Confessions of an ex-Slaithwaite anarchist.

Byline: Denis Kilcommons ,

Thirty years ago, an important chunk of the British establishment believed Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent.

Stuart Christie explains the situation in his autobiography My Granny Made Me An Anarchist (Scribner paperback, pounds 7 99). This faction included senior officers in MI5 led by Peter Wright, supported by the CIA, and "a whole cabal of Tory and neo-fascist ne'er-do-wells around the Carlton Club and the Special Forces Club".

He says: "All were convinced Wilson was a traitor and their loyalty to the Queen meant getting him out, by hook or by crook."

Their contingency plans included a pre-emptive coup and former SAS officer David Sterling had formed a volunteer army ready to impose order in the event of the expected collapse of the British Government in late 1975.

Christie was up to his eyeballs in anarchist politics at the time. As an 18-year-old idealist, the Scot had gone to Spain in 1964 with explosives strapped to his body, intending to blow up the dictator General Franco.

He was arrested in Madrid before he could make the attempt and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but he became a celebrity inmate. Among his supporters were Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell and Malcolm Muggeridge. Anarchists sent him money but did not want to use their own names, so they signed their notes with the only English names they knew in the 1960s: John, Paul, George and Ringo. The prison authorities assumed he was being funded by the Beatles. He was released after three and a half years.

Christie now says he is glad his assassination attempt failed: the subsequent publicity did more good in the war against Franco's blood-soaked regime.

Back in Britain, he lived in London and was arrested again but was acquitted. In 1975, with all the whispers about Harold Wilson and the possibility of coups and counter coups, a Special Branch officer advised him to leave the capital. Oddly, he and his partner Brenda picked Harold Wilson's home town - Huddersfield.

"Brenda's best friend had moved to Slaithwaite in the Colne Valley, on the outskirts of Huddersfield.

"When we visited, it turned out the registrar of Honley was selling his office.

"We bought the house for pounds 1,000.

"It was in the attic of this house that a group of Huddersfield Luddites had hidden in April, 1812, after shooting and fatally wounding William Horsfall, mill owner and member of the hated Manufacturers Committee Against the Luddites."

Christie continued to help run the Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoner support organisation and publishing house from Honley with a small group of fellow political activists.

Then, in 1975, Franco died. "Far away in Honley that late November evening, the "enemies" of Franco's Spain, congo'd down to the local off-licence and bought an enormous carry-out."

Christie, now a successful writer, lives on a remote Scottish island. His autobiography, laced with wit and honesty, recalls a largely forgotten but troubled period.