664. Britain in the 70s: Scandal in Downing Street (Part 3)

25:37Tom Holland:Yeah, very sad because he was such a brilliant, able, go-getting, white-hater technology kind of guy, wasn't he, in the 60s?

25:44Dominic Sandbrook:He was. And the sheen has worn off the Gannick's plastic raincoats. Yeah, Gannick, they'll be turning up again later.

25:51Tom Holland:They will, yeah. Shop-soiled is the word that's always used, isn't it?

25:55Dominic Sandbrook:Well, I think I use that word a lot with Howard 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 business with Mars here 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.

26:28Dominic Sandbrook: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 and the queen loves him doesn't she he's her favorite it was a proper monarchist he's a sort of um he's quite they talk probably about i bet they talk about agatha christie or something yeah and they'd bond over the tupperware yeah they absolutely would so the way he tells her is so sort of um 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 the Land Rover and they went to this cottage and it's 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 going to resign so it's a kitchen sink drama 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 i mean the new prime minister's not gonna take her on is he no no no no and um 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 they they thought you know he's run out of ideas he probably should go that and as donoghue 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 rumours going around Whitehall and Westminster.

28:00Dominic Sandbrook: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, an announcement date, I should say. He will announce his departure on Thursday, the 11th of 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.

28:43Dominic Sandbrook: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 6th, 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 And, of course, as a result of all this, as the pound falls, the danger is that inflation will start to rise.

29:28Dominic Sandbrook:So that night, so the 10th, the Commons voted on yet more Dennis Healy cuts. And to the government's horror, the Labour left rebel and the government loses by 28 votes. A massive humiliation.

29:42Tom Holland:Can I just ask, the Tories aren't voting for these cuts? No, the Tories always vote against the government. Okay, but they would presumably be in favour of these cuts. Yeah. They're putting party ahead of country.

29:51Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, I mean, that's just not how politics works, Tom. You're in the opposition. Your duty is to oppose. I mean, basically, Mrs. Satcher agrees with Dennis Healy's diagnosis, right? She does. But I mean, they would say, I mean, the opposition, any opposition in this circumstance says this government is, you know, 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.

30:17Tom Holland:That would be very bizarre. But if the government wins the vote in a kind of Tory 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.

30:31Dominic Sandbrook:That is four-dimensional. I think if you were Howard Wilson and the Tories were always going to vote with you on your economic plans, you'd probably take it because it means you can have a nice lion or something. You don't have to worry about whipping all your elderly MPs into the voting lobby anymore.

30:46Tom 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.

30:52Dominic 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 uh a cabinet when he was going to make the announcement the the cabinet sing happy birthday to him instead led by shirley williams and you know what tony ben wrote about it in his diary he said it was odious so that evening said 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 for the government he leads for the government the chancellor and he spends most of his time actually hammering the left not the right he so he says the left are going to betray the whole of our labor 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 our politics before parliament was televised in fact before parliament was even broadcast on the radio so you could get away with all kinds of behavior and healy actually gets into a brawl a punch-up a punch-up so he's literally a bruiser 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 he complained he said the chancellor's verbal behavior was unprintable and obscene in the extreme he came across like a drunken oaf what did he say dominic he said callum will have to get his bleeper ready he said go and f**k yourselves you f**kers he shouted this at the at the labor left left of his own party is it in hansard i don't think it is in hansard no no it's not in hansard because it says they're going out anyway Where at one level it works, because the rebels fall into line and the government survives.

32:39Dominic Sandbrook:But Dennis Healy 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 Chequers, 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. Like, let's do this. So the next day is the Tuesday.

33:11Dominic Sandbrook: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 Callaghan aside, the foreign secretary. Callaghan 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. Frenemies, do you think? Frenemies, exactly. They're like old prize fighters. and Wilson calls him upstairs and Callaghan comes down and he comes down he's described as looking winded and when Joe Haynes says good morning Jim to him Callaghan just says is it and then Wilson takes Healy aside takes him into the toilet and um but Wilson being Wilson he probably puts on all the taps to make sure they're not being listened to by MI5 we'll come back 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.

34:00Dominic Sandbrook:Wilson reads this prepared statement. He says, I've been Labour 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. Callaghan, who now has this sort of glint in his eye of somebody who's fancying a shot at the top 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 marcy'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 pomp but there were some very funny responses an old man in a cardigan said uh 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.

35:21Dominic Sandbrook:I hate those left-wingers. I despise them. And are these representative?

35:25Tom Holland:Or have you just cherry-picked them? No, I cherry-picked them, of course.

35:29Dominic Sandbrook:Of course I cherry-picked them.

35:30Tom Holland:Because there must be some people who... Yeah. Particularly they're working for the council from Durham. There must be some people working in councils in Durham who like the left.

35:39Dominic Sandbrook:I suppose it was fresh in people's minds because Wilson had just had this huge battle with the left. There'd been this business in the House of Commons. Okay, fair enough. 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.

36:17Tom Holland:and a$3 menu. Limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

36:49Tom Holland:Now streaming only on Disney+.

37:17Tom Holland:Welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever.

37:28Tom Holland:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History, where Harold Wilson has resigned. British politics is in tumult. What happens next, Dominic?

37:38Dominic 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 was 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

38:07Tom Holland:it's like um is it metta nick uh when talleyron died and he said i wonder what he means by that

38:13Dominic Sandbrook:it's that kind of order isn't it exactly so the most common rumor 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 the 22nd of march and it's a very very miserable and we mentioned 1970s food it's a very desultory occasion. The only highlight is when a waiter accidentally poured Ollandaise sauce all over Dennis Healy. Accidentally? Yeah.

38:47Dominic Sandbrook:Maybe it's somebody who's got investments and is paying 98 % in tax on his investments or something. Tony Benn said in his diary afterwards, the pathetic thing about tonight, Tony Benn is 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. But someone's going to miss him, right? The Queen? Well, the Queen actually, so the Queen comes the next day for dinner at number 10 and this is a signal honour.

39:20Dominic Sandbrook: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. Yeah, the two titans of 20th century politics. I'm sure, international listeners. I mean, people probably study Wilson, don't they, in schools in Australia and American stuff? He's one of the great men of history.

39:43Tom Holland:Yeah, I imagine that's why we're not shedding listeners to this episode in any way in Sydney and New York.

39:49Dominic Sandbrook: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 a sheet of lavender-coloured notepaper simply ticked by Harold Wilson. We will come back to this. So remember this lavender notepaper. Wilson finally leaves on the 5th of April when the Labour MPs have finally picked a successor. We'll tell you who the successor is at the end of the episode.

40:25Dominic Sandbrook: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. One last little power play from Marcia. and Donoghue 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 and the sad association is with Marcia with Marcia but this is not quite the end of the story because that lavender colored list so this was Wilson's resignation honors 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 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 donoghue's diary the person they thought had drawn up the list was marcia williams it's marcia's last chance to influence honors 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.

41:58Dominic Sandbrook:He is not prepared to listen. He is suicidal. He doesn't seem to care about the 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. Do you think it's the onset of dementia? I think it's not caring. I think it's Wilson was always incredibly weak when it came to Marcia. I think, you know, 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 i just wonder whether it's expressive of a kind of mental decline as well oh there's no doubt that 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 um 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.

43:20Dominic Sandbrook: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, and father of Jemima. yes and zach and zach and ben so james goldsmith he gets a knighthood another corporate raider called james hansen gets a knighthood uh the man who had made uh wilson's raincoats so the death the gannick's raincoat tycoon joseph already sir joseph kagan he gets a peerage

44:07Tom Holland:you see i love a topic on the rest of history where you get to have the phrase gannick's raincoat tycoon yeah well there aren't that many no there are that with hannibal no you don't at

44:18Dominic Sandbrook:all even samuel johnson didn't have a raincoat tycoon did he so these are not traditional labor people in fact a lot of them don't even vote labor 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 um there were claims that he had bought her a muse flat in um 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 labor mps were appalled by this so what about tony ben 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 unsavory 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 and he just handed it in now marcia and wilson denied this wilson said this is sexism and And Marcia said, this is snobbery because you don't like the people on the list.

45:43Dominic Sandbrook: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. To what effect? She would win. You couldn't prove that she had done it. And she would say, she generally, I think, won the case. And so what's the consensus now?

46:04Tom Holland:She definitely did it. Oh, right. Okay.

46:06Dominic Sandbrook:The BBC did a drama in the late 2000s called, I think, The Lavender List, and she basically forced them to apologise 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. um emily who is our head of written content says there are extraordinary carry bj parallels so listeners can um read into that what they will but she's not wrong right i mean the idea that there's a sort of um a prime minister who's handing out a departing prime minister handing out sort of um 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 mcbeth figure i mean you could argue i suppose that this is sexism, but in this case, I'm not sure that it is.

46:52Dominic Sandbrook:And what's disastrous for Wilson is that two of the people on the list, Scotland Yard does wish to interview them. So Eric Miller, who was the guy who had supposedly bought Marcia a flat, a year later, he was charged with fraud, theft and forgery, and he shot himself. Oh no. So that looked very bad for Wilson. And what about the Ganex raincoat tycoon? How does he bear up? Oh no, this is a terrible story. The Ganex raincoat tycoon, Joseph Kagan. I mean, And he's the sort of poster boy for Harold Wilson's resignation on his list. He was charged with tax evasion in 1978. He was charged, bizarrely, with stealing barrels of dye from his own raincoat company.

47:32Dominic Sandbrook:Wow. What was he doing with it? I don't know. Maybe secretly making rival raincoats, making his own raincoats. Who knows? Dying them lavender. 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.

48:14Dominic Sandbrook: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 into 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 but also it could be more dodgy also there were bugs in number 10 they had been installed under harold mcmillan in the 50s the official history of mi5 by christopher andrew 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 ben brought all this up with james callaghan wilson's successor callaghan told him the story about the gladstone portrait but callaghan didn't tell it as in gosh maybe there is a bug in the portrait callaghan told it as a joke against Wilson to say Wilson's lost the plot.

49:31Dominic Sandbrook: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 favourite 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 Rinker was murdered and that's terrible.

50:28Dominic Sandbrook:Thorpe first of all said this was a lie. He said I'm being framed by the South African security service BOSS. They're not called BOSS. They're 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 Donoghue stay behind after work for three hours to discuss 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.

51:07Dominic Sandbrook: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 Falkander, because she's now Lady Falkander, 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? I mean, I suppose the South African government hates liberals.

51:45Dominic Sandbrook:It does hate liberals. It hates anti-apartheid campaigns, which Thorpe was. but really you're gonna well the problem is castle also says also jeremy thought was having an affair with this bloke how does he know that do you know the person who's looked into it for her who jack straw the future blairite 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 who had the lunch for Barbara Carson. He went to the Commons.

52:17Dominic Sandbrook: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 the 9th of May, the Sunday Times published letters that showed that Thorpe had been having an affair with this bloke. It's the letters, Tom, if you may recall, that have the telltale and damning phrase

52:45Tom Holland:bunnies can and will go to france spoken very very entertaining by hugh grant in the dramatization

52:53Dominic Sandbrook:of this story 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 rang a bbc journalist a young journalist called barry penrose he 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 um 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 to crack the case.

54:13Dominic Sandbrook: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. 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 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 one they investigate eventually the bbc lost patience and said to these guys penrose and courtier 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 marcio 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 taring 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 thought 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 callaghan 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 um is beginning to claim him in december 1978 donoghue had a drink with wilson's former driver and the driver who's called bill howsdon 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 Seacombe and he runs out of questions.

57:27Dominic Sandbrook:There are long pauses. It's really awkward. He stumbles over his words. He can't read the autocue. 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 he kept britain out of the vietnam war didn't he 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 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 would have dreamed of being remembered for much more sort of um substantive things i mean you said he was

58:43Tom Holland:brilliantly clever but i guess it just shows that being clever isn't everything it's not everything

58:48Dominic Sandbrook:yeah i mean i think my verdict on him in my book seasons and 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 so in bernard donoghue's memoirs donoghue who worked for him as his policy advisor like a 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 healy who obviously was his chancellor gave an interview in the 2000s someone said what do you think of harold wilson dennis healy said he was a terrible prime minister which is kind of harsh when you've been his chancellor Anyway, he's gone now.

59:39Dominic Sandbrook:So someone's got to replace him. Now, in 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 and Chancellor in the 60s and is now Home Secretary again. And Roy Jenkins was the son of a minor.

1:00:16Dominic Sandbrook:He went to Baleel College, Oxford. He has this smooth, urbane, very Whiggish style. He can't pronounce his R's properly. He is the darling of the sort of society hostesses, of the high-minded. he's a rest his politics man isn't he's so rest his politics he completely is he loves europe he loves uh sensible people moderation um claret all of this kind of stuff all of this actually means that he has now fallen out of favor with the labor party which has moved to the left because it's all horny-handed sons of toil 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 out with a load of other Labour MPs.

1:01:03Dominic Sandbrook: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' 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-idle good looks that he's now turned into a lounge lizard, 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 did Kissinger enjoy it?

1:01:43Dominic Sandbrook:yeah and after Kissinger left office after the Gerald Ford fell from power Crosland took Kissinger to watch Chelsea versus Wolverhampton Wanderers and did Wolves win? I don't actually know I should that's stupid of me not to look that up but well listeners it's good to let the listeners do a little bit of work i think um so there's jenkins and this is ex pal uh crossland who's a very long shot there's one other candidate on the right really and that is dennis healy yeah dennis healy he's gone around punching people in the face and quoting emily dickinson to them that's not the way to win votes is it i don't know 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 capitalism all of that hasn't been stung on the penis yet by wasp has he but that's to come not yet the other candidate on the left is michael foot 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 long white hair hasn't he yeah and he dresses scruffily and

1:02:57Tom Holland:that's something that will come back to bite him in due course yes he wears an ill-advised coat

1:03:03Dominic Sandbrook:donkey jacket i believe day service he looked like an out-of-work navvy i think it was my favorite newspaper verdicts on uh on micro four 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 Callaghan. And I'm delighted to say we'll be talking a lot more about Jim Callaghan in the next episode. So he's the Sandbrook candidate. Well, I like Dennis Healy as well, to be fair. Callaghan, just to give you a slight sense, we'll get more into him next time.

1:03:36Dominic Sandbrook: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

1:03:50Tom Holland:the hat trick. And so, Dominic, if he becomes Prime Minister, he will be the only person in british history who's ever done that right yes exactly the grand slam a massive achievement

1:04:00Dominic Sandbrook: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 um 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 calan he's a bit

1:04:16Tom Holland:of a bully but he's quite sort of solid and reassuring he has the definitive 1970s kind of glasses yeah i know kind of like um ronnie barker and smiley and he's just the embodiment of 1970s spectacles wearing man he is and the other thing he does in the he wears his trousers incredibly

1:04:38Dominic Sandbrook: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 labor 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 it's a sign of just how exhausted and how kind of gray and threadbare they all are really of the also rands crossland comes bottom he gets 17 healy gets 31 jenkins um with his can't pronounce his r's he gets 56 which is a really poor showing from him given that he had been the favorite 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 votes 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 they're voting on the personality not the issues i think exactly which he would despise and michael foot goes is way ahead of him on 90 michael foot gets 90 with his long white hair and his love of

1:06:02Tom Holland:yeah he hasn't it yeah exactly he's the front runner at this stage god i mean imagine if they let michael foot as leader of the labor party that would be mad they'd never do that surely

1:06:15Dominic Sandbrook: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 um second ballot they've all pulled out all the also rand's pull out except for healy healy 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 healy finally drops out so callahan picks up most of his votes and callahan on monday the 5th of April is having lunch on his own in his commons office. And the chairman of the parliamentary party, Kledwin Hughes, comes and knocks on the door and he says, we've got the results.

1:06:53Dominic Sandbrook:You have beaten Michael Foote by 176 votes to 137. And Callaghan had this hard man image, but he actually starts crying at this. 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 callaghan'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 labor party but they're there and i'm here you can see the the chip on his shoulder anyway he then goes and addresses all the Labour MPs.

1:07:36Dominic Sandbrook: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 emphasise 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 kind of speech that Mrs.

1:08:09Dominic Sandbrook:Thatcher could have given. 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 defence 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 labour 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 fraudster he quits the pay's returned to british politics he quits the party and he says there should be an immediate general election.

1:09:23Dominic Sandbrook: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 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

1:10:04Tom Holland:premiership is doomed before it has even properly begun what will dominic's great hero do um 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 what we've got to do head to the rest is history.com um if not you just have to wait but we will be back with the Sex Pistols. Goodbye.

1:10:38Dominic Sandbrook:Goodbye.

1:10:43Dominic Sandbrook:We have an absolutely thrilling announcement to make. 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 of 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?

1:11:29Tom 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 Callaghan. And if you're not British, I mean, what's wrong with you? This will be the most exclusive, the most exclusive T-shirt design ever. Imagine walking the streets of Peoria with your James Callaghan T-shirt. Unmissable. So, Dominic, here's the question. How can people go about getting their hands on one of these unbelievable items?

1:12:16Tom Holland:Just head to therestishistory.com and go to our merch page. 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 of history merch.

1:12:38Dominic 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 go to the rest is history.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 rest is history.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 and you'll never ever be happier and you will never ever regret it it is out of control in

1:13:39Tom Holland:the white house right now welcome to the rest is politics us i'm katty k i'm anthony scarabucci who is the worst politician in washington right now They don't know how to manage Donald Trump.

1:13:51Dominic Sandbrook:I talked to the people that organized the abduction. I'm telling you why they did it.

1:13:56Tom Holland:The White House is in a bind, Anthony. Here's what I would say to you about FAFA. The chaos is the strategy. It should not have happened, and it is a violation of international law. Is he losing control of the party? I survived 11 days in Trump's White House. I know the SOB. I've been covering politics in Washington for almost 30 years. Twice a week, we break down what's really going on in Trump's White House. The big issue for the United States is going to be we were once seen as a benevolent superpower, and now we're seen as an aggressor. You know, he can lie about a lot of things, but he can't lie about what people are feeling about the economy.

1:14:35Tom Holland:If you really want to understand what's going on in Trump's mind, just search The Rest is Politics US wherever you get your podcasts.