1976 E-Book

Christopher Sandford

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 557

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Searing heat, political turmoil, revolution in popular culture: relive the scorching year of 1976 in all its glory. On the political scene, Harold Wilson abruptly resigned as prime minister; Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe resigned in advance of his arrest and sensational Old Bailey trial for conspiracy and incitement to murder; and the Tories elected 'Milk Snatcher' Margaret Thatcher as their party leader. The IRA's long-running demands for the reunification of Ireland exploded into a campaign of wholesale terrorism on the British mainland. Meanwhile, the Black Panther was finally arrested and brought to justice, and the curious case of John Stonehouse, the UK's last Postmaster General, came to its climax. Throw in the fact that Southampton defied 500:1 odds to win the FA Cup, and the irresistible rise of punk rock, triggered by the iconic moment when the Sex Pistols were let loose on an unsuspecting teatime-television audience, and 1976 proves itself a truly pendulum year that divides the old from the new - recaptured here in fully living, human detail. Inside 1976: - Season-by-season account of the events of this bumper year - Stories from across the UK, USA, Europe and the Soviet Union - Political rivalries in a Cold War era, including the early rise of Margaret Thatcher and the demise of Harold Wilson - Celebrities of the era, including David Bowie, Sid James and the Sex Pistols, ABBA and the Bee Gees - Massive breakthroughs in criminal justice, such as the arrest of the Black Panther, and the conclusion of the case of postmaster general John Stonehouse Leaving no stone unturned and no story untold, *1976* is a book of pure nostalgia for those who lived through it, and an eyeopening experience for those who didn't: a page turner right to the end.

Leseprobe

Also by Christopher Sandford:

HISTORY

Houdini and Conan Doyle

The Final Over

Harold and Jack

The Man Who Would be Sherlock

Kennedy and Great Britain (originally Union Jack)

The Zeebrugge Raid

The Final Innings

The Man Who Conned the World

Midnight in Tehran

1964

MUSIC BIOGRAPHIES

Mick Jagger

Eric Clapton

Kurt Cobain

David Bowie

Sting

Bruce Springsteen

Keith Richards

Paul McCartney

The Rolling Stones

FILM BIOGRAPHIES

Steve McQueen

Roman Polanski

SPORT

The Cornhill Centenary Test

Godfrey Evans

Tom Graveney

Imran Khan

John Murray

Laker and Lock

The Cricketers of 1945

FICTION

Feasting with Panthers

Arcadian

We Don’t Do Dogs

PLAYS

Comrades

For the Parish family

Publisher’s Note: The following text contains quotes that use racist and insensitive language representative of the time depicted. There are also graphic descriptions of violence. Readers should proceed at their own discretion.

First published 2025

The History Press

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© Christopher Sandford, 2025

The right of Christopher Sandford to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 1 80399 958 6

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Blood on the Tracks

I. Winter

II. Spring

III. Summer

IV. Autumn

Sources and Chapter Notes

Select Bibliography

‘I do not give you to posterity as a pattern to imitate, but as an example to deter.’

The Letters of Junius, ‘Dedication to the English Nation’ (1769)

‘The question is not yet settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether all that is profound does not spring from disease of thought.’

Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora (1842)

‘Anarchy in the UK’

The Sex Pistols (1976)

Acknowledgements

A harsh critic, reviewing my recent 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began, complained that I appeared to have only ‘slightly changed’ the book’s structure (as opposed to its contents) from an earlier biography I wrote of the international conman Victor Lustig. I risk the same critic’s ire here by freely admitting that this new book’s structure hasn’t been changed even as much as slightly from the one on 1964. In fact, it’s identical. Dividing the story of a year into four main chapters that broadly follow the annual seasons still seems to me a reasonable enough way to go about the job, although I’ve made no superhuman effort to keep the compartments watertight. The subheadings that appear in each chapter hopefully give some idea of where that particular part of the tale is heading.

More to the point, I’d like to thank the following individuals or institutions for their help with the whole business, while again making clear that none of those listed can be blamed for the shortcomings of the text. As always, they’re mine alone.

For archive material, input or advice, I should note, professionally: AbeBooks; America; the Brazen Head; the British Library; the British Newspaper Library; Cambridge University Library; Companies House; Cricketer International; the Cricket Society; the Daily Express; the FBI, Freedom of Information Division; the General Register Office; Peter Hain; Hansard; Hedgehog Review; The History Press; Imperial War Museum; the late Louis Kirby; Barbara Levy; the Library of Congress; the MCC Library; Christine McMorris; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; the Mitre House Hotel, London; Modern Age; the UK National Archives; The Oldie; Bill Payne; Plough; Public Record Office; Tim Reidy; Renton Public Library; Seattle Central College; The Seattle Times; The Spectator; Sussex County Cricket Club; Derek Turner; Vital Records; Wisden Cricket Monthly; and the late Tom Wolfe.

And personally: Leann Alspaugh; Reverend Maynard Atik; Pam and Dudley Ayres; Pete Barnes; Henry Blofeld; Rob Boddie; Robert and Hilary Bruce; Don Carson; the late Charles Cross; Mark Demos; Monty Dennison; the Dowdall family; Barbara and the late John Dungee; Steve Fossen; Malcolm Galfe; Dr Raul Garcia; James Graham; Karolyn Grimes; Steve and Jo Hackett; Duncan Hamilton; Nigel Hancock; Christine Hewitson; Alastair Hignell; Charles Hillman; Alex Holmes; Jo Jacobius; the late Julian James; Robin B. James; Tommy James; Bill and Morgan Johnson; Jo Johnson; the late Wilko Johnson; Lincoln Kamell; Bob Knowles; Terry Lambert; Alex Larman; Belinda Lawson; Gene Lemcio; the late Alexei Leonov; the Lorimer family; Robert Dean Lurie; Somar Macek; Les McBride; Dan McCarthy; Myra McEwan; the Macris; Lee Mattson; Jim Meyersahm; the late Jerry Miller; the Morgans; Harry Mount; the Murray family; Greg Nowak; Phillip Oppenheim; Valya Page; Robin and Lucinda Parish; Owen Paterson; Peter Perchard; Roman Polanski; the Prins family; Bill Reader; Neil Robinson; the Rushbrooke family; Debbie Saks; the late Sefton Sandford; Peter Scaramanga; Fred and Cindy Smith; the Smith family; the Stanley family; Jack Surendranath; Matt Thacker; Nick Tudball; Derek Turner; the late Diana Villar; Lisbeth Vogl; Rogena and the late Alan White; Richard Wigmore; Debbie Wild; the Willis Fleming family; the late Aaron Wolf; and Bill Wyman.

My deepest thanks, as always, to Karen and Nicholas Sandford.

C.S.

2025

Introduction

Blood on the Tracks

The young Metropolitan Police Inspector John Purnell remembered he and his fellow officers feeling disgruntled with life, and as time went by, ‘freezing our arses off ’ during the bitterly cold Saturday night of 6 December 1975. They were part of Operation Combo, in which the Met had flooded central London with both uniformed and plainclothes officers in the hope of catching an IRA active service unit (ASU) that had been terrorising the capital. Just a week earlier, the Guinness Book of Records co-founder Ross McWhirter had been shot dead outside his home in suburban Enfield after offering a £50,000 reward for information leading to the ASU men’s arrest.

The unit had targeted popular pubs, clubs and restaurants with bombings and shootings throughout 1975, and had murdered a 21-year-old unarmed police constable when he gave chase to several men down a road near Barons Court Tube Station in west London following what he took to be a common house burglary. On 23 October, the IRA cell had even managed to significantly put back the campaign against cancer when they detonated a bomb that killed Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a pioneering Professor of Oncology at St Barts Hospital, after he had brushed against the booby-trapped car belonging to his next-door neighbour, the Conservative MP Hugh Fraser. The horrible circumstances of his neighbour’s death had moved Fraser with every particle of his being with the resolve to ‘treat the IRA as the street thugs they really are’.

These were far from isolated cases of organised violence around the English capital that autumn. After the regrettable error with the cancer doctor, the IRA unit had turned its attention to what it called ‘ruling-class’ restaurants, such as the popular Trattoria Fiore in Mount Street, where on 29 October their bomb ripped the scalp off an American tourist and another woman lost her foot, while several other diners were blinded or maimed by razor shards of flying glass.

On the night of 18 November, it was the turn of Walton’s restaurant in Chelsea, where a 5lb bomb containing an assortment of nails and ball-bearings was flung through the front window, killing a man and a woman and injuring twenty-three other people, the oldest of them in his mid-seventies. In the period from July to December 1975, the gang averaged more than a shooting or a bombing a week in the capital, a level of violence against civilian targets that had been unmatched since the IRA’s own ‘S’ (or Sabotage) campaign on the British mainland of the late 1930s.

So the various stakeout teams involving Inspector Purnell and his colleagues that cold December night were bored but watchful, sitting in their unmarked cars in residential streets as far afield as Clapham and Chiswick, or loitering among the crowds milling around Leicester Square or Oxford Circus, hoping to catch sight of anything out of the ordinary. It was a routine broken only by the welcome arrival of a female colleague bearing mugs of hot soup to Purnell and his partner, Sergeant Phil McVeigh, as they stood stamping their feet in an attempt to keep themselves warm in a shop doorway, or walked in tight circles around the corner of Park Street and North Row close to Marble Arch. Having been sustained only by an endlessly replenished supply of Players cigarettes, the two officers thought the soup a ‘sensational result’, profusely thanking the WPC, who said cheerfully as she returned to a waiting car, ‘It’s all yours now, lads’. Years later, Purnell admitted that three hours in to their nine-hour shift, he and McVeigh were ‘bored out of our boxes’, with only a couple of passing pedestrians and a dog noisily fouling the next doorway for company.

Shortly after 9 p.m. that boredom was rather dramatically relieved. Over Purnell’s radio came the news that the IRA gang had apparently just fired shots through the window of Scott’s restaurant in nearby Mount Street, a location they, the ASU, had visited earlier in the autumn by throwing a bomb through the open front door, killing an elderly diner and injuring fifteen others in the process. Moments later, a dark Ford Cortina drove slowly but erratically past the two policemen, crossed Oxford Street against the red traffic light and headed north along Cumberland Place. Anyone familiar with the then popular Thames Television show The Sweeney need only think of a scene from that same programme, but with the responding officers on foot rather than in the back of a screeching Rover P6, to get some of the flavour.

Rapidly abandoning the soup and stubbing out their cigarettes, the men ran to the corner of North Row and commandeered a passing black taxi. ‘I literally said to the cabbie, “Follow that car!”’, Purnell recalled. ‘He said, “Blimey, I’ve always wanted this to happen!” Of course, we didn’t tell him that it was full of armed terrorists.’

Within five minutes, the chase led them to the dead-end Alpha Close, near Regent’s Park, where the Cortina’s four passengers abruptly abandoned it. The street was nearly empty of other traffic – much of Britain was, after dark, fifty years ago – leaving Purnell and McVeigh to again continue their pursuit on foot.

Noticing they were not alone, one or more of the fleeing ASU men turned and opened fire, the bullets ricocheting against the side of a parked car. In short order, other officers arrived on the scene to join the chase, which continued down the darkened Rossmore Road, an elevated street that crosses the railway lines from Marylebone Station. One of the newly arrived reinforcements was a 21-year-old trainee constable named Ian Blair, who, thirty years later, went on to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and later still to write of his involvement:

We turned the corner, and there [was] the car … It was a very defining moment. I think I spent the next half an hour pretending to be a bush. They got out of the car and started firing at us. It is an interesting experience being shot at when you have absolutely nothing to shoot back with. I loved everything about that whole job.

Here some discrepancy exists with the account of the first man on the scene, John Purnell, who in 2007 recalled of the events that night:

I’ve never for one second associated Ian Blair with [the incident] in any shape or form, and his story of seeing the gang get out of the car and then being shot at is totally impossible. They didn’t fire at him. When the men got out of the car there were three people present: a cab driver, Phil McVeigh and myself. At that stage there wasn’t another police officer in sight. I wish there had been.

All parties agree on the salient point that the four IRA men, having hurriedly abandoned their vehicle, then ran down a flight of steps from Rossmore Road and pushed their way through the unlocked front door of a block of council flats at 22 Balcombe Street, adjacent to the station. In a flat on the first floor, an elderly couple, John and Sheila Matthews, were just settling down in front of their black-and-white Baird television set next to the two-bar electric fire in their sitting room to enjoy an episode of the American police drama Kojak. They both initially assumed that the loud gunshots that they could hear nearby were part of the show’s soundtrack. The couple were soon disabused on this point.

A moment later, four wild-eyed young men carrying handguns barged through the front door and announced that they were taking them hostage. Mr Matthews, a retired postman, had his legs tied together with his wife’s tights, while Mrs Matthews was dragged into the hall with a gun at her head by one of the gang, later identified as a London-born carpenter-turned-Irish Republican named Harry Duggan. Duggan shouted at the police gathered at the front door of the building below them, ‘Fuck off, you bastards!’ There were some further remarks of this sort, both to and fro, over the next few minutes, with the police using megaphones for amplification. The lengthy exchange rattled the flat’s front windows.

A six-day standoff ensued. The police surrounded the building and, with a telephone dropped onto the balcony of the flat from the roof, continually talked to the four Irishmen, who identified themselves only as ‘Paddy’ or ‘Mick’ for the officers’ benefit. Over the course of the week the latter’s tactics ranged from what might be called the Sweeney school (‘You come down here or we’ll kick your arses up to your shoulder blades’) to the more reasoned approach of remarking how the men were betraying the principles of Wolfe Tone – the eighteenth-century father of Irish Republicanism – at which, eschewing the conversational high road, Duggan angrily threw the negotiating phone out the window with another colourful epithet. The ASU men weren’t without a mordant sense of humour, however, because from time to time the strains of Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1967 hit ‘Release Me’ could be heard issuing loudly from the flat’s front room.

In the late morning of the sixth day, with the hostage-takers’ request for a plane to take them back to Ireland having been refused by negotiators, and having long since exhausted the Matthews’ supply of tinned goods and instant coffee, some cardboard boxes containing sausages, Brussels sprouts, potatoes and peaches were lowered to the flat from the balcony above. In what may have been a psych-ops exercise on the part of the authorities, a BBC radio broadcast stated that armed members of the Special Air Service were about to be deployed to resolve the crisis. This seemed to focus the Irishmen’s minds, and shortly after their midday meal, all four ASU men came out with their hands up to be swiftly driven away to the nearby Paddington Green Police Station. Their two hostages were in turn taken to University College Hospital, where a spokesman said they were ‘shaken and weak’ but otherwise unharmed.

In an apparent revenge attack five days later, a powerful homemade bomb exploded at Biddy Mulligan’s pub in Kilburn, north London, sending eight customers to hospital with injuries. Under questioning – which the UK National Archives describe, perhaps euphemistically, both as ‘intense’ and applying ‘deep psychology’ – the four ASU members gave up the address of a nearby London flat they and their colleagues had used as their base for the previous several months. When they visited the premises, the police recovered a list of other potential objectives, such as the British Museum, Madame Tussauds and the National Gallery, as well as 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace.

The authorities found evidence that the unit was also considering less obvious targets, including power plants, water-pumping stations and sewage works. A typed note attached to an eighty-six-page ‘Action List’ included the dates and venues of specific functions, among them events held by the British Law Society, the Coldstream Guards and the passing-out parade of the Junior Sea Cadets, a national organisation of 9–12-year-old boys sponsored by the Royal Navy.

In February 1977, the four Balcombe Street hostage-takers were found guilty at the Old Bailey of twenty-five terrorism-related charges, including seven murders. Each of the men was given twelve life sentences, with the recommendation that they serve not less than thirty years. One of the defendants saluted the bench with a V-sign and another shouted ‘Up the Provos!’ as they were taken down to the cells.

After twenty-two years, all four were released under the terms of the amnesty negotiated under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. On 10 May of that year, the men made a dramatic appearance on stage at a special Sinn Fein conference in Dublin, where they enjoyed a ten-minute standing ovation as Gerry Adams, the absentee MP for Belfast West, hailed them as ‘our Nelson Mandelas’. The remark was prominently featured in the daily US papers serving cities such as New York and Boston with large Irish immigrant communities.

It’s worth lingering on the Balcombe Street siege and its aftermath for a moment, if only because the whole affair seems to highlight certain fundamental characteristics of British life on the eve of the year this book seeks to revisit. Whether in the long campaign of violence itself, or such details as the haphazard manner of the police stakeout, or the press photographs of the interior of the Balcombe Street flat, with its fashionless mahogany and chintz furnishings, Formica-topped kitchen, coffin-sized radiogram and tobaccostained floral wallpaper, it’s an illustrative story.

The US city of Boston happened to be celebrating its ‘Billion-Light Christmas Bonanza’ over the weekend of 12–14 December 1975, with a gaudily lit downtown ‘starlight garden’ and ranks of sparkling, Disneythemed dancing holograms, so that the grim black-and-white pictures of the Matthews’ Dickensian front room must have seemed to belong to some primitive, faraway world. There may have been no village in the rural Carpathians where living conditions were quite as archaic as in parts of Britain in the hangover years following the Swinging Sixties.

***

Apart from the matter of basic home furnishings or personal style, it sometimes seemed as if the UK wasn’t really a properly formed country at all, as much as a series of geographically connected tribes linked by physical proximity and their exposure to certain words that defined the era: inflation, shortages, strikes, redundancies, violence, hooliganism, divorce, Europe. It was a time of unease and despair, punctuated by disaster. A three-day working week, and homes plunged into darkness by recurrent industrial action. Desert emirates cutting off the nation’s oil supply. The pound in freefall. Terrible crimes against the person reported in the daily press, of which the sprees of the so-called Black Panther and Yorkshire Ripper were only the most heinous.

And in the background loomed still greater calamities and afflictions across the world. The ice age was returning. The governments of large parts of the world – Uganda first came to mind – lay in the hands of homicidal maniacs. Nobody was quite sure if the UK was really in or out of Europe. Kohoutek’s Comet was hurtling towards the planet. Lord Lucan had apparently gone berserk and murdered his children’s nanny. The Bay City Rollers had the biggest selling single of the year in the pop chart. For some unfathomable reason, people wore extravagantly flared trousers and ties, and jackets with lapels the width of hang-glider sails. And overlaying it all was the pervasive economic gloom that led the leader writer of the Wall Street Journal to compare aspects of the contemporary UK to the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.

To Britons of a certain age, it must seem that their whole lives have been spent contemplating the prospect of some form of imminent financial Armageddon. The annual inflation rate in the UK in December 1975 was 25.15 per cent, which was bad, certainly, but down from a high of 27.25 per cent the previous August, the worst such figures anywhere in the industrialised world. A future Conservative prime minister would characterise the era as one of ‘darkened streets, unlit offices, sports matches cancelled, frozen, broken-backed Britain ruled under a permanent state of emergency’. It would be going too far, but not, perhaps, going entirely in the wrong direction to say that the prime minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson, was at times in despair at the reigning state of affairs and at his apparent inability to rectify the situation. Barbara Castle, Wilson’s Social Services Minister, would write of a particularly fraught Cabinet meeting that spring:

Harold was sitting in his chair, obviously in a shattered state. Mike [Foot] sat at one end of the table opposite him; Jim Callaghan at the other, head in hands. ‘Have a drink,’ said Harold morosely and as I helped myself he added, ‘I was very insulting to Barbara just now and I apologise.’ I went over and kissed him affectionately on the forehead. ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’ said Jim, gloomily. ‘God knows I need it.’ So I kissed him too and sat down next to him … Harold had obviously calmed down a bit, but he was still in a pretty neurotic state, so for an hour we had to listen to him.

As we’ll see, the married Wilson, who, it turned out, was salving his melancholy in the arms of his Deputy Press Secretary, also married and twenty-two years his junior, would abruptly resign from office in March 1976, giving rise to a whole raft of conspiracy theories yet to be fully scotched. Was he the victim of a plot by the security services, who thought he had communist sympathies and was in fact a KGB asset, or had the onset of Alzheimer’s disease already dulled his faculties? In some ways, Wilson stands as the human embodiment of his nation in the mid-1970s: a once-brilliant success story increasingly mired in a state of paranoia and quite possibly what we would now characterise as clinical depression, operating in a disturbed political climate at a time of exceptional turmoil.

Of course, it’s always a mistake to try and assemble random historical facts into a neatly unified pattern that few people would have recognised at the time. Whether in their claim that Britain overnight became a socialist Mecca with the advent of the welfare state in 1945, or that the country as one succumbed to a priapic fit characterised by the sight of bare-thighed young women swaggering around Carnaby Street in their Mary Quant miniskirts to a backdrop of herbally tinged joss sticks and the wafted strains of Sgt Pepper in the Summer of Love, twenty-two years later – with a sort of communal nervous breakdown triggered by the Suez Crisis at the midpoint between the two poles – social historians are always keen to identify what seem to them to be the transformative shifts in our national life. Such judgements are generally only possible with the aid of hindsight. Few of those confronted by the individual pieces of the jigsaw can picture the completed puzzle.

It should be said that there were several points of light, too, if not distinct optimism, amid the doldrums, even if it sometimes took a friendly outsider to locate them. Bernard Nossiter, a prize-winning reporter who served as the Washington Post’s London correspondent in 1976, began his book Britain: A Future That Works by mocking all ‘the scribes and prophets of doom’, who had for so long queued up to predict the nation’s wholesale collapse. On the contrary, Nossiter argued, despite ‘undeniable material challenges’, Britain under Harold Wilson and his immediate successor in office was ‘healthy, democratic [and] as stable a society as any of its size in Europe’. Making the choice of leisure over goods and moving towards an economy based as much on services and the arts as on manufacturing, the UK ‘might be a model for the future of all successful post-industrial Western nations’, he added.

Nossiter found grounds for cheer in a wide variety of British walks of life, large and small: increased longevity, ever-improving and largely cost-free healthcare, better universities, greater variety in the shops, more books sold, cleaner air, the return of fish to the Thames. Speaking about leisure, Nossiter informed his readers that there were 265 state-run sports centres in Britain in 1976, up from twenty-three in 1971, with plans for another 500 by 1980. People were flocking to huge new indoor retail malls, such as the Birmingham Bull Ring or Brent Cross in north London, while forsaking such traditional resorts as Skegness or Clacton for more exotic destinations like Miami or Los Angeles for their holidays. The average attendance at an English First Division football match stood at a fraction under 30,000, modest by modern standards, but often enlivened by the crowd’s creative adaptation of the lyrics of popular Top 40 hits and willingness to put the boot in to the opposition fans.

Even England’s more pastoral summer sport of cricket had staunched its long post-war haemorrhage of paying customers by introducing a series of comparatively breakneck limited-overs competitions and, just the previous year, an inaugural World Cup. The West Indies beat Australia in the final, which saw the normally cathedral-like calm of Lord’s transformed into a reasonable facsimile of Wembley, complete with rattles and horns and a blaze of flags, along with singing, cheers and ‘even a few jeers from the shirtsleeved patrons of the Tavern’, the Daily Telegraph tutted.

The frivolous side of life dominated the press on Friday, 2 January 1976, the day marking the beginning of the end of the extended festive season. ‘ARISE, SOOTY OBE!’ was the banner headline in the Daily Mirror, referring to the New Year’s Honour conferred on Harry Corbett, the middle-aged operator of the nation’s beloved yellow bear glove puppet. The Daily Mail also reported on the award but was chiefly exercised by the matter of ‘GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT’S SECRETS FOUND DUMPED IN WHITEHALL SKIP’. The Times led with the ever-popular ‘SALE FEVER JAMS ROADS’, noting that after a disappointing Christmas, retailers had got off ‘to a bright start’ to 1976, while the Wolverhampton Express and Star combined three media staples into the surely unbeatable ‘SALE FRENZY BLOCKS TRAFFIC: ROYALS DELAYED’, splashed under its masthead.

Turning to the classifieds, readers were urged to take advantage of seasonal bargains on ‘Real Imitation Leather Chesterfield sofas’ for ‘that gentleman’s club look’ retailing at £135 (£1,080 in today’s money) apiece, or treat themselves to a winter break at ‘newly built deluxe hotel, with fully carpeted guests’ lounge and large TV’ on the Isle of Wight, with single rooms starting at just £7 a night. Meanwhile, a ‘spacious, three-bedroom luxury flat’ in London’s desirable St John’s Wood was offered for just £24,500 on a ninetynine-year lease, while a four-bed manor house in Sevenoaks with ‘two acres of woodland, rhododendrons, shrubs and lawns, with a carpet of bluebells in season’ was yours for £30,000, or £200,000 and £240,000 respectively.

There was a good deal more in the press promoting the virtues of threepiece suites, fitted carpets, cars, cameras, cold remedies, castor oil, miracle ointments, denture repairs, toupees, trusses and medical aids in general. Much of Britain’s employment landscape still existed in a sort of extended Edwardian limbo, with ‘Wanted’ columns full of openings for domestic servants, private chauffeurs (‘only Rolls-proficient men need apply’) and ‘well-spoken English girls’ for immediate employment as nannies – including one vacancy for a ‘privately-educated young woman to oversee Lady Charlotte, aged three, and twins Georgina and Edward, aged two months, in tandem with other resident staff at home in Kensington’. Many of the displays for goods and services retained their essential 1950s air of apology for the tastelessness of having to promote their wares in the first place, with taglines such as ‘If we have a rival in our field, we should be glad to know of it’, or ‘Any Interested Parties are invited to correspond or call by appointment at our Premises’.

On 3 January, a Saturday, the press all led with variants of the Mirror’s ‘WHIPLASHED!’ to describe the gales that had buffeted much of the British Isles, with winds recorded at 109mph at RAF Wittering in Cambridgeshire. Coastal streets were flooded, rail and air traffic came to a standstill and roads everywhere were blocked by fallen trees. The roof of one of the stands at the Stoke football ground blew off and the Old Vic Theatre in London was evacuated when scaffolding collapsed, smashing a plate-glass window and causing a heavy chandelier to crash to the ground in the foyer. Eleven people died in a variety of accidents. In retrospect, perhaps it was only an apt way in which to start what would prove to be a consistently turbulent year.

***

Nor could it be concluded from events elsewhere in early 1976 that this was likely to be an era of undisturbed peace and prosperity for humanity as a whole. The Atlantic Alliance had recently been tested, first by Britain’s refusal to commit troops to the cause of the long US campaign in Vietnam, and then by the appointment of 57-year-old Anthony Crosland as Foreign Secretary. As the US Secretary of State and globetrotting superstar Henry Kissinger wrote of his opposite number, ‘Crosland’s articulate petulance – combined with a languid, offhand manner – served to turn him into the enfant terrible of diplomacy. He also turned out to have a bizarre sense of humor, inventing a game in which each side scored points whenever the other committed some absurdity.’ Kissinger once ruefully told me that he had been debited ‘many marks by Crosland’ when at a state dinner attended by the royal family in July 1976, a senior US diplomat had in all seriousness enquired of Prince Philip if he had fought for the Axis side in the Second World War.

Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the United States and the Soviet Union similarly reached a nadir in 1976, with Kissinger reporting, ‘We went to [the Kremlin] in February, proposing a workable way forward. They turned us down flat.’ There were no further substantive arms control talks that year.

Leaving aside the bloody aftermath of the decade-long US adventure in South East Asia, civil wars or coups erupted in Morocco, Nigeria, Argentina, the Congo, Angola, Lebanon, Uruguay, Algeria, Syria and Thailand. There were repeated terrorist outrages of varying degrees throughout Western Europe, not to mention the continuing IRA campaign in Britain itself. A series of riots broke out among the residents of the racially ostracised Soweto township in Johannesburg against the centrally imposed apartheid regime of the National Party in Pretoria, while the 50-year-old schoolteacher-turned-Marxist fanatic known as Pol Pot blithely continued his psychotic reign of terror that, over time, by the most widely accepted estimates, led to the deaths of fully a quarter of Cambodia’s 7 million citizens, through execution, torture, starvation and disease.

A frantic edge also crept in to the behaviour of the leaders of China, where the death in January 1976 of the long-serving Prime Minister Zhou Enlai saw large crowds gather in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mark his passing. The late premier’s elderly boss, Chairman Mao Zedong (himself to die later in the year) interpreted the demonstrations as being directed against state orthodoxy, if not to create a rival icon to himself, and ordered his Red Guard to disperse the mourners. In response, a crowd of over 100,000 forced their way into nearby government buildings to protest their affection for the values enshrined by Zhou, and as many as 600 men, women and children died in the subsequent purge of ‘counterrevolutionary wreckers’ said to have disturbed the peace.

Taken as a whole, this all fell some way short of fulfilling the ‘year of universal harmony and goodwill’ heralded in international affairs by the United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (who, unlike the Duke of Edinburgh, actually was a former Wehrmacht officer) in his annual address to the General Assembly in January 1976.

***

Louis Kirby was at this time a 47-year-old pipe-smoking former political correspondent, who had recently been handed the unenviable job of editing London’s Evening News. Born in Liverpool, Kirby had started his journalistic career as a reporter covering weddings and funerals for the Wolverhampton Express and Star, then spent two years in Bermuda before joining the Daily Mail’s Manchester office in 1953. He remained with Associated Newspapers for the next half-century – a remarkable record of loyalty, even in an era when journalists were less inclined to flit promiscuously from title to title and group to group – serving in turn as the paper’s lobby correspondent and chief reporter with the Mail’s sister paper, the Daily Sketch, before taking over the reins at the News in 1974.

Kirby’s brief was to turn the ailing broadsheet into a tabloid without lowering its editorial standards or compromising its mid-market appeal. The tone of the News was a curious paradox as a result. Although dedicated to ‘the fundamental interests of the common man’ and fiercely opposed to the ideas that ‘material gain should inevitably be the prerogative of the upper crust’ or that management ‘need rest in the hands of a public-school elite’, to quote two of Kirby’s editorials, the paper was plagued by a series of shop-floor disputes throughout the 1970s.

By the middle of the decade, the News was selling some 600,000 copies a day, roughly half the total it had enjoyed in its prime, although sometimes the figure sloshed around like water in a bathtub, gaining or losing 100,000 or so in response to a particularly arresting headline or a photograph of a swimsuit-clad Princess Margaret on the front page. The paper’s distinctive red, black and yellow delivery vans remained a familiar sight around Greater London each weekday afternoon, darting between shops and pitches like so many shoals of tropical fish, but changing consumer habits eventually brought about a merger with its long-time rival, the Evening Standard. As critics observed, even by 1976 the News seemed to have abandoned the ideals of its glory days as the respectable working Londoner’s outlet of choice in its bid to match its more disreputable competitors. But despite being dumbed-down (or perhaps for that reason), the paper remained defiantly old-school, with its curiously dated spot-the-ball competitions on the back page and its tendency to take every opportunity it could to display images of scantily clad women. Above all, it was a recognisably British confection, with all that implied in the mid-1970s.

‘I just didn’t have the heart for it,’ Kirby told me shortly before his death at the age of 77 in 2006:

It wasn’t the London newspaper I really wanted. The things that most interested me were politics and the whole way the state grew out of all recognition from how our fathers and grandfathers would have known it. You didn’t even need a passport to travel around in those days, and look at the way we’re treated now. I certainly didn’t want the [News] to become a paper for the chattering classes … And yet every time you went to a [board meeting] and said anything about serious journalistic standards, the people in the room would begin to shift their feet and start coughing and you knew you’d lost them. But then the moment you said something about beefing up the paper’s gossip columns, or having lots of photos of toffs arsing around and women with their chests hanging out – anything with shock value – everybody would be sitting there beaming.

Looking back on it, Kirby thought that 1976 was really the year the world went a bit barmy. It seemed to him like looking at an old-fashioned lantern show, full of flickering images of Sweeney-like car chases, bombings, strikes, the Sex Pistols, a scorching summer and fashions that ran the gamut from flares and spandex to young people with safety pins through their noses. ‘Of course,’ Kirby concluded, ‘that’s hindsight. But even at the time, it did feel like the curtain was finally falling on the peace-and-love scene of the 1960s. One had an uneasy feeling about what was coming next.’

I

Winter

THE PARANOID STYLE

Just after 6 o’clock on the wet Monday evening of 5 January 1976, a dark red Ford Transit van came over a hill to be confronted by a man in army uniform flashing a powerful torch at it on an otherwise deserted road near the town of Kingsmill, about 40 miles south of Belfast in County Armagh. The van was carrying a driver and eleven other men, who were on their way home after working a shift at a textile factory in the nearby village of Glenanne, and they seem to have initially assumed that the man with the torch was nothing more ominous than a member of the British Army out on patrol, a common enough sight in an area known as ‘bandit country’ for its frequent clashes between the security forces and members of local paramilitary units. As the vehicle came to a stop, however, several other figures dressed in combat fatigues and with blackened faces emerged from behind the hedges flanking the road. A man ‘with a clipped English accent’ and with an Armalite assault rifle in his hands, briskly ordered all twelve men to get out of the van and to line up facing it with their hands on the roof. A moment later, he asked, ‘Who is the practising Roman Catholic here?’

The only such person was 56-year-old Richard Hughes, who remembered that, at that point, two of his co-workers had reached out and squeezed his hands, apparently in the belief that he was about to be shot. For a moment, the three men had stood staring up at a distant red glow in the cold night sky, which seemed like another terrible omen. ‘I thought I was a dead man,’ Hughes recalled.

Instead, the man with the English accent advised Hughes to turn around and to run with the utmost speed away from the van. Still terrified, he paused to ask in which direction he should go, and at that the man with the rifle, dropping the formality of his tone, told Hughes to ‘just piss off down the fucking road’. As he did so, he was followed by two of the other men in combat uniform, who unceremoniously bundled him over a wire fence to the side of the road and ordered him to lie face down in the wet bracken. At that point, Hughes recalled, a burst of automatic gunfire had rung out, followed by a ‘terrible silence’ and then the sound of the man with the English accent shouting, ‘Finish the bastards off!’

In the ensuing bloodbath, ten workmen, aged from 19 to 58, lost their lives, while an eleventh, 32-year-old Alan Black, shot eighteen times, survived only by lying motionless beneath the body of one of his colleagues and pretending to be dead. He later remembered how the youngest of the victims was crying out for his mother at the moment a gunman shot him point blank in the face. Other men were moaning in their death throes, and parts of the van itself had disintegrated in the chaos, half its front dashboard blown into the road, the shattered instrument gauges adding a surrealistic touch to the horror.

‘The noise of the gunfire was deafening,’ Black recalled:

And what they’d done, they’d deliberately shot us all at waist-level, I suppose to stop anyone running away. And that lasted maybe ten seconds. And the next thing … I was hit multiple times and so was, I take it, everyone else. It was made even more awful because of these screams of pain … The [teenaged victim] fell across my legs. It was absolutely horrific. He was crying out, “Mother! Mother!” And the next thing, the gunfire stopped and the same guy that had done all the talking told them to finish it off.

One of the first police officers on the scene, Constable Billy McCaughey (himself later imprisoned for committing a sectarian murder) recalled, ‘When we arrived, it was utter carnage. Men were lying two or three together. Blood was flowing, mixed with water from the rain.’ Another emergency responder remarked that the victims were ‘just lying there like dogs, blood and body parts everywhere. It was like a scene from a butcher’s shop.’

More than thirty years later, thus speaking in the tones of the twentyfirst century, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that there had indeed been a breach of Article 2 (Right to Life) of their charter that week in County Armagh. But this referred to ‘the lack of proper zeal and integrity’ of police investigating the deaths of six Roman Catholic civilians who had perished in two separate gun attacks by Loyalist paramilitaries on Sunday, 4 January, roughly twenty-four hours before the Kingsmill massacre. In the nuanced view of the court, which awarded each of the bereaved families €10,000, ‘the [Catholic] victims’ human rights were demonstrably infringed by the United Kingdom government, [and] in particular by the subsequent 1999 enquiry into the six deaths, which had lacked the requisite independence, transparency and accountability’. Events such as those on 4 January were regrettable in themselves, the court held, but were exacerbated precisely because they were ‘insufficiently prosecuted [to] any reasonable standards a civilised society might expect’.

These were of course eminently fair points on the court’s part, even if relatively few outside the legal profession could hope to possess the judges’ academic objectivity on the issue. To laymen, there had been first a terrible mass murder, followed by the next night’s even greater atrocity on the road outside Kingsmill. Taken together, the events of early January 1976 were a stark reminder that the Irish sectarian struggle of the time was by no means confined to the streets of the British mainland. To this day, no one has ever been held to account for the Kingsmill slaughter. A 2011 report by the Historical Enquiries Team of the Northern Ireland Police concluded only that members of the Provisional IRA had in all probability committed the crime and, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the victims were ‘specifically targeted because of their religion’.

Other than the central tragedy of the lives lost, perhaps the most important aspect of both the ASU attacks around the British mainland and the twin tragedies of 4–5 January 1976 is the insight they provide into the impenetrable logic of Ireland’s troubles as a whole. On one level, there was a large and, to varying degrees, disaffected Irish population in London, more than 500,000-strong by 1976, with roughly 1,000 new arrivals swelling their numbers each week from the Republic, which constituted what the UK Cabinet delicately termed a ‘broadly receptive pool of potential or active support for the IRA, and which assert[ed] itself in repeated attacks on life in the city’, with no fewer than a dozen bombs exploding around the West End on the single day of 29 January 1976.

There were unlicensed Irish pubs and clubs, as well as popular establishments like the evocatively named Biddy Mulligan’s, clustered around the Kilburn area, where it might have been thought unwise to openly express excessive sympathy for the British crown. At that time, the Provisional IRA even operated a branch office from an otherwise nondescript four-storey family home flying a green flag with the silhouette of a man holding a rifle on it, overlooking the banks of the Grand Union Canal near Kensal Green Cemetery, and there were frequent marches protesting the British presence in Ulster.

The ground was fertile for a degree of direct action on the streets of the English capital and other cities, therefore, in opposition to the Westminster government’s policy, and when no such activity existed, the tabloids of the day often seemed to compete to fabricate it. The Daily Mirror, for instance, reported in February 1976 that the IRA had ‘hired assassins from behind the Iron Curtain to gun down British troops’, while the Daily Express alleged that ‘billions of pounds of social security benefits [had been] illicitly diverted to fund the IRA campaign’.

On another level, the Northern Ireland question also played a starring if necessarily submerged role in the secret-intelligence controversies that so beset the final weeks of the Harold Wilson government. Colin Wallace, who had served as Senior Information Officer of army operations in Belfast, later wrote about an MI5 campaign to present – or smear – Wilson as under both KGB and IRA control by insisting that his ultimate aim before leaving office was to see a ‘Red Shamrock Irish Workers’ Republic’ established in the UK. To that end, Wilson was alleged to have used his meeting with the IRA in early March 1976 to encourage them to end their latest ceasefire – if true, either an unorthodox request by a sitting prime minister or an intriguing glimpse into the looking-glass world of what was coming to be called the ‘secret state’.

We’ll return to the vexed matter of Wilson and the UK’s security establishment, but for now it’s enough to note that the whole question of British direct rule of Ulster, which was first introduced in March 1972, was sufficient to unite the feuding creative duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the first of whom took part in a march holding a banner reading ‘For The IRA – Against British Imperialism’, while the latter released a single with the striking title ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, which, despite a BBC ban – or for that same reason – became a Top 20 hit. It was an anomaly by a songwriter whose next release was a close adaptation of the beloved nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, which hit No. 5 on the chart.

***

Speaking to a Cabinet subcommittee in the week after the Kingsmill tragedy, Harold Wilson, somewhat belying his reputation as a Republican sympathiser, gloomily predicted a ‘long and involved’ standoff over Ireland, with a ‘likely unsatisfactory outcome’. As the bombs and shootings continued, both in Ulster and on the mainland, the British public ‘might well come to demand a strike at the [IRA’s] heart’. As in Vietnam, Wilson continued, the struggle was rapidly coming to encourage the view that ‘a great power cannot beat determined fanatics, [but] they cannot ignore them, either’. The prime minister had no immediate suggestion to break the impasse, remarking merely with the note of world-weary ennui that characterised his final weeks in office, ‘It is a fact of human life that there will be outrages perpetrated by a fanatical or mentally disturbed minority against the peaceful majority’.

The bitter truth of Wilson’s aphorism, at least as it applied to individual acts of violence, struck home again shortly after 7 o’clock on the dismally wet evening of Tuesday, 20 January 1976, in a darkened side street just north of Leeds city centre. A 42-year-old mother of three named Emily Jackson, who worked as a bookkeeper for her husband’s building firm, had taken up position outside the town’s Gaiety pub earlier that evening to pursue her supplementary job as a prostitute. In due course, she was approached by a small, soft-spoken man of about 30 at the wheel of a lime-green Ford Capri. The man’s courtship technique was direct: he briefly looked Jackson up and down and then asked her how much.

‘A fiver,’ she replied. The woman got into the car, and the two of them drove off together in the direction of the town centre, before parking on a patch of derelict land behind a dimly lit block of flats in Enfield Terrace, near today’s Leeds City College. Once there, the man, who somewhat unimaginatively gave his name as John, apparently had a change of heart based on his sudden revulsion at his companion’s sickly sweet brand of perfume.

Pretending that the Capri had stalled, the man then got out to look under the bonnet, while Jackson fatally volunteered to help him by holding her lighter while he examined the engine. As she did so, he took a step backwards and hit her twice with a hammer he removed from under his jacket. The man then dragged his victim’s inert body into an adjacent yard, pushed up her sweater and bra, and pulled down her skirt and underwear. Taking a cross-ply Phillips screwdriver from the car, and by now ‘seething with hate for her’, as he later put it, he proceeded to stab her a total of fifty-two times in the neck, breasts, lower abdomen, groin and back. Following this frenzy, he then searched the yard until he found a rough-hewn plank of wood some 3ft long and thrust it violently between the woman’s legs.

‘I left her lying on her back, and never took anything from her,’ the man later remarked. ‘Just as I was about to get back in the Capri, a car came round with its lights on and stopped a few yards from us. I didn’t know what make of car it was, but it scared me. I put the hammer and the screwdriver on the car floor and drove away. I went straight back to my mother-in-law’s house for a cup of tea,’ he added.

Two passing workmen found Emily Jackson’s lifeless body at around eight the following morning. A news photograph was taken of the scene as plainclothes officers with long sideburns, all of them smoking and dressed uniformly in heavy winter coats with upturned collars, peered into the recesses of a puddle-stained yard surrounded by crumbling brick walls – the whole tableau reminiscent of some ghastly Jack the Ripper outrage of nearly a century earlier.

Apart from the human suffering, the terrible story of the serial killer later named as Peter Sutcliffe also serves to illustrate some of the joyless detail of life as it still existed for many residents of a large industrial area in 1976: streets of undifferentiated red-brick houses packed together as tight as dominoes, where indoor plumbing was far from universal, family members took a bath with bowls and pitchers in front of the kitchen stove, and where many young women, destined for a life of cultural and material poverty that could leave them looking haggard and washed-up before their 30th birthdays, went ‘on the game’, as the jargon of the day had it, simply in order to make ends meet. Social revolution might be in the air in the form of the rollout of Concorde and the advent of punk rock, but looking out over many British city streets on the darker days of 1976 was still to be immersed in a scene of Dickensian antiquity, although even that great chronicler of Victorian slum life might have been shocked by the sheer profusion of sexual liaisons of one form or another by no means bound by any consideration of mutual affection.

It has to be said that the initial investigation into the brutal death of Emily Jackson was neither distinguished by forensic brilliance nor by excessive tact on the part of the West Yorkshire Police. As constituted in 1976, that force was a chronically cash-strapped, somehow recognisably northern-provincial agency, suffused with certain old-school if not Wild West attitudes. Women such as Emily Jackson and her fellow victim, 28-year-old Wilma McCann, found fatally stabbed and dumped in a park in the Chapeltown area of Leeds ten weeks earlier, were officially described as of ‘doubtful morals’ when it came time to brief the press, although some of the in-house terminology was considerably less elevated. Such individuals were ‘whores’, ‘slags’, ‘bints’, ‘prozzies’, ‘slappers’ and ‘tarts’ – not exactly asking to be bludgeoned and left to die like a dog in a municipal wasteland, perhaps, but not to be mourned in quite the same way as the mayor’s lady wife, either.

Before taking his leave of Emily Jackson, Peter Sutcliffe had paused to repeatedly stamp on her upper thigh, leaving behind an impression of his shoe which was in time identified as a Dunlop Warwick boot, size 7. It later emerged that Sutcliffe had actually been questioned by the authorities as far back as 1969, after he had seen fit to hit a local prostitute across the back of her head with a stone rolled into a sock, an assault that brought a visit to his home from two officers but no subsequent criminal charges, and that a work colleague had been sufficiently alarmed by his behaviour to write a letter about him to the police.

In all, Sutcliffe would be brought in for questioning on roughly an annual basis throughout the 1970s, and on at least one occasion his interviewers had missed the fact that at the time he was wearing an identical pair of Dunlop boots as in the photograph they were showing him of the marks on Emily Jackson’s body. It also transpired that his car had been spotted in the Leeds red light area no fewer than sixty times in the months immediately before and after the January 1976 attack. Even Sutcliffe was surprised by the police lassitude in the matter, later telling a court, ‘It was just a miracle they did not apprehend me earlier – they had all the facts.’

Sutcliffe, a name now synonymous with evil, was born in 1946 in Bingley, an otherwise irreproachable market town located just north of Bradford. Somehow, it fails to come as a surprise to learn that he had a violently troubled upbringing: his mother, Kathleen, was regularly abused by his father John, who was also an alcoholic. Taunted as a mummy’s boy at school, his home life was equally chaotic. In one pivotal scene, his father posed on the phone as his wife’s lover, luring her to a local hotel to expose her infidelity to him, and bringing both the adolescent Peter and his younger brother with him to witness the ensuing confrontation. This seems to have been a formative if not a defining moment in all the family members’ lives. Peter later remembered that his father had ‘had a wild look on his face, like an animal. I think it may have turned his mind.’

Peter Sutcliffe left school shortly after his 15th birthday and began a series of menial jobs, including working as a gravedigger, a profession his colleagues reported he had enjoyed rather too much, even volunteering to wash corpses on overtime, before drifting into the long-distance driving business in 1975, when he was 29. He was dismissed by one employer for the theft of used tyres but found another haulage job at around the time he assaulted Emily Jackson.

Having known her since they were teenagers, Sutcliffe had married 24-year-old Sonia Szurma, the daughter of Ukrainian and Polish-born refugees, in August 1974. She, in turn, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, thus adding another layer of complexity to Sutcliffe’s already troubled view of women and what constituted an acceptable adult relationship with them. One way or another, their marriage would soon fall short of the mutually respectful, monogamous ideal. Sonia began an affair with their local ice-cream salesman, and Peter spent much of his off-duty life spying on sex workers or soliciting their services. Sutcliffe’s marriage turned into his parents’ marriage with the volume up.

He started attacking women in earnest in July 1975, when he viciously beat and stabbed a 36-year-old victim, who survived only after extensive brain surgery. A second woman he assaulted a month later escaped to tell police that her attacker was about 30, small, gap-toothed and with a distinctive Bradford accent. West Yorkshire detectives eventually called on Sutcliffe a total of eleven times to enquire about his possible involvement in the series of violent crimes in their area. They cleared him on each occasion.

***

Early in January 1976, the BBC screened three successive programmes on the theme of ‘Why is Britain becoming harder to govern?’, exploring the theory that the post-war national consensus epitomised by jolly workmen and their paternalistic bosses who went around in bowler hats and carried a copy of The Times rolled up under their arms finally seemed to have run its course. In fact, it appeared to some of the programmes’ contributors that a culture of rampant egoism had replaced the former note of self-effacing service to Queen and Country and was now the distinguishing characteristic of much of Britain’s population under the age of 30. Many blue-chip panels of bishops, Cabinet ministers, charity organisers, chairs of local government committees, senior police officers and sundry academics and headmasters were paraded on screen to that end. The formidably highbrow Professor Anthony King, of the University of Essex, spoke of a rising tide of ‘mass alienation from the dictates of authority’, and the Labour MP John Mackintosh, known for his advocacy of devolution, worried that popular disenchantment with the established political parties might allow the rise of a ‘dangerous Hitlerite alternative which will impose its right-wing programme’, a reference to the National Front Party, which had fielded ninety candidates (all of whom lost their deposits) at the most recent general election, largely on a platform of trenchantly stated opposition to current levels of non-white immigration to the UK, frequently expressed in bluntly demotic terms. (The author vividly remembers a Union Jack-laden speaker van repeatedly circling the streets of central Cambridge at around this time, from which the peak-decibel slogan, ‘Don’t be a cunt, Vote the Front’ issued at intervals.)

Apart from such abstract considerations of the UK’s governance, the ruling Labour Party was itself divided over the question of possible public-sector spending cuts, which remained a live political issue throughout 1976, with the Cabinet split on both narrowly economic and more broadly ideological lines. Denis Healey, the generally pragmatic Chancellor, had demanded total annual savings of £3.77 billion, and was challenged by Dr Kissinger’s friend (and until 8 April, Secretary of State for the Environment) Anthony Crosland, who argued for the more modest figure of £2.45 billion. Chairing a Cabinet meeting on 15 January, Harold Wilson noted ‘the widespread impression that there are serious and acrimonious differences between colleagues in the present difficult situation’, adding that there was a ‘pervasive mood of unease’ about the ‘continuing questions both at home and abroad commanding HM Government’s attention’.

One such challenge of the kind Wilson noted was the recurrent issue of Britain’s hotly contested fishing rights with Iceland, or ‘Cod Wars’ as the press dubbed them. The dispute had begun as long ago as 1952, and had dragged on cyclically ever since, seeming to resolve itself only to flare up again with renewed vigour, much like one of the premier’s own gastric attacks, he privately noted, at roughly biennial intervals.

The central problem concerned whether Iceland had the right to unilaterally extend its territorial waters to first 4, then 12, and ultimately to as many as 200 miles around its coast, an area traditionally fished by large British trawlers operating out of English east coast ports like Hull and Grimsby. To the press, here was a story that combined the principle of Britain’s unrivalled sovereignty over her home seas with a comic whiff of nineteenth-century jingoism in one irresistible package. Images of British fishing boats clashing with their adversary’s somewhat ramshackle coastguard vessels were a staple of the nightly news in the early weeks of 1976. In one incident on 7 January, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Andromeda was rammed by a harpoon-firing Icelandic patrol boat. Back in Westminster, Anthony Crosland, who represented Grimsby in Parliament, took time away from debating the nuances of public spending cuts to announce that the whole affair was both ‘faintly ludicrous [and] yet a more pressing threat to the Western alliance’ than any other issue currently on the world stage.