When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Read online

  ‌Foreword

  ‌Plus ça change…

  Twenty-five years ago I returned from a four-year posting as chief US correspondent of the Observer. In 1987 Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp, about to win a third term of office. I wanted to explore again my own country, so I took notebook and pen and set out to report what I found. I travelled widely – from Aberdeen and the already fading oil boom, via the dying, post miners’ strike, Durham coalfields, the north-west and a failing new town, sink estates, a successful comprehensive, the homes of affluent immigrants, the bolt holes of victims of race hate, the factory floor, the boardroom and the booming City wine bars immediately after the ‘Big Bang’.

  I journeyed with an open mind. I was not bent on ‘Thatcher-bashing’, but I soon encountered aspects of British life that alarmed me (and alarm me yet more now). Already the poor were being blamed – as in early Victorian days – for their plight; to be poor was to have ‘failed’; those who could were being encouraged to shift for themselves in vital areas of public life like education; the NHS, buckling under the strain of an ageing population and vastly more expensive treatments and medicines, was becoming the political minefield it is today; the old industrial areas were bleak and declining – our national crisis was that we were fast dividing into ‘them’ and ‘us’ camps, a vast gulf opening between comfortable and very uncomfortable Britain. The comfortable were taking it for granted that homeless people dossed down for the night in the doorways of West End theatres, while, riots apart, uncomfortable Britain was normally safely out of sight and mind.

  Born in the 1940s, I belong to what has been dubbed the ‘lucky generation’. The cards were stacked in our favour: good free education, copious and stimulating job opportunities, affordable homes even for those on modest salaries, a coping health service and longer life expectancies than any previous generation. Our further luck was that, as we became adults, Britain grew more harmonious, more egalitarian, more civilized: it was good to live in these islands. The unity fostered by the second world war, when (within reason) all classes were in the same boat, and the benefits of the welfare state had combined to create a country at ease with itself. Of course, not everything was perfect. Trades unions and poor managements had between them rendered Britain uncompetitive. Millions of days were lost to strikes; innovation lagged; industrial complacency reigned. We had crafted effective political and industrial structures for our defeated enemy, Germany, but thirty-five years on we ourselves had failed to modernize. Something had to be done and someone had to do it. That someone proved of course to be Margaret Thatcher. By 1987 she was, by head and shoulders, the most significant player in Britain. It was her era, and she ruled the roost, bestriding every aspect of national life: young people who grew up during her reign as PM were dubbed ‘Thatcher’s children’.

  She arrived on the steps of 10 Downing Street in May 1979 mouthing the emollient words of St Francis of Assisi: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ I already knew something of the lady, and these were not the sentiments I expected to hear from her lips. I had seen her at close quarters steamroller people with whom she disagreed. On the day of her first general election success I was on a beach in Florida trying to catch fish with my children. The local radio station opened its British election report – the third item in the running order after traffic accidents – with the news that actress Vanessa Redgrave (standing for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) had failed to be elected to the British parliament. The newscaster had just time before an ad break to slip in the information that the United Kingdom had elected its first woman prime minister.

  Back in London I reported on the first two years of life in Britain under her new government, before heading again for Washington and four years abroad. When I left, Mrs Thatcher was as unpopular as any PM had been in the early stages of an administration. It seemed likely that I would return to a Thatcherless Britain, breathing more easily after the trauma of her short regime. Unemployment was going through the roof, and manufacturing through the floor. The divisions between Briton and Briton, narrowing over the previous thirty-five years, were again widening. Harmony was not the word. However, in April 1982, I was in the office of Senator John Warner, one of Elizabeth Taylor’s cast-off husbands and a member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, when he took a phone call. ‘Your country is at war with Argentina,’ he said as he replaced the receiver. Mrs Thatcher entered those alarming months when the success of the Falklands conflict hung in the balance as a failing premier: she emerged triumphant, and the ‘Iron Lady’ – myth in the making – had been born.

  She swept back to office in 1983, and for the next seven years dominated British politics. Lord Hailsham, her lord chancellor, had coined the term ‘elective dictatorship’ to describe the British constitutional arrangement whereby a prime minister with a large parliamentary majority can more or less do as he (or she) pleases – although his target had been the then Labour government. Margaret Thatcher was, without doubt (as Tony Blair was to be a generation later), an elected dictator. What she said went: doubters were brushed aside, dandruff on the political collar.

  It was, therefore, the Iron Lady’s Britain to which I came home. To speak ill of her was to commit (in many eyes) treachery, certainly lack of enthusiasm ran the risk of being condemned as unpatriotic. This book was attacked in a Sunday Times editorial (alongside work by Ian McEwan and Hanif Kureishi) as being ‘smugly negative’. We stood accused of gathering at ‘favourite watering holes, where (even in such supposedly hard times) the Montrachet flows freely’. If only. Our sin was to doubt. ‘Rejoice, rejoice,’ Thatcher had exhorted the nation as the Argentinians were defeated. The mood persisted: Britain was, so Thatcher’s supporters proclaimed, on its way again. Those who were less than enthusiastic about our leader and who failed to rejoice were deeply unfashionable and – if they knew what was good for them, implied the Sunday Times – would do well to keep their thoughts to themselves.

  Whatever one’s views, it was impossible not to recognize that Thatcher was a phenomenal force blowing through British (and world) politics: through the sale of the more desirable council homes she put capital into the hands of a new class of person; she curbed (emasculated might be a better word) the unions; she wrapped the union flag tightly about these islands. But the way she did things was not always pretty, and even her devoted supporters had to acknowledge that she was deeply divisive. The current silly ‘Marmite’ test – you either love it or hate it – has nothing on the ‘Thatcher’ test. Indifference was not an option. I know people to this day who will not have a word said against her: to them she remains untouchable, on a pedestal with Winston Churchill. I know others who continue to blame her and her legacy for the ills of economic failure and social division that afflict us now. At one stage such people even blamed her (not always jokingly) for bad weather.

  I have changed nothing in this book except the title, for what strikes me returning to my own return twenty-five years on is how far Britain has remained unaltered. Add a few noughts for inflation, and 1987 is still with us. The difficulties that beset us now, beset us then. Even the statistics are eerily similar – three million out-of-work then, nearly three million out-of-work now, for example. The film, The Iron Lady – a strangely crafted biopic, in which Thatcher, portrayed as a senile woman who labours under the delusion that her late husband, Denis, is still with her, revisits her life and career – is far from accurate. But it does shine a light on her dominance, mistress of all she surveyed, in particular mistress of the pusillanimous Tory wets in her Cabinet
. She vowed to go ‘on and on and on’, and in 1987 it was easy to believe that she might. One myth, perpetuated by the film, is that Mrs Thatcher’s origins were ever so ’umble; if not born in a cardboard box, she nonetheless had had to climb a very greasy pole. The Iron Lady shows her serving behind the counter of her father’s grocer’s shop in Grantham. When Thatcher became Tory leader, I interviewed her prudently low-profile sister, Muriel, an Essex farmer’s wife who pooh-poohed this image. ‘Our father had destined Margaret for Oxford, and she would sweep through the shop with her school books under her arm past the girls he employed to serve the customers.’ Thatcher may not have possessed swathes of Scotland, as had previous Tory leaders, but her father was mayor of Grantham, alderman, chairman of the grammar school governors, politically successful in the local milieu and fiercely ambitious for his clever daughter. He actually owned two shops. Her disadvantages were exaggerated (as were John Major’s some years later) for political ends. She was from many rungs further up the social ladder than her hated predecessor, Edward Heath. She certainly didn’t fool the people I met on my journey round Britain, who saw her – with her son Mark at Harrow and a hereditary title for her husband – most certainly as ‘one of them’ rather than as ‘one of us’.

  Shortly (and this is not to wish her ill, but is inevitable) there will be the Thatcher State Funeral and a flood tide of reassessments. This book, however, is not a reassessment: it is contemporary reporting of what it was actually like to live and work in many areas of British life when Mrs T ruled the roost.

  Then we had: rapidly declining manufacturing; holidays, homes and cars financed by mounting debt; overpaid City slickers; insane house prices; a fast-growing underclass of long-term unemployed, economically unwanted; a society divided by education and opportunity; arguments over welfare; inner-city knife crime; a gulf between the north and the south; riots across the country; business struggling for bank finance. Sound familiar? What we sowed then, we reap now. While in Washington I missed key moments of Thatcher’s time as PM – the high of the Falklands War and the low of the miners’ strike. But before she became prime minister, I had seen her sweep aside views counter to her own arguments. She was invited to a lunch I attended at The Observer, and, as she had recently served as a junior Treasury spokesperson, the editor also asked an economics professor from the LSE. As soon as this wretched man said anything with which she disagreed, she pounced: ‘Nonsense. Absolute nonsense, professor.’ The overwhelmed academic was rapidly reduced to silence. He had been at the LSE for thirty years: Thatcher had a few months of front-bench experience under her belt. No wonder that Tory Cabinet ministers wilted later.

  Throughout my travels, the spectre of Thatcher hovered over the proceedings: her economic policies were destroying old industries like coal and steel-making and hollowing out the communities that depended on this work. It was brutal, and seemed certain to leave as its legacy what Thatcher’s present-day successor, David Cameron, has dubbed ‘the broken society’. People in the City and elsewhere were becoming obscenely rich. ‘The Devil take the hindmost’ had become the dominant political philosophy. A man who waited at a bus stop in the rain was a fool if he could afford a fast, warm BMW. The greed – and the lack of controls that made that greed possible – had become not just acceptable, but praiseworthy. Twenty-five years on, the chickens have come home to roost: we have both the broken society (starkly revealed in the 2011 riots) and a rampant capitalism that has brought the wider economy to its current plight. Britain (and, to be fair, much of the Western world) is on its knees, and the responsibility here (and to some extent abroad) rests on the record of the elderly woman portrayed by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady to evoke our pity.

  The character of the woman as seen through the eyes of the many British people with whom I spoke was better revealed in the photo on cover of this book. Taken in 1987, the year I was writing, by Middlesbrough Gazette photographer Peter Reimann, it shows Thatcher alone in the industrial wasteland of the north-east. The occasion remains famous locally as ‘The Walk in the Wilderness’. How she (or her handlers) allowed her to be so utterly exposed among the economic ruins, is a mystery. But there she stands – bouffant hair, power suit, handbag – the woman who was to proclaim that there was ‘no such thing as society’. As a northern professor of politics said: Thatcher’s government was ‘foreign’ to many over whom it presided.

  We write and talk today as if City greed is new. We rolled our eyes when Peter Mandelson said that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ (a comment he later both modified and regretted), but there were plenty of people saying much the same thing twenty-five years ago. American arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, for one: ‘Greed is all right by the way. I want you to know that you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’ The Big Bang created the first wave of extremely rich City workers, earning by their wheeling and dealing many times the salary of productive professionals such as engineers. Not long after writing this book I went to Oxford University during the recruitment ‘milk round’: the city’s Randolph Hotel was packed with undergraduates in suits, desperate for jobs in the financial sector. Even I was addressed by these aspirants as ‘sir’, in case I was an undercover head-hunter. After the First World War, a confidential government document warned that the ‘foolish and dangerous ostentation of the rich’ would create social unrest. In 1987, when the young and privileged partied on their City salaries and on inherited wealth as if there was no tomorrow, that lesson had long been forgotten. Sloanes were in their prime, and the jeunesse dorée drank themselves insensible as their elders paraded at Ascot and Henley. My memories of encounters with the Hooray Henries of 1987 are stirred whenever I see a picture of the young royals staggering from the Boujis nightclub. Those troubled by the impact of the fast-widening wealth gap were open-mouthed at the audacity of the young plutocrats of 1987. Like the poor, they remain with us.

  A stone’s throw from where these people partied, thousands lived in deprivation and fear, warehoused in south London’s grim estates. What might be described as ‘the NCO class’ – those who, through running youth groups and being prepared to stand up to troublemakers, gave stability to such communities – had despaired and departed, leaving behind the predators and the preyed-upon. One woman told me: ‘The people who have power to make changes are far away, they haven’t a clue what it is all about.’ In fact they were just down the road in Westminster and the City, but what the woman meant was that the powers-that-were lived on an altogether different plane of reality. When riots broke out in Tottenham in August 2011, there was not just dismay, but also disbelief. There should not have been. The environment from which those troubles sprang was well-established in 1987, and the people I met uttered constant warnings. Nothing had changed. A few years after this book first appeared with its chapter on the North Peckham estate, the young Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death there on a bleak concrete stairway, occasioning a momentary paroxysm of concern. But the main focus of attention was, as ever, on detection of the ‘evil’ culprits, rather than on the living conditions – constant from that day to this like City greed. Comfortable Britain’s collective lack of knowledge as to how ‘the other half’ lives has in recent years been yet further reduced. Present-day newspapers and magazines, dazzled by celebrity and ‘names’, devote almost no resources to reporting what life is really like in Britain.

  When politicians and the media rail against the radicalization of young British Muslims, they turn for the explanation to extreme religion (and its preachers) and, occasionally, the political and emotional impact of western wars against Islamic countries. They ignore (or more likely fail to recognize) that black and Asian Britons still suffer harassment and fear on a level that white people would find insupportable. The Stephen Lawrence murder (another of those Damilola Taylor moments) led, thanks to the determination of his parents, to both a condemnation of the capital’s police as ‘institutionally racist’ and (eventually) to tw
o convictions. In 2001 there were riots in northern towns, the response to which was again first and foremost to arrest and convict those in the front line. In 1987 I visited beleaguered flats where terrified Asians hunkered down, both tormented by racist skinheads and cold-shouldered by the police. They were angry, but impotent. But there were plenty of storm warnings that eventually the children of immigrants would rise up. Among the many thousands who felt discriminated against, it is not too fanciful to think there was a handful who would be attracted by Islamic militancy. So long as the lid appeared to be tightly screwed down, those who might have improved race relations at the bottom of society did little. The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) recently issued a report, ‘Racial Violence: the Buried Issue’. Still buried indeed.

  Education is much now as it was then. The division created by independent schools has, if anything, grown wider. George Orwell highlighted the fact that the post-war Labour government would have achieved more social equality, and therefore greater social contentment, had it used its clout and energies to abolish the public schools rather than to nationalize the commanding heights of the economy. Melvyn Bragg was quoted recently as saying that the public schools ‘are the bedrock of the inequality that cripples the country.’ Seven per cent of children go to fee-paying schools: did ever so short a tail wag so large a dog? In 1987, as now, the middle classes were agonizing over comprehensives. I visited one in Knutsford that without question passed the anxious parent test. But, as we know, abused by the press and largely unloved, comprehensives in the end got a firm thumbs down, hence the academies and ‘free’ schools that are the enthusiasms of the moment. In 1987 Britain’s social class bedevilled education as it bedevils it today. Choice, as a campaigner for state education told me, is a nice word for an often nasty process. I passed my teens under an Old Etonian cabal, presided over by Harold Macmillan: fifty-plus years later, I live again under an OE cabal. I asked my MP, Old Etonian Zac Goldsmith, how it came about that, in Cabinet terms, we were back in the 1950s. All the Old Etonians in the present government are, he assured me with a straight face, absolutely the best people among our 60 million fellow citizens to occupy the commanding heights. The distortion in opportunity is so obvious that those who benefit from it ought at least to recognize not just the advantages they are buying their children, but the consequences for the far greater numbers of the less fortunate. Look at the proportional imbalance in places gained at major universities between state and fee-paying students. The waste of national potential is enormous and damaging. Those who campaign against such inequalities stand accused of the ‘politics of envy’; the ‘politics of fairness’ more like.