THE POLITICS When Jackie first went over to 24 hour broadcasting. The DTI visited it's transmitter location (a suburban residence in Cheam) in an effort to close it down. For the first time - and unlike all of the previous raids in its history - one of the staff members accepted responsibility for the equipment. Meaning that the whole thing had to go to court to be proved, and the DTI had to leave empty handed, and allow the station to carry on broadcasting. To cut a long story short, although they ultimately proved their case and got their conviction, they were unsuccessful yet again, in their attempt to silence the station. It was to be the last they saw of the DTI for a few years. Why did they leave them alone? Because the whole thing had moved upstairs. Shortly after going on air 'full time' Jackie started appealing to the listeners to write to their MP's and basically campaign for its legalisation. At the time Angela Rumbold was the elected (Tory) MP for Mitcham & Morden, right in the heart of Radio Jackie land. Angela received a lot of letters from her constituents, and to her credit she campaigned along with the rest of them, to the extent that she even recorded an appeal for support which was aired regularly. It is said also, that the station was a 'hit' in the very highest ranks of government. Maggie Thatcher and Norman Tebbit were reputed to be taken with it, and so it came to pass that the Conservative Government wasn't going to let the small matter of the Wireless Telegraphy Act get in the way of free enterprise (and the potential votes of most of South West London), so Radio Jackie found itself with a sort of amnesty. It was fully VAT registered, and there were a number of staff on PAYE. So they carried on, and the bad guys stayed away. One person who wasn't happy about it all was a man called John Aumonier. He was the Managing Director of Radio Mercury who's TSA crossed into Jackie territory, and they were losing listeners to them hand over fist. Aumonier tried to serve a High Court injunction on Radio Jackie's owner Tony Collis. This he succeeded in doing. However in the weeks preceeding the court case, the station was 'sold' to a man called Robin King (otherwise known as DJ Phil Hazelton). Robin lived in Holland so they could serve as many injunctions as they liked on him. It wouldn't make a scrap of difference. The station continued broadcasting. Eventually the station's reach became too much of a threat to too many licenced broadcasters. Or more specifically Capital Radio, who's audience figures began to buckle as Jackie continued to grow at an alarming rate. Eventually the Attorney General signed their death warrant, and one cold Thursday evening in January, a phone call from somewhere in SW1 said "Get as much equipment as you can out of the studio's, because they're going to raid you tomorrow". And raid they certainly did. With boundless enthusiasm. As the shot on the left of the door leading up to the studio complex shows. A door which wasn't actually locked at the time, by all accounts. As you can see, the DTI certainly enjoyed their work. They raided on the Friday (February 1st), and the station was back on air by Saturday, with the equipment that they managed to remove from studio two after the tip off on the Thursday evening. They raided again that weekend, and it was clear that this time they were going to keep coming back. So yet another hasty pile of studio equipment was rustled up, and it was decided to make Monday the 4th of February 1985, the stations last day.