Rejoice! Rejoice!

Britain in the 1980s

Alwyn W. Turner

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781781310724
• eBook ISBN: 9781845137298
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 she promised to bring harmony where once there had been discord. But Britain entered the 1980s bitterly divided over its future. At stake were the souls of the great population boom of the 1960s. Would they buy into the free-market, patriotic agenda of Thatcherism? Or the anti-racist, anti-sexist liberalism of the new left?

From the miners’ strike, the Falklands War and the spectre of AIDS, to Yes, Minister, championship snooker and Boy George, Rejoice! Rejoice! steps back in time to relive the decade when the Iron Lady sought to remake Britain. What it discovers is a thoroughly foreign country.

PART ONE

PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH GASOLINE

1979–83

I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow.

The Beat, ‘Stand Down Margaret’ (1980)

BARRY: I blame Thatcherism, you know. Yeah, it’s a misguided policy. It’s totally misguided and misconstrued. Mind you, the Labour Party’s in such disarray, I don’t think the opposition offers much alternative or consolation, does it?

Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983)

MORGUS: The stews of the cities are full of such unemployed riff-raff.

PRESIDENT: Most of them unemployed, Trau Morgus, because you have closed so many plants. It’s caused great unrest.

Robert Holmes, Doctor Who (1984)

1

The First Thatcher Government

‘Just like starting over’

It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot.

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (1984)

Margaret Thatcher once expressed to me genuine admiration for Shirley [Williams] but implied that decisiveness was not her strength.

Lord Longford (1981)

ANNE JAY: It’s very common, Henry, to confuse stubbornness with strength.

Ron Hutchinson, Bird of Prey (1982)

There were precedents, of course – Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi in India, Golda Meir in Israel – but the idea that staid old Britain, shackled by tradition and nostalgia, might choose a woman as prime minister was a major international story, covered by news outlets all round the world. In fact just about the only major journal not to mention the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979 was The Times, which was then in the midst of an epic industrial dispute. It hadn’t appeared since November the previous year, and the doubts that existed about whether the world’s most famous newspaper would ever be published again seemed somehow symbolic of the crises and chaos of the passing decade. Similarly, the fact that two years later it was to be bought by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born owner of the Sun and the News of the World, seemed symbolic of the 1980s’ triumph of meritocracy over establishment. When the paper did eventually re-emerge after nearly twelve months of silence, Thatcher was amongst the first to greet it: ‘The absence of The Times has been tragic and overlong,’ she told the Lord Mayor’s banquet on the night that the presses started to roll again. ‘I welcome its reappearance with enthusiasm.’

It wasn’t the first occasion on which The Times had failed to report the big news story; back in 1955 a month-long dispute had caused it to miss the resignation of Winston Churchill as prime minister, the politician, coincidentally, with whom Thatcher was most eager to seek association. That, however, was for the future; no one in 1979 was thinking of comparisons with Churchill. Indeed no one was quite sure what a suitable comparison would be, so uncertain were the commentators of the new prime minister. To start with, Thatcher herself was not noticeably popular as an individual. In personal terms, she had trailed the incumbent, Labour’s James Callaghan, right through the election campaign, but had nonetheless scored an extraordinary victory: the biggest swing against a government since the war, producing Labour’s worst share of the vote since 1931, when it had been smarting from the self-inflicted wounds of Ramsay MacDonald’s defection. And, despite a series of effective posters from Saatchi & Saatchi, and despite a few memorable photo-opportunities (the one that saw her holding a new-born calf was particularly striking, if devoid of any discernible meaning), the media feeling at the time was that she had failed to articulate Tory policy with any degree of conviction. Certainly that was the perception on election night in the BBC studios, as the likes of Peregrine Worsthorne and Peter Jenkins pored over the results.

But there was something about Thatcher that defied traditional analysis, something more to do with tone and image than with political content. In an election populated by overweight, pasty-complexioned, middle-aged men in crumpled suits, and with political memories still dominated by media images of the public sector strikes just a few months earlier, Thatcher stood out. ‘How did she get elected prime minister?’ reflected Shirley Williams, the most high-profile casualty of Labour’s defeat. ‘Because Mrs Thatcher – bandbox neat, with Saatchi & Saatchi smoothly organizing fields and factories, cars and calves around her – was such a contrast to the winter of discontent, the chaos, the disorder and mess.’ Even if the electorate weren’t entirely certain about the nature or advisability of her policies, she at least looked different.

Perhaps inevitably for the first woman to lead a major party in Britain, this question of image was central to selling the new brand of Conservatism. When she had stood against Edward Heath for the leadership of the party in 1975, she had employed the television producer, Gordon Reece, to advise on her campaign, and following her success, he remained as director of communications at Conservative Central Office. Amongst other contributions attributed to Reece, not always correctly, were a simplification of line in her dress, a new approach to microphone technique, and the lowering and softening of her voice. There was a marked change in her style in the first years, when she was still opposition leader. At its most basic, there was the adoption of the diminutive ‘Maggie’, a name that no member of her family or close circle had ever used, but which fitted well into a tabloid headline, and which had a more homely tone; it became universal, employed by friend and foe alike. (The alternative, Mrs T, was only used by supporters, even if it did make her sound as though she were part of a witness protection programme.)

There were also attempts to suggest that there was more to Thatcher than the slightly dated suburban woman that she sometimes appeared. Following a Conservative rally and concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1976, the press was informed that she was really very keen on music: ‘She does like New Orleans jazz, especially Duke Ellington,’ an aide pointed out, leaving it unclear whether it was he or she that didn’t know Ellington was born in Washington, made his name in New York, and most certainly did not play New Orleans jazz. Two years later she was a guest of the Football Association at the FA Cup final; invited to select the man of the match, she chose Trevor Whymark, which caused some consternation amongst officials since Whymark wasn’t playing that day – it turned out that she really meant David Geddis, who was a late replacement and who provided the cross for the single Ipswich goal that settled the match in favour of Bobby Robson’s team.

To some extent these were the traditional mistakes made by politicians when trying to play to the agenda of popular culture. But there was too a sense of her being slightly more removed from the common grain of humanity than were most MPs, a feeling that was encapsulated by what appeared to be a complete absence of humour. In a 1979 episode of the sitcom Fawlty Towers, even before she became prime minister, a character comments on the guide-book What’s On in Torquay that it must be ‘one of the world’s shortest books – like The Wit of Margaret Thatcher’. It was a judgement that survived her choice of a sketch by American comedian Bob Newhart as one of her Desert Island Discs, and one that even her closest allies were to confirm: ‘One has to remember that she has little sense of humour,’ noted William Whitelaw, her deputy leader, ‘and therefore if you have a sense of humour, you are always suspect with her.’ But then Britain in 1979 was not necessarily in the mood for a jokey politician, or even for one as relaxed and unflappable as Callaghan; for many people, the country had felt for years as if it were stumbling into chaos, and the British tendency to mock, its willingness to sink giggling into the sea, was looking as though it might be part of the problem, not the solution. The Labour peer Lord Longford found himself secretly agreeing when someone suggested, in the context of Thatcher’s lack of humour, that ‘we in Britain had been suffering from an excess of humour’, and he was not alone.

If the nation was agreed on her seriousness, it was less certain about her sex appeal, though – again inevitably – it was very much a topic of conversation in a world where female politicians were few and far between. (The number of women MPs actually went down in the 1979 election from twenty-seven to just nineteen, representing 3 per cent of the House of Commons.) Not many were prepared to agree entirely with Tory MP Alan Clark’s 1980 assessment – ‘she is so beautiful,’ he drooled, ‘quite bewitching, as Eva Peron must have been’ – but there was an appeal that, for some men at least, couldn’t quite be pinned down. ‘Cette femme Thatcher! Elle a les yeux de Caligule, mais elle a la bouche de Marilyn Monroe,’ as French president François Mitterrand famously claimed. Or, in the words of Sue Townsend’s schoolboy creation, Adrian Mole: ‘She has got eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice like a gentle person. It’s a bit confusing.’ Perhaps more common was the opinion of Colin Dexter’s detective, Inspector Morse; encountering a ‘grimly visaged, tight-lipped’ Scottish ward sister, he characterizes her as ‘an ideal of humourless efficiency: a sort of Calvinistic Thatcherite’. Images of matrons, as well as governesses and nannies, became commonplace.

It was possibly no coincidence that the arrival of Thatcher in Downing Street was followed swiftly by the appearance of several female authority figures on television. After several successful books on training animals, for example, Barbara Woodhouse became a national star in 1980 with the series Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way, intimidating dumb creatures (and their pets) with a voice once described as ‘Joyce Grenfell crossed with Lady Bracknell’. She was not, however, without her critics, particularly when she endorsed the use of choke-chains that were disapproved of by the RSPCA – like Thatcher, she was sometimes seen as being too strict, and not entirely in step with more modern liberal ways. Then there was Mrs McClusky, who took over as head teacher in the children’s school soap Grange Hill. Her advent too attracted controversy as the prices went up in the tuck shop, thanks to a new tax known as the School Surcharge, and as she responded to a spate of vandalism and arson by introducing a prefect system, despite complaints that it was a draconian measure. When two boys are caught running an unauthorized cake stall on school premises, they are given a detention with the task of writing an essay on ‘the problems of private enterprise in an authoritarian society’. Even the nightmarish, overcontrolling mother of Ronnie Corbett’s character in the sitcom Sorry! (played by Barbara Lott) had a hint of Thatcher about her.

And, after years of all-male fictional police forces, two series in 1980 finally broke the mould. Jill Gascoine appeared as Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes in the ITV drama The Gentle Touch, followed a few months later by the BBC entry in the field, Juliet Bravo. Set in a small northern town decimated by the closure of its mills, Juliet Bravo starred Stephanie Turner as Jean Darblay, a uniformed officer whose husband has been made redundant but who finds herself promoted to Inspector. ‘Yours is a very important appointment, Jean. Very few women in England are running a town like this,’ her superior tells her, adding: ‘There are quite a few around who’d be pleased to see you fail. In any way.’

The same warning could have been applied to Thatcher, and behind much of the conspiratorial whispering that accompanied her early years was, as so often in British politics, an issue of class. As a would-be rival for her job, Francis Pym, once pointed out, the trouble with the Tories from his perspective was that ‘we’ve got a corporal at the top, not a cavalry officer’. Thatcher actually came from a more elevated social background than her predecessor as Conservative leader, but, unlike Edward Heath, she made little attempt as she rose through the ranks to adapt and to fit into the highest echelons of her party, dominated as they still were by the public schools and the land-owning classes. She made no pretence of being anything other than provincial middle class, displaying an assuredness and a self-confidence that was to inspire a new generation of Tories, even as it infuriated her opponents within the party.

And opponents there undoubtedly were, chief amongst them Heath himself. In the build-up to the 1979 election, there had been much speculation about whether he would be invited to join the cabinet in the event of a Conservative victory (as he had himself welcomed his predecessor Alec Douglas-Home into his cabinet in 1970), and when asked directly about the possibility by Robin Day on election night, he had chuckled, ‘It depends’, with a self-satisfied air. It was to be the last occasion for some time that he appeared on television in a good mood. Thatcher decided she’d be safer with him a long way outside the tent, and offered him the job of being British ambassador to the USA; he turned it down, instead lurking on the backbenches for the remainder of her premiership, ‘like a sulk made flesh,’ as the journalist Edward Pearce put it.

Nonetheless, Thatcher’s first cabinet was largely composed of Heath’s men. The only members who hadn’t served under him in 1970-74 were John Biffen, Nicholas Edwards and Angus Maude, and there were even fewer who had voted for Thatcher against Heath in the first ballot of the leadership election in 1975: just her mentor Keith Joseph and, more surprisingly, Norman St John-Stevas, a delicate soul who had served as Heath’s arts minister. Importantly, however, two of those who had entered that leadership contest had now come onside: home secretary William Whitelaw and chancellor of the exchequer Geoffrey Howe. Whitelaw was the very model of a patrician Tory, but also possessed ‘a sort of military loyalty to the commander-in-chief’ and, having lost to Thatcher, could be relied upon for absolute support. In parliament, this was invaluable, for he was credited with having a sure touch when it came to judging the mood of the party and with being an astute political analyst (‘every prime minister needs a Willie,’ as Thatcher once noted). In the country more widely, it counted for little; clearly a decent man, he might, in another age, have been considered a safe pair of hands, but in the turbulent times of the first Thatcher government, his bumbling delivery and his flabby, watery-eyed face, normally bearing a doleful expression, were unlikely to win over a doubting electorate. Nor was Howe any more inspiring in the eyes of the general public. There was a story that his wife had once claimed that, ‘When I married Geoffrey, he was a fiery Welshman,’ but no one gave the tale any credence – a less fiery politician, it was impossible to imagine. His image was that of a plodder, a man whose most intriguing feature was the gap between his evident dullness and the extremity of the economic policies he pursued. Even when, in 1982, it was reported that he had contrived to lose his trousers while travelling on a train, the details of the story turned out to be much less interesting than the headlines: he had undressed in a sleeper compartment and the trousers had been stolen (they were subsequently recovered, minus his wallet).

Even with these allies, though, the divisions in the party and the cabinet meant that Thatcher had a desperately insecure base from which to operate, and particularly to launch anything resembling a radical programme for government. Undeterred, she proceeded to do precisely that, determined that there could be no compromise. The principal enemy was inflation, and she was quite clear how it was to be fought: ‘To master inflation,’ the election manifesto had declared, ‘proper monetary discipline is essential, with publicly stated targets for the rate of growth of the money supply.’ Quite what that meant was never to be entirely clear to much of the population. Even Sir Desmond Glazebrook, a banker in the television sitcom Yes, Minister was confused: ‘Took me thirty years to understand Keynes’ economics,’ he complains. ‘Then, when I’d just cottoned on, everyone started getting hooked on these new monetarist ideas. You know, I Want to Be Free by Milton Shulman.’ (The reference, of course, should have been to the American economist, Milton Friedman, not to Shulman, the celebrated theatre and film critic.) Nor was it ever certain whether monetarism was much more than a theoretical construct – the intention was to control the amount of money in circulation, but opinions differed on how that was to be measured: a succession of different versions of this elusive concept passed through the financial pages of the more weighty newspapers, meaning little or nothing to anyone without an economist in their immediate family.

Instead the policy came mostly to be seen by the public as involving lower income tax, an unfettered market, no state intervention to assist industry, and cuts in public spending. It was an interpretation that Thatcher actively encouraged, with a rhetoric designed to appeal to the housewife, using what she called ‘the homilies of housekeeping, the parables of the parlour’. The Labour MP Austin Mitchell saw it in similar terms, though obviously from an opposite standpoint; it was ‘essentially a counter-revolution against 1945 carried through by a small town Poujadist brought up to scrimping, saving and the politics of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and Hayek under the bed-clothes’. A media-friendly Tory dissident, Julian Critchley, reached for the same imagery: ‘an uncongenial blend of Samuel Smiles and Pierre Poujade.’ (It was somehow symptomatic of how dogma-driven politics had become that references were being so casually tossed around to something as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title page
• Contents
• Intro EIGHTIES: ‘This is the dawning of a new era’
• Part One PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH GASOLINE 1979–83
• 1 The First Thatcher Government: ‘Just like starting over’
• 2 Comrades: ‘Dog eat dog’
• 3 Alternatives: ‘A thousand people just like me’
• 4 Resistance: ‘We’re living in violent times’
• 5 War: ‘People are stupid’
• Part Two WHEN THE WIND BLOWS 1983–87
• 6 The Second Thatcher Government: ‘The edge of heaven’
• 7 Identities: ‘Standing on their own two feet’
• 8 Enemies: ‘When two tribes go to war’
• 9 Moralities: ‘I don’t want to change the world’
• 10 Boom: ‘Let’s make lots of money’
• Part Three UNDER THE GOD 1987–90
• 11 The Third Thatcher Government: ‘The only way is up’
• 12 Media: ‘When will I see my picture in the paper?’
• 13 Establishment: ‘I will be your preacher teacher’
• 14 Globalization: ‘Walls come tumbling down’
• 15 Fall: ‘There she goes’
• Outro AFTERMATH: ‘You’re history’
• References
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• A Classless Society – Britain in the 1990s
• About the author
• Copyright