Abstract
With Kick ‘Em Back, self-published in this, his ninety-first year, we have the third book chronicling the life and times of Joe Haines. Has Joe finally come to the end of his vengeful saga? I wouldn't bet on it. For Joe shares one attribute – or failing – with Theresa May: he never stops fighting back, even though most of his enemies are dead.
For a while it looked as if his greatest foe, Marcia Williams, might outlive him, but she died just as Joe was putting his manuscript to bed. So, as an epilogue, he added his final theory on what dreadful secret Marcia held over Harold Wilson that kept him crushed beneath her thumb for so long. And Joe's theory is… well, actually that there was no secret at all; it was just a colossal bluff on Marcia's part. A Wizard of Oz moment, as disappointing as finding the old man behind a curtain doing it all with smoke and mirrors. Talk about a let-down. Say it isn't so, Joe.
The title of Kick ‘Em Back was a piece of advice given to Joe by his mother, and I'm one of the people he decided to kick. Maybe it's because I gave him a job when demand for his services elsewhere might have been a bit thin on the ground. For me, the most interesting fact in this book is that Joe claims he has seen two ghosts in his lifetime: surprisingly few really, since he has been living in his own haunted house for more than 40 years.
He was born into poverty and his father died when he was two years old. He was raised by an indomitable mother, who scrubbed floors to support him and his sisters. Understandably, this made Joe rather bitter; a quality that has sustained him down the years. Starting with a lowly job in Fleet Street, he rose to the exalted rank of lobby correspondent, where, on his first day, he was reprimanded for wearing Hush Puppies to work!
Eventually he was recruited by Harold Wilson to be his press secretary, and Joe found his first father figure. Unfortunately, he got a wicked stepmother as well: his nemesis, Marcia, who was to thwart the whole of his years with Harold.
Joe could do the press officer's job with one hand tied behind his back, giving him plenty of time to undertake his major task: calculating how to see off dangerous moves by Wilson's enemies that were mostly inside the Labour Party. Everything was fine, except for the malevolent, ever-present Marcia, who constantly frustrated Joe's best-laid plans.
The years passed, Heath beat Wilson in an election and got into No 10 for a bit, but the unions soon saw him off. Wilson returned to power and stumbled on, Marcia behaved in her usually deranged fashion and Joe despaired. Then, to everyone's astonishment, Wilson resigned. So Joe wrote The Politics of Power, a book the Daily Mirror, which I then edited, bought and serialised.
Somewhere, Joe got the idea that I found the book “boring”. Not true. It was an important historical document - which also contained some red-hot gossip. Perhaps Joe's kicking me started because I chose to extract the juicy bits. After publication, he accepted my offer of a job and eventually I appointed him leader writer, a role in which he excelled.
When Maxwell entered the story, Joe allowed himself to be wooed and he became a trusted acolyte. So did I, for a time: Maxwell had astonishing powers to present himself as a peasant boy that anti-semitic Tories slandered as a crook because of his devotion to socialism. Eventually, Maxwell fired me and Joe remained, but I always thought that he dreaded the possibility that he might one day be tarred by some very nasty brush of Maxwell's making. Joe didn't cheat any pensioners, but he was close to the man who did: a devastating position for one who always prided himself on his inside knowledge of what was really going on.
For me, the real tragedy of Joe has been his obsession with Marcia. He was one of the best writers I ever knew: able to move, persuade, and also reduce a reader to helpless laughter. Sadly, the other books he should have written never came about.
I am glad to say there is one consolation for me in Kick ‘Em Back, after Joe's somewhat bitter reassessment of my character. When Heath was unexpectedly defeated in the 1974 general election, he writes that “Harold and I went for a final walk round the polling booths in his Huyton constituency. There were more houses with that day's Mirror front page proclaiming ‘For all YOUR tomorrows vote Labour today’ in their windows than party posters. It was the best slogan the paper – or the party - had ever devised”.
Actually, the front page read: “For all OUR tomorrows vote Labour today.” I know, I wrote the headline and I designed the page.
