Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

money was two quid, this prospect of riches – enough for two LPs – helped to numb the pain of the blows and raillery that my fluting treble voice had earned me. I spent many happy hours, while nursing my wounds, deciding which albums to buy. The Who’s Live at Leeds had to be one, surely. And maybe Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, or Neil Young’s After the Goldrush, or even Al Stewart’s Zero She Flies, so I could play along to them on my guitar. Then again, it was hard to resist The Groundhogs’ Thank Christ for the Bomb, whose title track I’d heard on John Peel’s Radio One show. My politics at the time were inchoate (‘wishy-washy liberal’ was how I defined myself if asked), but I was enough of a hippy – insofar as one could be a hippy at a school where short hair was obligatory and the dress code included straw hats and tailcoats – to know that the Bomb was a bummer, man. It amused and puzzled me that three hairy scruffs in an electric blues band were singing in praise of nuclear deterrence and the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, rightly known as MAD, and implying that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn’t been all bad: ‘Since that day it’s been stalemate,/Everyone’s scared to obliterate./So it seems for peace we can thank the Bomb …’ If I bought the LP and listened to it every evening on my Dansette portable gramophone with the requisite brow-furrowed intensity, I’d deconstruct its meaning sooner or later. Was ‘Thank Christ for the Bomb’ somehow ironic, in a fashion beyond my teenage comprehension? Or so robustly conservative that it could be added to the Harrow School songbook without any parent – not even Margaret Thatcher, then the Secretary of State for Education – having a fit of the vapours?

      Winston Churchill loved his old school songs. During the Second World War many of them had extra verses added in his honour, which we still sang a quarter of a century later:

      Nor less we praise in sterner days the leader of our nation, And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim from each new generation. While in this fight to guard the right our country you defend, sir, Here grim and gay we mean to stay and stick it to the end, sir!

      The man invited by Churchill’s widow as her escort on 4 December 1970 was the latest leader of our nation, Edward Heath, who had won a most unexpected victory in the general election that June. I remember wondering, during rehearsals, if he too would win acclaim from future generations. It seemed rather unlikely on his performance so far. Still, give the man a chance. Who could tell what wonders this plodding galoot might yet accomplish by staying grim and gay and sticking it to the end?

      There were two things everyone knew about Ted Heath: he was a great sailor and a talented orchestral conductor, or at least so he thought. At Churchill Songs he insisted on taking the baton for a while, though thankfully not while I sang my new boy’s solo: ‘Five hundred faces and all so strange./Life in front of me, home behind./I felt like a waif before the wind,/Tossed on an ocean of shock and change …’ Then he made a short speech, in which he confessed that he’d felt nervous about conducting the school orchestra – ‘far less confident than the young Mr Wheen, who sang so beautifully’. All most gratifying, but where was my fiver? Perhaps no one had told him what was expected, or perhaps (as I concluded) he was a graceless and ungenerous oaf. Either way, the Prime Minister scuttled back to 10 Downing Street leaving the school eunuch penniless.

Which is a pretty fair summary of what he did to the rest of the country over the next three years or so, as he and his ministers struggled like waifs before the wind, tossed on an ocean of shock and change. In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970, when British economic policy followed the neo-Keynesian route known as Butskellism,^* a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five. The first occurred within a month of his election. Another came in December 1970, soon after his visit to Harrow School songs, when a go-slow in the electricity supply industry gave Britons their first experience in a generation of regular power cuts, soon to become indelibly synonymous with the Heath era. (Rather enjoyable they were, too, for those of us still at school: an unimpeachable new excuse for late homework.) The national miners’ strike of January 1972 – the first since 1926 – brought yet another state of emergency, though this time the Prime Minister dithered for a full month before imposing it. What eventually panicked him into action was the closure of the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham on 10 February after a six-day struggle between eight hundred police and fifteen thousand ‘flying pickets’ led by a bolshie young Lenin from the Yorkshire coalfields, Arthur Scargill. ‘We took the view that we were in a class war,’ Scargill said. ‘We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in ’26. We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies … We had to declare war on them and the only way you could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points.’

      As usual at times of crisis, everything seemed to be happening at once. A few months earlier Heath had introduced internment without trial in Northern Ireland, hoping to thwart the renascent IRA by rounding up its commanders, but intelligence on the terrorists was so erratic that dozens of innocent people were caught in the net as well. Appalling stories soon began to emerge. The civil rights leader Michael Farrell described being kicked and thumped as he and other prisoners were made to run between two lines of baton-wielding soldiers. Some internees had to stand on a tea chest and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, and were beaten if they refused; others were attacked by military guard dogs. Eleven suspects, known as the guinea pigs, were subjected to ‘disorientation techniques’ which the British Army had developed during colonial wars in Kenya and Aden, and which would be revived more than thirty years later by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. ‘All were blindfolded by having a hood, two layers of fabric thick, placed over their heads,’ the Sunday Times revealed in October 1971. ‘These hoods remained on their heads for up to six days. Each man was then flown by helicopter to an unknown destination – in fact Palace Barracks. During the period of their interrogation they were continuously hooded, barefoot, dressed only in an over-large boiler suit and spread-eagled against a wall … The only sound that filled the room was a high-pitched throb … The noise literally drove them out of their minds.’

      The insanity was contagious. British forces were clearly out of control, as were the British politicians who had sent them to Northern Ireland. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver, chief of the general staff, recalls ‘a legal luminary in the Cabinet’ proposing that his troops should shoot everyone – even unarmed civilians – who got in their way, since these people were ‘the Queen’s enemies’. When Carver warned Ted Heath that ‘I could not, under any circumstances, order or allow a British soldier to be ordered to do such a thing because it would not be lawful,’ the Prime Minister replied that his legal advisers ‘suggested it was all right’.

Heath himself was by now incapable of thinking rationally. The purpose of internment had been to placate Ulster unionists and snuff out militant republicanism, but it achieved just the opposite: declaring that mere detention without trial couldn’t contain the threat, the Rev. Ian Paisley set up a fifteen-thousand-strong vigilante group called the Third Force; other loyalists created a new paramilitary army, the UDA. Meanwhile, the round-up and torture of their fellow Catholics outraged the nationalist population and gave a huge recruitment boost to the Provisional IRA. On Sunday, 30 January 1972, in defiance of an official ban on demonstrations, anti-internment protesters marched through Derry under the banners of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Thirteen of them were shot dead by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment; another died from his injuries four months later.^* ‘Bloody Sunday’ provoked condemnation of Heath’s government around the world and riotous scenes nearer home: a furious crowd in Dublin burned down the British Embassy; the nationalist MP Bernadette Devlin punched the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, in the chamber of the House of Commons. (Maudling can scarcely have been surprised. On his first visit to the province, the previous summer, he made it plain that he wished to have as little as possible to do with Northern Ireland, telling army officers that it was their job to ‘deal with these bloody people’. On the plane home he turned to an aide: ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!’)