24 Hours - Yesterday's Men (16 June 1971) from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
Straight-dealing is one of the principles of BBC programme making, but it has not always been followed. The BBC enraged Harold Wilson and his outgoing government after they lost the 1970 General Election. They were effectively tricked into taking part in a programme that would ridicule them.
Had Wilson and his front-benchers known, for example, that the programme would take as its title a soundbite from their own campaign against the Conservatives (they called the Tories "yesterday's men"), they would not have agreed to take part. Later Huw Wheldon, Managing Director of BBC Television, conceded that it was like making a programme about doctors and calling it Quack Quack.
Along the way Harold Wilson, a touchy individual at the best of times, was put out by the reporter's question about how he was profiting from the sale of his memoirs. After a shouting match in the studio, Wilson asked the Governors to intervene, and the chairman, Lord Hill, took the unusual and highly risky step of asking to see the programme before it was transmitted. It was agreed that the question about Wilson's memoirs should not be included, prompting the reporter, David Dimbleby, to ask for his name to be removed from the credits.
But that spat was nothing compared with the row that erupted when Wilson's press secretary, Joe Haines, attended a press viewing of the programme ahead of transmission. In places the finished product was more satire than documentary. The icing on the cake was a disrespectful song specially commissioned from pop group The Scaffold, and Yesterday's Men was in stark contrast to a serious and conventional 'balancing' documentary that had been made about the Conservative government a year after the election.
Haines described it as "calculated, deliberate, continuous deceit". Relations with Labour were to remain difficult for some time, and it damaged the BBC overall. John Crawley, Chief Assistant to the Director-General, noted: "Most commentators and nearly all politicians concluded that we could not be trusted. It will take ages to live it down."
Adam Curtis - EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
In his 1976 memoir Walking on Water, Hugh Cudlipp recounts a meeting he arranged at the request of Cecil King, the head of the International Publishing Corporation, between King and Lord Mountbatten of Burma. The meeting took place on May 8, 1968. Attending were Mountbatten, King, Cudlipp, and Sir Solly Zuckerman, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government.
According to Cudlipp:
"[Cecil] awaited the arrival of Sir Solly and then at once expounded his views on the gravity of the national situation, the urgency for action, and then embarked upon a shopping list of the Prime Minister's shortcomings...He explained that in the crisis he foresaw as being just around the corner, the Government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets and the armed forces would be involved. The people would be looking to somebody like Lord Mountbatten as the titular head of a new administration, somebody renowned as a leader of men, who would be capable, backed by the best brains and administrators in the land, to restore public confidence. He ended with a question to Mountbatten- would he agree to be the titular head of a new administration in such circumstances?"
Mountbatten asked for the opinion of Zuckerman, who stated that the plan amounted to treason and left the room. Mountbatten expressed the same opinion, and King and Cudlipp left.
On 30 May 1968 King was dismissed as the head of the International Publishing Corporation.
In addition to Mountbatten's refusal to participate in King's mooted plot, there is no evidence of any other conspirators. Cudlipp himself appears to see the meeting as an example of extreme egotism on King's part.[7]
A later memoir by Harold Evans, former Times and Sunday Times editor, observed that the Times had egged on King's plans for a coup:
"Rees-Mogg's Times backed the Conservative Party in every general election, but it periodically expressed yearnings for a coalition of the right-centre. In the late 1960s it encouraged Cecil King's lunatic notion of a coup against Harold Wilson's Labour Government in favour of a government of business leaders led by Lord Robens. In the autumn election of 1974, it predicted that economic crisis would produce a coalition government of national unity well inside five years and urged one there and then between Conservatives and Liberals.
William Rees-Mogg called for a coalition in a December 8, 1968 Times editorial entitled "The Danger to Britain", a day before King visited the Times office."
A BBC programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, broadcast in 2006, reported that, in tapes recorded soon after his resignation on health grounds, Wilson stated that for eight months of his premiership he didn't "feel he knew what was going on, fully, in security". Wilson alleged two plots, in the late 1960s and mid-1970s respectively. He said that plans had been hatched to install Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles's great uncle and mentor, as interim Prime Minister (see also Other conspiracy theories, below). He also claimed that ex-military leaders had been building up private armies in anticipation of "wholesale domestic liquidation".
On a separate track, elements within MI5 had also, the BBC programme reported, spread "black propaganda" that Wilson and Williams were Soviet agents, and that Wilson was an IRA sympathiser, apparently with the intention of helping the Conservatives win the 1974 election.
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