by A. N. Wilson
The European debate can be seen as an endlessly circular dispute between economic and political experts on the pros and cons of this or that vision of the future. But in Britain, where everything reduces itself to triviality, the question of Europe has always been a question of something else. The Establishment, the New Establishment, liked Europe because of, not in spite of, the fact that it is anti-democratic. The Little Englanders’ objections to Europe were that its executive was unaccountable, that its bureaucracy was unnecessarily interfering, that its inner workings were profoundly corrupt and that its attempts at joint sovereignty, joint currency were unworkable. For the New Establishment, such considerations were ‘embarrassing’, ‘negative’. While there were Establishment sceptics, there are not many. The Eurosceptics were seen as beyond the pale by the People Like Us who found Thatcher intolerable.
The European question both highlighted and tried to sideline the central paradox of Margaret Thatcher’s political philosophy, and the position of Britain during her incumbency. A belief in free trade had always, since the old quarrels about it split the Tories in the 1840s, entailed the willingness to follow the market, regardless of narrow nationalism. While signing up to various documents on the continent of Europe undoubtedly diminished the sovereignty of the British Parliament, it could be said that these encroachments upon the national identity were often scarcely noticeable.
The great event, from an economic, and hence from a national and political viewpoint, in Thatcher’s period as First Lord of the Treasury, was the abolition of fixed commissions in the London stock market. This was what was known as ‘Big Bang’, on 27 October 1986. Between 1979 and 1984, foreign firms had handled some 95 percent of the £12 billion new overseas investments of insurance companies and pension funds generated by the North Sea oil boom. Something had to change and it was Thatcher’s government, with its belief in allowing as much freedom to the market as possible, which made the inevitable decision. This enabled non-British firms to take over existing broking and jobbing houses in the City of London, and to create enormously rich conglomerates. Electronic dealing, now technically possible, brought to an end the arcane rituals of the stock market floor, men in top hats, bells ringing, and so on. The old Forsyte Saga–style banking firms and stockbroking families retreated before the invasion of American and European firms. By 1990,154 of 408 Stock Exchange member firms were foreign, mostly Japanese, American, Swiss and French. By 1995, Barings, S. G. Warburg, Kleinwort Benson and Smith New Court had been absorbed into Dutch, Swiss, German and American banks. There had never been more money in the City of London in its history. And this created, in Britain itself, a class of super-rich city slickers, yuppies, Porsche drivers, second and third home-owners, crankers up of the housing market, competers for places in private schools, draughtsmen and women of a new social map, in which previous levels of income, and standards of living, seemed puny. But while it brought in untold wealth–wealth which would remain in Britain untaxed in many cases, until Gordon Brown’s government laid down plans to charge ‘Non Domiciled’ (the so-called Non Doms) for their place in Britain–it could not be said to have left Britain unchanged. If Britain was less British at the end of our times than it was at the beginning, this was undoubtedly because of Europe, because of immigration, because of the Americanisation of popular culture and the cosmopolitanisation of eating habits. But a key factor, and one which actually played its part in all the foregoing, was Big Bang and the deregulation of capital. Not least, it had the effect of making London supremely more important, as a wealth producer, than anywhere else in Britain. As the manufacturing wealth of the North declined, as the mines of Scotland, Wales, Nottinghamshire and Kent were closed down, London became ever more the centre of British life. Provincial British and aspirant immigrants flocked to London if they could. ‘Britain’ was in the process of becoming a synonym for London, a multi-national, multi-racial city state, based in London, and largely indifferent to the fate of Manchester or Leeds.
There would inevitably be moments when the bubble burst. The story of Nick Leeson, born in a council house in Watford, reached its strange conclusion in 1995. Sitting in front of a computer screen in Singapore, the twenty-eight-year-old trader appeared single-handedly to bring down one of the most solid and ancient of banking dynasties–Barings–when he disastrously miscalculated and went on buying as the Nikkei index tumbled in February 1995. Yet, though he was, sociologically speaking, very much a product of his times (and he would not have been the sort of chap the Barings would entertain on a shooting party or at their London club), he was only doing what everyone in the City, since Big Bang, had hoped to do–making money not by solid investment but by gambling. ‘Hedging’–protecting an open position in order to minimise risk–was an illusion of which Marx himself would have been proud, had he imagined it in the more apocalyptic pages of Capital. ‘In layman’s terms,’ remarked the Sunday Times, as Barings went down, ‘Barings’ top team chose to smash through red light after red light in a craven chase for “easy” profits. Then, in the final moments, when it was clear that the next stop was a brick wall, they scrambled desperately to find someone, anyone other than themselves, to blame. Leeson, the oik from Watford, looked the perfect fall guy.’27
Though Leeson went down–literally–he went to prison while the ‘top team’ were ‘sitting at home nursing their credibility back to pieces and always knowing what their friends were saying behind their backs.28–the ethos which destroyed him was not laid aside. The sheer venality, the savagery, the way that money gobbled and destroyed not only its greediest lovers, but also the entire culture which spawned it, was the theme of Martin Amis’s most successful novel, Money. Significantly, it was set in New York. Like his friend Salman Rushdie, whose best novel, Midnight’s Children, chronicled the lives of Indians born at the moment of national independence, the fecund imagination of Amis could not focus on the mother country. The revitalisation of London by Big Bang by the most ‘patriotic’ of Prime Ministers had mysteriously blown Britain sky high.
One of the early-warning signs that the New Establishment intended to fight back had been given in December 1984, when the ruling executive of Oxford University, the Hebdomadal Council, proposed the names of seven people whom it wished to honour with doctorates the following summer. There were some academics, Sir Geraint Evans, the former President Pertini of Italy and the Oxford graduate of Somerville College Margaret Hilda Thatcher, born Roberts. Normally, when the Hebdomadal Council proposes names for honorary degrees, the 2,500 or so Oxford teaching staff (the dons) allow the matter to proceed without protest. But they possessed a parliament where they could debate matters which they deemed important. And it soon became clear that they wanted to have their pathetic little moment of power. The seven previous British Prime Ministers had been honoured by Oxford with degrees, Attlee, Macmillan, Heath and Wilson within a year of taking office, and Douglas-Home and Eden receiving doctorates before they reached Number 10. The university had even given a degree to the bonehead Jim Callaghan. They were unable to stand back and consider the justice of promoting Thatcher. She was a person of high intelligence who had, in her way, shed glory on her old college, the more so since, while studying under science dons who were not merely left-leaning but actually communist, she had gone her own way and joined the University Conservative Association (OUCA), while being conscientious. ‘I came to rate her as good,’ said her tutor Dorothy Hodgkin, later a Nobel Prize winner. ‘One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay.’ Yet, when Thatcher returned to Somerville as Prime Minister, neither the former Principal, Janet Vaughan, nor Hodgkin would so much as consent to meet her. And now the university teachers en masse–if so petty a swarm could be described as a masse–voted against her being allowed an honorary degree by 738 votes to 319. All sorts of bogus justifications were produced for this exhibition of Lilliputian malice–Thatcher’s supposed philistinism, or the government ‘cuts’ in expenditure on libraries, the ‘arts’
and so forth. As a matter of fact, Thatcher was no more philistine than many politicians, and she was considerably more intelligent. Whatever view might be taken of her politics, it was surely quite an achievement to have risen from modest origins to become the first woman Prime Minister; and it might have been thought that the university would have been big enough to see that her journey was unimaginable without Oxford, that she was indeed Oxford’s daughter, and as such one who deserved an honour.
But the 738 ninnies who voted against her all supported that very influential class, the New Establishment. The vote to snub Thatcher showed them at their nastiest. The vote to appoint Roy Jenkins as Chancellor of the University a couple of years later, in March 1987, showed them at their most foolish. Puffed up, pompous and vacuous, Woy was the embodiment of all that these people would consider ‘civilised’. This New Establishment had no more democratic mandate for determining the course of public affairs than had the Old Establishment of Etonians, senior bishops and civil servants, the army and the clubs. But the dismissal of Thatcher and the elevation of Woy to a position once occupied by the 1st Duke of Wellington and later Lord Curzon made it very clear, not merely that Thatcher, as a public figure, was living on borrowed time, but also that the New Establishment would never allow such a revolutionary phenomenon to happen again.
As a matter of fact, the political success of the Lady had been in large measure because the fastidious Woy, who, upon his return from the Continent, where he had served as a very well-dined President of the European Commission, could not dirty his hands any longer with engagement with the Labour Party. The formation of the Social Democratic Party, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unelectable hopelessness of the Labour leadership, made it very easy for the Conservatives to win elections in the 1980s. Woy had been an incompetent Home Secretary and a disastrous Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in his person, manner and friendships he appeared to stand for all the things which the New Establishment stood for, whereas Thatcher blatantly did not. When Jonathan Miller referred to her ‘odious suburban gentility and sentimental saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy’.29 he was at least making clear where everyone stood. Britain was technically a democracy. The commuter classes–the majority of those working in the South East–might have supposed that they had enjoyed the supremacy of the trades unions and organised labour, in their alliance with leftist academics, for long enough; nor did they want, perhaps, to return to the days of being patronised by the Old Establishment or, before that, by the aristocracy. Perhaps this class–the class from whom H. G. Wells emerged and for whom he wrote–imagined that they might, just for once, be allowed their say. Their favourite newspaper, the Daily Mail, had made Mrs Thatcher politically. But the very expressions on the faces of such as Dr Jonathan Miller when that publication was mentioned would have been enough to remind the Pooters that their decade of whoopee was not to be allowed to last.
It would have been good for the New Establishment if a Social Democratic Party could have beaten the Conservatives outright; failing that, they realised that their best bet would have been that a Social Democrat fifth columnist such as Douglas Hurd or Kenneth Clarke could be fielded to defeat Thatcher in a challenge for the Conservative leadership. But they knew this was never going to be practicable. To defeat the Lady, they would have to field a paradoxical candidate–not one of their own, but a maverick from the ranks of the spivs, a man who from his rise to riches through property speculation and motoring magazines might have seemed like the classic Thatcherite–and perhaps for this very reason became the snarlingly envious anti-Thatcherite Michael Heseltine.
The ‘moderate’ views of Heseltine–by which he meant a desire to return to the failed corporatist economics of the Heathite past, and his ‘passionate commitment’ to Europe–were more often heard among the sophisticated classes than the raw language of Thatcherism. To that extent his views went with his bought furniture and his Palladian house, Henford, near Banbury. Politicians who had inherited such houses tended, like Ian Gilmour, to be wets.
Michael Heseltine badly miscalculated his timing. Had he challenged Thatcher after the Westland affair he might at least have lived up to the image which he cultivated for the blue-rinsed ranks of Conservative rallies and conferences: namely, that of a swashbuckling man of courage. In fact, he had been too cowardly to risk losing the prize he so coveted. For years he had been preparing for the moment when he would become Prime Minister. In his absurd country house–absurd because he and his wife managed to transform a nice old Palladian seat into something with the gleaming, brand-new atmosphere of a ‘country house’ hotel–he had hung portraits of previous Prime Ministers such as Disraeli, giving the impression to any visitor that this was a mere waiting room for Chequers. For years he had plotted and smarmed and muttered his way round the smoking rooms and tea rooms of the Palace of Westminster. But although there were those who admired him for his supposedly compassionate Conservatism, others saw him merely as the spiv of spivs, a figure who made the lesser spivs such as Parkinson seem positively aristocratic. The result of the first ballot was a humiliation for Heseltine–Margaret Thatcher 204, Michael Heseltine 152, Abstentions 16. Had the Conservatives devised a sane method of electing their party leader, the Lady would have been safe. But she fell four votes short of the required surcharge of those entitled to vote.
When she heard the news she was in the Paris embassy. Twice in our period, a woman who bestrode the stage and dominated the British news was to meet her fate in Paris. Thatcher bustled out of the embassy and down the steps to say words which had been prepared for her in the event of this calamity–for no one who understood politics could fail to realise that a calamity is what it was. ‘I’m naturally pleased that I got more than half the parliamentary party and disappointed that it’s not quite enough to win on the first ballot so I confirm it is my intention to let my name go forward for the second ballot.’
But back in Westminster her Cabinet had decided that enough was enough. There was little doubt by now that the lobby fodder of the Conservative back benches had decided that Thatcher, once the election winner, was now a liability. They would desert her at the second ballot. Her most ardent supporter, Alan Clark, believed she’d be lucky to get ‘90 f***ing votes’.30 Fairly obviously, the end had been reached, and when she summoned each of the Cabinet individually to give her advice, only the ultra-loyalists such as Cecil Parkinson and Michael Portillo told her to stay. Most of them told her to go. The next day she went to see the Queen and told her that as soon as the party had chosen a new leader she would herself resign.
She then went down to the House of Commons at a quarter past three to reply to an Opposition vote of censure of the government. No one who witnessed that scene could forget its drama. There must have been other women in the chamber of the Commons, but if so they did not seem visible. What was memorable was this small, immaculately dressed woman standing in the middle of a baying mob of males. Her old enemies Heath and Heseltine had already received cheers (from the Labour benches) as they entered the House to see the spectacle. But when she came in, things were different. The Conservatives cheered and waved their order papers, but the Labour members shouted ‘Judas!’ And justifiably so. Thatcher now stood in front of the party which had betrayed her and opposite the party which hated her, and she had never displayed herself so impressively.
‘The Opposition’s real reason [for the motion] is the leadership election for the Conservative Party, which is a democratic election according to rules which have been public knowledge for years. That is a far cry from the way in which the Labour Party does these things.’
She was asked about her visit to Europe.
Margaret Thatcher: Europe is strongest when it grows through willing co-operation and practical measures, not compulsion or bureaucratic dreams.
Alan Beith: Will the Prime Minister tell us whether she intends to continue her personal fight against a single currency and an independent
central bank when she leaves office?
Dennis Skinner: No! She’s going to be governor! (Laughter)
Margaret Thatcher: What a good idea. I hadn’t thought of that. But if I were, there’d be no European Central Bank, accountable to no one, least of all to national Parliaments. Because the point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking powers away from every single parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which takes all political power away from us. As my right honourable friend [Nigel Lawson] said in his first speech after the proposal for a single currency, a single currency is about the politics of Europe. It is about a federal Europe, by the back door. So I’ll consider the honourable gentleman’s [Mr Skinner’s] proposal. Now where were we? I’m enjoying this. I’m enjoying this.
Michael Cartiss: Cancel it. You can wipe the floor with these people.
Later, Dennis Skinner shouted at the Conservatives, ‘She’s a better man than the whole pack of you!’ In the morning, she had been unable to read her resignation speech to the Cabinet without breaking down, but now she was like a great diva, high on adrenaline, and there was tremendous poignancy in her final parliamentary hour.