WATCH THE POUND

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”