1 JANUARY 1977, Page 4

Portrait of the Year

Perhaps the day in 1976 that historians of England will remember was 10 March, when for the first time the pound sterling fell below two dollars. For the rest of the year we stopped worrying about what might be the unthinkable as the pound gracefully descended though £1.90, £1.80, £1.70, £1.60. Nobody seemed to mind much where it might end, except possibly the Government. Even before June, when Mr Healey formally applied for a loan, a succession of frantic efforts were made to prop up Great Britain's financial position, culminating in December with the 'mini-budget' after an interminable negotiation with the I M F.

One surprise which few had foreseen was the resignation in March of Mr Harold Wilson. After a hard-fought election he was succeeded as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister by Mr James Callaghan. Wilson re-emerged as Sir Harold Wilson KG, surrounded by a motley collection of 'entrepreneurs' variously dignified, in a resignation honours list which caused much premature speculation and in the event gave much delight. The Liberals as well lost a leader: Mr Jeremy Thorpe was hounded out by the jackals of Fleet Street—or was unlucky over a letter to his friend Mr Norman Scott, according to taste—and at last resigned, to be succeeded, after a notably undignified contest, by Mr David Steel. Within the Tory Party there was a brief if' tepid rapprochement between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Heath. That was until the Government's devolution Bill finally oozed upon the political scene, a result of a bad attack of nerves about nationalist encroachments in Scotland, and of the defection of two MPs to the 'Scottish Labour Party.' The while, Solzhenitsyn arrived in England to proclaim the collapse of the West. Lord George-Brown was memorably overcome by this announcement and fell over in the street.

Abroad, it was a year of elections. From his victory in the Pennsylvania primary in May it looked horribly as though Mr Jimmy Carter would win the American presidential election against the gloomy incumbent Mr Gerald Ford. And so he did, though not without a number of bet ises on the way, such as telling an interviewer that he had committed adultery in his heart many times. More dramatically, the social democrats were thrown out of power in Sweden after forty years in power. Elections in Italy, Germany and Japan brought no comparable upheaval, but everywhere times were unsettling. Italian and Japanese politics were both tossed in the wake of various bribery scandals, the biggest of which—involving Lockheed—brought disgrace upon Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

Southern Africa dominated the news, usually in a horrible way. There was a bitter 'civil' war in Angola. In fact most of the fighting was between Cubans, who defeated South African forces, and a motley collection of mercenaries to establish a Marxist state for MPLA. A number of mercenaries, some British, were shot after a form of trial. South Africa had trouble even nearer home a little later when black rioting broke out, beginning at the township of Soweto and spreading widely. It was put down with much loss of life. Further north in Africa the Israelis provided the coup de main of the year when an airborne commando rescued an aeroplane-load of hijacked hostages at Entebbe in Uganda.

Various people contributed more than their share to the merriment of the nation : Princess Margaret's marriage to Lord Snowdon broke up in melodramatic circircumstances ; two members of the Russell family argued in amazingly squalid detail over questions of paternity in front of a House of Lords committee to establish which was the rightful Lord Am pthi ; John Stonehouse underwent a long trial for

fraud before departing Parliament for a jail sentence; Sir James Goldsmith—for so he was after the Wilson resignation honours —spent the whole year waging one of the lengthiest legal battles ever seen in the High Court to punish Private Eye.

China nearly provided the most dramatic news of all: the death of Chou En-Lai was followed later in the year by that of Mao Tse-tung. The succession resolved itself fairly peacefully although it involved a virulent campaign against Mao's widow and her allies. China also suffered a series of earthquakes and continued to explode nuclear devices. Another great crime against the environment occurred in northern Italy, where an explosion at a chemical plant left a large area around Saves° poisoned.

The IRA continued its murderous campaign in Northern Ireland but the emergence of a widely-supported peace campaign showed that the people of Ulster were tiring of the killing. The British Ambassador to Dublin, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was assassinated. Later in the year the President of the Irish Republic, Mr O'Daly, resigned in protest at the description of him as a 'thundering disgrace' by a cabinet minister. He was succeeded by Mr Patrick Hillery, who had previously worked for the EEC. A notable departure from English political life was Mr Roy Jenkins who left for the Presidency of the EEC Commission and a well-earned salary (free of tax) of more than £50,000. The EEC gave some aid—though not much—to the British in their attempt to protect their fisheries.

The FT share index, which had fallen below 400 at the news of Wilson's resign

ation, dropped further through 300, but recovered towards the end of the year. The reputation of British business received two hard slaps with reports on Slater Walker and on Lonrho. Mr Angus Ogilvy felt obliged to resign from Lonrho as a matter of honour. His namesake, John Ogilvie, a sixteenth-century Scotch Jesuit, was canonised in Rome. The Pope's battle with the recalcitrant conservative prelate Monsignor Lefebvre brought the Roman Catholic Church close to schism.

England enjoyed a freakish year's weather. July and August saw an extreme heatwave, which caused a severe drought..

In the autumn the weather broke, and prolonged rain was followed by a hard winter: snow lay in London a week before

Christmas. The Observer was bought by an American oil millionaire. There were

several air disasters and a train crash in Kenya. Mr Peter Hain, a former young Liberal, was tried and acquitted on charges of robbery. William Joyce, the wartime traitor `Lord Haw-Haw,' was reburied in his native Ireland.

Dr Kissinger's final act of prestidigitation before leaving the State Department was to arrange a great conference to settle the Rhodesian problem, but after many weeks inger had been unable to halt the terrible civil war in the Lebanon, which at last burnt itself out after an appalling loss of life and the devastation of Beirut. A group of Arabs bought the Dorchester Hotel in London shortly after the President of Israel had stayed there.

Deaths during 1976 included L. S. Lowry. the painter, Lord Montgomery, Geza Anda, Adolph Zukor aged 103, Paul Gallic°, Lord Thomson of Fleet, Andre Malraux, Rosalind Russell and Benjamin Britten, who had been made a Life Peer in the summer. Two of the richest men in the world died : Paul Getty and Howard Hughes. In Olympic year, England suffered a succession of sporting humiliations. The West Indian cricketers easily won the Test series. The England football XI was almost certainly ejected from the World Cup.

French horses won four out of five classic races, including an impressive win by Empery in the Derby. Southampton won the FA Cup and Middlesex won the County Championship. Muhammad Ali narrowly defeated Norton, and, after a series of tos-and-fros, announced his retirement with the year's most chilling threat : he planned to become a black Dr Kissinger.