Geoffrey Goodman
London: Pluto Press, 2003
hb £18.99
As a conventional political memoir, this is quite an interesting read. The big figures march by: Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, Robert Maxwell; and there are interesting stories about all of them. The best anecdote has Denis Healey, as Chancellor in the House of Commons in 1976, under attack from his own benches during a debate on public expenditure, turning round at the despatch box and shouting to his Labour critics: ‘And you can go and fuck yourselves.’
The most striking figure in the story, however, is Edward Heath, portrayed by Goodman as a centre-left European corporatist, leading the wrong political party. Goodman’s Edward Heath was the friend of the TUC in his search for industrial partnership along German lines and was
‘….scathing about the City’s failures to think into the future on such projects [a third London airport], the narrowness of the financial establishment, the “capitalist, inward-looking City-establishment”.
There are obvious echoes here of Blair, leading the wrong party; and, like Heath, trying to drag the party along with him.
But I didn’t get this to read yet another account of post-war British politics. I got it because in Lobster 39 (p. 21) I noted comments made by Mrs Thatcher to Robert Armstrong, MI5 liaison at the Home Office, in the mid 1970s on her ‘misgivings’ about the presence of Goodman in the Labour government. There was an MI5 file on him, she believed. Goodman’s memoir provides no direct explanation of why he ended up on Maggie’s paranoia-list but it gives a hint or two. Goodman spent most of his career close to the Labour Party and – here’s the clue – the trade unions. He knew many of the leaders of both; and by the mid 1970s two of the union leaders, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, had been promoted to the status of the front men for a Soviet revolution in the UK in the conspiracy theories of a faction of the British spooks which had Thatcher’s ear at the time. If Scanlon-Jones were suspect, so were their associates; and Goodman was one. Hence, I guess, the MI5 file on him – and the burglaries he was getting while briefly a member of the Wilson Labour government of 1974-6.
Goodman’s obituary of Wilson in the Guardian (1) in 1995 contained only one reference to the plotting of the mid 1970s, the throwaway, noncommittal comment, ‘It was an unstable government – quite apart from whether a group of MI5 officers was busily trying still further to destabilise it.’ Eight years on he is emboldened: ‘There was, in my considered view, a serious attempt by some groups to undermine, destabilise and remove the Wilson Government.’
His considered view. But what did he consider? Did he do any research into this period? (He is ideally placed to do it.) None that is visible. He does, however, give us a few new fragments on the coup-plotting atmosphere of 1973-76.
- ‘One influential company of stockbrokers, Kitkat Aitken (sic), actually had its entire staff join up with the Territorial Army because of the City’s fear that the nation was under threat.’
- At the back end of 1973, as the miners’ dispute with the Heath – three-day week and all that – reached a climax, Goodman, then at the Daily Mirror, met the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Employment, Conrad Heron. Goodman has Heron saying the following, in direct quotes:
‘I have to tell you that we must prepare for a possible revolution in this country.’
But not from the left! From ‘groups who would be prepared to exploit the current situation.’ (p. 144) Goodman doesn’t quote Heron saying ‘groups on the right’ but this is what he meant.
- During the Wilson period of 1974-6 Goodman’s
‘…close CBI contacts were telling [him], in confidence, about these weekend meetings and the agenda – which, effectively, was to devise a political strategy to stop Britain becoming – that phrase again – “an East European Republic”.’ (p. 168)
The comments of Heron are really rather significant coming from someone of his status and as early as late 1973. But apart from those quotes all we get is a sentence of mine from Smear! and a reference to Peter Wright.
Notes
1 < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politics obituaries/story/0,1441,563492,00.html >