Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In any case, Mrs Thatcher’s most urgent challenge now was to stave off a revolt by her own ministers. Listening to the Prime Minister and her Chancellor, Sir Ian Gilmour thought they were like First World War generals, marching their men towards certain annihilation. And that autumn, speaking off the record, Jim Prior told the journalist Hugo Young that he was ‘appalled by the seriousness of the situation, sceptical about the Treasury’s extremism, highly aware of the possibility of failure’. It was true, Prior said, that ‘nothing has worked in the past, so we must try it our way’. But like a growing number of his colleagues, he seriously doubted that Thatcher and Howe could turn things around. ‘We are sober people’, he said grimly, ‘who can see real collapse staring this country in the face.’63

  Mrs Thatcher spent Christmas at Chequers. On Christmas Eve she visited the British troops in South Armagh, but she was back by the evening, which she spent with her family. In this, as in much else, her tastes could hardly have been more traditional. Her Christmas lunch, according to her press office, began with an ‘avocado pear and grapefruit salad’, followed by turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas pudding and mince pies. In a modern twist, both the BBC and ITV had sent video recordings of the year’s best programmes. And as a John le Carré fan, she was particularly looking forward to seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which had gone out earlier that autumn.

  But she could never sit still. Her bodyguard, Barry Strevens, recalled that on Christmas Eve his Special Branch partner was summoned home because his child had fallen ill. Mrs Thatcher, just back from Northern Ireland, told Strevens to drive him home, because ‘family must always come first’. When Strevens got back to the outbuilding they used as their Chequers base, he was astonished to find ‘Christmas decorations up, a log fire blazing, a tin of biscuits on the table alongside a flask of coffee and a mini bottle of whisky’. On the mantelpiece was a Christmas card, with a handwritten message from Mrs Thatcher herself. ‘I stood there incredibly touched by what this lady – the Prime Minister – had just done for me on Christmas Eve, knowing I was away from my wife and children because my job meant I had to be there for her instead,’ he later told the Sun. ‘It was at that moment I knew I would stand in the way of a bullet for Margaret Thatcher without hesitation. And that I would remain utterly loyal to her for the rest of my life.’64

  A week later, Britain bade farewell to the 1970s. Almost without exception, Fleet Street’s commentators were pleased to see them go. The Times’s Louis Heren thought they would be ‘remembered as the decade when the decline of Britain, at home and abroad, accelerated at an alarming speed’, while the Observer’s Peter Conrad could think of ‘no apter farewell to the unlamented Seventies’ than the spittle of Britain’s punks, ‘a wet and well-aimed discharge’. ‘The Seventies were rougher than anyone thought they would be,’ agreed the Mirror, lamenting that ‘two thousand were killed in Ulster, 20,000 in Rhodesia, several hundred thousand in Uganda and millions in Vietnam and Cambodia’. As for the future, the Mirror was not optimistic. ‘If the 1980s are as awful as they predict,’ it thought, ‘the only people working at the end of them will be the experts forecasting unemployment for everyone else.’65

  For a more cheerful view of the decade ahead, newspaper readers were better off turning to the former deputy Labour leader George Brown, now a great Thatcher enthusiast. ‘The great joy for me this coming week’, he declared in the Sunday Express, ‘is that we can say goodbye to one of the worst decades Britain has known. A decade of despair and disintegration.’ For the first time in ages, Brown was looking forward with hope; for Mrs Thatcher had already brought a ‘sense of purpose and determination to her office that No. 10 has not seen in many a year’. As a patriot, he was convinced that she would ‘lead us to bury once and for all the Dean Acheson taunt … that “Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role”.’ And he concluded on a stirring note: ‘Ten years from now, we shall then look back on these dreadful seventies and wonder how we ever sank so low!’66

  For readers who preferred to put their faith in Old Moore’s Almanack, which had been forecasting the future since 1697, there was similarly cheery news. In the year ahead, Old Moore predicted, ‘a powerful sense of initiative’ would rouse ‘the aspirations of the ordinary men to greater self-reliance and enterprise’, which was precisely the sort of thing that the Prime Minister liked to hear. Perhaps Old Moore was really Old Margaret in disguise. But a book called The 80s, written by three Americans who claimed to be looking back from the future, made for humiliating reading. In 1982, with Britain’s exports having dwindled to ‘a chest of drawers and five dozen jars of marmalade’, the country was going to be advertised for sale in the world’s press: ‘For Sale: One country: Quaint. Needs work. Best offer.’ After being snapped up by Disney, Britain would become the United Magic Kingdom amusement park, admission 50p. To add insult to insult, its native employees would prove so ‘work-shy and disruptive’ that 45 million of them were going to be sacked and shipped to India.67

  Perhaps the most revealing indication of the national mood was, of all things, an Ovaltine advert, which ran in the national press over the New Year. The malted-drink firm had commissioned a cartoon by the Guardian’s Les Gibbard, showing an ordinary family outside their semi-detached house. The family are gazing in horror at the black clouds overhead, which are labelled ‘Recession’, ‘Inflation’ and ‘Strikes’. ‘Hello everyone. Here is the weather forecast,’ says the copy:

  A deep economic depression, centred over the entire country, will remain stationary, while associated troughs of despondency will be slow moving.

  Political visibility will be poor to moderate, due to thick fog in the Westminster area, and there will almost certainly be long outbreaks of industrial unrest with the possibility of heavy overnight recession.

  Barometric pressure on the pound is still rising and causing widespread inflation which could cause a sharp freeze over lowlying assets.

  Still it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and my wife always has a nice, warming mug of Ovaltine ready when I get home. Almost at once, the clouds roll back, and out comes the sun …

  The slogan was perfectly judged. ‘Ovaltine: In place of strife.’68

  Even abroad, it seemed, not many people shared George Brown’s confidence that the new decade would mark the start of a golden age. On the Mirror’s ‘Old Codgers’ letters page, Mr K. Davis of Bath reported that he and his family had just got back from a week’s holiday in Tunisia. The fact that a Mirror reader had been to Tunisia at all told a fascinating story of change, but that was not the point. Mr Davis was writing with a story that ‘made us both laugh and wonder what the rest of the world was thinking of the UK’. He and his family, he said, were strolling through the medina in the coastal resort of Hammamet when a ‘young Tunisian girl, no more than eight years old’, came up and tried to get them to buy some ostensibly local handicrafts. They declined, politely of course, but the girl did not seem surprised. She just shrugged. ‘English,’ she said knowingly. ‘No money, Margaret Thatcher!’69

  5

  The Word Is … Lymeswold!

  Our pleasure lies in returning from a day’s work, transferring the evening meal from freezer to cooker, then sitting back over the first drink to watch Delia at work.

  Joan Bakewell, The Times, 15 March 1980

  I wonder what picture is conjured up by your mind’s eye when I say the name ‘Lymeswold’?

  The World at One, BBC Radio Four, 19 October 1981

  On her first night in Downing Street, Mrs Thatcher took her evening meal in the State Dining Room, joined by her senior officials. Since there was no Number 10 canteen, her personal assistant had brought over some shepherd’s pie, cooked in Chelsea beforehand. Denis made sure everybody had a glass of wine, and Mrs Thatcher herself played hostess, carefully spooning the pie on to her officials’ plates. As it happened, Jim Callaghan’s last meal in Number 10, only hours earlier, had been shepherd’s pie, too. Some of the ci
vil servants must have been sick of it. It was almost impossible, though, to imagine Callaghan doling it out, like a schoolmaster serving dinner to his pupils. But then his successor was hardly a typical Prime Minister.1

  Ever since Mrs Thatcher had become leader of her party, interviewers had asked her about food. But the questions were rarely about eating it; they were about cooking it. Nobody had ever asked Harold Wilson if he liked preparing the family breakfast, or invited Edward Heath to suggest a recipe for spotted dick. But from the moment Mrs Thatcher stepped into the political limelight she had actively encouraged the misapprehension that she was, at heart, an ordinary suburban housewife. ‘What people don’t realise about me’, she said piously, ‘is that I am a very ordinary person who leads a very normal life. I enjoy it – seeing that the family have a good breakfast. And shopping keeps me in touch.’2

  Although this was far from being the whole truth, Mrs Thatcher very obviously wanted to believe it. Even though she had never been merely an ordinary housewife, she remained a child of the 1920s and 1930s, convinced that it was a wife’s responsibility to look after her husband and children. Not long after she became Conservative leader, a journalist made the mistake of asking whether she still made breakfast for Denis and Mark. Mrs Thatcher looked at him ‘incredulously’ and said firmly: ‘Mum makes the breakfast. Fresh fruit and a cooked dish. Currently, they prefer scrambled eggs to fried.’ She was not exaggerating. When the raffish Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken visited the Thatcher household in the mid-1970s, he discovered that his leader ‘cooked breakfast every morning for Denis, who could get pernickety if his bacon was not grilled in a certain way’.

  At other mealtimes, too, Mrs Thatcher bustled around the kitchen ‘at high speed like a television chef on fast forward’, specializing in traditional favourites such as roast beef and coronation chicken. She was, Aitken thought, ‘an excellent if monomaniac hostess, insisting on doing all the wine pouring, cooking and washing up herself, interspersed with imperious commands to the onlookers such as, “Watch out!”, “Move your elbows, dear!”, “Look sharp!”, “Out of the way!” and “Drink up!”’ And she was no stranger to the labour-saving appliances on which so many professional women depended. ‘She has the modern working wife’s Godsend – a freezer,’ reported the Barnet Press in September 1978. As always, though, Mrs Thatcher was keen to look as organized as possible. ‘I try to cook two or three things at the same time’, she explained, ‘to have dishes to put in the fridge or freezer in reserve.’3

  Amid the hurly-burly of the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher’s critics often painted her as some fantastically cruel and decadent empress, swilling champagne as she cackled over the unemployment figures. In fact, the strict rules governing life in Downing Street meant all food and drink came out of her own pocket. ‘We don’t have a cook,’ she told the Sun. ‘I never wanted one. I like cooking but when I come back in late, if there’s anything to be done … what we want is really something simple. I no longer cook anything very complicated.’ What that meant was ‘vegetable soup and inevitably something like poached eggs on toast or Marmite’. She still liked to think of herself as an organized housewife, though. Talking to Living magazine, she claimed that at weekends she liked to ‘go through the freezer to see what we’re running out of. I can’t allow it to get low. I’ve got to have a certain number of shepherd’s pies, lasagne, stews – yes, I still do it, and I like it.’ But whether this happened regularly is very dubious. In reality, she and Denis relied on Marks & Spencer’s ready meals or frozen meals brought in by the Downing Street staff, which she had to pay for privately. All in all, it was hardly a luxurious picture; indeed, she probably lived more frugally than thousands of anonymous professional women.4

  In the kitchen, as elsewhere, Mrs Thatcher’s tastes were often very nostalgic. Her fondness for coronation chicken, for example, reflected her upbringing in a middle-class provincial household in the reign of George V.fn1 Yet even here she was far from being a walking throwback. As a working wife who found little time to cook, relied on ready meals and became increasingly dependent on her freezer, she was very much a woman of the 1980s. In this respect, her experience was more like that of a much younger professional woman than that of a woman of her own age. Talking to the writer Beatrix Campbell later in the decade, one elderly Conservative activist – ‘a tough Tory’ who lived in the Borders and hated ‘scroungers and vandals and communists’ – spoke for many in deploring the laxness of the modern working mother. ‘That film ET just proved how indifferent the modern mother is,’ she explained. ‘She just packed the fridge with food, there was no discipline and ET was there but she didn’t know! Standards are going down. I’d never dreamt it would be like this. I don’t know who’s to blame – it’s the mothers going out to work too early!’ The irony, of course, is that she could easily have been talking about her leader.5

  When the Mass Observation project was revived in 1981, one of its volunteers’ first assignments was to describe their typical weekly diet. The answers offered a perfect snapshot of a country poised between the reassurance of heavy, traditional British meals on the one hand, and the allure of exotic, spicier foreign food on the other.

  In the kitchen, as elsewhere, class mattered. Working-class families still called their evening meal ‘tea’, rarely ‘dinner’ and never ‘supper’, and were much less likely to try expensive novelties from abroad. They also drank a gargantuan amount of tea. Here, in her own words, is what Margaret Bradshaw, the 45-year-old wife of a retired policeman in Lambeth, south London, prepared for her family on a typical weekday in 1981:

  9 Porridge and Tea.

  11 Biscuit and Tea.

  12.30 Egg and Tomato Sandwich, Tea.

  3pm Ice cream or Tea & Cake or Shandy or Lemonade.

  5pm Pork Chop, New Potatoes, Peas, Apple Sauce, Pineapple Rings, Custard. More Tea.

  7pm Tea and Biscuit.

  9.30pm Toast and Cheese. Tea or Milk.

  For Jean Carr, a library cleaner from Chelmsford, the weekday menu seemed to have barely changed for decades, apart from the addition of spaghetti:

  My husband always goes to work with a cooked breakfast inside him. I have bread and marg and marmalade.

  4 days a wk we have tea at 5 o’clock and that is tea, bread and butter, paste, cheese spread and jam, also some home made cakes, sometimes shop bought if they are at a reduced price.

  3 days a wk we have a hot tea or a salad which could be egg and chips, or mushrooms on toast, or egg on toast, spaghetti and sausages, any kind of hot meal like that.

  For a salad, we would have lettuce, tomatoes, luncheon meat, hard boiled eggs or maybe a salad of beetroot, spring onions, pork and egg pie and hot potatoes and we could also have with the salads coleslaw and pickled onions, salad cream and pickle.

  My sons usually have a cup of tea and cereal before going to school …

  For dessert it could be a plain steam pudding, Golden Syrup and custard, or a crumble and custard, bananas and custard, rice or a macaroni pudding so long as it’s hot and sweet.

  Luncheon meat, pork pies, steamed puddings, crumble: this might have been a family menu from 1951.6

  In more affluent households, food more obviously reflected cultural change. Jenny Palmer, the Guardian-reading mature student from Lancaster, gave two sample weekday meals: a ‘casserole of sweet and sour chicken’ with rice, followed by apple crumble; and ‘grilled bacon, homemade burgers and mushrooms’, followed by jelly and cream. Meanwhile, Susan Gray, the journalist on a weekly paper in Darlington, began her day with yoghurt and cereal, while her husband had cornflakes and scrambled eggs. Lunch was relatively austere – ‘crispbread and cheese’ for Susan and ‘meat sandwiches with tomato’ for her husband – but dinner was very old-fashioned: toad in the hole with onion gravy, cabbage and potatoes, followed by rhubarb and custard. In one respect, though, the Grays were unusual. As Susan proudly recorded, all their yoghurt, bread, cakes and biscuits had been homemade, while all their fruit and vegetab
les came from their garden or the local allotment. Clearly they had been great fans of The Good Life.7

  But perhaps the most interesting case was that of Peter Hibbitt. As a former lorry driver who had recently become night supervisor at his Basildon depot, he might have been expected to subsist on a diet of egg and chips. In fact, his tastes were much broader. He too had cereal for breakfast, with ‘boiled egg, beans on toast or individual pietza [sic]’ for lunch, and ‘anything from egg or cold meat and chips via spaghetti Bolognese, shepherd’s pie, steak [and] kidney pie or pudding, kebab, sausages and onions [or] chops’ for dinner. But on Sundays, he wrote, ‘the evening meal is a bit more elaborate … lasagne or moussaka with the authentic ingredients’, or perhaps a roast with vegetables, ‘often some of the more unusual ones’. Like many other respondents, he placed great emphasis on the ‘sweets’ (‘generally a choice of two’), followed by ‘percolated coffee’ and, terrifyingly, ‘home made wine’. And like so many people at the turn of the 1980s, Peter put away ‘vast quantities of tea with everything’. ‘I drink about 12 pints a day from a pint mug’, he wrote. Perhaps it was no coincidence that his political hero was Labour’s Tony Benn, the only man in Britain who drank more tea than he did.8

  To younger readers, all those pies and puddings, all those cold meats and pickled onions and cups of tea, probably sound like something from a gastronomic Stone Age. At the time, however, what was striking was the sheer pace of change, especially for older people who remembered the ration books of the Attlee years. According to the National Food Survey, people in 1981 ate far more margarine and cheese than they had in 1950, as well as twelve times as much pork, usually as bacon or sausages. But they ate less white bread, butter, mutton and lamb, fewer potatoes and much less pudding. According to a survey just before the 1979 election, only one in six housewives served as many puddings as they had three years before, and only half of all families finished off Sunday lunch with a pudding. The Guardian thought this was terrible news. ‘A terrible future of pudding-less dinners and lunches is in store for Britain’, it warned, ‘unless the country’s children take direct action.’ But it was no good. Even the greatest pudding of the 1970s was about to enter an irreversible fall from grace. As Susan Gray reported to Mass Observation, the emblematic pudding of the age, Black Forest gateau, had now ‘gone the way of scampi and chips, chicken Kiev and beef stroganoff … very non-U!’9