“Nowhere”, Wheen writes, “is the abnormality [of the Seventies] more head-achingly apparent” than in the diaries of Bernard Donoughue, the academic plucked from obscurity at the London School of Economics by Harold Wilson to work in the Downing Street Policy Unit after Labour’s general election victory in February 1974. (The two volumes of those diaries contain almost unimaginable riches for any student of the political psychopathology of the period, and Wheen mines them assiduously - as indeed did Andy Beckett for his recent book about the Seventies, When the Lights Went Out.)
Donoughue records that when Wilson resigned a little over two years later and James Callaghan took over as prime minister, staff at 10 Downing Street immediately began to breathe a little more easily. The Callaghan regime was “sane, sensible and balanced”, whereas Wilson’s reign had been characterised by a kind of generalised “hysteria” - much of it concentrated in the person of his theatrically awful political secretary and amanuensis, Marcia Williams. (Wheen describes the dramas of Wilson’s kitchen cabinet as resembling “a Strindberg play punctuated with scenes from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”.)
Though Donoughue would later declare himself bemused by allegations that Wilson made in retirement about the activities of MI5 while he was in office - the “most incredible part” of an interview the ex-prime minister gave to the Observer in July 1977 was “the paranoia it revealed”- he himself at the time hadn’t been immune to the contagion. Suspecting that his room had been bugged and his phone tapped, Donoughue admitted that he had “tried to resist the kind of paranoia which surrounded HW and Marcia. But the evidence is growing.”
Naturally, it would be dangerous to try to deduce a national mood from the craziness of Williams’s and Wilson’s tortured imaginings, not least because we now know these to have been an effect of incipient dementia. (The account of Wilson’s precipitous mental decline is one of the more melancholy strands of the tale told here.) Yet the evidence Wheen has assembled from multiple sources is so deftly patterned, as to smother any such misgivings and to evoke with remarkable vividness the widespread sense of what even sober observers at the time, such as the Guardian columnist Peter Preston, were ready to call “civilisation’s collapse” - an apocalypse presaged by endless strikes, racial tension, runs on sterling, IMF loans and bomb scares, not to mention the actual bombs in British cities that followed the Provisional IRA’s decision to bring its “war” to the mainland.
Wheen, who works for Private Eye, is a journalist, not a professional historian, and his preferred mode is the vignette rather than the argument. This is not to say that there is no analytical heft to the story he tells - his most considerable intellectual debts are to the American historian Richard Hofstadter and the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. From Hofstadter, Wheen has borrowed the idea of a “paranoid style” in politics, a style that “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values”. The political paranoid, in other words, is a catastrophist, and there were a lot of them around in the Seventies. And not just in Britain, either: Wheen writes about the greatest paranoid fantasist of them all, Richard Nixon, and also about the terrorist groupuscules that proliferated in the early Seventies, whose motivations were “as much psychological as political”.
From Gramsci, Wheen takes a line which, he says, “could serve as the epigraph for Britain in the mid-Seventies”: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” At that time, the “old” was the accommodation between capital and labour. Today, we are also living through an interregnum: neoliberalism is dying, but we do not know what will take its place. One day, another Francis Wheen will have to catalogue the morbid symptoms of its demise.
Strange Days Indeed
Francis Wheen
Fourth Estate, 344pp, £18.99