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Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy review – Armageddon meets Ealing comedy

Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened Harold Macmillan and a young Thatcher fire up this genially narrated history of the early 1960s

In 1962, Whitehall’s war planners spotted a fatal flaw in their defensive preparations against a surprise nuclear attack. What if the prime minister happened to be on the road when the four-minute warning came? The solution, decided the men from the ministry, was to issue the PM’s driver with a radio link, borrowed from the technology that the AA used to communicate with their mechanics on motorbikes. On receiving the alert, the driver would divert to the nearest public call box, whereupon the PM would phone Whitehall, pass on the nuclear codes, and escalate Armageddon. But what if neither the PM or his driver had the requisite coins to make a call from a phone box? After some back-and-forthing between various departments, Tim Bligh, the principal private secretary, came up with a ruling: if the PM found himself caught short, he should simply reverse the charges. By which time, you can’t help thinking, the four minutes would have passed, and Downing Street would be a handful of radioactive dust.

Peter Hennessy has found this glorious moment of Ealing film comedy daftness buried deep in the national archives. But what makes him such a deft public historian is the way he stitches these patches of rich local colour into a narrative with the widest possible reach. Having dealt with the immediate postwar period in two of his previous books, Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (1992) and Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties (2006), here he picks up his story in 1960, the moment Britain becomes modern. Don’t, though, expect a slack meander through the entire decade, stopping off at the usual staging posts: Profumo, the Pill, Beeching, Mary Quant, blah blah blah. What we have instead is a forensic look at the years from 1960 to 64, what one might call "the low 60s", when everyone aged over 35 still wore a hat out of doors and fanned themselves theatrically with a copy of the Daily Herald if the thermometer looked as if it would go over 75F (24C).

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