Those who have not been catching Dominic Sandbrook’s What if … alternative histories for the New Statesman immediately should. Previous pieces have gently mused on topics such as:

• what would have been the consequences of the 1975 Euro-referendum going the other way (Britain … its entrenched social democracy and its taste for meatballs, is all a bit dull … a small price to pay for trains that run on time, redistributive taxes and the world’s leading whaling industry)

or

• what if Thatcher had lost her  desperate Falklands gamble (her principal assassin, an obscure young MP called John Major …)

The series continues to be superficial, provocative, but — above all — fun. That’s not a notion casually linked to the New Statesman of recent years.

This week’s effort, What if … Hugh Gaitskell had lived, though, does not strike Malcolm as one of Sandbrook’s stronger efforts.

Sandbrook’s essential problem is that he is a historian, born a decade and more after 1963. Malcolm, and those of Malcolm’s generation, lived that period. We are history. Indeed.

19th January 1963

This was one of those days fixed in the memory, when one recalls exactly where one was.

Malcolm was in the house of the Copleys, Uncle Ernest and Aunt Kit, at Worksop Road, Netherthorpe, Aston, Sheffield. Don’t go looking for the house: it’s long gone. A lorry loaded with detergent took it out, prompting the headline Tide comes in at Aston. The loss of his beloved garden promptly killed Cop. Today, sandstone foundations may lie under the grass roadside embankment. Ernest Copley was a Labour man: he had been President of the Waleswood NUM Miners’ Lodge, and had fronted the stay-down strike of 1948. For no accountable reason, Cop’s morning newspaper was the Daily Mail (this had not greatly worried the infantile Malcolm, because he could read the Teddy Tail comic strip).

Now, that morning Malcolm was about to continue his ride back to Dublin, TCD, and the Hilary term. His aged but worthy Lambretta 150LD had brought him to Aston the previous freezing day of that bitter winter. Then ensued a heavy night, among the dominoes school in the Yellow Lion. So Malcolm, a trifle the worse for wear, was further taken aback by Saturday’s headline that Gaitskell was, suddenly, unpredictably, dead.

Until that moment Gaitskell had been something of a bogeyman for Malcolm: the Clause IV debates and the anti-CND rhetoric mattered then. Yet: de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Among the real Labour men of South Yorkshire waiting for the bus for the Wednesday or United game (whoever was at home and if the pitch had thawed out), there was a feeling of sorrow and regret, and — as Sandbrook would appreciate — of what might have been. Clause IV, among the pitmen, was a shibboleth, but — for heaven’s sake, nobody of any sense or reason could contemplate de-nationalising the mines, or the railways: good grief, look the mess that was steel!

The 1964 Election

In one respect, Sandbrook correctly reads the runes. The Tory Government, in power since 1951, was doomed to defeat in 1963-4. Despite the Sandbrook tabloid of history, that was not just because of the sexual shenanigans of the Profumo affair. The peasants, we ordinary folk, had no illusions about the doings and morals of them as wuz above us. No: it was the economic climate, and the mood which had changed, a wind of change that would blow hard for the next three decades. And only then briefly relent.

It took two General Elections to complete the deed, to be rid of the Tories for the moment. Like all vermin, they keep coming back. The other side take the same view: Malcolm remembers the Daily Telegraph promising the faithful, on 10th October 1959, that Labour in defeat was finished for a decade — if not a generation. That, in itself, convinced Malcolm that next time round would be different. Similar prophecies were made in 1970, 1979, 1983, 1992 and — heaven help us — may be in 2010. So: watch this space.

Probably with Gaitskell the 1964 campaign, Thirteen wasted years, would not greatly have differed in theme. We might even have more easily believed the white-hot heart of technological change. Whoever the leader and new Prime Minister, the new stars in the political firmament would have been, as Sandbrook suggests,  Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland and Anthony Wedgwood-Benn. To which Malcolm would add Barbara Castle and Douglas Jay and Denis Healey and George Brown and Richard Marsh …

Where Sandbrook’s fantasy goes wrong is the assumption that the Profumo event could have been re-enacted in the context of “swinging London” (© Time, April 1966 – see right):

…in 1967 came the final blow. Amid the hoopla surrounding You Only Live Twice, the new James Bond film, Private Eye dropped the bombshell that the prime minister had been sleeping with the wife of Bond’s creator for the last decade.

Sandbrook’s misconstruction there is to be a Beatles, rather than a Stones man.

Yes, in Britain, in 1967, Let’s Spend the Night Together was acceptable for prime-time family television. Only on the US networks, and for the Ed Sullivan Show, was bowdlerising needed.

Sandbrook, though, is correct in his essential conceit: Gaitskell could not have survived the 1960s. He would, presumably (after his principled stand on Suez), have been as reluctant to get involved in the Vietnam mess as Wilson was. That, in itself, required an expert balancing act (not often celebrated) by the Foreign Office, keeping the Atlanticists, the graduates of the CIA schools of patronage, in play but not in the driving seats.

Where things would have gone sadly adrift is the terminal failure of Butskellism. The economic consensus of the 1950s was past any sell-by date. Macmillan, with or without that 1959 mis-quotation, had stoked up a consumer demand which the state of the economy could not afford. British metal-bashing industry was totally out-classed in the new dispensation. The right-wing of the Tories was going rogue: witness the proto-monetarism that emerged at the 1970 Selsdon conference. Heath could not resist the inevitable, which was then presented to the British electorate as wolf-dressed-as-lamb.

What would have been different is that Gaitskell (in, say, the aftermath of a 1966 landslide) would have been supplanted by a leftist, more socialist Labour administration. Doubtless Harold Wilson, cannily positioned in the left-centre, would have emerged. That would have left the “loyalists” to be bought or to go into the wilderness. In 1970 the British electors could have have a more positive choice. None of which would have prevented the dire, drear sterility of the 1970s.

• With the situation in Northern Ireland ripe for explosion.
• With the European debate still to be had.

Which leaves just two thoughts

1. Malcolm has been here before. When one passes up Church Row in Hampstead, one passes the  grave and memorial of Hugh (“Fortitude and integrity”) and Dora Gaitskell. It’s a nudge to do what Sandbrook does: to consider the numerous “might-have-beens”
2. Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece was one of Sandbrook’s pupils at Sheffield. It would seem that Sandbrook left the History Department at Sheffield in a puff of sulphuric smoke. He had been offered a contract for a populist history, a development frowned on by his superiors. He merely shrugged his shoulders, cited the money, made no apology, and left..
   

I never knew just how many famous people dropped off society’s radar because of Alzheimer’s/dementia! I was surprised to see certain people in this list, because often the news would only say that so-and-so passed away; the person’s Alzheimer’s/dementia diagnosis was not always mentioned.

(Please ignore the depressing soundtrack and overly dramatic ending; the names and faces are really the most interesting part of this video.)

There’s yet another of the Euroseptics — sorry, Eurosceptics (and, yes, that was Ted Heath’s joke originally — whinging on the comments to Nick Robinson’s eminently sane and sensible piece:

I DO think that [Cameron] – and the country – needs a Referendum, regardless of the Lisbon Treaty or any other agreements, just so we can find out, once-and-for-all, how the British people truly feel about this whole EU concept.

Thank you, Khrystalar @ 10:26am: don’t call us, we’ll call you. Perhaps.

Except …

We’ve already done that. Been there. Still got the pamphlets (if the tee-shirt rotted long ago). It was 6th June 1975. Two-to-one the Great British Public voted for EU membership. Curiously enough, the arguments then against membership (mainly coming from the Left) sounded very like those today coming from the Right. Try this one:

TUC General-Secretary Len Murray … remained adamantly opposed to the EEC. “Many of the most important decisions about our future can only be taken here in Britain,” he said.

Or, for real UKIPpery try the selected speeches of Tony Benn.

Malcolm went into the Referendum campaign a convinced anti-marketeer. He spoke from platforms, denouncing the whole Euro-thing. During the campaign, he did the politically unthinkable: he listened to the argument. At some point, he recognised it was a lost cause. He had to acknowledge he had been wrong. Come the day, he did not even use his vote. As Alcuin had it, twelve centuries gone, and dismissively as a matter of fact, Vox populi, vox dei.

But, of course, the matter will never be settled to the satisfaction of the lunatic fringes in either direction. Memories are short — political memories barely reach the intellectual capacity of a gold-fish. So, we are doomed to go through this febrile cycle in each and every generation.

Once more Malcolm is reminded of that sad, instructive story of the English tenor, singing at La Scala. His soaring aria was concluded in wholesale, deafening applause. The tenor bowed graciously, and went into a reprise. Again, the audience rose as one and demanded a repeat: encore! encore! After the third iteration, the tenor came to the front of the stage to express his gratitude; but demurred. Only the great Gigli had ever had a fourth encore at La Scala: that was a record he could not want to match. A voice from the Gods called down: You will do it again. And again. Until you get it right!

Last week, the New Statesman had a neat little fantasy by Dominic Sandbrook (who was a mentor of Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece, while both were features of Sheffield University’s History Department). In it Sandbrook invented an alternative history: what if the 1975 Referendum had gone the other way?

Today, no household is without its beloved New Zealand butter and Canadian cheese, yet it is a chilling thought that if Britain had stayed in the EEC, we might have become a nation of Brie and Gorgonzola addicts. And if we had remained in thrall to Brussels, we would never have had the chance to forge such strong links with Europe’s other freedom-loving nations, now our political and cultural partners – our Scandinavian cousins in Iceland and Norway.

Indeed, if the decision had gone the other way, many of our 21st-century tastes and habits might be very different. Would Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim still attract hundreds of thousands of British holidaymakers? Would Reykjavik be a Mecca for spa lovers and stag parties? Would the National Gallery’s Edvard Munch exhibition have been such a blockbuster? Would the RSC put on its sell-out Ibsen season every winter? And for that matter, would pickled herring still have become the nation’s favourite comfort food?

There are always those who think that we would have been better off staying in the EEC, and that today’s Britain, with its environmentally friendly monarchy, its entrenched social democracy and its taste for meatballs, is all a bit dull. But it’s surely a small price to pay for trains that run on time, redistributive taxes and the world’s leading whaling industry. And who wants to be like Italy, anyway?

Err … yes.

Life. It can be so crazy. People come and go, in and out of our lives. Some leave something wonderful behind and others just leaving a bad taste in our mouths. Funny thing though; right when you think you know what to expect, something changes. Your normal life and everything you’ve come to expect suddenly is history. That’s life I suppose; change, change and more change.  

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”  Harold Wilson

I never used to be good with change…I was a sorry basket case when things started to be different from normal. I was the male version of Anne of Green Gables; always wanting things to stay the same. In my mind if it wasn’t broken, don’t fix…ya know what I mean? Of course I learned that change was impossible to escape and although it wasn’t always fun, I had to adapt to it and embrace it.

I’ve had some amazing people come into my life, and I’ve had to accept the fact that they may not always be there. They have a calling that may not always include a close proximity to me; darn it all. They’ve taught me, inspired me, and gave me a greater worth. They’ve challenged me, pushed me and believed in me. I’ve always known that not everyone has one of these great people in their lives and that these moments should be cherished. Not every Anakin has an Obi-Wan, not every Robin has a Batman and not every Frodo has a Fellowship. Some people go their whole lives without someone believing in them, but they don’t give up. Those of that have been lucky to have an Obi-Wan, should jump at the chance to be that for someone else.

Change is going to happen. The people in your life RIGHT NOW, may not always be there no matter what you think, and if they are in your life; there’s a reason. Don’t expect things to stay the same, expect change and then you won’t be surprised when it comes. Invest, believe and create worth in others while you have the chance.

Thanks for reading.

16. The Moscow apartment bombings
Former GRU officer Aleksey Galkin and former FSB officer the late Alexander Litvinenko (who was killed with Polonium-210 in London in November 2006) and other whistle-blowers from the Russian government and security services have asserted that the 1999 Russian apartment bombings were operations perpetrated by the FSB, the successor to the KGB, to justify the second Russian war against Chechnya.

17. Black or unmarked helicopters
The concept became popular in the American militia movement, and in associated political circles, in the 1990s as an alleged symbol and warning sign of a military takeover of part or all of the United States. Rumours would circulate that, for instance, the United Nations patrolled the US with black helicopters, or that federal agents used black helicopters to enforce wildlife laws. In Britain, a similar conspiracy theory known as “phantom helicopters” has been reported since the mid 1970s. This concept relates phantom helicopters to UFOs and alien invasion rather than to martial law.

18. Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent
Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn is thought to have claimed that Wilson was a KGB spy. He further claimed that Hugh Gaitskell was assassinated by the KGB so that he could be replaced as Labour leader by Harold Wilson. Furthermore, former MI5 officer Peter Wright claimed in his memoirs – Spycatcher – that he had been told that Wilson was a Soviet agent. MI5 repeatedly investigated Wilson over the course of several years before conclusively deciding that he had no relationship with the KGB. On the BBC TV programme, The Plot Against Harold Wilson, broadcast in 2006, it was claimed that the military was on the point of launching a coup d’état against Wilson in 1974. Wilson himself told the BBC that he feared he was being undermined by MI5 in the late 1960s after devaluation of sterling and again in 1974 after he narrowly won an election against Edward Heath.

19. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Despite being utterly discredited for at least 100 years, belief in this document has proved remarkably resilient on the internet. The text takes the form of an instruction manual to a new member of the “elders,” describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation. Scholars generally agree that the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, fabricated the text in the late 1890s or early 1900s but belief in it still persists – particularly in the Middle East.

20. The peak oil conspiracy
Peak oil (a theory in itself) is the supposed peak of oil production during and after which demand for oil outstrips supply sending prices through the roof. The peak oil conspiracy theorists believe that peak oil is a fraud concocted by the oil industries to increase prices amid concerns about future supplies. The oil industry is aware of vast reserves of untapped oil, but does not utilise them in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity, they claim.

21. Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen
Theorists believe that President Franklin Roosevelt provoked the Japanese attack on the US naval base in Hawaii in December 1942, knew about it in advance and covered up his failure to warn his fleet commanders. He apparently needed the attack to provoke Hitler into declaring war on the US because the American public and Congress were overwhelmingly against entering the war in Europe. Theorists believe that the US was warned by the governments of Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, Peru, Korea and the Soviet Union that a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was coming and that, furthermore, the Americans had intercepted and broken all the important Japanese codes in the run up to the attack.

22. The Philadelphia Experiment
Popularised by the Charles Berlitz novel of the same name, conspiracy theorists believe that during an experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in October 1943, the US Navy destroyer Eldridge was rendered invisible. According to some accounts, the scientists on the experiment found a way to bend light around an object but that the experiment went wrong and Eldridge was transported through space and time, reappearing at sea. Several sailors, it is said, were badly hurt when the experiment went wrong and some were melded into the ship’s superstructure. The US Navy has denied that the experiment ever took place.

23. Pan Am Flight 103
Pan Am Flight 103 was Pan American’s third daily scheduled transatlantic flight from Heathrow to New York John F. Kennedy International Airport. On December 21, 1988, the aircraft flying this route – a Boeing 747 – was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. The remains landed around Lockerbie in southern Scotland. A popular theory for which no evidence has been produced suggests that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had set up a protected drug route from Europe to the United States – allegedly called Operation Corea – which allowed Syrian drug dealers to ship heroin to the US using Pan Am flights. The CIA allegedly protected the suitcases containing the drugs and made sure they were not searched. On the day of the bombing, terrorists exchanged suitcases: one with drugs for one with a bomb. Another version of this theory is that the CIA knew in advance this exchange would take place, but let it happen anyway, because the protected drugs route was a rogue operation, and the American intelligence officers on the flight had found out about it, and were on their way to Washington to tell their superiors.

24. Fluoridation
Fluoride is commonly added to drinking water as a way to reduce tooth decay. However, there has been some evidence that there could be some harmful side effects from fluoride and conspiracy theorists believe that this information is known and recognised by those responsible for adding the fluoride, but that they continue the practice regardless. Drug companies have been targeted as possible beneficiaries, as they will profit from a population with ill-health. Another motive is that fluoride lowers mental abilities thereby “dumbing down” the entire population.

25. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
A popular theory in the Muslim world is that the tsunami could have been caused by an Indian nuclear experiment in which Israeli and American nuclear experts participated. Several newspapers in Egypt and the Middle East alleged that India, in its heated nuclear race with Pakistan, has acquired sophisticated nuclear technology from the US and Israel, both of which “showed readiness to co-operate with India in experiments to exterminate humankind,” beginning with the heavily populated Muslim regions of southeast Asia, where the bulk of casualties took place.

26. Plastic coffins and concentration camps
Just outside Atlanta, Georgia, beside a major road are approximately 500,000 plastic coffins. Stacked neatly and in full view, the coffins are allegedly owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). Conspiracy theorists believe that Fema has also set up several concentration camps in the US in preparation for the imposition of a state of martial law and the killing of millions of Americans. They suggest that the financial crisis will be used to justify the imposition of a police state.

27. HAARP
More than 200 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, is the Pentagon’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, officially an enormous experiment to heat the ionosphere with radio waves. But conspiracy theorists believe the project is a weapon to bring down aircraft and missiles by lifting sections of the atmosphere, cause earthquakes or even a huge weather modification machine.

28. The Aids virus was created in a laboratory
Based on the theories of Dr William Campbell Douglass, many believe that that HIV was genetically engineered in 1974 by the World Health Organisation. Dr Douglass believed that it was a cold-blooded attempt to create a killer virus which was then used in a successful experiment in Africa. Others have claimed that it was created by the CIA or the KGB as a means to reduce world population.

29. Global warming is a hoax
Some climate change doubters believe that man-made global warming is a conspiracy designed to soften up the world’s population to higher taxation, controls on lifestyle and more authoritarian government. These sceptics cite a fall in global temperatures since last year and a levelling off in the rise in temperature since 1998 as evidence.

30. Chemtrails
Chemtrail conspiracy theorists believe that some contrails, which consist of ice crystals or water vapor condensed behind aircraft, actually result from chemicals or biological agents being deliberately sprayed at high altitude for some undisclosed purpose. The staple of right-wing radio shows in the US, there is fevered speculation that the chemicals being sprayed are part of a wider plot that involves the so-called New World Order and is being directed by shadowy forces within the government. The existence of chemtrails has been repeatedly denied by federal agencies and scientists.

It’s said that probably the most stressful thing that many people do is to move house. Imagine how much more stressful it might be though, if you had to move not just the contents of the house, but the house itself – bit by bit. This is exactly what May Savidge did with her  half timbered medieval hall-house when the planners wanted to knock it down to make way for a road. This was back in the 1950s when progress was everything and preserving the past took a back seat in the face of development. After trying to fight the planning decision she eventually came to the conclusion that the only course of action would be to dismantle the house and rebuild it elsewhere (and by this time she was already 60 years old). Her house was in Ware, Hertfordshire and she decided she wanted to move to Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk .  Once the house was there May had to sort out all the components of the house and slowly put it back together again, with very little help from builders and others, whilst living in a cold, draughty caravan. As her nephew’s wife, Christine Adams, explains in the book, with the help of many extracts from May’s correspondence and detailed diaries, Miss Savidge took the next 23 years to put the house back together, but sadly she was unable to finish the task : old age and infirmity eventually took its toll.

Today the house is now finished and comfortable ;it has been featured on the BBC’s “Antiques Roadshow” and Christine Adams has written up the story of May and her ancient house in a remarkable book A Lifetime in the Building [Aurum £16.99 9781845133962]. The introduction by Paul Atterbury of the BBC Antiques Roadshow got me hooked: once started, I just couldn’t put the book down and continued reading whenever I had a spare moment.  It will be one of my recommended reads for 2009.

Are you old enough to remember the 1970s?

Well, if you are, then a new book published this month by Private Eye columnist and BBC Radio 4 News Quiz  panellist Francis Wheen may strike a chord. Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia [Fourth Estate £18.99 9780007244270] harks back to the decade when Harold Wilson believed that Soviet trawlers were spying on him when he took his holidays on the Scilly isles whilst the British secret service and the Conservative establishment thought he was a Soviet agent. It was also the decade of Richard Nixon’s strange behaviour in the White House and the trial of Rupert Bear.  Francis Wheen homes in on these and other examples of paranoia from the ‘70s in what promises to be a fascinating book.

Are you a fan?

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I’m a fan of that dynamic duo Ant and Dec who feature heavily in ITV’s Saturday night schedules. However, there’s no denying how phenomenally successful the pair have become and  I feel duty bound to let those of you who are fans know that Ant and Dec’s new book Ooh What a Lovely Pair [Michael Joseph £20 978-0718154462] is now available. The book has already reached the top three of the hardback non-fiction bestsellers according to The Bookseller magazine. As you might expect, Ant McPartlin and Declan Donelly, to give them their full names, are attending signing sessions in a few locations around the country  – ASDA at Derby Road , Spondon  (01332 661751) is the nearest they will get to our neck of the woods.  The signing session is due to begin at 12.30 on Thursday October 8^th – for conditions, please refer to the Penguin Books website.

Remember the early ’90s. The GOP dinosaurs ran rampant through proto-Clintonian Washington.  MegaNewt Gingrich (the arch adulterer) and Tom DeLay (indicted abuser) ruled the Congressional roost. Nirvana for the Christian Right was imminent.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

Bob Tyrrell, the founder and editor of the American Spectator, was in and of the belly of the Beast. He made denigration of the Clintons his mission in life. Tyrrell can describe himself as a “libertarian conservative” but also say “I’m the last Communist left”, the son of a Chicago Democrat,

and I learned my politics from the Daley machine.

His political pantheon is inclusive:

FDR and Ronald Reagan both were the unique individuals who changed the course of American policy, both domestically and with foreign policy.

In 1992 he published The Conservative Crack-up. Tyrrell saw the neo-Cons failure to put Bork on the Supreme Court Bench as harbinger of present weakness and future further failings:

… in the Bork nomination and the failure to get him on the Supreme Court … we saw the conservatives’ typical weaknesses that have hampered their ability to create the kind of political culture that I think is important for a conservative movement. The conservatives had not reached out. They had not reached out and created the kind of alliances and networks — they hadn’t expanded them — that would have helped them. They underestimated the opposition.

He then wonders where the neo-Con ideology is going:

There were three elements that went into the founding of the conservative movement in the late ’40s. One was libertarian economics and philosophy, as embodied in the work of Friedrich Hayek and others. The other was traditional Western values …

… the final element in the conservative movement was anti-communism and an awareness of the menace to the whole Western world that Russian communist totalitarianism represented. The conservatives in the late ’40s often thought we were going to lose. They were very fatalistic, and Whittaker Chambers was one of those people who wanted to wake America up to the menace of communism, not just Soviet communism.

In other words:

• monetarism and resource management by market forces:

The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.
— Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)

• authoritarianism. Since Tyrrell specifically refers to Richard M. Weaver as his guru here, we are into rightist populism (not excluding the Old South as a model) and warnings of the continuing degeneracy of our society into an imminent dystopia:

This is another book about the dissolution of the West. I attempt two things not commonly found in the growing literature of this subject. First, I present an account of that decline based not on analogy but on deduction. It is here the assumption that the world is intelligible and that man is free and that those consequences we arc now expiating are the product not of biological or other necessity but of unintelligent choice. Second, I go so far as to propound, if not a whole solution, at least the beginning of one, in the belief that man should not follow a scientific analysis with a plea of moral impotence.
— Introduction to Ideas have Consequences (1948)

• and social control by the exploitation of the fear factor (which, historically, has been the Yellow Peril, the Red Menace, and now Islamophobia: the perceived threat changes; but the method remains the same).

Tyrrell was prescient: the neo-con operation fell apart, spectacularly, in the last years of Bush II, culminating in the pile-up that was the McCain-Palin ticket last year.

Even so, Tyrrell could be dismissed as a curiosity, a poseur, and ignored as a triviality. This piece would belong across the road, in Malcolm Redfellow’s World Service, were it not for the start of new meme or troupe, which has parallels with Tyrrell’s thesis:

The fragility of the Cameroonie conspiracy

Quite where the Tory Party is going is anyone’s guess. At one level there is this engaging assumption that the General Election of 2010 is a foregone conclusion. The error there is that the Tory share of the vote (currently sampled at about 40%) is way, way below Thatcher in 1979 or Blair in 1997. If — when — it slips below that level, everything is up for grabs. That is

• why the fellow-travellers, for one obvious example Mike Smithson, scrutinise the runes and extrapolate hyperspatially;
• why the Tory bloggers follow Smithson’s every twitch so avidly; and
• why journalists, who should know better, treat political nonentities (step forward Nick Clegg!) with unwonted respect.

Then there is the lack of any ideology in the present Tory leadership. Cameron has made a fetish of being a “modernizer“, of being pragmatic (or whatever non-Wilsonian synonym the snake-oil salesmen can conjure up). In swift order we have had Cameron-the-successor-to-Blair, green Cameron, true-blue-Cameron, unionist red-white-and-blue Cameron, Cameron-the-spender, Cameron-the-cutter, Cameron-the-flipper-of-his-mortgage, Cameron-the-appalled-at-expensesgate … all of which amounts to Cameron-the-rootless, Cameron-the-unprincipled.

That does not mean there are no ideologues in the ranks of Toryism: John Redwood; David Willetts; Oliver Letwin all have their moments. All are kept (in view of previous disasters) on a short rein. Even William Hague (heaven help us) might chip in if they were short-handed. Then there is Dan Hannan, who would love to be elevated to a role. Any, or all of these would find approval in the Right world of ConHome. And therein is the problem: the Right is where any pretence of Tory intellect can be located. It is a rarefied world well adrift from those opportunist Etonians and rough-and-tumble City Slickers currently in charge.

Win or lose next year, things must fall apart when there is no centre to hold.

Already there are several defenestrated Tories — most recently, Edward McMillan-Scott — with grievances. There are many more, particularly among the ersatz squirearchy, would feel they were discriminated against, sold out in the long-running expenses row — the most recent gesture to the pursuing wolves being Alan Duncan. For the duration, the affronted will sit on their hands, bite their tongues, cherish their resentment and keep it warm. Individually, even collectively, after the Election, revenge will be taken; and the fall-out thereof shall be magnificent to see.

Then there is the embuggerance factor. Last Tuesday, First Post gave Donald Malcolm space (well, they never have much of real worth to fill it) to rubbish Labour in London. In the process another vein was opened:

By May or June 2010, unless he’s knocked over by a bendy bus, David Cameron will be prime minister. A year on – less, possibly – he is likely to have become one of the most unpopular prime ministers in modern history. It doesn’t matter that pollsters are currently recording a desire for public service cuts rather than tax rises. The public will be thinking very differently by the time those cuts begin to bite.

Unless an economic miracle intervenes, Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor Osborne will oversee a bloodbath in public service cuts.

The trickle-down – make that pour-down – effect will be something to behold. ‘Soft’ Labour voters now happily rubbishing Gordon Brown will again have a flag to rally around. By the end of 2011, the Tory government will be heading into mid-term having outraged many members of their new fanbase and re-energised Labour supporters.

Sounds familiar?

That was the scenario is 1979-81.

As Malcolm has pointed out on previous outings. Let us remember Thatcher doing her bit:

Now recall: the self-styled “Lady” was addressing her own Party Conference. She was soliciting support from the blue-rinses and golf-clubbers of her rank-and-file over the heads of her dissident Cabinet colleagues. Her position was so precarious that, short of the Argentinian junta rushing to her aid, her tenure would near-certainly have been abbreviated; and more voter-friendly, middle-of-the-road measures introduced.

What  Thatcher had, which Cameron has yet to show, is determination, commitment and a sense of direction (from Keith Joseph).

So, Mr Smithson, any bets on:

• how long a “Prime Minister” Cameron can survive? Who wields the knife?
• whether Philip Hammond’s intended bloodbath of cuts pushes unemployment beyond 4 million? Or does the failure-of-nerve and the U-turn come earlier? Do we get the double-dip depression?
• does the Great Tory Schism derive from economic policy or merely the old European heresy? Do the Europhobes and crypto-UKIPpers get their way?
• is the only real beneficiary of all this the amazing self-basting Salmond?

Now, let’s look on the bright side:

Mr Cruddas or whoever,

• can you save the Nation?

Daniel Finkelstein of Times writes:

When Brian Epstein died of an overdose of sleeping pills in the summer of 1967, he was only 32 years old. He was buried in Liverpool at the Long Lane Jewish Cemetery, mourned over by his doting mother Queenie. The Beatles, the group that Epstein had made famous, had to stay away. There would have been too many members of the press and too many fans.

…Money normally enters the Beatles story only as a reason for their demise. When Epstein died, the group famously began to argue about management and contracts and cash. Born out of music, killed by money, that’s the usual story.

However, Tony Bramwell provides a different account. Bramwell was friends with all the group, present when Paul met John; he was Brian Epstein’s right-hand man, fixing gigs for Jimi Hendrix and mixing drinks with the Rolling Stones; and was still there when Phil Spector produced Let It Be. In his recent book Magical Mystery Tours (a wonderful insider memoir) Bramwell argues that it was penal tax rates that helped to destroy the group’s cohesion.

First told to give away vast amounts to avoid tax bills — which they did in a series of madcap ventures, offering money to any old person who dropped by with a demo tape — then told they had to make £120,000 in order to keep just £10,000. Soon their finances were in chaos and their energy sapped, as nutters beseiged Apple HQ pressing tapes on them. They also ran a clothes shop as a tax dodge.

Bramwell blames Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, directly. “There were enough new regulations and red tape to tie up free enterprise for years … One minute Swinging London was like a giant theme park, the envy of the world, then they — Wilson and his gang — closed it down. It was as if they went out and stamped on it.”

The reason why the influence of the 1960s endures is because it was the dawn of modern consumer capitalism. It was this culture — of commerce and consumption — rather than the counter-culture that made the era and now shapes out time. And of this era, Brian Epstein was a symbol.

Click here to read the full article.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
-Harold Wilson

Many concerned readers have written to inquire whether or not the Dancing Henry Almanac is carbon-neutral. We would like to reassure you all that not only are we not carbon-neutral in the slightest, but we have in fact gone one better and are opposed to carbon in all forms.

The Dancing Henry Organisation has always been a trendsetter (one of the first, in fact), and our anti-carbon policy was put in place long before the rise of the so-called ‘green’ movement when, in 1953, a scientific study commissioned by Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond to investigate the physical make-up of members of the most reviled groups on Earth (including Nazis, Gay Catholics, and Vegetarians Who Eat Fish) found that a significant portion of their body mass was carbon-based. Shortly after, Sir Henry instituted a policy forbidding the drinking of carbonated drinks, the breathing of carbon dioxide, and the making of carbon copies in the Dancing Henry offices. A hastily scrawled memo also led to an accidental prohibition on car bonnets in the Dancing Henry car park which remains in place even today.

But enough about us… on with the digest.

Jason Fleming
Author of “Learn How to Write Books” so poorly written and incomprehensible that only the most patient of readers was able to decipher them. This is a shame, as those who did go to the effort found that the advice within them was actually extraordinarily helpful.

Pimentoa
Italian village situated high on the slopes of a dormant volcano. Despite a prediction by experts that it would erupt shortly after Christmas 1926, the villagers remained adamant that they wanted to stay, and staged an elaborate ceremony to mourn their impending deaths. When the expected eruption did not happen, scientists amended the predicted date to Christmas 1927, but after another extravagantly grief-stricken ceremony, the volcano still remained dormant. Experts again moved their estimate back a year, and this pattern has now been repeated every year since, resulting in three generations of children that have grown up to the incessant sobbing of parents convinced that they will never live into adulthood.

Bruno Bandi
Legendary method actor whose most famous role was that of an ordinary mechanic living in poverty on the East Side of New York. In an effort to maintain something of the purity and integrity of the performance, Bandi made the brave decision to refrain from ever committing it to film, and so dedicated was he to his craft that he carried the role from the moment of his birth right up to the point of his death.

Liam Burns
Obituary writer for The Times that became so respected in the 1950s for the exquisitely eloquent epitaphs he crafted for the rich and famous that he need only announce a death for it to became accepted as fact. After his first attempt at a serious novel flopped spectacularly, Burns became bitter and began to use his influence to “kill off” any public figures whom he took a disliking to. Victims of his column would thereafter find it impossible to gain employment, or to be taken seriously by any of the official living. In one famous incident, then Prime Minister Harold Wilson returned to London after a country holiday to find that his death had been reported by Burns in The Times that morning, and subsequently taken up by all the major media. On attempting to enter his home at 10 Downing Street, Wilson was turned away by a security guard with the immortal words “Who are you kidding, Deadzo?”.

Gnusmas
Moroccan dish, often called the most duplicitous food on earth, so disgusting at first taste that it can – and usually does – induce vomiting. However, the aftertaste is so sweet that the prospect of another serving is irresistible. Frequently served in Moroccan restaurants with a side-dish of a cloth and bucket.

Koyanisqat
A state of being which many Native Americans believe can be achieved in place of death if, at the point of dying, your will is strong enough and you are able to retain consciousness. Although the body cannot move in any way, and may in fact appear to be dead, the person is actually extremely lucid and at last able to clearly perceive all the rights and wrong, truths and falsities of the Universe, as well as being highly attuned to everything in their surroundings. Unfortunately, as the person is unable to communicate this wisdom, the Indians soon grow tired of them and bury them anyway.

Each month, The Bloody EEC’s editor-in-chief, Umbert T. Bumspringer, QC, answers readers’ letters on the subject of the (bloody) European Economic Community. This month, Mr. Bumspringer turns his attention to the sticky subject of employment …

Dear Mr. Bumspringer

I’ve been working at British Leyland’s Longbridge plant for the last seventeen and half years. It’s a good job, what with only having to work three days a week (and most of them spent outside with the lads on the picket lines), but now we’ve entered into The Bloody EEC, I have concerns.

Will these foreigners impose directives on British Leyland that will force the management to employ these buggers we’ve had to take in from Uganda? And if they do, will we be forced to eat curry in the staff canteen and wipe our arses with our hands?

I blame Harold Wilson.

Fred Lung Cancer, Birmingham

Umbert T. Bumspringer, QC writes …

You blame Harold Wilson? I BLAME THAT POOFTER JEREMY THORPE!”

Dear Mr. Bumspringer

Talks recently broke down between my union representatives and the management of the colliery I’ve worked at for the last eight years. As a result, the entire workforce is out on strike again, and we’re buggered if we’re going back unless Roy Jenkins comes to his senses and agrees to a 30% pay-rise for all pit-workers.

However, as I was sat at home the other day watching Huey Green telling us all to pull together next year at the end of his Opportunity Knocks show, the broadcast was interrupted by a newsflash. Angela Rippon told me The Bloody EEC was planning on stepping in to resolve the strike action by bringing in a load of Poles from Czechoslovakia to do the mining.

Can they do this? I thought we won the Battle of Waterloo to prevent this sort of thing? Or am I wrong?

I don’t want my job taken by Russians.

Barry Melanoma, Grimesthorpe

Umbert T. Bumspringer, QC writes …

TONY BENN!”

Next month, Umbert T. Bumspringer answers readers’ concerns about the new EEC weights and measures legislation due to take effect in August.

First posted on April 23 2009

I just read the Telegraph’s Jack Jones obituary. Positive?

The writer of the piece tries to blame Jones’ fight against Harold Wilson’s legal sanctions on striking workers for Labour’s election defeat in 1970 (continue)

1985. The Queen at 10 Downing Street to celebrate 250 years of it being the official residence of the British Prime Minister, with those who occupied the most famous address in the world. From left to right James Callaghan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Macmillan, HRH, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath.

April 29th 2002: Queen began her Golden Jubilee celebrations with a special 10 Downing Street dinner party with Tony Blair and past prime ministers. From left to right, Tony Blair, Baroness Thatcher, Sir Edward Heath, HRH, Lord Callaghan, and John Major.

In 54 years on the throne the Queen has had eleven prime ministers: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Wilson (again), Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown. The first, Winston Churchill, was 77 when she became Queen, and had been 20 years her father’s senior. Tony Blair was born only four weeks before the Coronation.

Veteran Labour MP Margaret Beckett has revealed she is a candidate to succeed Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons.

Ms Beckett, a government minister under Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, stood down as Housing Minister in last week’s reshuffle.

MPs will elect a new Speaker on June 22nd.

Tory MP Ann Widdecombe has also declared she is a candidate for the job, despite the fact she is standing down from Parliament at the next election.

“My own retirement plans are very advanced and it’s quite true that until Michael Martin resigned, this idea had just never entered my head,” she told the BBC.

“And that’s why it’s taken me a while to make up my mind that I would put my hat in the ring, because I wasn’t entirely convinced that an interim was necessarily the right thing to do.

“But as I’ve talked to people, and people have responded positively, I’ve decided to do it.”

Yesterday Labour MP and former minister Parmjit Dhanda said he was a candidate for Speaker and claimed that recent Euro election wins by the British National Party had inspired him to throw his hat in the ring.

Sir Michael Lord, another candidate, said: “I have got strong support, and I am very serious about the contest.”

Declared candidates include Alan Beith and John Bercow and others known to be interested include Sir George Young, Frank Field, Sir Alan Haselhurst, Sir Patrick Cormack and Richard Shepherd.

Other potential Speakers include former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell, Chris Mullin, Tony Wright and Sylvia Heal.

The method that will be used to elect Mr Martin’s successor is new.

It was created after the 2000 election, when the conflicting claims of more than a dozen candidates led to confusion.

The Exhaustive Ballot system will allow MPs to vote in secret for the first time.

On June 23rd, the day after Mr Martin leaves office, nominations will be handed to Commons authorities between 9:30am and 10:30am.

To be eligible, nominated MPs must have the backing of 12 MPs, three of whom must be from a different political party.

At 2:30pm, the candidates will address the Commons, then the voting begins.

If one candidate gains 50% or more of the votes in the secret ballot, they are the winner.

Otherwise the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and MPs will continue to vote until an outright winner is decided.

Ah, the delightful Ella (quick fumble with the 1TB Big Bastard to locate the iTunes overflow). Here in glorious monochrome:

That’s not the point, Malcolm!

True, indeed, oh best-beloved.

The point is derived from Brian Wheeler on the BBC Politics web-page:

Moustache in return to cabinet

There then follows a paeon of praise for Bob Ainsworth’s stiff upper lip:

A solid, unflashy model served him well on the production line at the Jaguar car plant and in his rise through the tough ranks of trade union activism.

But the moustache he wears now is a more close-cropped, bristling beast, more suited to a regimental sergeant major barking orders on the parade ground than a left wing rabble rouser – entirely in keeping with his new job as defence secretary.

That’s not the comparison Malcolm originally reached for. And Ainsworth as a “rabble-rouser”? Decency forbids!

Now, Malcolm has to tread carefully here. His brother, the Professor, wears a ‘tache. It started as the full-blown late-60s sideburns and extras (think Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider or Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H). Then it … sort of … mutated into a Zapata, before being trimmed back to a drooping generic bandito. Finally, it is more of a disciplined thing, the hirsute equivalent of a well-preserved, if over-gentrified, Grade 2 listed building. It still needs a double swipe after a swig of ale.

Brian Wheeler ponders on why the ‘tache went out of style for politicos, and cites Mandelson, Hoon, and Byers, in full fig and illustration. He could equally have noted the amazing disappearing facial hair of Harold Wilson. Which raises the question of whether it was all a distinctive break with the Attlee years: the “white heat of technological change” against Harold Macmillan’s pseudo-Edwardianism.

Once upon a time (circa 1964-5), in the side-bar of O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street, the full intellect of Dublin University Fabian Society’s ideological dynamos (hey! have we been purged from wikipedia?) was applied to formulating the Grand Theory of Commy Beards (GToCBs). This attempted to explain the contrasting styles of Marxism (as untrimmed as any overgrown Leylandii)  versus the severe discipline of Leninism. As the pints followed one after the other, the GToCBs developed into something that made dialectical sense at the time. At this distance in years, Malcolm cannot recall how Iosef Stalin was fitted into the schema. Nikolai Bulganin reverted to the neat Leninist set. Krushchev went clean skinned. It’s pretty clear where Che and Fidel fitted into the syllogism. And that was about it for the GToCBs. Closing time at O’Neill’s.

Meanwhile, the West had long gone the Gillette route. Finally,  we had the “Be Clean for Gene” moment of 1968, which effectively finished facial hair for American politicians and wanna-bes.

So a small cheer for Bob Ainsworth’s bristle. However, don’t expect Malcolm to adopt the mode.

272

“Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup Under a Labour Government?” -  Harold Wilson

The article below appears in today’s Guardian. I co-wrote it with my friend and colleague, Chuka Umunna, who is Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Streatham at the next general election.

The collective reputation of MPs has been burned to ash and the clean-up begins not a moment too soon. MPs of all parties have been shamed, but it has been most galling when associated with people on the left, who were first elected by telling voters they would change the rules – in politics and beyond – to make Britain better and fairer. Labour activists who go door to door for them have been on the receiving end of public anger and are themselves furious.

The mantra often repeated is “my claims were within the rules”, but this is a complete irrelevance when the claims do not stand up to moral scrutiny. How can they not see this?

It appears they have been deafened to political reality by the siren songs of vested interest, manifested in the deference of Commons police and staff, the patronage of the whips, the Speaker’s offices and the indulgence of the fees office. To the public, it seems they have been rewarded with TVs, kitchens, massage chairs and imaginary mortgages for doing so. If politics in Britain is to have a future, all this must change.

Another future is possible. We are two Labour politicians but there are many more of us – parliamentary candidates, councillors and activists – who still believe in what Harold Wilson called the “moral crusade” of our party. We are all putting our hearts and souls into it and a better future for our communities.

Most of our politicians are idealistic and well-intentioned. The corrupt are few, and now is the time for them to be driven from office by the many who want to rebuild trust in what should be an honest and open vocation.

As the Commons considers what to do, Labour’s next generation has a duty to make a contribution if it does not wish to inherit the public’s contempt.

We must start by recognising that if we want to dismantle the “gentlemen’s club”, we must tackle the machine ¬politics out of which it was born. Root and branch constitutional reform is a prerequisite. We must elect the Lords, make the voting system more ¬proportional and end the degraded adversarial culture of Westminster, as exemplified by the so-called theatre of prime minister’s questions.

The Labour party must change too. MPs who have acted within the rules but outside the bounds of public acceptability should be deselected. There is a moral and political imperative to do so – we will not retain seats where we are offering damaged goods. The higher education minister David Lammy has mooted introducing primaries as a way of making parliamentary selection more open, and to involve the public. The clamour for this is growing.

But first, changes to MPs’ expenses and the election of the Speaker are imminent. Gordon Brown’s proposal of an independent parliamentary standards regulator, responsible for pay and allowances, is welcome. Expenses should now be fully published online and investigated without further delay, with absolute application of the law towards MPs found to have broken it.

Whatever shape the new expenses system takes, one principle should win out: there must be an end to any privileges that set MPs apart from the people they represent – no first class travel, no London congestion charge reclaim, and no claims for anything that is not directly related to the work of being an MP.

In 1994, the then Labour leader, John Smith, said: “The opportunity to serve our country – that is all we ask.” Service.

That is what our parliamentarians need to remember as they consider reform. The time has come to serve the people, not politicians.

“A week is a long time in politics, but four years is a very short time”, as Michael Barber once told Tony Blair’s Cabinet in a misquotation of Harold Wilson. Alistair Darling will be hoping that the first part of this is true and that next week’s Budget allows the political focus to move on from the Damien McBride-affair. This affair has undermined the momentum that Gordon Brown built at the G20 conference and Darling will attempt to recapture this.

However, he might reflect upon the second part of Barber’s observation, as he draws up his Budget. Anatole Kaletsky may have him question its wisdom, while Dieter Helm would praise it. An energy crisis may only be six years away, argues Helm. The recent comments of Lord Browne may cause us to wonder about the proper role of energy markets in both keeping the lights on and meeting our climate change obligations. Helm makes a convincing case that government decisions made now will massively bear upon our ability to keep the lights on in six or so years time; with the possibility that we will be diminished in this ability far more real than we might imagine. While Kaletsky joins Samuel Brittan in encouraging Darling to focus on economic growth in 2010, not the state of public finances in 2015. The later only deteriorates without the former, even if focusing on the former involves more borrowing now, which inevitably has implications for public finances in 2015.

The McBride-affair has made the political challenge facing Darling even bigger. But, as Matthew Taylor has noted, there are some “huge choices to be made” on policy. These are such that the policy-making and economic dilemmas facing Darling are, arguably, even bigger than the political dilemmas.  They are certainly more important. This isn’t a time to play political games but to face up, as honestly and as fully as possible, to the real challenges that we face as a country. Ironically, to do so might also be the best political response. This would be to place political strategy above political tactics; the reverse of what Taylor claims is the defining trait of Gordon Brown’s administration.

I met David Kingsley, the advertising guru who helped transform the Labour party in the 1960s. Here he talks about working for Harold Wilson, how it feels to be compared to Alastair Campbell, and whether he thinks Gordon Brown can beat David Cameron at the next election.

A small box sits on the mantelpiece in the study, a slogan playfully scrawled across its side in marker pen.

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‘Fidel Castro gave this cigar to Harold Wilson,’ it records. ‘H.W. then gave it to D.K. at a meeting on the evening of his son Andrew’s birthday.’

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Next to the cigar case is a black and white photograph. It shows three men flanking Wilson, the tough-talking Labour prime minister whose mercurial personality dominated the politics of the 1960s. They appear to be smiling in modest celebration.

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“Won two, lost one,” David Kingsley chuckles, nodding at the picture. Now approaching his 80th birthday, he allows himself the indulgence of raising a bushy eyebrow. He is talking, of course, about general elections. Kingsley’s natural aversion to boastfulness must be one of the reasons his story has remained one of the untold tales of modern politics, until now.

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Before Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson refashioned the Labour party into an election winning machine, before ‘spin’ entered the daily lexicon of British newspapers, even before Margaret Thatcher paid two brothers from Baghdad to design her first election poster, a team of elite executives became the first professionals from the world of marketing to help a politician break into Number 10.

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‘Let’s Go With Labour’ and ‘You Know Labour Works’ were the motifs that powered Harold Wilson’s Labour party to two consecutive general election victories in 1964 and 1966, accompanied by innovative TV broadcasts. They sprang from the fertile mind of a young media guru who felt his socialist leanings tugging more urgently than his wallet.

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At the age of 33, David Kingsley was already a veteran marketeer with his own business and experience of working in New York for Proctor & Gamble, the founders of modern advertising. He was “something of a man-about-town”, he remembers with a laugh, a dynamic figure who made regular TV appearances and knew the power players in London’s blossoming advertising scene. Like Alastair Campbell, Kingsley was – and still is – a dyed-in-the-wool Labour supporter.

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Excitement was buzzing in the air when Harold Wilson shaped up to fight the ageing Harold Macmillan in 1964. Here was an energetic challenger, fresh and full of self-belief, who promised to forge a new Britain in “the white-hot heat of technology”.

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So when a mutual friend told him the prospective prime minister was considering radically changing the Labour party’s election strategy, Kingsley jumped at the chance to help.

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“I had a feeling that politicians weren’t very good at communicating with the people, and the people found it very difficult to understand what the politicians were doing,” Kingsley says.

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“The Labour party didn’t know how to communicate with words. If you look back, none of the parties really did.

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“I became very interested in how one could use the latest marketing techniques to understand how you needed to get through to people, instead of just throwing out headlines.”

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After Labour won the 1964 election with a slender majority, Kingsley persuaded Wilson to let him bring in two more high-flyers from the advertising realm, Peter Lovell-Davis and Denis Lyons. Together they became known – only partly in jest – as the prime minister’s Three Wise Men. The first golden age of Labour PR had truly begun.

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“We quickly became very involved,” recalls Kingsley. “Every second Tuesday we’d go to Number 10 and chat over what was happening. Sometimes we’d find ourselves in the embarrassing situation of carrying messages from Number 10 to the party because they didn’t always see eye to eye. It was an extremely interesting period.”

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Political folklore has it that the trio of Mandelson, Campbell and Blair were the first senior figures within the party to really hook themselves to the addictive potion of opinion polling, the gauge of public favour widely seen to be responsible for forming many of New Labour’s early policies.

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But Kingsley insists it was the Three Wise Men – together with their friend Bob Worcester, who later went on to found the hugely successful research company Mori – who started using regular opinion polls to guide party strategy. It was they, years ahead of Tony Blair’s watershed moment, who identified the potential appeal of ditching the Labour party’s manifesto commitment to nationalisation. At the time, even raising the idea would have been like uttering a blasphemy. It was quickly shelved.

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“They weren’t doing proper [opinion poll] research when we arrived,” Kingsley explains. “What they liked was to show their ratings once in a while, but they weren’t digging deeper to find out why people had views on things.

“So the research part of it was very important. In fact to my mind, introducing the Labour party to proper opinion poll research was one of the most important things we did.”

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For a moment he looks slightly rueful.

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“Bob [Worcester] was very good. If they’d used him more we needn’t have lost the 1970 election. I know everyone always looks back, but he was tracking very clearly what was happening and what the problems were in a way the Labour party had never experienced before.”

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It’s clear the art of spin, now so associated with vicious briefings and irresponsible hype, was governed by a certain gentlemen’s code in the 1960s. Kingsley describes Wilson as “a marvellous chap” who would bring his wife and children to parties and would charm friends and foes with his bluff northern manner. He takes pains to point out that even at the peak of the Wise Men’s activities, advertising was seen as a precursor to real discussion.

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“The most notorious slogan we ran against the Conservatives was ‘Yesterday’s Men’,” Kingsley says, referring to the controversial campaign that portrayed Ted Heath’s team as puppets languishing in the dustbin of history.

“But that was actually planned as a preliminary to clarifying our position. It was a preliminary to talking. I always believed you should talk about your policies and your principles, because those are the key ingredients which other people tend to feel good about or not.

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“Things go wrong in politics when people think they know it all, when they aren’t actually closely in touch with what’s going on around them or what people feel like. But everything goes so quickly these days. We used to have time to think about these things. Now you have to think on the spot for 24-hour news.”

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Kingsley parted amicably from the Wise Men and the Labour party when Ted Heath’s Tories scraped to power in 1970. He says he has never been tempted to return to the heart of British politics, preferring to split his time between charity work and advising a number of African governments.

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He still takes an interest in the Labour party’s fate, though. What are his thoughts on Gordon Brown’s chances at the next ballot box? There is a long, meditative pause as Kingsley rubs his hands together.

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“Well,” he offers, “when the first troubles came to the Labour party, and MPs were beginning to say ‘We must get rid of Brown’, I wasn’t of that ilk. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but I thought he’d come through very well at the right moment, and…”

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Again Kingsley hesitates, weighing his words carefully.

“And, I think he has. It doesn’t mean he’s done everything right or everything wrong. But I still think he is the right person for this time. You can’t just go by what the newspapers say.

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“There’s still a lot going to happen in the next 18 months or so until there’s an election. I think it’ll swing back to Labour, more than anything because Cameron and his crew seem to be so bad at doing things.”

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At this point Kingsley raises his hands in mock incredulity.

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“They don’t ever seem to get anything right. I’d love to advise them how to do things because it would be very easy. What is amazing is the Conservative party hasn’t yet managed to modernise itself in the sense of being a party that cares for the whole country – they just haven’t done it.”

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Asked whether he sees the likes of Alastair Campbell and Andy Coulson as his progeny, Kingsley is more evasive. He is grateful to Peter Mandelson for breathing life back into the Labour party in the 1980s, he says, and he recognises a certain parallel between the professionalism the Three Wise Men brought Harold Wilson and the professionalism New Labour’s modernisers brought to the party 30 years later. How about Blair himself?

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“I will always praise Tony Blair for getting the party into the frame of mind where it realised it needed to win something,” Kingsley says slowly. “Of course, many of us lost faith with the Iraq war and… it deteriorated after that.”

Silence settles for a few seconds. An email pings softly on the laptop behind him.

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“He did a very good job for the party,” Kingsley finally pronounces. “But he was a bit of a disappointment. As a person.”

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As the conversation draws to a close, Kingsley lets slip a surprising revelation: he didn’t draw a penny in salary from the government in all his time as its communications maestro. Offering his services for free gave him a feeling of distance from the political machine, he says, and the freedom to do as he liked. His only remuneration came in the form of a Havana cigar, itself a gift from Fidel Castro to Harold Wilson.

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“I’ve promised to give it to one of my sons, but it’s probably falling to pieces,” he explains, gesturing towards the box on the mantelpiece. “I know the exact date Wilson gave it to me because my first son was born earlier in the evening, so I arrived at Number 10 late from the hospital.

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“He had it ready for me, and I said, ‘I don’t smoke’. He said, ‘David, you don’t have to smoke this, but do have it as a celebration of your son’.”

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Kingsley smiles at the memory. “I keep meaning to give it to Andrew, but I think perhaps we ought to frame it or something.”

David Davis

Thanks to the Englishman for this. We have happily not heard much about ecotowns for a few weeks, perhaps because the State is bust, and does not want to remind its rather worse kinds of attack-dogs about the Mordor-style projects that it had promised were in store for us, and which means that private-sector builders with white vans will have to be given money…. I mean, er, how gross and repulsive that is.

But this reminds me of Huyton, about 20 miles away south of us. It was built more than 4o years ago: so why are they trying to resurrect the idea now, since it failed?

Please remember that it was also Harold Wilson’s constiuency.