No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  26. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, London, 1993, p. 26.

  27. Edward Heath, The Course of My Life: My Autobiography, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1988, pp. 573–4.

  28. Information from Heath’s long-serving adviser, Michael McManus, reveals that that day Heath had been complaining about the chairs on which they were expected to sit. However, when he and Lady Thatcher finally met backstage, and she remarked, ‘Hello Ted, have you seen those awful chairs?’, he replied, ‘Can’t see what is wrong with them.’

  29. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 14

  30. Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical, Bantam, London, 1992, p. 64.

  31. Observer, 26 September 1982, quoted in Robert Leach, Political Ideology in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2002, p. 112.

  32. Maurice Cowling, Conservative Essays, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 9.

  33. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 11.

  34. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher – Volume Two: The Iron Lady, Jonathan Cape, London, 2003, pp. 251–2.

  35. Observer, 15 January 1984.

  36. The text of the draft statement is in the Cabinet Offices. It is undated, but is likely to have been draft ed in February 1984.

  37. Hansard, 29 February 1984, col. 218W.

  38. Letter to Peter Shore MP, 12 April 1984. Full text at www.margaretthatcher.org.

  39. Neil Hamilton MP ‘Getting the Joke’, in Iain Dale (ed.), Margaret Thatcher: A Tribute in Words and Pictures, Daily Telegraph/Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2005, p. 216.

  40. My first face-to-face encounter with her came as I was hurrying along a narrow corridor behind the Speaker’s chair when Prime Minister’s Questions had just ended. Ahead of me, that diminutive, familiar figure was coming in the opposite direction, but for a moment I was too startled to stand aside. With a pleasant enough smile on her face, she raised a finger and moved it from side to side, like a windscreen wiper, telling me that I had a choice of flattening myself against the wall to my left or right, so long as I made way for her. It was the gesture of someone accustomed to being obeyed.

  41. On one of her trips abroad, late in her premiership, I was among a small group of journalists permitted to go to the front of the aircraft , where she was holding court. It was rather like flirting with someone’s grandmother. The party included Gordon Greig, the veteran political editor of the Daily Mail, whom she knew well. He made a teasing remark about her relations with Sir Geoffrey Howe, which were then at breaking point, whereupon she poked his lapel and told him: ‘You must rearrange your ideas, Gordon.’ This flirty, easily amused side of her personality was never displayed in public.

  42. Hansard, 14 June 1978, col. 1027.

  43. Alan Clark, Diaries – Into Politics, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2000, p. 147.

  44. Kingsley Amis, Memoirs, Vintage, London, 1991, pp. 315–9.

  45. Woodrow Wyatt, The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Volume One, edited by Sarah Curtis, Pan, London, 1998, p. 206.

  46. Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, Pan, London, 1990, p. 383.

  47. Hansard, 25 January 1985.

  48. John Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography, Jonathan Cape, London, 1993, p. 711.

  49. Tony Benn, Against the Tide; Diaries 1973–76, Arrow, London, 1990, p. 616.

  50. The Times, 29 September 1976.

  51. Quoted in Jim Prior, A Balance of Power, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1986, p. 167.

  52. Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism, Simon & Schuster, London, 1992, pp. 22–3.

  53. Daily Mail, 26 April 1979.

  54. Margaret Thatcher, speaking at a general election press conference, 23 April 1979. BBC Sound Archive. Full text at www.margaretthatcher.org.

  55. Speech to Conservative rally at Darlington, 23 April 1979.

  56. Guardian, 4 January 1981. See also, Phillip Knightley, The Rise and and Fall of the House of Vestey, Time Warner, London, 1993.

  57. Elizabeth Bailey, ‘The Vestey Affair’, New York Times, 2 November 1980.

  58. Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, p. 6.

  59. Jim Prior, A Balance of Power, pp. 119–20.

  60. Speech to the Conservative Party conference, 10 October 1980. Full text at www.margaretthatcher.org.

  61. Hugo Young, One of Us, p. 215.

  62. The Times, 9 October 1981.

  63. Andy McSmith, Kenneth Clarke: A Political Biography, Verso, London, 1994, p. 72.

  64. Hansard, 26 November 2008, col. 768.

  65. Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 686.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Lawrence Byford, HM Inspector of Constabulary, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper Case – Review of the Investigation of the Case, pp. 95–6. This report was presented to the Home Office in December 1981, but was never published. Since 2006, however, it has been possible to access on the Home Office website at www. homeoffice.gov.uk.

  2. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments – Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Merlin, London, 1979, p. 41.

  3. Rosalind Carne, ‘Feminist theatre divides to rule’, Financial Times, 4 January 1982.

  4. Quoted in Rosemary Betterton (ed.), Looking On, Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, Pandora, London, 1987, p. 153.

  5. Bertolt Brecht, Threepenny Novel, translated by Desmond I. Vesey, Penguin, London, 1961, p. 115.

  6. Brian Masters, Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen, Coronet, London, 1986, pp. 14–15.

  7. Lawrence Byford, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper Case’, p. 13.

  8. Michael Bilton, Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, HarperCollins, London, 2003, p. 32.

  9. Lawrence Byford, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper Case’, pp. 9–11.

  10. The Times, 3 December 1980.

  11. Associated Press, 3 December 1980.

  12. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Women’s Conference’, 25 May 1988. Full text at www.margaretthatcher.org.

  13. Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, Pan, London, 1990, p. 237.

  14. Letter from Clive Whitemore, Principal Private Secretary, 10 Downing Street, to John Halliday, Principal Private Secretary, Home Office, 25 November 1980.

  15. Letter from L.E. Emmentt to the Chief Constable, West Yorkshire Police, December 1980. John Humble, from Sunderland, was identified by DNA evidence in 2005 as the hoaxer and sentenced to eight years for perverting the course of justice.

  16. Letter from S.S. Kind to Dr Alan Curry, Forensic Science Service, 6 January 1981.

  17. Yorkshire Post, 27 December 2007.

  18. Richard McCann, Just a Boy: The Story of a Stolen Childhood, Ebury Press, London, 2003.

  19. Richard McCann, interviewed by Michael Buerk, The Choice, BBC Radio 4, 2 September 2008.

  20. International Prostitutes Collective, Some Mother’s Daughter: The Hidden Movement of Prostitutes Against Violence, Crossroads Books, London, 1999, pp. 49–51.

  21. The Times, 19 January 1982.

  22. Daily Mail, 19 January 1982.

  23. Hansard, 21 January 1981, col. 428.

  24. Hansard, 21 January 1981, col. 426.

  25. Simon Calder, Hitch-Hikers’ Manual: Britain, Vacation Work, Oxford, 1979.

  26. The Times, 6 January 1982.

  27. United Press International, 11 December 1982; see also Jennifer Temkin, Rape and the Legal Process, Sweet and Maxwell, London, p. 10.

  28. Guardian, 13 March 1986.

  29. Her story can be accessed on the BBC website at www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/ insidelives/2004/06/jill_saward.shtml.

  30. Guardian, 4 February 1987.

  31. Hansard, 24 January 1986, col. 126.

  32. Clare Short, Dear Clare . . . this is what Women Feel about Page 3, Letters edited and selected by Kiri Tunks and Diane Hutchinson, Hutchinson Radius, London, 1991.

  33. Hansard, 12 March 1986, col. 938.

  34. P
eter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick it up Your Punter – Stick it up Your Punter – The rise and fall of the Sun, Mandarin, London, 1992, p. 201.

  35. Andy McSmith, Faces of Labour, The Inside Story, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 224–5.

  36. Helena Kennedy and Jennifer Nadel, Sara Thornton, the Story of a Woman who Killed, Gollancz, London, 1993.

  37. Jennifer Temkin, Rape and the Legal Process, p. 1.

  38. Independent, 11 April 1990.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, London, 1993, pp. 239–48.

  2. The Times, 25 January 1980.

  3. The Times, 30 January 1980.

  4. The Times, 7 February 1980.

  5. The Times, 14 February 1980.

  6. John Minnion and Philip Bolsover (eds), The CND Story: The First 25 Years of CND in the Words of People Involved, Allison & Busby, London, 1983, p. 35.

  7. E.P. Thompson, Protest and Survive, Penguin, London, 1980, pp. 18–19.

  8. You Can’t Kill the Spirit: Yorkshire Women Go to Greenham, Bretton Women’s Book Fund, Wakefield, 1983, quoted in Kate Hudson, CND, Now More Than Ever, Vision, London, 2005, p. 138.

  9. Financial Times, 13 November 1985.

  10. Walter Patterson, ‘Futures: A dramatic change in attitudes’, Guardian, 13 December 1985.

  11. ‘I regret nothing, says Stasi spy’, BBC, 20 September 1999, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/09/99/britain_betrayed/451366.stm.

  12. Hansard, 2 November 1998, col. 628.

  13. Hansard, 17 January 1989, col. 299.

  14. The Times, 9 March 1985.

  15. Stella Rimington, Open Secret – The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5, Arrow, London, 2002, p. 176.

  16. In 1978, Martin Linton, a journalist on Labour Weekly, surveyed constituency parties and estimated that the true membership figure was 284,000. The exercise was repeated in 1981 by Harold Frayman, another Labour Weekly journalist, who arrived at a figure of 300,250. Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987, p. 40.

  17. John Silkin, Changing Battlefields: The Challenge to the Labour Party, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1982, p. 35.

  18. Interview with Dr David Hubbard, ‘The Press Gang’, World in Action, Granada TV, 5 March 1984.

  19. David Owen, Time to Declare, Michael Joseph, London, 1991, p. 418.

  20. On Jim Murray, see Andy McSmith, ‘The Shoppie on the Scotswood Road’, in Faces of Labour, The Inside Story, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 189–212. David Owen, Time to Declare, p. 477.

  22. Statement issued by Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Roy Jenkins to the Press Association, 25 January 1981. The full text can be found at www.liberalhistory.org.uk/uploads/LimehouseDeclaration.pdf.

  23. Hansard, 26 March 1981, col. 1074.

  24. The Times, 19 September 1981.

  25. David Owen, Time to Declare, p. 520.

  26. Sadly, even Gerald Kaufman cannot recall where or when he first made this aphorism, but there is no dispute that he was its author. He says that he wishes he had taken out a copyright on it, because it has been quoted so oft en that it could have made him rich.

  27. Original copies of the manifesto ‘New Hope for Britain’ (Labour Party, 1982) are now difficult to obtain. The full text was reproduced in The Times Guide to the 1983 Election, The Times, London, 1983, pp. 304–33, and is available on the internet at http://labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1983/1983-labour-manifesto.shtml.

  28. John Golding, Hammer of the Left , Defeating Tony Benn, Eric Heffer and Militant in the Battle for the Labour Party, Politico’s, London, 2003, p. 289.

  29. Ian McAllister and Richard Rose, The Nationwide Competition for Votes: The 1983 British Election, Frances Pinter, London, 1984, p. 5.

  30. The Times, 26 May 1983.

  31. David Owen, Time to Declare, p. 577.

  32. The Times, 27 May 1983.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Sally Bedell Smith, Diana: The Life of a Troubled Princess, Aurum Press, London, p. 83.

  2. Quoted in Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles, Century, London, 2007, p. 64.

  3. Nigel Dempster, Daily Mail, 19 May 1993.

  4. The Times, 25 February 1981.

  5. Tim Clayton and Phil Craig, Diana: Story of a Princess, Atria, London, p. 62.

  6. Andrew Morton, Diana, Her True Story – In Her Own Words, Chivers Press, Bath, 1998, pp. 37–8.

  7. Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles, p. 111.

  8. Sarah Bradford, Diana, Viking, London, 2006, p. 114.

  9. Andrew Morton, Diana, Her True Story – In Her Own Words, p. 31.

  10. Michael Shea, A View from the Sidelines, Sutton, Stroud, 2003, pp. 121–2.

  11. Andrew Morton, Diana, Her True Story – In Her Own Words, p. 42.

  12. Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles, p. 148.

  13. Andrew Morton, Diana, Her True Story – In Her Own Words, pp. 53–4.

  14. Andrew Morton, Diana – Her True Story, BCA, Swindon, 1992, pp. 73–4.

  15. The Times, 30 July 1981.

  16. Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words, p. 43.

  17. Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, Atheneum, London, 1984, p. 316.

  18. For this account of the state of the music industry in the early 1980s, I have drawn heavily on Simon Garfield, Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Music Industry, Faber and Faber, London, 1986.

  19. Steve Malins, Duran Duran Notorious: The Unauthorised Biography, Sevenoaks, London, 2005, p. 10.

  20. James Maw, The Official Adam Ant Story, Futura, London, 1981, pp. 118–9.

  21. Peter York and Charles Jennings, Peter York’s Eighties, BBC Books, London, 1995, p. 36.

  22. Midge Ure, If I Was . . ., the Autobiography, Virgin, 2004, p. 59, p. 57.

  23. Boy George with Spencer Bright, Take It Like a Man: the Autobiography of Boy George, Pan, 1995, pp. 56, 138.

  24. Robert Elms, The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads, Picador, London, 2005, p. 197.

  25. Martin Kemp, True – The Autobiography of Martin Kemp, Orion, London, 2000, p. 54.

  26. Robert Elms, The Way We Wore, p. 197.

  27. Steve Malins, Duran Duran Notorious, p. 16.

  28. Boy George, Take It Like a Man, p. 212.

  29. Andrea Ashworth, ‘Once More With Feeling’, Observer, 20 March 2005.

  30. Simon Garfield, Expensive Habits, p. 13.

  31. Daily Mirror, 21 July 1983.

  32. Daily Mirror, 16 April 1985.

  33. Interview on TV-am, 17 April 1985.

  34. Woodrow Wyatt, The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Volume One, edited by Sarah Curtis, Pan, London, 1998, p. 38.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. The Times, 8 October 1980.

  2. Quoted in Andrew Roth and Byron Criddle, Parliamentary Profiles 1997–2002 A–D, Parliamentary Profile Services, London, 1998, p. 157.

  3. ‘Note for the Record: Vietnamese Refugees’, 9 July 1979, NA Prem 19/130.

  4. TV interview for World in Action, 27 January 1978. Full text at www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103485.

  5. Lord Scarman, The Scarman Report: the Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983, p. 27.

  6. ‘Policing Britain’s Police’, Economist, 8 May 1982.

  7. Lord Scarman, The Scarman Report, pp. 83–4.

  8. Final Report of the Working Party into Community/Police Relations in Lambeth, Public Relations Division, London Borough of Lambeth, Brixton, January 1981, pp. 2–7.

  9. BBC News, 14 May 2001.

  10. Guardian, 15 May 1981.

  11. Evening Standard, 25 May 2004.

  12. ‘Violence as West Indians march in Protest’, The Times, 3 March 1981; Sun, 3 March 1981; Daily Express, 3 March 1981; ‘Why black unrest brings out the banner headlines’, The Times, 4 March 1981.

  13. Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, HarperCollins, London, 200
3, p. 279.

  14. Lord Scarman, The Scarman Report, p. 95.

  15. An eyewitness account by the ‘We Want to Riot, Not to Work Collective’ (1982), reproduced at www.urban75.org/brixton/history/riot.html.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Lord Scarman, The Scarman Report, p. 75, p. 65.

  18. William Whitelaw, The Whitelaw Memoirs, Headline, London, 1989, p. 243.

  19. Lord Scarman, The Scarman Report, p. 71.

  20. The Times, 6 July 1981.

  21. William Whitelaw, The Whitelaw Memoirs, pp. 246–7. Whitelaw was not always so calm. A year later, when a harmless vagrant named Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace and found his way to the queen’s bedroom, where he talked quietly to her until police arrived, Whitelaw experienced such ‘utter shame and misery’ that he wanted to resign. Mrs Thatcher had to talk him out of it.

  22. Hansard, 16 July 1981, written answers col. 430.

  23. Hansard, 6 July 1981, col. 24.

  24. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, London, 1993, p. 145.

  25. The Times, 16 October 1981.

  26. Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, My Autobiography, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2000, p. 216.

  27. Financial Times, 1 May 1986.

  28. ITN News at 10, 30 September 1985; Guardian, 1 October 1985.

  29. Guardian, 8 October 1985.

  30. The Times, 9 October 1985; Guardian, 9 October 1985.

  31. David Rose, ‘They Created Winston Silcott, the Beast of Broadwater Farm’, Observer, 18 January 2004.

  32. Information from Paul Boateng. See Andy McSmith, Faces of Labour, The Inside Story, Verso, London, 1997, p. 233.

  33. The Times, 30 April 1987; Financial Times, 30 April 1987.

  34. The Times, 1 May 1987.

  35. Financial Times, 15 November 1985.

  36. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, Faber and Faber, London, 1990, p. 78.

  37. The Times, 18 April 1984.

  38. Hansard, 23 July 1997, cols 998–1,000.

  39. Inter Press Service, 7 October 1988; Independent, 6 October 1988.

  40. New York Times, 13 July 1991.

  41. Quoted in Washington Post, 29 September 1990.

  42. John Torode, ‘Illiberal liberalism’, Independent, 3 October 1989.