She described how an inquisition consisting of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave and two party officials ordered her into a room.
‘Then they started on me. How long had I been working for Special Branch? Where had I planted the bombs and the drugs? Why did I miss the coach?
‘At first I was very flippant. I would say things like, “Let’s see where did I put the bombs? Was it in the loo? Was it under my bed?”’
After an hour, she tried to leave. They pushed her back into a chair. ‘Don’t you dare,’ cried a party official. ‘You’re not leaving until we’ve found out what we want to know.’
He was particularly angry that she had drunk tea with the ambulance crews. ‘Didn’t I realize that the police planted those bombs and would have been delighted to find a WRP member on the spot.’
So it went on, all day. They searched her luggage. They examined her address book and stripped down her transistor radio. They imagined fantastical links between her brother and the CIA. They treated as highly suspicious the fact that her father’s drinks company bought cork from Portugal – then under the same right-wing dictatorship whose oranges so repelled my mother. ‘Ahaa,’ they said in a knowing way.
‘Even if you discover I am what you think I am, what are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Put me up against a wall and shoot me?’
Gorst said she was ‘quite hysterical by this time’ and told her interrogators, ‘You’re all mad, let me go.’
They did in the end, and she went to the Observer. The WRP said it had not held her against her will, sued for libel and lost. In answers to questions from the judge, the jury said that although it did not necessarily believe every word of Irene Gorst’s testimony it did believe the main thrust of it. What mistakes the jury suspected did not alter its decision to find against the WRP because they did not ‘materially injure’ the accusations against the party.
The Observer may not have got every last detail right, but I think it is reasonable to conclude that Gorst was accurately describing a sect in the grip of raging paranoia.
Fear has its uses. Political cults create their own reality as effectively as the Scientologists or the Exclusive Brethren. Their leaders cannot allow members to take at face value evidence that contradicts their teachings. It has to be the result of a capitalist plot or a Jewish conspiracy or the machinations of Freemasons or a disinformation campaign by the security services. To maintain control the cult must blacken the world beyond its walls. Families are the most credible source of dissonant information. Parents, husbands, wives, lovers and children are the people whose cries of ‘Get a grip!’ or ‘Don’t be daft’ are most likely to hit home. Nazi Germany, communist Russia, Maoist China and Baathist Iraq all worked to weaken family influence. So too did those tiny mirrors in Britain and America, those fragments of totalitarianism, which winked and sparkled as they reflected the dream of Utopia.
Right-wing militia groups in the United States encouraged their members to abandon their homes for ‘retreats’ in the wilderness. The far-left cults matched their determination to hide their members from the malign influences of unreliable relatives. Corin Redgrave’s first wife, Deirdre, described how Healy reacted when she refused to join the party:
I was suddenly commanded into Healy’s presence. Two rather grim looking henchmen took me by the arms, albeit gently. He looked at me with a steady, even gaze and demanded, ‘Why don’t you join the party? Why won’t you support your husband?’
I told Healy quite clearly that I had two young children to bring up – and I didn’t want them to grow up disturbed. I wanted them to be normal kids. If you are a member of the WRP – a real dedicated member, that is – you would seldom see your children. You are travelling everywhere. Bradford one day. Cardiff the next.
She refused to accept the party line, and the marriage broke up.
In her almost charmingly naïve autobiography, Vanessa Redgrave describes sitting on the bed of her young daughter, Natasha Richardson. ‘Natasha appealed to me to spend more time with her. I tried to explain that our political struggle was for her future, and that of all the children of her generation. She looked at me with a serious, sweet smile. “But I need you now. I won’t need you so much then”.’
Cult leaders know they must exhaust their followers as well as isolate them. The harder the party or the church forces them to work, the less time they have to think for themselves. As important, the harder they work, the greater their investment and the tougher it becomes to accept that the years of labour have been an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Overly rational historians wonder why supporters of causes from Bolshevism through to Islamism don’t give up when they realize that the death and suffering will never bring the workers’ paradise or new Caliphate; why they fight on for decades, only to achieve more death and suffering? They forget the emotional outlay and the lost lives of dead comrades and martyrs. For immense and minute revolutionary movements alike, more suffering is easier to accept than the admission that all the previous suffering was in vain. Macbeth explained messianic politics better than most historians when he said:
I am in blood Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
Trying to find rational explanations for the irrational sects of the far left and far right is like trying to find ‘the root causes’ of Islamism or trying to explain Saddam Hussein by looking at the ‘realism’ of Iraqi foreign policy. It is more profitable to look at persecution fantasies, group loyalty, the strongman’s will to power and the feeble personality’s willingness to obey.
Once the sect has its claws dug in, it takes a tremendous jolt to shake devotees free. In On the Edge, their study of cultish politics, Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth describe how Kate Blakeney, a mother of four, threw herself into organizing meetings and making collections for the WRP. She distributed its leaflets in the streets of Oxford and sold its newspaper at factory gates. The more newspapers she sold the more copies the party sent her to sell. If she couldn’t sell them, the party didn’t mind. She had to pay for them whether she sold them or not. The more money she collected, the more Healy demanded. Blakeney finally allowed him to debit funds direct from her account so he could take what he wanted at will. She borrowed from her friends until she ran out of ones she could tap. Once she had met the party’s demands, she barely had enough left over to feed her children.
Still she kept on working herself into the ground. ‘We were too busy, always busy, and could hope only to catch a few hours’ sleep.’ Still she carried on believing that the party would either triumph and be a beacon to the human race or go down as the first victim of a British fascist dictatorship.
One day Healy asked to meet her in his London flat. She went hoping to convince him to give her and her comrades in Oxford a respite from his demands:
[He] opened the door for me. He had been drinking. Something was all wrong. I pushed by his large body, sat down in the chair and started to make my report. Healy came towards me, was hovering over me. He was not listening to a word I was saying.
He wanted only one thing from me, my sexual submission. For a moment, I just stared at him: fat, ugly, red-faced. Was this the price I was supposed to pay for some respite for my area?
Something snapped in me. I