In the bigger picture of UK politics since 1945, Bernard Donoughue’s Downing
Street Diary is best seen as a play – a drama tingeing into tragedy and
often laced with farce – with the Labour Left and the Conservative Right
lurking in the wings, itching to prevail when old Labourism issues its last
gasp and collapses into the arms of waiting historians, ready to pronounce
the obsequies of the post-war consensus. Donoughue, part historian, part
political operator, sitting in No 10 Downing Street for five years, first as
Harold Wilson’s Senior Political Adviser, then James Callaghan’s, is ideally
placed as dramatist/commentator/participant. Donoughue’s is a very good play
– gripping, filled with personalities and acute observations, punctuated by
moments of frustration verging on fury – for the author is quite a hater,
especially when crossed.
The play’s two most dramatic acts are the International Monetary Fund crisis
in 1976 (when the world’s money markets moved powerfully against the
aspirations of the Callaghan Government and a reeling pound) and the Winter
of Discontent in 1978–9 (when the wider Labour and trades union movement,
out of whose bowels Callaghan had come, ensured that Labour would lose the
forthcoming general election whenever it was called). These events, which
were to change the tectonics of the United Kingdom’s politics and political
economy profoundly and, almost certainly, permanently, are the bookends of
this volume.
First, I must declare an interest. Donoughue outs our clandestine relationship
during that era of tightly drawn official secrecy in this book:
15th–17 November 1976
Ridiculous that we [special advisers] are always suspected of leaking to the
press. In fact I do occasionally talk with three old friends in newspapers
without giving anything secret away – one on the Sunday Times (Harold
Evans), one on The Times (Peter Hennessy) and one on the Financial Times
(Joe Rogaly). Each tells me that most of their frequent leaks of secret
information comes from regular civil servants.
There has always been a whiff of John le Carré about Bernard Donoughue. He
suggested I acquire a cover name for the purposes of contacting him in the
office. I did. I would ring the switchboard and ask for Dr Donoughue’s
secretary, “Brenda”, I’d say, “it’s Mr Robinson for Bernard” and through the
call would go. The ripest fruit from one of those “Mr Robinson”
conversations had to do with the very official secrecy we were conspiring to
thwart.
In July 1976, New Society leaked a Cabinet paper revealing the Callaghan
Government’s U-turn on replacing children’s tax allowances with a child
benefit paid directly to mothers. There was a huge leak inquiry which,
naturally, failed to find a culprit. Callaghan, not an open government man
by temperament, was furious – and I knew he was. Weeks later at the
Westminster political correspondents’ briefing on a quiet Friday morning (I
was the FT’s number two lobby man for a short period), Callaghan’s Press
Secretary, the agreeable Tom McCaffrey, told us of a ministerial Cabinet
committee which, that very morning, was deciding to liberalize official
secrecy by bringing forward a more narrowly constructed statute to replace
the vilified and discredited catch-all Official Secrets Act, 1911.
I was suspicious, went back to my office and activated the “Mr Robinson”
connection. I told Bernard what McCaffrey had said and of my doubts. “You’re
quite right”, said Bernard. “It’s all to do with the child benefit leak. Jim
wants an Official Secrets Act that will work.” He paused. “In fact, the
whole idea is to replace an old, unusable blunderbuss with a modern, deadly
Armalite!” That was the FT’s story the following day and Bernard’s
non-attributable one-liner took on a life of its own, including within
Whitehall, to Bernard’s secret pleasure, as his diary reveals.
Friday, 30 July 1976
10.30 We had a Cabinet committee on the Franks Report on Official Secrets. The
PM was quite open that he wants “reform” in order to tighten the law and
make it more effective. Jenkins [Home Secretary] wanted something more
liberal than Franks, and quoted my (original) phrase about replacing the
blunderbuss with the Armalite rifle (which I gave to Peter Hennessy of the
FT and now keeps cropping up everywhere).
But, barely four months into his premiership, Jim Callaghan had far more
pressing matters on his mind than reforming the secrecy laws. He would say
later he had hoped, when he became PM in April 1976, he would not have to
spend excessive amounts of time on the economy – with the big-hitter Denis
Healey in the Treasury – but the “economy is always there, like Banquo’s
ghost, to haunt you”. “Haunt” is not quite the right verb. For from July
1976 and into, at least, January 1977 the economy marched into the Cabinet
Room and plonked itself firmly beside the Prime Minister.
The crunch had been coming for some time. On the morning of February 28, 1974,
the day of the “Who Rules?” general election called by Ted Heath, the
Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, convened a secret meeting of permanent
secretaries to consider a paper from the Foreign Office’s planning staff
entitled A Policy for the Lean Years (exactly the kind of exercise we need
now but won’t get for fear of leaks). With a weakened British economy,
raddled with industrial strife, a quadrupling of the oil price, dreadful
prospects for the balance of payments, the priority had to be “policies
which would inspire confidence in the markets”. A few hours later, Donoughue
tells Wilson, as they walk through the damp streets of a council estate in
his Huyton constituency near Liverpool, that the polls suggest he will win
the largest number of seats in the new House of Commons (he did – just)
while remaining well short of an overall majority.
The inheritance from Heath, who eventually resigned the following Monday,
having failed to secure a deal with the Liberals, really was the leanest of
lean years. The permanent secretaries reckoned “international borrowing in
the next few years would be from the international money markets and not
from Governments. It should be adequate to see the country through the lean
years”. It wasn’t. By the autumn of 1976, the world no longer wished to lend
to Britain and showed no sign of wanting to resume without a good
housekeeping seal of approval from the International Monetary Fund – hence
the acute crisis which Callaghan feared might be a re-run of 1931 and bring
the Labour Government down.
The minutes of the nine bruising Cabinet meetings it took to get his ministers
to face hard reality are now declassified, as are Callaghan’s scribbled
notes of which colleagues were in what camp (Healey’s, Tony Crosland’s
anti-deflationists, or the siege economy/import controllers with Tony Benn
and Peter Shore). Donoughue was not allowed to see those minutes at the
time, so sensitive were they, and he was reduced to prowling around No 10
talking to the private secretaries, snatching glimpses at the papers in
Callaghan’s “dip” to find out what was going on (he did).
The archives are frozen history. The Donoughue diaries bring them to life; the
limbs begin to move; people breathe and talk, fume and plot.
Donoughue’s own battle was with a Treasury whose knights, he was convinced,
were both secretly encouraging the IMF, the Ford administration in
Washington and Chancellor Schmidt in West Germany to impose tough terms for
a loan and constantly trying to boost the deflationary element of the
inevitable cuts package that would be the price of a deal. The
counter-argument of the knights (to me and a few other journalists) at the
time was that it was their duty to tell ministers what the finance
ministries of key countries really thought and what would be needed for the
money markets to be persuaded in mid-December 1976, after the “Letter of
Intent” to the IMF was being completed, is captured in a characteristic
diary entry for December 12.
As I was leaving at 9 p.m. I saw Nicholas Monck, the Chancellor’s private
secretary, whom I have known for many years, in Private Office. He was
waiting for the Chancellor to arrive to see the PM. Presumably he had the
revised letter, but he did not show me. In fact, he was very nasty, accusing
me of being a “conspiracy theorist” and saying that the treasury had behaved
“decently and openly throughout.” He said to Gavyn Davies [an economist in
Donoughue’s No 10 Policy Unit], “I strongly resent being accused of
cheating.” Gavyn said, “the Treasury only gets what it deserves”. I decided
not to put the boot in, since he had clearly been working terribly hard and
had had a rough time. But one saw the Etonian bureaucrat resenting the
interference by upstarts such as me. Too bad. They deserved to lose this
one.
Donoughue, like his boss, wished to steer a course between monetarism and a
siege economy, and the political historian in him was ever sensitive to the
would-be beneficiaries of Left and Right if Callaghan was broken by the IMF
crisis, which seemed a real possibility (“The atmosphere still full of
crisis and doom, talk of Callaghan not surviving and a coalition around the
corner”, October 28, 1976). He watches the alternative strategists in
Cabinet committees (“the siege economy looks a little nearer. Benn and Shore
sit and wait for it. We may just avoid it by the skin of our teeth”;
September 23, 1976). And he sees the other alternative in action in the
House of Commons when he accompanies Callaghan to an economic debate on
October 11, 1976. (“Keith Joseph looked absolutely mad, arms waving, head
and eyes rolling, when he interrupted to speak up for monetarism.”)
Callaghan did prevail. He eased the deal through in Cabinet without a single
resignation in one of the finest – perhaps the last – examples of genuine
collective government in the post-war years, and carried the Commons. His
tragedy, acutely captured in Donoughue’s pages, is that all his remarkable
political gifts were deployed in holding the line; getting his Government,
his party and his country by. Callaghan shone in his last job with a lustre
that had been lacking when he was in the Treasury, the Home Office and the
Foreign Office. Avoiding another 1931 was a kind of triumph – but a negative
one. Donoughue’s respect for Callaghan grew as it fell for Wilson. In both
his diary and his introduction to the volume, he contrasts his two premiers
as neatly as anyone has. Callaghan, he writes,
had three layers of personality. On the surface was the familiar bluff and
avuncular Jim. Below that was a shrewd, secretive and even wily politician.
And beneath those layers was an authentic and very decent person who really
did believe in the straight honest values in life.
Incidentally, his Nonconformist formation – Jim the Baptist – is revealed by a
habit I did not know Callaghan possessed. Before a crisis meeting or a big
debate in the House, Jim would sing hymns quite unselfconsciously,
surrounded by his advisers.
Wilson, another Nonconformist in Downing Street, had, by contrast,
only two main layers. On top was Tricky Harold, the clever and devious
political manipulator. Below that was a kindly, weak and insecure man. But I
am not sure that there was anything at all beneath that: perhaps just a void
where Jim had his root values.
We learn in these pages, via Ken Stowe, Principal Private Secretary to both of
them (and a very reliable source) that Wilson “had ‘heart attacks’ in
1975–76” (October 4, 1978). We knew he had some “heart racing” on a trip to
Paris in December 1974 to see Giscard d’Estaing, when his pilot had to abort
the landing at the last minute – but no more than that. One of the
sub-themes of this volume is the sad decline of the former PM:
a quick bite in the cafeteria – where Harold Wilson’s driver Bill Housden
joined us. He was very disparaging about HW. He said he still drinks too
much, and that his memory is completely going – he cannot remember where he
is going in the evening, even though Bill keeps reminding him. Bill says
that nobody visits him, and he has no friends: “It is very sad”.
Callaghan, as he told me himself, many years later, thought being Prime
Minister “absolute heaven – I enjoyed every minute of it until those last
few months of the ‘Winter of Discontent’”, though “when you lose your
majority it’s jolly inconvenient, because you have to look at every piece of
legislation, every piece of business that’s coming up in the following week,
to see whose support you are going to get”.
Callaghan’s core problem was the almost daily task of governing without a
majority with his party moving left and his country moving right. The
tension this created, and the sheer fatigue of constantly juggling the
political arithmetic in the House of Commons, explains, I think, why he
could not bear the thought of leading another minority government which an
election in October 1978 would almost certainly have produced. His instinct
was confirmed by the figures brought by his pollster, Bob Worcester, to his
Sussex farm during the summer recess of 1978. He told no one among his team
of advisers in No 10, who confidently planned for an autumn contest. He
teased the Trades Union Congress by dredging up a song from the music hall
of his youth – “There was I, waiting at the Church . . .” – which caused
some of them no little fury.
From this decision sprang the second great shift in the UK’s political
geomorphology illuminated in this volume – the Winter of Discontent. For
several years after leaving No 10, Callaghan would host an annual lunch at
the Athenaeum for his former private secretaries. In the flow of
reminiscence, this was the one subject he never raised and they did not dare
to. Callaghan not only wanted to go into a general election with a chance of
a majority, he wanted to squeeze as much inflation out of the British
economic system as he could. The 5 per cent pay target was his – not a
collective decision of the Cabinet – and he was determined to stick to it
through thick and thin.
It turned out to be entirely thin, from the moment Moss Evans’s Transport and
General Workers burst it handsomely in the autumn, in the deal they struck
for the Ford workers. Before Christmas, the Labour Left in Parliament
ensured that the power to impose sanctions on norm-busting employers was
denied the Government. In a rare misjudgement in January, Callaghan,
returning from a G7 summit in sunny Guadeloupe, appeared to say “Crisis,
what crisis?” (they were not his actual words) to the waiting cameras at
Heathrow airport, as a nation suffering snow, a crippling haulage strike and
a rush of industrial action across the public services, looked on deeply
unimpressed.
The Donoughue diaries are the best account yet of those dreadful weeks, when
Callaghan seemed to lose all idea of what to do, spending hour after hour on
his own in his upstairs study, occasionally coming down to read the Press
Association tapes just along from the Cabinet Room, looking grumpy and
speaking to no one. He said to one of his closest advisers (not Donoughue)
later: “I think I let the country down”. No student of the 1970s and 80s
should fail to read Donoughue’s entries for January 15–19, 1979, the “end of
the worst week – worst politically, that is – since I came to No 10. The
depth of the crisis is reflected in the fact that it is not hectic and
fraught, with people dashing around desperately trying to rescue the
situation. It is all very quiet . . . . The atmosphere is one of quiet
despair”. Labour had blown what it regarded as its trump card with the
electorate – the belief that only they could handle the unions. The country
was in the process of deciding it wanted union power broken – not managed.
24 January 1979
Watching this happen, it strikes me how governments are beaten – from within
and not without. The Tories have never done us this kind of damage. Nor did
the IMF. The present demoralisation arises from within, from within the
Labour movement and from within the Cabinet itself.
Spot on. The bitter farce of these diaries is in the witnessing it permits of
Labour eating itself, turning inwards and chewing up the best of its
political tradition and its electoral prospects.
Callaghan simply couldn’t handle it. He was flesh of the unions’ flesh. He had
been their protector during the In Place of Strife crisis of the late 1960s.
There are no iron laws of politics; but there is a non-ferrous metal law of
premiership. Think how many post-war prime ministers have been undone on the
political terrain they had made their own: Eden on Middle East and diplomacy
in 1956; Callaghan on trade unions in 1979; Margaret Thatcher (nobody had a
surer or swifter access to the mind of the aggrieved taxpayer) on the poll
tax in 1990; Gordon Brown on the economy in 2008.
Only at the final lunch in No 10 on May 4, 1979, with Mrs Thatcher but hours
away from kissing hands and becoming Prime Minister, could Callaghan face it
as he ate the cottage pie provided by the Private Office (they warmed it up
for Mrs Thatcher’s supper) with his closest advisers:
Finally he said it – “The unions did it: people could not forget and would not
forgive what they had to suffer from the unions last winter.” Here I
mentioned my joke about Thatcher giving Moss Evans and Alan Fisher [of NUPE]
a life peerage each “for services to the Conservative Party.” He laughed
easily and with pleasure.
Then we all rose and drifted out.
Callaghan was a bigger man and a better Prime Minister than people remember.
The Donoughue diaries have done him a posthumous service.
What will I most recall of Bernard Donoughue’s Downing Street when little else
remains stuck to the Velcro of memory? It’s one of the le Carré-like
occasions – a Saturday morning in 1977, the two of us taking a walk not far
from his Dartmouth Park home in north London, on Parliament Hill Fields. We
spied a distinguished looking elderly man and his wife walking up the hill
towards us. “Do you know Willie Robson of the LSE?” asked Bernard.
“I know of him, but we’ve never met”, I said of the great expert in public
administration. “Well, I, of course do. I’m not going to introduce you – and
you’re not to say anything.” I didn’t – contenting myself with flashing a
Queen Mother smile at the charming couple. We strode on talking, if I
remember, about who should succeed Sir Douglas Allen as head of the Home
Civil Service. Those were the days. Donoughue Rules, as le Carré might have
written.
Bernard Donoughue
DOWNING STREET DIARY
Volume Two: With James Callaghan in Number 10
562pp. Cape. £30.
978 0 224 07380 6
Peter Hennessy is Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen
Mary, University of London, and the author of The Prime Minister: The office
and its holders since 1945, 2000, and Having It So Good: Britain in the
fifties, 2006.
