Operation Nimrod came a year and a day after Margaret Thatcher had become Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. From her perspective, the timing was perfect. The economic picture was darkening by the hour, with inflation heading towards 22 per cent and unemployment racing towards 2 million. But now, at last, the lion had roused himself from his slumbers. The fact that the world had been watching made success all the sweeter. Among the telegrams flooding into Downing Street, one came from the former American President Richard Nixon, who told Mrs Thatcher that ‘the superb demonstration of British guts and British efficiency by your commando operation is an inspiring example to free people throughout the world’. Another came from the Commonwealth Secretary General, Sir Sonny Ramphal, who thought Britain had ‘won the admiration of the international community’, while the premier of Ontario told her that ‘the free world owes Britain a debt of gratitude for demonstrating such brave resolve’. Even the New York Times, which loved to portray post-imperial Britain as an object lesson in shabbiness and failure, changed its tune. ‘Americans’ first reaction to the remarkable hostage rescue in London is admiration,’ an editorial admitted. ‘The audacity and precision of the Special Air Service’s commandos reaffirms the intrepid British image of a Winston Churchill, a Francis Chichester, or even James Bond. “Who Dares Wins” is the commandos’ motto; they dared, and they saved real lives in 14 electric minutes.’6
At home, the operation was greeted as a modern-day equivalent of the relief of Mafeking. The headlines in the Daily Express – ‘VICTORY!’, ‘The Decision and the Triumph’, ‘So Proud to Be British’, ‘Our Country at Its Best’ – captured the mood. To most papers, the SAS were heroes, real-life versions of James Bond who had restored the nation’s pride in the eyes of the world. For Jean Rook, the ‘First Lady of Fleet Street’, they had proved that the British lion could still roar like no other:
Fearful and bloody pity it is that we had to go through hell-smoke and gunfire to prove it, at least we know that Britain is still a great nation – and so does the rest of the world.
They sniped that we were a second class power, going bust – until we blasted open the Iranian Embassy siege, saving 19 lives (16 of them not our own), and showing America, and open-eyed millions watching the showdown live on TV, how it should be done.
In 45 minutes flat we proved to a gaping world that we’re still a Super Power – and a super people …
It was the British at our best … our finest three-quarters of an hour in years.
All our greatness was there, and all the old discipline … We produced the fastest and best in the SAS – that shadowy, space-age, masked and medalless crack force of unknown warriors. Their motto: ‘Who Dares, Wins.’
And this, she said proudly, was ‘not Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain’. It was Britain here and now, in 1980. ‘This wasn’t the way we were. It’s the way we are.’7
Not everybody rejoiced at the Battle of Prince’s Gate. In The Times, Fred Emery thought the celebrations ‘made it seem as if we had won a war’ and betrayed a neurotic ‘lack of self-confidence’. And in the Guardian, the newsletter of liberal Britain, some readers were beside themselves with horror. What had happened in London, wrote Rosemary Sales, was a chilling reminder of ‘the SAS’s activities in Ireland’, which she considered so heinous that she did not need to describe them. From the University of Aston, Michael Townson advised the ‘thinking public’ to reject Mrs Thatcher’s ‘jingoistic self-congratulation’, as well as the bloodthirsty methods of the SAS. Another academic, F. M. Chambers of Keele, was similarly appalled by the ‘jingoistic congratulations of politicians and the media on the ability of the British to shoot (and kill) terrorists’.
But even many Guardian readers thought these complaints outrageous. One dismissed the academics as ‘tendentious and gratuitous’; another wondered whether Dr Townson would have preferred ‘cold-blooded death … to rescue by the SAS and their methods’. The controversy even drew a letter from a Mr Duckett, who had once served in the SAS. It was, he wrote sadly, only ‘to be expected that in our typically British fashion after any good piece of news … there has to be the knockers who try to denigrate any successful operation’. It was not surprising, he thought, that both letters came from academics. Britain’s universities had ‘more than their fair share of political activists who are prepared to knock law and order at every opportunity and to tear down a democratic system without any suitable alternative’.8
The Prime Minister never wavered in her admiration for the SAS. Only hours after the siege had ended, she and her husband Denis had visited their Regent’s Park barracks. As one of her officials recalled, ‘the air was thick with testosterone’, the men kicking back with bottles of beer to celebrate a job well done. According to one account, Denis jokingly complained: ‘You let one of the bastards live.’ But the SAS did not mind. Together they watched the coverage on the evening news, the men giving Mrs Thatcher a raucous running commentary. At one point, one of them remarked: ‘We never thought you’d let us do it,’ a tribute she never forgot. ‘Wherever I went in the next few days,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘I sensed a great wave of pride at the outcome.’ Afterwards, their brigadier rang Number 10 to let Mrs Thatcher know that the regiment had been ‘thrilled to bits’ by her visit. ‘Her smile’, one soldier said afterwards, ‘would have lightened up the darkest room.’9
From that moment, the romance between Mrs Thatcher and the SAS was sealed. For all her patriotic rhetoric, she had come to power as an earnest economic reformer, promising to sort out the nation’s household budget. In the spring of 1980, few people imagined she would ever take Britain into battle. But now, at a time when everything seemed to be going wrong, she had enjoyed her first taste of a promising new role: the warrior queen, the British St Joan, Britannia incarnate. Looking back, one of her officials recalled that in the days after the operation, she had become ‘the nearest thing to Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury’. And in December, with the economy deep in recession, she found time to visit the SAS regimental headquarters in Herefordshire. They were, she declared, ‘a marvellous example of leadership, purpose and resolve’.10
Even after another dramatic military operation had transformed her worldwide image and ensured her place in history, Mrs Thatcher maintained a soft spot for the SAS. In January 1983 she accepted an invitation to dine with the regiment at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, the guests including almost all the majors and captains who had served in the Falklands. Afterwards, she received a gushing letter of thanks from Colonel David Stirling, who had founded the SAS during the Second World War. In the mid-1970s Stirling had returned to the headlines as the founder of GB75, a group of ‘apprehensive patriots’ who would ‘intervene’ in the event of a general strike. He was still a patriot, but he was no longer apprehensive. Like his fellow SAS veterans, he told Mrs Thatcher, he had been ‘exhilarated’ by the opportunity ‘to pay tribute to your leadership’.11
Many years earlier, Stirling had coined the regiment’s motto, ‘Who Dares Wins’. Though hardly afraid of patriotic rhetoric, Mrs Thatcher never used it. Perhaps she thought it too unsubtle. But amid a flood of cash-in books, the phrase began to seep into popular culture. In November 1980 the Confederation of British Industry’s director general, Sir Terence Beckett, told business leaders that in making their case to the government, they should remember ‘the SAS rescue at the Iranian Embassy. Their motto, as you know, is “Who Dares, Wins”. They knew exactly what they had to do, and with a practised and punctilious professionalism, they did it.’ In the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which began in September 1981, the would-be entrepreneur Derek Trotter is always telling his brother: ‘Remember, Rodney: he who dares, wins!’ And a year later, The Times’s political correspondent David Watt suggested that Mrs Thatcher might already be ‘suffering from a form of hubris that is the commonest disease of successful politicians … “Who dares, wins”, you may say; and up to a point that is true. But Nemesis awaits the politician who confuses good f
ortune with good management and good management with the righteousness of his or her cause.’12
One man who took the SAS’s motto seriously was the film producer Euan Lloyd. Best known for The Wild Geese (1978), which starred Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris as mercenaries in southern Africa, Lloyd was a man of firmly conservative opinions. ‘I watched in awe at what these SAS men did and truly I felt very proud,’ he said later. On the evening of the operation, he called his lawyer in New York and told him to register the title Who Dares Wins with the Motion Picture Association of America. Then he commissioned The Prisoner’s scriptwriter George Markstein to write a story and hired Lewis Collins to play the lead. He could hardly have made a more apt choice. Not only was Collins already playing an ex-SAS hard man in ITV’s The Professionals (1977–83), but he was fascinated by the armed forces. Having joined the Parachute Regiment as a reservist in 1979, he applied to join the SAS after the film came out, passed the brutally demanding selection tests and was only rejected because his fame made him a security risk.13
The plot of Who Dares Wins is obviously modelled on the Iranian Embassy siege, but this time the terrorists are the hard left, who are using the nuclear disarmament movement as a Trojan horse. When they seize the American Embassy, their chief demand is that the Americans detonate a nuclear bomb in Scotland, so as to discredit the nuclear deterrent and pave the way for unilateral disarmament. This storyline did not go down well with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At the premiere in London in August 1982, demonstrators stood in pouring rain for three hours to make a silent protest in Leicester Square. And in a revealing footnote, the veteran actor Kenneth Griffith, who plays the pacifist Bishop of Camden (‘Jesus Christ was a militant radical!’), paid the price for taking the producers’ shilling. Having won great acclaim for his iconoclastic historical documentaries, Griffith had been asked to introduce a programme of progressive films at a festival organized by Islington North Labour Party to mark the borough’s birth as a self-styled ‘socialist republic’. But when the organizers heard that he was in Who Dares Wins, they withdrew the invitation. As it happened, the guiding force in the North Islington party, already adopted as its candidate for the next general election, was a young man called Jeremy Corbyn.14
Lloyd had imagined Who Dares Wins as a riposte to the negativity of British popular culture, symptomatic, he thought, of an age of national decline. But by the time it came out, the mood had changed completely. The Falklands War was over; the flag flew proudly again. Isolated and beleaguered at the time of the Iranian Embassy siege, Mrs Thatcher now dominated the political landscape like no Prime Minister for decades. So instead of standing against the tide, Who Dares Wins felt like propaganda for the winning side, less a bracing restatement of unfashionable values than a reheated helping of tabloid jingoism. In any case, who cared about the embassy siege now, when the Falklands heroes were splashed all over the papers? And to make matters worse, the reviews were awful. The Times considered it ‘so antiquated in technique that it might have escaped from a cobwebbed Pinewood vault’, and thought one scene so boring it deserved the ‘reverse of an Oscar’. It was, lamented the Guardian, a ‘truly dreadful’ film.15
Yet some people clearly liked it, since Who Dares Wins was the tenth most popular film of the year. And at least one Hollywood veteran adored it. According to the Los Angeles Times, President Reagan requested a special screening for ‘friends and cabinet members’, and gave it a ‘rave review’. His Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, told the paper that they thought it a ‘terribly exciting drama’ and a ‘realistic portrayal of the world in which we live’. Almost incredibly, the producers had been asked to arrange special screenings for the Los Angeles Police Department, the FBI and the US Army, who were hoping for anti-terrorist tips before the Los Angeles Olympics. Once again, then, the Americans were learning from the mother country. The natural order had been restored; all was right with the world. It was just a shame it was such a terrible film.16
This book tells the story of Britain during the most exciting and controversial years in our post-war history, from the spring of 1979 to the summer of 1982. It begins with Margaret Thatcher walking into Number 10 as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. It ends with the high drama of the Falklands War, a ten-week conflict that could easily have smashed her premiership into fragments. If it had, then Britain today might be very different. If nothing else, defeat in the Falklands would surely have confirmed Britain’s self-image as a country trapped in an inexorable cycle of post-imperial decline. But the war was, of course, a triumph. The Task Force returned to a carnival of pomp and patriotism. The Union Jacks waved, and after the economic agonies of her first three years, Mrs Thatcher seemed the mistress of all she surveyed. From then on, the national narrative became very different.
In some ways this period looks like the final chapter of a long 1970s. The headlines were dominated by inflation, strikes and unemployment, street violence, football hooliganism and terrorist bombings. Commentators wrung their hands at Britain’s wretched economic performance, bemoaned the collapse of the political centre and argued about the nation’s relationship with Europe. The Irish republican hunger strikes horrified the world, vast crowds marched against Cruise missiles and tensions between the police and black communities exploded into shocking violence. The two major parties seemed fatally divided, manufacturing industry was lurching towards oblivion and an entire generation of school-leavers seemed doomed to life on the scrapheap.
But the early 1980s were not quite like the 1970s. When television documentaries recreate the era, bright young things with elaborate eye make-up always seem to be listening to Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ while Brixton smoulders in the distance. And although this is obviously a caricature, this short period did have an intense flavour of its own. Cultural moods are tricky to pin down, but by the turn of the decade there was an indefinable vibrancy, a sense of colour and confidence, that had not quite been there in the mid-1970s. These were the years of Joy Division, the Specials and Spandau Ballet, of Juliet Bravo, Minder and To the Manor Born. They were the years of Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel, the Austin Metro, Not the Nine O’Clock News and the New Romantics. In Moscow, Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe battled for gold. At the Crucible, Steve Davis became a symbol of Thatcherite efficiency. At Headingley, Ian Botham became the greatest patriotic icon of the age. And for perhaps the first time since the early 1960s there was a palpable sense of the future rushing to meet the present, embodied in everything from Gary Numan’s synthesizers and Clive Sinclair’s computers to the microwave ovens and video recorders of the middle classes. In many parts of the country, the Victorian Britain of factories, pubs and chapels was collapsing amid dreadful hardship. But in shiny new shopping centres and suburban living rooms, the next century was at hand.
Even four decades later, the story of these years is bitterly contested. There is no consensus about the 1980s, and there never will be. No single narrative can do justice to the complexity of the national experience: the steelworker who lost his job, the computer enthusiast who set up his own business, the couple who bought their council house – and even these examples, while real enough, teeter on the brink of caricature. And because these years were so divisive, not even the most judicious account can capture every nuance. So it is probably worth saying at the outset that this is absolutely not a partisan book. I have no desire to waste the reader’s time, or indeed my own, by picking sides. And though there is no such thing as a truly objective history, I set out from the start to get the facts right, to dig beneath some of the myths and, above all, to be fair.
My previous books about post-war Britain – Never Had It So Good, White Heat, State of Emergency and Seasons in the Sun – covered a period when I was not yet born or too young to remember anything. But I was 4½ when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and almost 8 by the time of the Falklands. I cannot honestl
y say, though, that the great events of the day made any impression. My memories are entirely dominated by school and family, toys, books and films. I played a lot of Space Invaders, was obsessed by Star Wars and watched what now seems an enormous amount of television. But I found Doctor Who much too frightening, at least until Peter Davison took over, and was not allowed to watch Grange Hill. I went to McDonald’s for the first time for my friend’s birthday party, and regarded it as the finest restaurant in the world. I went on my first foreign holiday, staying in a concrete monolith on Malta, which I barely remember at all. I conducted a long campaign to blackmail my parents into buying a home computer on the entirely fraudulent basis that I would use it for ‘education’. But although I had probably heard Tony Benn, Sir Geoffrey Howe and General Galtieri mentioned on television, I knew little about them and cared even less. I had heard of Mrs Thatcher, of course. But I never gave her the slightest thought.
In the popular imagination, the first woman Prime Minister dominates the story of the 1980s. Whatever divides her admirers from her critics, both agree that she was uniquely transformative. With one wave of her magic nation-saving wand, a new shopping centre materializes in Peterborough. At one touch of her special working-class-destroying button, a factory explodes in South Wales. She destroys Britain; she saves it. But were the changes that swept over Britain during the 1980s really attributable to just one woman? Was she really as transformative as both her enthusiasts and her detractors claim?
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