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

Hugh Gaitskell.

* This is one of the longest shadows cast by the 1970s in Britain. The initial investigation into Bloody Sunday, headed by Lord Widgery, was widely scorned as a whitewash. Tony Blair’s government set up a new one in 1998, chaired by Lord Saville. By the time Saville wrote up his findings, more than a decade later, he had interviewed more than nine hundred witnesses and run up a bill of over £150 million, making it the longest and most expensive inquiry in British legal history.

* But not to many disgruntled Conservative voters, who regarded Powell as the lone voice of robust common sense. ‘Let’s try Enoch for a bit, I say,’ the poet Philip Larkin wrote to a friend. ‘Prison for strikers,/Bring back the cat,/Kick out the niggers – /How about that?’

* Heath himself entered into the spirit of national austerity, as he revealed when Jean Rook of the Daily Express pointed out to him that he was getting rather fat. ‘Yes, I must say I am,’ he sighed. ‘The trouble is I don’t get any swimming now. We had to turn off the pool heating at Chequers – it’s oil.’

* While celebrating these splendid ‘objective pre-conditions’, the IMG alluded regretfully to the one subjective obstacle: the ‘deep-rooted influence of reformism, electoralism and parliamentarism (combined with social chauvinism) inside broad layers of the working class’. What was needed was not so much a revolutionary vanguard as a ‘vanguard of a vanguard’ – four-star generals such as the IMG leader Tariq Ali, presumably – who could spur these blinkered proletarian dobbins into a gallop.

* Redgrave had been nominated for an Oscar in 1970 for her performance in the title role in the film Mary, Queen of Scots.

* ‘While everything, all forms of social organisation, broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives, as if nothing fundamental was happening. It was amazing how determined, how stubborn, how self-renewing, were the attempts to lead an ordinary life.’ – Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

* The big difference is that Heath’s resentments were usually manifested in petulance rather than paranoia. For Nixon, the remorseless pursuit of ‘leakers’ was a daily duty; Heath’s habitual response to newspaper leaks was a sulky shrug of his burly shoulders. He’d learned his lesson from a farcical episode in February 1972, when he asked his private secretary to find out which Cabinet minister had given the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, an inaccurate story about a new peace initiative in Northern Ireland. Heath thought it ‘undesirable, and contrary to the rules laid down in “Questions of Procedure”, that ministers should discuss future Cabinet business with a newspaper editor’. After a ten-day investigation, the private secretary reported his findings to the PM: the minister who told Rees-Mogg about the Northern Ireland initiative, over lunch at the Goldsmiths’ Company, was none other than Heath himself.

       THREE

       Going Underground

       The accusation of ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’ no longer has the negative meaning it used to have. It has acquired a new clothing, a new colour. It does not divide, it does not discredit; on the contrary, it represents a centre of attraction. Today, to be ‘violent’ or a ‘terrorist’ is a quality that ennobles any honourable person.

      Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969)

      Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay, checked his watch just after 9 a.m. on 8 January 1971. If he waited for his wife to finish her morning bath he’d be late for a meeting at the Embassy, and Jackson was a stickler for punctuality. He dashed into the bathroom to kiss her goodbye (‘I remember that her lips were wet’), promising to be home for lunch. More than eight months passed before they saw each other again.

      Although the action began on 8 January, when Jackson was kidnapped en route to the Embassy in Montevideo, the mise en scène had been quietly playing out for almost a year. From early 1970 he began to sense that unknown enemies were observing him, as odd coincidences and anomalies multiplied. On leaving for work he often noticed a young couple on a motor-scooter, ‘skirmishing round the vicinity of the residence, then showing up as my car was parking by the chancery offices’. In the public park across the street from his residence, families suddenly seemed to be having picnics almost round the clock. They looked normal enough: the husband dozed or played with the baby while the wife listened to her radio. ‘But they were too recurrent, and their pattern of identity too identical, even though their apparent normality was such that I could not possibly denounce them.’ At the golf course, even on the remotest fairways, a small gaggle of young spectators would congregate to study his technique.

      This subtle change of mood – ‘the intensified whiff of invigilation’ – coincided with an upsurge of urban-guerrilla violence by the Tupamaros, a self-styled Movement of National Liberation, and a spate of diplomatic kidnappings elsewhere in Latin America. Count Karl von Spreti, the German ambassador to Guatemala, was abducted and murdered in April 1970. Similar attacks closer to Uruguay – the successive kidnappings in Brazil of the American, German and Swiss ambassadors – heightened Jackson’s foreboding, as the unseen menace seemed to draw ever nearer. There was a narrow escape by the American consul in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, not far from the Uruguayan border; and then a daylight hold-up of the Swiss Embassy offices in Montevideo itself. In July, the Tupamaros abducted a Uruguayan judge, a Brazilian diplomat and an American security expert, Dan Mitrione, whose bullet-riddled body was found in the boot of a car a few days later.

      Until the late 1960s, Uruguay was for many decades the calmest and most democratic state in the region, often cited by Fidel Castro in his speeches as the one Latin American country that could never experience a violent revolution on the Cuban model. That all changed in 1968 after the installation of a new president, Jorge Pacheco Areco, who ordered a freeze on wage and price rises to halt Uruguay’s rampant inflation and economic decline. When trade unions threatened a general strike, the President imposed martial law. The Tupamaros had been around for a while, mostly organising sugar workers in the north of the country, but now they emerged as a fully-fledged political movement, announcing their presence by kidnapping the President of the State Electricity and Telephones Service, who was forced to read books by Che Guevara for a few days before being released unharmed. Suspecting that students must have been responsible, Pacheco sent the army into Montevideo University to root out subversives, thus beginning a long cycle of action and reaction in which every kidnapping or murder prompted the suspension of yet more civil liberties – which was just what the Tupamaros wanted, believing as they did that official brutality would incite popular discontent and, ultimately, revolution.^* It was an article of faith among urban guerrillas in the 1970s, from West Berlin to San Francisco, that intensified repression worked in their favour by exposing the true and hideous face of the state and winning new converts to their thesis that official violence could only be defeated by force. Although they called themselves Marxists they owed at least as much to Marx’s old enemy Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, who held that ‘the urge to destroy is really a creative urge’.

      On the morning of 8 January 1971 the main road into Montevideo was unusually quiet: the President had just left for a seaside holiday, taking many of the usual security forces with him. Geoffrey Jackson felt relieved once his driver left the open highway for the bustling side streets