Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Even before Mrs Thatcher came into office, Britain was becoming a much more private, domestic, individualistic society. Full employment was dead. The heyday of heavy industry had peaked; the transition to services was underway. The old world of working-class masculinity was breaking up; more women were working than ever before. Globalization was already altering people’s daily lives and working habits. Mines and factories were already closing; the City was already opening its doors to the world. In Cambridge, Sinclair’s engineers were already working on Britain’s first mass-market computer; in Liverpool, thousands of school-leavers were already contemplating life on the dole. These were aspects of a wider global story, not an exclusively British one; a story driven, however unconsciously, by the choices of millions of people. Similar things were happening all over the world, in American car factories, French coal mines, German shopping centres and Italian boardrooms. Life would certainly have been different if Labour’s Michael Foot had been Prime Minister. But not, perhaps, as different as people think.

  As a person, Mrs Thatcher remains a uniquely divisive figure: the woman who rescued Britain for some, the woman who broke it for others. Both of these views are perfectly understandable, though both are exaggerated. No fair-minded observer can deny that she could be strident, ungenerous, blinkered and immensely annoying. But no fair-minded observer can deny, either, that she showed extraordinary courage, resilience and moral commitment, and there are too many anecdotes about her personal tolerance and kindness for them all to be invented. This book treats her as a historical actor like any other: neither a saint nor a sinner, but a human being, by turns anxious, domineering, frustrating and sympathetic, a professional career woman trying to cope with the colossal changes of the day.

  What this book shows is that many of the things people believe about Mrs Thatcher and the early 1980s are just not true. It is not true, for example, that she rigorously followed an economic blueprint. In fact, there was a considerable element of making it up as she went along. It is not true that she deliberately set out to destroy British manufacturing; in fact, she always believed she was saving it. It is not true that the lady was ‘not for turning’; in fact, she was far more flexible than either her admirers or her critics pretended. It is not true that she cared only for market values; in fact, she had an intensely romantic sense of Britain’s history. It is not true that she was exceptionally anti-European; in fact, she was probably more pro-European than most ordinary voters. It is not true that she cut spending, since spending kept on rising, and it is not true that she turned off the tap to industry, since she kept handing out multi-million-pound subsidies. It is simply not true that she took Britain to war in the Falklands merely to secure her re-election, just as it is not true that she sank the Belgrano to destroy any chance of peace negotiations. Finally, it is not true that she only won re-election in 1983 because of the schism in the Labour Party. Even if Labour had remained unhappily united, she would almost certainly have won the next election.

  There is more to the story, though, than Westminster politics. By and large, history is driven, not by one or two individuals, but by countless everyday decisions by people who rarely feature in the history books, the anonymous masses about whom Tolstoy famously wrote in War and Peace. So Who Dares Wins goes into the factories, homes and high streets of Britain in the 1980s. We visit a vegetarian restaurant in Barnstaple, a snooker hall in Romford, a peace rally in Glasgow and a holiday camp in Minehead. In rural Derbyshire, a village school bans its female staff from wearing trousers. In Sussex, a man builds his own nuclear bunker. In Oldham, rioting hooligans reduce Jack Charlton to tears; on Majorca, irate pensioners tell a horrified Polly Toynbee how much they hate the Germans. It is often said that the early 1980s were uniquely conflicted years, which saw the nation divided against itself as never before. But most ordinary people did not see themselves as combatants in an ideological civil war. They were too busy getting on with their lives. When Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher comes across the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the House of Lords bar and asks what happened in the 1980 Budget, Wilson says that ‘he didn’t know and didn’t give a bugger’. In this respect, yesterday’s man spoke for millions.17

  Finally, why the title?

  What was really distinctive about the early 1980s, it seems to me, was not the shock of mass unemployment, the triumph of individualism or even the novelty of a woman Prime Minister. It was something more primal: the rebirth of a patriotic populism that would have seemed very familiar to the eighteenth-century mob or to the readers of Edwardian newspapers. When the Express gloried in ‘OUR COUNTRY AT ITS BEST’, when the Sun told Argentina to ‘STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA’, when the Mail roared ‘THE BRITISH ARE BACK!’ they were not saying anything that would have shocked or surprised earlier generations. But these were not, by and large, things people had said in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Union Jack was being hauled down across the world and the only chance of a prosperous future seemed to lie within the European Community. There is no doubt that Harold Wilson and his Labour successor Jim Callaghan were deeply patriotic men, often to the point of parochialism. But in their world-weary way, they seemed to embody a kind of national defeatism, a sense that Britain’s best days were behind her. Perhaps this is unfair. But when Callaghan told his colleagues that, as he shaved every morning, ‘I say to myself that if I were a young man I would emigrate,’ he was only half joking.18

  This was what changed in the first few years of the 1980s. What underpinned everything Mrs Thatcher believed in, the premise for her entire project, was her passionate belief that Britain had been great, was trapped in a spiral of decline and could be great once again. To some of her own colleagues, this seemed a simplistic and reactionary way of looking at the world. But for millions of her fellow Britons it struck a very powerful chord. She never doubted that the people were with her. ‘Deep in their instincts,’ she told the Sunday Times three months after the Iranian Embassy crisis, ‘they find what I am saying and doing right, and I know it is, because that is the way I was brought up.’

  And although millions never liked her, she was probably right. When the political controversies of the 1980s are forgotten, the role that will define her is surely the Iron Lady, the victor of the Falklands, a patriotic populist who dreamed of standing alongside Churchill, Nelson and Elizabeth I. ‘I have always voted Labour,’ a Birmingham shop steward said in the autumn of 1982. But ‘I am an admirer of Margaret Thatcher as a leader. She impressed me over the Falklands. She said it was ours and we were going to defend it … I have never seen my way clear to voting Conservative. It is only what Maggie has done over the last three years that has made me waver.’ He was not, of course, alone.19

  When Mrs Thatcher talked of reviving British greatness, when she paid homage to ‘our boys’ in the South Atlantic, when she spoke of Britain leading the world into a bright new tomorrow, she was consciously rekindling a patriotic tradition, a faith in Britain’s unique past and glorious future, that had seemed close to extinction a few years earlier. Whatever their politics, this was something many people loved to hear. This was why the words ‘Who Dares Wins’ struck such a chord. This was why people remembered the adverts for the Austin Metro, ‘a British car to beat the world’. This was why they cheered the SAS, adored Ian Botham and wept at the return of their Falklands heroes. Not everybody, of course; there were always doubters, dissenters, citizens of the world, just as there had been radicals and pacifists in the Victorian age. But it is only a slight stretch to suggest that, had it not been for the revival of their patriotic self-image, the British might not have remained so doggedly suspicious of the European project. Perhaps, if they had still seen themselves as a nation in decline, reeling from the loss of Empire and the collapse of industry, they would have become more like their neighbours, and would never have thought of breaking away. Perhaps it was here, then, that the road to Brexit began.

  But this is a book about the past, not the present. It opens
, as promised, in the spring of 1979. And before we get to Margaret Thatcher, we begin, as all books should, with Fawlty Towers.

  Author’s Note

  Most readers should just ignore this and crack on. But for those who enjoy such things, a bit of housekeeping.

  Since the history of the 1980s is so contested, it may be worth saying something about my sources. I read every edition of The Times, the Guardian, the Mirror and the Express from the early 1980s, and dipped into countless other newspapers and magazines, from the Sun to Smash Hits. There is already a vast academic literature about Thatcherism, as well as books on every conceivable aspect of life in the 1980s. But by far the most valuable resource is the Thatcher Foundation’s colossal archive, brilliantly curated by Christopher Collins at https://www.margaretthatcher.org. Not only does this contain every word Mrs Thatcher said in public, it also has thousands upon thousands of pages of her private papers and declassified documents from the National Archives. If it did not exist, this book would look very different. The benefit is that I was able to see everything that Mrs Thatcher read, wrote and said, day by day, as Prime Minister. The downside is that I spent years scrolling through documents, trapped inside Margaret Thatcher’s head.

  Because the Thatcher website is so user-friendly, I have usually given the citation TFW (Thatcher Foundation website) rather than the more complicated National Archives reference. Sometimes, though, I have cited National Archives files directly, usually when the documents were not on the Thatcher website. The other major online archives I used were the Hansard website at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/index.html and Ulster University’s collection of digitized government documents from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/proni/index.html.

  Perhaps my favourite source, though, was the Mass Observation Project, which was not running during the period covered by my previous books. Inspired by the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s, this was launched in 1981 as a ‘national life writing project’ and continues to this day. In 2012 a selection covering the 1980s was published online as part of a University of Sussex project, ‘Observing the 80s’, at http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/. For this book, I picked eleven people whose accounts struck me as particularly vivid. Under Mass Observation guidelines their real names are hidden, but you are allowed to give brief biographical details and to invent pseudonyms. I naturally decided to name them after the members of Wolverhampton Wanderers’ League Cup-winning side of 1980. For their first names, I used the census to find the most popular names when they were born. That gave me the following XI:

  Margaret Bradshaw, a 45-year-old former journalist from Lambeth, south London, married to a policeman.

  Jenny Palmer, a 40-year-old Guardian-reading mature student from Lancaster, married, who later founded her own business.

  Sheila Parkin, a 40-year-old assistant manageress of a camping and leisure shop from Brentwood, Essex, who bought her own council house.

  Carol Daniel, a 29-year-old shelf-stacker at a Tesco in Romford, Essex, married with children.

  Lesley Hughes, a 36-year-old cleaner and single mother from Stowmarket, Suffolk.

  Stephen Berry, a 48-year-old architectural technician from Chelmsford, Essex.

  Peter Hibbitt, a 47-year-old lorry driver turned depot supervisor from Basildon, Essex, a great fan of Tony Benn.

  Jean Carr, a 44-year-old part-time cleaner in a library near Chelmsford, Essex, married with children.

  Susan Gray, a 39-year-old journalist on a Darlington paper, married with a daughter.

  Mary Richards, a 54-year-old woman from Newton Abbot, Devon, who collected eggs on a battery farm.

  Anne Eves, a 40-year-old clerk, married, who bought her own council flat.

  As volunteers, they were obviously self-selected. Still, they give a surprising insight into what self-consciously ‘ordinary’ people made of life in the early 1980s.

  Two other quick points. First, although this book is absurdly long as it is, some things inevitably had to be left out. Readers looking for Space Invaders, Greenham Common, gay rights, Grange Hill, Martin Amis or video nasties will have to wait until the next book in this series, which will cover the period from the end of the Falklands War to the end of the miners’ strike in the spring of 1985.

  Finally, some readers may wonder why I call the woman who became Prime Minister in 1979 ‘Mrs Thatcher’ rather than ‘Thatcher’. There are really three reasons. The first is that her biographers all call her ‘Mrs Thatcher’. The second is that ‘Mrs Thatcher’ reinforces the most unusual thing about her: the fact that she was a woman. Whenever newspapers or broadcasters referred to her in the 1980s, they called her ‘Mrs Thatcher’. Even a passing mention, therefore, hammered home the fact that she was different from almost every other politician in the land. ‘Thatcher’ might have been a man. ‘Mrs Thatcher’, though, was a woman.

  The most important thing, though, is that it just sounds right. As a child, I was used to hearing her described as ‘Mrs Thatcher’ on television. Sometimes people called her ‘Maggie’ or ‘Mrs T’, which usually implied approval. But whenever I heard people talking about ‘Thatcher’, it was almost always during some withering denunciation. Even now the word ‘Thatcher’ often carries an electric charge, as if the speaker is gearing up to tell you about her thirst for slaughter and hatred of the poor. A BBC documentary producer once told me that he went through his directors’ scripts changing ‘Thatcher’ to ‘Mrs Thatcher’ because it made them sound more considered. I knew exactly what he meant.

  All the same, in my earlier books I never called Barbara Castle ‘Mrs Castle’. So I don’t claim to have been consistent.

  Part One

  * * *

  WHAT THE HELL’S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY?

  1

  Whatever Happened to Britain?

  Wasn’t the Seventies a drag, you know? Here we are: well, let’s try to make the Eighties good, you know? ’Cos it’s still up to us to make what we can of it.

  John Lennon’s last radio interview, 8 December 1980

  In a quiet way the British were hopeful, and because in the cycle of ruin and renewal there had been so much ruin, they were glad to be still holding on – that was the national mood – but they were hard put to explain their survival.

  Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain (1983)

  A miserable, rainy evening in March 1979, and after hours ploughing through the spray of the M5, Mr and Mrs Hamilton have finally pulled up at their hotel, a handsome white building on the English Riviera. ‘Everything on the wrong side of the road,’ Mr Hamilton mutters grimly, ‘and the weather, what do you get for living in a climate like this?’ They deserve a stiff drink, he says: then something nice for dinner. Unfortunately, the Hamiltons are in for a shock. As the hotel’s owner explains, the kitchen has just closed for the evening. ‘The chef does actually stop at nine,’ he says awkwardly. Perhaps they would like a sandwich instead. ‘Ham? Cheese?’ Mr Hamilton, who lives in California, can barely believe his ears. ‘What the hell’s wrong with this country?’ he snaps. ‘You can’t get a drink after three, you can’t eat after nine, is the war still on?’

  Eventually Mr Hamilton hands over £20 – ‘Mickey Mouse money’, he calls it – to persuade the chef to stay for an extra half-hour. But his ordeal has only just begun. He orders a screwdriver, but nobody knows what it is. His English-born wife explains that it is vodka and orange juice, but when it arrives he spits it out in horror. He was expecting freshly squeezed juice, not ‘freshly unscrewed’. He orders a Waldorf salad, but his host claims to be ‘just out of Waldorfs’. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Mr Hamilton demands. ‘You know something, fella? If this was back in the States I wouldn’t board my dog here.’ And then, at last, matters come to a head. Discovering that the hotelier pocketed his money, let the chef go and is trying to cook the meal himself, Mr Hamilton loses his temper. ‘This place’, he roar
s, ‘is the crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe!’ At that, one of the hotel’s most faithful residents, a former major, feels bound to intervene: ‘No! No! I won’t have that! There’s a place in Eastbourne!’1

  Mr Hamilton, who appears in a memorable episode of the second series of Fawlty Towers, never existed. But he might have done. For if the turn of the 1980s brought terrible devastation to Britain’s steel, coal and car industries, it also brought an unprecedented influx of foreign visitors. In 1980, a year after Mr Hamilton’s supposed visit, almost 13 million tourists, many of them Americans, landed on British shores. They brought an estimated £4 billion into the national economy; but as so often, success bred discontents of its own. That summer, The Times complained that crowds in London meant ‘lengthening queues at underground stations’, exorbitant prices for ‘souvenirs, soft drinks and ice cream’ and shouting mobs in Westminster Abbey. There were so many visitors that the capital’s hotels were booked solid, forcing some holidaymakers to sleep in dormitories. ‘A groaning system is already overloaded,’ lamented the archdeacon of Westminster. ‘Visitors to London by sheer force of numbers are destroying what they come to see.’2

  What had all these millions of visitors come to see? Most of them probably dreamed of a historic, unchanging Britain that seemed utterly remote from the messy realities of most people’s daily lives: Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, the West End, Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle, the Royal Crescent and the Royal Mile. Yet modern Britain could not be shut out entirely, even on a flying visit. Indeed, if the guidebooks were to be believed, the state of the nation was grim indeed. Here, for example, is the Let’s Go guide for 1982, written by Harvard students and aimed at young American backpackers: