by A. N. Wilson
I had taken the precaution of ingesting a few pretty stiff ones across the road in the Barbican Arms, and my recollection of the opening moments is not all that clear, but I realised as soon as the Proprietor made her entrance, in total silence without so much as a breath of applause, let alone the massed trumpeters or Cup Final cheering we had expected, that someone had blundered. When Runcie finally minced up into the pulpit and adjusted his frock, instead of rendering thanks to the great Bartender in the Sky for the sinking of the Belgrano and all his other mercies viz unexploded bombs, crass bungling by Argies, massacre at Goose Green etc., we got a lecture, would you believe, on the evils of war with the strong suggestion the whole episode need not have happened…M. inevitably was fit to be tied, shredded her programme, looked at her watch several times during the homily, and when it came to shaking hands with the Primate at the West Door, gave him a radioactive look that left him smouldering.12
The real-life Denis, however, had said that the sermon was ‘better than expected’, but this was ‘more than could be said for the rest of the bloody service’.13 The truth is that the sort of people who draft services in St Paul’s Cathedral were never going to vote for Thatcher, or encourage Thatcherism; their lip-curling and disapproval, sensed throughout the Thatcherite ranks, was only one of many indications of disapproval which egged on the first-time home-owners and would-be purchasers of council houses, who found themselves the natural allies of the entrepreneurs, the moderate trades unionists who had had enough of being bullied by Marxists, and the old-age pensioners who did not mind it when interest rates increased the income from their savings in the building society. The sneering disapproval of those who considered themselves more sophisticated actually exacerbated the Thatcherites’ taste for another battle.
In his diary, Alan Clark noted that, during the service held in Plymouth to commemorate the Falklands War, Dr David Owen had ‘bellowed out the words’, ‘God who made Thee mighty, make Thee mightier yet’.14
The 1983 General Election was a foregone conclusion. It had been helped on its way, not merely by the war, but also by the short-term, or apparent, success of the monetarist economic miracle. On 30 March, 1981, three hundred and sixty-four academic economists had signed a letter to The Times stating, ‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby introduce an automatic recovery in output and unemployment; present policies will deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.
‘There are alternative policies.
‘The time has come to reject monetarist policies and consider which alternative offers the best hope of sustained recovery.’
Nigel Lawson was to write proudly in his memoirs, ‘Their timing was exquisite. The economy embarked on a prolonged phase of vigorous growth almost from the moment the letter was published. So far from launching the economy on a self-perpetuated downward spiral, the Budget was a prelude to eight years of uninterrupted growth and left our economic critics bewildered and discredited.’15
Lawson, as perhaps the most adventurous of Thatcher’s Chancellors of the Exchequer, was bound to say this; and in his monetarist triumphalism he overlooked the fact that the despised academics in their letter to The Times got some things right: Thatcher, Howe and Lawson did help to exacerbate social problems by pursuing policies which destroyed manufacturing industry and increased unemployment. This, like the GOTCHA! attitude to the Argies, was very much what the fans wanted. For decades, the suburban classes had watched while members of big trades unions were able to clobber their bosses, especially those in the nationalised industries, by inflationary wage demands. In times of inflation, it was the middle classes, with mortgaged houses, who paid in higher interest rates for the short-term triumphs of the union barons. And for many such voters it was a chance to exact revenge on the collective bullyism of the left. The left, the numerically diminishing working classes, or as Auberon Waugh always referred to them, the ‘working’ classes, of course fought to maintain the status quo, as did the great liberal majority of academics, civil servants and their like. The knowledge that Thatcher intended to ‘deal with’ the unions was undoubtedly one factor in the electoral triumph of 1983, when she increased her majority by over a hundred seats–to 144.16 True, because of the peculiarities of the British electoral ‘first past the post’ system, this figure concealed another fact–that Conservative votes had actually diminished in the election by 700,000. In 1983 only just over thirteen million people voted for Thatcher. Those who would belittle Thatcher’s popularity point out that this was well less than half the possible adult electors. That somewhat misses the point. Thatcher never believed, and nor did her enthusiastic supporters, that she was loved by all of the people all of the time. Unpopularity, as well as popularity, was an essential ingredient in her political success. She was extremely fortunate, in her first two terms of office, in her enemies. The Thatcherites deplored not only the left, who were her natural enemies, but also the wets, the liberals, the consensus politicians, who wanted to hold back from a showdown.
And there was no doubt that a showdown was coming. Enter stage left the President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, a gift from the gods. In 1980, Derek Ezra, the chairman of the National Coal Board, had warned the government that unless it injected more cash into the ailing British coal industry there would have to be pit closures. A ‘hit list’ was leaked, the following year, of between twenty and fifty uneconomic pits which were ripe for closure, a leak which led to unofficial strikes in Kent and South Wales, followed by a hasty retreat by Thatcher. She did not want to repeat the fate of Heath, who was seen off by the miners. When she took on the miners she would do so on her own terms, and, after years of preparation, when she had insured that sufficient supplies of cheap foreign coal had been imported, and the army and the police primed for the conflict. She also needed a less conciliatory figure than Ezra at the NCB. For her role as general in the war against the working class, she chose the self-made Scots-American Ian MacGregor, who had already earned the nickname ‘Mac the Knife’ while running British Steel, and cutting the workforce by half. Was he a fit match for Scargill? Arthur Scargill, schooled in the Young Communist League, had remained in the party long after the Hungarian atrocities of 1956 had driven out tenderer souls. He first came to prominence in 1972 during the miners’ strike, when he organised ‘flying pickets’ who had turned back the police at the Saltley Gate pits in the Midlands. Wearing a baseball cap, Scargill seemed willing to do Thatcher’s work for her, coming on the television news night after night and mouthing threats against the police, verbal assaults on the management of the NCB and unapologetic, hectoring expressions of hope that a socialist paradise would soon spread from his own luxurious flat in the Barbican across the coal fields of England, Wales and Scotland until it made intrusions into the suburbs of Middle England.
‘We had more people arrested at Saltley…than in the rest of the strike put together. I was the only official of the NUM arrested and subsequently convicted. It was incredible. I was taken to court for picketing and for organizing picketing…you will not get real control of the society in which we live, unless you commit and convince the working class of the need to struggle’……‘If we get another Saltley then thewhole picture can change from one where you have a peaceful road to one where you do not have a peaceful road.’17 There was no doubting Scargill’s ability as an orator and as an agitator. For a limited few (as in the case of his great enemy Thatcher) there was a great personal appeal. He was boyish in appearance, with a high, pink complexion, and an intelligent, bright pair of eyes. But the zest for going too far made him ultimately better suited as a political demagogue than as a union leader. Gormley had known exactly how to lure Ted Heath up to the edge of the heffalump trap: he did not even need to push. Scargill, who was a well-read Marxist, sensed a c
oming apocalypse. He wanted a battle. Thatcher therefore did not need to make her supporters’ flesh creep with fear of the Red Peril; Scargill did the job for her.
Between the pair of them were the lives of tens of thousands of coal miners and their families, and of the towns and villages which were sustained by their earning power. In South Wales, in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Kent, the miners were divided, most of the 25,000 Nottinghamshire miners, for example, being opposed to Scargill, realistic about the possible future of their industry and opposed to the strike. The dispute therefore became not merely (from Thatcher’s perspective) a battle with the communists and wreckers; it became a civil war among the working class, with ‘scabs’ on the one hand and foolhardy left-wing loyalists on the other. As the cruelly long months of the strike were extended, more and more miners, however much it stuck in their throats to do so, felt forced by economic hardship to return to work, even though crossing the picket lines to the cries of ‘Scab! Scab!’ from their fellow workers led to lasting wounds and breaches within families and communities.
Scargill had made three attempts, since becoming President of the NUM in 1979, to call for a national strike and on each occasion he was defeated by ballot. He would have been defeated again in 1984, but this time he did not call a ballot and merely called his union out on strike against the will of many–probably a majority–of his membership. MacGregor was not nearly as belligerent as either Thatcher or Scargill probably wanted him to be. The offer he had made to the miners was a £33,000 redundancy pay for a man aged forty-nine in the case of closed pits. Unlike Thatcher, and in common with most miners, MacGregor actually wanted to save jobs in the industry, and he did not have in mind any solution as draconian as, say, the Wilson government which, during the 1960s, closed more than two hundred pits.18
Thatcher’s line, carefully dictated by her monetarist advisers, was that this was not a government versus miners dispute. That had been the mistake of Ted Heath in the old corporatist days. Governments did not negotiate with unions. Their bosses did–in this case the National Coal Board. All that was required of a government was to watch, and to support the police when the fisticuffs got out of hand.
The idea that the government were not involved, from the start, with the resistance to Scargill, was a fiction. As well as insisting that the Central Electricity Generating Board stockpiled cheap Polish coal at the power stations, the government had also made sure that the ‘police’ at the trouble spots were in fact members of the army wearing police uniforms. One of them told Tony Benn in 1986, ‘I was in the army until last year, and during the miners’ strike I was at Catterick Camp and we were regularly put into police uniforms and sent on to the picket lines. We didn’t like it particularly…At Nottingham, of the sixty-four policemen in our group, sixty-one were soldiers and only three were regular policemen–an inspector, a sergeant and one bobby.’ He said that the soldiers used were from the Military Police, the SAS and the Green Jackets.19
When, in the House of Commons, Thatcher insisted that the government was not intervening in the coal strike, Michael Foot, now resigned as the leader of the Labour Party, to be replaced by Neil Kinnock, rose from the back benches and said that she had ‘lied to the House’. Most unusually, the Speaker did not ask him to withdraw the comment.20 For the miners, both those who lost their jobs and those who attempted, by means of work and moderate negotiation, to keep them, the strike had brought nothing but anxiety and wretchedness. And in the end there was nothing which they, or MacGregor, or anyone else could do to make British coal competitive in the global marketplace. By the end of the century every mine in Britain would have closed.
As so often in Thatcher’s career, the point of the war with Scargill was not its actual consequences but its mythic significance. Though her actual success in government owed much to her phenomenal grasp of detail (Quintin Hogg said that he had never known any other barrister who could master a brief, or a mass of government documents, with a more telling and thorough eye than she21), it was not the hard work and the detail which made the Thatcher magic successful in its glory days. She worked, by contrast, with a theatrical flourish; not with oratory–she was a leaden and boring speaker–but with the telling event, and with large emblematic gestures. The Argentinian forces might–just might–have been persuaded to leave the Islands by the intervention of some outside figure such as the President of Venezuela. But Thatcher’s war showed that Britain was still capable of independent military action in the world. Likewise, Scargill’s strike could have been averted by government, the NCB and the anti-Scargill miners uniting to express their common cause. But Thatcher had wanted, and achieved, a fight against what she called ‘the enemy within’.
The ‘police’, in reality the army, who occasionally confronted the miners, were seen by Thatcherite television viewers as holding the pass against violent anarchy and communism. It was, to use the phrase of Denis in a ‘Dear Bill’ Letter–‘Comrade Scargill’s fifty-nil defeat at the hands of my good lady the Grantham Mauler’.22 The rest of the world could see the Iron Lady in action. This was the woman who, in her alliance with Ronald Reagan (first inaugurated as President of the United States in January 1981), in her championing of the Solidarity movement in Poland, in her persistent verbal onslaughts on the Soviet Union, had come to be seen, throughout Eastern Europe, as a real champion of the anti-communist cause. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, they had actually been living for decades under governments which thought the things which Arthur Scargill thought. They did not regard her as a joke.
Moreover, she was manifestly a person of steely personal courage. In the middle of the miners’ strike, on the night of 11 October, a bomb exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where she and the rest of the Conservative leadership were staying during the Party Conference. It was planted by the IRA ‘because prisoners in Northern Ireland were being tortured’.23
There was no doubt that they had intended to kill Thatcher and as many as possible of her Cabinet. Five people were killed. John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, and Norman Tebbit were badly injured, and Tebbit’s wife was paralysed for life. Thatcher would undoubtedly have been killed had it not been for the diuretic consequences of late-night whisky consumption. As Alan Clark put it in his diary: ‘Mrs T had been saved by good fortune (von Stauffenberg’s briefcase!) as she was in the bathroom. Had she been in the bedroom she would be dead.’24
She was determined not to allow the IRA the satisfaction of seeing her in any way rattled. She walked about among the rubble talking to reporters with a prodigious sangfroid and only a few hours later, with not a hair out of place, she stood in front of the packed Conference to deliver her speech as usual. ‘It was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our conference…It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government.’ There was something simply impressive about her demeanour on that day. Even her enemies were bound to see that.
Chesterton once said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting; it had never been tried. The same could be said of Thatcherism. Although John Hoskyns, Keith Joseph and the inner cabal of monetarist mullahs who had tried to steer her in their direction, a combination of external events, the nature of the British economy and her own character made it ultimately impossible. She spent more on the Health Service, for example, than Harold Wilson, in his wildest or most extravagant dreams, would have promised. (Health spending rose by 32 percent in real terms during the 1980s.25) The pure Thatcherite doctrine, taught by the guardians, was that it was their duty to get government off the backs of the people. But Thatcher, while convinced of this as a rhetorical device, was too bossy by temperament ever to wish to put it into practice. She was by nature an interventionist. She used her power to intervene in the economy just as much as Heath or Wilson had done–for example, it was at her personal insistence that high interest rates were imposed in 1980–81 on an economy already experiencing a high exchange rate and recession.26<
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The nationalised industries could be disbanded and sold off; the rates of income tax could be lowered; home-ownership could be encouraged and made more common. In the end, however, the bills for an unwieldy, centralised welfare system had to be paid: enormous sums of money had to be doled out to the National Health Service and ‘benefits’ showered down upon the old, the halt, maimed and blind, as well as upon the millions of unemployed put out of useful work by the monetarist experiment. Thatcherism, if by that is meant the pure word of monetarism, was not really any more a practical possibility in the messy, confused real world than doctrinaire Marxism was.
Thatcherism, however, meant something more than mere doctrine. It was a certain style.
For anyone as politically ambitious as Michael Heseltine, the question of Europe must sometimes have caused him worries. British membership of the European Economic Community was never very popular in the country at large and in the Conservative Party it was increasingly unpopular. In order to challenge the leadership of Thatcher, he would have to embrace opposite policies, and this meant, inevitably, adopting a vigorously pro-European stance. Not a good recipe for favour with the broadly anti-European public.
Thatcher herself, in common with almost all British politicians of the period, had in fact a very changeable attitude to the question of Europe. As a member of Heath’s Cabinet, she had been not merely accepting of the EEC, she was a keen advocate; and certainly for most of the years of her premiership she supported economic membership of the community, while wishing to keep to a minimum any commitment to the more collectivist or pan-European dreams (things changed a little after she went into exile and became a focal point for the more hysterical Eurosceptic tendency). She forced the Single European Act through a reluctant House of Commons in 1986 but two years later expressed herself surprised by the intentions of Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, wanting a ‘fully fledged political spokesperson for federalism’, with a single European currency and a Social Charter regulating workers’ rights. In 1989, at a European Summit meeting in Madrid, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor Nigel Lawson confronted her with an ultimatum. Unless she committed Britain to entering the ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) they would both resign. Subsequent events proved the wisdom of her reluctance to sign up to the scheme, but ‘The Ambush before Madrid’, as she called it, caught her on the hop and she was already beginning to lose her grip by then. Seeing the cataclysmic effect on savings and jobs which the collapse of the ERM caused in Britain she would have done much better to dispense with the services of Lawson and Howe, who both vanished into obscurity the moment they retired.