The Lost World of the Seventies

As a reporter in search of four characters,

I've come to an underground vault,

150 feet beneath King's Cross in central London.

It houses a treasure trove of old films,

some of them containing unseen footage,

and four of the iconic figures,

who each played central roles in the tragicomedy of Britain in the 1970s.

It was a bad-hair decade.

Students were revolting...

..militant unions were striking...

Get a bloody photograph of this.

..force was met with force.

Bastards!

Asset strippers were flourishing,

as inflation and unemployment rocketed.

And there was even talk of the Army taking over.

It was an age of paranoia,

with a febrile feeling that Britain was on the brink.

All four of the characters in this film

felt, in their very different ways,

that they had a mission to mend broken Britain.

The first is a senior general, Sir Walter Walker,

who was setting up his own private army to save the country

from the catastrophe of a take over by the Marxists.

No-one has the guts to do anything.

Year after year, we are held to ransom.

We are sick and tired of this lack of leadership.

Our second character is Lord Longford,

self-appointed guardian of the nation's morals.

He pursued his campaign against pornography with such fervour

that the media christened him Lord Porn.

Well, I mean, Teenage Perverts -

I mean, that's presumably not a serious study.

Well, biased against pornography?

Surely, every decent person is biased against pornography.

You might say, simply being biased against filth.

The third character is Sir Robert Mark,

who, as London's top policeman,

was on a mission to clean up Scotland Yard

and get rid of every corrupt detective.

A bent detective harms the whole fabric of public confidence in the police.

And, so far as I'm concerned, he will always be a prime target,

and he can look to no mercy at all from me.

The last is Sir Jimmy Goldsmith,

the tycoon with a complex business and love life,

who believed the media were plotting to destroy capitalism.

You lied. That's what I'm trying to show,

and what I intend to prove on this programme.

At the time,

I was making some of these films as a reporter for the BBC.

Michael Cockerell is down at Downing Street,

brushing the hair out of his eyes.

-Michael, good morning again.

-Good morning, David.

What's going on there?

-We're running out of time, now.

-We're running out of time.

While making documentaries in the 1970s,

I met or filmed each of the conspicuous characters featured in this programme.

The inside stories of the four men

shed new light on the lost world of the '70s.

My first contentious character from the '70s

is the British general Sir Walter Walker.

He was to become notorious when he tried to set up his own private army in Britain.

Until 1972 he was Commander-in-Chief of NATO's Northern Forces,

who formed the thin blue line against the Red Army of Soviet Russia.

I, as a soldier, know there's a great temptation

to the Soviets towards aggression.

We've got to close this gap between what we, as soldiers, know to be the position on the ground,

and what the man on the street is told by the politicians.

"I'm all right, Jack" is no recipe for survival.

The Ministry of Defence banned this documentary,

which has not been seen before on national television.

General Walker had allowed the cameras to film how NATO prepared for war.

The headquarters you're about to see is one of these preparations.

Britain's top military expert on the Soviet threat

had first made his name fighting communist subversion

in the jungles of the Far East.

Now, he was in charge of rehearsing doomsday scenarios

in case the Cold War was suddenly to turn hot.

Here, if world war did come, are the men who would fight it,

and in the chair, General Sir Walter Walker,

Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, Northern Europe.

General Walker retired form the Army to Somerset in the early '70s

and his conviction that the country was going to the dogs

grew stronger every day.

In 1974, you didn't quite need to be a Telegraph-reading General

to fear that Britain was becoming ungovernable.

The year had started with a miners' strike, a three-day week

and regular power blackouts.

Ted Heath's government had been brought down,

and Harold Wilson's minority Labour government was seen by many people

to be at the mercy of communist trade union leaders, militants, and subversives.

For General Sir Walter Walker, the picture was all too familiar.

As a soldier, one had to study not only one's external enemy,

but the enemy within, and I've been studying the enemy within.

These people defy parliament, they defy the courts,

and they defy the rules of law.

And if you plot to destroy this present system,

what are you doing?

General Walker's son Anthony, who himself was a regular Army officer,

has never seen this film of his father before.

What are you doing? You are committing a form of treason.

It reminds me of getting a rocket for a bad school report.

He was very passionate about it

and I think he just felt that he was probably saying

what a lot of other people thought but were too frightened to say it.

General Walker knew something had to be done.

He wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, which the paper published.

In it he said, "Why is the country in such a mess?

"The answer is complete lack of inspiring and trusted political leadership.

"The communist Trojan Horse is in our midst

"with its fellow-travellers wriggling their maggoty way inside its belly...

"The country yearns for a true dynamic and patriotic leader.

"Such a man must be produced before it's too late."

At his home in Somerset,

General Walker receives an immediate response to his letter

from likeminded Telegraph readers

who contact him from all over the country.

The fact of the matter is, why did all these people,

in the first instance, write to me in their thousands,

and telephone me for three months?

We were getting a hundred calls a day

saying, "For goodness' sake, tell us what to do.

"Organise us into something. We can see what's happening in this country.

"No-one has the guts to do anything."

Colonel Patrick Mercer, who served 25 years in the Army

from the mid '70s onwards, is now a Tory MP.

"Year after year we are held to ransom.

"We are sick and tired of this lack of leadership. Will you please organise something?"

HE CHUCKLES

Fiery rhetoric - no two ways about that.

Walter Walker and I, of course, served in the same regiment,

so I have a great interest in this individual.

I think that Walter Walker saw himself as being the saviour of the country.

That as society spiralled downwards, as he would have it,

that there was going to be this charismatic,

convincing leader, who was ready to step into the breach.

A number of people asked me - friends in the Army, or, you know,

people who, like me, had retired from the Army,

or just retired from the Army...

Er, more of a joke, you know.

What's happening? Is your father going to take over the country?

It was said more like that.

A lot of people asked me, and I said, "Actually, I don't know."

General Walker decides to organise the people who've written to him

into his own unofficial army.

It would have regional command centres.

They'd be run by controllers, hand picked by the general.

Just to show you the, sort of, cross section...

Here we have a flying club, with 25 excellent pilots

and, of course, light aircraft, for communication purposes.

Here we have, from Reading, a merchant banker

who has had previous intelligence experience.

A man from Carmarthen who is in the investigation service,

previous intelligence experience.

General Walker's mind goes back to how, as NATO commander,

he'd organised his fellow generals

to confront the Soviet nuclear threat.

He chooses to deploy the same methods

for the new battle against the enemy within.

Hello, Peter.

Nice to see you, thank you for all the bumf.

Robert, congratulations on that show last night. Absolutely first class.

-Alex.

-Hello, General.

Thank you very much for coming.

Surrounded by his top brass, all former comrades in arms,

the General produces his latest sit-rep.

Here is the up-to-date situation.

Now, for example, that packet...

contains people who, I think, are fit to be controllers,

which Robert is now placing on the map.

Um, so, I have sifted the controllers from the non-controllers,

and it covers England, Scotland and Wales.

The command group discuss exactly when their unofficial army

should move into action against the threat of a Marxist take over in Britain.

I think that we have to decide,

when does law and order break down?

Uh, and when, perhaps, it may be dangerous for the...

For the palace.

In the Second World War, Major Alex Greenwood

had been aide-de-camp to General Claude Auchinleck in India.

There, Auchinleck served under the Queen's uncle,

Lord Mountbatten, who was then Supreme Commander in Asia,

and the two big guns became great friends.

Major Greenwood wasn't prepared to talk candidly

about what he and Sir Walter Walker had been up to, until recently.

I thought the trains would fail to run,

London Airport would not function any more,

the ports would be stagnant...

There would be complete chaos in the land.

And Lord Mountbatten rang up General Sir Walter Walker one evening

and said, "If you want any help from me, will you let me know?"

General Sir Walter Walker had prepared a sort of speech

which the Queen might read out on the BBC,

ask of the people to stand behind the armed forces,

as there was a breakdown of law and order

and the Government could not keep the unions in control.

The first thing you'd do if you want to control a country

is to take over the airports,

take over the BBC and protect Buckingham Palace with the Queen.

If you've got those three things you're pretty well in control, you know.

Major Alexander Greenwood, in an interview, said

Lord Mountbatten rang up General Sir Walter Walker one evening

and said, "If you want any help from me, let me know."

I'm sure he did, I'm sure he did. Er, I mean,

they knew each other from a long time ago,

going back to Burma days.

I mean, the suggestion is Lord Mountbatten himself

might have played a role in some kind of military take over

and he could be that figure

that your father was saying was needed, and the strong leader.

Possibly, yes. He was possibly...

But, um, again, you know, I can't... I wouldn't comment on that one.

General Walker publicly denied he was thinking of staging a coup.

Um, certainly not.

It is a smear campaign perpetrated by the media

and perpetrated by the enemy within.

When General Walker's chief of staff, Colonel Robert Butler,

arrives with his latest report from the battle front,

the general has bad news.

He's discovered a new enemy within, lurking in a most unlikely quarter.

Jolly glad to see that your letter got in the Telegraph.

-Did it?

-Oh, yeah.

-I haven't heard about it.

No? Well, it's in,

but unfortunately there's another article in, which really, you know,

for a right wing paper like the Daily Telegraph, really is beyond the pale.

This is using ridicule as a weapon. I'm bloody angry.

However, we can talk about that later.

You mean they published my letter, all of it, uncut?

They published your letter, uncut,

and then this chap came and interviewed me on Saturday night -

you know, he pressurised me to do it.

And I thought the Telegraph was trying to alert the public

to the threat not only from without but from within,

and he's made the whole thing look ridiculous,

and this is the first time that any report in the Daily Telegraph

has betrayed my confidence.

-So, I'm pretty angry.

-I wouldn't have expected it from the Daily Telegraph.

I would have expected it from certain other papers, maybe.

If you think Walter Walker sounds like something from the wilder shores of British conspiracy,

then think again.

This is Sandhurst, the British Army Officers' training academy.

I made a film here in 1975 for Panorama.

One of the officers I filmed was the 19-year-old Patrick Mercer,

who's now a Tory MP.

He gave a lecture to his fellow students as part of his training.

We've seen several different guerrilla groups operate in this country,

and we've seen what damage and fear they can bring into the country.

Can you see the point I'm trying to make? It can escalate so easily.

'The lines of supply which people like the IRA use'

can be tapped, and there are powers outside this country

which are willing to let them be tapped,

who will be glad to see insurgency - civil strife - break out in this country.

The young officer's scenario of a breakdown of civil order in Britain

is acted out in a remarkable Sandhurst training exercise

in internal security techniques.

The Sandhurst officers arrive at a deserted Army camp in Wiltshire,

where a sinister picture of Britain in the near future has been created.

The official Sandhurst narrative for the exercise runs like this...

Economic and political chaos is reigning in Britain

due to the failures of consecutive Labour and Tory minority governments.

Unemployment is rife, and the richer parts of the United Kingdom

are thinking in terms of independence.

Scotland has already seceded,

and the Government has sent the Army to deal with the political violence

in Ogbourne St George, where two policemen have been killed.

Michael, you said in your commentary

that this was a remarkable exercise setting,

and I think it is remarkable. It is remarkably...

blunt, it's remarkably unsubtle in the setting

and it's remarkably frightening.

Later on in my career, when I was setting these sorts of exercises,

I wouldn't have dreamed of being so political.

In the exercise, the Army is trying to keep the peace

between two political factions in the Wiltshire town.

One group is led by Eric the Red,

a union militant who's played by a Sandhurst lecturer.

I said, "Listen here, sunshine,

"unless you get your people off the street, there'll be trouble."

Piss off, Army! Go on!

They are mainly a left-wing organisation,

who draw their support from the unemployed and the lower classes.

The other political faction is the Ogbourne Loyalist Front,

who are located mainly in this area here.

They are a principally right-wing organisation,

and are led by a man called Simpson,

who is also the member of Parliament for Ogbourne.

Democracy. Democracy does not come from the barrel of a gun.

'Democracy comes from you and I...'

Keith Simpson, who played the neo-fascist MP for Ogbourne

in the training exercise was a Sandhurst lecturer

who's now a real-life Tory MP.

You see, art imitates life and life imitates art.

And I, as your legal representative, as your member of Parliament,

will make certain that you get democracy.

CHEERING

God, how embarrassing.

Mind you, some of my colleagues are like that.

And we have these soldiers here, these super boy scouts,

who have so far failed to deal with terrorists

at the other end of the town.

We shall interpret what "law and order" means.

Let me tell you, just after this documentary, Panorama, was shown, there were questions in Parliament.

Some MPs felt the Sandhurst exercise was provocatively party political,

and showed the Army being trained for possible intervention in Britain.

But Keith Simpson says the exercise

was actually aimed at preparing officers for Northern Ireland,

though he accepts it gave a different impression.

This was against the background

of great domestic and international unrest,

suspicion by people that Harold Wilson and the trade unions

were controlled by the communists.

And, of course, there were come ex-military people -

the famous General Sir Walter Walker,

some former members of the security service,

and old Tufton Buftons in clubs in London -

who muttered about the fact that, you know, "Time for a coup

"to perhaps get rid of these people."

And it's interesting to see how an exercise like this,

which was orientated towards Northern Ireland,

nevertheless when shown, given the background of 1975,

the assumption was by a lot of people watching it, which was that,

yes, the Army was preparing for this kind of thing.

The passing out parade for the class of '75 at Sandhurst,

where more than 40 years earlier, Walter Walker had been trained.

He'd come to see himself as a man on a white horse,

who would save the country from the Red Terror.

But the media searchlight revealed

he was commanding little more than a paper army,

and, as old soldiers do, General Walker just faded away.

Our second '70s figure is Lord Longford,

the great moral crusader of the decade.

He was a contradictory character,

an hereditary earl, who identified with the outcasts of society.

He made headlines in the '70s

by visiting notorious criminals in prison,

and for his campaign against pornography,

when the Sun christened him Lord Porn.

I don't think I was conscious at all of having any image

until I got involved with pornography.

Then I was very much in the news, and taxi drivers, you know,

they always know who I am. And one of them said to me the other day,

"I know you're Lord Porn, I never can remember your second name."

At that point I took off, for good or for ill,

into the realm of notoriety.

Lord Longford headed a literary dynasty.

Both his wife and his eldest daughter were historians.

Another daughter was a novelist,

and was asked about her father's anti-porn campaign.

As it happens, I write novels which have some sort of sexual content...

-Completely pornographic!

-..and my father

has never suggested in any way

that I should alter this, or has ever read them and said to me,

"This is wrong," or, "You're going to do me harm in this way."

The same way I would never make any judgment on what he does.

Hear, hear.

I published six books during the '70s and I had four babies

so I wasn't in constant dialogue with him.

What I do remember is, er,

when one of my very sensitive novels came out -

it must have been about my second or third,

which was a charming, sensitive love story,

brilliantly written, of course -

my publishers rang me up and said, "There's a big reveal

in the Daily Express - you'll be so pleased."

So, I rushed off and bought it,

and the headline for the big review was, "Lord Porn's daughter writes sex romp."

So, it wasn't altogether good.

Educated at Eton and Oxford, Longford had grown up as a Tory

but, after their grand wedding,

his wife converted him to socialism.

He also became a Catholic convert.

In the Second World War he suffered a nervous breakdown,

and was invalided out of the Army.

He said he felt humiliated at the time,

but later saw it as a blessing.

I think working among prisoners,

or people who themselves have had mental breakdowns,

drug addicts, anything you like...

The one way of really making them feel

there isn't a gulf between you and them

is when you can say, "I also have been humiliated."

Longford had campaigned for prison reform since the '30s.

By the '70s, it seemed he'd allied his moral conscience

with a taste for the headlines.

He would visit the most infamous prisoners, like Myra Hindley.

I think he took literally the line in the New Testament,

about, "When you visit a prisoner, you visit me,"

and he always quoted to hate the sin and love the sinner.

Obviously, you do get publicity

if you involve yourself with the most notorious ones,

and he probably did think...

He certainly thought that it was a good idea to raise public awareness

of what went on in prisons and the rules.

The public, of course, know me rather through my connection,

or friendship indeed, with certain very well-known criminals,

people who've been convicted of terrible crimes,

but I have been connected with many prisoners of whom the public know nothing.

It would be rather unfair to me, if it did get about...

Well, it has got about - I can't help it -

that the only prisoners I'm interested in

are the very sensational ones.

What really brought Lord Longford to public attention in the '70s

was his anti-pornography campaign.

He wanted to stem the tide of sexually explicit material

that he felt had been released by the Government's permissive legislation of the late '60s,

when theatre censorship was abolished,

and the Obscene Publications Act liberalised.

Longford deplored the rapid spread of adult bookshops in Soho.

Well, I mean, Teenage Perverts...

I mean, that's presumably not a serious study.

And he went to see the erotic revue "Oh! Calcutta!"

that consciously exploited the new freedoms.

Hey, Doc, they're a attaching an inter-uterine camera.

Think yourself lucky it's not a Polaroid Swinger, sonny.

Lord Longford was appalled by what he'd seen,

and as the revue played to packed houses,

he decided to set up his own committee

to look into the problems of pornography.

Its members were drawn

from the seasoned ranks of the great and the good.

Longford felt he also needed young blood,

and rang up Gyles Brandreth, who was just down from Oxford,

where he'd been a publicity-hungry president of the union.

Lord Longford told me that he was going to investigate

the question of pornography in our time.

"I'm forming," he says, "a high-powered committee.

"I've got a bishop, an archbishop, a rabbi and I need some young people.

"I thought of you and Cliff Richard."

I said, "Yes."

If I can be part of something

that is going to help combat immorality and so forth, I think I'd like to be part of it, really.

It doesn't look particularly healthy, the attitude that general

people have towards pornography and the sort of permissive - so-called - society.

I'm biased against pornography.

Surely every decent person is biased against pornography.

You might say it's simply being biased against filth.

The question is how to overcome pornography

and we're not biased about that because we come with very open minds.

Maybe not quite that open,

on the evidence of the very first meeting of his committee.

The meeting began and Lord Longford welcomed us to his "crusade".

Well, my eyebrows rose at this.

So far as what he called his anti-pornography "crusade",

what do you think it was that drove him?

Well, I think he did genuinely believe

that people could be corrupted by pornography.

But possibly the way he went about it was slightly counter-productive.

Longford and his committee decide to fly to investigate in Denmark,

where the government had removed all legal restraints on pornography

and Copenhagen had become the sex capital of the world.

We come with a fairly open mind

and we are determined to talk to everybody who can help us

either through official life or also, of course, the pornographers.

We want to meet everyone we can in the two days.

Don't you see yourself subject

to accusations of voyeurism on your part?

You mean we're going on a sort of free dirty weekend

in the middle of the week?

Yes, indeed. I see the accusation -

you've just made it - but it isn't justified.

I'm not anticipating coming back depraved and corrupted.

When we arrived in Copenhagen we were greeted by an official

from the British Embassy who, over dinner, gave us a briefing

on the hottest sex spots in the capital and gave us a run down of

what we could see, and Lord Longford then distributed £10 to each of us.

The British Embassy official said,

"Oh, I think you can get live intercourse for a fiver."

Lord Longford said to him,

"You seem to be remarkably well informed!"

The man from the Embassy replied, "We try to be of service, sir."

'One of the places the Longford mission visited was

'the well-equipped film studio where Jens Theander conducts his

'million-pounds-a-year hardcore film and magazine business.'

Do we know how we get in?

You've now made the easy pornography,

pornography just showing couples making intercourses

and now we are in the position that

we would like to put a little more expression,

a little more feeling, into the magazines, into the films

to make it better, to make it more professional.

Longford and his team decide to go and see for themselves

Copenhagen's live sex shows.

Can we go in?

There was a stout businessman seated in the row in front of us

who's brought up onto the stage and his trousers were lowered

and the artist, the performing artist...

Anyway, he became part of the show.

We didn't quite know where to... We spent most of our time looking at our knees

and looking nervously at Lord Longford who was sitting there

with his eyes out on stalks, amazed.

Then this girl who had been involving the audience

came toward us and she literally arrived at the side of Lord Longford.

She was naked, but she was holding a whip...

..and with this whip she began to encircle Lord Longford's bald pate.

And clearly she was about to land in his lap.

He tried to smile agreeably at her

but as she got as close as she was going to get,

he got up, made his excuses and left.

If you ask me for my most rude impression so far,

I'm afraid it has been the visit to these two ghastly shows,

the live shows.

They are far worse even than I expected.

I thought I was going to be able to take it quite easily

but this was so utterly evil that, frankly, I'm very glad

I went out on each occasion after a short while.

I cannot believe for a moment the British public would ever tolerate

the sort of thing I saw last night, or indeed the Danish arrangements.

When the Longford report was published, it recommended

much stricter laws on pornography.

The government ignored it.

But Lord Longford was never to shed his nickname.

I don't think he was really keen to be Lord Porn -

I think he was much more serious than that.

And it was rather sad for me

that people decided to think that he was a buffoon,

which he absolutely wasn't.

He was really a remarkable person.

When I go in for these things I don't calculate very much.

I go bald-headed,

which I think is quite an appropriate phrase in my connection,

for what seems to be right and leave it to chance or God.

Our third character was rather different.

Sir Jimmy Goldsmith was the decade's most buccaneering businessman,

whose role models were the past captains of British industry.

All these men who founded these companies were tough,

ruthless, ambitious and not necessarily likable men,

but they founded the great companies.

And they were not founded by committees,

by collectivism or anything else.

They were founded by these individuals, likable or not.

Goldsmith's father, Frank, came from a German-Jewish family.

He'd been a Tory MP until the First World War.

Later he married a French woman and they lived in France, where their son Jimmy grew up.

He was sent to school at Eton, where he distinguished himself as a gambler

and after a big win on the horses, he left school early.

Jimmy wasn't English - he was French, you see.

I know he was half-English but he was something different.

And I suppose that in a way is what made him so attractive.

He was different to all the people I knew.

He was much more French - very proud of his French roots,

very proud of his Jewish roots -

but, erm, he wasn't really English, Jimmy, at all.

Goldsmith was only 20 when he first made big headlines.

He'd fallen in love with an 18-year-old Bolivian heiress.

Her father refused to let them marry, so they eloped.

What are you going to do now?

Going straight to bed.

And how do you both feel about all this publicity

-and all this excitement?

-We're both a little tired.

And how do you feel about it, madam?

Rather tired too.

'Bride and groom drink to each other.'

All looked set fair.

Their runaway romance was front-page news around the world.

But within five months, the pregnant Isabel Goldsmith fell gravely ill

with a brain tumour and her husband watched her die.

After the funeral,

Jimmy Goldsmith threw himself into the business of making money.

He was a risk-taker and came close to bankruptcy several times.

Starting in cut-price medicines, he moved into confectionery

and was steadily to build a huge food company.

He had a sharp instinct for when markets would rise and fall

and said his private passion for gambling helped him in business.

'Being a gambler's useful,

'because being a gambler you know that luck goes and comes.'

So when things are doing well, you try to benefit from it

but you also know that they won't continue to do well

so you try and consolidate.

He was a gambler, absolutely, but he hated losing.

When he had lost a lot he used to retire like a wounded lion,

lick his paws.

He hated losing. But you know, he did gamble.

He loved it, he liked all games.

And he loved going to Clermont and playing backgammon,

chemin de fer - poker or whatever it is.

The Clermont Club in Mayfair also housed the ritzy nightclub

called Annabel's, named after the wife of its owner.

But the couple grew apart

and Lady Annabel Birley became Jimmy Goldsmith's mistress in London.

He would live with her during the week but would return

to spend the weekends at his Paris home with his second wife.

IVAN FALLON: Jimmy Goldsmith then decided to marry Annabel

and divorce his first wife -

or second wife, as she was.

Now he has his third wife,

but then he had another very beautiful girlfriend

in New York, who became, effectively, his wife.

So he operated on the basis of three wives -

all of whom knew about each other.

There was no secret about it.

He was a family man.

He'd ideally have liked all of us to live together

and that was part of his tribal instinct.

When you say ALL of you to live together, what - you and the woman

who was his second wife and then his mistress after he'd married you?

Yes, he'd like us all to be...

He would have loved us all to have had holidays together.

Really?

But life doesn't quite work out like that!

It probably would today, but not then.

Were you hurt when he had a mistress after he had married you?

Well, everybody's hurt by things like that.

Of course I was, yes, but I mean

I had done it to his second wife -

I should have expected it, you know, in a way.

It's quite odd to have three households,

one in Paris, one in London, one in New York.

I know it does sound a bit odd, but that's the way it was.

It does sound a bit odd but it did work.

We all get on very well now.

Goldsmith himself joked,

"If you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy."

And his business life was just as complex as his love life.

He built his company into a multinational food empire.

He was the financial Houdini of the take-over business.

Although everybody believed he was sailing close to the wind -

and certainly he shuffled companies

at a rate that no-one could possibly keep contact with them.

I wrote the book and that had great charts

showing one company went that way and one company went that way,

cos he was splitting them between his French interests and Swiss interests

and UK interests, for tax reasons and other reasons.

But there was nothing actually illegal about it.

And so that suddenly gave the impression that he was, somehow, a bad man.

Goldsmith was fiercely protective of his business reputation.

When the BBC's Money Programme

produced a sharply critical investigation into his methods,

Sir James went live on the programme the following week

and launched an explosive counterattack.

All I'm trying to show is that on every fundamental issue last week,

be it on capital investment, on new factories,

be it on dealing in companies,

be it on the fact that we didn't develop new products, you lied.

That's what I'm trying to show,

-and what I intend to prove on this programme.

-Sir James,

almost everybody says you're

an amazingly charming and persuasive man

but that you're also ruthless and a bit of a bully

-in the way in which you deal with things.

-I am...

-Is that right?

I tell you what I am bullying you about, yes.

What I am doing today

is that last week we saw a programme

in which you made the following suggestions about Cavenham -

and you said them specifically.

You said we patched up old factories, that was the Goldsmith style.

-You said that when companies...

-Can I...

-You said it here!

Now what worries me, Mr Stephenson,

is when I see a programme come through

which is nothing but riddled with factual lies -

lies of which you were appraised because you had the facts before -

I wonder whether this is indicative

of a far more malignant and general disease.

Goldsmith had come to believe he was the target of a media conspiracy,

a belief intensified by the epic battle

he had fought against the magazine Private Eye.

From a sleazy part of Soho

Richard Ingrams, Private Eye's editor,

ran the satirical fortnightly from shabby offices

above a sex shop.

I think that Goldsmith personified everything that Private Eye ought to be against.

He was very rich, very ruthless, very right wing.

Private Eye targeted Goldsmith.

It depicted him as an asset stripper,

then as dirty a label as "banker" is today,

and it alleged he did dodgy deals.

It also claimed that Goldsmith had helped Lord Lucan,

his Old Etonian gambling chum,

to disappear after the sensational murder of his nanny.

Goldsmith then went nuclear.

Resuscitating the medieval law of criminal libel,

he issued a flurry of writs against

Richard Ingrams and Private Eye's printers and distributors.

Goldsmith frankly admitted that his aim

was to send Ingrams and other Eye journalists to jail

and close the magazine down.

Goldsmith was deploying the criminal law

against a satirical magazine

that he saw as the centre of a concealed conspiracy

to destroy capitalism.

All the wit, the satire - which is funny -

is no more than the sugar coating

the product, the sheer poison.

Most of the journalists who work within Private Eye...

I've found that Private Eye in fact consists of a club of journalists,

who were not only working in Private Eye, usually anonymously,

but were also working throughout the press.

That's why this nation, for so many years, has been fed pus.

It was quite flattering to me

to think that I was controlling this conspiracy.

We had agents throughout the media.

It was true we had people throughout the media who were sending us stories -

it was perfectly true -

but this idea that we were some kind of political conspiracy was...

lunatic.

Goldsmith versus Private Eye became the most notorious libel case in modern times.

It was to involve 20 different judges,

witnesses who went missing,

and many bizarre twists and turns.

It became a field day for the lawyers.

And mounting legal costs threatened Private Eye with closure.

Large sums have been quoted

but there are 90 writs in this case

and that could obviously lead to large amounts.

I'm fortunate that I'm really rather rich.

And I can take them on and they can't harm me any more,

and therefore as far as I'm concerned

I'm in a position to take them on and expose them.

Lady Annabel went with Goldsmith on the first day

he was due to give evidence.

I went to court with him every day.

There was a famous photograph that appeared.

I was wearing a perfectly respectable dress,

but it was sort of...

wrap-over, whatever it is,

and the wind was quite strong and it blew it open,

and there was a great speculation

as to whether I was wearing any pants or not,

and of course I was actually.

I do remember going into that court room

and seeing all these rather hostile people

and cringing in my seat

thinking, "This is so awful, I'm not going to like this,"

and how magnetic Jimmy was in the box, having to be told,

"Can we have a little less theatrics, Mr Goldsmith?"

He spoke very loudly and he waved his arms around

and he jabbed his finger,

rather like Alastair Campbell with Jon Snow.

And our lawyer, a very quiet Irishman,

James Cummins - a lovely man -

he said, "Isn't your aim, Sir James,

"to smash Private Eye?"

And Goldsmith lent across...

"No, I want them to be more truthful."

It was bit like the giant taking on the small man.

This was a small little magazine

and I found all my friends were trying to make money for the Private Eye fund,

-when Jimmy...

-The Goldenballs fund.

The Goldenballs fund.

And it's embarrassing, actually.

Private Eye's well-heeled supporters

organised a fund-raising cricket match.

And there were other social events to help pay the magazine's legal bills.

Goldenballs?

What do you like about Private Eye?

It's made us laugh for years.

Cheques came into Private Eye's offices every day from readers.

All those who donated to the Goldenballs fund

had their name published in the magazine.

The irony of it is, the more Goldsmith sues us,

the more publicity we attract to the magazine

and the more the circulation goes up

so in a way it's counter-productive.

Although he sought to make light of it,

Ingrams didn't relish the prospect of going to prison

for criminal libel.

But did Goldsmith think that the mud from the Private Eye case was sticking to him?

Undoubtedly in England, yes. People have believed it in England.

Fortunately my life is spread in various countries,

partially in France and the United States,

and there they're not taken seriously,

but here the campaign, which spread to other newspapers, was taken seriously.

Eventually Goldsmith decided to sue for peace.

He felt he'd only get fair coverage if he took over a newspaper himself,

but he found his image as someone seeking to crush one organ of the free press

was stymieing his chances of a take over.

He reached a deal whereby Private Eye paid for a full-page newspaper ad,

totally retracting its story

about Goldsmith helping Lord Lucan to disappear.

If the worst had turned out for you and you'd gone to prison,

what was your greatest fear?

My main fear was that of Lord Longford coming to visit me.

Goldsmith later told his wife that the Private Eye libel case

had been the biggest mistake of his life,

as it had poisoned the atmosphere against him

and caused every project he touched in Britain to rot.

She feels he was much misunderstood.

Though I know he's always painted as an ogre in the press,

he had a few bad points, but he was a brilliant man, utterly brilliant.

At his memorial service Margaret Thatcher said - and, God, she was right -

"We will not see his like again."

Because he was larger than life, he was a larger-than-life figure,

and the thing is, it's wonderful to know him, wonderful to have in your life,

but, you know, you need a bit of a rest now and then, I think.

-He could be a bit exhausting.

-Yes. He was exhausting.

Private Eye marked the death of its old foe with this cover.

His wife says it makes her laugh,

though whether the man they called Sir Jams

would have seen the joke is another matter.

The last of our iconic figures is Sir Robert Mark,

who became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1972.

Faced with evidence of widespread corruption,

Mark pledged to purge all bent detectives from the force.

With my colleagues, I have set out to make virtue fashionable.

A bent detective not only is himself a wrongdoer...

..not only does he do

irreparable harm to a body of men

who little deserve to be discredited in that way,

but he harms the whole fabric of public confidence

and the confidence of the courts in the police.

So far as I'm concerned, he will always be a prime target,

and he can look to no mercy at all from me.

Mark had been chief constable of Leicester

when he was first brought into the Met as assistant commissioner.

He said later he was made to feel as welcome as a leper

at a colonial governor's garden party.

He found Scotland Yard a secretive, Masonic place,

with its own inbred culture.

The plain-clothes detectives of the CID

looked down on the uniformed branch, and it was in the CID

that corruption had been allowed to flourish.

In a sting operation, The Times had exposed detectives

faking evidence, taking bribes and blackmailing criminals.

And just as Mark took the top job,

The People produced a damaging splash story.

It said the head of the Flying Squad, Ken Drury,

had shared a Mediterranean holiday

with the Soho porn baron James Humphreys.

Humphreys had picked up the tab.

Ken Drury stood down from his job protesting his innocence,

and claiming he'd actually been in the Mediterranean

looking for Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber.

It's no good going to the vicar's tea party

and trying to gain information

about the activities of organised teams of robbers.

If these teams commit highly organised crime,

they will spend certainly a lot of their proceeds

in places like the West End or go to Spain,

getting rid of their ill-gotten gains.

After lengthy negotiations, Sir Robert Mark, in 1975,

agreed to give access for TV cameras to film for the very first time

inside the normally closed secret world of the Met.

He said I could make a film here at Scotland Yard

and track the progress of his efforts

to stamp out corruption at all levels in the CID.

Mark, who was to become known as the Lone Ranger from Leicester,

had begun his campaign with a meeting of his top detectives.

He told them bluntly that he wanted a CID that caught more criminals

than it employed.

There wasn't even a discussion. This was an entirely one-sided meeting.

-It was said that you actually walked out.

-Indeed.

But this was simply because I told them exactly what I wanted them to hear...

..and then left them.

I think he overstated the case, if I might say so,

having been a nailing point as to where he was

because I was a career CID officer

of 22 years in the Metropolitan Police.

John Stevens was to rise through the ranks

and eventually himself become head of the Met.

When Sir Robert said, "Basically, all the CID are corrupt,"

that was, in my view, wrong, because I was not corrupt

and I knew a lot of my colleagues and friends weren't.

But I think he said that in order to get some effect in terms of what he was doing.

There's no doubt that there was corruption at the highest levels

and through some of the structures in the Yard.

What did you think the position was and what did you propose to do?

Well, I thought the position was that the misdeeds of the few,

and their apparent immunity,

was harming both the reputation of the bulk of the CID

and of the force as a whole,

and that I was prepared to do

anything that was necessary to correct that.

It's been said to me that you threatened to put all the CID officers back into uniform

if it was necessary to correct that.

Well, I don't regard that as a threat.

I looked upon it simply as a managerial statement of fact,

which I would have been perfectly prepared to implement.

Mark's prime target for reform was the Flying Squad,

which he saw as a force within a force,

ever keen to promote its image as the Yard's heavy mob.

The Flying Squad are a fine body of men.

They're dedicated, and to do their job,

they've got to permanently associate

with people of the criminal fraternity.

Robert Mark saw it rather differently.

I said to the detectives, "Of course you must mix with criminals.

"But the criterion you must adopt is that you must mix with them

"for the public good, not for your own personal profit."

We filmed with the team from the Flying Squad,

keen to be seen as The Sweeney and proud of their underworld contacts.

Most Flying Squad officers have their own informants.

This is the way we work - strictly through informants.

To me, there's no other way to work.

The team was led by a detective inspector.

How do you think the criminals regard the Flying Squad?

I think with a fair amount of awe.

-How rough is it?

-It can be a bit rough sometimes.

Mind you, I've got two wrestlers on my team. That can't be a bad thing.

They're good, strong boys.

They're my bodyguards personally, you see.

His "good strong boys"

were Detective Sergeants Mick Howell and Fred Cutts.

They were proud of their easy access to the sleazier parts of Soho

in search of information.

INDISTINCT

It's very quiet.

Mind if I have a look around?

Howell and Cutts also had entree to secret Chinese gambling dens.

Although Robert Mark had brought in reforms designed to cut back

on the Flying Squad's close contacts with the underworld,

the two detectives routinely drank in pubs used by what they called

"the villains" as their way of finding out what was going on.

I think the policeman and the villain get on very well.

We've got something in common which is unique. We think like each other.

He's looking for ways that he can't be arrested,

and we're looking for ways where we can arrest him.

At the end of a hard night's drinking for business,

the team relaxed, but Robert Mark feared that the Flying Squad

was always in danger of swallowing its own mythology

and behaving as if it were a law unto itself.

What do you say to those detectives who've said to me

that you are more concerned with catching bent detectives

than you are with catching criminals?

Well, I should say they're right!

And I see nothing improper about that.

I tried to explain to you that I believe that the effectiveness

of the Criminal Investigation Department does not depend

upon mystique or hocus-pocus or any of the nonsense that you've read

in these fictional autobiographies over the last decade or two.

It depends on...

Their effectiveness depends, basically, on professional skill

and training, and then on integrity.

Corruption will always be there. It's endemic.

It's a matter of how you control it, which is the important part of it,

and if you allow it to grow, then you're in big trouble.

Sir Robert Mark was all about ensuring that it was kept to

the limitations that it was, because it's around.

The sums of money that are around and the temptations are always there.

But because the CID were always dealing with what

I would call very convincing corrupters,

those people who will make it their business to actually try and corrupt

police officers and bring them in close and, if you like, groom them,

and unless you're actually aware of that, unless you've got a structure

that deals with that, and also you've got a very strong anti-corruption branch

to deal with that, which is what Sir Robert Mark introduced,

and was one of the first do that, and if you don't do that,

you'll have problems.

Mark's new anti-corruption branch called A10

ended the CID's traditional system.

PHONE RINGS

A10 branch.

The CID alone would no longer investigate corruption charges

against its own officers.

A10 was run by the uniform branch,

although most of its staff were detectives

who would listen to complaints against police from the public.

'And consequently, they arrested him and charged him with

'threatening behaviour, two assaults and criminal damage.

'And the officers that have arrested him are six foot

'and as wide as an 'ouse, and it's ridiculous.

'My brother's only five foot two and weighs about ten stone.'

In the Flying Squad, A10 was not popular.

They called it the Gestapo,

and claimed they had to look over both shoulders at the same time -

one for the criminals, the other for A10.

Their views were shared by the man who'd been running the CID

until Mark took over.

I'm afraid I'm left with the impression that the whole of

the CID have been blasted the tar brush across their face.

Why should police officers have to think that there's

a sort of spy network watching them

all the time behind their backs,

-checking up on them?

-They are honest, straightforward men,

and when they are working these long hours and facing

dangerous criminals, they expect some support from their senior officers.

They don't expect to have pins stuck in their backside.

It had to be done.

If you actually had the CID investigating themselves,

I don't think you'd ever get to the bottom of what was going on

in terms of corruption, particularly the Dirty Squad

as they were referred to, and some of the senior officers involved in that. It had to be done.

The Dirty Squad was the Yard's nickname

for the Obscene Publications Squad.

Their job was to rid Soho of hard-core pornography,

and they were umbilically linked to the Flying Squad.

The biggest single inquiry undertaken by A10

was into powerful allegations

against senior Porn and Flying Squad officers,

that they were effectively running their own protection rackets.

Sir Robert Mark gave me a fulsome endorsement of the work of A10.

I should think it's probably the most effective organisation

for investigating internal wrongdoing

created by any public service in this country.

Inside A10, its investigation into the links between Scotland Yard

and the porn industry was kept tightly secure.

It was alleged that the top CID men were in the pockets

of the porn barons of Soho.

Ironically, Bill Moody, the head of the Dirty Squad,

had himself been hand-picked to work as a A10 investigator.

But when the porn baron James Humphreys was arrested,

he claimed that Moody was one of 40 Dirty and Flying Squad men in his pay.

Humphreys' wife Rusty supported his story.

He did pay thousands of pounds out to these people.

I've been there on occasions where it has been paid out, in this flat.

My children can tell you it's been like

Union Station at Christmas time, people getting off and on trains.

What my husband calls bung day.

My husband didn't corrupt the police, they corrupted him.

They come to you for the money, you don't go to them.

Humphreys himself claimed that Bill Moody

and other senior CID officers

even organised their own sales of pornography.

He said that materials they'd seized in raids

would be loaded into an unmarked car and driven to a Soho car park.

Humphreys would arrive there in his Jaguar,

where he'd pay the detectives half the market price for the porn.

"I had a flying start, you might say," joked Humphreys.

When Robert Mark and his top team received

the results of A10's lengthy investigation into Humphreys' allegations,

the commissioner took dramatic action.

In a dawn raid, Bill Moody was arrested.

He'd been head of the Dirty Squad and worked for A10.

Also arrested was Ken Drury, the Flying Squad chief

who'd been on the sunshine holiday with Humphreys.

And the biggest fish of all was Commander Wally Virgo,

who was in overall charge of both the Porn and Flying Squads.

Humphreys claimed he paid Virgo £2,000 in cash every month.

Throughout the morning,

cars brought the men to Cannon Row Police Station

in the shadow of the old Scotland Yard building

where many of them once worked.

Some, like Kenneth Drury, former commander and head of the Flying Squad,

hid under blankets on the back seat.

So, too, did Alfred Moody, formerly Detective Chief Superintendent

and head of the Obscene Publications Squad.

Wallace Virgo, retired commander of the Yard's central office,

was accompanied by his wife.

All three top CID officers received lengthy prison terms for corruption.

They were among the 600 police officers

who left Scotland Yard prematurely during Robert Mark's five years at the top.

Many of them had been under investigation,

and most were what Mark described as shotgun resignations.

Sir Robert Mark must have gone through hell,

because he went through some very difficult situations in terms of the top team.

But as time went on and as I watched his portrayal of policing,

and he came behind and supported the CID after a period of time,

because he had to, because he knew how effective

and how important it was to policing London, that I got to respect him.

Don't forget, this situation lasted from 1879 until 1972,

and I was like a surgeon who had to cut out a major cancer

without killing the patient.

In other words, I'd got to do great execution amongst the CID,

whilst at the same time maintaining their morale

and, to some extent, maintaining public belief in them.

THEY SING DRUNKENLY

Of his reformed Flying Squad, Mark says,

"I don't know what they do to the enemy,

"but by God, they frighten me."

Sir Robert Mark and the three other characters in this film

are now dead.

But all four of them lived their lives in primary colours,

compared to most of today's public figures, who are pastel-shaded.

MUSIC: "Heroes" by David Bowie

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd