The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (40 page)

Sunday 18 May

We had a bite to eat in the Embassy, which Lady Wilson had provided, just cheese and apples and coffee, and at 10.30, Derek Moon, Ivor Manley, Ieuan Maddock and I walked in Red Square, then went back to the hotel where I found a radio, a gift from Kosygin and Gvishiani. I played it a bit, packed and went to bed.

Tuesday 20 May

I had a mug of tea made with my little boiler, which I plugged in to the shaver socket. This has made life tolerable this week.

At the airport I bought a few presents and had my last talk with Gvishiani,
who had come to see me off, along with Kirillin, Madame Santalova, and the Ambassador. Then I thanked Gvishiani for the radio and he said, ‘We know you listen to the radio a lot,’ and with this inadvertent admission that my room was bugged, he added rather hurriedly, ‘We remembered that you told us that you listen to the radio a great deal.’

The only other example of bugging that occurred while I was there was that the Ambassador had complained to his wife about the room which they had been given in the Astoria in Leningrad, and they received an apology the following morning.

Kirillin and Gvishiani examined the aircraft and we waved goodbye at 9.15 am and left for London.

There was a late night sitting and the Chief Whip wouldn’t let me off, so I didn’t get home until after midnight I saw Caroline and the children and gave them their presents, including a balalaika for Stephen.

Tuesday 17 June

Our twentieth wedding anniversary, a day altogether spoiled for Caroline by the fact that she heard this morning that her mother had got cancer and was shortly going into hospital for treatment She didn’t tell me this all day and even in the evening when we had dinner together in the Post Office Tower she didn’t want me to know it and only told me very much later, when we got home.

I went back to the office after Cabinet and had a meeting with UCS: Hepper and his people from Scotland told me that they were, after all, going to liquidate the following morning and I had at this stage absolutely no authority to prevent them from doing so. So I just listened very carefully and asked them to keep in touch with me.

There was a further Cabinet on industrial relations, which went on and on. Harold and Barbara became extremely bitter. Harold threatened to resign several times and said he wouldn’t do what the Cabinet wanted him to do and they would have to look for a new leader, and so on; people were completely unmoved by it. His bluff was called and he just looked weak and petty, he spoke too much, he interrupted, he was angry. Barbara was frantic in the usual Barbara sort of way. In the end he said he would meet with the TUC tomorrow and he would tell them what he thought, do what he thought necessary, and the Cabinet would either have to uphold him or repudiate him. That was how it was left.

It was a very, very tense meeting and Harold and Barbara had evidently taken the future into their own hands, relying on the fact that we couldn’t get rid of them. But I’m not sure that if it had come to a choice between Harold and Barbara and the survival of the Labour Movement and Government, people would not let them go; and I think Harold knew that and that was why he was so angry. But he did emerge as a small man with no sense of history and as somebody really without leadership qualities. My opinion of
Harold Wilson, if I haven’t set it down in my diary recently, is very low indeed.

Wednesday 18 June

Cabinet was postponed and postponed and postponed, awaiting the outcome of Harold’s negotiations with the TUC. We finally met at 5.50 pm. I went to see Peter beforehand, having told him that I knew Harold would climb down: and Harold and Barbara climbed off the hook and announced that they had found a settlement. Harold said that he told the TUC he had rejected their Letter and that if his demands weren’t accepted, a Bill on penal sanctions would be introduced. He proposed that a solemn and binding agreement requiring unions to carry out this new arrangement should be taken by them and would have the same force as the ‘Bridlington’ Agreement of 1939 which regulated inter-union relationships.

He then went on to describe what a triumph he’d had, that it was a tremendous success. Judith Hart very foolishly suggested that there should be a dinner in honour of Harold and Barbara, which didn’t go down very well because Harold was furious with Judith for not supporting him, and the rest of the Cabinet saw it as a complete climbdown. Harold was truculent; he had pulled it off again and this was his great achievement and nobody really felt disposed to disagree with him at that particular moment. He went and announced the settlement with the TUC at the Party meeting which of course was popular because it meant the end of the penal sanctions.

Monday 23 June

In the evening I had a talk with John Silkin, Peter and Gerald Kaufman, who was quite awful. I haven’t talked to him for a very long time; he is completely cynical now, blown up with his own importance and feeding into Harold the most unsatisfactory ideas, which make Harold think that he is God Almighty and everybody else has got to fall into line. It was clear that John Silkin is in the doghouse and Peter is now hated by Harold for what he did on the industrial relations thing. Indeed last Sunday’s papers were full of briefings by Harold on how certain Ministers had let him down.

Friday 11 July

This morning I went with Ivor Manley by helicopter to the Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor at Winfrith for the Queen’s visit. It was a most beautiful day and we had a lovely flight down. When I got there I had a talk to John Hill about the centrifuge and the reorganisation of the AEA and he wants to come and have a talk with me.

The Queen arrived and looked extremely angry. I think the truth is that she is bored but feels she has to look interested or something, anyway she walked round and I followed behind with the Duke of Edinburgh. Of course a Minister during a royal visit is just an office boy.

At lunch the Queen was really rather different, indeed she was very pleasant. First of all we talked about the television programme made about the royal family. She said it might have to be cut for showing in the United States; the American Ambassador had used very long words and made himself look rather ridiculous.

I asked her if royalty had to be so formal. The Queen said that it is just that you have to dress up and be told what to do for Privy Council. Obviously she did not much like the suggestion that the thing was more formal than was necessary.

We talked about the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting and I asked her what impression she had formed of Trudeau. She said that he had been rather disappointing. I gave my view in support of disposable politicians – that, in fact, you could not do more than a certain amount of work before you had to go and refurbish yourself.

Then we moved on to the subject of the Royal Prerogative. I asked her whether, when there was a dissolution contemplated, she ever consulted the Speaker, because he was impartial. She said, ‘I am supposed to be impartial but, of course, I can call in whom I like.’

So I asked her, ‘Well, suppose, for example, there had been a row on the industrial relations legislation and the Prime Minister had come and asked for a dissolution. It was at least arguable that another Prime Minister would have held together a government without a dissolution.’ She said, ‘Well, we had to look up all the precedents on the dissolution,’ and I pointed out that it might well have become real if the Parliamentary Labour Party had rejected an Industrial Relations Bill.

We got on to talking about the Lords and the Commons and she raised the redistribution of parliamentary boundaries. I think she wanted to provoke me into saying something but I didn’t comment on it.

She told me that the royal train was bulletproof and had two diesels, which had its origins in 1937 when one diesel had broken down and the train had got stuck. That led to Concorde and she said how she wished Trubshaw had seen people applaud when Concorde went over on her birthday and I told her what I had told George Thomas, that if Concorde had crashed into the Palace that day, the occasion would have turned into a coronation.

She said, ‘You
can’t
cancel Concorde.’ I pointed out the question was whether we could sell it: that was the real test.

We talked about the Civil Service machine and I remarked that a new Minister coming into a Ministry really was in a position to put the brakes on. ‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘the machine thwarts you too?’ I do not think that had quite occurred to her. I went on and talked about the desirability of having a longer government with Ministers who retired at a certain stage in order to cope with the rate of change.

She is not clever, but she is reasonably intelligent and she is experienced:
she has been involved in government now for eighteen years. She knew about the test routes for Concorde and that they would be going up the West of Scotland. So either she had been reading Cabinet papers or her Private Secretary had briefed her on this particular matter.

I proposed her health, having got my Private Secretary, Ivor Manley, to speak to Sir Martin Charteris, her Assistant Private Secretary, a typical pyramid operation, rather than asking her directly, ‘Should I propose a toast?’

On the way out I had a brief word with the Duke who, as usual, was talking about high taxation as a major disincentive.

Friday 15 August

Pelting with rain all day. Caroline worked on an article on women’s education and Stephen got his ‘A’-level results envelope. He said nothing all day.

Today we heard on the news that UK troops had been committed to maintain law and order in Deny during the troubles that arose out of the Apprentice Boys’ annual march.

We had discussed this in Cabinet before the end of July and agreed that troops could be used, so long as the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary and the Foreign Secretary kept in touch with each other. So it looks as though civil war in Ulster has almost begun.

Saturday 16 August

Stephen woke us at 2.45, having finally opened his results, and told us he had got an A in History, a B in Music, and a C in Pure Maths.

Hilary went off to Scotland with his friend Alan Burton.

Sunday 17 August

I had a message last night from Ivor Manley saying there would be an emergency Cabinet on Tuesday to consider the situation in Ulster.

The crisis in Northern Ireland had been slowly building up with riots in July and August. On 12 August in Londonderry fighting broke out between Protestants and Catholics during the Apprentice Boys’ march, and in the ensuing violence Catholics’ homes were burned. Troops were moved into Londonderry, and then into Belfast, where the trouble had spread, after appeals to Roy Hattersley, the Minister of Defence for Administration, who was deputising for Denis Healey, from the Royal Ulster Constabulary and from Bernadette Devlin, Independent Unity MP for Mid-Ulster.

Tuesday 19 August

Ron Vaughan took me to London and Caroline came with me. We arrived home at 11 and found the Comprehensive Schools Committee, which uses my office in the basement, in action. I went off to the Cabinet.

I had underestimated the immense excitement over the Ulster thing. Downing Street was cordoned off and there was a mass of photographers and television cameras outside Number 10.

There were jokes in Cabinet about my new beard and Michael Stewart reminded me of what Attlee had said when Sydney Silverman, MP for Nelson and Colne, grew a beard. He had said, ‘I move previous face’ and indeed Harold began by saying, ‘Motions to move previous face are out of order.’

We then settled down to discuss the Ulster situation. A paper by Jim Callaghan was passed around, which made five recommendations.

First, that the 12,000 B Specials [the Protestant Ulster Special Constabulary] should be disarmed; second, that we consider a Bill transferring some authority to Westminster; third, that there should be advisers attached to the Northern Ireland Government; fourth, that we might consider a coalition or, at any rate, more elements brought into the Northern Ireland Government; and fifth, that a Community Relations Organisation might be set up, possibly with a Minister on the spot, to examine complaints of discrimination.

Jim opened quietly and extremely well. He said he had been prescient in July in warning us that there was a very poor Intelligence Service in Ulster; he had seen Chichester-Clark and asked him about the demonstrations before they occurred and had not wanted them banned. He said Hattersley had done an extremely good job at the Ministry of Defence in Denis’s absence, the troops had been welcomed by the people and indeed there had been many appeals for help at different stages.

The Stormont Govrnment say it is the IRA who are the cause of the trouble but this does not conform to British Intelligence. The Catholics were defending themselves with ferocity, as Jim put it, and it was really because of that fear that the situation had got out of control. Jim said we must remove the cause of the fear, ie get rid of the B Specials, and he would like to see Peacocke, the Inspector-General of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, replaced by a British Chief Constable. The Northern Ireland Labour Party agreed the recommendations in his paper but they fear that if the B Specials are disarmed, there will be secret arms caches kept and used. Jim pointed out that the B Specials got no police training, only shooting practice.

The meeting was quiet and Jim, I thought, did very well. Harold was all right except that, as usual, he was much too tactical and there was too little thinking about the future. Denis was realistic in seeing that he might find himself in a position of sending in the troops against all the Protestants. I wonder whether people understood how serious the situation was – whether, in fact, this was not the beginning of ten more years of Irish politics at Westminster which would be very unpleasant. None of us had thought it out very carefully.

I went home and waited and waited in case there was another Cabinet
meeting but in the end Harold managed to carry Chichester-Clark on the proposals which were published this evening; not to disarm the B Specials but to bring them under the control of General Freeland the GOC, Northern Ireland. It is a compromise because he will actually collect their arms and keep them in armouries. That is the most effective way of dealing with them.