Book reviews: Seasons In The Sun: The Battle For Britain, 1974 – 1979, Dominic Sandbrook

Allen Lane, £30

THE first three volumes of Dominic Sandbrook’s epic history of Britain between 1956 and 1979 were exceptionally good. The fourth, Seasons In The Sun, is magnificent. Its title is deliberately ironic: the years he is dealing with here – 1974-9 – are the dolorous dog- days of the decade that taste forgot.

Sandbrook was born in 1974. That not only makes him precociously gifted; it also means that he was barely sentient during the era of which he has delivered such a striking obituary. He tours the foreign country of Britain’s past like a visitor from another, smarter civilisation, alternately amused by and aghast at our follies and our material and imaginative poverty.

He is something of a cultural revisionist. His 1960s, for instance, hardly swung at all. And as he points out, the middle-of-the-road, anodyne ballad which gives his book its title nonetheless sold more copies in the 1970s than any punk hit. Most teens and twentysomethings in the late 1960s were not full-time hippies, and most of their younger cousins did not wear safety pins in their noses and pogo along to the Sex Pistols.

Politically, however, he steers to the centre. Seasons In The Sun is more absorbed by the politics of the time than were his earlier books, possibly for the good reason that British politics was vastly more interesting than British culture in the 1970s. Lists of bestselling records and extracts from emblematic novels illustrate the social background, but they are little more than mood music. You sense that Sandbrook can hardly wait to get back to the red meat of industrial dispute and the endlessly riveting kitchen sink dramas at the Court of King Harold.

Here, there is little room for revision. The post-war consensus was collapsing, along with working-class solidarity, and as the Boomers raised their own families they were vastly more interested in new white goods than in the inevitable advance of socialism. The Labour Party’s attempts to square the circle of its founding principles and the political realities of the late 1970s were usually inadequate and ultimately unsuccessful, but frequently decent and honourable. That tragi-comedy is the central theme of a book that is as much marked by its pace, style, wit, narrative and characterisation as by its exhaustive research.

Once Wilson had gone in 1976 – decent and clever, but with a weakness and paranoia that hinted at his incipient Alzheimer’s – under James Callaghan the likes of Denis Healey, Michael Foot, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, Roy Mason, Harold Lever and even Tony Benn, capering like the gremlin of lost ideology around his irritated colleagues, formed one of the most talented cabinets of recent times.

Sandbrook brings them to life. Assisted by the memories of the advisers Joe Haines and Bernard Donoughue, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this period piece, he recreates the cold documents of contemporary political history as a compelling novel which absorbs the reader up to and including its 811th page.

He ends by demolishing the myth that Callaghan could have won an extra term – and finished Margaret Thatcher’s Tory leadership in its infancy – if he’d called an election late in 1978, before the Winter of Discontent. Like snow off a dyke, his time had melted away. The achievement of Seasons In The Sun is to show us how a corpus of politicians fought against the dying of the light and how, when their sun went down, they left with a grace which is perhaps best illuminated by Sandbrook’s extraordinary story of the parliamentary no confidence vote that brought down the last Labour government for almost 20 years.

Its result seemed likely to depend on the availability of a Labour MP who was dying at his home in Yorkshire. The Labour chief whip, another Yorkshireman named Walter Harrison, refused to drive his sick colleague south and wheel him through the lobby.

Out of nowhere – for the “pairing” system where a politician of one party abstains to make irrelevant the absent vote of a sick member of another party does not traditionally apply to crucial no confidence votes – the Tory chief whip, Bernard “Jack” Weatherill, offered to blight his own career in the Conservative Party by “standing out” himself.

He would do so, he said, out of respect for the “straightness” of his opponents in the failing Labour government.

Harrison instantly refused Weatherill’s offer. “I don’t see why Jack Weatherill should have sacrificed himself,” he said. Harrison’s government lost the subsequent division by one vote – Jack Weatherill’s vote. Within two months it was out of office, because of one man’s decency and despite another’s.

Such honour in adversity has been so thoroughly concealed by mythology and subsequent events that its exposure was left to a historian who was born in the year that Old Labour’s last hot season began. «