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  The controversy continued long after the deaths of those involved. In April 1978, the Spectator published an article by Auberon Waugh claiming that Crossman had boasted at a Private Eye lunch that he and Bevan had been ‘pissed as newts’ in Venice. And in 2000, the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft said he had once heard Crossman say all three men had been toping heavily and at least one was blind drunk.20 But Anthony Howard did not think ‘pissed as newts’ was a phrase Crossman would ever have used. Nor did the politician care much for whisky.21

  What became laughingly known within the Labour Party as the ‘Venetian blind’ incident certainly illustrated the risks British libel law posed to journalists. But proving anyone was drunk on some occasion in the past is not easy and Jenny Nicholson could not convince the jury that her account was true. Her career in journalism was tarnished by the trial, even though it was subsequently shown that there was a large slug of accuracy in her story. What the Spectator trial had demonstrated was how sensitive senior politicians were now becoming about any public amusement at their tippling.

  The post-war generation of politicians included other serious drinkers. A distinguished member of this generation was Anthony Crosland, raffish, clever and charismatic, whose book The Future of Socialism, published in 1956 (with its concluding call for more Liberty and Gaiety in Private Life, including ‘more open-air cafes … later closing hours for public houses’), became the bible of Labour modernisers.22 As Education Secretary in the 1960s he promoted comprehensive schools; he was made Foreign Secretary by James Callaghan in 1976, but died suddenly a year later.

  Crosland’s enthusiastic enjoyment of alcohol had threatened to scupper his early career. In 1951 he received a letter from the historian A.J.P. Taylor, who was by then his brother-in-law. Taylor had been talking to the Tory MP Bob Boothby (the long-time lover of Harold Macmillan’s wife Dorothy, and a man with his own colourful private life) and passed on what was being said in the Commons about the young Tony Crosland:

  You’re extremely able; have a high reputation as an economist; and speak very well. You ought to be a junior minister by now; & would have been if it wasn’t for drinking too much. I know on the very best authority that Attlee has said as much: he won’t give you an appointment because he has seen you drunk too often in the smoking room. This is really deadly serious for you and your future … It’s the worst thing that can happen to an intellectual – I’ve seen it with one of my colleagues and it’s a ruin. You can go to rot when you’ve had your career, but not when your career is beginning; and I do urge you most humbly to face this danger.23

  Taylor recommended complete abstention, or at the very least that Crosland should limit his alcohol intake to beer. Crosland wrote back saying it was none of his business.

  Labour lost office in 1951 and Crosland became bored with Westminster life. When Richard Crossman suggested he should not get so drunk when going into the House of Commons, Crosland replied: ‘How else is one to endure being here?’24 The Oxford economist never got his dream job of Chancellor of the Exchequer, but his enjoyment of the good life did not prevent a distinguished career in government. According to Alan Watkins, ‘He drank a good deal, though not excessively by the standards of many politicians and journalists. He liked gin in the middle of the day and whisky in the evening. He enjoyed wine too, though made a fuss about not fussing.’25 Like Harold Wilson, Crosland was in the habit of knocking back alcohol to relax him before facing MPs at the dispatch box. ‘Crosland had cut down on drink by the time I got to know him but it’s relative. He used to have three large G&Ts before answering questions in the House,’ remembers his former adviser David Lipsey.26

  The man who became Chancellor in 1967 instead of Crosland was Roy Jenkins, whose well-known fondness for claret was mocked by his friend and rival. One of Crosland’s favourite quips was ‘let’s just have the carafe wine and leave the vintages to Roy’.27 Jenkins’ conspicuous enjoyment of the good life also irritated his HP sauce-eating neighbour next door at Number 10. According to Harold Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, the Prime Minister used to call Jenkins ‘Old Beaujolais’.28 Long after the pair had left office, Wilson quipped at a press conference that Roy Jenkins had been a good Chancellor until seven o’clock in the evening.29 The implication was that after that he devoted himself to his club, Brooks’s, dinner and drink. The charge is unfair. Roy Jenkins was an industrious Chancellor at a bleak economic moment, adroitly handling the balance of payments crisis and devaluation. As Home Secretary in the mid-1960s he had made a big impact through a range of liberalising measures and was regularly tipped as a future Prime Minister. But he was never quite in step with his party and in the early 1970s Labour’s hostility towards deeper European integration drove him away, first to the European Commission and then towards the creation of a new political party, the SDP. He was an acclaimed writer of political biography, Chancellor of Oxford University and mentor to Tony Blair. It was on the morning after one of Blair’s dinners with Jenkins that Alastair Campbell, Blair’s director of communications, first registered that the new Labour leader had arrived at work with a hangover.30

  Sir Menzies Campbell also recalled his enjoyment of Jenkins’ hospitality: ‘The empty magnums of what had gone before were on the sideboards. A certain amount of compare and contrast with the magnificent Pomerol and Margaux that had gone before. You always got very good drink and no shortage of it when you went to Roy’s for lunch.’31

  But Jenkins took indulgence in his stride. This is his own description of how he fortified himself at lunch before delivering his first Budget in March 1968 in the midst of economic crisis: ‘Although I was determined to get through the afternoon’s performance without the bogus prop of some specially prepared alcoholic concoction on the dispatch box, I drank a fair amount at lunch. The wine seemed to do my headache more good than the fresh air had done.’32 Jenkins drank, but was never a drunk.

  In fact he was one of the most rounded of post-war politicians. Like Denis Healey, Jenkins had a hinterland outside politics and was unapologetic about his enjoyment of expensively lubricated conviviality. As he got older his manner grew ever grander and Private Eye started calling him ‘Smoothiechops’. Why did Jenkins’ imbibing of claret become such a well-known element of his caricature? Perhaps because it symbolised the distance he had travelled from his Welsh mining roots. Jenkins had impeccable Labour ancestry. The son of a miner who became an MP, by the time he went up to Oxford the boy from Pontypool was already developing a taste for fine wine that aped the social habits of someone much richer. With a Labour leadership contest brewing in the 1970s, there is a story of Jenkins attempting to butter up his colleagues with beer. Jenkins’ supporters told him it would be a good idea to pop into Annie’s Bar and buy some of the old boys a pint. The grimy bar was not Jenkins’ natural habitat, but in he breezed and treated the grateful backbenchers to a round of drinks. After putting his cash on the bar, Jenkins said, ‘I’m terribly sorry not to join you, but I’ve got an important engagement,’ and swept out again.

  What made Jenkins attractive to some, but less so to others, was that he did not seem to care what others thought about his claret drinking. For him a vigorous social life, organised around good food and wine, along with an appreciation of books and culture, enhanced a politician’s professional life rather than distracted from it. Significantly, even though Jenkins’ drinking was far more generous than today’s generation of government ministers, it does not seem to have harmed his ability to do the job. In fact he found it much harder to write books after an evening of imbibing than he did trudging through ministerial business. As the historian David Cannadine says, Jenkins insisted it was ‘perfectly feasible to transact a morning’s ministerial business with a mind-numbing and physiologically debilitating hangover’.33

  Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland were by no means the only Cabinet ministers in the 1960s and 70s who could have been seen strolling back to their offices through Westminster and Whitehall, well lubrica
ted after a long lunch. Many leading politicians of the era kept the sommeliers busy, as the journalist Alan Watkins remembers:

  A politician of the day – Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Denis Healey, and Iain Macleod come to mind – would think nothing of enjoying a large aperitif beforehand, sharing a bottle of wine with the meal and having some brandy afterwards with his coffee. He would then go either to the House of Commons or to his department, where he would put in a long afternoon’s work or, if he went to the House, even make a speech. Tomato juice and mineral water and much worse, the bringing along of press officers, came in during the 1980s, to the detriment of politics and journalism alike. Roy belonged to an earlier and better age.34

  Perhaps the 1970s marked the final era of serious and routine ministerial drinking. According to the former Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, a tumbler of something strong used to punctuate the political day: ‘It would have been perfectly normal to have a drinks cupboard – with whisky, gin and sherry and glasses in it. And if the minister had a visitor before lunch or in the evening he would offer them a drink.’35 There were exceptions of course – like Tony Benn, who was famously teetotal. But in general government floated along on a sea of booze. David Lipsey, Crosland’s special adviser in the 1970s, says drinking at work was routine: ‘The amount of drinking would shock a modern politician. It was easier to drink a lot because there wasn’t any 24-hour media. In those days if Crosland was on the TV twice a month we thought it was tremendously good going.’

  In the early 1970s Victor Rothschild, head of the government’s think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff, dreamed up a test called ‘Are You Fit to Make Decisions After a Long Air Flight and Two Extra Gins?’ He wanted to see whether ministers’ powers of logical reasoning deteriorated under the pressures of their job. But every minister he asked refused to take the test.36 Most probably felt that they could only make decisions after at least two gins.

  It was a decade of strikes, high inflation, unemployment, pessimism and economic decline, and politicians were not the only ones drinking their way through it. As the historian Andy Beckett says, ‘in the seventies, when booze pervaded British life, from City of London lunches to the onstage stumbles of bands like The Faces to the pissy terraces of football grounds, politicians almost certainly drank more than they do now.’37 At the time senior ministers would think nothing of getting through a bottle of wine at lunchtime and tucking into the drinks cabinet in the evening. Civil servants would join them for a drink too if the minister offered, and Lord Armstrong believes alcohol could usefully lubricate the wheels of discussion: ‘I remember many occasions when it’s eased a relationship or particular occasion. I can think of relatively few occasions when I thought its effect was damaging on public life.’38 But it is very difficult, if not impossible, precisely to measure the effect of drink on government decision making. There are certain jobs that clearly demand a clear head and a steady hand – bus drivers and heart surgeons for instance. They could not do their jobs to the same standard after a bottle of Burgundy and a noggin of brandy. But for three centuries, many government ministers ran their departments with a drink close to hand.

  Of course, running the country is not like operating a lathe. Ministers do not sit at their desks pulling at a panel of policy levers, and there are armies of sober civil servants to supervise their actions. For most of the time, the daily life of a government minister is a relentless schedule of meetings, receptions and red boxes of policy papers to work through, along with questions in the House to prepare for and the legislation process to navigate. It is a slog, says Lord Armstrong, and drink has long provided a prop and an escape: ‘The life of a minister is a grind. He has to combine running a department, running a constituency, being a member of the Cabinet if he’s in it, maintaining some kind of social life. There are lots of things that are social or semi-social that you need to do so the pressures on a minister are very great. Every minister that I’ve ever seen has always found those pressures in the end very wearing and has been made very exhausted by them over time. When people get as stretched as that, one of the ways you can get relief or apparent relief is a drink. Or two drinks, or four drinks.’39

  There is also the fact that in the 1970s the pressures on ministers were huge. With industrial unrest and relentless waves of economic crisis to contend with, perhaps it is no surprise that ministers sought some solace with a bottle. The Leader of the House of Commons in Jim Callaghan’s government, Fred Peart, used to hold his morning conferences with the chief whip on the floor of his office with a bottle of sherry between them.40

  ‘Tired and Emotional’

  The name of one leading politician in particular of this post-war generation became synonymous with drink. It was a sleepy, work-worn Friday evening in November 1963 when the first Reuters report about the shooting in Dallas rattled out from the newsroom wire machines at 6.42 p.m. At the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, the tuxedoed talent from ITV and the BBC were gathering for the annual dinner of the Guild of Television Producers and Directors. In east London, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, George Brown, was attending a mayoral drinks reception at Shoreditch Town Hall.

  That year had already been a rotten one for George Brown. In February, Harold Wilson had beaten him to the Labour leadership in a contest Tony Crosland described as a choice between a crook and a drunk. Wilson then denied the heavy-drinking Brown the job of Shadow Foreign Secretary, a snub that triggered a five-day disappearance by the party’s volatile deputy leader. And so it was a bruised George Brown who helped himself to another gin and tonic on the evening of 22 November. Within an hour of the first report from Dallas, drinks had been downed at the Dorchester and stunned television news teams and schedulers were scrambling to cover the biggest breaking story of their lives.

  It was Milton Schulman, assistant controller of programmes at the independent London television company Rediffusion, who told Brown that President Kennedy was dead. Brown had met Kennedy briefly three times since 1960, including a ten-minute encounter less than a month earlier. Schulman snapped Brown up for ITV’s hastily arranged This Week special on the assassination and a car took him to the studios in Kingsway, central London. More drinks were poured for the guests, who included the historian Sir Denis Brogan and the actor Eli Wallach.

  Brown was already showing signs of intoxication before they went on air, almost coming to blows with the American film star. In the studio, he angrily reprimanded Wallach for not having heard of the playwright Ted Willis. But it was Brown’s drink-soaked, toe-curling sentimentality on camera that outraged viewers. He told the interviewer Kenneth Harris that he and the late President were great friends and implausibly claimed to be very close to the Kennedy family. With tears in his eyes Brown said: ‘Jack Kennedy, who I liked a lot, who I was very near to … I remember it’s not many weeks ago I was over there with my daughter who lives in New York. We were walking across the garden, and she was talking to Jackie across the garden. One is terribly hurt by this loss …’41 In a performance that managed to be both weepy and aggressive, Brown slurred his way through the tribute. Watching at home, Richard Crossman was appalled at his colleague’s antics, writing: ‘At the first moment I saw that he was pissed and he was pretty awful.’42

  The press condemnation took a couple of days to heat up. Brown was given a rollicking by Harold Wilson and had to apologise to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Some journalists were more forgiving, Anthony Sampson writing in the Observer that Brown’s emotional performance was less of an outrage than the BBC’s decision to carry on transmitting a light comedy show when even Moscow was broadcasting solemn music.43

  Soon, though, letters of complaint started to arrive at George Brown’s office. From St Anne’s-on-Sea, a correspondent wrote: ‘Dear Mr Brown, you have shown yourself unfit to govern yourself. How do you expect to govern others?’ This florid reprimand came from a woman in Chester: ‘Dear Sir, I have always thought of you as a small man, but after your disgus
ting performance in This Week last Friday I have altered my opinion. I now think you are a small drunken man.’ And a letter from Renfrewshire read: ‘You have appeared on canned television canned. On a solemn occasion you were as pissed as a coot. You are a disgrace to the nation.’44 Brown wrote sorrowful letters of apology to them all.

  Drink would sink Brown eventually, but not before Harold Wilson had put him in charge of economic planning and then appointed him Foreign Secretary. A year after his inebriated tribute to President Kennedy, Wilson decided to give Brown one of the biggest jobs in government. In October 1964 Brown became Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, a new ministry charged with modernising British industry. He also served as Wilson’s deputy.

  Brown was popular in the Labour Party and had indisputable proletarian credentials. The son of a Lambeth lorry driver, he grew up on the Peabody estate in Southwark and had a career as a fur salesman for John Lewis before becoming a trade union official and then an MP. A fiery public performer with a sharp mind, Brown could also be volatile and lachrymose when drunk. Not long into his new job he was pouring slugs of whisky into his morning tea and coffee and drinking heavily at lunchtime. Others in the government drank just as much, but the effect on Brown was ugly. Robert Armstrong was a civil servant in the Department of Economic Affairs at the time: ‘He said and did things when under the influence of drink that he wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t had a drink. Quite a small amount would set him off. A single gin and tonic could make him paranoid about something – it sparked off his natural tendency to be suspicious and jealous of colleagues and sometimes to behave stupidly.’45

  Although frequently drunk and rude to civil servants and secretaries, Brown did manage to oversee the publication of a national economic plan in September 1965, a plan that collapsed in the sterling crisis of 1966. But his behaviour shocked some of the journalists who encountered him. The renowned industrial reporter Geoffrey Goodman was sent to interview Brown on wages policy for the BBC, but when he got to the Treasury early in the evening he found the Secretary of State soused. ‘He was absolutely pissed. It was at the peak of the incomes policy crisis. Discussions with the TUC were at crisis point. I got there at six in the evening and the private secretary said it’s impossible. There he was at his desk, head in his hands on the desk. I said, George, we’re going to do an interview, aren’t we, and he shouted “fuck off!” I said the whole thing has been fixed, you can’t say no. I went outside for five minutes. He went to the bathroom for twenty minutes and came out. In the end we did it, it was difficult but it was coherent. It was a hell of an experience. He was completely pissed. Incomes policy was right at the centre of the government. And here was the number two in the government incapable.’46