Andy Beckett: Crisis? What crisis? ... Worrying Parallels for Brown
[Andy Beckett is writing a book for Faber about British politics in the 1970s.]
All ailing governments have an atmosphere. In the mid-1990s, John Major's slowly expired amid pinstriped rebellions by Eurosceptics and Tory sleaze stories in the papers. In the early 90s, Margaret Thatcher's sickened more suddenly as poll tax protesters rioted and Michael Heseltine quietly plotted. In the early 70s, Ted Heath's was stalked and then strangled by the National Union of Mineworkers.
Yet British Labour governments - less common than Conservative ones, less tolerated by the press and, perhaps, by British society as a whole - can seem particularly doomed and melancholy in their final stages. Thirty years ago the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan took delivery of two new official cars. Callaghan was a highly patriotic premier, and British manufacturing was in need of a lift after the recession of the mid-70s; so the cars had been ordered from British Leyland, the state-owned car maker. But to many of his government's critics British Leyland's workmanship exemplified all that was unhealthy about the economy under Labour in the 70s. The cars, when they arrived, were found to have 34 mechanical faults between them.
They were sent back, repaired and fitted with £250,000 of security features, a considerable outlay at the time, especially for Callaghan's administration. When the cars were finally ready, the prime minister was taken in one to an official engagement. On the way, he opened one of its electric windows for some air. The window fell in his lap. He lost power nine months later.
This example of how accident-prone prime ministers can become when their fortunes turn downward comes from the diaries of Bernard Donoughue, Callaghan's senior policy adviser during his three years as premier. Downing Street Diary is in some ways an old-fashioned political book, fat and exhaustive as the many lunches it recalls at Old Labour's favourite restaurant, the Gay Hussar in Soho. Its busy, opinionated pages describe a compelling but vanished political world, of "dangerous Trotskyites" infiltrating the Labour party, and vast nationalised industries, and fraught loan negotiations between Britain and the International Monetary Fund.
Yet in other ways the diaries feel eerily current. They detail Callaghan's disastrous decision in 1978, seemingly so similar to Gordon Brown's last year, not to hold a general election during a surge of popularity for his government. They show ministers and advisers fixated by bad opinion polls. They feature a hungry new opposition leader who, whatever the government does, increasingly makes the political weather.
"I waited 30 years to publish, until everyone was off the stage," says Donoughue, a streetwise Westminster operator who since the 1970s has been a journalist, a City grandee, briefly a minister under Tony Blair, and is now a Labour peer. "But you see lots of the same issues in the diaries that you see now: an energy crisis, public sector difficulties, trade unions being difficult. The present government is still not able to resolve many of the issues that were around in the 70s."
Britain, Donoughue and his diaries imply, has not been reformed as completely since the 70s as later governments have liked to make out.
Downing Street Diary also offers a vivid day-by-day account of how a government fails and what that feels like on the inside. In the beginning, however difficult a situation the new premier inherits, there is optimism. Callaghan became prime minister in 1976. Harold Wilson, the great showman of postwar Labour politics, had abruptly resigned after presiding ineffectually over Britain's worst economic downturn since the 1930s. A month into the new government, Donoughue could write admiringly: "Jim has three layers: on the surface is Simple Honest Bluff Jim. Below that is a very cunning and secretive politician ... beneath that is somebody who does believe in the simple and honest virtues." When Brown replaced Blair last year, Donoughue felt that the same switch from flash to shrewdness was taking place: "I thought, 'This is Callaghan after Wilson'."
Callaghan, like Brown, immediately faced crises: out-of-control state spending, a weak economy, a vulnerable currency. And like Brown, at first he and his government appeared to relish them...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
All ailing governments have an atmosphere. In the mid-1990s, John Major's slowly expired amid pinstriped rebellions by Eurosceptics and Tory sleaze stories in the papers. In the early 90s, Margaret Thatcher's sickened more suddenly as poll tax protesters rioted and Michael Heseltine quietly plotted. In the early 70s, Ted Heath's was stalked and then strangled by the National Union of Mineworkers.
Yet British Labour governments - less common than Conservative ones, less tolerated by the press and, perhaps, by British society as a whole - can seem particularly doomed and melancholy in their final stages. Thirty years ago the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan took delivery of two new official cars. Callaghan was a highly patriotic premier, and British manufacturing was in need of a lift after the recession of the mid-70s; so the cars had been ordered from British Leyland, the state-owned car maker. But to many of his government's critics British Leyland's workmanship exemplified all that was unhealthy about the economy under Labour in the 70s. The cars, when they arrived, were found to have 34 mechanical faults between them.
They were sent back, repaired and fitted with £250,000 of security features, a considerable outlay at the time, especially for Callaghan's administration. When the cars were finally ready, the prime minister was taken in one to an official engagement. On the way, he opened one of its electric windows for some air. The window fell in his lap. He lost power nine months later.
This example of how accident-prone prime ministers can become when their fortunes turn downward comes from the diaries of Bernard Donoughue, Callaghan's senior policy adviser during his three years as premier. Downing Street Diary is in some ways an old-fashioned political book, fat and exhaustive as the many lunches it recalls at Old Labour's favourite restaurant, the Gay Hussar in Soho. Its busy, opinionated pages describe a compelling but vanished political world, of "dangerous Trotskyites" infiltrating the Labour party, and vast nationalised industries, and fraught loan negotiations between Britain and the International Monetary Fund.
Yet in other ways the diaries feel eerily current. They detail Callaghan's disastrous decision in 1978, seemingly so similar to Gordon Brown's last year, not to hold a general election during a surge of popularity for his government. They show ministers and advisers fixated by bad opinion polls. They feature a hungry new opposition leader who, whatever the government does, increasingly makes the political weather.
"I waited 30 years to publish, until everyone was off the stage," says Donoughue, a streetwise Westminster operator who since the 1970s has been a journalist, a City grandee, briefly a minister under Tony Blair, and is now a Labour peer. "But you see lots of the same issues in the diaries that you see now: an energy crisis, public sector difficulties, trade unions being difficult. The present government is still not able to resolve many of the issues that were around in the 70s."
Britain, Donoughue and his diaries imply, has not been reformed as completely since the 70s as later governments have liked to make out.
Downing Street Diary also offers a vivid day-by-day account of how a government fails and what that feels like on the inside. In the beginning, however difficult a situation the new premier inherits, there is optimism. Callaghan became prime minister in 1976. Harold Wilson, the great showman of postwar Labour politics, had abruptly resigned after presiding ineffectually over Britain's worst economic downturn since the 1930s. A month into the new government, Donoughue could write admiringly: "Jim has three layers: on the surface is Simple Honest Bluff Jim. Below that is a very cunning and secretive politician ... beneath that is somebody who does believe in the simple and honest virtues." When Brown replaced Blair last year, Donoughue felt that the same switch from flash to shrewdness was taking place: "I thought, 'This is Callaghan after Wilson'."
Callaghan, like Brown, immediately faced crises: out-of-control state spending, a weak economy, a vulnerable currency. And like Brown, at first he and his government appeared to relish them...