this because he's run out of ideas. He probably should go. And as Donahue said, it's a sign of his weakness. He should take a decision and stick to it. By the beginning of 76, there are lots of rumors going around Whitehorn and Westminster, but most people don't really believe them because they think of Wilson as so wily and so cunning that this is another of his schemes to hold on to power a bit longer. At last, he decides on a departure date. Well, on an announcement date, I should say. He will announce his departure on Thursday 11th March, 1976, which is his 60th birthday. But then fate takes a turn, because, as we said, confidence in the British economy is at a very, very, very low ebb. And it won't take much to trigger another run on the pound. On the 5th of March, that's a week before Wilson is planning to make his announcement. The bank of England decides to cut interest rates to try and give the economy a little bit of a boost. And the markets don't like this at all. And people start rushing to sell sterling. And quite soon, the rush turns into a stampede. So by the evening of the following day, the sixth, the pound has now fallen to $1.98. Remember, it was $2.23 a few minutes ago. It's now $1.98, the lowest level in its history. And the bank of England panics and it starts desperately buying up sterling. And in total, in the next two weeks, it spends a billion dollars to buy up pounds to try and preserve the value of the currency. But it's no good. The pound just keeps sliding. So by the 10th, it's down to $1.92. And of course, as a result of all this, as the pound falls, the danger is that inflation will Start to rise. So that night, so the 10th, the Commons voted on yet more Dennis Healey cuts. And to the government's horror, the Labour left rebel and the government loses by 28 votes. A massive humiliation.
- [30:38]
Tom Holland
Can I just ask?
- [30:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [30:39]
Tom Holland
The Tories aren't voting for these cuts.
- [30:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, the Tories will always vote against the government.
- [30:43]
Tom Holland
Okay, but they would presumably be in favor of these cuts. Yeah, they're putting party ahead of country. Oh.
- [30:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, that's just not how politics works, Tom. You're in the opposition. Your duty is to oppose.
- [30:51]
Tom Holland
I mean, basically Mrs. Thatcher agrees with Dennis Healey's diagnosis. Right?
- [30:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
She does. But I mean, they would say, I mean, the opposition, any opposition in this circumstance says this government should be turfed out, we should get rid of them and get a new government in and we vote against them. I mean, it would be unheard of, really, for the opposition to vote with the government on part of the government's own economic agenda. That would be very bizarre.
- [31:15]
Tom Holland
But if the government wins the vote with in a kind of Tory right wit right of the Labour Party alliance, then that's very bad for the government. I'm just playing four dimensional chess here in a way that clearly Mrs. Thatcher wasn't.
- [31:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
That is four dimensions. I think if you're Howard Wilson and the tourists are always going to vote with you on more economic plans, you'd probably take it because it means you can have a, you know, you can have a nice lion or something. You don't have to worry about whipping all your elderly MPs into the, into the voting lobby anymore.
- [31:42]
Tom Holland
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, he may have got the top economics degree at Oxford in its history, but he's not as shrewd a political operator as me.
- [31:49]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, clearly not. Harold Wilson isn't there for this crucial vote. He's at Marcia's birthday party. So anyway, the next day is the 11th and it's Harold Wilson's birthday and he doesn't make the announcement after all. I mean, to be fair to him, it would be crazy to make the announcement in the middle of this kind of sterling crisis. And instead a Cabinet, when he was going to make the announcement, the Cabinet sing Happy Birthday to him instead, led by Shirley Williams. And you know what? Tony Benn wrote about it in his diary? He said it was odious. So that evening, to Wilson's birthday, he doesn't have a fun birthday evening because it's a vote of confidence in his government and it's an incredibly fractious debate. Basically, it's sink or Swim. Healey leads for the government, the Chancellor, and he spends most of his time actually hammering the left, not the right. So he says the left are going to betray the whole of our Labour movement to its enemies if they don't vote for us. And as they all go to vote, there is a massive row. Now, these are in the days before politics, before Parliament was televised, in fact, before Parliament was even broadcast on the radio, so. So you could get away with all kinds of behavior. And Healey actually gets into a brawl, a punch up, A punch up.
- [33:02]
Tom Holland
So he's literally a bruiser.
- [33:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's literally a bruiser and with some of the left wing MPs, and one of them said to the Times, I think it was the next day, complained, he said the Chancellor's verbal behavior was unprincipled and obscene in the extreme. He came across like a drunken oaf.
- [33:17]
Tom Holland
What did he say, Dominic?
- [33:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
He said, callum will have to get his bleeper ready. He said, go and yourselves, you. He shouted this at the. At the Labour, left, left of his own party.
- [33:26]
Tom Holland
Is it in Hansard?
- [33:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
I don't think it's in Hansard, no. No, it's not in Ansard because it says they're going out anyway. At one level, it works because the rebels fall into line and the government survives. But Dennis Healey unwittingly has shot himself in the foot because this is going to be a leadership contest, which there clearly is. He doesn't know it. He will not be well placed, having just shouted this at half of his own party. So Wilson spends the next weekend at Checkers, his country house, with his wife Mary. When he comes back to London on the Monday morning, the 15th, he listens to the news in his car and the news says the markets have opened and they're actually pretty calm. And when he gets to number 10, he says to his civil servants, all systems go, let us do this. So the next day is the Tuesday. It's a regular Cabinet meeting. All his ministers come in and Wilson takes two of them aside beforehand. First of all, he takes Jim Callahan aside, the Foreign Secretary. Callahan is Wilson's oldest rival and he's been part of his government since 1964. So they've always been sort of slightly wary of each other.
- [34:25]
Tom Holland
Frenemies, do you think?
- [34:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Frenemies, exactly. They're like old prize fighters. And Wilson calls him upstairs and Callahan comes down, and he comes down, he's described as looking winded. And when Joe Haynes says, good morning, Jim to him, Callahan just says, is it? And then Wilson takes Healy aside, takes him into the toilet. And Wilson B Wilson, he probably puts on all the taps to make sure they're not being listened to by MI5. We'll come back to this. Healy emerges impassive, and he doesn't give anything away. And then they all sit around the cabinet table. Wilson reads this prepared statement. He says, I've been Labor leader for 13 years. I've decided to step down, give other people a chance. Time for fresh ideas. All of this, some of them started crying. Callahan, who now has this sort of glint in his eye of somebody who's fancying a shot at the top. Job, job. He delivers this tribute and he says, thank you so much, Harold, for all you've done for us and all this kind of thing. The meeting breaks up. They're all in shock. Wilson goes off to ring the trade union leaders. That's a sign of where power lies in Britain, actually. And then he goes up and of course he has to have lunch on his own because of Marcia's prescriptions. So the news is traveling fast. Just before we get to the break, the Times sent a man onto the streets of London to gauge people's reactions that afternoon after the news broke. And some of most people were absolutely amazed that Wilson was going kind of unheard of to walk away with no warning in your pump. But there were some very funny responses. An old man in a cardigan said, you can't control a government with people going against you. I'm a labor man. I have to be because I come from Durham. I say the trouble with the party is there's too many of those left wingers in it. And then the other man whose contribution I enjoy, who was a 78 year old man in a flat cap who used to work for the local council and he absolutely, he said he hated the left. He said it was the left's fault. They were always having a go at him. There's only so much a man can stand. I hate those left wingers. I despise them.
- [36:21]
Tom Holland
And are these representative or have you just cherry picked them?
- [36:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, I cherry pick them. Of course. Of course.
- [36:27]
Tom Holland
There must be some people who. Yeah, I mean particularly they're working for the council from Durham. There must be some people in, in working in councils in Durham who like the left.
- [36:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
I suppose it was fresh in people's minds because Wilson had just had this huge battle with the left. There'd been these stones up business in the House of Commons.
- [36:42]
Tom Holland
Okay, fair enough.
- [36:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
So it's all up for grabs now. Who will the Labour Party pick as the new Prime Minister. Is there perhaps a secret scandal behind Harold Wilson's resignation? And Tom a scandal involving MI5 bugs in Downing street, the South African secret police, some lavender notepaper and a blind man on the corner of the Charing Cross Road. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from the Rest Is Science.
- [37:08]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [37:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lungvax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on Tracer X, the world's
- [37:29]
Tom Holland
largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs.
- [37:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Lungvax is designed to train the immune
- [37:39]
Tom Holland
system to spot these signs early on,
- [37:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
destroying faulty cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year. Focusing on people at higher risk.
- [37:57]
Tom Holland
It shows what long term research makes possible.
- [38:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org therestiscience snoring gasping during sleep?
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- [39:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
Demon Hunters, Haja Boys Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that? What's that, roomie? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take
- [39:55]
Tom Holland
breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [39:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
- [40:11]
Tom Holland
a participating McDonald's while supplies last. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rest Is History, where Harold Wilson has resigned. British politics is in tumult. What happens next, Dominic?
- [40:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, there's all kinds of mystery and all kinds of exciting espionage and sexual scandal detail to come. The general reaction at the time is that there must be some sinister explanation for all this. So most people thought, Harold Wilson is so shifty, he would never just walk away. The Sunday Times called it yet another characteristic confidence trick. Wilson's friend Barbara Castle wrote in her diary. She said, I wonder what exactly Harold is up to. More than meets the eye, I have no doubt.
- [40:56]
Tom Holland
It's like, is it Metternich? When Talleyrand died and he said, I wonder what he means by that. It's that kind of order, isn't it?
- [41:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So the most common rumour at the time, which goes around Westminster and has never really gone away, to be honest, is that he was being framed by the security services over some hideous financial or sexual scandal. And we will come on to this later on because Wilson himself does a lot to fuel these rumors. Anyway, he has his farewell dinner on 22nd March, and it's a very, very miserable and I mean, we mentioned 1970s food. It's a very desultory occasion. The only highlight is when a waiter accidentally poured hollandaise sauce all over Dennis Healey.
- [41:35]
Tom Holland
Accidentally.
- [41:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Maybe it's somebody who's got investments and is paying 98 in tax on his investments or something. Tony Ben said in his diary afterwards, the pathetic thing about tonight, it's only better. So harsh about Harold Wilson. The pathetic thing about tonight is that nobody is sad that he was Going. He hasn't inspired any affection. He's fudged every issue, dodged every difficulty, but kept us in power, kept us together and ground out the administrative decisions.
- [42:02]
Tom Holland
But someone's gonna miss him, right?
- [42:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
The Queen. Well, the Queen, actually. So the Queen comes the next day for dinner at number 10. And this is a signal honor. The Queen only did this, I think for Churchill when he resigned. So for Winston and for Harold Wilson. So she really, I mean she thinks of Harold Wilson as a leader on the scale of Churchill.
- [42:22]
Tom Holland
Yeah, the two titans of 20th century politics.
- [42:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
I'm sure our international listeners, I mean people probably study Wilson, don't they, in like schools in Australia and America and stuff. He's one of the great men of history.
- [42:33]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I imagine that's why we're not shedding listeners to this episode in any
- [42:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
way in the Sydney and New York. So there's then a hiatus while they wait for the Labour MPs to elect a new leader. And that takes another two weeks. At the end of March, there is a sign of trouble to come. Joe Haynes says to his friend Bernard Donahue that he has seen, And I quote, 50 names for peers and knighthoods, all in Marcia's handwriting on, on a sheet of lavender colored notepaper simply ticked by Harold Wilson. We will come back to this. So remember this lavender note paper Wilson finally leaves on the 5th of April. And when the Labour mps have finally picked a successor, we'll tell you who the successor is. At the end of the episode, there was a last lunch for his wife and all his aides. Surprise. They have to stand around for 45 minutes waiting for Marcia to join them. You know, one last little power play from Marcia. And Donahue says in his diary afterwards, he says it was an embarrassing way to go out, but fitting. Harold Wilson went out as he came in, a remarkable man, but too often humiliated and made shabby by this sad association.
- [43:37]
Tom Holland
And the sad association is with Marcia.
- [43:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
With Marcia. But this is not quite the end of the story because that lavender colored list. So this was Wilson's resignation honours list for our overseas listeners. When you resign as Prime Minister, you have one last kind of little chance to dole out patronage to, you know, your cronies and to people you, you know, who've helped you and all this kind of thing. And this has never before been an issue for an outgoing prime minister. But in Wilson's case, it's toxic for his reputation. For weeks, for the last couple of weeks inside number 10, there had been gathering rumors this was going to be a Massive problem. Some of Wilson's civil servants had complained to him that the list was. Was bonkers, that it was full of people in the media who had promised to pay him money for books or for TV series and things. And it's very clear from Donahue's diary, the person they thought had drawn up the list was Marcia Williams. It's Marcia's last chance to influence honours and she is going for the lot. And he and Joe Haynes had some massive rows with Wilson in the final days, begging him to change the list. He is not prepared to listen. He is suicidal. He doesn't seem to care about their reaction to this final and scandalous use of patronage. He just wants to be rid of the whole thing and to buy some peace with Marcia.
- [44:59]
Tom Holland
Do you think it's the onset of dementia?
- [45:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think it's not caring. I think it's. Wilson was always incredibly weak when it came to Marcia. I think, you know that the. Some of the quotes from the first half of the episode where Donahue says, you know, he just. He's tired, he's. He's blown, he's. He doesn't care. I think it's that, actually. I think he just basically thought, yeah, why not? You know, who cares?
- [45:22]
Tom Holland
I just wonder whether it's expressive of a kind of mental decline as well.
- [45:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, there's no doubt there's a. There is a mental decline. How much that is to do with the dementia that basically is consuming him by the beginning of the 1980s, or how much this is just exhaustion, drinking the stress. It's. It's hard to distinguish those two things. And I think he's not a well man. But he's not a well man at all. No, exactly. Then there's a long delay. The list isn't published. And the reason is that the bank of England, the Home Office and the Inland Revenue have complained about some of the names on the list. And Haynes said to Bernard Donahue, there are people on that list that Scotland Yard might in due course, wish to interview, which is not a good sign. And then finally, at the end of May, the list is published and the reaction is a complete meltdown. So there are 42 names on the list and actually most of them are pretty standard. They are like the staff at Downing street, the housekeepers at Chequers, this kind of thing. But some of the names are inflammatory. So Wilson's publisher, George Weidenfeld, he gets a peerage. A property developer called Eric Miller gets a knighthood. Corporate raiders. James Goldsmith, later of the. Was it the Referendum Party, yeah.
- [46:34]
Tom Holland
And father of Jemima.
- [46:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. And Zach.
- [46:37]
Tom Holland
And Zach and Ben.
- [46:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
So James Goldsmith, he gets a knighthood. Another corporate raider called James Hansen gets a knighthood. The man who had made Wilson's raincoats. So the. The Ganex raincoat tycoon. Joseph. Already Sir Joseph Kagan, he gets a peerage.
- [46:57]
Tom Holland
You see, I love a topic on. The rest is history where you get to have the phrase Gannex. Raincoat tycoon.
- [47:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [47:03]
Tom Holland
There aren't that many.
- [47:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, there aren't many.
- [47:05]
Tom Holland
You can get that with Hannibal.
- [47:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, you don't at all. Even Samuel Johnson didn't have a raincoat tycoon. Didn't he? So these are not traditional Labour people. In fact, a lot of them don't even vote Labour. They are friends of Marcia's. So Eric Miller, the property developer, he'd been very close to her. He'd possibly been her lover. There were claims that he had bought her a mews flat in the West End. James Goldsmith, there were claims that he had promised to make her a director of his firm and that he was paying her son's private school fees. And all the newspapers said this was absolutely appalling. The Times, by his last act of patronage, Harold Wilson has succeeded in reducing himself. And not only himself, he has demeaned the office of Prime Minister. And actually, Labour MPs were appalled by this.
- [47:54]
Tom Holland
So what about Tony Ben?
- [47:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Tony Ben? Well, I mean, what's he. He said it was odious when they sang Happy Birthday to Wilson, so he's not gonna be best pleased by this. That he should pick inadequate, buccaneering, sharp shysters for his honors was disgusting. It was unsavoury, disreputable, and it just told the whole Wilson story in a single episode. And Haynes and Donahue go around everywhere and they say to everybody, this is Marcia's list. She wrote it on a lavender notepaper. Wilson is an absolute weakling of a man. Man. And he just handed it in. Now, Marcia and Wilson denied this. Wilson said, this is sexism. And Marcia said, this is snobbery, because you don't like the people on the list. And actually, the row that followed lasted for another. I'm just doing the maths. More than 35 years because Marcia was so angry about this that she was still suing people well into the 21st century.
- [48:47]
Tom Holland
To what effect?
- [48:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
She would win. You couldn't prove that she had done it. And she would say she generally, I think, won the case.
- [48:52]
Tom Holland
And so what's the consensus now?
- [48:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
She definitely did it.
- [48:55]
Tom Holland
Oh, right. Okay.
- [48:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
The BBC did a drama in the late 2000s called, I think, the Lavender List, and she basically forced them to apologize and to withdraw it. She said, you know, there's no evidence. This is a lie. This is, you know, all of this kind of thing. Emily, who is our head of written content, says there are extraordinary Carrie BJ parallels, so listeners can read into that what they will. But she's not wrong, right? I mean, the idea that there's a sort of a Prime Minister who's handing out a departing prime minister, handing out sort of bounty to his cronies, and actually there's some sinister female in the background who is pulling the strings. I mean, that's the sort of Lady Macbeth figure. I mean, you could argue, I suppose, that this is sexism, but in this case, I'm not sure that it is. And what's disastrous for Wilson is the two of the people on the list. Scotland Yard does wish to interview them. So Eric Miller, who is the guy who. Who had supposedly bought Marcia a flat. A year later, he was charged with fraud, theft and forgery. And he shot himself.
- [49:57]
Tom Holland
Oh, no.
- [49:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
So that looked very bad for Wilson.
- [49:59]
Tom Holland
And what about the Ganex raincoat tycoon? How does he bear up?
- [50:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, no, this is a terrible story. The Ganex raincoat tycoon, Joseph Kagan, I mean, he's the sort of poster boy for Harold Wilson's resignation. On his list, he was charged with tax evasion. 1978, he was charged, bizarrely, with stealing barrels of dye from his own raincoat company.
- [50:21]
Tom Holland
Wow. What was he doing with it?
- [50:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
I don't know. Maybe secretly dyeing, Making rival raincoats. Making his own raincoats. Who knows?
- [50:29]
Tom Holland
Buying them lavender.
- [50:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. He ended up in prison where he literally sewed mailbags. And he lost his knighthood, but not his peerage. And he returned to the House of Lords and became a campaigner for penal reform. But this is not the only blow to Harold Wilson's reputation. We are moving fast towards that blind man on the Charing Cross Road. So, in the 1974 series, we described how Wilson had been increasingly paranoid that he was being spied on by the security services. He thought MI5 was stealing his tax documents. He told his ministers that there was a bug in the Cabinet Room ceiling. And he was also convinced that there was some sort of listening device hidden inside a portrait of Gladstone. Now, there is actually a degree of truth in this, as we talked about in 2024. In the 1940s, Wilson, as a trade minister, had visited Moscow. And ever since then, Mi5 had kept a file on him under the name Norman John Worthington. And some of the. At least one of the people on that list had links to the kgb. Joseph Kagan, the Ganex raincoat tycoon, used to go and I think play chess with a KGB man from the Soviet embassy. And the claim is that maybe this was because he had family back in Lithuania here, but also it could be more dodgy. Also, there were bugs in number 10. They had been installed under Harold Macmillan in the 50s. The Official History of MI5 by Christopher Andrews says they were defunct and no longer maintained. And to be honest, most of Wilson's own aides and ministers thought he was bonkers about all this. They thought he was paranoid. So when Tony Benn brought all this up with James Callahan, Wilson's successor, Callahan told him the story about the Gladstone portrait, but Callahan didn't tell it, as in, gosh, maybe there is a bug in the portrait. Callahan told it as a joke against Wilson to say Wilson's, you know, lost the plot. But Wilson believes all this. And it's compounded by 1976 by a scandal that we talked about in the early days of the rest is history. It's great to welcome back to the show fan favorite Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the tiny Liberal Party. So the Liberals, for context, have only 13 MPs now, just a month after Wilson left office, Thorpe resigned as leader of the Liberals. And the reason we did an episode on this in the early days of the show, it turned out that Thorpe had once had an affair with a former stable groom called Norman Scott. Scott held a grudge against him because he believed that Thorpe had stolen his National Insurance card. They could never forgive this. Anyway, Scott eventually comes out and he says, jeremy Thorpe had this affair with me. He stole my National Insurance card. And what is worse, he plotted to have me murdered by an airline pilot on a moor. And I wasn't murdered, but my dog Rinka was murdered. And that's terrible. Thorpe first of all said this was a lie. He said, I'm being framed by the South African Security Service. Boss.
- [53:24]
Tom Holland
They're not called Boss.
- [53:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, they were called Boss. That was what they're called. B, O, s s. That's so 70s. I'm being framed by boss because I'm anti apartheid. And Wilson believed him. He completely believed him. In February 1976, Wilson made Donahue stay behind after work for three hours to discuss it. It, and I quote, he is absolutely convinced that the South Africans are behind it. The PM is loving it all since it appeals to all his obsessions with plots, spies, leaks, conspiracies, etc, Wilson's confidence by and large said to him, please don't pursue this. You know, this is mad from you. So in March, Barbara Castle, one of his ministers, had lunch with him and he said to her, I and Marcia, or as he called her, Detective Inspector Falkenda because she's now Lady Falkender. We have looked into this and we have conclusive proof that it is a South African plot. Castle said to him, please don't pursue this. This is insane. Why would boss, the South African Security Service, why would they pick on the Liberal Party, which has only 13 MPs? Why would they go to all this effort to bring down a man that basically nobody outside Britain has ever heard of?
- [54:31]
Tom Holland
I mean, I suppose the South African American government hates liberals.
- [54:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
It does hate liberals, it hates anti apartheid campaigns, which Thorpe was. But really you're gonna. Well, the problem is Castle Auto says also Jeremy Thorpe was having an affair with this bloke.
- [54:45]
Tom Holland
How does she know that?
- [54:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Do you know the person who's looked into it for her? Who? Jack Straw, the future Blair Wright, Home Secretary who worked for her, looked into it, did some digging and found out, basically. I don't know how they found it out, but it was, it basically was common knowledge by this point. Wilson just wouldn't listen. He was deaf to reason. That same day that he had the lunch with Barbara Carson, he went to the Commons. He said to the Commons, Thorpe is being targeted by South African intelligence. They are using massive reserves of business money and private agents of various kinds. He said it publicly. Anyway, we've now moved on to May after Wilson's resignation on 9 May, the Sunday Times published letters that showed that Thorpe had been having an affair with this bloke Luke. It's that the letters, Tom, if you may recall, that have the telltale and damning phrase bunnies can and will go to France.
- [55:38]
Tom Holland
Spoken very, very entertaining by Hugh Grant in the dramatization of this story.
- [55:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. You have to imagine that being said with enormous amount of suggestiveness. The next day, Thorpe resigned as leader of the Liberal Party. But Wilson just will not give this up. He is still convinced that Thorpe is being framed. And so two days later, Wilson runs rang a BBC journalist, a young journalist called Barry Penrose. He just basically picked him out of a telephone book or something and said, come to my flat in Westminster, I've got a story for you. So Penrose roped in this mate of his called Roger Courtier, who was a researcher at the BBC. And they both go along to Wilson's flat in Lord North Street. When they get there, they find Wilson there, is puffing on a cigar. And Wilson says to them, I think democracy as we know it is in grave danger. He says, the British security services were out to get me for years. They spread rumors that I was running a communist cell in Downing Street. And these BBC blokes can't believe this. I mean, this guy was Prime Minister just a few weeks ago. And then he. He's very calm. He's still puffing on his cigar. He says, they were saying that I was tied up with the communists. The link was Marcia. She was supposed to be a dedicated communist. And he goes on to say. He says, norman Scott, this stable bloke, is a South African agent, and he's part of a wider conspiracy with MI5. He says, I want you to crack the case. If you can crack the case, you'll be the Woodward and Bernstein of British journalism. This is the British Watergate. And then he reaches this mad peroration. He sort of looks them in the eye, puffs on his cigar, and he says, I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Room. Sometimes I speak when I'm asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man might tell you something, might lead you somewhere. And they leave. And I mean, obviously they're like, you know, I can't. They're in their 20s or early 30s or something. They cannot believe that the Prime Minister of Great Britain from just a few weeks earlier is telling them this stuff about being a spider in the Charing Cross Road. And they believe it. And they spend months following his leads. And the irony is they. They follow this mad cul de sac about South Africa, and they completely miss the truth that Jeremy thought was not a terribly good person and was trying to kill Norman Scott, which is a madder story, really, than the. The one they investigate. Eventually, the BBC lost patience and said to these guys, Penrose and Kot, enough did this. Now they shut the investigation down. They then sold the story to the newspapers, and the Daily Mirror splashed it under the excellent headline. Wilson feared Marcia was being lured into a sex orgy. This is an absolute disaster for Wilson's reputation. He and Marcia immediately published statements, and they said, oh, that he was just joking about being a spider. He was just joking about the blind man on the Charing Cross Road. But obviously, everybody who knew him in Westminster, said, this does sound like the kind of thing Harold would say. He's been saying mad stuff like this for the last few years and Marcy has been going around telling everybody that boss are out to get her and Jeremy Thorpe, with whom she was quite friendly. Most people at this point just conclude that he's a fantasist. So when Tony Ben again asked James Callaghan about it, Callahan said, oh, Harold is just a Walter Mitty, I. E. Somebody who's just making up mad stuff in his head. And actually that sets the tone for Wilson after he's left office, because the next few years bring a very sad decline. He'd never had many close friends in politics and he seems to Vanish, really, after 1976. So within a year or so, there are clear signs, I think, that the Alzheimer's is beginning to claim him. In December 1978, Donahue had a drink with Wilson's former driver. And the driver, who's called Bill Howist, said nobody visits him. He has no friends. It's very sad. He still drinks much too much and his memory is completely going. He can't remember where he's going in the evening. And he had one last turn in the limelight, which people can see bits of on YouTube. It is excruciating. He was invited to be the guest presenter on a BBC chat show called Friday Night Sunday morning. It's in October 1979. It's like a sort of nightmare that you have that you're playing Hamlet and you haven't done, you know, you haven't learned the lines because he's sitting there and he's interviewing Pat Phoenix, the actress from, I think, Coronation street, and he interviews Harry Secombe and he runs out of questions. There are long pauses. It's really awkward. He stumbles over his words, he can't read the auto cue. Even the short clips on YouTube are actually quite a painful watch. And after that, he pretty much vanished. And the mad thing is really, he had been the defining politician of the 60s and 70s in Britain. So when he resigned in 1976, all the obituaries, sort of political obituaries, said this will be remembered as the Wilson era. But actually, nobody ever uses that phrase. Nobody talks about Wilsonism. And as early as 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, it was as though he'd never existed. He just was completely absent from the political conversation. Some historians since then, I mean, not that many people write about the Wilson government, to be honest. Some historians, because historians probably tend. Academics tend to be Slightly more left leaning. They're keener to rehabilitate him. They say, well, there were the liberal reforms of the 60s.
- [61:12]
Tom Holland
He kept Britain out of the Vietnam War, didn't he?
- [61:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I mean that's the thing he's praised for most and I think it's a reasonable thing to praise him for. He. He refused to get involved with the Vietnam War, but it's a negative achievement rather than a positive one. And I think when he came in in 1964, he was have dreamed of being remembered for much more sort of substantive things.
- [61:31]
Tom Holland
I mean, you said he was brilliantly clever, but I guess it just shows that being clever isn't everything.
- [61:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's not everything, yeah. I mean, I think my verdict on him in my book Seasons in the sun was he was one of the cleverest and kindest men ever to inhabit number 10. But sadly he was also one of the weakest. You know, he used the weakness almost as an asset because it meant that he never upset his party. He was brilliant at keeping his party together, but he also, he did that by deferring decisions and sort of not doing anything thing. St. Bernard Donahue's memoirs. Donahue, who worked for him as his policy advisor, like his senior advisor said of him, you know, we wasted our time in Downing street, completely failed to take to tackle Britain's economic and industrial weakness. And basically all of this left an open goal for Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. And Dennis Healey, who obviously was his Chancellor, gave an interview in the 2000s, someone said, what do you think of Harold Wilson? Tennessee said he was a terrible Prime Minister, which is kind of harsh when you've been his Chancellor. Anyway, he's gone now, so someone's got to replace him now then. The 70s was a saner time than today because they didn't allow activists any role in picking the leader. It was just the MPs. Anyway, this contest to succeed Wilson in some ways has been going on for more than a decade. So starting really when the first Wilson government ran out of trouble in 1966, people had speculated about who would succeed him. And for a lot of that period, that intervening period, the favourite had been a man called Roy Jenkins, who was the Home Secretary in chancellor in the 60s and is now Home Secretary again. And Roy Jenkins was the son of a miner. He went to Balliol College, Oxford. He has this smooth, urbane, very wiggish style. He can't pronounce his R's properly. He is the darling of the sort of society hostesses of the high minded.
- [63:23]
Tom Holland
He's a rest his politics man, isn't he?
- [63:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's so restless politics. He completely is. He loves Europe, he loves sensible people, moderation, Claret, all of this kind of stuff. All of this actually means that he has now fallen out of favour with the Labour Party which has moved to
- [63:42]
Tom Holland
the left because it's all horny handed. Sons of toil.
- [63:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. There's a good story told by Neil Kinnock that one of Jenkins's acolytes went canvassing in the House of Commons tea room and he came up to the table that Kinnock was at with a load of other Labour mp' and he said, will you be voting for Roy Jenkins? And the Yorkshire MP said, no, lad, we're all Labour here. Very good, very good. Great repartee. So there's Roy Jenkins. Another candidate is Jenkins's former best friend and possibly former lover, Anthony Crosland, who he'd been mates with at Oxford. So they'd been very, very close. Crosland had sort of matinee idol, good looks that has now. He's now turned into a lounge list. I think when you Google him, he's the Environment Secretary. He had been the party's great intellectual in the 50s. He was a big football fan. He took Henry Kissinger to watch Grimsby Town play Gillingham.
- [64:31]
Tom Holland
Did Kissinger enjoy it?
- [64:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And after Kissinger left office, after the Gerald Ford fell from power, Crossland took Kissinger to watch Chelsea vs Wolverhampton Wanderers.
- [64:42]
Tom Holland
And did Wolves win?
- [64:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
I don't actually know. I should. That's stupid of me not to look that up up. But, well, listeners, it's good to let the listeners do a little bit of work, I think. So this Jenkins and this is ex pal Crossland, who's a very long shot. There's one other candidate on the right really and that is Dennis Healey. You know Dennis Healey, he's gone around punching people in the face and quoting Emily Dickinson to them.
- [65:05]
Tom Holland
That's not the way to win votes, is it?
- [65:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, no, no. He's never going to win. But he throws his hat in the ring anyway. So there's the right wing candidates, then we've got the left wing candidates. So we've got Tony Ben from last time talking about how much he loves the unions, how much he hates Europe, hates NATO, hates capital, all of that.
- [65:19]
Tom Holland
He hasn't been stung on the penis yet by wasp, has he? But that's to come.
- [65:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Not yet. The other candidate on the left is Michael Foote and he is the sort of sentimental party favorite. He's a brilliant Speaker. He's a brilliant essayist. He's a fan of Jonathan Swift and of Byron and all of these kind of 18th century writers. He looks a million years old. Like he looks older than he is.
- [65:43]
Tom Holland
Very long white hair, hasn't he?
- [65:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [65:45]
Tom Holland
And he dresses scruffily and that's something that we'll come back to bite him in due course.
- [65:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. He wears an ill advised coat at
- [65:51]
Tom Holland
a donkey jacket, I believe.
- [65:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Reverence day service. He looked like an out of work navvy. I think it was my favorite newspaper. Verdict on. On microphone Anyway, he's Employment Secretary and his job is to suck up to the trade unions and he's going to be the other left wing candidate and then that leaves the middle of the party and the candidate at the center. And this is the great titan of British history, Jim Callahan. And I'm delighted to say we'll be talking a lot more about Jim Callahan in the next episode.
- [66:19]
Tom Holland
So he's the Sandbrook candidate.
- [66:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, I like Dennis Healey as well, to be fair, Callahan, just to give you a slight sense. We'll get more into him next time. He's the son of a Royal Navy petty officer from Portsmouth. He Left school at 17, he never went to university. He rose through the ranks of the unions and the Labour Party. He's already been Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. So he's done the hat trick.
- [66:40]
Tom Holland
I said, dominic, if he, if he becomes Prime Minister, he will be the only person in British history who's ever done that. Right?
- [66:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly. The grand Slam. A massive achievement, massive stakes. His nickname is the keeper of the cloth Cap because he is seen as having this sort of mystical link to the working classes. He's this big bloke. He's avuncular. Everyone always says avuncular. By law, you have to use that word when you're talking about Jim Gallahan. He's a bit of a bully, but he's quite sort of solid and reassured.
- [67:08]
Tom Holland
He has the definitive 1970s kind of glasses.
- [67:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I know.
- [67:13]
Tom Holland
It's like kind of like Ronnie Barker and Smiley. And he's just the embodiment of 1970s spectacles wearing man.
- [67:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
He is. And the other thing he does in the, he wears his trousers incredibly high. So he has very, very high rise trousers. Anyway, he's been plotting for the leadership for more than a decade and unlike the other people standing, he doesn't give any interviews, he doesn't publish any policies, he doesn't even appear on tv. He says, everybody knows where I stand. He has brilliant connections with the Labour mps, he thinks, I don't need to really bother with a public campaign. They know where I stand. Let's see if I can do this. They have the first ballot on the 25th of March. It's all a bit less dramatic than the Tory business with Margaret Thatcher and it's a sign of just how exhausted and how kind of gray and threadbare they all are. Really, really. Of the. Also Rands Crosland comes bottom. He gets 17, Healey gets 31. Jenkins with his. Can't pronounce his Rs. He gets 56, which is a really poor showing from him given that he had been the favourite a few years earlier. It's a sign of how his Euro enthusiasm has hamstrung him. So he's going to go off to Europe actually and run the European Commission. On the left, Tony Ben does much worse than you might expect. He only gets 37 and that's because a lot of MPs, as we discussed last week, they say, you know, he's very polite and he's very courteous and he's charming, but I hate him.
- [68:39]
Tom Holland
They're voting on the personality, not the issues, I think.
- [68:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Which he would despise. And Michael Foot goes, is way ahead of him on 90. Michael Foote gets 90 with his long white hair and his love of.
- [68:52]
Tom Holland
Yeah, he hasn't it.
- [68:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. He's the front runner at this stage.
- [68:56]
Tom Holland
God, I mean, imagine if they let Michael Foot as leader of the Labour Party. That would be mad.
- [69:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
They'd never do that. Surely. Callahan is. Is just behind him on 84 and that's fine because basically he knows he'll hoover up all the votes of the other right wing people. Second ballot, they've all pull out, all the also rans pull out, except for Healey. Healey fights on out of just bloody mindedness and being difficult. Callahan's now narrowly in the lead, 141 to 133 for foot. And the third ballot, Healey finally drops out. So Callaghan picks up most of his votes and callahan on Monday 5th April is having lunch on his own in his Commons office and the chairman of the parliamentary party, Cladwin Hughes, comes and knocks on the door and he says, we've got the results. You have beaten Michael Foote by 176 votes to 137. And Callahan had this hard man image, but he actually starts crying at this point and he says very slowly and very revealingly, I think Prime Minister of Great Britain and I never went to A university. And Hughes says to him, well, you're in good company. The two greatest prime ministers of the century didn't go to university. Lloyd George and Churchill. And then Callahan's aides come in to congratulate him. And again he harps on the same theme. He says to one of them, there are many cleverer people than me in the Labour Party, but they're there and I'm here. You can see the chip on his shoulder. Anyway, he then goes and addresses all the Labour MPs. He gives them a nice unity speech. He says, you know, clean slate after all the fighting of the Wilson years. And then he gets in the car to take him to Buckingham palace. And that night he addresses the British people for the first time as Prime Minister. And his aides prepared him a speech, but interestingly he tweaked it because he wanted to emphasize the theme of restoring traditional values. And he says, you know, priority is to fight inflation. We're going to stop borrowing so much money. We stop going deeper and deeper into debt. No one owes Britain a living. He says, I mean, this is the
- [70:57]
Tom Holland
kind of speech that Mrs. Thatcher could have given.
- [70:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
You're not wrong. Because if you look at the rest of it, we've got to stop appeasing the greedy and graspy and selfish. He wants an end to vandalism and violence. The family is at the heart of the battle for our national survival. Parents should stand firm in defense of old fashioned morality. And above all, he wants a national effort to uphold our values and our standards. And Tom, this is top Sandbrook Daily Mail column. Bingo, isn't it? And it's a sign that Callaghan is going to be a very different kind of Prime Minister from Harold Wilson. So you might think everything is looking great for Britain and for Big Jim, but no. On his first full day as Prime Minister, one of his junior ministers called. Brian o' Malley died after brain surgery in hospital. On his second day as Prime Minister, another Labour mp, a disgraced Labour MP called. This is very hard to explain in one sentence, but basically a disgraced Labor MP called John Stonehouse, who had faked his own death on a beach in Miami and then turned up in Melbourne and was arrested as a friend fraudster. He quits the. He's returned to British politics. He quits the party and he says there should be an immediate general election. So now Callaghan has no majority at all. After just a couple of days. He's got 314 seats. All the others put together have got 316 seats. And to Survive, he has to rely on the votes of two Northern Irish nationalist MPs called Jerry Fitt and Frank Maguire. So that's pretty bad. He's got no majority. And then just a few days after that, the Governor of the bank of England comes to see him and says, I've got terrible news. I've got really, really, really bad news. The pound is collapsing once again. We are running out of money. Britain is staring into the abyss of bankruptcy. And it seems that Jim Callaghan's premiership is doomed before it is even properly begun.
- [72:58]
Tom Holland
What will Dominic's great hero do? You can find out in the thrilling climax of this epic series. And on that thrilling climax, we will also be welcoming onto the Rest Is History for the first time, the Sex Pistols. So Rest is History Club members can hear that episode right now. And to join them, of course, you know, we've got to do head to the Rest is History dot com. If not, you just have to wait. But we will be back with the Sex Pistols. Goodbye.
- [73:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Goodbye.
- [73:33]
Tom Holland
We have an absolutely thrilling announcement to make.
- [73:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, Tom, this is probably the most thrilling announcement we've ever made on the Rest Is History because we have a very special bespoke Rest is History T shirt available to celebrate our new series about Britain in the 1970s. These were great years. Crazy scenes, of course, behind the door number 10, Britain had to go, I believe the technical term is cap in hand, to the International Monetary Fund for a record bailout. And of course, Tony Benn was funding factories that made both car radiators and orange juice. And what you're probably thinking, Tom, is how can I get a T shirt that somehow captures the spirit of those tremendous years?
- [74:19]
Tom Holland
So what we have done is to commission Graham Johnson, who is one of our beloved Athelstans, to come back with another stunning design. And this time, this is so brilliant. Must be the only T shirt ever to feature the heads of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and James Callahan. And if you're not British, I mean,
- [74:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
what's wrong with you?
- [74:47]
Tom Holland
This will be the most exclusive, the most exclusive T shirt design ever. Imagine walking the streets of Peoria with your James Callahan T shirt. Unmissable. So, Dominic, here's the question. How can people go about getting their hands on one of these unbelievable items?
- [75:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Just head to therestishistory.com and go to our merch page.
- [75:12]
Tom Holland
And for our wonderful club members, do keep an eye out for this week's newsletter, which will include a special discount for friends for the show and an even more exciting discount for our ever beloved Athelstans and you can use this code on all the rest is history merch.
- [75:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Now, if you're not yet a member of the show, you're probably thinking, I really want one of these T shirts. I'm desperate for a discount. I'm missing out on all the unbelievable benefits that you get through club membership. Well, here's the thing. Now is the time to sign up. You can go just as Britain went to the International Monetary Fund. Cap in hand. Cap in hand. Go to therestishistory.com to sign up and you will get, I mean, even more largesse than Britain got from the IMF in 1976. It'll be absolutely brilliant. So please go to the restishistory.com and sign up. You'll get all the discounts you can buy your merch. You can get all the tremendous benefits that you get from being a member. You'll never, ever be happier, and you will never, ever regret it. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever. Have no fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. With cooking oils, salad dressings and mayo,
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Tom Holland
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Dominic Sandbrook
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