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Old King Coal is a bitter old soul: He gloated at Lady T's death



While his ex-wife led gleeful former miners as they burnt an effigy of Baroness Thatcher on the morning of her funeral, Arthur Scargill chose to disrespect her passing rather more succinctly.

When an old trade union colleague relayed the momentous news to him via a text message that read: ‘Thatcher dead,’ the man she defeated in the catastrophic pit strike replied instantly, in capital letters: ‘SCARGILL ALIVE!’

Several days have passed since the former miners’ leader issued this gloating, two-word send-off. But such is his determination to avoid making a more sophisticated comment on his great ideological clash with Lady Thatcher — which has in many ways shaped the face of modern-day Britain — that he has remained in hiding.

On Thursday, however, I finally caught up with the elusive Arthur. Scuttling into a tower block on London’s Euston Road, accompanied as ever by his austere personal assistant Nell Myers (who is not the only woman in his life, as we shall see), he was barely recognisable as the pugnacious picket-line rabble-rouser of the Eighties.

Then, he was as stocky as a Yorkshire bull-terrier, with bushy ginger sideboards and a Bobby Charlton-style comb-over hiding his bald patch. Three decades later, now 75, he is wizened and gaunt, with sagging jowls and a grey fringe of hair circling his monkish pate.

He had been forced to break his cover to attend a union dispute hearing — what else?

As usual these days, however, the man accorded messianic status by miners he led, lemming-like, into that year-long strike, wasn’t fighting for the National Union of Mineworkers. He was fighting tooth and nail against them.

Armed with thick clip-files, and seemingly revelling in the arcane nuances of the debate, he was there to represent a former union official who claims the current NUM president, Scot Nicky Wilson, was unlawfully elected.

Such banal wrangles have become the staple of Scargill’s life ever since his retirement as NUM president 11 years ago.



Allegations: Ex-actress Linda Sheridan has written an explosive memoir which details her alleged eight-year relationship with Arthur Scargill





Beginnings: Arthur Scargill met Linda Sheridan, pictured aged 40, when she was a voluntary campaigner for his Socialist Labour Party in 2001

For the great irony is that his enmity with his one-time comrades is now every bit as entrenched and bitter as was his war with Lady Thatcher. Indeed, though the charge used to disparage the former PM since her death is that she was ‘divisive’, it is Scargill who, in his twilight years, has become the truly divisive figure, tearing apart a band of men whose solidarity, forged at the coalface, once seemed unbreakable.


Battle lines: The NUM won their court battle with former leader Scargill after refusing to pay the £34,000 rent for his City of London flat

To a few, diehard ex-miners in his old South Yorkshire stamping ground he remains a working-class hero; to many more, though — sickened by his recently failed court bid to get the shrunken NUM to pay for his grace-and-favour flat in the Barbican — he is the socialist icon who sold-out and joined the capitalist fat-cats he purportedly decries.

Incidentally, although for the past three years the union hasn’t stumped up the £34,000 rent for this sought-after 25th-floor City of London residence, Scargill still somehow affords to live there (while also maintaining his sprawling country house near Barnsley, bought during the strike with a union loan).

But the row over his Barbican flat is only one of many disputed issues to have come to light after the current NUM leadership investigated the terms of a parting deal, which Scargill drew up during his last days as president, to feather his retirement nest in addition to his £70,000-plus pension.

Under the terms of this arrangement, which ran for almost ten years (from July 2002, when his tenure ended, to December 2011) union trustees continued to pay him half his salary — about £34,000 a year — to carry out advisory work on their behalf.

They also agreed to provide him with an office at the NUM’s Barnsley HQ, plus another for the ubiquitous Nell (who was also given the use of a nearby flat) and pay him generous expenses: £15,000 for a car, plus his mobile and landline phone bill, and the cost of his domestic fuel and even his security alarm system.


Former glory: As leader of the National Union of Mineworks, Arthur Scargill was treated as a messiah in the 1980s

However, the union’s Yorkshire Area Trust eventually claimed he did insufficient work to warrant these benefits, and refused to pay more than £50 towards his Ford Mondeo, whereupon Scargill took it to court last year, in Sheffield.

He emerged victorious from that case, with the judge commenting that he had carried out ‘meaningful and considerable’ duties and ordering the trust to pay him £13,000 in expenses owed to him.

But round two of his court skirmish with the union — the Barbican case — saw him ignominiously defeated. The NUM say there could be further legal actions over outstanding matters.


Then there is the £20,000 annual affiliation fee which, until recently, the union paid to the International Energy and Miners’ Organisation (IEMO), a Paris-based body set up by Scargill (its president) and his great friend Alain Simon, the French trade union leader who is its secretary-general.

NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen concedes he has no idea what the IEMO does, much less how its funds are spent.

Before Scargill retired, however, the union agreed at Scargill’s behest to pay an annual affiliation fee to the IEMO for the next ten years. No amount was stipulated, but they were charged £20,000 annually.

Each year, Kitchen says, Scargill would notify him of the IEMO’s bank details — first an account in Vienna, then one in Ireland — and the money was transferred, no questions asked.

Finally, in 2011, by which time £180,000 had been handed over, that the NUM executive committee suspended these payments because the NUM claims the IEMO had failed to produce its accounts, as requested.

There is however no suggestion that Scargill or Simon have personally profited from the IEMO.

The litigation costs of this interminable and unedifying feud have been enormous, and these days the union can ill afford them.

When Scargill led the 1984/5 strike, he represented a powerful and wealthy organisation with almost 200,000 members working in 174 pits; today there are just 1,700 employed in Britain’s three active coalmines.

Small wonder that these few remaining members were so angry about Scargill’s determination to hang on to his £1.5 million Barbican apartment when they were each forking out £20 of their union subscription fees to pay the rent.





Battle lines: Sporting bushy ginger sideboards and stocky as a Yorkshire bull terrier, Scargill was in his prime





Deserted: The man who lead the miners into a year-long strike has spent recent years fighting them tooth and nail in the courts

Why, then, does ‘King Arthur’ appear to put his own interests above those of the collective he championed?

‘There’s an old saying, isn’t there? All men are born equal, but some are more equal than others,’ Kitchen surmises wearily. ‘I’ve tried to work it out [Scargill’s behaviour] but I still can’t square it in my own mind.

‘At first I tried to console myself that it was Thatcher’s fault — that she had taken a good trade unionist and socialist (which was my perception of Arthur during the strike) and turned him into the version of Arthur we see today.

‘I thought she had beaten him into the ground, to the point where he thought: “There’s not going to be a mining industry in five years, and I need to make a future for myself.”

‘Unfortunately, when I started doing my research for the court cases, I found Mr Scargill had put some of these things into place long before the strike.’

Mr Kitchen claims from day one Mr Scargill had been managing things to suit himself and secure his future, going back to the Seventies when he was first elected into union office.

But, of course, as with everything between Scargill and the union these days, Arthur would doubtless fiercely dispute that claim.

‘If only he had walked away in 2002, he could have left with a very good living and his reputation intact,’ says Kitchen. ‘He still had the respect of the miners then, which is priceless. But he couldn’t walk away and now we know he isn’t the person we thought he was.’

It would seem not; but unbeknown even to the mining community there is another side of Scargill that calls his integrity further into question.

In 2001, with the ink barely dry on his divorce from his wife Anne, he allegedly began a clandestine, eight-year relationship with Linda Sheridan, a voluntary campaign worker for the Socialist Labour Party, which he founded and still leads.

And in her explosive memoir, which she is now hawking around publishers, this red-haired ex-actress, still glamorous in her 70s, deconstructs Scargill’s upright image, portraying him as paranoid, obsessively secretive and self-centred.

Miss Sheridan’s story is supported by detailed diaries and the many text messages, scrawled letters and cards she received from Scargill — or ‘Honey Bear’, as she called him.

It began shortly before the General Election of 2001, when she decamped from her London home to canvass for him in Hartlepool, where he was standing for the Socialist Labour Party against the sitting Labour MP, Peter Mandelson.

The daughter of a Labour organiser in Birmingham and the granddaughter of a Welsh miner, she had formed an idealistic impression of Scargill, having admired his stance against Mrs Thatcher. She recalls how, before boarding the northbound train, she bought him a gift — an antique book about a peasant worker in the Stalin-era USSR — and as she handed it to him their eyes met, and she was captivated.





Hurt: Scargill's former flame Linda Sheridan says he became insistent on having a threesome with another woman











Evidence: Miss Sheridan's story is supported by many detailed diaries,love letters and cards such as this






Secrecy: Despite sending Christmas cards such as this, Scargill insisted his relationship with Linda Sheridan remained secret

‘I know it sounds corny but I really felt as if I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning,’ she told me at her home in York. Scargill seemed equally smitten, she says, for after the election count (in which he was trounced, getting 2.4 per cent of the vote) he drove her back to her hotel.

They enjoyed a furtive kiss in his car and he asked her to spend the night with him. But she demurred, so he promised to phone and fix a date.

A few weeks later the phone rang. ‘It’s me — the chap you met in Hartlepool,’ Scargill said conspiratorially. ‘Do you remember me? I’d like you to spend a weekend with me up in Barnsley.’

Linda envisaged country walks and romantic dinners. But from the moment Scargill met her off the train from King’s Cross, however, his paranoia became evident.

‘Don’t sit too close to me! There are a lot of speed cameras around here, and we might be filmed together,’ he barked as they raced through the Yorkshire lanes. He never satisfactorily explained this insistence on secrecy, she says, yet it would continue throughout their relationship.

Could Scargill have feared that his assistant Nell Myers might find out about them? ‘No, I don’t believe they were ever lovers, despite what many people think; she isn’t his type,’ Miss Sheridan insists.

Insecure behind his cocksure façade, she says, Scargill constantly tried to impress her. He would mention the TV and radio shows he’d been on, such as Desert Island Discs, and regale her with gossip about famous people he had met, from Nelson Mandela to his great hero Fidel Castro.

He also bragged about a dinner date with Left-wing actress Vanessa Redgrave. Yet if she responded with her own anecdotes, he seemed irritated and changed the subject.

As the relationship developed, and they spent weekends with one another in Yorkshire and London, it also became evident they had very different expectations. Single, with several ill-starred relationships behind her, she was looking for a soul-mate — perhaps a husband — with whom to share her interests in politics and literature in the autumn of her years. Like Chris Kitchen of the NUM, she too believed Scargill had been left emotionally damaged after being defeated by Thatcher. She felt she might be able to ‘heal him’ and help him to reinvent himself.

‘But Arthur didn’t want to move on,’ she says. ‘He’s stuck in the past. He can’t accept that the world has changed and can never escape the politics of the factory gate.’


Glamour: Miss Sheridan as a young actress for the Birmingham Theatre school in 1960

As for their relationship, she eventually realised he didn’t want an equal companion — he simply wanted a compliant girlfriend to share his bed and be at his beck and call. With a growing sense of discontentment she played out the role, moving to Yorkshire in 2003 and agreeing to take an unpaid job as the Socialist Labour Party’s regional secretary — so no one would suspect they were an item.

But everything changed, she claims, when Scargill made a shocking suggestion to ‘spice up’ their love life. ‘Arthur turned to me and said: “Linda, have you ever thought about what you want to do before you die? Is there anything you’ve never done, and would really like to try?” ’

Taken aback at being prematurely invited to ponder her ‘bucket list’, she said she had always wanted a pet dog, and would like to be married.

‘How about you Arthur?’ she asked, to be met with ‘an ominous silence’. She thought he was about to say he’d like to go on some outlandish adventure, such as climbing the Himalayas or paddling down the Amazon.

To her utter amazement, however, the trade union titan replied bluntly: ‘I’d like a threesome with you and another woman.’

For a moment she thought he must be joking. But when she realised he was deadly serious she felt ‘physically sick’. Yet, during the ensuing weeks, she says, Scargill, who was then 67 years old, returned to the subject at every opportunity.

‘He would refer to the experiences of his heroes such as Castro, Lenin and Stalin. I think he sees himself on the same level as these great historical figures, and he would harp on about how they all had several mistresses at the same time.

‘It would be: “Look at Lenin’s wife, she was OK with threesomes. He had a mistress and a wife and they all got on together and were very happy.”





Churlish: When a friend text him with the news that Margaret Thatcher was dead, Scargill's reply was 'SCARGILL ALIVE!'

Or, “Castro had lots and lots of women, but there was only one who he really loved and she didn’t mind about it because he really wanted her, and it was only sex with the others.” ‘I would reply that if I had been Lenin’s wife I’d have hit him over the head with a saucepan. And later I did some reading up and, of course, Mrs Lenin didn’t enjoy it at all. It almost ended her marriage.’

To her eternal regret, after several years of this, Miss Sheridan succumbed. At the time her mother had just died, she says, and she felt grief-stricken, confused, and extremely vulnerable.

Afterwards, she says she felt consumed by such deep-seated self-loathing that she almost suffered a breakdown. But when she refused to repeat the squalid liaison, she says, Scargill ended the affair. Their final meeting, which Linda arranged ‘for closure’, came at her cottage in November 2010. She says he told her as they parted for the last time: ‘You know, love, I think we just wanted different things.’ Then, glancing around nervously, he scurried to his car and drove off.

Miss Sheridan says she wasn’t surprised when she read of Scargill’s churlish reaction to Lady Thatcher’s death. ‘It wasn’t clever or statesmanlike, but that’s how he is,’ she says. ‘When he saw how Lady Thatcher’s faculties had begun to deteriorate, he would say “she’s lost her marbles”.

‘And he used to remark that he had never once met her in the flesh. He seemed to be proud of that, for some strange reason. He will probably have celebrated the news alone, with a glass of wine and a sardonic look of satisfaction on his face. But where is the satisfaction in outliving her?’

Scargill refuses to comment on Miss Sheridan’s tawdry story. Nor will he discuss his various disputes with the NUM. As for his reaction to Lady Thatcher’s death, he seems unlikely to elaborate on that cheap, two-word riposte.

Thatcher dead. Scargill alive? Yes, but what a sorry existence.

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