Old Labour Values

Government papers, released today after the thirty years necessary to make the knowledge safe, reveal that Tony Benn's energy ministry showed rather less than the required enthusiasm for the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977. Good for them. The ministry noted that floodlighting buildings "could be psychologically extremely damaging to public acceptance of the need to save energy", an attitude which will come as a considerable surprise to those who know only New Labour's engaging mix of gnat-straining and camel ingestion. The chairman of the London Celebration Committee blamed "the anti-monarchist in DoE", presumably a reference to the republican Benn. The prime minister, James Callaghan, blamed it on "pernickety bureaucracy", the horrors of persnickety, thusly and so forth being then far in the future.

Callaghan's government also braved the wrath of Edward Heath's dear old pal, Idi Amin, who by that time was well into his barking phase and promised to "personally attend the [Commonwealth] meeting and also be present at all the functions organized for the celebration of the silver jubilee ... accompanied by a delegation of 250 people, including dancers of the Heart Beat of Africa". Since no arms sales were at stake, he was rebuffed. He threatened to invade the United Kingdom, but in those unenlightened times this was not considered sufficient provocation to start a war, even though Uganda probably had nearly as many weapons of mass destruction in 1977 as Saddam Hussein did in 2003. What progress we have made.