by A. N. Wilson
Johnny Rotten had said, at the time of the 1977 Jubilee, ‘You don’t write a song like “God Save the Queen” because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re sick of seeing them mistreated.’
Some of the electorate, probably including the surviving Sex Pistols themselves, felt alienated by the entire political system. Some vainly believed that the creaking old system could serve them for their lifetimes: the series of industrial crises, labour disputes, high taxes. They offered corporate political and fiscal solutions to something which others felt to be not so much an economic as a moral malaise. The German guests in Torquay, treated to a gross series of insults by Basil Fawlty who is unsuccessfully trying not to mention the war, eventually stare at him, his head in a bandage from concussion, collapsed beneath a moose’s head, which he had unsuccessfully tried to hang on the wall to add a bit of class to the hotel lobby. As the drunken Major leans over him to offer ineffectual help, the German asks, ‘How did they ever win?’ By the date of Fawlty Towers and Sunny Jim Callaghan it had indeed become unimaginable that Britain had ever been a country which could win a war or solve its own problems without intervention from the International Monetary Fund or injections of cash from America.
‘There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics,’ said Callaghan to Bernard Donoughue. ‘It does not then matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change–and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’ The fatalism of the remark reveals what the electorate found so insufferable about, not only Callaghan’s Labour Party, but also about the old Heathites of the Conservative Party: namely the suggestion that they, who had been elected to solve certain problems, were incapable of doing so. The only reason that they were turning to Mrs Thatcher in this view of events was that there had been a mysterious alteration in mood. It was about this time that the political clichémongers appropriated the beautiful Shakespearean phrase sea-change (‘into something rich and strange’ from The Tempest) and used the phrase simply to mean ‘change’. At a similar date they raided, and thereby desecrated, the Apostle Paul, as translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible, and spoke of themselves grappling for ‘hearts and minds’, in their language, as a clichéd synonym for ‘votes’.
Johnny Rotten in a sense spoiled the effect of his ‘God Save the Queen’ lyric by coming out from behind the screen and saying that he was sick of seeing the people of England mistreated. Mrs Thatcher could in a comparable sense be seen to have diluted her message, when she had won the election and became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, by quoting the supposed words of Francis of Assisi–‘Where there is hatred may we sow love, where there is injury pardon, etc.’ She had arrived at Number 10 Downing Street and her speechwriter Sir Ronald Millar had, on the spur of the moment, suggested the words for her. They were apt neither to herself nor to the times. Mrs Thatcher was the first politician in a generation to appeal to something visceral in voters. Her appeal to her admirers had something of what made punk attractive to fans of the Sex Pistols. To vote Thatcher was to issue a cry of rage. Where there was pardon, to sow injury, where there was love, hate. A vote for Thatcher was psephological pogoing, and to many of her followers she was the Siouxsie Sioux of politics, revealing things on the stage which had normally been reserved for the specialist market. Her fellow Somervillian and polar opposite Shirley Williams lost her seat at Hertford and Stevenage. Callaghan said he was ‘heartbroken’. Alas, Williams would return. All the old duds expressed their sadness at Callaghan’s defeat. A. J. Ayer wrote to commiserate, and Sir Goronwy Daniel, Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, made what must rank as a double-edged remark: ‘You will surely be as highly esteemed by tomorrow’s historian as you are by the great majority of today’s public’: it sounds like a compliment, until, read twice, it becomes the deadliest insult.
In fact, the Labour Party had polled its lowest result in a General Election since the debacle of 1931, a mere 36.9 percent of the vote. The Conservative share was 43.9 percent, and the final result, in terms of parliamentary seats, was Conservatives 339, Labour 268 and Liberals 11. Callaghan’s biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, an Old Labour Welsh academic, was right to describe him as representing ‘more clearly perhaps than any other living politician’ the post-1945 consensus. ‘He was the classic consensus man.’17
Of course nothing ever changes as radically as revolutionaries, or as story-tellers, would like. The old Heathites heavily outnumbered Margaret Thatcher in her Cabinet. The civil service remained the same. The benefits system still continued to underpin the lives of the unemployed and the sick and the old. But the Siouxsie Sioux of Grantham came not to bring peace but a sword.
The times were not auspicious for classic consensus men. Airey Neave MP had been one of Mrs Thatcher’s keenest supporters and allies. He had escaped from the Colditz prisoner-of-war camp and lived, as a barrister, to take part in the post-war Nuremberg trials. As a fervently Unionist Opposition spokesman for Northern Ireland he had been blown up in his car as he was leaving the Houses of Parliament on 30 March. In Pakistan, President Bhutto, the closest thing Pakistan possessed to a Nehru-style Westernised liberal democrat, was executed for ‘conspiracy’. In Iran, the Revolutionary court was ordering summary executions in a Robespierre-style bloodletting. Karol Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II on 16 October 1978, was on his way to Poland (his visit began on 2 June) in one of the most confrontational demonstrations against communism to take place since the Russian Revolution. But nor did he endorse the Western capitalism model of society. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, he deplored the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor of the world, and criticised both the communists and the believers in free trade.
The Pope’s political and economic ideas derived from his nineteenth-century predecessor Leo XIII and were of the kind sometimes labelled Distributism, popularised in England during Edwardian days by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc–a distrust of international finance, of companies and financial institutions, a belief that Small Is Beautiful.
Britain did not have the option to experiment with the Distributist belief that all society’s ills would be solved if each family were given an acre and a cow. The left had failed to help the poor, yet in its blundering efforts to do so it had destroyed the economy. Thatcher would take the risk of making an American decision: to allow the lumpenproletariat to stew in its own juice while the Treasury attempted to save British industry from terminal decline, establish a culture of share and home-ownership, and increase prosperity for the fortunate 80 percent. Could this ruthless programme be put through without calamitous social consequences? Was it possible so to control the money supply that unemployment was used as a weapon? And what compensation could be offered, in terms of real job creation, real improvement in education and training, for those who unfortunately suffered ruin in the first waves of the monetarist revolution–not through fecklessness, but simply because they happened to be employed in a dying industry, or an industry which the monetarist politicians had condemned to death? In times past, an angry underclass could be contained by press gangs and workhouses, institutions which no longer existed. The lunatic asylums were closing down, but could the prisons hold the numbers of dissidents if, in the face of rising unemployment and disillusionment, the young of the urban wastelands, in a punk gesture of despondency, and in order to fund their drug habits, turned to crime and plunder? The alternative to consensus is confrontation. What if the balance of civilised life in Britain turned out to be much more precarious than had formerly been supposed? From 1945, the politicians had lived with little worse than the dread that the trades union barons would turn nasty. They had never had to confront, as earlier generations had done, the possibility of the Mob erupting once more as a factor in British political life. With one part of herself, no doubt, Mrs Thatcher merely wanted a standard of middle-class decenc
y to prevail, and to protect the interests of her natural constituents–the aspirant upper working classes, who would like to have owned their own homes; the old people with savings; the entrepreneurs trying to make something of small businesses, and labouring under bureaucratic laws and crippling taxes. With a deeper part of herself she felt instinctively that none of these benefits were to be had without a struggle. In her world-view the Labour Party, and Shirley Williams and A. J. Ayer and the Principal of the University of Wales, were merely hydra heads sprouting from the monster of anarchy who questioned the very validity of hard work, thrift or saving, who would undermine Britain itself.
In May 1978, Margaret Thatcher had been driving across Tehran with the British Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons. She remarked to him, ‘Do you know, there are still people in my party who believe in consensus?’ Parsons expressed surprise, suggesting that surely this was the belief of most British people, himself included. ‘I regard them as Quislings, as traitors,’ she replied. If she had her way–and given the power of the quislings in the Cabinet it was to be a big If–those traitors were to be smoked out as the first step in full-scale confrontation with the Enemy.18
Part Five
The Lady
19
‘This Was a Terrific Battle’
‘Ripper eleven, police nil!’ was one of the chants at many football grounds in the north of England in the opening weeks of the 1979–80 season. Skinny, raven-haired, bearded Peter Sutcliffe, a former undertaker’s assistant, had been hitting women over the head with hammers and stabbing them repeatedly with screwdrivers throughout the Callaghan years. He had taken amazing risks, and his victims, mostly, though not all, prostitutes, had often been attacked within hailing distance of other human beings. Wilma McCann, for example, in February 1977, had been found near the house of the disc jockey Jimmy Savile. She had been stabbed so violently in the stomach with a Stanley knife that her intestines had spilled out.1 Yet 150,000 interviews, 27,000 house-to-house searches, and more than £3 million expended had failed to locate the killer. When Sutcliffe’s friend Trevor Birdsall wrote a letter to the police identifying Sutcliffe, and saying, ‘This man as [sic] dealings with prostitutes and always had a thing about them,’ he was thanked for his cooperation but he heard nothing more from the police, and the constable on the desk who took his statement either failed to transcribe it or lost it. Sutcliffe was eventually found because he was driving with false number plates.
It was characteristic of the new Prime Minister that she was not content to allow the incompetence of George Oldfield’s investigation to blunder on without her personal intervention. When Queen Victoria heard of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888, she wrote to Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, ‘This new most ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action.’2 In a rather comparable, but even more interventionist spirit, Margaret Thatcher announced to Willie Whitelaw, her leadership rival, whom she had appointed as Home Secretary, that she intended personally to take over the investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper case. He dissuaded her, and in the event, almost by chance, the Ripper was found without Thatcher donning the Miss Marple mantle.3 She would have made a good bloodhound, however, and no one would have envied the Ripper had it been she who tracked down her prey.
Everyone agreed, when the years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership were over, that England had changed. How far she was personally responsible for changes, good and bad, opinion differed. Her admirers pointed to a Britain which was revived and richer. Antony Crosland, in his book The Future of Socialism, had written
We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafés, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing estates, better designed new street lamps and telephone kiosks and so ad infinitum.4
During Thatcher’s three administrations, Giles Gilbert Scott’s elegant neo-Georgian red telephone boxes were replaced, by a privatised telephone company (British Telecom), with ugly glass boxes, and there were no notable works of sculpture erected in housing estates, but the council houses in these estates became the property of the occupants, and many of the good things to which Crosland had looked forward did follow the enormous injection of wealth which Thatcher’s reforms instigated. It was not socialism which made England have better restaurants and hotels. It was the availability of more private money. If you were lucky enough to survive the lurches of economic boom and bust which characterised the Thatcher years, if you managed to sustain mortgage repayments when interest rates were set at 15 percent, if you held on to your property and your job when all about were losing theirs, then you, and the majority of Britons, would find yourselves citizens of a country which was more free and more prosperous. But the freedom and prosperity did not come free. Discarded with the true lumpenproletariat of people who could not find useful employment were many citizens who had the bad luck to be employed in industries which had simply died during the monetarist revolution. There were also many who were lured by the monetarist dream of becoming owners of their own house when they could not afford to do so, and there were those who bought into the share-holding democracy who watched their savings evaporate.
Those who hated Thatcher pointed to a Britain which was coarser, more philistine, which spent less money than other European countries on the arts and on libraries. It was a Britain in which the latent aggression which lurks beneath the surface of polite society came out into the open. It was in every sense a more violent society. Some of the violence had little to do with the Prime Minister and sometimes, as in the case of the successful crushing of the miners’ strike, and the successful prosecution of war in the South Atlantic, it was Thatcher who was the Boudicca, leading the charge, the scythes on her chariot wheels cutting the legs off all who stood in her path.
It seemed appropriate, when poor old Betjeman died in 1984, that Thatcher should have chosen as her Poet Laureate the Little Englander from Hull, who hated abroad, and who cheered on her election victory–albeit fearing that she was ‘much too left wing.5 ‘How do you cut unemployment?’ he asked. ‘Cut unemployment pay!’6 When asked to write some journalism, he replied, ‘Thanks to the successive gangs of socialist robbers that have ruled us since the last war, now there is little incentive to make more than a certain amount of money annually.’7
Bald, myopic, bespectacled, awkwardly fat and tall, Larkin was technically one of the deftest lyricists of modern times. His melancholy, taut poems nudged towards the edges of life’s limitations–‘first boredom, then fear’. (‘What have you got to complain about?’ was A. L. Rowse’s shrill question when he met Larkin–‘You’re tall, aren’t you?’8) The metaphysics, more, surely than the deafness or the alcoholism, found the hard limit of Larkin’s music. It could not go any further. ‘Aubade’, his terrified, controlled meditation upon death, was one of the greatest poems of our times. But it was a suicide note to his muse. He could not, would not, imagine himself outside the confines of his self-imposed limitations, both of opportunity and of imagination.
Ted Hughes was a very different figure, and, when Larkin turned down Margaret Thatcher’s offer of the Laureateship, it was given to Hughes. Larkin, in point of fact, was the laureate of a different Britain. His fondness for drinking himself sozzled at the Hull branch of the British Legion, his hatred of London, his provinciality, all bound him to the Britain which had already died before he did. Hughes by contrast, who, Larkin said would in a happier age have been not the Poet Laureate but the village idiot, was an imagination which had engaged with the essential violence at nature’s heart. To judge from the writings of the American feminists who held him guilty for the suicides of two women in his life, and who
had deified his first wife, Sylvia Plath, Hughes was on a moral level with Peter Sutcliffe; he was the literary Ripper. His posthumous letters revealed a more troubled, sensitive figure than his published poems had suggested, a man who had been a good friend to his children and a patient enabler of other people’s talents. In his best work, he invented a new theology. Crow, his perky twentieth-century Prometheus, was a Johnny Rotten of the ornithological world. His laughter torments his mother. He worships death. While God sleeps, Crow goes on laughing. When God wakes and tries to teach Crow to love, the bird retches.
He sees life as conflict:
This was a terrific battle
The noise was as much
As the limits of noise could take.9
He is an electrically amplified beakful of amoral violence and cynicism. This notion of conflict being at the heart of existence fitted well with the Britain of the 1980s, and was as much a characteristic of the Queen’s Prime Minister as it was of the Poet Laureate.