The Enemy Within, page 35
‘Hi Tommy, d’you want to come on in?’ she said. Ryan is Ryan these days, not Liam, but I’m always going to be Tommy.
‘Good luck,’ he whispered, and squeezed my hand.
I squeezed back, and stood up on shaky legs. The doctor stood aside to let me go into her office, and then closed the door behind me.
AFTERWORD:
WHAT (REALLY) HAPPENED NEXT
An agreement was eventually struck between the management and the students at the Polytechnic of North London, whereby Patrick Harrington was allowed to resume classes on his own, in a separate building, but not before two student union leaders had each been jailed for sixteen days for contempt of court, and the Polytechnic’s director, David MacDowell, had resigned, wishing ‘all the picketing students the best of luck with their campaign’.
The PNL student union did try donating funds directly to the miners: their fight for the right to do so went all the way to the High Court in May 1985, by which time the strike had been over for nearly three months. It was called off after a full year when an increasing number of ‘hunger scabs’ began to return to work because they could no longer feed their families. Mrs Thatcher won.
The printers’ unions at the Sun did prevent the ‘MINE FUHRER’ headline from appearing on the edition of 15 May 1984. This was one of several episodes that prompted Rupert Murdoch to whisk his papers away to Wapping two years later and jettison the print unions along the way, leading to the next (and final) long-running industrial confrontation of the Thatcher years. Ken Livingstone’s GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government in 1986. Livingstone later became the first independent, and then first Labour, mayor of London, before he went mad and started making claims about Hitler.
Livingstone also wrote the foreword to Gerry Healy’s ‘official’ biography, in which he blamed MI5 for the WRP leader’s downfall. You won’t find anything in there about the repeated and long-standing sexual and physical abuse of young WRP members that got Healy expelled from his own party in 1985, other than a passing reference to ‘poisonous allegations’. Nor is there anything about the internal party investigation that discovered he had kept the WRP afloat with huge amounts of cash, not just from Gaddafi’s Libya but from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in return for passing on information on exiled opposition activists and ‘Zionists’ in the UK. Much of Gaddafi’s cash went into the production of News Line, the WRP’s daily paper, which was published in full colour, long before any mainstream newspapers in Britain had ventured beyond black and white.
I was able to virtually wander the much-renovated rooms of the College of Marxist Education courtesy of the website of a very posh estate agent: at time of writing the ‘spacious upgraded country home set in a glorious setting’ was on sale for £1.6m.
Both John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn were involved in 1984 in pushing through GLC funding to set up the Irish Centre in Islington, which eventually shared its premises with Corbyn’s constituency office. Its Community Outreach Worker was Gerard McLaughlin, who had been released from a four-year sentence for conspiracy to cause explosions in November 1983.
The Old Bailey trial of Gay’s the Word’s directors and manager collapsed in 1986 due to a ruling in the European Court of Justice involving the import of German sex dolls – rather than the fact it had been a ridiculous and vindictive charade from start to finish. The story of Mark Ashton and his friends setting up the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group and everything that happened as a result is told brilliantly in the 2014 film, Pride.
After her days as half of Biddy and Eve, Eve Ferret had the misfortune of becoming my friend and sometime next-door neighbour: thank you, Eve, for your help with scene-setting and permission to include you in my story.
I’ve tried hard to reflect the UK knowledge of Aids – and lack thereof – in June 1984 as accurately as possible – something that’s particularly tricky given the understandable reluctance of charities and health authorities to keep out-of-date advice available online (which another pandemic meant was the only place I could look for it). The virus that causes Aids had only been firmly identified that April: it had yet to be named HIV and was then being referred to variously as LAV and HTLV-III. Blood tests for the virus were officially introduced in the UK on 14 October 1985. For some time after that, the advice of the Terrence Higgins Trust was that as long as you practised safe sex there was little point being tested as there was nothing that could be done even if you got a positive result. Everything has changed beyond recognition for the better now: for the most up-to-date advice, go to https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hiv-and-aids/.
In our universe Derek Jarman didn’t move to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness until 1987, although he had considered buying one of the other houses there, fashioned from old railway carriages, the year before. I’ve given him three extra years to enjoy the place he called a ‘corner of paradise’: consider it my gift in return for everything his films, his journals and, most of all, his campaigning did for me as a teenager. In his ‘Saint’s Testament’, At Your Own Risk, Jarman announced his intention to be ‘cremated and have Christopher [Hobbs, his studio assistant] mix the ashes with black paint and paint five canvasses which I’ll have signed – it’ll be my last artwork.’ At other times he said he wanted them flushed down one of the toilets in Heaven instead. In the event, and according to his final wishes, he was buried in the churchyard closest to his home at Dungeness in 1994.
The boat that was actually intercepted carrying arms to the IRA on 29 September 1984 was the Marita Ann; the weapons and explosives on board were from America, supplied by an organised crime gang in Boston. The first shipments from Libya in that decade are thought to have been sent, via Malta, on the 65ft fishing boat, the Casamara, on at least three separate trips during 1985. Virtually all of the Semtex used in IRA bombings in the late 1980s and 1990s came from Libya, and some of it is thought still to be in the hands of dissident republicans despite the Provisional IRA’s decommissioning of its arms following the Good Friday Agreement. None of it made it over in time to be used in the Brighton bomb, something the bomber Patrick Magee expressed regret about as it meant he could not “effect the maximum impact”.
A public inquiry is currently investigating how hundreds of undercover police officers wormed their way into political groups, and in many cases instigated sexual relationships with members who were unaware of their real identity. At time of writing it has yet to get on to the years 1983-1992, which will form the second tranche of its work. Among the more than one thousand groups already known to have been infiltrated are the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Anti-Nazi League, CND, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the Irish Solidarity Campaign, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, Troops Out Movement, Militant Tendency, the Socialist Workers Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Spartacist League, the Workers Revolutionary Party and the National Union of Students.
In one of the most surprising bits of political weirdness from a decade that has hardly been short of them – and one that would surely blow the minds of Sergeant Coyle’s bosses – current Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson appointed Munira Mirza, a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, as director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, and put another ex-RCP member, Claire Fox, in the House of Lords. The RCP’s position on the attempt to assassinate Johnson’s predecessor, her cabinet and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the way in Brighton in October 1984 was that ‘we support unconditionally the right of the Irish people to carry out their struggle for national liberation in whatever way they choose.’
* * *
Tommy Wildeblood will return in The Inalienable Right.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Rose Collis, Paul Barlow, Keith Sadler, Neil Mackay and Eve Ferret provided invaluable help in recalling and re-living the gay days of the early 1980s for me, while memoirs by Richard Coles and Michael Cashman helped fill in some details. Elegantly-ageing lefties Solomon Hughes, Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen, and marginally less aged but no less elegant leftie Padraig Reidy have all helped guide me through the myriad splinter groups of the period. Andy Hosken’s biography of Ken Livingstone was extremely well-thumbed.
I wallowed in the archives of the Workers Hammer, Socialist Organiser, News Line, Labour Herald and Labour London Briefing, many of which are available online in the Splits and Fusions collection (splitsandfusions.wordpress.com).
Measure for Measure was the set text for both my A level and English degree a quarter of a century ago, which goes to prove that if you give me long enough I will always find a way to recycle my research somewhere. Thanks for this, and much more, are due to my teachers Chris Rowe, Barry Windeatt, Kiernan Ryan, Georgia Brown, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and all their colleagues.
Simon Edge once again did a superb job as my editor, providing infuriatingly constructive criticism which always – even if it took me a while to realise it – turned out to be correct. Clio Mitchell performed expert colonic (and semi-colonic) irrigation on the text, flushing out everything unnecessary and reducing my sentences to healthy lengths. Thank you also to Dan Hiscocks and everyone else at Lightning Books for letting me follow Tommy on to another adventure.
For help with various period details, plot points and general inspiration, thanks to Sandra, James, Kirstie, Janie and Andrew Macqueen, Tom, Harriet and Kate Lee, James, William, and Alys Price, Michael Powell-Davies, Nick Dawson, Tina Jackson, Sheila Molnar, Olivia Brindley and always and forever, my husband Michael Tierney.
Also by Adam Macqueen
Beneath the Streets
Longlisted for the Polari Prize
When Jeremy Thorpe hired thugs to kill his ex-lover, they botched it. What if they had succeeded?
It is February 1976, and the naked corpse of a young rent boy is fished out of a pond on Hampstead Heath. Since the police don’t seem to care, twenty-year-old Tommy Wildeblood – himself a former ‘Dilly boy’ prostitute – finds himself investigating.
Dodging murderous Soho hoodlums and the agents of a more sinister power, Tommy uncovers another, even more shocking crime: the senior politician Jeremy Thorpe has ordered the murder of his former male lover. The trail of guilt seems to lead higher still, and a ruthless Establishment will stop at nothing to cover its tracks.
In a gripping thriller whose cast of real-life characters includes Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his adviser Lady Falkender, Adam Macqueen plays ‘what if’ with Seventies political history – with a sting in the tail that reminds us that the truth can be just as chilling as fiction.
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Dan Hiscocks
Publisher
Lightning Books
Adam Macqueen, The Enemy Within
