So quite apart from the woes of the economy, there were two problems with Mrs Thatcher. She was like a nagging wife, and she wasn’t a woman at all. And this was another woman talking.25
When, on 5 May, the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy, the Prime Minister’s second year seemed to have got off to the perfect start. But within days the cold rain of reality was falling once again, the headlines dominated by surging prices and closing factories. On 16 May the official inflation figure reached 21.8 per cent, higher than in any other member of the EEC, while the collapse of exports meant Britain’s trade gap had widened to £264 million. ‘Another milestone of misery’, said a spokesman for the Trades Union Congress. The government made the usual noises about hard but necessary decisions. But for most people, said The Times, the reality was ‘higher rates and rents, electricity and gas price rises, dearer transport and food’.26
By now the mood in Whitehall was grimmer than ever. Addressing the Conservative women’s conference on 21 May, Mrs Thatcher quoted Sir Francis Drake before singeing the King of Spain’s beard at Cadiz: ‘When we endeavour any great matter it is not the beginning but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished which yieldeth the true glory.’ She would ‘not stop’, she said, ‘however hard the road’. But her defiance was rather undermined by the fact that, earlier that day, John Biffen had told the same audience that in the ‘next year or so’ they would face a ‘protracted winter of discontent’, when they would need ‘all the friends we have got’. Behind the scenes, Biffen was seriously worried about the economy, urging Howe to put income tax back up as soon as possible. Within Hoskyns’s Policy Unit, too, there was a sense of real anguish. On 28 May, his colleague David Wolfson told him he was ‘v. despairing about Margaret at present. Reads papers superficially, treats colleagues very badly, still overexcited by being PM, will not sit down and think about key issues. Prior and Co. simply registering their reservations for the record, but biding their time for a forced U-turn when she will have to resign.’27
In public, Mrs Thatcher talked of standing firm and staying the course. But even her closest supporters were wobbling badly. As Hoskyns recalled, he and his team were ‘convinced that the monetary stance was too tight, while the fiscal stance had always been too loose’. They were paying the price, he thought, for Howe’s first Budget, too lax and ‘too rushed’. And as The Times’s Ronald Butt reported on 22 May, there was a growing consensus in the Commons, too, that Howe’s ‘own policies of raising VAT and high interest rates’ had set off a bonfire of price rises, wage settlements and bank lending. Even some Tory MPs now believed they would have to strike an informal deal with the unions to keep wages down, just as the Wets had been saying for months. But the problem, as Butt noted, was that ‘the Government could not get an incomes policy agreed with the unions [even] if it wanted’, because the union leaders would demand so many concessions ‘that the Conservatives might as well have never taken office’. In effect, then, they were stuck with the current approach, whether they liked it or not.28
Dreadful news had now become a daily ritual. On 23 May The Times’s lead story fell like a hammer-blow on the government’s remaining supporters. ‘Britain on the brink of slide into recession’, read the headline, above a report that industry sources were expecting the worst slump since the Second World War. The pound had just hit its highest level against the dollar for five years, the respected Economist Intelligence Unit was forecasting unemployment of 2 million by the end of the year, and companies as diverse as ICI, GKN and Cadbury Schweppes had all issued profits warnings. A few weeks later, the Mirror ran a blistering front-page editorial. ‘Britain is now in the worst slump since the 1930s,’ it began. ‘And it’s only the beginning … There are few rays of hope anywhere. Not even North Sea oil can get the Tories out of it this time.’29
It was at this point, despite the horrendous inflation figures and soaring exchange rate, that a third issue began to dominate the headlines. Fear of mass unemployment had been gathering strength since the early 1970s, with the jobless total passing 1 million under Heath, falling under Wilson and then surging back above a million under Callaghan. Most observers had been anticipating a further increase ever since Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street. But it was not until in the summer of 1980 that they glimpsed the scale of what would become one of the defining issues of the age.
The tipping point came on 24 June, when Jim Prior announced that unemployment had jumped by 49,400 in a month, the biggest rise for almost five years. With some 6 per cent of the workforce officially out of work, the jobless total had reached 1.47 million, a postwar record. In the Commons, the news sparked uproar, the Speaker having to eject Labour’s perennially irascible Dennis Skinner when he ‘roared to his feet and began shouting incomprehensible things at Mr Prior’. At Prime Minister’s Questions Mrs Thatcher insisted that since her priority was ‘to squeeze inflation out of the economy, it is, sadly, inevitable that in the short run we shall suffer some unemployment’. But this only provoked so much shouting from the Labour benches that she could scarcely be heard above the din. ‘For how long does the right hon. Lady propose to bask in that complacent air of hers?’ Jim Callaghan asked bitterly. ‘For how long does she think we can go on suffering? How much industry will be left by the time she thinks that she has conquered inflation?’ Across the chamber, Conservative backbenchers howled with fury. But on the government benches, there were more than a few who agreed with him.
Even at this stage, many observers could barely credit the scale of the calamity. When, under Heath, unemployment had reached 1 million, the newspapers had treated it as a national disaster. Yet as an editorial in The Times warned on 25 June, the downturn made it almost certain that unemployment would pass 2 million in the first half of 1981 and keep rising until 1982 or even 1983. ‘By that time it will have reached levels, 2½ or 3 million, that are quite without precedent in postwar experience. It is impossible to predict the economic, social and political consequences of entering into this entirely uncharted terrain.’ What worried the paper most were the implications for Britain’s youngsters, the boys and girls who would once have expected to walk into jobs in local factories. ‘The potential damage to social attitudes and the social fabric of this situation’, it said, ‘cannot be over-estimated.’ The government must direct resources to find jobs for Britain’s teenagers, though what those might be The Times did not say. Otherwise, ‘the nation will reap a bitter harvest of alienation, even violence, in the rising generation of adults’.30
A few weeks later, some 820,000 teenagers were due to leave school. But with 108,700 boys and girls under the age of 18 already out of work, their prospects were bleak. In interviews, they spoke again and again of the shock and demoralization at finding themselves on the scrapheap so young, as well as their fury at being dismissed as failures or scroungers. In Surrey, job vacancies had fallen by 60 per cent in a year, while youth unemployment was up by 40 per cent. In King’s Lynn, the Gaywood Park comprehensive was teaching teenagers how to sign on – not unreasonably, given that the town already had 500 unemployed youngsters and just eleven vacancies. And when a new Sheffield boutique, Jeanery, advertised in the local paper for shop assistants, its owners were astonished to find almost 500 people waiting outside the next morning. Most were teenagers; some had degrees; such was their desperation that many had been waiting for two hours. ‘It was a sad sight,’ said one of the directors, ‘but it was quite impossible for us to interview all of them … You could call it a queue of despair.’31
‘Where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ Such had been Mrs Thatcher’s words, just over a year earlier. Yes, she had promised to take difficult but necessary decisions, but as the columnist David Wood pointed out, there had been no talk during the election of ‘bitter medicine’. The British people had not been invited to vote for high inflation, collapsing exports and a catastrophic recession; ‘they believed, and were encouraged to believe, that their life would be better’.
Yet when the next set of unemployment figures were released on 22 July, they showed that a further 71,000 people had lost their jobs, taking the total to 1.6 million, the highest since records began in 1948. When school-leavers were included, the total jumped to 1.9 million, a level not seen since the 1930s.
On the front page of The Times, Mel Calman’s cartoon showed three men waiting in line. ‘Is this the queue for the Thirties?’ one asks. In the Commons, Mrs Thatcher insisted that Britain was paying a tragically high price for the mistakes of the past. In Liverpool, the careers office had 6,907 registered job seekers and just five jobs. How did that campaign slogan go again? ‘Don’t just hope for a better life. Vote for one …’32
Part Two
* * *
I HAVE FORGOTTEN THE REST OF THE TRICK
9
Your Boys Took a Hell of a Beating
When they go abroad they represent Britain and it is up to them to back up jolly good teams to show the best of Britain and not to show her in the worst light. It was a very dark day when that happened.
Margaret Thatcher, speaking after the European Council, 13 June 1980
The deep blue, smoky, specifically November air resounds to a huge, joyous, rhythmic bark of ‘You’re-gonna-get-your-fuckin’-’eads kicked-in.’
Lincoln Allison, Condition of England: Essays and Impressions (1981)
On Thursday 5 June 1980, Mrs Thatcher’s schedule was typically frenetic. Meetings all morning, Cabinet at eleven, Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons – and then the first of two unusual and memorable engagements. The finance minister of Argentina, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, was in town, and Mrs Thatcher was keen to hear his thoughts about the difficulties of implementing a monetarist economic strategy.
‘The first year was quite easy, years two and three the most difficult, year four the first when really impressive results became apparent,’ Martínez de Hoz told her, adding that it was ‘vital not to change course or let up’. That, of course, was music to Mrs Thatcher’s ears. But in his record of the conversation, her junior minister Nicholas Ridley noted three differences between Britain and Argentina. ‘They started from an infinitely worse position,’ he wrote. ‘They had infinite difficulty in changing the expectations of people that inflation was going to continue.’ Finally, and most importantly: ‘We are a democracy, and they are not.’1
Just over an hour later, Mrs Thatcher welcomed a very different group of guests to Number 10. After ten years in the international wilderness, England’s footballers had qualified for the finals of a major tournament, the European Championships in Italy, and Mrs Thatcher had invited the squad for drinks before they flew out. Some of the younger players were obviously overawed. ‘I was very shy back then and a little tongue-tied,’ the full-back Kenny Sansom recalled. ‘On meeting the Prime Minister, what do you say?’ But Southampton’s burly central defender Dave Watson remembered the occasion more fondly. ‘She seemed to take a liking to me for some reason, and came over and took hold of my hand,’ he remembered. ‘Suddenly we were off on this excursion. She showed me these paintings of the ex-Prime Ministers that were hanging on the walls and gave me their history. It was very enjoyable – we didn’t talk football at all.’2
For the oldest player in the squad, the trip to Number 10 was a chance to rekindle an old friendship. Four years earlier, Mrs Thatcher had made a trip to Anfield, striking up an unlikely rapport with Liverpool’s captain, the ebullient Emlyn Hughes. They got on so well that in February 1978 she sent him a handwritten letter congratulating him on victory over Manchester United in the FA Cup. Among tens of thousands of documents in her personal and political papers, this is surely the most unexpected:
Dear Mr Hughes,
A note to say how much I rejoiced with you in your victory last Saturday against Manchester United. I watched it on ‘Match of the Day’ but without knowing the result. At first it was agony seeing the near misses – almost as bad for me watching as for you playing! But at least I only had the tension for half an hour before getting the result I was longing for.
No reply – you will be far too busy preparing for the next round of the European Cup. Very good luck.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher
It is worth repeating that this was written by hand, not typed by some football-loving adviser. Did Mrs Thatcher really sit through Match of the Day? Was she really ‘longing’ for a Liverpool victory? Of all the roles she played in her political career, that of the fervent Liverpool fan, mentally swaying on the Kop in her red-and-white scarf, is surely the most implausible of all.3
Yet as Hughes’s England teammates sipped their drinks in Number 10, many were surprised by the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm. According to some reports, she climbed on to a chair, as if channelling Elizabeth I, and told the players: ‘We shall love you if you win, and we shall still love you if you lose.’ Afterwards, as the players lined up for photographs, Hughes and the England captain, Kevin Keegan, persuaded Mrs Thatcher to pose with a football while they gave her a kiss, a gesture she would never have tolerated from the Argentine finance minister. In the next day’s papers, she was pictured grinning self-consciously, while Hughes and Keegan doubled over with laughter. Years later, the photographer David Levenson remembered that as soon as the Prime Minister picked up the football, Hughes said: ‘I bet you wish you could grab hold of Arthur Scargill’s balls like that!’ Levenson recalled her ‘looking bemused’, but the photos show her with a definite smile. There was an omen there, if only Scargill had known it.4
With the winds of recession whipping through the factories of industrial Britain, the prospect of victory in the Italian sunshine came as a welcome tonic. For ten years England’s fans had endured a succession of disappointments. But now millions dared to hope that their heroes might rekindle the spirit of 1966 and return home decked with glory. Even the manager, Ron Greenwood, seemed a throwback to a vanished age, a decent, schoolmasterly man who had grown up wearing clogs in Burnley, left school at 14 and begun his working life as an apprentice sign-writer. And as Greenwood prepared to take on Europe’s finest, the Daily Express’s David Miller joined many of his fellow writers in predicting that the manager’s ‘lonely crusade to change the face of English football’ would end in triumph. ‘By that achievement, with the style Greenwood has promoted,’ he wrote, ‘England would have done more for the world of football than any team other than Hungary, Brazil or Holland.’ This was high praise indeed, given that their tournament had not even started.5
As England’s opening game approached, optimism surged to new heights. Watching the players fly out from Luton ‘in marvellously confident mood’, the Mirror’s Frank McGhee thought they had ‘all the calm authority of young executives departing for a sales conference’, a slightly odd compliment, but a compliment nonetheless. And the Sunday Express’s James Mossop, too, foresaw that their courage, skill and patriotic enthusiasm would propel them to glory. ‘The spirit and willingness of Greenwood’s team is greater than I have ever known it,’ he explained. ‘No player in the tournament will work harder than Steve Coppell or Keegan. Few will display the vision, craft and authority of Ray Wilkins and Trevor Brooking … By Sunday evening, June 22, they could be standing in the Olympic Stadium in Rome as champions of Europe.’6
In the early evening of 12 June, with millions watching at home, Greenwood’s men walked out into the sunshine in Turin for their opening game against the unfancied Belgians. When Ray Wilkins put them ahead with a lob of exquisite delicacy, it seemed as if the patriotic predictions might, for once, be realized. Three minutes later, however, Belgium equalized, and then grim reality came crashing down. On the crumbling terraces of the Stadio Comunale, where a paltry 15,186 fans had paid to see the game, the Belgian goal was the cue for bedlam. As Frank McGhee put it, ‘the louts and drunks who defile the Union Jack they wrap around themselves immediately started hitting out at any neutral who happened to be handy’.
As bottles rained d
own from the terraces, the riot policemen waded in, first with batons and then with tear gas. On television, pictures showed hundreds of fans, including Italian women and children, wiping tears from their eyes. What was worse, as clouds of yellow smoke drifted on to the field, some of the England players were clearly affected, waving for help as tears streamed down their cheeks. Eventually the referee led both teams off the pitch, and although play restarted eight minutes later, any sense of innocent excitement had long since disappeared. At half-time, with running battles continuing in the stands, an official read a message from Greenwood over the public address system: ‘You are doing the chances of the England team and the reputation of England no good at all. Please, please behave yourselves.’7
What happened in Turin that evening could hardly have been a more humiliating indictment of English football. On television, the former World Cup winner Bobby Charlton told viewers that he was ‘certainly not proud to be British right now’, while Kevin Keegan, interviewed after the match, said he was ‘ashamed to be English’. Greenwood, too, said he felt ashamed of his own supporters. ‘We have done everything to create the right impression here, then these bastards let you down,’ he said bluntly. ‘I wish they could all be put in a boat and dropped in the ocean … The Italians must think we are idiots.’
Plastered with pictures of the weeping England players and the chaos on the terraces, the next day’s front pages made for excruciating reading. In the Mirror, an editorial drew attention to Charlton’s words, adding that ‘he spoke from the heart and he spoke for us all’. There was talk of kicking England out of the tournament, and the mayor of Turin warned that their next match, against Italy, would be cancelled if there was more trouble. One travel agent claimed that some England fans, frightened by the backlash, were holed up in their hotel rooms and refusing to come out, while a BBC team were turned away from a Turin restaurant when the owner found out where they were from. ‘Life’, the Guardian’s correspondent dolefully reported, ‘has become something of an ordeal for other Britons in Turin.’8
Who Dares Wins Page 31