From the Sixties through to the Nineties the Socialist Workers’ Party had Tony Cliff – a noisy and dense man, who believed his followers could seize power if they understood where the Russian Revolution had gone wrong. The Militant Tendency had Ted Grant who believed that his Trotskyists could infiltrate and take over the Labour Party of the Eighties, and complained furiously when it refused to accommodate him.
Healy was the best, however: the perfect example of the politician as cult guru. Like Saddam, he combined megalomania and paranoia as he offered a part of the 1968 generation of middle-class Marxists a Manichaean ideology. On the one hand, he said, British society had decayed to such a point it was possible to imagine that a great revolutionary could storm the citadels of the state, a point he emphasized to 10,000 supporters at a 1973 rally at Wembley while standing beneath a 40-foot image of himself. On the other, he warned that all might be lost. The ruling class was planning ‘massive state repressions against the working class and the Marxist movement’. It would rather turn Britain into a fascist state than allow him to take over.
Like many another cult leader, Healy created an ideology of longing and fear. There would be socialism or fascism: heaven or hell. The stakes were so high, there was so much to gain or lose, his followers had no choice but to hurl themselves into the struggle, and obey his commands.
Initially, serious people on the Left gave credence to Healy’s claims that a British Bolshevik revolution was possible. The post-war social democratic consensus fell apart in the early Seventies, and Britain for a moment did feel like a country on the edge of pre-revolutionary chaos. In 1973, Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said they would not trade with the North American and European countries that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The price of oil shot up and unemployment and inflation went up with it. Central bankers decided not to worry about inflation and to cut interest rates to prevent unemployment rising. In defiance of every law of economics they thought they knew, they got the worst of both worlds: stagflation with unemployment and inflation increasing together. For the first time since the Thirties – and the last time until the present day – the extremes prospered. Neo-Nazi parties did well in British elections as anti-immigrant sentiment grew, and the far left became a significant force in industry as strikes swept through it and the public services.
In 1973, the National Theatre reflected the apocalyptic mood by staging The Party, by Trevor Griffiths. It is a hard text to wade through now, and I doubt if a producer will ever revive it as anything other than a curiosity piece. Everything about the play feels ridiculous because the drama, such as it is, consists of characters representing various shades of Marxist opinion arguing about when and how socialist revolution will come to Britain.
At the time, though, Griffiths’ work did not seem peculiar. Makiya’s comrades on the far left were not alone in believing that the system was about to break down. A glum A. J. P. Taylor predicted that the end was nigh. ‘I’ve been expecting the collapse of capitalism all my life, but now that it comes I am rather annoyed,’ he said. ‘There’s no future for this country and not much for anywhere else … Revolution is knocking at the door.’ Geoffrey Rippon, a minister in the 1970 Tory government, agreed: ‘We are on the same course as the Weimar government with runaway inflation and ultra-high unemployment.’ When Labour took over in 1974, its ministers were as glum. One warned Harold Wilson that the private sector was facing ‘wholesale domestic liquidation’. Should inflation accelerate further, ‘a deep constitutional crisis can no longer be treated as fanciful speculation’.
The rise of the far right and far left, the strikes, the power cuts, the inflation, the slump and a civil war in Northern Ireland pushed Sir William Armstrong, the head of the Home Civil Service, into a spectacular nervous breakdown. He was ‘really quite mad at the end’, said one Conservative minister, who described how he stumbled on Sir William at a Chekhovian summit of British and American leaders in a country house outside Oxford. As rain lashed the windows, the minister found the supposedly cool-headed civil servant ‘lying on the floor and talking about moving the Red army from here and the Blue army from there’.
If Trevor Griffiths’ Marxist delusions now seem like the fantasies of a fruitcake, he was no fruitier than the mandarins.
The Party is set during the student riots in Paris in 1968. Healy appears as John Tagg, a character played at the National Theatre by Sir Laurence Olivier, no less. Beyond Griffiths’ assumption that a Marxist revolution was possible in Britain, the play isn’t as didactic as the worst of the agit-prop of the Seventies. Griffiths allows his characters to put forward competing points of view. One who has seen Tagg at close quarters warns that life in his party was one of demeaning subservience. He illustrates the debasement by quoting the dismal speech the cornered Leon Trotsky made when he realized Stalin was using his own theory of revolutionary dictatorship to destroy him.
Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right against the party. The party in the last analysis is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems. I know one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through the party, for history has not created other ways for the realisation of what is right.
Clearly, Griffiths didn’t buy the Workers’ Revolutionary Party sales pitch in every detail. Nevertheless, John Tagg is the centre of his play. It is his views on the chances of revolution everyone else argues about; it is his criticism of dilettante middle-class students the rest of the cast debate. Griffiths does not say he is right, but treats him with respect as a substantial figure who is worth hearing.
Healy had a hold over theatrical types. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were among his most devoted supporters, while the actor members of Equity were the only workers to give him a toehold in the trade union movement – always a bad sign for an aspiring leader of a proletarian revolution. Actors have a professional predilection for extreme emotion, which the thundering Healy satisfied with his bombast. They obeyed him because he was also an authentic member of the working class, who ‘realized early in his political career that many middle class people desperately wanted to be abused and humiliated by a self-appointed representative of the proletariat’.
Radicalism in Britain was to come from the free-market right not the far left. When what revolutionary fervour there was faded, the presence of the Redgraves turned the WRP from the subject of grave consideration on the South Bank to a running joke in Fleet Street. Poor little rich girls playing at revolution, actors who lose the plot when they speak without a script … these were butts for satire from central casting.
Vastly enjoyable it was, too, for the chortling newspaper readers. Yet it was also the case that if Healy had seized power the gutters would have bubbled with blood. Britain is not Iraq, and Healy’s grandiose ambitions to be Britain’s proletarian dictator made the press find him funnier still. The laughter missed the point that while he could not rule globally he could terrorize locally.
Healy convinced his followers that their enemies were everywhere, and probably believed it himself. Outsiders visiting the party headquarters in Clapham, south London, were surprised to see a sheet of polished steel along one wall of his office. He explained it was ‘to frustrate the listening devices trained on him day and night by MI5’. A fleet of vehicles waited in the car park outside so that WRP militants could make their escape if the fascist coup came.
In September 1975, the first of many scandals to hit the party broke when a young actress and WRP member called Irene Gorst told the Observer how obsessive terrors haunted a redbrick Edwardian mansion that Corin Redgrave had bought for the WRP in the Derbyshire countryside. Healy changed its name from the pastoral ‘White Meadows’ to the insurgent ‘Red House’, and made it the party’s residential training centre. The rules for members and their families were strict, Gorst said. The party banned fraternization with villagers over beers in the local pub. If your children cried outside the lecture hall, you had to wait until the lecture had finished before finding