To see this merely as an escape from the recession, though, misses the point. For decades, social scientists had argued that Britain was becoming a more private, home-centred society. Under pressure from television, collective institutions of all kinds – pubs, churches, even football clubs – were losing members. A BBC survey in the summer of 1983 found that on weekdays, seven out of ten people spent the evening at home, while six out of ten spent Sundays at home, too. And of course this helps to explain the appeal of that irresistible symbol of individual choice, the video recorder. Take-up was simply extraordinary. In 1978 there were only 100,000 households with video recorders, yet by 1982 there were already more than 2 million. No other country in the world, not even the United States or Japan, had such a high rate of video-recorder ownership.
As cinema owners, restaurateurs and football-club chairmen looked on in horror, therefore, the suburban living room was becoming Britain’s chief cultural marketplace. It was at home that people encountered new ideas; it was at home that they made sense of their country and their place within it; it was at home, tucked up on the sofa with a microwaved lasagne, that they listened to the politicians of the day. And although some critics deplored what they saw as the turn away from public citizenship to private self-indulgence, from the collective ‘we’ to the individualistic ‘I’, most recognized that there was no going back. Soon, predicted The Times, every home would have a ‘high definition television, a video recorder … and a home computer controlling everything’. This, it thought, would make it ‘even more difficult to persuade people to venture away from the home for entertainment. They might even not have to leave home to work.’41
For some commentators, all this meant the death of community. To Jonathan Raban, England seemed ‘withdrawn, preoccupied and inward – a gloomy house, its shutters drawn, its eaves dripping, its fringe of garden posted against trespassers’. But this is easily exaggerated. Instead of reducing people to atomized individuals, social change actually gave rise to new kinds of communities, from computer clubs and caravan parks to Neighbourhood Watch schemes and Dungeons & Dragons clubs. This was not just the age of the rented video and the ready meal: it was the age of ice rinks and bowling alleys, of shopping centres, multiplex cinemas and amusement parks. Far from barricading themselves into their homes, people seem to have been just as neighbourly as they had been beforehand. A survey in 1984 found that an impressive 84 per cent of people thought their neighbours were ‘mainly pleasant’. In 1948, at the supposed high point of collectivism, the corresponding figure had been just 68 per cent. Perhaps the cynical explanation is that in Clement Attlee’s day, people had known their neighbours much better, and therefore liked them much less.42
One of the strangest examples of the way technological change fostered a new kind of community was the craze for citizens’ band radio. Having originated across the Atlantic, CB allowed users to talk to each other on the 27-MHz short-wave radio frequency. In May 1980 there were an estimated 70,000 British users, most of them using rigs fitted under their car dashboards. By the autumn of 1981, The Times even claimed that CB jargon was ‘the fastest-growing foreign language in Britain’. The paper’s reporter, David Hewson, was clearly a bit baffled by it: after driving around London with one enthusiast, he thought the real problem was that ‘after the standard exchange of CB jargon, the British have very little to say over it’. The transmission range was so limited that even the safest topic, the weather, was a waste of time, because ‘if it is raining on your communicant then it is almost certainly raining on you’. The result was endless ‘gaps and uncomfortable pauses’, as if at some disastrous dinner party. If the weather was off limits, what else was there to say?43
For a time, however, CB radio seemed the technology of the future, a ‘people’s radio’ in which, freed from the tyranny of the broadcasters, users would not just make their own content but would find like-minded friends and soulmates. Since a basic set cost just £60 and a car aerial £15, there seemed no reason why the entire population might not become part of a giant social network. Indeed, by November 1981 the newspapers were recording a ‘flood of CB books and magazines’, with some experts predicting as many as 5 million users. But then the bubble burst. By January 1982 The Times was already printing an obituary for the ‘boom that never was’. CB radio, it turned out, appealed to people on long journeys, farmers and the disabled, but most other users soon lost interest. According to a survey for Which?, many found other users more ‘annoying’ than they had expected, while parents were put off by the ‘bad language’.
By the end of 1983, with licence numbers in free-fall, CB already seemed like yesterday’s embarrassing fad. It was, said one report, used by too many ‘irresponsible people, mainly in urban areas, who use bad language, play music and use Channel 9, the emergency only channel, for ordinary conversation’. Not even cutting-edge technology, it turned out, could alter the reality of human nature. Nor, apparently, could it change the national character. ‘I don’t think the British like the idea of matey chats with all and sundry on the air as happened in the United States,’ said one disappointed retailer. ‘People here are more reserved.’44
So what was next? CB might have come to nothing, but the pace of technological change, especially in the home, meant another hi-tech fad was bound to be along soon. In May 1981 an exhibition of ‘homes of the future’, held in Milton Keynes, imagined pyramid-shaped houses, solar panels and an enormous amount of glass. A year later, Milton Keynes hosted an even more impressive vision of the future, with an ‘IT House’ to celebrate the government’s Information Technology Year. The kitchen boasted a computer to organize the household accounts and control the freezer, linked to a bedroom camera for ‘remote’ babysitting. A second computer controlled the temperature and ran the bath, while the lounge had a fax machine and a third home computer with ‘the promise of electronic mail’. There was even a ‘try-it area in the garage’, with electronic instruments and a voice synthesizer. Very soon, predicted the journalist Michael Tracey, ‘homes will themselves become “smart”, monitoring everything that is happening within them and, where necessary, communicating with their owner’. Cities, too, would ‘become “smart”, seeing, understanding and regulating everything that happens within their boundaries, from traffic accidents, to crime, to pollution, to voting’. All this, apparently, by 2001.45
Yet most people’s fantasies were more mundane. Mary Richards probably came close to capturing the national ideal in a letter to Mass Observation in the spring of 1982. What, they had asked, was her dream home?
I don’t like bungalows. The house I would like would be detached with a small garden in front and a little veg garden at the back it would have three bedrooms with fitted cupboards and a tiled bathroom with a shower and a separate WC upstairs.
Downstairs
A tiled fitted kitchen (like lady Diana) come diner.
A lounge and a utility room downstairs, gas central heating, double glazing and a garage. And a swimming pool.
Although the swimming pool was an unusually exotic touch, Mary’s vision was widely shared. One man who undoubtedly understood it was Lawrie Barratt, who had been born in 1927 to a Newcastle power station engineer. After leaving school at 14, Barratt had trained as an accountant. In the early 1950s, married with two young children, he wanted to buy a house, but could not afford the mortgage. So he built his own, using his savings to buy a plot of land, digging at evenings and weekends, and bringing in craftsmen where necessary. The result, a four-bedroom detached cottage, cost him just £1,750 to build (perhaps £114,000 today). But even before he had moved in, it was worth £3,000. Britain had its first Barratt home. By the end of the century there would be at least 200,000 more.46
Decried by his critics as a salesman of cheap nostalgia, Barratt had a good claim to be the man who built modern Britain – the Britain people actually lived in, rather than the one written about by architecture critics. By the end of the 1970s he was the country’s bigge
st house-builder, completing 10,000 houses a year, many of them for first-time buyers. In just ten years, his annual turnover had soared from less than £3 million to a whopping £285 million. Famed for his punishing work ethic, Barratt was virtually a national celebrity: travelling in his celebrated helicopter, he visited two sites a day and aimed to visit each of his 500 sites every month. Yet the ‘Lawrie Barratt’ people thought they were seeing in his ITV adverts was not really Lawrie Barratt at all. For all his success, Barratt was a shy man who avoided the camera. The rugged man in the helicopter was actually the veteran actor Patrick Allen, whose other credits included Dial M for Murder, Where Eagles Dare and – as luck would have it – Who Dares Wins. Allen was also the voice of the government’s Protect and Survive films, designed to be broadcast in the event of a Third World War. So if the bomb had dropped, people might have been reassured to find that the man telling them how to build their fallout refuge was the same man who had sold them their 95 per cent mortgage.47
In the summer of 1983, Barratt set an all-time national record, completing some 16,500 new homes in almost every corner of the country. Already a backlash was underway: when World in Action attacked his timber-frame construction system, the applause from architecture critics echoed across the land. But there were good reasons for Barratt’s success. For one thing, his business model – cheap mass production, close attention to social surveys and extremely aggressive marketing – clearly worked. He was a brilliant salesman, using gleaming show-homes and glossy brochures to reel customers in, and offering to sort out their fees and mortgages. If necessary, he would even buy your old home and sell it for you. And once he had you, he meant to keep you. After a cheap starter home, a young couple might move up to a three-bedroom semi. Then, as their children grew up, they might aspire to a detached house with a double garage and large garden. There was a Barratt home for everybody. The only exception, ironically, was Barratt himself. He had long since moved into an eighteenth-century mansion in rural Northumberland.48
By the early 1980s the look of Barratt’s houses had become a national cliché. Most of his developments were unashamedly suburban, in quiet cul-de-sacs on the fringes of thriving towns, with bright flags to lure the punters. Critics winced at the pantiled roofs, the mock-Georgian doors and the ‘Tudorbethan’ façades. In reality, this was merely the mass production of a suburban style that had been popular for at least sixty years. But the familiarity of the style was all part of the appeal. To lower-middle-class first-time buyers, Barratt’s houses were precisely what houses ought to look like. They were new, but they were old. They were recognizably modern, but they were reassuringly nostalgic. They were satisfyingly cheap, but they had a touch of gentility. They were houses for people who were moving up and getting on. They were homes for people who thought the country was in a bit of a mess, but were themselves doing better than ever; people who were worried about schools, crime, inflation and debt, but were planning their annual foreign holiday, saving up for their first video recorders and eagerly devouring the latest Jeffrey Archer. They were, in a word, aspirational.49
While admirers saw Barratt’s homes as the embodiment of the new opportunities of the age, his critics saw them in a very different light. After inspecting an executive house at the Dulwich Park development in south London, the Observer’s architecture writer, Stephen Gardiner, could scarcely contain his horror. If Barratt’s mock-Georgian houses caught on, he wrote, they would ‘turn the clock right back’ and mark the ‘dead-end of the line for British architecture’. But they did catch on, because Barratt’s vision chimed perfectly with the values of hundreds of thousands of homebuyers. A very good example was one married couple, not far from retirement, who were looking to move out of central London and fancied a home near the Dulwich and Sydenham golf course. They had previously looked at a more expensive house in Regent’s Park, but were worried about taking on so much debt. Visiting Dulwich one day at Easter 1985, they went to look at Barratt’s new gated development. By the summer, they had spent £350,000 on a five-bedroom executive house.
‘For the first time in my life, I’ve got the kitchen I always wanted,’ Margaret Thatcher said happily. It was going to be a ‘country kitchen’, she explained, in keeping with the fashionable style of the day. As it turned out, though, Lawrie Barratt’s political heroine never spent more than a night or two there. A workaholic to the last, she could never tear herself away from her office. But with its blend of nostalgic pastiche and suburban populism, the reassurance of tradition and the comforts of modernity, 11 Hambledon Place could hardly have been a more fitting symbol of her new Britain.50
2
The Line of Duty
I am a very emotional person. I am a romantic, you know, at heart, and believe wholeheartedly in love. Anyone who doesn’t must be terribly unhappy.
Margaret Thatcher, interviewed in Woman’s World, October 1978
Sometimes I think Mrs Thatcher is a nice kind sort of woman. Then the next day I see her on television and she frightens me rigid. She has got eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice like a gentle person. It is a bit confusing.
Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982)
It had just gone four in the afternoon of Friday 4 May 1979 when, to cheers and boos from the waiting crowd, a black Rover turned off Whitehall and into Downing Street. ‘Good afternoon, Prime Minister,’ shouted a BBC reporter, as the first woman to follow in the footsteps of Sir Robert Walpole climbed out of the car and waved to the crowd. As Margaret Thatcher stepped towards the waiting journalists, a group of burly policemen moved protectively around her. Not for the last time, however, she seemed almost oblivious of her surroundings, her attention fixed on the cameras.
‘How do you feel at this moment?’ asked the man from the BBC. ‘Very excited, very aware of the responsibilities,’ she said softly, almost humbly:
Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to form a new administration and I have accepted.
It is, of course, the greatest honour that can come to any citizen in a democracy. I know full well the responsibilities that await me as I enter the door of Number 10 and I’ll strive unceasingly to try to fulfil the trust and confidence that the British people have placed in me and the things in which I believe.
And I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi, which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment:
‘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.’
By now she was looking right into the camera, her voice gentler than ever, her gaze almost imploring:
And to all the British people – howsoever they voted – may I say this. Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country of which we’re so proud to be a part.
And finally, finally, one last thing: in the words of Airey Neave, whom we had hoped to bring here with us, ‘There is now work to be done.’1
Never had any Prime Minister made such a dramatic entrance. It was pure political theatre, meticulously scripted by Mrs Thatcher’s speechwriter, the playwright Ronald Millar. Not wanting to tempt fate, Millar had kept the draft of her speech to himself until the small hours of the morning, when the result was certain. ‘The lady rarely showed her deep feelings,’ he later recalled, ‘but this, on a night of high tension and the constant switchback of emotion, proved too much. Her eyes swam. She blew her nose.’ Yet as a much more cautious politician than many people realized, Mrs Thatcher hesitated. A few hours later, she told Millar that she was considering ditching the prayer. It might be controversial, she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Millar asked. ‘Churchill spent half his life being controversial and much of what he said is remembered whether people agreed with it at the time or not.’ At that, ‘she brightened visibly’. As Millar knew, even the slightest me
ntion of Churchill was usually enough to carry the day.2
Not everybody appreciated Mrs Thatcher’s words on the threshold of Number 10. Behind the heavy black door, her adviser Michael Dobbs was waiting with the civil servants to applaud her into the building. Now, listening from inside, he thought she had ‘gone mad’. Indeed, even at the time there were plenty of people who found her pious promises almost comically insincere. But her theatrical delivery betrayed none of the doubts she had entertained only hours earlier. And when she stepped through the doorway, accompanied by the loyal Denis, she seemed supremely collected, the picture of serene self-confidence. When the introductions were over, her new Principal Private Secretary, Ken Stowe, showed her into the Cabinet Room, where a huge stack of briefing documents awaited her. And only then did she show a hint of uncertainty. ‘Ken,’ the new Prime Minister asked, ‘what do I do now?’3
One of the first things people noticed about Margaret Thatcher was her voice. Politicians’ voices are central to their public image, from Harold Macmillan’s languid drawl and Harold Wilson’s Yorkshire vowels to Edward Heath’s artificial drone and Jim Callaghan’s reassuring burr. Mrs Thatcher’s voice, like Heath’s, was a testament to ambition and self-improvement. When she won the Conservative leadership in February 1975 it was widely considered high-pitched and condescending, the cut-glass voice of a moneyed Home Counties housewife. Her public relations guru, Gordon Reece, famously advised her to drop a semitone, even hiring a voice coach from the National Theatre to help her sound ‘sexy, confidential and reasonable’. But although she managed to lower it and slow it down, she never pleased everyone.
‘When she talks to you on the telly you feel about five years old,’ one Huddersfield woman remarked during the election campaign. ‘She talks to me,’ said the Mirror’s Keith Waterhouse, ‘as if my dog has just died.’ Indeed, before the election the wet-fish merchant Henry Root was even motivated to send her a word of advice. ‘In the coming campaign, don’t worry about your voice,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t listen to people who say you sound like a suburban estate agent’s wife. What’s wrong with suburban estate agents? They have a vote!’fn14
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