STABILIZE THE ECONOMY

“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. 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.”

“On his second day as Prime Minister, another Labour MP, a disgraced Labour MP, 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 returned to British politics, he quits the party and he says there should be an immediate general election. So now Callaghan has no majority at all after just a couple of days. He's got 314 seats.”

“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, Labour MPs were appalled by this. That he should pick inadequate, buccaneering, sharp seisters for his honours was disgusting. It was unsavoury, 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 note paper.”

“And Bernard Donoghue followed him out and found him in the toilet with kind of with his head in his hands, absolutely crushed. And Wilson just said very weakly, I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. And he just he basically allowed himself to be insulted in this way by his own Chancellor in front of everybody. He did nothing at all about it. And he is, as Donoghue writes a month later, privately, we know he's blown. He's no more interest, no more ideas, no appetite for power.”

“In April 1976, he was telling a press conference that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. Then in May 1976, so the following month, came the most notorious incident of all, when he turned up at Victoria Station in I think an open top Mercedes and greeted fans with what was alleged at the time to be a Nazi salute and which Bowie, Elon Musk style subsequently said had just been a wave. Then a few weeks later, he gives the interview that I've just cited.”

“Because Healy is actually a very clever man and he's intellectually self-confident, he's self-confident enough to listen to them and to say, OK, fair enough, I will change. And it's very rare that Chancellor does that, actually. It's one of the signal examples in modern British history of a Chancellor starting off as one thing and then turning into something else. So he then reinvents himself as something of a monetarist, as somebody who is basically going to use monetary targets to bring inflation down.”

“He said the British security services were out to get me for years. They spread rumours 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's very calm, he's still puffing on his cigar. He says, 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.”