Dominic Sandbrook
WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT
Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia
By Francis Wheen (Fourth Estate 388pp £18.99)

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In the dying days of 1973, two days after Christmas, a long-haired, sixteen-year-old Francis Wheen wrote a note advising his parents that he had run off to join the alternative society and wouldn't be back for tea. Leaving the note on the kitchen table, he caught a train from suburban Kent to London, and an hour or so later, rucksack and guitar in hand, showed up at the 'BIT Alternative Help and Information Centre', a kind of hippy drop-in centre on Westbourne Park Road. 'Hi,' he said. 'I've dropped out.' Slumped on a threadbare sofa, a 'furry freak' peered at him through a haze of hair. 'Drop back in, man,' he muttered. 'You're too late. It's over.'

It was indeed: for the last days of 1973 have a good claim to be some of the darkest in our modern history, both figuratively and literally. After the miners announced an overtime ban in pursuit of a massive, inflationary wage claim, Edward Heath's government had announced the fifth State of Emergency in less than four years. Street lighting had been switched off, electric heating was banned in factories and offices, and since floodlit football matches had been cancelled, cold, shivering Britons could not even divert themselves by watching Bill Shankly's Liverpool or Don Revie's Leeds United. From New Year's Day, the government announced, the entire country would be on a three-day week.

It is easy now to laugh at the events of the early 1970s, to see them as a lovably brown-and-beige backdrop for hit TV series like the BBC's Life on Mars, or even to see them as the last gasp of authentic politics before Thatcherism turned us all into gluttonous, apathetic consumer junkies. But what this deliciously enjoyable book reminds us is that in many ways they were genuinely, undeniably awful. This was an age, Wheen reminds us, in which The Spectator could run the cover shout, 'A military coup in Britain? See Patrick Cosgrave's Commentary', and yet give it less prominence than Gyles Brandreth's column on sport, because coup predictions were so common as to have become old hat. It was also an age in which even Whitehall mandarins like the urbane Ronald McIntosh, head of the National Economic Development Council (itself an eminently Seventies-sounding body, even though it had been set up years earlier), genuinely thought that 'a right-wing authoritarian government' might be around the corner.

And perhaps it was no wonder that just a couple of weeks later the head of the Home Civil Service, Sir William Armstrong, astonished participants at a country-house seminar by announcing that the 'Communists were infiltrating everything', and might even be in the room at that very moment. Five days later, during a meeting with Heath's private secretary, Armstrong stripped off his clothes, lay full-length on the floor and began babbling wildly about the need to mobilise the army to stop the collapse of democracy. The really revealing thing, though, was that when the Governor of the Bank of England walked in on them, he seemed to think nothing of it.

Wheen loves these kinds of stories; he has a wonderful eye for the amusing and the absurd, and he has plenty of fun with the madness of British high politics during the years of stagflation - above all, the claustrophobic, demented court of Harold Wilson between 1974 and 1976, perennially absorbed by Marcia Williams's tantrums about lunch arrangements. Wilson had only been in office for a day when she threw her first fit about the food. 'Already upset because we were eating whitebait,' recorded his policy chief Bernard Donoughue. 'She says she hates them looking at her from the plate ... She stalked out. HW followed, his meal unfinished. Gloom.'

Some of the best stuff, though, comes when Wheen ventures outside our fog-bound, strike-torn island into the mad worlds of Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin and the incomparably bizarre Richard Nixon. As a Nixon aficionado myself, I think Wheen is a bit harsh on the great man, although, to be fair, the White House tapes give him plenty of ammunition. 'Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general - these are the enemies of strong societies,' Nixon tells his chief of staff Bob Haldeman at one point. 'You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?'

Wheen's theme is the 'beguiling charm' of paranoia (although, quite rightly, he never lets it get in the way of yet another good story), which he sees as having contaminated our political culture since the 1970s, reaching a decadent high point in the conspiracy theories of demagogues like Michael Moore. In some ways, though, I wonder if he stretches the point a bit. It is true that the 1970s were politically and economically dreadful, but the great majority of Britons actually told pollsters that they were happy and contented with life; for most, the everyday experience was rather more Terry and June than Survivors, a world of cheap package holidays, prawn cocktails and Elton John. And while many, including Wilson and Nixon, succumbed to paranoia, millions more kept their feet on the ground - including Ted Heath, who for all his adolescent grumpiness never told journalists that he might want them to 'kick a blind man' on the Charing Cross Road for secret information, as poor, demented Wilson did.

What makes this book such an outrageously funny, entertaining read is the stream of anecdotes, from the Oz obscenity trial judge asking, 'For the benefit of those who did not have a classical education, what do you mean by this word "cunnilinctus"?', to the mercenary coup plotters who fly into the Seychelles posing as rugby-playing members of the fictitious Ancient Order of Froth Blowers, their weapons hidden in their luggage under piles of toys 'for disabled children'. Not even the most outrageous novelist could make this kind of stuff up, but perhaps only a writer of Francis Wheen's skill and touch could turn it into a book as glorious, memorable and laugh-out-loud hilarious as this.

Dominic Sandbrook's latest book, 'A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties', is published by Little Brown. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Rothermere Institute, University of Oxford.