Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Social disengagement isn’t the same thing as fury or even resentment at the conditions of life around one. Are the Walkman People each marching to the individually-heard beat of Thoreau’s different drum, or does this invasion just usher a new ME generation of narcissists into a world so abrasive and anarchic they no longer want to listen to it?60

  In this, as in so many cultural debates, the final verdict fell to Roy Hattersley. In the spring of 1983, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary told readers of the Guardian that he had just bought his first Walkman, an ‘elegant silver Sony’ with ‘svelte ebony corners and space-age PVC belt holster’. He had spent his Tube journeys listening to Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, and had been disturbed by a Labour aide while enjoying Top Hat in his Commons office. But there were, Hattersley wrote, ‘immense advantages in being able to shut out the world’. Now, whenever he was lunching with a ‘boringly beautiful girl’, he could ‘escape the tedium of her compliments’ by switching on Radio Four’s The World at One. Whenever he strolled the streets of London, he felt part of ‘a new electronic community, bound together by the wires of our headsets’. And when people saw him, they would, he hoped, ‘think of me as being “into Walkman”’. So there it was. Friends were electric, after all.61

  13

  High Noon at Leyland

  At last Sir Michael Edwardes’s appointment as the first dwarf to be chairman of British Leyland is explained. It was so that he could pose for photographs beside the new Mini Metro without giving away the fact that it was especially designed for childless dwarves.

  Auberon Waugh’s Private Eye diary, 14 October 1980

  You’ve probably seen that the work-shy yobboes at BL are once again up to their seasonal pranks. I told the Boss that now surely we can come out of the closet and close the whole thing down once and for all.

  ‘Denis Thatcher’, in Richard Ingrams and John Wells, One for the Road (1982)

  In the autumn of 1980, the vast Longbridge car plant, on the south-western edge of Birmingham, was buzzing with excitement. For years the car giant British Leyland (BL) had been planning a replacement for the Mini. Now, after apparently endless delays, the new car was almost ready. Everybody knew that this would be a decisive moment in the strike-plagued firm’s desperate struggle for survival, a last chance to compete with foreign models such as the Ford Fiesta, Renault 5 and Volkswagen Polo. As British Leyland’s South African-born chairman, Michael Edwardes, told the press, this would be the most advanced British car ever made, a ‘child of information technology’, built with the latest production-line techniques. But after years of terrible publicity, Edwardes knew that it was ‘more than just a new car, it was the yardstick by which the whole company would be judged … Everything depended on its being right from day one. This time there would be no second chance.’1

  Never had a British firm invested so much money, hope and political capital in a single product. By the middle of 1980 Edwardes had spent £285 million on the colossal New West Works at Longbridge, much of it coming from the taxpayer. By the standards of most British factories, the new plant was a technological cathedral, bright and airy with state-of-the-art assembly lines and more than fifty gleaming robots. Watching in awe as the machines clanked and clattered, one motoring journalist reported that on some lines just thirteen men were doing the work of eighty in an ordinary plant, while ‘in another department, 38 do the work of 102’. Here was a vision to make Margaret Thatcher proud, a flexible team working at full throttle in one of the most advanced factories in Europe. The only downside was that it had been so extraordinarily expensive, with estimates suggesting British Leyland would need to sell 6,000 cars a week to make a profit. But early tests were extremely promising, and the first hatchbacks rolled off the production line without a hitch. All that remained was the name, chosen, in a clever bit of public relations, by Longbridge’s workers. Some 20,000 men voted, and the winner, beating ‘Maestro’ by just 267 votes, was ‘Metro’.2

  It is hard to exaggerate the anticipation surrounding the Metro in the autumn of 1980. It was ‘not just a car, more a symbol of national survival’, declared the Guardian. ‘On this car rests the hopes and possibly the life or death of a vast hunk of British industry.’ If it flopped, that would mean disaster not only for 145,000 British Leyland employees, but tens of thousands whose jobs in engineering, components, steel and rail depended upon the car industry.

  But all the signs were good. At the beginning of September, BL came up with an unusual way to introduce the car to its dealers, inviting them on a free cruise to the Isle of Man. This already rather dubious treat was almost scuppered by the weather, and Edwardes recalled a lot of ‘rolling and pitching’ as they ploughed through the waves. But when the Metro emerged ‘amidst billowing mist from the centre of a globe’, the dealers went berserk, clapping and stamping with delight. Some were so relieved by the new car’s angular modernity that they burst into tears. And when, the next day, they got to drive it around the Isle of Man, their excitement turned into ecstasy. When they returned home, some arranged Metro-themed drinks parties for the launch day; others invited their customers to come for breakfast at the showroom on their way to work. ‘Even by the extravagant standards of the car industry’, wrote one reporter, there had never been hype like it.3

  When Michael Edwardes awoke on 14 October, he looked out across the lake beside Birmingham’s Metropole Hotel and thought of ‘how great industries can be built up from small beginnings’. Even somebody with his immense self-confidence could have been forgiven for feeling nervous. But he need not have worried. As his blue hatchback cruised into the cavernous National Exhibition Centre for the annual Motor Show, he could already hear the cheers. ‘Metro Mike’, said one paper, was the ‘star model of this motor show’. He was the star of the Paris Motor Show, too. ‘One has to raise one’s hat a long way,’ said Le Figaro, while Le Matin saw the Metro as ‘the ideal small car, which many European constructors would have liked to have created’. The only real sceptic was Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher, who was not impressed by the sight of his wife test-driving a Metro at the Motor Show. ‘The rather smarmy little South African johnny’ might be ‘cock-a-hoop about advance orders’, Denis tells his friend Bill, but the ‘bloody shop stewards’ would soon ruin everything. ‘I keep telling the Boss one of these days they’re going to have to pull the plug on that lot, Metro or no, and concede victory to the Nips.’4

  In the real world, the Metro was a triumph. Every newspaper was full of praise, and within days dealers were reporting thousands of orders. Cleverly, British Leyland marketed it not just as the most modern car in its class, but as a patriotic icon, the ultimate expression of the nation’s thirst for renewal. The Metro’s much-acclaimed television advert began with a doom-laden shot of military landing craft approaching the coast of southern England, preparing to unload their consignments of foreign cars. ‘Some of you may have noticed’, says a gravelly voice, ‘that for the past few years Britain has been invaded by the Italians, the Germans, the Japanese and the French. Now we have the means to fight back.’ As Metros roll off the Longbridge assembly line, the music switches to ‘Rule, Britannia’, while Union Jack-waving crowds rush to the motorway bridges to cheer them on. In a bucolic village, an old man, medals glittering on his chest, gives an emotional salute; his neighbour waves her handkerchief from her cottage window. At last, with the music reaching a patriotic crescendo, cars streaming on to the white chalk cliffs and the enemy retreating across the Channel, comes the tagline: ‘The new Austin Metro. A British car to beat the world.’5

  Made by the American firm Leo Burnett, the Metro advert was the best party political broadcast Mrs Thatcher never gave. Drenched in nostalgia for the Second World War, glorying in the potential of technological modernity, fired by the conviction that Britain was turning the corner after decades of decline, the advert perfectly captured her patriotic appeal. Even the print campaign hammered home the same message: ‘Never before have so many gone so far on so
little … Even Wellington never imagined a boot this big … Great space for Great Britain … Safe as the Crown Jewels … This could be your finest hour.’

  There was a nice irony in the fact that, although British Leyland had designed the car with one eye on the European export market, it was relying on island-story imagery to sell it at home. But that too was pure Margaret Thatcher, the supporter of European integration who inveighed against a European super-state, the patriotic populist who threw open the doors to international capital, the champion of globalization whose voice throbbed with pride in Britain’s unique history. In any case, the public loved it. By the end of 1980 the Metro was already the third most popular car of the year, and by 1983 annual sales had hit 130,000. Not since the Mini had any British car made such an impact.6

  But British Leyland would not have been British Leyland if there had not been bad news, too. Almost every week in the autumn of 1980 brought reports of some squabble on the shop floor, but the worst came on 21 November, when a dispute about Metro seats escalated into open fighting. Ironically, this was a dispute born of the car’s success. With demand surging, BL had been forced to buy in extra seats from outside. Outraged, the seat assembly team downed tools. The trim workers, however, wanted to carry on working, and their ‘right to work’ protest rapidly escalated into a saloon-style brawl. Fortunately the dispute fizzled out, but the publicity – ‘Leyland Workers Run Riot at Metro Factory’, ‘Metro Jobs Rampage’ – was awful. Even the Guardian, hardly an instinctive cheerleader for BL’s management, thought the dispute had been ‘disgraceful’.7

  When disputes interrupted production of the Metro, the press were predictably merciless. This is Jak in the Evening Standard, 18 April 1980.

  To most people, though, reports of trouble at Longbridge were nothing new. There had been reports of trouble at Longbridge almost every month for the last ten years. And not even the Metro’s brilliant campaign could reverse the irreparable, decades-long damage inflicted on the reputation of Britain’s car industry. Two letters printed in the Guardian in December 1980 tell the story. In Amersham, Buckinghamshire, K. R. Sturley had been waiting more than a month for a new Ford Escort, but delays at the Halewood plant meant he had still not received it. ‘Perhaps I had better cancel my order and change to a German, French or even Japanese car,’ Mr Sturley wrote angrily. ‘They have no waiting list.’

  As for L. Barratt of Torquay, he had been driving British cars for almost thirty years, from the Humber Sceptre and the Singer Vogue to the Morris Marina and the Triumph Dolomite, ‘all new, all expensive, all faulty’. Two weeks earlier, he had bought his first foreign car, a Datsun Bluebird, and was very pleased with it. He noted that representatives from Britain’s car firms had recently been to Japan, hoping to ‘persuade them to sell fewer cars in Europe and Britain’. The more sensible solution, Mr Barratt thought, would be to ‘persuade Japanese car makers to turn out cars that are sloppy, out-dated, unreliable and very expensive’, just like their British competitors. ‘Then even we patriots wouldn’t buy them.’8

  At the turn of the 1980s, about 300,000 people worked for Britain’s major car companies: British Leyland, Ford, Vauxhall and Talbot. Many people believed that buying a British-made car was the patriotic thing to do, while the newspapers treated the car industry as the supreme barometer of economic virility. But if that was the case, Britain badly needed medical intervention. Half a century earlier, it had produced more vehicles than any other country in Europe. But by the end of the 1970s the car industry was in deep trouble. Hamstrung by incompetent management, painfully slow to exploit the markets of Continental Europe, crippled by a culture of shopfloor militancy, it had become Exhibit A in every narrative of post-war decline. As Louis Heren reported in Alas, Alas for England (1981), it took ten British workers to build a Ford Escort at Halewood, but only four West Germans to make the same car at Saarlouis. For every 100 Cortina doors a British worker produced at Dagenham, his Belgian counterpart at Genk made 219.9

  As a result, car exports were in steady decline, while foreign cars were roaring into Britain on a scale that horrified industry insiders. Extraordinary as it now seems, only 5 per cent of the new cars bought in 1965 had been imported. But by 1975 that figure had already leapt to 33 per cent, and every year it surged still higher. Once, brands such as Renault, Peugeot, Fiat and Volkswagen had been exotic novelties. Now they were household names. Some of this, of course, was inevitable as soon as Britain joined the Common Market. Even so, the fact that no other major Western car market was so dominated by imports told its own story. In 1982 foreign-made cars commanded 27 per cent of the market in West Germany, 28 per cent in the United States and 31 per cent in France. In Britain their share was almost 60 per cent.10

  At the centre of this sad story was British Leyland. Cobbled together by Tony Benn from the remains of Britain’s motor industry in 1968, and encompassing household names such as Austin, Morris, Mini, Jaguar, Daimler, Triumph and Land Rover, the national car conglomerate was in a terrible condition. Only seven years later, it had become a ward of the state under the National Enterprise Board, with production spread across dozens of factories. But what followed was a shambles. By the end of the 1970s BL’s output had fallen by more than half, annual exports had collapsed from 368,000 to 158,000 and domestic market share had tumbled from 38 per cent to barely 18 per cent, all in just ten years. Even the Daily Mirror, its biggest defender on Fleet Street, admitted that things had gone badly wrong. ‘Since the 1960s,’ lamented a blistering editorial in September 1979, ‘Leyland has limped from one disastrous year to another, a car manufacturer with built-in suicidal tendencies.’11

  A proper exploration of British Leyland’s problems would take a book in itself. As Michael Edwardes recalled, they included ‘ageing models’, persistent strikes, an ‘unachievable’ strategy and a ‘world image so damaging that the company craved only for silence, which it didn’t get’. Fleet Street loved to blame the unions, but there was more to it than that. The management were at once criminally complacent and pathologically afraid of alienating the shop stewards, which meant many plants were ludicrously over-manned. Some observers claimed that in some factories there were ‘two workforces who swapped over in mid-shift, playing cards the rest of the time’. Perhaps this was an exaggeration. Still, BL’s non-executive director Ian MacGregor, later of steel and coal fame, was not alone in likening the firm’s bosses to ‘tribal chiefs of old, who measured their wealth in the number of slaves they had’. But what the firm was best known for was strikes. Every morning Edwardes was presented with a summary of the latest disputes, which usually came to at least four typewritten pages. In 1977 strikes cost the firm some 250,000 vehicles; in the next six months production was interrupted 346 times. Even in May 1979, Edwardes told his shareholders that strikes had cost them 110,000 vehicles and a staggering £200 million in the last year.12

  Meanwhile, British Leyland was making vast demands on the public purse. In the decade after 1975 it swallowed a gargantuan £2.4 billion in public money: that is to say, more than a million pounds every working day for almost ten years.fn1 If the cars had been any good, people might have thought it money well spent. But by the turn of the 1980s BL’s cars were widely seen as rusty, old-fashioned and almost comically unreliable. When Edwardes joined the company, he asked the Two Ronnies to stop joking about its abysmal productivity, ‘so that we heard less about workers clocking in by signing the visitors’ book’. The wet fish salesman Henry Root, however, had a much better idea. ‘I would remind you, Sir,’ he wrote to Edwardes in 1979, ‘that every time someone laughs at “British Leyland” they are laughing at Great Britain.’ Root suggested changing the name to either ‘Japanese Leyland’ or ‘Jamaican Leyland’. The words ‘Japanese Leyland’, he pointed out, would dramatically improve the company’s image. ‘And if jokes were made about “Jamaican Leyland”, you could prosecute the offenders under the Race Discrimination Act.’13

  That October, the Daily Express’s Georg
e Gale told his readers that for the first time in his life he was planning to buy a foreign car. ‘I always thought, without thinking much, that British was best,’ he wrote. ‘I was brought up when “Made in England” was a sign of quality and “Foreign made” a sign of rubbish.’ Deep down, Gale still wanted to buy a British car. He felt ‘sick’ when he pictured himself driving a car made in France, Germany, Italy or Japan. But after a decade of headlines about terrible productivity, strike-torn factories and unreliable models, he had had enough. Now, he admitted, ‘I no longer think that British is best.’

  To Gale’s employers, this sort of talk was tantamount to surrender. ‘If we will not buy our own goods how can we expect prospective customers overseas to have confidence in them?’ the Express demanded in July 1980, launching a short-lived ‘Buy British’ campaign. Yet only a few years later, the columnist James McMillan lamented that nothing had changed: ‘Jack, should we buy the Renault or the Fiat?’ ‘Well, Jill, I fancy the Volkswagen or possibly the Datsun.’ This, McMillan wrote, was ‘an everyday conversation that could be repeated hundreds of times a week – and probably is – up and down the country.’ Like many commentators, he blamed ‘slack managements’ and ‘short-sighted unions’. But he also recognized that the endless jokes about Longbridge tea breaks and Austin Allegros had done terrible damage to the domestic car industry. ‘The perception “British is Best”’, he wrote, ‘has been transformed in the customer’s mind to “British is Worst”.’