Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
Earlier this year, I wrote two pieces on the end of Heath’s government and the February 1974 General Election campaign. This period came to represent the nadir of the post-war consensus for many Conservative politicians and commentators. Edward Heath seemed charmless, directionless and drifting like his yacht Morning Cloud on a tide of industrial turmoil. He almost begged the voters to renew his mandate to stand up to the militant trades’ unions, but their patience had ended.
Following the Conservative defeat on the Thursday night, Heath wouldn’t call Pickford’s to summons the furniture removal van on Friday. Instead, he spent the weekend in Downing Street attempting to persuade the Liberal Party Leader, Jeremy Thorpe, to join a coalition. Thorpe was not enthusiastic, and any potential deal unravelled instantly over his demand to introduce Proportional Representation in future elections. Finally, Heath vacated Downing Street at 6.30pm on the Monday.
The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was a tired and prematurely elderly man when he appeared on 10 Downing Street’s doorstep later that day. Despite only being 57, he was now hunched with white hair and his eyes looked permanently weary. Wilson’s Press Secretary, Joe Haines, later commented that his boss experienced “one cold after another”, as well as persistent styes beneath his eyes. Wilson also came to suffer from chronic diarrhoea, which he referred to as “the squitters”. A specialist warned him that “physical changes were taking place which were likely to affect his mental powers”.
The other domestic problems that Wilson faced were entirely of his own making. Firstly, he had the most bizarre relationship with his Political Secretary, Mrs. Marcia Williams. She was to become one of the government’s most influential figures, even attempting to chair a Cabinet meeting when the P.M. was laid low. She became infamous for her crude bullying of Wilson, calling him a “Yorkshire Walter Mitty”. Sometimes Marcia even called him “a little c*nt” to his face and whilst in the presence of Haines and Bernard Donoughue, the Chief Policy Advisor. When she really got angry, she would say “One call to the Daily Mail and he’ll be finished. I will destroy him.” Wilson never dared to replace her.
On one occasion, Williams approached Mary Wilson, Harold’s poetry-loving “official” wife, and stated, “I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.” After this, Wilson remarked to Haines: “Well, she has dropped her atomic bomb at last. She can’t hurt me anymore.” Once Haines remarked to Donoughue that Wilson had become “the man with two wives”. Donoughue agreed and observed ironically that he returned to Mary for some peace and quiet from Marcia.
Secondly, if Marcia was the old flame that Wilson could not safely extinguish, then 22-year-old Jane Hewlett-Davies, his Deputy Press Secretary, described as a “saucy young blonde” by Haines, became his new romantic interest from 1974 onwards. It is alleged that the two had liaisons in the flat above Downing Street after most of the staff had left for the day.
Finally, Wilson’s alcohol dependency worsened. By 1974, he drank brandy throughout the day. To illustrate this, it was noted that in his last years, Wilson always drank four brandies before weekly P.M.Q.s and two immediately afterwards. Donoughue recorded in his diary: “When he drinks, he becomes very strange and aggressive. His brow lowers and a very strange look comes into his eyes. Rather hunched and brooding.”
Gone was the enthusiasm and optimism Wilson possessed when first elected Prime Minister ten years earlier. There was no more mention of the technological revolution and modernisation. Instead, upon re-entering No. 10, Wilson just raised a hand to the journalists and said, “We’ve got a job to do.” Even the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror remarked that “It wasn’t like old times.”
For the next couple of years, Wilson chose not to live in Downing Street, treating it as his place of work. He remained domiciled at his rented property in Lord North Street and a car chauffeured him to work each morning at 9am. Following the appointment of his Cabinet, Wilson privately remarked: “They are going to do the bloody work, while I have an easy time.”
The feeling of despondency extended to Wilson’s colleagues, most of whom were veterans of the 1964-70 era. Barbara Castle wrote in her diary of “a kind of dread at the resumption of a feverish round of meetings and paperwork.” She commented that when she returned to the Cabinet Room, there was “no stardust left”. However, she couldn’t but help notice that Heath had renovated No. 10 in Labour’s absence, albeit in “appalling taste” with gold carpeting and gold moire curtains.
Historians now know that Wilson hesitated to remain Labour Leader following his 1970 defeat.
Four days before the February 1974 election, most opinion polls forecasted a Conservative victory. Wilson thus contemplated an end to his political career. This didn’t seem to upset him at all. In fact, he secretly looked forward to retirement. Throughout the campaign, journalists noted that he appeared to be going through the motions for his party’s benefit. The Sunday Times described him as “withdrawn, nervous, tentative, apprehensive, not to say distinctly bored with the whole affair”. On the election trail, he adopted an almost leisurely style, mostly speaking to small audiences in Labour Clubs.
Who could blame him? With inflation growing, industry running on a three-day week and the miners on strike, who would relish the task of handling that? However, by dawn on Friday, Labour had four more constituencies than the Conservatives. Wilson was to become the first leader of a minority government since Ramsay McDonald in 1929.
A few days afterwards, Wilson was told by the financier Siegmund Warburg that the U.K. was in the midst of “…the most serious economic crisis in its history, a crisis which indeed is not only of a material character but is a crisis of the whole fabric of our society”. Unfortunately, apart from Tony Benn, who advocated adopting red-blooded socialist measures, most of Wilson’s team didn’t have a clue how to resolve this crisis. Donoughue said that he could not recall “a single sustained discussion in Cabinet or Cabinet Committee of central economic policy”.
The first task the government faced was ending the miner’s strike. The N.U.M. demanded from Heath a wage package worth £138 million. Within 24 hours, Employment Secretary Michael Foot struck a deal with them worth a £108 million increase, which doubled Heath’s offer. Donoughue privately commented “It was really a capitulation on the miners’ terms.”
In July 1974, Heath’s pay restraint policy expired, and each trades’ union rushed to get a better deal than the next. When Barbara Castle asked union baron Clive Jenkins to help her deflect the possibility of a nationwide nurses’ strike, Jenkins replied with one word: “No.” Faced with the prospect of following Heath into oblivion, the government bought off the nurses, followed by the teachers, postal workers, B.A. air hostesses and civil servants. The biggest pay rise was 28% at the BBC. No wonder that one grateful union boss referred to Wilson’s government as “a gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that had suddenly got stuck in favour of the customer.”
The Economist accurately commented that “…the one overriding objective of the government’s economic policy is to be returned to power with a comfortably higher share of the vote at the next General Election.” So, the government planned to spend a further £1.5 billion on target voters in pre-election sweeteners. In total, public expenditure increased by 35% in 1974-75, and a further 25% in 1975-76.
On the 26th March, the new Chancellor, Denis Healey, unveiled his first budget. To finance the pay rise jamboree, taxes were raised by £1.4 billon, with the standard rate of income tax set at 33% and the higher rare at 83%. Corporation tax was set at 52% and tax on unearned and investment income shot up to 98%. Within four days, the FT30 Index plunged by 30 points. Meanwhile, within the following 12 months, public borrowing increased to £8 billion, almost £5 billion more than predicted. A year later, it rose to 11 billion. So, inflation rose to four times that in West Germany, eventually forcing the government to humiliatingly seek support from the International Monetary Fund in 1976.
In Adam Sisman’s biography of the left-wing historian A.J.P. Taylor, Taylor wrote to his Hungarian lover around this time remarking “You can’t realise how near we are to catastrophe: all our banks may close their doors in a few months’ time. You are lucky to be living in a Communist country and safe from such things.”
I hope to return to the story of the disastrous 1974 to 1976 Labour government in the New Year.