"Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving
But how can they know it's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time..."
- Fairport Convention, Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
◇◇◇
He hadn’t meant to stay so late, but Audrey knew he couldn’t well come home that night. The news of the “insurrection” came just before five o’clock, though it was already too late for Jim to halt the rush of journalists down to Battersea to listen to their golden boy tear the party apart once more. By twenty to six, the announcement had wrapped up and the news crews were ready to report Jim’s humiliation to the country. He wondered if they got some pleasure out of wounding him, as if they held some grudge against him. He couldn’t think why, but he knew they wouldn’t turn up a chance to twist the knife.
The report began with a shot of Battersea Town Hall, then switching to the sight of the Member for Battersea North with his spindly frame and proud face running deep with creases. The jacket he wore was far too big, it appeared to force him to stoop a little as he welcomed a young man to the podium. Nearly every journalist in the city had turned up.
How does he do it? There was something mystical in the way the former Viscount Stansgate could summon up the newspapermen and television reporters with the shortest of notice and barely a hint as to his intentions. Fleet Street needn’t have pondered for too long, Jim was sure. It was the best-known secret in the country, though Jim had thought the plot dead. The reporting camera switched to a shot from another angle, catching the easy smile and sharp-tailored suit of Labour’s “young new hope” from the side. The figure that reached out to shake Jay’s was so unlike the greying Gaitskellite. The new man was clean-cut, strongly built, and so young that he’d most likely seen no more than a few weeks’ service in the war; Douglas Jay was slow, old-fashioned, and would be sixty-two by the following spring.
I could beat him without saying a word, the leader thought with a chuckle that slumped into a downbeat sigh.
“Today, my purpose is the same purpose of every Labour member across this country – to get our party back into government. But, with time fleeting as the next election approaches, the party looks no better than it did in 1959.” Jim might have heckled had he not realised he was the only man in the room.
We’re closer to Maudling than Brown was in ’64, that’s for sure. He reckoned the young Benn would omit that little episode of recent history, preferring to beat his leader with the bloody stick of Bevanism. “And yet, though I know in our hearts we are all fighting for this same goal, the party feels as if it is being led away from this end. Leadership is lacking and, without it, there will be no Labour government – there will be no great victory, nor any consolation that those we seek to protect will be safe in our failure. That is why I declare that I will challenge Mr. Callaghan for the leadership of our party and set us all back on the road to a Labour victory…”
The camera panned back, Benn’s voice faded away, and Jim Callaghan rose to switch the television off before Michael Aspel wrapped up the programme. That was at ten to six, when BBC One turned over to the Olympic coverage from Budapest. By such time, Callaghan’s Shadow Cabinet had been ordered to take a vow of silence on the leadership contest and to keep talking to the press at the bare minimum. When the Shadow Chancellor finally arrived, Callaghan could still be found seated at his desk. His hair slicked back and his smile disarming, the Shadow Chancellor might’ve been confused for a handsome conman.
The papers certainly think so. The previous month had seen Greenwood sustain a barrage of attacks upon his plan to re-nationalise steel, with every news outlet from the
Daily Express to
The Guardian finding some way to talk the Shadow Chancellor’s plans down and castigate him as a relic of the 1950s – “four election defeats on and still the Shadow Chancellor believes unreconstructed Bevanism will win the day for Labour”, one journalist had written. Benn and his “cabal” must have cackled like hyenas at that, Jim surmised. Their respect for the Shadow Chancellor was practically non-existent, though their sincerest hatred was reserved for the old Welsh firebrand.
And they think Tony is stuck in the past.
“I’ve been on the phone to Dick. He says he’s getting a team together.” The Shadow Chancellor picked a seat from across the leader’s desk and pulled it forward to sit upon. The characteristic Greenwood smile lingered on his face, half-hearted in its pretence. “We still have the party behind us, Jim. We’re not going to-…”
“Give up? No, we’re not. We’re going to fight, Tony. We’re going to fight and we’re going to be proved right, mark my words.” He held his head up and pointed to the grand portrait behind Greenwood’s head – a portrait of a silver-haired man sat in the same chair Jim planted himself in that night and every night that he’d been leader. “Bevan wouldn’t have given up.”
Nye smiled warmly from the wall, his eyes immortalised in their benevolence and his wrinkled hands clasped at the arms of the chair. An immovable man, moved only from that seat by death, bore down upon Callaghan and Greenwood like the opening of the clouds after the storm.
“We wouldn’t be here without him, Tony. We’d be on the outside kicking in, just like Benn and Brown and the rest of them.” Gaitskell’s portrait once hung on the wall opposing Callaghan. Placed there by Brown in 1964, at some time in the month between Gaitskell’s death and the general election, it had been swiftly replaced when Brown managed to drink himself to defeat in the country and then in the party.
“Very true, Jim. I can’t imagine he’d be anything less than proud,” Anthony replied.
Callaghan stood, a police car trundled past, and the clock on the wall just reached half past eight.
He recalled the first time Nye had held a Shadow Cabinet meeting, the nervous faces of Summerskill and Jay as they knew they were soon on their way out, and the bright young things of the ‘Keep Left’ group: Foot, Castle, Greenwood, but not Callaghan – not yet. It took some time, but Nye raised him up and bestowed the Home Office portfolio upon him after Jay was given leave to join his beloved Hugh on the backbenches. They’d all come up together, stayed loyal to each other through the lean years after Bevan’s death and the heady left-wing honeymoon following Callaghan’s election.
Benn was the new “bright young thing”.
The bright young thing of a dying breed, Callaghan thought.
The bright young thing who would hand Maudling another election.
“We’re going to fight, Tony.”
“Fight, fight, and fight again?” Greenwood replied with a smirk.
“Whatever it takes.” With that, the keeper of the cloth cap made his resolution: the Bevanites would go forth and put paid to Benn, the last of the Gaitskellites.