Britain’s athletes flew back into Heathrow to a rapturous welcome from hundreds of fans. But there was no Downing Street reception, as there had been for previous winners. And although Fleet Street was only too happy to glory in their triumphs, the scars of the boycott row had not quite healed. The real heroes of Moscow, said the Express, were the ‘equestrians, marksmen [and] yachtsmen’ who had refused to go. ‘They put liberty and justice before personal sporting ambitions. It was a hard thing to do, and we are proud of them for doing it.’ The Times agreed. The athletes who had stayed away had ‘sacrificed the chance of a lifetime but their consciences will be lighter … The moral achievement of those who did not go to Moscow, especially those who could have expected medals, must surely outshine the sporting achievement of those who did.’ These were fine words. But it was Coe and Ovett that people remembered. Nobody ever remembered the missing equestrians.49
On the last day of the year, there came one last twist. When Buckingham Palace published the New Year’s honours list, not one of Britain’s medallists had been included. It was a calculated snub, and Mrs Thatcher did not bother to disguise it. ‘I advised them strongly not to go,’ she said. ‘They chose to accept their democratic right to go to a country which has no democratic rights. I respected their view. I did not agree with it.’ Instead, she preferred to think about those ‘people in Afghanistan who are genuinely fighting for the very freedom which our Olympic people take for granted’.
‘Three cheers to Mrs Thatcher,’ read a letter from John Vernon to the Daily Express. ‘It is obvious to everyone who has the slightest belief in common dignity that they should never have gone to Moscow in the first place.’ By contrast, the former Olympic steeplechase champion Chris Brasher wrote that he had ‘yet to meet anyone who does not think that Mrs Thatcher is petty and schoolmarmish’. Indeed, even the Express found room for a letter simmering with outrage. ‘What a mean, spiteful, petty attitude,’ wrote H. Jacobs. ‘They dared to disobey her – so what? Britain is supposed to be a democracy.’ Of course it was only a trivial issue, and they did get their honours eventually. But as Mrs Thatcher’s European counterparts had learned, she rarely forgave a slight and had a knack of provoking fierce passions. Not all the issues at stake would be so trivial.50
8
Mrs Thatcher’s Final Solution
I’ve just been chatting to Bob [Conquest] on the telephone. She’s had it according to him … All the fucking wets in the Cabinet will stop her being tough enough and the effort will collapse.
Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 7 March 1980, in Zachary Leader (ed.), The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000)
Everyone in the Cabinet loathes the PM, is out to do her down.
Alan Clark’s diary, 12 April 1980
On 6 January 1980 Mrs Thatcher welcomed the cameras to Downing Street. In her first live interview since the general election, she had agreed to take questions from the former Labour MP Brian Walden, now presenting London Weekend Television’s Weekend World. Walden’s introduction set the tone:
Britain enters the Eighties under the most radical leadership the country has known for a generation. Not since Clement Attlee arrived here in Number 10 thirty-five years ago have we seen a Prime Minister so determined to change things. Margaret Thatcher insists that prosperity must return to Britain and she believes that the way to ensure that this happens is to stamp out inflation and improve incentives …
There were those who thought Mrs Thatcher would be forced into a U-turn within the first six months, but she hasn’t been. Instead she’s made it clear that she intends to do whatever’s necessary to make her plan work, and it’s now apparent that this may mean a rougher ride for all of us than anybody expected.
In private, Walden, the grammar-school-educated son of a Black Country glass-worker, was a keen Thatcher fan. But as he relentlessly interrogated her about the impending steel strike, her union reforms and the next Budget, few viewers would have guessed. And moments before the credits rolled, he identified what many critics saw as a key weakness in her philosophy.
Even if her reforms succeeded, Walden said, she ‘would still have created a society that was more unequal, riddled with avoidable injustices’. So was ‘the price for our economic recovery and prosperity greater inequality in this country’? Mrs Thatcher leaned forward. ‘I don’t believe many people go for equality, except in equality before the law, equality in voting rights,’ she said. ‘No, you will get a more thriving society when people can rise to the limit of their talents, and out of the wealth they create, we shall all be better off.’
‘But it does mean more inequality, does it not?’ Walden insisted. And what she said next became part of her legend. ‘Yes indeed,’ she said earnestly. ‘If opportunity and talent is unequally distributed, then allowing people to exercise that talent and opportunity means more inequality, but it means you drag up the poor people, because there are the resources to do so. No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.’1
That a Methodist preacher’s daughter would remember the parable of the Good Samaritan was hardly surprising. What shocked her critics, though, was how she interpreted it. For the Mirror, ‘Maggie’s Thought for the Day’ was a highly revealing glimpse into her ‘brutal’ philosophy. She had completely missed the point that ‘it is better to help those who fall by the wayside – through no fault of their own – than rush selfishly past them. The welfare state is based on THAT message. Not Mrs Thatcher’s.’ ‘Could she complete the revelation’, one Guardian reader asked scornfully, ‘by telling us how much money Jesus Christ had?’2
How much money? That was the question. When the latest Treasury figures were published a few weeks later, they showed price inflation at 20 per cent, the pound on the brink of $2.30 and unemployment rising at record speed, with some 1.3 million people officially out of work in February 1980. By now Mrs Thatcher’s ministers were no longer pretending that things were going to get better. Their own forecasts showed unemployment reaching 2 million before the end of the year, while at the end of February Sir Geoffrey Howe told the Engineering Employers’ Federation that it could take a decade before the economy was ‘really strong again’. In Downing Street, John Hoskyns agonized over the soaring exchange rate, which meant that imports – the proverbial German cars and Japanese video recorders – were rising ten times faster than exports. In the Treasury, Howe’s special adviser Adam Ridley recorded the thoughts of sympathetic City economists, almost all of whom agreed that the high pound was ‘gratuitously damaging to industry’. And all the time, Mrs Thatcher seethed in frustration at her ministers’ reluctance to cut their budgets. At the end of January, her aide Tim Lankester sent her a note about Howe’s plans for higher prescription charges. On the back, she scribbled, with multiple underlinings: ‘We have got to get economies.’3
On the left, Mrs Thatcher’s extremism and folly were already articles of faith. On the right, there was a growing consensus that she had just not been tough enough. But even among her supporters there was no agreement about what they should do next. Hoskyns, for example, thought interest rates were far too high and wished they had made really radical spending cuts instead. By contrast, the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs organized an open letter by sympathetic economists, calling for the government to ‘go further and faster’ in raising interest rates to squeeze ‘excess money and credit out of the economy’.
Perhaps most striking, though, were the prescriptions of the 80-year-old Friedrich Hayek, who told the right-wing Monday Club that the government could bring inflation down overnight by ordering the Bank of England to throttle the monetary base. Among other things, Hayek thought Mrs Thatcher should call a national referendum on abolishing trade union rights, and believed Howe should balance the budget straight away by slashing at least £10 billion in public spending. Even Mrs Thatcher blinked at that, telling him that it would cause ‘too much social and economic disruption in the short run’. But H
ayek did not give up. Two years later, he advised her to model herself on Chile’s General Pinochet, whose government had brought inflation down to single figures from more than 500 per cent. But much as Mrs Thatcher might have disliked Ted Heath and Arthur Scargill, she had no immediate desire to see them electrocuted with cattle prods. The Pinochet regime certainly offered a ‘striking example of economic reform’, she wrote back. ‘However, I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.’4
For some of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers, the fact that she was not yet ready to call in the torturers was just as well. For inside her Cabinet the mood was becoming increasingly rebellious. On 7 February, in a calculated gesture of ideological independence, Sir Ian Gilmour went to Cambridge and poured scorn on almost every aspect of his leader’s world-view. True Conservatives, he told a student audience, hated ‘ideology and dogma’ – code, many listeners thought, for monetarism. They rejected ‘economic liberalism à la Professor Hayek’, because its ‘failure to create a sense of community’ was a threat to political freedom. They believed in moderation, conciliation and consensus, virtues not understood by the ‘leader writers of some of our right-wing newspapers’. They knew there was more to life than market forces, were strong supporters of the welfare state (a ‘thoroughly conservative institution’) and welcomed a ‘mixed’ economy, with a prominent role for the state. Above all, they believed, like Lord Salisbury, that ‘political theory should never get in the way of sensible political action’. On her copy of Gilmour’s speech, Mrs Thatcher underlined those words in black ink. The fact that one of her own ministers could so publicly rubbish her political philosophy, if only indirectly, spoke volumes about the insecurity of her position. Later, she would have wasted little time in showing Gilmour the door. But now she did nothing.5
It was at about this point, in the spring of 1980, that a new word entered the political lexicon. To the press, Gilmour and his friends were the ‘Wets’. The term had originated a few years earlier, as a term of abuse for people Mrs Thatcher regarded as weak and woolly. To be a Wet, wrote Hugo Young, was to believe in ‘moderation, caution and the middle-minded approach to politics’. It was ‘to be paternalistic and speak the language of One Nation. It was also to be fearful of extreme measures, such as severe anti-union laws, and unfamiliar conditions, such as high unemployment.’ And it was to be a particular kind of Conservative: seasoned and worldly, decent and reliable, a man of sense, a man of bottom, a man you could picture sitting back with a large brandy at the club. Gilmour was a Wet. Christopher Soames was a Wet. Jim Prior was the ultimate Wet. But Mrs Thatcher could never be a Wet. For one thing, she was a woman.6
As The Times remarked, it was tempting to see the story of the Wets as a morality tale, with the Thatcherites as the mean-spirited villains and the Wets as ‘the good guys … sympathetic and interesting politicians who have a sense of the unity of Britain, and a consciousness of their descent from the moderate and progressive wing of the Conservative Party’. Yet there was more than a hint of snobbery in all this. Many of the Wets were Old Etonians, who seemed unable to shake their disbelief that the grocer’s daughter had beaten them to the top job. At lobby briefings, Ferdinand Mount was struck by the ‘patronising’ way that the ‘Soameses and Gilmours’ talked about her, clearly ‘regarding the propping up of this suburban little person as a temporary interruption’. When the former party chairman Edward du Cann described her and Denis sitting on his sofa ‘like a housekeeper and a handyman applying for a job’, or when Gilmour warned that she would corral the Tories ‘behind a privet hedge into a world of narrow class interests and selfish concerns’, it was hard to miss the condescension. As Matthew Parris recalled, looking down with a ‘collective snigger’ on Mrs Thatcher was ‘a matter of good taste’. She was not one of us. She was staff. ‘The trouble is’, muttered Francis Pym, late of Eton, Cambridge and the 9th Lancers, ‘we’ve got a corporal at the top, not a cavalry officer.’7
Why were the Wets so ineffective at restraining their leader? After all, the doubters included not just Gilmour, Pym, Soames, Prior, Walker, Norman St John-Stevas and Michael Heseltine, but the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw; the Foreign Secretary, Peter Carrington; and the Lord Chancellor, Quintin Hailsham. But the Wet label suggests a unity that never existed in reality. Gilmour thought there were only really four ‘open and consistent’ dissenters: himself, Walker, Prior and St John-Stevas. If Carrington and Whitelaw had rallied the others to join them, things might have been different. But Gilmour complained that Carrington was ‘never wholly engaged’ and ‘did not understand economics’, while Whitelaw, too, simply ‘did not understand the economic question’. As the runner-up in the last leadership contest, with enormous appeal across the party, Whitelaw made a very plausible alternative leader. But he regarded himself as ‘second-in-command of a battalion’ and would ‘absolutely never get in her way’. He was, Gilmour said contemptuously, ‘the weakest man I have ever known’.8
This was very unfair. Since Carrington and Whitelaw had both won the Military Cross, they were hardly short of courage. But they saw themselves as men of honour, duty-bound to serve their commanding officer. They were well aware that they knew little about economic policy, and although Carrington had qualms about the costs of Mrs Thatcher’s approach, he ‘believed that there was, in fact, no alternative’. In any case, what was Gilmour asking them to do? At this stage, the Conservative Party had little history of open rebellion, which is why Heath had been able to ignore the right for so long. There was no modern precedent for a gang of Cabinet ministers forcing the Prime Minister and her Chancellor into a radical change of course, let alone driving them from office so soon after an election. And even if the Wets had launched a coup, Mrs Thatcher was never going to go down without a fight. As Whitelaw’s biographers put it, the Wets were ‘like an army that lacked any conventional forces: they had only a nuclear device, which could not be deployed without serious risk to themselves, to the party and (so they had reason to think) to the country’. Not surprisingly, they always found a reason not to use it.9
The other reason why the Wets failed to force the issue is that they had nothing to say. Looking back, Howe wondered why they had never raised their objections face-to-face, and concluded that they simply had ‘no practical alternative policy’. They all hated mass unemployment; they all agreed that monetarism was not working. They were very good at diagnosing the contradictions of Howe’s policies: the hasty tax cuts, the roaring inflation, the missed monetary targets, the lengthening dole queues. They were good, too, at wringing their hands at the effects of his medicine, adopting what Lawson dismissed as ‘cold feet dressed up as high principle’. But not one of them developed a practical alternative. As Hugo Young remarked, they were ‘moderate men’ who simply wanted ‘less of everything from monetarism to unemployment’. But they had no idea how to obtain it.10
Later, in his anti-Thatcher polemic Dancing with Dogma, Sir Ian Gilmour addressed this criticism head-on. It is not fair, he says, that people mocked the Wets for not having an alternative, since dissenters are ‘entitled just to oppose what is being done, to point to its calamitous consequences and to urge its abandonment’.fn1 In any case, Gilmour insists that they did have an alternative. What was it? It was ‘never a single, simple unalterable blueprint’, he adds hastily, but it did exist. The Wets would have used North Sea oil to ‘finance a massive increase of investment in industry and in the infrastructure’. He never spells out which industries, nor how the investment would be used, nor how this would have been more successful than the industrial policies of the 1970s. Happily, ‘the social repercussions of economic change could have been cushioned’, industry would have been ‘restructured and made more competitive’ and the ‘tax and benefit systems and the system of pay bargaining could been reformed’. But how would all this have come about? A Britain that reinvested in indu
stry, modernized its infrastructure, reformed its tax system and sorted out its industrial relations, while cushioning its people from economic change, would have been the envy of the world. But no such country ever existed. This was not an alternative policy. It was the political equivalent of a Miss World contestant’s hopes for world peace.11
The Wets had nothing to say because they were pining for a vanished age. ‘They do not understand the difference between the 1950s and the 1980s, and they do not understand economics,’ said The Times. ‘They are historically out of phase and intellectually out of their depth.’ That was harsh, but it was true. The Wets had come of age in the days of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan: paternalistic patricians, like themselves, who had presided over booming economies with full employment and low inflation. It was natural that they were nostalgic for the carefree policies of their youth. But the context had changed. Even if Macmillan had been in charge in the 1980s, he would have had to face the fact of high inflation and the need for unpopular measures to handle it. As The Times put it, ‘To attempt to apply the principles of the 1950s to the circumstances of the 1980s is not compassion; it is an invitation to catastrophe.’
Who Dares Wins Page 29