Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The rising popularity of shopping centres, especially malls such as Dudley’s Merry Hill or Gateshead’s Metro Centre, established on former industrial sites that had been designated as Enterprise Zones, posed a formidable challenge to Britain’s retailers. Ever since Alan Sainsbury had pioneered ‘Q-less’ shopping in 1950, the pace of change had been set by Britain’s supermarkets. Thirty years later, these temples to the affluent society had become part of the fabric of everyday life, a weekly destination for rich and poor alike. Like other post-war institutions, though, supermarkets were changing. Originally they had cultivated an image of industrialized, mass-produced homogeneity. But by the beginning of the 1980s, very few people still saw frozen fish fingers as the height of modernity. As one report noted in March 1981, aspirational shoppers no longer wanted mass-produced sliced white loaves and square slices of ham in plastic packages. They wanted ‘real’ bread produced in an ‘in-store bakery’ and ‘real’ meat ‘prepared by staff in striped aprons, visibly sawing and chopping in the background’.21

  In effect, this meant that supermarkets were not merely usurping high-street greengrocers, they were passing themselves off as butchers and bakers, too. Once again Sainsbury’s – ‘the country’s biggest wine merchant, biggest butcher, biggest greengrocer’, according to the Guardian – was in the vanguard. The supermarket chain had weathered the recession better than any of its rivals, largely because its stores were concentrated in the south of England. There was only one Sainsbury’s in Wales, and none at all north of Leeds. The chain’s bosses, however, like those of its competitors, were conscious that customers’ habits were changing. Crucially, people no longer walked to the shops; they drove. Customers’ single biggest grievance, executives admitted, was the lack of car parking, so they planned to open new branches only where parking was readily available.

  What people bought, too, was changing. With customers demanding more obviously ‘worthy’ food, Sainsbury’s was now pushing ‘muesli and yoghourt, wholemeal bread and skimmed milk’. With more people living alone and old-fashioned family meals in decline, meanwhile, it was stocking more ‘sandwich fillings, sliced brown bread, small pork pies’ and ‘individual servings of chocolate mousse or ice cream’. Above all, it was seriously worried by the rise of Marks & Spencer, which, thanks partly to its chicken Kiev, was positioning itself as the fashionable destination for middle-class shoppers who wanted both convenience and quality.

  So when, in February 1982, the biggest new Sainsbury’s for years opened in Nine Elms, south London, its management trumpeted its ‘50 varieties of fresh fish’, ‘60 different types of bread’ and even its ‘fresh orange juice … squeezed and bottled under customers’ eyes’. It clearly worked. By late 1983 Sainsbury’s customer base had grown by almost half again in just five years, while sales had doubled and profits were up by a staggering 220 per cent – and this despite the recession. The chain was now so popular, remarked The Times, that it need ‘never invest in another newspaper advertisement or TV commercial. Britain’s leading food retailer has such a high reputation for quality and value that its most vocal salesmen are its customers.’22

  For every supermarket or shopping centre that succeeded, however, there were dozens of independent, family-run shops that suffered. Thanks to the ruthless expansion of the supermarket chains, almost half of Britain’s grocer’s shops had closed in the 1970s, and few of the survivors made it to the end of the next decade. Chain stores were the future: as Margaret Bradshaw reported to Mass Observation in the spring of 1981, two of her local shops, a DIY store and a decorating shop, had just closed down. The culprit was ‘the large new Sainsbury Home Care shop at Croydon [actually the first Homebase in the country]. They seem to undercut considerably and many young folk who are doing home improvements all the time are going there.’

  Even the grandest names were vulnerable to the tides of history. In London, the Bayswater department store Whiteley’s, which had first opened in 1911, closed its doors in September 1981. The Swan & Edgar store, founded in the early 1800s, once famous for its aristocratic customers and grand Piccadilly Circus façade, disappeared behind ‘To Let’ signs a few months later. And when the Guardian sent a reporter to Oxford Street’s art deco Bourne & Hollingsworth store in April 1982, she painted a thoroughly depressing picture. Venturing upstairs on the ‘rickety, ancient wooden escalator’, she found the upper floors empty of customers, despite the notices promising ‘fantastic’, ‘amazing’ and ‘unrepeatable’ bargains. ‘There just isn’t the supply and demand any more for a store of this size,’ the manager said sadly. Within a few years, it was as if the store had never existed.23

  The first weeks of 1982 brought more snow, more travel chaos and more miserable headlines. With temperatures dipping well below freezing, major roads were closed, trains and flights cancelled and thousands of people trapped far from home. In South Wales, some 500 men were even snowed in at the Port Talbot steelworks. ‘Going to school with the children proved almost impossible,’ wrote Carol Daniel in Romford. ‘Many babies in pushchairs were crying with the cold.’ In Lambeth, Margaret Bradshaw lamented that the roads were so icy that one friend had slipped and broken his wrist, another had broken her arm, a third had badly bruised her leg, a fourth had landed ‘on her face and grazed it badly’ and, to cap it all, a fifth had fallen, suffered a heart attack and died. ‘Suddenly, the weather isn’t funny any more,’ said the Mirror. ‘It is no longer a case of grit and bear it … Locally and nationally, the expensive consequences of the blizzards will be with us for a long time. Unemployment will get even worse. Industry will pay a high price.’ Perhaps it was no wonder that the first new number one of the year, topping the chart on 16 January, was Bucks Fizz’s whimsical ‘The Land of Make Believe’. With the roads blocked by snow, the prospects so bleak and the credit card bills looming, make-believe had rarely seemed so appealing.24

  For Mrs Thatcher, it was a grim start to the year. As she well knew, the weather matters in politics. Perhaps remembering how Jim Callaghan had misjudged the public mood during the Winter of Discontent, Bernard Ingham urged her to ‘dispel the gloom and accentuate the positive’, because ‘the British public will want to hear a calm, cool, collected Prime Minister who is manifestly in control’. She did her best, trying hard to sound upbeat in her interviews to welcome the New Year. There was, she insisted, ‘much more hope ahead this coming year than there has been at the depth of [the] world recession … I think we are through the worst.’25

  In broad economic terms she was right. The recession was over, the economy was growing, productivity was improving and profits were rising. But the bad news kept coming. On 26 January, official figures showed that unemployment had reached the dreaded milestone of 3 million. In the Commons, Labour’s Eric Varley bitterly recalled Mrs Thatcher’s prayer on her first day at Number 10, wondering ‘what St Francis would have said about 3 million unemployed’. The furious Dennis Skinner, meanwhile, told the ‘Westminster Ripper’ that ‘she and the Government have created more havoc in the British economy than the German High Command in the whole of the last war’.

  ‘WASTE OF THE MILLIONS’, read the headline in the next day’s Mirror, appalled not just by the figures, but by the fact that people seemed to be getting used to them:

  Three million unemployed. Shocking? Yes, but it is failing to shock. Intolerable? Yes, but it is being tolerated. Unacceptable? Yes, but it is being accepted.

  The senses are dulled by years of economic failure …

  Mrs Thatcher says the Government deplores the tragedy of unemployment, as if it were nothing to do with her. Yet it has much more than doubled since she was elected …

  We are wasting the talents of three million people. We are wasting money spent on keeping them out of work. We are wasting the future. We are wasting the nation.

  Yet still unemployment kept rising. By July it had reached almost 3.2 million, some 304,000 of them school-leavers. That summer, later remembered as the summer of victory, hal
f of all youngsters leaving school walked straight on to the dole queue.26

  By now even many of Mrs Thatcher’s supporters conceded that her economic offensive had come at a punishing cost. Writing in the Journal of Economic Affairs, the monetarist David Laidler admitted that the experiment in controlling the money supply had been ‘clumsy to the point of incompetence’, and claimed they should have adopted Monetary Base Control instead. The great guru of monetarist theory, Milton Friedman, seemed to agree with him. Britain’s economic performance under Mrs Thatcher, Friedman told the BBC in February 1982, had been ‘terrible’. Her only success, he thought, was in cutting inflation. Not only had she failed to bring taxes down, she had failed to cut government spending and failed to roll back state interference in the economy. So even now Britain’s economy was ‘desperately sick … I don’t see how you can use any other term.’

  With unemployment at 3 million, Trog could not resist looking back to the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster (Observer, 31 January 1982). Here the glowering Norman Tebbit, complete with bike, makes a few tweaks to the message.

  Unlike some of Mrs Thatcher’s critics, though, Friedman maintained that things could yet improve. The shock to British business, he conceded, had been ‘too costly’, but the economy would see the benefits eventually. And he still believed Mrs Thatcher and her team were the only people who could turn Britain around. Indeed, he ‘would not be surprised if, in the next two or three years, Britain experienced a rather significant revival’.27

  Whether Mrs Thatcher would still be in Downing Street to see it, however, remained very uncertain. ‘The Conservative Party faces grimmer prospects than at any time since the end of the second world war,’ began a memorandum from her Minister of Agriculture, Peter Walker, in mid-February. ‘We are presiding over 3 million unemployed and, now, falling living standards for those still at work. We are confronted with the emergence of the SDP/Liberal alliance, the most ominous third-party threat in modern times. The potential for an electoral disaster for the Conservatives is clear.’ Walker’s suggestions included pumping money into the economy and bringing back incomes policies, neither of which was remotely likely. But he was not alone in his pessimism about the next election. In political and academic circles, the general consensus was that it would probably produce a hung parliament, leaving the Alliance as coalition kingmakers. That same month, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies, Alfred Sherman, warned the Prime Minister that he and his colleagues could only envisage a Tory majority if there were ‘several major changes in the situation’. The ‘most likely outcome’, he thought, was ‘a parliament where the Alliance holds the balance, one way or the other’, so she should start thinking about coalition talks.28

  One bit of good news for Mrs Thatcher was that talk of mass Tory defections to the SDP had at last died down, while Heath and Gilmour had temporarily retreated into the shadows. But if things went badly in 1982, they were bound to be back. And while the atmosphere in Number 10 lightened a little with the departure of the perennially disgruntled John Hosykns, who left with a knighthood to run the Institute of Directors, his replacement was astonished to find things so gloomy. The son of a baronet, educated at Eton and Oxford, the former Spectator journalist Ferdinand Mount came from an impeccable Tory background. Although he found Mrs Thatcher’s radicalism invigorating, his languid scepticism felt very different from Hoskyns’s apocalyptic urgency.

  But when Mount toured Whitehall to talk to Mrs Thatcher’s ministers, he was shocked by the sense of ‘pessimism and sloth’. ‘Only Kenneth Baker and Michael Heseltine’, he remembered, ‘showed any appreciable bounce.’ But even Baker’s bounce only went so high. A few months earlier, the technology minister had organized a sweepstake on the result of the next general election, the other contestants including young bloods such as Chris Patten and William Waldegrave. Mount predicted that the Conservatives would win 290 seats, Labour 270 and the Alliance eighty, which would mean a hung parliament. Later, he was amazed to learn that, of all the forecasts, his had been the most optimistic.29

  Almost unnoticed amid the headlines about the big freeze, however, there had been a subtle change in the political temperature. In the Conservatives’ private polls, their support had reached an all-time low of 23 per cent in early December. But then they began to recover. In early January they were back up to 25½ per cent, and by late January they had regained the dizzy heights of 30 per cent. Of course this was still pretty dire; even so, the momentum had definitely shifted. Mrs Thatcher’s personal approval rating had risen, too, up from 18 per cent in December to 33 per cent by late January. Most striking of all, though, was the decline of the SDP, who – without doing anything wrong – were losing supporters by the week. In early December, they had been on 38 per cent, with the Liberals on 13½ per cent. But while the Liberals’ backing held up, the SDP fell to 25 per cent by early January and were down to just 21½ per cent by mid-February. Even Mrs Thatcher’s private pollsters found this puzzling, but the explanation is obvious. Despite all the hyperbole, the Gang of Four’s support had always been soft. Now that their novelty value had worn off, voters were drifting back to their old haunts. And this, perhaps more than anything that happened in the South Atlantic, was the key to Mrs Thatcher’s electoral recovery.30

  ‘Take a sniff at the air this morning,’ began a leader in the Sunday Express on 6 March:

  No matter what the weather is like there will be a different tang about it.

  From the gloom of winter there is emerging a whole new cycle of life.

  Suddenly there are crocuses springing up. The forsythia is in bloom. The grass is beginning to grow again. The birds are in full song. Everywhere the signs of a fresh beginning are to be seen.

  Is there anything quite so marvellous as a British spring?

  The joys of spring would have come as little consolation to the thousands who had lost their jobs in the freezing winter months. And yet, as Sir Geoffrey Howe put the final touches to his fourth Budget, he had reason to feel optimistic. A few days earlier, the Financial Times’s regular survey of business opinion had found that confidence was higher than at any time for two years, with almost half of all firms feeling more cheerful than in the autumn of 1981. The stock market was growing, house prices were on the rise, interest rates were falling and, best of all, public borrowing was running below the Treasury forecasts. And when the Sunday Express invited its readers to imagine the Chancellor enjoying a pre-Budget stroll through the Surrey countryside (‘Observe his easy stride, his relaxed manner, his calm expression’), the contrast with the feverish wrangling a year earlier could hardly have been more striking.31

  Howe unveiled his Budget on Tuesday 9 March. By the standards of his previous efforts it was a comparative non-event, which came as a relief to many of his colleagues. The Chancellor’s tone was upbeat: at last the economy was ‘moving in the right direction’, with borrowing budgeted to fall to £9½ billion in 1981–2. That meant he could relax the purse strings a little, raising income tax thresholds above inflation and cutting employers’ National Insurance contributions, both of which were very well received. It was certainly enough to please the Tory benches, satisfy the financial markets and impress the next day’s papers. Even the Mirror, usually so scathing, called it ‘half a step forward’. The public seemed fairly happy, too. A poll for the Daily Star found that people were generally pleased with the Budget, with six out of ten saying it was better for them personally than expected and only two out of ten worse. Perhaps people had become so used to punishment that they treated even the slightest respite as a rare treat. Even so, it was striking that 48 per cent thought it would be good for the country, compared with 38 per cent who disagreed.32

  A year earlier, Howe’s third Budget had plunged the government into a slough of introspection and infighting. Now, as Francis Pym warned his colleagues, the Budget had been ‘so well received that there could be danger in over-selling it’. But some of Mrs Thatcher’s Fleet Street suppor
ters seemed almost giddy with relief. Not only had her approval ratings regained the sunlit uplands of the early 30s, but the combined Alliance standing was now down to just 26 per cent, with the Tories on 37 per cent, four points clear of Labour. As the pain of the recession began, very slowly, to ease, voters were returning to Mrs Thatcher’s banners. ‘It is becoming daily more evident that she is going to win the economic battle,’ exulted the Sunday Express. ‘The party is uniting around her … Let no one doubt for one second that but for the courage and strength of purpose of this one remarkable woman the fight to restore economic sanity to Britain would have been, as it was so many times before, given up long ago.’33

  There was, of course, a long road ahead. Millions were still out of work. Morale at Conservative high command remained desperately low. A week after the Budget, Mrs Thatcher became embroiled in a bitter row about the rising crime figures, with police spokesmen demanding that she bring back hanging. In the Glasgow Hillhead by-election, Roy Jenkins was campaigning hard, hoping to take the seat from the Tories and give the SDP a much-needed shot in the arm. ‘The Alliance’, said the Guardian optimistically, ‘still has a reasonable hope of enough seats in the next Parliament to ensure that no one else gets an overall majority.’ Victory for the SDP’s Great Panjandrum, agreed the Observer, ‘would not only advance its fortunes and revive morale but would more importantly secure in Parliament the one man who is capable of forging the Alliance into a united force at the next General Election’. There still seemed everything to play for; the future was still uncertain.34