The political disaster is that there is no one to gainsay Thatcher. I had spent much of the election campaign wandering remote regions in the yellow ‘battle buses’ chosen by the two-party Alliance [the Liberals and the Social Democrats, the forerunners of the Lib Dems] to convey its twin leaders on their futile missions. The question I posed myself as the bus bumped through the West Country or twisted down narrow roads in the Scottish Borders was why it was apparently so difficult to sell a moderate and reasonable package to the British people who – for all the intolerance at either extreme of politics – themselves remain centrist and balanced. I knew from writing this book that there was in the country a fatigue with the old, polarized ways; the common sense of the Alliance was very much the common sense of middle England. But what the people I had met also wanted in public life was passion and vision. Where Thatcher proclaimed her programme for the millennium, David Owen and David Steel, the Alliance leaders, offered six-point plans. The dual leadership with its incompatibilities was a disaster. Steel’s capacity for self-destruction was apparent from the moment he volunteered to me the phrase ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ as we drove through his constituency one Saturday morning. He was a man for the margins. When he joined the Liberal Party, it commanded just 2.5 per cent of the popular vote; his expectation was of a lifetime in guerrilla politics.
David Owen had a stubborn streak. Although he was in the American sense the most packageable of British politicians, he failed to exploit his own potential. He told me he did not admire Jack Kennedy, who had been more ‘style than substance’, and that he disdained the cheapening of complex issues. Like Coriolanus, he would not – as he would see it – pander to the public appetite for meretricious campaigning. The passion that his cause and his despairing supporters so badly needed was, for him, a private virtue. ‘When you are a doctor, you have to learn to control your tears, your grief,’ he said. Without passion the political centre could not – and did not – hold.
On the Saturday after the election I was in Edinburgh to hear Neil Kinnock address the Scottish Miners’ Gala. Having until then only seen gobbets of his speeches on television, I had not realized how devoid of content they were. The empty phrases rolled round the interior of a damp marquee. His audience, which had been warmed up by some formidable old-timers like Mick McGahey of the National Union of Mineworkers, was in a nostalgic mood. The occasion was like stepping back three decades in British political life. This was unreconstructed cloth-cap Britain. Outside in the drizzle, families huddled over picnics; inside, Mr Kinnock invoked a world of ‘them and us’ in a setting that had already been a caricature when Peter Sellers starred in I’m All Right, Jack. Could, I wondered as I sprinted up an Edinburgh hill in search of a working phone box, this ramshackle party ever be modernized? What, anyway, did party functionaries like Brian Gould, a senior Labour MP, mean by ‘modernization’? Show or substance? Was the fragrance of a million red roses all that that wet tent needed? It seemed unlikely. What – aside from her own arrogance – was left to unseat Thatcher now? The talk of the possibility of her still being in power in the year 2000 did not seem so fanciful in the soft rain of that Scottish afternoon.
In the now two years since my return from the United States I have not been able to divorce Britain’s social, economic and political problems from its class structure. The radical right likes to have it both ways. It pooh-poohs the notion that we are a class-ridden society; yet it remains intrinsically snobby and continues to take full advantage of the privileges that our caste system affords those at the top. It is fashionable in such circles to accuse liberals of hypocrisy and of oppression – the imposition, that is, of their liberal views on those who are not liberal. John Rae, the former headmaster of Westminster characterized the contemporary liberal as ‘an upper-class twit with his heart on his sleeve and his stomach replete with roast pheasant’. In my experience, the pheasant, the claret and all the other goodies were far more likely to be in the bellies of the Thatcherites, who had the further advantage of being able to enjoy them without being overly troubled by conscience. In the meantime, class divisions continue to bedevil Britain. The young people of a middle-class, suburban area, such as the one I live in, are segregated into two camps from the minute their parents decide which form of education they should have. Within a very short time, formerly best friends with a great deal in common walk metaphorically and literally on opposite sides of the street. The division is a tragic microcosm of the geological fault that runs through British society.
The Royal Family remains a national obsession, its younger members clammering for incessant attention. They also want it both ways; they succumbed to the fallacious yuppy idea that ‘you can have it all’, revelling in the publicity their antics attract, yet complaining of intrusion when those antics stimulate inevitable press curiosity. Too late they discovered that those who mount tigers can seldom dismount. Right-wing commentators suggested that the press was bringing disrepute on its own head by the activities of the royal ‘rat pack’, but there was at least as much evidence that the young royals themselves were losing respect. A survey of young people elicited the following comments: ‘They’re on a cushy number. All that money just for shaking hands and cutting pieces of string,’ and ‘They live off us. Big cars, big houses and loads of horses.’ The royals reached a nadir at which even royalists cried ‘enough’ when several made fools of themselves by appearing in a special staging of It’s a Knockout – the perfect game for a nation that scoffs at intellectuals. In the same idiom an army captain shot a champagne cork 109 feet 6 inches and had a colour-supplement feature devoted to his achievement. The ultimate accolade in Thatcher’s new Britain was, it seemed, to gain an entry in The Guinness Book of Records – preferably for something entirely trivial. Class tentacles reach even here; had the record-breaker been a corporal rather than a captain, his achievement would have had something to do with beer. It was not necessary to worry our heads about more important matters: those could safely be left to our leader.
This was the prevailing mood in which this book was first published in September 1987. On the right it had, therefore, a gloomily predictable reception, which reinforced much of what I had been trying to say about the polarized nature of the country I came home to. I was struck again by the closed minds we bring to arguments or analyses with which we do not automatically agree – the left, of course, is equally guilty. Under the headline ‘Britain’s Breed Apart’, the Sunday Times attacked the notion that there was anything left to criticize. ‘Britain’s intelligentsia has become the lost tribe of the 1980s ... so it has retreated to its own left-wing laager, where erudite moaning is taken for wise critique ... Rarely have the ideals of the country’s intellectual elite been so out of kilter with the aspirations of plain folk.’
This was the unvarnished advocacy of populism. I tell in the foreword to this present edition how I was lumped together in this context as an out-of-touch leftie and (worse) a Montrachet drinker alongside other misguided liberals like Hanif Kureishi and Ian McEwan. What the Sunday Times writer – and those unswerving Thatcherites he stood for – appeared to be saying was that in these stirring times those who were not whole-heartedly for us (by which he meant the dominant political philosophy) were against us. He was seeking to create a national mood music familiar to all who have lived under authoritarian governments. It was not what we have been accustomed to in Britain. Thatcher was already assaulting the last redoubts from which effective opposition could be deployed – education authorities and turbulent councils; now her acolytes were turning on the freedom to think differently. Although celebrated as the advocate of such liberties as the right to buy shares (and to drink in pubs all day), Thatcher was proving reluctant to tolerate the bedrock freedom – the right to oppose.
She did manage to unite the media by her obsessive pursuit of the former MI5 man Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher. Two or three separate issues were cynically rolled into one in order to suppress both public knowledg
e and discussion of the power and accountability of the security services and of specific allegations, such as whether Roger Hollis, the former head of MI5, had been a spy and whether elements within MI5 had tried to destabilize Harold Wilson’s government. Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary (ennobled the moment he stepped from office), trotted round the world being ‘economical with the truth’. What the Spycatcher affair did – and continues to do as I write in the early days of 1988 – was to strip bare the prime minister’s intolerant way with opposition.
As I write this, Thatcher is passing Herbert Asquith’s record as the longest-serving prime minister this century: ‘She has raised this country from its knees,’ opined the Daily Telegraph. As she becomes more millennial in her utterances – we shall go ‘on and on and on’ – and more clearly determined to stamp Thatcherism indelibly on the nation she leads, commentators are already looking to the year 2000, in which she would – if she survives that long – overtake Robert Walpole as the longest serving premier of all. She would then still be considerably younger than Gladstone was when he formed his third administration, and younger than Ronald Reagan is today. The possibility appears all too real.
But even as she has been sketching her grandiose vision, the foundations of both her economic and her political security have been shaken. The notion that in the City money could make money indefinitely – breeding incestuously like gerbils – without regard for whether it was helping to make anything else of a more useful nature was severely dented by the stock market crash of 19th October 1987 that came to be dubbed ‘Black Monday’. The government had to pull the BP privatization flotation, and millions of new capitalists woke up to the truth that share-buying is not a game in which investors inevitably get something for nothing. Some were so besotted by the incessant propaganda of the previous years that they still queued on the deadline morning to pay way over the odds for heavily devalued shares. As the temple of Mammon came tumbling down, it was the small man who got most hurt. The victims included a twenty-three-year-old trainee accountant who lost £1 million gambling with other people’s money, and a schoolboy, whose £20,000 deficit on dealings put his family’s home in jeopardy. Despite its technology, ‘Big Bang’ failed to keep pace with itself, and a massive backlog of settlements accumulated. Few stockbrokers – even those who advertised their services to the small investor – could any longer be bothered with tiny deals; corporate raiders ignored the petty capitalist, who therefore could not take advantage when prices were momentarily forced up. Within a few weeks the prospects for a widely based share-owning democracy were set back years.
The Thatcherite ideal – thrift, hard work, responsibility – had somehow been perverted by the mood music that played a tune of greed. Two Tory MPs fell from grace and Parliament (one of them briefly into jail) for making illegal multiple applications for privatized shares. Thatcher may have conducted the national budget according to the principles of Mr Micawber, but the ethos of her me-first philosophy encouraged the people who elected her to go on a staggering binge. As the Guardian commented: ‘Just why Thatcher should think it is economically sound to allow people to borrow at penal rates of interest to purchase (say) depreciating Japanese videos, while unsound to allow the public sector to borrow at barely half the rate to finance profitable capital projects is a mystery …’ Between 1979 and 1987 consumer credit climbed by 300 per cent, much of it at interest rates so exorbitant that the lenders were clearly as callous as they were greedy. The very poor were borrowing in order to repay borrowings, accumulating interest that they were forced to bear like millstones round their necks. By the end of 1987 homes were being repossessed at an unprecedented level – 1,900 owner-occupier families were evicted between July and September, the majority for debts incurred on second mortgages and credit cards. Homelessness consequently stood at dire levels.
On the day that Thatcher set her longevity record, promising that she would turn her attention to such issues as ‘fairness, honesty and courtesy to others’, a report from the Family Policy Centre revealed that during the first six years of her government the income of the poorest fifth of the country fell by six per cent, while that of the richest fifth rose by nine per cent. Within that poorest fifth, specific groups like one-parent families had fared even worse – their average net income had fallen by eleven per cent. The Centre – the chairman was Sir Campbell Adamson, a former director-general of the CBI and the chairman of the Abbey National Building Society, scarcely a leftie – commented that this disadvantaged twenty per cent had been ‘left behind in a pool of poverty which is getting wider and deeper’.
Those who pointed to these contradictions and their devastating consequences – often clergymen – continued to be branded ‘moaning minnies’ by true Thatcherites. The journalist Paul Johnson in one of his off-the-cuff diatribes against compassion wrote: ‘It says much for the intellectual bankruptcy of the Church of England that, at such time of crisis [“Black Monday”], the best its senior primate could do was to encourage the destructive British vice of envy … envy is very dear to bishops. It is the dynamic of their economic theology.’ What the much-abused Dr Robert Runcie had done was to suggest that City salaries were too high, a judgement rapidly backed by City firms themselves as they slashed wages and laid off staff. Even as the November 1987 unemployment figures showed a drop of 50,000, a leading City analyst forecast that financial institutions would have to shed 50,000 workers as a consequence of the Crash.
Unrepentant, the clerics stuck to their guns. The then dean of St Paul’s told of a reduction of 1,726 hostel beds in the capital at a time when homelessness was rising fast, and related the story of an acquaintance who had had to give up his bed for a seventy-five-year-old woman whose electricity had been cut off. He added crisply: ‘No doubt those who were reported as speaking of “state junkies” at a recent conference are not aware of the deterioration of services and the suffering of so many in our great cities … It is tragic that when there are many of us whose standard of living is secure … the community, as represented by the government, cannot achieve a more warm-hearted approach to the unfortunates.’ The Bishop of Durham said the Crash had exposed the ‘increasingly dangerous near-nonsense of what are called the global financial services industries’.
The Church itself was making news at the time, with the suicide of the cloistered canon who penned an anonymous attack in Crockford’s accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a wimp. Thanks to this and to a passionate debate about whether active gays should be clergymen, little notice was taken of its leaders’ pronouncements on other matters. But there were surprising noises from different quarters – not least mumblings from the Foreign Secretary, dogged, dependable Geoffrey Howe, in the form of a letter to his constituents. He stressed the ‘social and moral’ context within which market forces should operate. He wrote: ‘We have come a long way over the last eight years, but we still have a long way to go in tackling social tensions, tensions caused by generation gaps, racial differences, class and regional differences.’ This was widely interpreted as muted criticism of Thatcher – a ‘gentle rebuke’, commented the Guardian. [In 1990 Howe, in his speech of resignation from the government, was to light the fuse that ultimately led to Thatcher’s downfall.] Under the headline ‘Not too much social Darwinism in 1988, please’, a leader in the final Sunday Telegraph of 1987 stated: ‘Encouraging the unambitious to struggle is a good thing; but if the ambition is already there, too much encouragement may push it into selfish and anti-social ruthlessness.’ At the top end of society, readers were told, unbridled self-interest ‘has begun to have positively nasty results’. One had to look at the masthead to check which paper one was reading.
The consequences of the narrow pursuit of self-interest – largely in financial terms – continued to exacerbate the already critical situations I report on in this book. At the end of 1987, Sir George Porter, the president of the Royal Society, warned that Britain was doomed to join the ‘third world of science’
. Sir George, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967, said: ‘The time has come to hold the line somewhere, before individual creative science is lost altogether’, adding that the existing loss of young scientists through lack of opportunity was ‘the saddest and most deplorable result of the philosophy of the present time’. The director-general of the Engineering Council asserted that Britain was in danger of running out of qualified engineers. British universities continued to suffer through cuts.
At the same time there were daily stories of crisis in the National Health Service – children dying because of postponed operations; hospital wards being closed down; nurses striking. Notable doctors who had supported Thatcher as recently as the general election presented a petition to Downing Street. The heart of the problem was poor staffing levels caused by inadequate wages. Measures were proposed to give health workers and other essential professionals, like teachers, preferential mortgages so that at least some of them could afford to live in the south-east, where the Crash did nothing to steady the nonsensical rise in house prices.
By the end of 1987 the gap between housing costs in the south and the north was wider than ever. The average semi-detached house in an inner-London borough reached £105,950, while in Doncaster it was £22,850 and Birmingham £32,900. London overtook Paris the most expensive city in Europe for new flats, with prices ranging from £4,178 to £4,873 per square metre: this meant that London had become more costly than traditional high-price cities such as Geneva and Stockholm. Commercial enterprises – unlike public ones – saw the sense and necessity of subsidizing their workers; building societies and banks, for example, paid substantial London bonuses to their staffs.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 44
