by Mark Colvin
We drove back to the ABC bureau at 54 Portland Place and I filed the story for ABC Radio News and PM, so the night had not been entirely wasted, but the loss of that TV story remains one of the most frustrating experiences of my reporting career. It underlined that old journalistic truism: you can have the world’s greatest scoop, but it’s not even a story unless you can meet your deadline.
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In 1980, my father was fifty-eight, past the official retirement age for SIS/MI6 officers, and the end of his Washington posting was the end of his official career. While in the US capital he had, however, got to know the chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller, who appointed him as his personal envoy, based in Hong Kong. Rockefeller had been a founding member of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime American intelligence organisation that laid the foundations for the CIA. Those connections are never entirely broken, so I’ve always assumed that Dad’s relationship with Rockefeller was intelligence-related in some way. This new position—vice president, international, Asia, Chase Manhattan Bank—gave Dad access to presidents and prime ministers in a wide arc from Delhi to Manila. He rang me one day from Islamabad, where he had been for a week. ‘What’s it like?’ I asked. ‘Dry,’ was the answer. ‘I haven’t been sober this long since 1945.’
I have little doubt that my father’s reports to Rockefeller revolved around political intelligence and analysis, though probably not of the covert kind. I suspect, too, that much of what he wrote for Chase Manhattan also found its way back to Century House in London. After Dad died, I became aware from various bits of correspondence that the SIS has a system of ‘aftercare’ whereby what is officially the pensions department keeps in regular contact with ex-officers. No doubt this ensures continuing adherence to the Official Secrets Act, but it can also be useful cover for continuing ‘consultancy’ work for the service. Later in life, when my father published his memoir, Twice around the World, it was heavily vetted by his former employers, and he made little secret to me of the fact that he was in occasional touch with his old workplace. At Chase Manhattan, though he would remain a Cold Warrior at heart, I think his actual war—in terms of spook operations on the ground—was over.
So I think of the 1980s as the time when my father stopped fighting the Cold War and I started covering it. For the next few years, everything else in my professional career, from British politics to the historic Reykjavik, Iceland meeting which led to the first de-escalation of the nuclear arms race in Europe in 1987, would be overshadowed by it.
It’s in the nature of history that events often appear inevitable in retrospect. But when you live through an era, not only does the future look unpredictable at the time, you can sometimes see more clearly later where the hinge-points were, and how easily things might have gone a different way. So it was with what we now remember as Thatcherism, or Thatcherism/Reaganism as it came to be seen in terms of global politics. We tend to see it now as progressing ineluctably through the 1980s to an inescapable conclusion: the triumph of Western democracy over international communism, the break-up of the Soviet Bloc and the splintering of the Soviet Union itself. But in practice, the survival of a political philosophy based on the economic ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman was much more precarious at the time.
In the USA, Ronald Reagan had a good chance to win the November 1980 presidential election, but it was the embassy hostage crisis, and particularly the disastrous rescue attempt I witnessed from Tehran, that sealed Jimmy Carter’s fate and ensured that Republicans would remain in the White House for the next twelve years. In London, too, Thatcher’s future was by no means certain. From reporting on her almost daily, I recall her first years in office as a constant battle for power both inside and outside her government. It was not merely a battle played out in terms of opinion-poll popularity, but a struggle for the soul of her own Tory Party.
Margaret Thatcher was a truly remarkable politician: she had to be, because she rose to head a party that was deeply resistant to her, not only because of her gender but her class as well. She supplanted a leader, Edward Heath, who refused to accept defeat, remaining instead on the backbenches in the long and forlorn hope that the Conservatives would see the error of their ways—though in reality, Heath had few friends and little support. But he was not really at the centre of Thatcher’s problem as party leader. What she perceived was a group of ‘enemies inside the gate’, members of her own Cabinet who she saw as insufficiently tough, insufficiently loyal, and insufficiently prepared to take the hard lines she was certain were essential to reform a country in crisis. She called them ‘The Wets’, and divided her inner circle up in terms of absolutes. ‘Is he one of us?’ was the question she constantly asked, so often in fact that her early biographer, Hugo Young, made One of Us the title of his book.
Hanging around the periphery of the Westminster political scene as a reporter, you got a flavour of the feeling inside the government from some of the nicknames. Many originated either from the backbencher Julian Critchley or the feline Arts Minister Norman St John Stevas, a Wet himself in social matters, but a loyal Thatcherite in Cabinet and on economic matters. Borrowing from the formal title for the female head of state of Swaziland, they called Thatcher ‘The Great She-Elephant’. Lifting directly from John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories, then hugely popular on TV, they called her ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’—itself a borrowing from the colonial-era adventure writer H Rider Haggard. And perhaps most percipiently, St John Stevas noted that her most frequently used phrase in Cabinet was ‘There Is No Alternative’, thus the acronym ‘TINA’.
The government leaked quite a lot in the early years, with most of the leaks coming from frustrated Wets. Even at the time, it seemed pretty clear—and many subsequent annual releases of Cabinet papers have confirmed it—that Thatcher’s reaction to resistance was simply to redouble her determination. The Civil Service, as well as her colleagues, were taken by the scruff of the neck and given a long hard shake. Her handwritten notes and marginalia, to heads of department and ministers alike, were full of absolutes: ‘ridiculous’, ‘too woolly’, ‘culpable inefficiency’. As St John Stevas wrote in his book The Two Cities in 1984, she saw ‘everything in black and white [but] the universe I inhabit is made up of many shades of grey’.
Obviously, part of the journalist’s job was interviewing ministers when you could, and when the tape recorder was switched off, some of them would give you hints and more of this sort of thing—strictly off the record. But two things became clearer in these encounters. One was that the Wets were also mostly, in British terms, ‘toffs’. They included notably Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, a hereditary peer, and Sir Ian Gilmour, a hereditary baronet. They had made their careers in the tradition of noblesse-oblige Toryism, defined by patronage and continuous negotiation and compromise: ‘It is the business of the wealthy man/To give employment to the artisan’, as Hilaire Belloc once wrote. It had probably reached its apogee in the prime ministership two decades earlier of Harold Macmillan. The Wets were ill-prepared for the absolutes of monetarist policy, and sometimes shocked and squeamish about the human cost in terms of poverty and unemployment.
In February 1980, just after I arrived in London, Gilmour openly defied Thatcher and her coterie in a speech in Cambridge: ‘economic liberalism à la Professor Hayek, because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of community, is not a safeguard of political freedom but a threat to it’. ‘A sense of community’: Mrs Thatcher, of course, famously said later, ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’
And secondly, the Wets were ranged against single-minded people: not just the prime minister herself, but also her closest political friend and adviser, Sir Keith Joseph, an evangelical believer in Friedmanite, small-government, free-market conservatism. Another rising star in the party was the equally uncompromising Norman Tebbit, dubbed the ‘Chingford Skinhead’, also once labelled by an opp
onent as a ‘semi-house-trained polecat’. Tebbit said later that the insult ‘gave my political career a tremendous lift’, and literally wore it as a badge of honour by incorporating a polecat in his coat-of-arms when he entered the House of Lords.
Margaret Thatcher was in her way a revolutionary, and a rule of revolutions, even bloodless ones, is that absolutists usually prevail over centrists. It took a few years, but gradually almost all the Wets who dared stand in her way were eliminated.
Out in the real world, thousands of British firms went broke in 1980—more than 3000 in the first six months alone. Their failures had sentimental as well as monetary impacts. Among the hard-hit were the makers of such staples of an English (or Australian) childhood as Meccano construction sets, Dinky Toys, Hornby trains, Scalextric cars, Sindy dolls and Matchbox toys. Everyone who grew up in the 50s and 60s, myself included, had played with at least some of these. Other companies thrived, however, notably the big accounting firms that scooped up bankruptcy business when Thatcher privatised the work of what had been the government-owned Official Receiver.
Apart from bulldozing the opposition within her own party, Margaret Thatcher was also fortunate in whom she faced across the despatch box in the House of Commons. Like Gough Whitlam in Australia in 1975, Jim Callaghan had stayed on as the UK Opposition leader after his election defeat in 1979. Unlike Gough, he had the sense not to fight another election, using the time instead to prepare the party for an orderly succession to his colleague, Denis Healey. That precipitated a leadership election, the result of which was to make Thatcher’s job much easier.
Labour was riven by a deep Left/Right split, much of which centred on the question of unilateral nuclear disarmament. It was deeply evident when I travelled to Blackpool, that garish northern seaside town with its mini Eiffel Tower and fairy lights, to cover Labour’s annual conference. It was loud, unruly, chaotic. Labour was very slowly beginning to understand that large parts of the party had been taken over by ‘entryist’ Trotskyites called the Militant Tendency. At their height, the Militants would go on to control (disastrously) local government in the major city of Liverpool, but for now, they were just part of the ‘hard Left’, which was clearly out to do everything possible to disrupt Callaghan’s succession plan. Their hero was Tony Benn, who had made an interesting transition towards their end of the political spectrum since being Harold Wilson’s technology minister in the 1960s. They loathed Healey, who had been defence secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, and who was implacably opposed to unilateralism in foreign policy. For me, the complete inability of the party leadership to control events at Blackpool was an extraordinary window into the state of Labour.
Within weeks, deals done behind the scenes at that conference in Blackpool fed into the mess of the leadership contest. Denis Healey was the clear favourite over the Left’s Michael Foot in the first round, but it was a four-cornered battle, and most of the votes of the men who came in third and fourth, John Silkin and Peter Shore, transferred to Foot.
A lot is written about journalistic bias, and most of what’s said usually focuses on whether we’re on the Right or Left. My own experience is that journalists’ strongest bias is usually towards drama, character and colour. Denis Healey, whom I interviewed a few times down the years, remains one of my favourite politicians, and I’ve always regarded him as potentially one of the best prime ministers Britain never had. Healey possessed a near-Keatingesque turn of phrase—famously, for instance, describing an attack by Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe as ‘like being savaged by a dead sheep’—he was combative and powerful in argument, and, as a convinced ex-communist himself, tough in his determination to keep at bay the forces of the Leninist and Trotskyist Left. It was Healey who defined the difference between politicians with and without what he called a ‘hinterland’, by which he meant a breadth of interests and activities outside politics. His own hinterland was broad. Widely and deeply read, he was also a talented photographer, easily good enough to have gone professional in another life.
At sixty-seven, blind in one eye and walking with a stick, Michael Foot also had undeniable hinterland. For decades he had been one of the intellectual giants of his party. A distinguished historian and the author in 1940 of Guilty Men, a coruscating attack on those who’d appeased Hitler, Foot was personally a well-liked man, with friends and admirers across the political spectrum. His own politics were uncompromisingly of the Left, making him the ideal candidate for those motivated by rage at the growing damage of Thatcherism, but definitely not for those Labour would need to win back the broad centre of British politics. He was also completely unsuited to the needs of a leader in the era of modern broadcast journalism, with his duffel coat and dishevelled appearance making him less than telegenic. I found from painful experience that his rambling delivery, characterised by strange mid-sentence pauses, made him extremely difficult to cut. I’ve never been a devotee of ‘sound-bite journalism’, but Michael Foot was almost impossible to use in a Radio Current Affairs piece, let alone a short news bulletin insert.
In Cold War terms, Healey’s leadership would have meant Thatcher facing an opponent strongly committed to Britain’s defence, including the nuclear deterrent. Instead, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition was an elderly, rambling member of the London intelligentsia whom the tabloids labelled ‘Worzel Gummidge’, after a talking scarecrow in a children’s book and TV series. Despite this, the survival of Thatcherism was still not assured. Thatcher’s government was determined all right, but that determination was deeply divisive. I saw the results of that resolve never to take a backward step most vividly in the case of the Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands.
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In early May 1981, as Bobby Sands was dying, Les Seymour and I flew to Belfast. We had an arrangement to share footage with NZBC, so we were working alongside their reporter, Peter Newport, a funny, energetic, spirited companion with whom we already had an excellent relationship.
Belfast was exceptionally tense: rioting had already begun and would escalate over the next few days. The leader of the Long Kesh Prison strike, Sands had also been elected, from inside jail, to a sudden vacancy in the House of Commons caused by the heart attack and death of the MP for the border seat of Fermanagh & South Tyrone, a long-time Republican stronghold. It was a seat Sands would never take up. His entire campaign centred on the demand that IRA members like him should be regarded as political prisoners. Margaret Thatcher’s view was equally adamant: Sands was a convicted criminal and a senior member of an organisation dedicated to killing others. There was no compromise, and Sands died an awful death, after sixty-six days on hunger strike, on 5 May.
Covering the rioting could be fraught, particularly as a couple of French photographers had been caught paying kids to throw stones at the police. You were in double jeopardy. On one side, Republicans who, attacking first and asking questions later, tended to assume you were the hated British ‘Mainland’ TV. On the other, the police and the British Army, who now regarded the media with deep suspicion. Rocks and Molotov cocktails on one side, rubber bullets and even live rounds on the other. I remember one nervous half-hour, about a hundred metres from the bottom of Falls Road, keeping watch while one of us changed a punctured tyre on the rented car. Fortunately, we got clear before the conflict got too close.
One thing that was very clear was that the city was absolutely overwhelmed by reporters and news crews. Their usual haunt, the Europa Hotel, had often in the past been a target for riots and bombs, and nobody much liked it anyway, but now it was completely booked out. We ended up at a country hotel about ten minutes out of town.
On the day before the funeral, we’d been among many crews filming on the Twinbrook Housing Estate where Sands’ parents lived—there were long queues of supporters lined up outside to pay their respects. We had to plan the next day’s coverage of the funeral itself. These were still the days before easy electronic access to shared or agency footage: we had to get all the pi
ctures ourselves. We got up early and arrived outside the Sands’ house at sunrise. Ours was the first or second car there, so we parked right across the street and put the tripod on the roof. The plan was that the coffin would be carried up the road mid-morning for a church funeral, then the burial itself would be in the afternoon. It was bright but cold, and Bobby Sands’ mother came over to ask us in for a cup of tea. She wouldn’t accept our protestations that we wouldn’t like to impose, so at about 7 that morning I found myself sitting on a sofa in the Sands’ front room, facing the open casket. He was arrayed like a saint in the coffin, his hands clasped on his chest by the embalmer in an attitude of prayer. He was so thin that, as the rising sun shone on to them through the front window, his hands became translucent. It was like looking at a skeleton.
A really big international press pack is not an edifying sight. The scene as the coffin was carried out of the house, placed in the hearse and driven to the church was more like a rolling scrum than a funeral procession. Photographers and camera operators with sharp elbows were jostling for position. Many had stepladders or were standing on boxes, but some were knocked over. Our decision to set up early on the roof of the car proved prescient, as we had good, clear shots of the entire chain of events, but we were worried about what would happen at the burial that afternoon, so the next thing to do was buy our own stepladder. About five hardware stores had sold out, after what the shopkeepers thought was an inexplicable run on the things, but we eventually found one and returned to the hotel to assemble the footage for the first half of our story. Eating a sandwich in the sun, we saw an odd-looking group at the end of the lawn, engaged in some sort of sporting contest. Who were they, we asked? ‘The Northern Ireland gumboot-throwing association,’ we were told, ‘holding their annual championships.’ A quarter of an hour away, central Belfast was practically at war. Here, they were chucking rubber boots about for fun.
