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

“However, it’s a very suggestive part because this is a period in British history, the mid nineteen seventies, when there’s an awful lot of talk about Britain as the new Weimar Germany, about the ravages of inflation, about the rise of political extremism, the decay of the centre, and about the possibility, even the probability, that Britain will slide into some sort of authoritarianism.”

“Five days later on the August 28, this is a good window, I think, into the sort of the flavour of the time. A bomb goes off outside Selfridges on Oxford Street, and it injures seven people. The day after that, the twenty ninth, another bomb goes off on Kensington Church Street, and it killed the bomb disposal officer who'd been sent to deal with it instantly.”

“He’s an increasingly sad figure. And the moment that I think captures this really nicely is December 1975. They’re having a meeting, surprise, surprise, about cuts with Dennis Healy. And somebody says, well we, you know, we can’t really decide. We’ll have to have a meeting of the full cabinet tomorrow or on Friday to discuss it. And Wilson, the prime minister says, well, I can’t make Friday.”

“For weeks, for the last couple of weeks, inside number 10, there had been gathering rumors this was gonna 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.”

“In the 1974 series, we described how Wilson had been increasingly paranoid that he was being spied on by the security services. He thought MI five was stealing his tax documents. 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.”

“Just a month after Wilson left office, Thorpe resigned as leader of the Liberals. And the reason, we did a 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.”

“And Callaghan, on Monday April 5, 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. You have beaten Michael Foote by 176 votes to 137. And Callaghan had this hard man image, but he actually starts crying at this.”