London Diary

Bell Bottom Coups

I was given an introduction to an elderly Indian gentleman in London, once a rising star of the Conservative Party. He very kindly invited me to his club for tea. Waiting for him, I was reading a notice on the club’s notice board about Colonel David Stirling, the swashbuckling founder of the SAS, Britain’s elite commando regiment. Just then my host arrived. To break the ice I asked if he’d known David Stirling. “I did, indeed,” he replied. “He was a remarkable man, and a true patriot.” He then proceeded to tell me a startling story:

“In the mid-1970s, Britain was on the verge of collapse. The trade unions had paralysed the country. The Labour government was rotten. The KBG was believed to have infiltrated the political system at the highest levels. We were extremely worried about what would happen to the country. David Stirling then set up a secret group called GB75, which planned to remove Harold Wilson’s government and replace it with a nationalist government, to be headed, hopefully, by Lord Mountbatten. Stirling had the backing of important people in the military, civil service, business and politics. In fact, I myself was invited to be part of GB75, and I thought it made a lot of sense at the time. But I finally decided against it.”

What? A coup d’etat in Britain in the 1970s? Was this for real? But then our conversation turned to other, less dramatic, things. I came back and did some research on “GB75” and, sure enough, it was real. Some say it was a full-scale coup plot, with plans to imprison the cabinet on board the QE2, and assassinate a certain left-wing Labour Party leader. Others claim it was just a private security force to act as a deterrent in case of a leftist strike. We’ll never know for sure. Harold Wilson suddenly resigned and the situation was defused. But GB75 ultimately did succeed, I suppose: not long after, Margaret Thatcher did remove the Labour government—legitimately, of course—but, interestingly, the person who masterminded her rise to power was Airey Neave, a shadowy Conservative politician who is alleged to have been closely connected with GB75. He was Mrs Thatcher’s political mentor. She then went on, in her inimitably dictatorial style, to achieve all of GB75’s larger objectives over the next 15 years.

As Clausewitz might have said, “Democracy is sometimes the pursuance of fascism by other means.”

The Proverbial Palm

London’s cabbies are amazing for their knowledge of the city. It apparently takes three years of studying the city’s 25,000-plus roads on a scooter before they can acquire what’s called “The Knowledge” (note the capital letters), without which they can’t get their licence. But what does that mean in today’s age of high-tech GPS systems? A London newspaper organised a race between three drivers equipped with the latest GPS systems and three seasoned London cabbies without GPS. Sure enough, the cabbies without the GPS came first, second and third. (The GPS systems may have known all the roads, but they couldn’t judge, for example, which routes would have the clearest traffic patterns at that hour.)

Telescoped Reality

H.R.F. Keating wrote that wonderful series of detective thrillers about Inspector Ghote, set in Mumbai. And the remarkable thing is that he did it without ever having set foot in the city. When asked later how he captured the atmospherics of Mumbai so accurately, he simply said he’d been guided by a friend who had once worked there, named Wally Olins.

I met Wally Olins in London, where he now runs a successful brand consultancy, and I asked him what exactly his working relationship with Keating had been. How he did manage to convey the textures and nuances of life in Mumbai to somebody who’d never been there? “Oh, that was a long time ago,” Olins said. “Keating called me and said he was writing a detective novel set in Mumbai, and could he talk to me about it? So we met once or twice, and I tried to paint for him a picture of life in Mumbai, as accurately as I could. The sights and sounds of the city. How people talk, and behave, and so on. I told him about some interesting characters I’d known. I’m a reasonably good mimic, so maybe that helped. And then he went off and wrote those marvelous books. The credit for capturing the spirit of Mumbai goes entirely to him. I don’t think I contributed very much.” So the real mystery—about how exactly H.R.F. Keating wrote about Mumbai without ever having been there—still remains quite unsolved.

The Rupee Sterling

Glassy Junction is one of London’s most singular pubs (motto: “World Famous Punjabi Pub. Established since 1994”). Its chief claim to fame is that it’s the first pub in Britain to accept payment in rupees. Presumably its business model uniquely combines hearty hospitality with some element of hawala?