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

developing in Britain, the cast of The Party had their first read-through in a rehearsal room. Kenneth Tynan was ecstatic: ‘Larry in tremendous form as John Tagg, the Glasgow Trotskyite: his long speech at the end of the first act will be the most inspiring call to revolution ever heard on the English stage. How ironic – and splendid! – that it should be delivered by Larry from the stage of the NT!’ Olivier had an irony of his own to add to the pungent stew. During the reading he passed a note to John Dexter, the director: ‘May I go about 12.45 to stand outside Russian embassy on account of the Panovs, please (in this mature capitalist society)?’ The phrase ‘mature capitalist society’ came from The Party; the Panovs were Russian-Jewish ballet dancers who, because they wanted to emigrate to Israel, had been denied exit visas and sacked from the Kirov company. As Tynan acknowledged, ‘Larry is obliquely saying that at least mature capitalism permits me the right of public protest.’

      The play opened on 20 December 1973, less than a fortnight before the start of the three-day week. Peter Hall, the theatre’s new director, was accosted during the interval by an unhappy member of his board, the lawyer Victor Mishcon. Was it right, he asked, that the National Theatre should ‘deal with subjects which are critical of politics and of the British way of life and in some sense are revolutionary, even anarchist?’ Hall defended the production: ‘I said I thought it was essential for the National Theatre to deal with such subjects if good dramatists dealt with them … Wasn’t it, I said, a sign of a mature society that its theatre should ask questions?’ While happy to celebrate the crisis of capitalism on stage, however, Hall was rather less cheerful about its actual manifestations beyond his theatre. ‘Bad news all the time,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘An economic slump threatens. The bomb scares go on. The miners continue their go-slow. The trains are in chaos. Meantime the nation is on a prodigal pre-Christmas spending spree.’

      It was a last knees-up before the lights went out, a final drink before closing time. ‘It was leaden gray and wet in London today, and at the annual carol service in St Paul’s Cathedral the dimmed lights barely tinged the drizzle yellow,’ an American correspondent reported. ‘For Britons on this Christmas Eve, nonetheless, it seems to be a case of eat, drink and be merry … The Christmas shopping spree has been as intense as ever. Though prices have risen sharply, Londoners stocked up heavily on turkey, ham, sausage, wine, cake, candy and everything else that goes on the holiday table.’ Musical accompaniment to the festivities was provided by Slade, who had entertained Gerry Healy and his cadres at the Empire Pool the previous year. Their ubiquitous new single, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, topped the charts for five weeks, its raucous optimism defying the grey monochromatic gloom that suffused every headline and every high street. ‘Everybody’s having fun!’ Noddy Holder screeched. ‘Look to the future now/It’s only just begun!’

      Few others could see any prospect of fun beyond the New Year. The Sunday Times predicted disease and famine. Ministers warned that if coal stocks fell below the danger level and power failed, sewage would rise out of the pipes – with the electric pumps silent – and drown the cities. (‘To an island-bound people whose level of consumption has steadily risen,’ the New York Times commented, ‘fear of accumulating wastes no doubt occupies a particularly nightmarish corner of the collective unconscious.’) On Christmas Eve the national press carried full-page government advertisements spelling out – in heavy black headlines – the desperate need to save electricity. Postal workers, always busy at Christmas, had the extra burden of distributing ration books in preparation for possible petrol rationing while also watching out for the IRA’s letter bombs and parcel bombs, several of which exploded in sorting offices – prompting the surreal headline ‘Scotland Yard Warns of Christmas Card Danger’. Some of the bombs came in calendars from a series called ‘Wonderful London’.

      Heath’s Cabinet colleague John Davies spent the festive season at home in Cheshire, ‘and I said to my wife and children that we should have a nice time, because I deeply believed then that it was the last Christmas of its kind we would enjoy’. Kingsley Amis vented his frustrations in a ‘Crisis Song’ that reached much the same conclusion:

      It’s one more glass of poisonous wine,

      And one more pint of beer

      Made out of stuff like malt and hops:

      Drink it while it’s here,

      And one more cut off the round of beef –

      You’ll be scoffing snoek next year …

      Yes, relish the lot, and collar the lot

      In a terminal spending spree,

      But one thing you can forget, because

      Of this firm guarantee:

      There’s going to be stacks of bloody salt

      – Mined by you and me.

      The Queen drafted a last-minute postscript to her annual Christmas message expressing ‘deep concern’ at the ‘special difficulties Britain is now facing’, only to have it vetoed by the Prime Minister for being too alarmist. When Her Majesty obediently toned down her comments (‘Christmas is so much a family occasion that you would not wish me to harp on these difficulties’) the PM still refused to budge, deeming any allusion to the crisis bad for morale. Viewers of the Queen’s broadcast were treated to a selection of Princess Anne’s wedding photos instead.

      Tony Benn was full of foreboding, as much about his own fate as that of the nation. While visiting a Labour Party bazaar in Derbyshire at the end of November he had met a fortune teller named Madame Eva, who gazed into her crystal ball and predicted that ‘You are going to have a great shock in February, a terrible shock. You are going to get the blame for something you haven’t done.’ Her words preyed on him for the rest of the winter. After speaking in a Commons debate on 18 December, he confessed to his diary: ‘I felt somehow … that this would be the last speech I would make for a very long time in Parliament. It was probably that silly old fortune teller in Derbyshire but somehow, the whole day I felt obsessed with the worry, which did nothing for my speech.’

      Why was a senior politician more perturbed by the witterings of a weird sister than by the genuine torments and afflictions that beset the country? Perhaps because quotidian chaos had now become such an inescapable fact of life that most people received each new bulletin without comment or surprise: they were inured to failure and disaster. ‘Things no longer shock us quite as much as they used to,’ an angry Labour right-winger complained. ‘We are beginning to get used to bombs in our cities, to strikes which turn off our electricity, to spectacular corporate failures and to the daily information of national decline … Of course political leaders talk of crisis, indeed about little else, but the word “crisis” has long since lost its urgent meaning.’ Ronald McIntosh described a lunch with Peter Wilsher, the Sunday Times’s business editor: ‘He talked a lot – and well – about Germany in the 1920s and thinks that we may well be on the edge of some kind of collapse or revolutionary change. He seemed unperturbed by this.’

Was the country slumping into that fatalistic lethargy identified by R.H. Tawney as a characteristic of the British – ‘the mood of those who have made their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without reopening the deal’? Some pundits said so, usually in the comment pages of The Times, but more sentimental observers cited the national nonchalance as proof that one of the sceptred isle’s most precious attributes, the stiff upper lip, was still as proudly immobile as ever.^* During the winter of 1973–74 an American correspondent in London paid tribute to ‘the remarkable equanimity that has characterised much of British reaction to the crisis’, and Tony Benn’s diary entry for 23 December exemplifies the stoicism: ‘I overslept and had a day at home. Three more IRA bombs in London. I tidied the office and wrapped Christmas gifts … The oil price was doubled again, the second doubling since September.’

      When I left home to join the alternative society, four days later, I paused at the news-stand on Charing Cross station and noticed a cover-line on the Christmas issue of the Spectator: ‘A military coup in Britain? See Patrick Cosgrave’s Commentary.’