Faded cutting in the attic that left me pondering a catalogue of ‘what ifs’
SIFTING through a boxfile in my attic last week, I found myself staring in wonder at a creased and faded newspaper front page with the headline ‘Tatchell Wins it!’ It described the victory of the famed homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tatchell in a by-election in Bermondsey in February 1983. But of course no such thing happened.
Mr Tatchell, the victim of several rather shocking smear campaigns, was undermined by his own Labour Party and badly beaten by a Liberal, Simon Hughes, and never returned to party politics. He has since risen far above those who did him down in 1983.
The creased and yellowing front page I held in my hand was what is called in the newspaper business a ‘set and hold’, one of several stories I had written in advance to cover all eventualities when the result came in around midnight, too late for fine writing.
It was long ago broken up and melted down, in those ancient days. And the real front page of the paper I then worked for proclaimed ‘Tatchell Thrashed’.
Generally I did not keep such things. They were often tiresome to write but editors insisted on them as they knew all too well how things did not always turn out as expected.
Some instinct must have made me treasure this one, though I had completely forgotten it. It was just so unlikely. But the sight set me thinking of all the many moments when things could have easily gone the other way, sending the country down a totally different road.
What if the Tories had narrowly won the 1964 General Election and the grammar schools had never been abolished? What if the Task Force had been beaten in the Falklands, as it so very nearly was?
What if the IRA had succeeded in murdering Margaret Thatcher when they blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton? What if Sir Anthony Blair’s student Trotskyism had emerged before the 1997 Election, rather than years after he left office? What if Alexander Johnson had sent the panic merchants packing in March 2020 and followed Sweden’s sensible example over Covid?
And, above all, what if the Soviet Communist Party had got rid of the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in the autumn of 1989, and ordered the East German regime to massacre pro-democracy protesters in Dresden and Leipzig, as China’s leaders did on Tiananmen Square in the same year? The Berlin Wall would still be there, Germany would still be divided and Western governments would treat the stone-faced Soviet despots with the same fawning respect they now give to the Peking regime.
It is not true that you learn nothing from history. You can learn a lot, if you wish to (though few do). Two things are for sure. The first is that history does not take sides. Its outcomes are good or bad mainly depending on the courage, will and intelligence of those in conflict.
Bad people and bad causes can and do win. The second is that it is often a very near-run thing and that vast events may depend on a tiny, unexpected detail.
I AM so sorry but I think there is something totally phoney about all this whooping and yelling for women’s football. Perhaps it is because I dislike the men’s game so much, that I am so sure the enthusiasm for it is deep and genuine and equally sure that the hoopla about the Lionesses is an act.