Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Although Headingley is remembered as a moment of glorious national triumph, what it really reflected was how low Britain’s morale had sunk. A more self-confident country would hardly have celebrated an unlikely victory in a single Test match as if it were the Battle of Waterloo. Yet after all the dreadful headlines about padlocked factories and smouldering streets, people were desperate for good news. Bloodied but unbowed, Britain had dragged itself off the canvas, and of course the next day’s papers loved it. ‘We need heroes,’ said The Times, ‘and we need the sudden joyous satisfaction of enjoying a prize that we had thought far beyond our grasp. It is because they provided all of these that Ian Botham and Bob Willis have brought a little sunshine far beyond the city of Leeds.’ But the tabloids had eyes only for Botham, a ‘colossal cricketer for whom nothing seems impossible’. Even the typically caustic Jean Rook was beside herself. ‘Normally cricket bores me to the stumps,’ she told her readers. ‘But Ian Botham yanked me out of my armchair like belted wickets … This was the banging, smashing, splintering stuff I’ve waited for what seems a lifetime of TV cricket matches … and never hoped to see.’44

  Headingley was, of course, just one match, and there were still three Tests to go. But when the players reassembled at Edgbaston on 30 July, it was clear that something had changed. The day before, tens of millions had been glued to the Royal Wedding, and as the crowds arrived in suburban Birmingham they were still brimming with patriotic enthusiasm. Once again England started poorly, and by lunchtime on the fourth day, Sunday, Australia needed just 37 runs to win. Then Brearley handed the ball to Botham.

  What followed was the stuff of a Boy’s Own story. With his third ball Botham bowled the Australian wicket-keeper Rodney Marsh, and as the crowd roared, he never looked back. In twenty-eight balls he conceded just one run and took five Australian wickets, an exhibition of concentrated ferocity almost unprecedented in cricketing history. ‘He just charged in and made it happen,’ thought Peter Roebuck, ‘shaping the outcome of the match by the sheer force of his personality.’ Even to his captain, Botham seemed a man possessed, driven as much by his demonic will to win as by the fervent passion of 10,000 spectators. ‘Each time he took a wicket,’ Brearley recalled, ‘his arms reached up, his chest filled, waist drawn in.’ ‘He plucked that game from nowhere,’ agreed his teammate Graham Gooch. ‘He won it with sheer magnetism.’45

  With another improbable victory sealed, the action moved to Old Trafford, and by now the script was almost predictable. England again started poorly, and Botham was caught facing his very first ball. Australia promptly fell apart, Botham and Willis ripping through them once again, and then England’s batsmen came out for their second innings. At first they made little headway. But then came Botham, and his blood was up. After a careful start, he surged into form, smashing 118 runs off just 102 balls, including thirteen fours and six massive sixes, to help England into an impregnable lead. It had become a familiar story: glory from the jaws of ignominy, the crowd a ‘mass of dancing people and waving flags’. ‘Botham’s innings was, of its kind, perhaps the greatest ever played,’ wrote The Times’s John Woodcock two days later. ‘I refuse to believe that a cricket ball has ever been hit with greater power or rarer splendour.’46

  England’s victory at Old Trafford, which ensured they retained the Ashes, cemented Botham’s place in the national imagination. A callow failure only weeks earlier, he was now the Nelson of the cricket field, before whose dauntless courage mere foreigners quailed in terror. One back page hailed ‘BLOCKBUSTER BOTHAM’; another called him ‘Roy of the Rovers … our fairytale champ’, who could produce ‘miracles almost to order’. In fact, Brearley, Willis and the rest had more than played their part, while Botham’s early performances hardly suggested a man who could do no wrong. Yet, in the euphoria of victory, all doubts were swept aside. ‘The Ashes Belong To Ian’, declared one headline. ‘Never in the field of cricket conflict between England and Australia’, began a story in the Express, ‘can one team have owed so much to one man.’ ‘He was the difference,’ agreed the Mirror, ‘a throwback to cricket’s golden age of Grace, Hobbs and Empire.’47

  No English cricketer since the war had inspired such enthusiasm. In the Observer, Hugh McIlvanney suggested that Botham had the unique ability to captivate people who believed that ‘cricket is only slightly less boring than watching celery grow or car bumpers rust’. In a crowded Glasgow pub, McIlvanney watched as all eyes turned to the television when Botham appeared. ‘For a man in cricketing whites to hypnotise such an audience into awed admiration’, he wrote, ‘is a small miracle.’ Yet McIlvanney was not surprised: ‘No one anywhere in contemporary sport more spectacularly channels immense animal vigour and a fierce hunger for winning into an overwhelming effectiveness on the field.’48

  There were downsides to Botham’s heroic status. Some observers thought that after 1981 his boyish self-confidence coarsened into outright hubris. As long as he believed in his own ability, ‘things would inevitably come right in the end’, no matter how badly he had prepared. He remained a supremely gifted player, but as he became distracted by his celebrity off the field, and less inclined to spend time practising, so his form declined. As the sportswriter Simon Barnes puts it: ‘The England team became based around an Inner Ring, with Botham at its heart: Botham, self-justified by his prodigious feats during that unforgettable summer. To be accepted, you had to hate the press, hate practice, enjoy a few beers and what have you, and generally be one hell of a good ol’ boy.’ As a result, Barnes considered the summer of 1981 ‘one of the greatest disasters’ that had ever befallen English cricket.49

  But nobody could have known that at the time. Instead, Botham stood unchallenged as the incarnation of the bulldog spirit, the amateur who hit first and thought later, the hero who waited until things were really desperate before smashing boundary after boundary. The irony was that, at a time when Sebastian Coe and Daley Thompson were conquering the world through meticulous hard work, he was the exact opposite, a throwback to a vanished age. It is hard to imagine him pounding along the beach at St Andrews with Liddell and Abrahams. It is harder still to picture him getting up to run through Sheffield in the snow, or poring over training manuals as the night drew in.

  But perhaps this explains why Botham loomed largest in the national imagination. When he retired in 1993, the journalist Jonathan Margolis wrote that with his raw energy, driving ambition and ‘anti-Establishment, outspoken’ style, he had been the embodiment of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, a ‘new type of Boy’s Own Paper hero – really a Yob’s Own Paper icon’. But he was also a reassuringly nostalgic figure, a rumbustious bruiser who would have been at home in the eighteenth century. ‘In much of what he did, on and off the field, he was excessive,’ admitted the cricket writer Derek Hodgson:

  but Regency England would have recognised him instantly as the man who could ride to hounds from dawn, fight 25 rounds bare-knuckle of an afternoon, dine on a mountain of boiled mutton, roast beef, plum duff and cheddar cheese, washed down by ale and claret, and top it off with a bottle of brandy: a man who proclaimed one Englishman worth 10 scurvy foreigners. For Ian Botham read John Bull.50

  Even at the time, some people found the Botham phenomenon a bit ridiculous. In a mocking article in August 1981, Miles Kington could not resist conflating his heroics at Edgbaston with the scenes at St Paul’s a few days earlier:

  ‘It’s like a fairy tale,’ said the American lady. ‘Only the British can do it this way,’ said the Tokyo Evening News. ‘Es mucho hombre,’ they were saying throughout Latin America. Yes, over 750 million people are thought to have been glued to their sets as Ian Botham single-handed rescued England yet again from disaster. What a man! What a giant! …

  This is the kind of simple but moving ritual that the British still do best. Who can ever forget those images? Botham, leaping high in the air in triumph. Botham, standing silently and reverently in the slips beside Mike Brearley, his father. Botham, a stump held aloft in the fi
nal act …

  It seemed as if the whole population of Birmingham was there to greet their idol. Some had slept out the night before rolled in Union Jacks, some had queued all morning at the local off-licence, but all came together in one vast crowd as they simply but movingly flowed across the field and trampled the pitch underfoot.

  With ‘men like Botham around’, claimed Kington, ‘it shows that Britain cannot yet be counted out’. It was ‘up to Ian now’ to ‘get the economy on a sound footing. But given what he has done already, there’s no reason why he should not do this as well.’51

  It was absurd, of course. Yet, in the summer of 1981, many people wanted to believe it. Perhaps not since the Second World War had there been such a demand for patriotic heroes. ‘Back Flows the Powerful Tide of British Pride’, roared the Express’s George Gale nine days later, claiming that the victories at Headingley and Edgbaston (‘Botham forgot he was British and played to win’) reflected a deeper revival of national self-confidence. Even at this stage, Gale thought the decades of decline were over. ‘Our industrial relations show a very marked improvement. Strikes are fewer. The work force is leaner. The unions are less arrogant. Even the dark cloud of unemployment has its silver lining … Good news keeps breaking in. We cannot quite credit it, but there it is.’

  Even the SAS were in the news again. Among the guests at the Royal Wedding had been the President of the Gambia, Sir Dawda Jawara, who returned home to find that Marxist rebels were holding his wife and children hostage in the capital’s main hospital. Mrs Thatcher duly despatched a three-man SAS team, who disguised themselves as doctors, infiltrated the hospital and rescued the President’s family. To the press, it was yet more proof that when the chips were down, you could always count on Britain. ‘Who needs James Bond and “M” when you’ve got the SAS?’ enthused the Express. ‘Once again Britain’s crack regiment carries out a remarkable rescue operation.’ As usual, the paper noted that the regiment was famous for its ‘total secrecy … Never knowing who is a member adds glamour to the incredible escapes it organises.’ But it could not resist suggesting one name, a man who had already proved himself capable of miracles. ‘Could it be that Ian Botham …?’52

  Part Four

  * * *

  THE BRITISH ARE BACK!

  27

  She Came, She Saw, She Clobbered

  You know, Geoffrey, the trouble with this government is that it isn’t fun any more. I don’t know why we do it.

  Christopher Soames, c. July 1981, quoted in Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (1994)

  YOUNG WOMAN: The things she’s done to people, she must be callous not to see how it’s hurting everyday people, in the family, in the home.

  DAVID DIMBLEBY: What do you think of yourself, for having voted for her?

  YOUNG WOMAN: Pretty dreadful – it’s the worst thing I done, really. I’m never doing that again.

  Young working-class woman interviewed on BBC1’s Panorama, 12 October 1981

  An evening in the summer of 1981, and at 10 Downing Street the phone is ringing. ‘I’ll get it, Denis,’ says a familiar voice, and, pulling off her rubber gloves, Margaret Thatcher opens a kitchen cupboard to reveal an official-looking red phone. ‘Mr Bond on the line, Prime Minister,’ says a patrician voice. ‘Ah, Mr Bond!’ says Mrs Thatcher. ‘I wanted to call you personally to say how pleased we all are that your mission was a success. Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you!’ a voice squawks back – unfortunately, not the voice of Britain’s finest, who is actually enjoying a naked swim with Carole Bouquet, but that of his girlfriend’s parrot. But as Mrs Thatcher’s officials know, she is not easily deterred when in full flow. ‘Don’t thank me, Mr Bond,’ she says earnestly. ‘Your courage and resourcefulness are a credit to the nation. Denis and I’ – and at this point she notices an addled-looking Denis, wine glass and cigarette in hand, reaching into the salad bowl, and gives him a smart slap on the wrist – ‘look forward to meeting you. Meanwhile, if there is anything I can do for you –’ ‘Give us a kiss!’ interrupts the parrot. ‘Give us a kiss!’ A look of surprised, almost coquettish pleasure crosses the Prime Minister’s face. ‘Well, really, Mr Bond,’ she says delightedly, ‘ah, ha, ha!’ ‘I think we’re having a little trouble with the line, madam,’ the official voice says desperately, and at the headquarters of the British Secret Service, the Minister of Defence pulls the plug.1

  Probably not even Mrs Thatcher’s greatest fan would claim that her appearance in For Your Eyes Only, courtesy of the impersonator Janet Brown, ranks among the high points in British cinematic history. Still, it spoke volumes about her impact on the international imagination. Never before had a Prime Minister appeared in a Bond film: sadly, it had never occurred to the producers to have Edward Heath popping up on the train at the end of Live and Let Die (1973). What is really remarkable, though, is that although For Your Eyes Only was released in June 1981, the scene had been shot at the end of 1980, when Mrs Thatcher had been in power for barely eighteen months. At the time, she was still a newcomer on the world stage. But she was a novelty, a sensation, the ‘nation’s most prodigious housewife-superstar’, as the Guardian put it. And as the producers knew, the first woman elected to lead a major Western power would be instantly recognizable, not just to her fellow Britons, but to audiences all over the world.2

  The irony is that at precisely the point when Mrs Thatcher became the unlikeliest Bond girl in history, her domestic popularity had sunk into the abyss. For much of 1981 her Gallup approval rating was about 30 per cent, and in August it fell to just 28 per cent, a nadir matched only by Harold Wilson in 1968. There was some good news: nine out of ten people thought she was a strong personality and spoke her mind, while eight out of ten said she was trying her best and was a good speaker. Yet seven out of ten thought she was divisive, self-centred and ‘not in touch with ordinary people’, and a similar proportion considered her ideas ‘destructive’. As for her party, the Tories’ private polls put their support at about 25 per cent, the lowest figure in the party’s modern history. When Gallup asked which party people expected to win the next election, just 13 per cent of respondents in July 1981 named the Conservatives.3

  No wonder, then, that although Mrs Thatcher never betrayed a hint of strain in public, her closest aides thought she seemed harried. After a Downing Street party that summer, Alan Clark recorded that she seemed ‘a little bit triste and blotchy, which I recognise as being one of her stress symptoms’. Her diary secretary, Caroline Stephens, was ‘so worried about the Prime Minister’s physical and mental exhaustion, harsh public image and alienation from her friends’ that she asked Ronnie Millar to come for lunch, with instructions to cheer her up. Perhaps she should have invited Roger Moore.4

  With the Budget controversy behind her, Mrs Thatcher was hoping for a quieter life. But the next few months were even worse, the events piling up with melodramatic speed. On 9 April, Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The following evening, the first reports of rioting came in from Brixton. In the early hours of 5 May, Sands died in the Maze; on the 8th, Ken Livingstone took control of the Greater London Council. On the 30th, England’s football fans ran amok in the Battle of Basle; on the 31st, some 100,000 people joined the TUC’s March for Jobs in Trafalgar Square. In the background, a grim soundtrack intoned the latest jobless figures, each month’s total worse than the last. Ireland, inflation, unemployment; rioting, fighting, demonstrations: it felt like the Heath years all over again, the government lurching from crisis to crisis, the headlines ever more depressing, the atmosphere ever more conflicted.

  But there was a difference. Even under pressure, Heath’s crew had remained unswervingly loyal. But Mrs Thatcher captained what The Times called ‘the most divided Conservative administration within memory’. And although the Wets had failed to influence Howe’s Budget, there was a sense in the early summer of 1981 that they were, at last, beginning to stir. When, on 17 June, the Cabinet discussed Howe’s latest public spendi
ng plans, Peter Carrington, Francis Pym and Peter Walker joined Jim Prior in opposing more cuts, while Willie Whitelaw even warned of ‘future Brixtons’ unless they turned the economy around. Bernard Ingham told the press that Mrs Thatcher had wiped the floor with them. ‘She came, she saw, she clobbered,’ claimed the Mirror. But her ministers did not see it that way. When Walker addressed businessmen in New York six days later, he went out of his way to dismiss the monetarists, warned that unemployment would breed a generation of criminals, praised the ‘industrial strategy’ of Japan and West Germany and could not bring himself to mention Mrs Thatcher’s name. For perhaps the first time she seemed vulnerable. Perhaps, suggested The Times, she was not such a decisive leader after all. ‘Invective against U-turns’, the paper remarked, ‘is not an adequate substitute for leadership and explanation.’5

  The temperature rose, and things got worse. On the first Friday in July, riots broke out in Southall. Then came Toxteth, and then copycat riots across the country. What on earth was going wrong? What was happening to Britain? The answer, wrote The Times’s David Watt a few days later, was that all this reflected a deep-rooted collapse of political authority. It was hard, he told his readers, ‘to respect a government that is divided and apparently unable to deliver economic success … What we need, and what we have not had for 20 years, is a settled spell of good government and moderate, persuasive political leadership.’6

  His message was obvious. ‘Most of the press, and indeed, most of the Cabinet, have been waiting for “rioting” to follow The Lady’s economic policies,’ grumbled Alan Clark. ‘Now that they have got rioting – though for different reasons – they are delighted to be able to link the two and use it to proselytise their own arguments.’ The situation, he thought, was ‘desperately dangerous … I do not think it is exaggerating to say that if this continues the Government, or at any rate The Lady, could very easily fall … If the disturbances maintain their present pitch she could be forced into consultations with leaders of other parties, followed rapidly by a coalition.’7