by Andy McSmith
For seven months, the Labour Party was convulsed by a frenetic campaign, fought out before the television cameras with little restraint or mutual respect. The main casualty was Michael Foot, caught between two powerful figures backed by large well-organized factions. A small number of MPs, including Neil Kinnock, tried to carve out an independent position for him by putting up a third candidate, John Silkin, who gathered almost no support outside Parliament. The widened franchise did not give every party member a vote. Very few constituency committees asked their members’ opinions, but simply decided to back Benn, who garnered 80 per cent of the vote in the constituency section. With a substantial majority of MPs backing Healey, the union votes proved decisive. NUPE was almost the only union to ballot its members. Though its leaders backed Benn, the membership backed Healey. Until almost the last minute, no one knew which way the huge TGWU vote would go; eventually, its general secretary, Moss Evans, placed his weighty cross, equal to the votes of seventy-two MPs, or the combined votes of all the constituency parties in Scotland and the north of England, against Tony Benn’s name. This made the result so close that Healey won by a margin of less than 1 per cent. If Neil Kinnock and a few others had voted for Benn, instead of abstaining, the history of the Labour Party would have been very different indeed. As it was, Tony Benn’s fortunes never recovered.
However, for another twelve months Benn was still a major player as chairman of the Home Policy Committee of the National Executive Committee (NEC), which meant that he, rather than Michael Foot, had the last word on what was included in Labour’s general manifesto. ‘New Hope for Britain’, as the document was called, was assured its place in political folklore when Gerald Kaufman pithily described it as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.26 It was certainly long – about 25,000 words. It proposed to bring unemployment down from 3.2m to 1m within five years, through rapid, planned growth guided by a new Department of Economic and Industrial Planning and a National Planning Council, financed by a new National Investment Bank. Another new body, the Foreign Investment Unit, would keep watch over foreign-owned multinational companies. All major companies were to negotiate development plans with the government. This was to be paid for by government borrowing, rather than raising taxes, and by cancelling all new nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons.
The manifesto also stated that all the restrictive trade union laws introduced by the Thatcher government were to be repealed, and the unions given greater influence than ever before. Exchange controls were to be brought back, along with new restrictions on imports. Interest rates were to be cut to bring down the value of the pound. Enterprises privatized by the Conservatives were to be renationalized and the government would also buy into industries in which it had not intervened before, including computers, pharmaceuticals and construction. There was to be government aid for workers’ cooperatives, through a new Co-operative Investment Bank. Much of this would have been barred under European Union law, but Labour proposed to forestall that problem by overriding the referendum held only a few years earlier, and by pulling out of the Common Market.
And still there was more. Spending on the NHS and on personal social services was to go up by at least 3 per cent a year above inflation. Child benefit and pensions would also be substantially increased. Unnecessary car journeys were to be discouraged by abolishing the tax disc and making up the lost tax through higher petrol duty. The number of prisoners was to be reduced through lower sentences for non-violent offences. There was to be a huge programme of council-house building and repairs. Local authorities were to be given more powers than ever before, including in some cases the power to convert private schools into state schools. The charitable status enjoyed by Eton and other public schools was to be abolished, along with everything that the upper classes seemed to enjoy most, including corporal punishment (then still practised in schools), the House of Lords and fox-hunting. However, angling, which was popular with Labour voters, was to be encouraged, by giving anglers better access to common land.27 When challenged during a televised press conference to explain the apparent inconsistency between fox-hunting and angling policies, the former sports minister, Denis Howell, declared that ‘fish feel no pain’. This statement – how Mr Howell feels qualified to say such things – is one of the many enduring mysteries of that disastrous election campaign.
Curiously, this document remained unchanged, although the NEC passed out of Bennite control in 1982 after a well-organized coup run by right-wing union fixers. One of them, John Golding, head of the Post Office Engineer’s Union, replaced Benn as chairman of the Home Policy Committee, but did not use this position to change the manifesto because, he said: ‘I was determined that the left would get the blame for the certain defeat in the coming general election, as we on the right had been blamed in 1979. And defeat was certain . . . it was no use thinking that things could be changed in the short term’.28
He was right about the certainty of defeat. The Conservatives held 42.4 per cent of the vote, down 685,000 votes on 1979, which was an achievement considering the government’s unpopularity in 1981. However, what was truly remarkable about the 1983 result was how the other votes divided – a little under 8.5m for Labour, and nearly 7.8m for the Liberal-SDP Alliance. A line could be drawn across the map of England, through the Midlands, below which there were entire counties where no Labour candidate had even come second and there were only three Labour seats outside central London. There were 119 Labour candidates who had not even collected the necessary one-eighth of the votes to save their deposits. The Liberal-SDP Alliance had lost just 11 deposits, was runner up in two-thirds of the seats that the Conservatives held and had 25.4 per cent of the popular vote. In England, the gap between Labour and the Alliance was only half a per cent. Analysts who tracked the polls taken during the campaign reckoned that if the campaign had lasted one more week, Labour would have dropped to third place. ‘While the Alliance did not break the Conservative monopoly control of government, it did break Labour’s monopoly claim as the opposition party,’ was the conclusion of one expert analysis. ‘The Labour Party has contributed to the decline of class politics in Britain by becoming a failed ghetto party. It is no longer the party of the working class.’29
Labour was saved, to some extent, by the unfairness of the electoral system. The Conservatives returned 397 MPs, including more than 100 who were entering Parliament for the first time, who were generally more hard-line Thatcherite than those already there. Labour had 209 MPs, 60 fewer than before, while the Alliance, with over a quarter of the vote, had just 23 MPs. This meant that the Conservatives had one MP for every 32,777 votes for their party, but it took 338,286 to elect an Alliance MP.
Michael Foot immediately announced his resignation, with the words: ‘I am ashamed.’ Two trade unions, the TGWU and Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS), kick-started the ensuing leadership campaign by declaring for Neil Kinnock. Since Tony Benn was among the many ex-MPs now looking for alternative employment, the election became a contest between Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, the former secretary of state for prices and consumer protection. On paper, Hattersley was by far the better qualified candidate and had the support of the old Labour establishment, including Callaghan and Healey. As a young MP, he had been seen as Roy Jenkins’ right-hand man, and the founders of the SDP had hoped he would join them. But these old right-wing connections were a handicap in a party that had shifted to the left, and it was not certain that Hattersley had the stomach for the gruelling and unrewarding task of leading the Labour Party. Kinnock campaigned with more vigour and won easily, and Hattersley settled for the job of deputy. The Labour Party quickly forgave the amiable old gentleman who had led them to defeat; at that autumn’s annual conference, Foot was warmly applauded by delegates, and watched as his protégé became his successor.
The Labour Party now began a long and difficult process of self-examination, which would occupy the party for the rest of the decade. Labour’s defe
at would be cited over and over again as a salutary warning about the perils of disunity and disorganization, a lesson taken to heart by several of the Labour candidates who fought their first general election that year, including Cherie Booth, who was not elected, along with her husband Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were.
There were many reasons for Labour’s humiliation, but what appears to have been the single most damaging political issue was not the ambitious recipe for economic revival, but the same emotive issue that had swelled the membership of CND. Michael Foot sincerely believed in nuclear disarmament and believed the country could be won over to this. For the first part of the election campaign, it was estimated that 30 per cent of the content of the speeches he delivered were on the subject of peace. He was persuaded by party researchers to switch to talking about unemployment only after Labour had the worst moment in its whole, dismal election campaign. Jim Callaghan delivered a speech in Cardiff, on 25 May, in which he said: ‘Britain and the West should not dismantle (their nuclear) weapons for nothing in return . . . We should not give them up unilaterally.’30 That, of course, was exactly what Labour’s manifesto promised to do, though it was well known that most of the shadow cabinet, including Denis Healey, privately agreed with Callaghan. Even the Labour-supporting tabloids, the Daily Mirror and Daily Star, did not play down the enormity of this challenge to Foot’s authority. Their headlines were, respectively: ‘Callaghan in Arms Revolt’, and ‘Callaghan’s Bomb Shock for Labour’. David Owen reckoned: ‘If the Labour Party had ever had a chance – which it did not – this was a blow from which it could not recover.’31
Michael Foot’s authority had hit such a low that Jim Mortimer, the loyal general secretary of the Labour Party, told the following morning’s televised press conference: ‘At the Campaign Committee this morning we were all insistent that Michael Foot as the Leader of the Labour Party speaks for the party, and we support the manifesto.’32 It was two weeks to polling day, and it apparently required a discussion by the Campaign Committee to remind the Labour Party as to who was their leader.
What made this issue so sensitive, pushing the defence of the British Isles to the forefront of the minds of people who might not normally have thought it important, was that the previous year a group of islands thousands of miles away had been occupied by the soldiers of a distant country, because of an obscure dispute about sovereignty.
CHAPTER 4
DIANA AND THE NEW ROMANTICS
On 24 February 1981, Britain and the world were electrified by the news that Charles Philip Arthur George, HRH the Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland and heir to the throne of the United Kingdom, was engaged to be married. His coy, virgin fiancée, the first bride of a Prince of Wales since 1863 and the first English bride of a future king since 1659, was a sweet-looking nineteen-year-old kindergarten nurse. Together they were embarking on what would be the most highly publicized event of 1981, although until a few weeks earlier Diana Spencer was barely recognized even within that smart set of wealthy, well-connected young Londoners called the ‘Sloane Rangers’, whose icon she would become.
A year of disturbing events, 1981 saw recession, violence in Northern Ireland, and political turmoil, but Diana was a counterpoint to all that. She was the princess of all that was bland. It was entirely fitting that her engagement should be announced in the same week as the launch of the SDP, and that her name should be linked to the Sloane Rangers and to the New Romantics, who – with occasional exceptions – set blandness to the sound of synthesizers. None of these escapist phenomena survived the 1980s, least of all the royal romance between Prince Charles and Lady Diana.
The ever-vigilant royal watchers from the tabloid press had been having fun for years, looking out for the next queen. They had put a series of young women through a cruel process that involved naming them as Charles’s suspected girlfriends, then trawling through their past and present lives until it became obvious they either could not or did not want to withstand the attention. Diana Spencer was first noticed in September 1980, when three royal correspondents were staking out a spot on the River Dee, near Balmoral, where they knew Charles liked to go fishing. Behind him, on the bank, they noticed a tall blonde in fishing gear, but before they could snap a picture of her, she had ducked behind a tree. From there, she used a compact to take a second look at the hunters. James Whitaker, royal correspondent for the Daily Star, thought: ‘A cunning lady. You had to be a real professional to think of using a mirror to watch us watching her.’1
He and his rival from the Sun independently established the mystery girl’s identity. ‘He’s in love again,’ ran the headline in the Sun on 8 September, ‘Lady Di is the new girlfriend for Charles.’ For the rest of the year, the teenager was under siege in her London flat, an ordeal that she handled with a shrewdness and self-restraint that earned her the respect of her future in-laws. For weeks, the public was treated to countless images of Diana walking demurely past the frenzied press pack, looking silently out from under her blonde fringe. She was nicknamed ‘Shy Di’, though in reality ‘Shrewd Di’ would have been more accurate. She had learnt from a mistake made by her older sister, Sarah, who ruined her moment in the spotlight as one of Charles’s girlfriends by blurting out her life’s story to James Whitaker and another tabloid journalist, Nigel Nelson, for which she was frozen out of the royal entourage. Diana enjoyed the attention and saw the royal correspondents as friends. Unlike the royals, she read the tabloids for pleasure.
She had another great advantage to go with her reticence – a spotless past. Contraception was safe and cheap in the early 1980s, the AIDS scare had not yet begun and not many girls held back to give their future husbands the pleasure of deflowering them, but Diana was such a rarity. One of her first appearances in print was in an article in Tatler about two eminent Sloanes: ‘There are still a few girls left in Britain who haven’t been to bed with Jasper Guinness or Prince Stash Klossowski and all of them are friends of Lady Diana Spencer.’2 In her unhappy childhood she had devoured the novels of Barbara Cartland, and it seems that she really believed in the romantic template of the pure, undervalued young woman whose life is transformed by the arrival of the strong, knowing male. Moreover, she believed that the gawky and self-centred Prince Charles was an ideal male, and had dutifully saved her virginity for no one but him. ‘I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead,’3 she explained.
It may well have been true, as the Sun proclaimed, that Prince Charles was in love. Whether or not he was in love with Diana Spencer was another matter. He liked older women who knew how to provide a service. The trauma he had suffered the previous August, when his favourite uncle, Earl Mountbatten, had been assassinated by the IRA, had driven him back into the arms of an old girlfriend, Camilla Shand, who was now married to an officer in the Household Cavalry named Andrew Parker Bowles. He was so well-connected that by 1987 he was Commanding Officer of the Household Cavalry and Silver Stick in Waiting, and did not object to his wife’s infidelity because he had extra-marital interests of his own. Nor did Camilla oppose the idea that Charles should marry Diana; it apparently suited her that someone else would carry out the public duties of Charles’s wife while she privately saw to his sexual needs.
At the age of thirty-two, Charles had the habits of a confirmed bachelor, and in an agony of indecision he set off on a long visit to India, during which he did not make any contact with the young woman with whom he was supposed to be besotted. When he returned, he received an angry note from his father, who thought that the press speculation about Diana had gone on long enough. Charles interpreted this as an instruction to marry, and dutifully proposed. At last, Diana was permitted to end months of silence, to speak publicly, and to pose for photographs in the garden of Buckingham Palace, dressed in air-hostess blue. She said, sweetly, ‘I am absolutely delighted, thrilled, blissfully happy. With Prince Charles bes
ide me I cannot go wrong.’4
‘I am positively delighted and frankly amazed that Diana is prepared to take me on,’ said Charles.
‘And in love?’ a BBC interviewer asked.
‘Of course,’ Diana answered at once.
But Charles, in that self-deprecating manner that shied away from any expression of strong emotion, remarked: ‘Whatever “in love” means.’5 He had apparently used the same words to her in private when he proposed marriage, in a conversation that involved no physical contact.6
The royal family had co-opted a new superstar, a fashion-setter, who was on her way to being the most photographed woman in the world. The cult of Diana has lasted to this day because she was a more interesting and complex figure than she first appeared. On the one hand, she was pedigree aristocracy. One Spencer had married the Duke of Marlborough’s daughter, creating the line of Spencer Churchills that included a prime minister. Another, Diana’s great-aunt Margaret, married Henry Douglas-Home, and so became the sister-in-law of Alec, another Conservative prime minister. Diana’s maternal grandmother, Baroness Fermoy, was a lady-in-waiting to the queen. When Diana was thirteen, her father, the 8th Earl Spencer, inherited Althorp House and 14,000 acres of countryside in Norfolk, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. As a young child, Diana romped in the nursery with Charles’s brother Prince Andrew. No one could accuse Lady Diana of being a social interloper.