Till Death Us Do Part - a clarification

In a post yesterday I quoted a rant by Rita in a 1974 episode of Till Death Us Do Part that linked together the names of Edward Heath, Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile. The ethics of that posting have been challenged by someone whose opinions I respect, so I thought I'd better try to explain myself.

Firstly, I don't believe the recent allegations of child abuse by Heath. They don't seem to me to be plausible at all. Like everyone else, I have heard over the years many rumours of Heath being actively homosexual - even, from one right-wing extremist that he regularly went cottaging - and I don't believe those either. More relevantly, I never heard stories about him having an interest in under-age sex. (Whereas such stories were common about both Smith and Savile.)

But I do believe that Johnny Speight, who created Till Death, knew what he was doing when he wrote that rant, putting those names together. He was an old-fashioned socialist who loathed the Conservative prime minister and was (I think) deliberately alluding to rumours he had heard with the intention of subtly smearing Heath. And as someone who writes about cultural and political history, I find this fascinating.

I didn't discuss this in my book Crisis? What Crisis?, where I used only the first half of the quote. And the reason I didn't discuss it was that two of the three men were then still alive and I would never have got it past my publisher's lawyer.

I did, however, post the quote on a previous blog last September, when the stories about Smith entered the public domain. And I did so again yesterday because the allegations against Heath have been front-page news for several days. This story is also now in the public domain and, given the wrong behaviour of the police and the extensive reporting, I don't think that a quote from a 1970s comedy show on an obscure blog is going to add to the misery of Heath's surviving relatives.

But it is fascinating that those connections were included in what was still one of the biggest sitcoms in the country, and certainly the only one that regularly featured very explicit comment on current politics. This was particularly the case in that fifth series at the beginning of 1974, the episodes of which Speight rewrote right up to the last minute, to ensure they were as fresh as possible, at a time when the political situation was changing rapidly.

Speight, of course, is long since dead and - as far as I know - never talked about this speech. But it feels deliberate, and I think it's worth noting.

There remains, though, another question: what were the rumours that Speight was alluding to?

This was written, it should be remembered, at a time when male homosexuality was still illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and when the age of consent for homosexual acts between men was still twenty-one in England and Wales. Brought before the courts, a thirty-year-old man having sex with an eighteen-year-old boy was quite likely to be dealt with as - if not more - harshly as if he had had sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. This, of course, is no longer the case.

I've written elsewhere about how sex with minors was viewed in the 1970s. Not just legally but culturally, there are some major differences between then and now. Amongst them is the fact that male homosexuality and paedophilia used to be seen as inextricably entwined; this perception was articulated in public and in popular culture in a way that would be entirely unacceptable today.

It is possible that some of this confusion is present in Speight's writing. It is equally possible that what he was mocking was hypocrisy in public figures. (Savile, though not a political figure, was at the time associated with moral campaigners such as Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse.)

I should add that although I don't think the stories of Heath being a paedophile are going to hold water, I do believe that the bigger story has a long, long way to run yet. There were undoubtedly paedophiles in powerful positions (though not necessarily household names) and there were undoubtedly some who chose to look the other way. This was not confined to Westminster. In the same way, the pupils at many a school would know which teacher to avoid, yet somehow no one in authority did anything about it.

That habit of concealment is now looked upon as having been disgraceful. And if an example of such a covering-up had been exposed forcefully enough at the time it would also have been censured. But it wasn't exposed. Because that's just how things were. As a society (though obviously this does not apply to those involved), we simply didn't consider it to be that big a deal.

Now it is considered the biggest deal of all, and consequently this story is going to be increasingly important over the next few years. I suspect there will be many explosions to come. Perhaps literally, because I think it's such an emotive subject that it could provoke violent expressions of anger. I can envisage it becoming the primary focus for the growing mood of anti-elitism.

Which is why I've written as much as I have on the subject. (There's another piece here.) And when I come across things like the Till Death quote, I record them. But maybe I should do so with a little more commentary.

Now that's what I call a Labour leadership election

Final nominations are due in tomorrow for candidates wishing to stand for the Labour leadership. Which inevitably brings comparison with the best slate of candidates who ever stood for the job, back in 1976 when Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as prime minister. The following is an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis?...

The three principal candidates of the right in the election were Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland, who had respectively voted for, voted against and abstained in the crucial 1971 Commons debate on entry into Europe. The rivalry between them ensured that there was no single figure around whom the right could comfortably coalesce, though the election did go some way towards resolving the issue for the future.

In the first ballot Crosland was decisively beaten into last place with barely 5 per cent of the 314 votes cast by Labour MPs (who then made up the entire constituency), and was therefore automatically knocked out.

Jenkins came third in a field of six but, distraught at having got only fifty-six votes, withdrew from the race, to the undisguised glee of his arch-enemy: ‘When I think of the fantastic press that man has had, year in year out, and all the banging I’ve had, it is gratifying that he should have only got eighteen votes more than me,’ exulted Tony Benn, who had already announced his own withdrawal.

It was indeed a disastrous performance by Jenkins; ninety Labour MPs were considered at the time to be strongly pro-European and yet the man who had risked his career by defying the party whip on the issue, and should therefore by rights have been the leader of that group, attracted little more than half of them.

Healey, however, coming second to last, with a paltry thirty votes to his name, refused even to consider withdrawing, and thereby enhanced his position for the future. Where Jenkins looked like a beaten man, Healey was revealed as a born fighter, determined to stay in the ring until forcibly ejected from it – next time round, it was clear, he would be the champion of the right and would probably be the favourite to win.

Crosland’s analysis of the contest summed up the shifting fortunes of the also-rans: it was, he said, ‘A year too soon for Denis. Four years too late for Roy. Five years too soon for Tony. Two years and one job too soon for me.’

The left was also split, despite the performance of Michael Foot. He came top in the first ballot, getting three times as many votes as Benn, but Benn was able to take comfort from a Sunday Times poll that showed him as the second-placed candidate among Labour voters, clearly ahead of Foot. Amongst Labour activists it is to be assumed that his support was stronger still, such was the growing gap between the old left in Parliament and the younger, more radical factions in the party outside, who looked to Benn as their tribune.

Foot had only joined the front bench in 1974, after many years on the backbenches, and though he brought with him a history as the conscience of the left and as the passionate defender of the memory of the sainted Nye Bevan, whose constituency he had inherited, he was starting to seem like something of a relic, a platform orator in a world shaped by the mass media. Moreover he was a man whose fierce loyalty to the party ensured that he would always side with the leadership in moments of crisis, a fact that was anathema to the idealist Jerusalem-builders two generations below him.

For it wasn’t just the attitudes that were looking elderly; now approaching his sixty-third birthday, Foot was older than Wilson himself. Even so, he was still younger than the man who beat him in the third and final ballot. (Healey had been knocked out in the interim round, gaining just one vote more than Benn had on the first ballot, which again gave the latter ‘great pleasure’.)

James Callaghan, the ultimate victor in the contest, was in many ways an outsider in the race, overcoming the handicaps of birth and circumstance. ‘Prime minister, and I never even went to university,’ he marvelled in his moment of triumph, revelling in his defeat of five Oxford graduates.

He had succeeded largely by remaining outside the fray; aligned with the factions of neither left nor right, but instead establishing himself as the master of the party machine, he carried no ideological baggage, just a reputation as a safe, if unadventurous, pair of hands. By these means he had already occupied the other three great offices of state – chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary – before ascending to the highest position of all.

As Claudius put it in the recently screened BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, when he finally became emperor and was accused of being half-witted: ‘I have survived to middle age with half my wits, while thousands have died with all theirs intact. Evidently quality of wits is more important than quantity.’

A tale of some minor parties

A week or so back, I predicted that one consequence of the election would be the resignations of Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg as the leaders of, respectively, Ukip and the Liberal Democrats. I also predicted that Natalie Bennett would not resign as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.

These things having now come to pass, it's time to evaluate them.

Starting with the last first, Bennett should have the decency to go immediately. She has proved herself to be completely useless as a leader. The Greens had a dreadful election, and much of the blame for that rests with her.

The party achieved less than 4 per cent of the vote. Under most sensible forms of proportional representation, the bar for securing seats is set at 5 per cent. Frankly they're fortunate that first-past-the-post came to their rescue and gave them an MP.

Yet the opportunity was unquestionably there for the Greens: lots of airtime and visibility, a weak Labour leadership, a widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. A breakthrough of sorts was possible. Obviously not in terms of winning large numbers of seats, but even without representation, a minor party can still have an influence, can help to shape the political agenda.

You only need look to Ukip. At a time when they had no MPs at all, they were still capable of scaring the British prime minister into promising a referendum when he didn't want one, and panicking the Labour Party into saying they'd 'get tough' on immigration, when we knew they wouldn't.

So what did Bennett do? She joined in the chorus of 'the Tories are mean and nasty'. Well, if you believed that, then you should have done the sensible thing and voted for a party capable of removing the Conservatives from office. Which is, indeed, what the vast majority of those opposed to the Tories actually did.

At a constituency level, things may have been different, but on the national stage Bennett offered nothing at all that was distinctive. One brief mention in a leaders' debate of climate change and vanishing species, and that was it. At a time when fracking offers a perfect way of linking the local with the global, there was only silence.

It is, of course, more difficult to get attention for environmental issues at a time of economic hardship, but this is far from a new problem. I wrote about it in Crisis? What Crisis?, my book on the 1970s. There's been plenty of time to work out a strategy for such a situation.

The Greens are one of the few parties who actually have a USP. Yet they didn't exploit it. Instead there was a manifesto and a platform full of policies on an absurd range of issues that were entirely irrelevant, including the stupidity over copyright, to which I drew attention a while back. (And which subsequently annoyed the hell out of a lot of creative people who were sympathetic to the party.)

Why? Where's the benefit in burying your brand? Why allow your core message to be lost amidst a welter of questions about a tax policy you will never have a chance to implement?

One other point, which most people are (quite rightly) too polite and decent to say out loud: the voice was wrong. The British public didn't warm to being waffled at in an Australian accent. Obviously it shouldn't matter, but it does.

In short, Bennett should go.

So too should Farage. He's left open the possibility of coming back from his holidays and standing again for the Ukip leadership, but he should resist the temptation. The party is better off without him now.

He has been an extraordinary figure who has over-achieved on a spectacular scale. In many ways, he was the story of the Coalition years, conducting a brilliant guerrilla campaign against Westminster. (Do I need to point out that I'm talking about technique not policies? I do hope not.) I went to one of his EU debates with Nick Clegg and he was a superb performer - committed Europhiles were coming out of the hall saying how good he was.

But he still has to go.

When Ukip won the elections for the European Parliament a year ago, I wrote that they'd reached their high-water mark. If they were ever to go any further, I suggested, they needed to thank Farage for all his work and ask him to step down. He'd taken them as far as he possibly could. My comparison was with Ian Holloway, a colourful, charming and competent manager who got Blackpool Football Club to the Premier League, but couldn't keep them there.

My argument was that if Ukip wanted to secure - let alone go beyond - the 4.4 million votes they achieved last year, they had to make serious inroads into Labour heartlands, and Farage was probably not the man for that. He did pretty well this week, but the party fell to 3.9 million votes on a far higher turnout. It could have been better if he'd gone last year. Now it's probably too late, and decline is (I think) inevitable.

Ukip are, as normal with third parties, an odd coalition of the disgruntled and the idealistic from all points of the political compass.

There are two broad bases of support: the Eurosceptic deserters from the Conservative Party and the disillusioned white working-class who feel abandoned by Labour. These are represented by Douglas Carswell and Paul Nuttall respectively, and I assume that they will be the two candidates in a leadership election. I also assume that Carswell will win, to the detriment of the party's electoral interests.

The alternative is Suzanne Evans, currently the acting leader, who would be their best choice of all. And since I think that, I don't expect her to get the job on a permanent basis.

Their moment has passed, but they leave behind an example of how to make a difference. Why is there no Left party that can do this?

And so, finally, to Nick Clegg.

What can one say? Well, firstly, that he made exactly the right decision in 2010. The Lib Dems, and before them the Liberals, had always banged on about coalition government being a good thing. They were offered it, and they accepted. To do otherwise would have been foolish.

Some people complained that Clegg would have sold his own mother to get power, but that judgement seemed a little harsh. After all, he did join the Lib Dems, which isn't traditionally the way to achieve high office. Given the state of modern politics, he could have fitted perfectly comfortably into the modern Conservative or Labour Parties, but he chose the road less travelled.

As the junior partner in the Coalition, the Lib Dems proved surprisingly effective at government. They got through key policies like the pupil premium and raising the threshold for income tax; even the tuition fees increase - damaging though it was - had a logic, if they'd only had the sense to call it a time-limited graduate tax.

Most of their members and (probably) their supporters would have preferred a coalition with Labour, but that wasn't available in 2010. In the circumstances, I thought they played a difficult hand rather well and could justifiably be proud of their record.

But over recent months, and particularly during the campaign itself, they decided to distance themselves from their Coalition partners and, in so doing, they thoroughly ruined the good story they had to tell.

The final straw came when Danny Alexander decided to reveal the contents of private government papers in an attack on the Tories. The effect was to make the party look incompetent and untrustworthy. Who would want to work with people who go telling tales out of school? The first rule of Coalition Club is you don't talk about what goes on behind the scenes at Coalition Club.

Before the election, it was widely assumed that Tim Farron would become the next leader. Now that looks like such a nailed-on certainty that the party's going to have to twist someone's arm to stand against him, so that it least has the formal structure of a contest. Norman Lamb, possibly; or that bloke up in Scotland, whose constituency is so remote that not even SNP canvassers could find it.

Farron is the obvious and correct choice. He's as close as they've got to an old-fashioned Liberal, and since the parliamentary party is down to the numbers last seen under Jeremy Thorpe, they might as well adopt an old-fashioned approach.

But it's an absurdly uphill struggle now. The thing is this: if the Lib Dems didn't exist, who would bother to invent them?