by A. N. Wilson
In roughly the same era that the Church abandoned the symbolism of an all-male priesthood, Britain had elected its first female Prime Minister.4 It had enjoyed a female Head of State for the previous quarter-century. The role of the monarchy and of this monarch in particular was so understated as at times to be unnoticeable. Thatcher was never unnoticeable. From the first, her confrontational manner awoke ancient mythological archetypes in the public psyche. Periods of history when the ruler has been female–Boudicca leading the Iceni in their fatal last stand against the Romans, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, or the Imperialist and capitalist expressionism of the reign of Victoria–have excited energy, aggressiveness, bravado. For much of the Thatcher era–and this decade is the Thatcher Era in a way that none of the other eras into which my chronicle is divided can plausibly take its name from an incumbent Prime Minister–political life, and the administrative life of Westminster, went on as before. The civil service and the diplomatic service and the Palace of Westminster continued in its all but self-perpetuating mechanisms. Laws were debated and drafted in Parliament: budgets were drafted and assigned to different departments, Secretaries of State and Ministers, having hoped perhaps for this or that degree of expenditure, this or that change, modified their expectations and laboured to complete the mounds of paperwork which these aspirations engendered. The Thames still flowed. Men and women still swarmed into London by morning and out by evening on the same semi-efficient transport system, and in a great many demonstrable ways Britain was more or less the same place at the end of the era as at the beginning. But it did not feel the same. For the politicians and the civil servants, immediately from the day she took office, felt something had changed.
It was not long before the country at large became aware of it, too. Two Margaret Thatchers took possession of public consciousness. One, as has been noted, did so subliminally. This was the takeover of power, in a phallic male world, by a priestess; the Queen of the Night had overthrown Sosostris. This, Thatcher’s mythic significance, programmed involuntary responses of revulsion or admiration. But there was another Thatcher, of whom everyone was aware, a figure of unconscious comedy, the bustling, busy woman, a non-stop talker who shamelessly tongue-lashed Cabinet Ministers, senior civil servants, foreign dignitaries–almost anyone except underlings, to whom she was affectionate and polite. John Hoskyns, now installed as a policy adviser at Number 10, kept a record of the hyper-energy and irascibility, but also of the prodigious mastery of detail. The entry for Tuesday 14 August 1979 is typical. ‘Meeting at midday with Angus Maude, David ****, Norman ****, self and Margaret. First half hour or so disjoined and Margaret as ever, passionate at full throttle on every tiny issue–and big ones too.’
Despite the preponderance of wets in her Cabinet, many of whom hoped and assumed it would be possible to get rid of her after the first setback, Thatcher set about the early stages of her capitalist revolution. She appointed as her Chancellor of the Exchequer a Welsh solicitor by the name of Geoffrey Howe. He had been Solicitor General in Heath’s government and was a recent convert to the One True Faith of monetarism. For nearly a decade, in various roles in Thatcher governments, he tolerated the rough edge of her tongue until his final act of revenge, which helped to topple her…‘Called in to sit in on [the] E[conomic Strategy Committee],’ wrote Hoskyns in an ominous diary entry. ‘I was rather shocked at the way Margaret told off Geoffrey in front of E…’
Howe was a clever man. His soporific boringness, toneless voice and tediously pale grey suits concealed a competent operator and a fervent convert’s zeal. Previous friends among the wets were appalled by Howe’s first Budget. In order to reduce the growth of the money supply from around 13 percent to 7–11 percent he raised interest rates from 2 percent to a staggering 14 percent. He reduced the public sector borrowing requirement from 9.25 percent to 8.25 percent in 1979–80. This meant colossal cuts in public spending–some £1,400 million–in social welfare, the National Health Service and the unprofitable nationalised industries. Howe also radically reordered the tax structure, moving from an emphasis on direct to indirect taxation. When before the Budget Peter Jenkins, a Guardian journalist, asked Sir Ian Gilmour, Lord Privy Seal and leading wet, whether it was true that VAT would be doubled, Gilmour replied that there had been ‘no question of any kind of Cabinet consultation’ about the matter and that it was ‘surely inconceivable that anything so silly could even be contemplated’.5
Prior whimpered, ‘It was really an enormous shock to me that the budget was…so extreme.’6 John Biffen, however, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, responded, ‘I do not deny that this is a severe package. The severity is made necessary by the situation we inherited.’7
In the same Budget, Geoffrey Howe reduced the highest rate of income tax from 83 to 60 percent, and the basic rate of income tax from 33 to 30 percent. This cost the Treasury over £4 billion in revenue, and, as the years unfolded, more tax revenue would be lost by the soaring numbers of unemployed, whose meagre dole money cost the tax-paying classes dear but was unable to stimulate the economy by spending. It was touch and go whether the medicine–what Denis Healey nicknamed sado-monetarism–would work.
Mrs Thatcher took on three principal enemies in the course of her eleven and a half years as Prime Minister. In the first of these two campaigns, she was decisively successful: when she confronted and overcame, first, the Argentinian invaders of the Falkland Islands, and secondly, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers–and, with him, the whole Marxian leviathan of organised labour which had demanded appeasement from the government classes since the Second World War. Her third foe was more amorphous. You could call them the chattering classes, an expression coined by her admirer the journalist Frank Johnson. You could call them the bien pensants. You could even call them the Establishment, or the New Establishment. Against these, she was never successful, and in the end ‘they’ got her. It is arguable that, with economic affairs in such a woeful state at the time of the IMF loan in 1976, some monetarist revolution would have been inevitable, whoever was the Prime Minister. Whether the ‘Revolution’ needed to take the sado-monetarist form, whether the medicine needed to have such drastic side-effects, is probably a debate for economists, all of whom would disagree with one another. One thing is sure–the ‘Thatcherite’ version of the revolution was the one which the British people experienced. And after it the old political, as well as economic, battle lines would never be the same again. Socialism, the attempt by socio-political means to overthrow global capitalism and replace it with corporatist state interventionism, was dead, seemingly forever. This happened in Thatcher’s political lifetime. She regarded it as a phenomenon for which she should take some credit. In her time, the number of home-owners in Britain increased hugely, largely because of her policy that council tenants should be allowed to buy, at usually very favourable rates, their own flats or houses. This encouragement of the upper-working and lower-middle classes to give themselves a leg-up in the world and to escape the dependency culture of the state was a characteristic part of the Thatcher revolution. Equally characteristic was the lack of apparent concern by government for those who were unable, by temperament or financial hardship, to take advantage of these arrangements; or those who, through the periods of soaring interest rates, and boom–bust economic roller-coasters presided over by the Thatcherite Chancellors–Howe, Lawson and Major–found their houses repossessed, themselves repossessed. There was never enough adequate housing built, or acquired, to compensate for the sale of the council properties in the early 1980s, with the inevitable consequence in the later part of the decade that, for the first time in living memory, homeless beggars began to appear on the streets of big cities, their huddled, sleeping-bagged presence a disturbing reminder, to the consciences of their fellow citizens, that all was not quite right with the Revolution. While the spivs seemed to become richer and richer–in the City, in the service industries–the old manufacturing towns slumped into near-extinction. The primary
British skill of the Industrial Revolution–making, or producing, commodities which other nations wished to buy–seemed to have deserted them. Two million jobs in the manufacturing industries were lost. Everyone in the world seemed able to make, or mine, or spin, or produce saleable goods more skilfully and more cheaply than could the British. And as the recessions grew, so did the unemployment queues, from 5.5 percent in 1979 to 13 percent by January 1983. Unemployment more than doubled in a single year, 1980–81, and by mid-1982 three million were out of work.
But fairness must allow the Lady her due, and record her two great victories. Without the first of these, the successful expulsion of Argentinian forces from the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, she might never have survived beyond her first term in office; the grievous social consequences of the monetarist revolution in its early stages would probably have lost her the election, and the wets in the party, who had always hated her, would have proceeded in the traditional Tory manner to assassinate their leader as soon as possible. But Margaret Thatcher was blessed in her opponents and enemies. Leopoldo Galtieri, who seized control of a junta government in Buenos Aires in December 1981, needed to establish popularity at home and to silence opposition. The Malvinas, known by the British as the Falkland Islands, were and are a remote and barren group of islands, inhabited by 1,800 people, 600,000 sheep and several million penguins. Ever since the British took possession of the islands, in 1765, their right to be there had been questioned. The Spanish had attempted to repossess them in 1769. Dr Johnson pointed out that West Falkland was a place ‘thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, barren in summer, an island which not even the southern savages have dignified with habitation, where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia, of which the expense will be perpetual’. Throughout the post-colonial period, someone at the Foreign Office had been forever on the point of moving papers about his desk and persuading the Foreign Secretary or the Colonial Secretary to hand over administration of the islands to the Argentines, but it had never quite happened, and this procrastination, interrupted by much sabre-rattling on both sides at moments of crisis, was what was destined to save Margaret Thatcher’s career.
The Falklands invasion was, indeed, one of those great strokes of luck which come upon some politicians. At the time of Galtieri’s decision, Thatcher was in all likelihood heading for political defeat, as the horrible effects of the monetarist revolution began to be felt. Then, in the early hours of Friday 2 April, news reached the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall that Argentinian troops had landed on the islands at Mullet Creek. A small force of British Marines was powerless against the Argentinian fleet, now moored off East Falkland, and a large fighting force, backed up by troop-carriers, guns and two Alouette helicopters. The Marines did what they could, firing 1,200 rounds of small-arms fire and they let off three 84mm Carl Gustav anti-tank rockets.8 but surrender was the only course. Before long the officer commanding the Marines, Lieutenant Keith Mills, and the Governor of the Falklands, Rex Hunt, clad in full gubernatorial regalia of feathered hat and white uniform, had had no alternative but to surrender to the superior forces of General Oswaldo García. So far the casualties were four Argies dead. But what were the British government back in London going to do about the crisis?
Harold Wilson or James Callaghan would have attempted to get out of the problem by means of negotiation. Having consulted with the service chiefs, Margaret Thatcher knew that she was running a colossal risk if she were to attempt the retaking of the Falklands by force. It required the sending of a task force accompanied by tanker ships, supply ships and hospital ships. The journey would take weeks, giving the enemy the chance to build up their defences. Once arrived, there was the formidable task of landing on the islands and engaging with the Argentinians, who would by then have had probably eight weeks to dig themselves in, and who could hold the islanders hostage. Loss of life looked inevitable and victory by no means certain. When Thatcher told the Cabinet of the venture, only the Trade Secretary John Biffen, one of her monetarist supporters, dissented. The alternative was that the government, who had allowed the invasion to take them by surprise in spite of intelligence suggesting a build-up of Argentinian aggression, would have been forced to resign.9
During the subsequent war, between 2 April and 14 June 1982,255 British and 650 Argentinian lives were lost. Perhaps the most controversial engagement of the campaign involved the sinking of the Argentinian ship General Belgrano by the British submarine Conqueror. Of all the events of the war, it was the one which was the most emblematic of the Prime Minister’s character. Three hundred and sixty-eight young Argentinian lives were lost when the ship was sunk–outside the agreed exclusion zone. Thatcher was obliged to take the decision to sink the ship, and her executive courage impressed the military and naval top brass. They were not used to dealing with Prime Ministers who took such decisions so readily. Nor, in all the subsequent and highly predictable hullabaloo, did she show the slightest penitence. The following Christmas at Chequers, when showing composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the film director David Puttnam (he of Chariots of Fire) round Chequers, she paused and said, ‘This is the chair I sat in when I decided to sink the Belgrano.’10
The British public had not been able to enjoy anything like this since the Second World War, which most Britons were now too young to remember. When news of the sinking reached the the Sun on the night of 3 May, most of its journalists were on strike; it was three non-union staff who in fact thought up the headline which many thought typical not only of that newspaper but also of the Thatcher era: GOTCHA!
‘I agree that headline was a shame,’ said proprietor Rupert Murdoch. ‘But it wasn’t meant in a blood-curdling way. We just felt excited and euphoric. Only when we began to hear reports of how many men had died did we begin to have second thoughts.’ In subsequent editions of the paper the headline was altered to the less catchy, and characteristically inaccurate, ‘DID 1200 ARGIES DIE?’
Those who were ‘horrified’ by the headline would be those who eventually had the satisfaction of seeing Margaret Thatcher’s political demise. They included the dons, and the clergy, and those who could see ‘no future’ for Britain outside Europe, who thought it would have been perfectly possible to continue with the consensus politics of the previous forty years, and somehow to work out the economic difficulties without the drastic monetarist remedy. These could be deemed liberal, or enlightened, Britain and, because they were unused to their voice not being heard in the land, they believed, correctly as it turned out, that it was only a matter of time before Thatcher and Thatcherism were eradicated. There was another group, however, who saw the Falklands War, and its enthusiastic reception in some circles in Britain, with an even heavier heart. This was the left, the old formal left, the communists of various colourings and their fellow-travellers. By means of the trades unions (some of them)–and with it the possibility of disrupted and disruptive organised labour; history and sociology departments in universities–and with them the possibility of student unrest; some of the back benches of the Commons, and their gang of fellow-travelling sillies in the media and the Church, the serious left had always known that, short of a revolution, they stood no chance of actually governing Britain. But they had sway and influence. The Falklands War was the first time they began to see that this influence was not merely on the decline. It was about to be eliminated–at first in Britain, and later across Eastern Europe–remaining eventually, by the end of our period, only extant in some parts of the United States, France and Northern Europe. ‘The Falklands crisis represents a truly enormous setback for the Left and even for liberal attitudes in Britain. It has brought to the surface of the Right-wing press an hysteria and intolerance which must make one tremble for what might occur in a really serious crisis.’11 The left saw immediately that, whatever the war’s origins, its consequences would be electoral triumph for Thatcher. Many voters who would not have considered themselves especially belli
gerent felt that a fundamental principle had been established. Regardless of who should have been in charge of the Falklands/Malvinas at the beginning of 1982, they were, as a matter of law and fact, British sovereign territory. The Argentinian dictatorship had brutally invaded. Britain had responded legally, and with prodigious skill and efficiency. When the Argentinians surrendered Port Stanley on 14 June it was a moment not simply of relief; it was a vindication of right. That was how a majority saw matters at home in Britain. The grown-up stuff–that in this day and age we should not be solving international difficulties by means of warfare; that battleships were a thing of the past; that royal princes (Prince Andrew) flying helicopters in military engagements belonged to a vanished age–these protests only inclined the cheering readers of the Sun and the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail to feel that something truly miraculous had taken place. The military victory was not miraculous, for these voters had always believed in the skill and courage of the armed forces. It was the political will, and the executive courage of the Prime Minister, which they loved. Here was a real war, with casualties and ships being sunk and battles being fought. And it was being directed, not by an old man who had himself been a soldier; not by a uniformed Churchill in peaked naval cap, but by a suburban ‘little woman’, a person whom the vast majority of her supporters could recognise as ‘one of them’.
The service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral for Victory on 26 July infuriated the right wing by its conciliatory attitude, its expressions of regret for the young Argentinians slain, and its profession of hatred for war itself. In one of his ‘Dear Bill’ Letters, the fictitious Denis Thatcher wrote: