When, at the end of 1980, Edwardes submitted his latest plan, the figures were even worse than he had implied. Back in 1979 BL’s forecasters had talked of needing £130 million to cover the next three years. But now they wanted a colossal £1.1 billion. Mrs Thatcher was aghast. There was ‘no good reason’, she thought, to throw so much money at a company that was still losing almost £600 for every car it made. But as Joseph gloomily reminded her, there was, in fact, a very good reason: the punitive cost of shutting it down. Her key economic ministers agreed that, despite the Metro, ‘the prospect of BL returning to profitability was virtually zero’. But even Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was hardly disposed to throwing money around, thought closing BL was not a ‘viable option’. ‘Even if there were a case in principle for withdrawing support,’ he explained on 12 January 1981, ‘closures in the steel and shipbuilding industries should have higher priority; and it was not politically possible to achieve all at once.’45
There was, however, a twist. The day before the Cabinet was due to rubber-stamp the bailout, Joseph had an attack of conscience. As he told Mrs Thatcher, he had changed his mind and thought they should ‘grasp the nettle now and accept the dissolution of BL’ – despite the fact that his own officials had just spent the last few weeks sorting out the new funding. This was, by any standards, extraordinary behaviour. Not even Tony Benn had ever sold a difficult decision to his colleagues before changing his mind and swapping sides to argue against it. To Joseph’s critics, it was definitive proof of his total unfitness to run a major department. In any case, he had left it too late. The next day, Mrs Thatcher’s ministers gave the bailout the green light. On 26 January, physically writhing with unhappiness, Joseph broke the news to the Commons. A few days later, a relieved Edwardes had a letter from the comedian Spike Milligan, who had heard that he had come into possession of a billion pounds, and wondered if he could spare some change. Edwardes sent him a £5 note.46
For Joseph’s critics, there was an exquisite irony in the fact that this passionate convert to economic liberalism, who had spent the last few years haranguing his former colleagues for their ideological apostasy, was now responsible for one of the biggest bailouts in British history. Yet contrary to political mythology, the government’s generosity to British Leyland was the rule, not the exception. Under Wilson and Callaghan, Britain had spent 2.7 per cent of GDP on industrial subsidies, prompting howls of fury from the Conservatives. Yet in the first five years under Mrs Thatcher, Britain still spent 2.3 per cent, more than either the United States or Japan and almost exactly the European average.fn2 Far from falling in the early 1980s, spending on trade and industry went up by almost a fifth, largely because, as the recession deepened, the government was forced to pour even more money into nationalized industries such as British Leyland, British Steel and the National Coal Board.
That it was Joseph, of all people, who signed the cheques made it all the more ironic. Later, he regretted that he ‘didn’t have the guts’ to shut British Leyland down, blaming his own lack of ‘conviction and moral courage’. But now even Mrs Thatcher had her doubts about her old friend’s stability. In Cabinet she muttered caustic remarks when he was talking, and in January 1981 she asked her ‘semi-house-trained polecat’, Norman Tebbit, to become his deputy and political bodyguard. ‘I want you to look after Keith – dear Keith, they are so unkind to him, and he needs someone to protect him,’ she explained. But dear Keith was under no illusions. Once, when he and Tebbit were going to see her about British Leyland, one of their officials asked if there was anything they needed. ‘No, thank you,’ Joseph said wearily, and then corrected himself: ‘Well, yes, ambulances for two at 3 o’clock.’47
By now Joseph’s tenure at the Department of Industry had turned into a nightmare. To his colleagues, he seemed to have aged overnight, his face paler than ever, his behaviour ever more erratic. When he spoke at universities, he was jostled, punched and pelted with missiles. At meetings he seemed restless and distracted, and Private Eye claimed that during radio interviews he hesitated so long that listeners thought they had lost the signal. After the Commons debated British Leyland in May 1981, the Sunday Times reported that Joseph had sent out a ‘formidable repertoire of distress signals’, burying his face in his hands and kneading his own forehead ‘until the veins turned purple’. ‘Even his voice, deep, unnaturally calm,’ the paper said, ‘seemed to emanate from a spirit beyond the grave’.48
A few years earlier, Joseph had proclaimed that radical action to unleash the power of the free market would turn Britain around. Now he had become the embodiment of what the government’s critics saw as a callous and catastrophic experiment. No wonder, then, that in one of the great parliamentary performances of the decade, Labour’s deputy leader, Michael Foot, made him a prime target. The occasion was a debate on unemployment in the autumn of 1980, which had dragged on for hours. To guffaws from his colleagues, Foot remarked that whenever he saw the Industry Secretary ‘walking around the country, looking puzzled, forlorn and wondering what has happened’, he was reminded of an experience from his boyhood:
In my youth, quite a time ago, when I lived in Plymouth, every Saturday night I used to go to the Palace theatre. My favourite act was a magician-conjuror who used to have sitting at the back of the audience a man dressed as a prominent alderman. The magician-conjuror used to say that he wanted a beautiful watch from a member of the audience. He would go up to the alderman and eventually take from him a marvellous gold watch. He would bring it back to the stage, enfold it in a beautiful red handkerchief, place it on the table in front of us, take out his mallet, hit the watch and smash it to smithereens.
Then on his countenance would come exactly the puzzled look of the Secretary of State for Industry. He would step to the front of the stage and say, ‘I am very sorry. I have forgotten the rest of the trick!’fn3
It was vintage Foot, a brilliant speaker at the top of his game. ‘That is the situation of the Government!’ he said gleefully. ‘They have forgotten the rest of the trick!’ And as Joseph sat there, listening to the laughter of his fellow MPs, there must have been a bit of him that feared Foot might be right.49
Michael Edwardes stepped down from British Leyland in the autumn of 1982. With characteristic perspicacity, he had accepted an offer to become chairman of Mercury Communications, the first real competitor to British Telecom. Like all good performers, the brusque South African left with applause ringing in his ears. At his last BL shareholders’ meeting, two private investors made gushing speeches; another begged him to stay. A fourth said he had come to London just to gaze on the great man with his own eyes. ‘I can see now that you are a man of little stature,’ he said, perhaps a bit riskily. ‘But I also know that in all other aspects you are a very big man indeed.’50
To his admirers, Edwardes was the most influential executive of the age, the hero who had restored the ‘management’s right to manage’. The Guardian described him as an undisputed ‘“Good Thing”, the strong-man who stood up to the unions and bent a chaotic BL to his will’. And in some ways his record was extremely impressive. In five years he had trimmed some 90,000 jobs without provoking a major dispute, while the number of hours lost annually to strikes had fallen from 15 million to fewer than 4 million. Even Longbridge was unrecognizable from the ramshackle, strike-plagued monument he had inherited. Thanks to his workplace reforms, productivity had leapt from seven cars a man to more than twenty-five cars a man, and visitors now walked around in awe rather than in horror. Under Edwardes, said the Sunday Times, the vast factory had ‘started to perform like its Japanese competitors’, with state-of-the-art robots, a flexible workforce and a new culture of individual initiative. The performance records at Longbridge and Cowley, agreed The Times, were ‘equal to the best in Europe’, and a testament to the man who had ‘re-established management’s right to run the company’.51
Yet by many standards British Leyland’s record under Edwardes was absolutely atrocious. Between 1977 and 1982,
annual car production fell from 651,000 to 405,000, while overseas sales collapsed from 170,000 to fewer than 80,000. Given the high hopes surrounding the launch of the Metro, the latter figure was particularly disappointing. Although BL sold hundreds of thousands of Metros, the vast majority never crossed the Channel. Even more seriously, BL had still not developed a mid-size competitor for the Escort or the Sierra, despite the fact that this was by far the most lucrative sector of the market. As a result, it found itself lagging far behind its foreign rivals. While BL sold 50,000 cars in the entire Common Market, West Germany’s car makers were now selling 250,000 vehicles in Britain alone.
All of this left a hole in the balance sheet. In 1977, when Edwardes arrived at the firm, BL had lost £52 million. In 1979 it lost £145 million, in 1980 £536 million and in 1981 £497 million. In 1982, even after the triumph of the Metro, it still lost £293 million. Appearing before a Commons Select Committee, Edwardes insisted that BL was through the worst. But with its market share in free-fall, this seemed wildly over-optimistic. ‘In the time it has taken you to read this paragraph’, lamented a Guardian report on the firm’s woes that March, ‘Britain’s state-backed car company will have lost another £1,000.’52
In fairness, little of this was Edwardes’s fault. The truth is that British Leyland had always been a pantomime horse, not big or profitable enough to compete with giants such as Renault, Volkswagen and Ford, but not lean or productive enough to match upmarket firms like Volvo and BMW. In the circumstances, the South African had probably done as well as anybody could have expected, leaving behind a company that, for all its losses, was leaner, more confident and more productive, as well as far less prone to strikes. But British Leyland did not survive for long. By the end of the decade it had been broken up and sold off, just as Mrs Thatcher and her advisers had wanted. Some elements, notably Jaguar, Land Rover and Mini, thrived under foreign ownership. But names such as Austin and Morris disappeared completely.53
The future of British car making lay not at Longbridge, but hundreds of miles to the north. On 6 August 1980, as Edwardes’s engineers were putting the final touches to the Metro, Sir Keith Joseph told Mrs Thatcher that he had received an approach from a Japanese car firm, Nissan, which was contemplating a European base for its growing business. If it worked out, it would be the biggest deal ever struck by a Japanese firm in Britain, as well as a spectacular demonstration of the government’s openness to foreign investment. Of course it would mean encouraging a competitor to British Leyland, but Joseph thought this a price worth paying for a £300 million investment.
As Joseph knew, the spectacle of a Japanese car maker establishing a base in Britain would provoke ‘strong feelings’, so the government proceeded with caution. All the same, they relished the prospect of such a high-profile vote of confidence in the British economy. When Mrs Thatcher visited Tokyo in September 1982, she made a point of telling Nissan’s chairman how pleased she would be to welcome his firm. And it worked. By March 1984 Nissan had selected a site just outside Sunderland. The choice was rich with symbolism: while Sunderland was a long way from the car-making heartlands of the West Midlands, it was a former shipbuilding and coal-mining town with one of the worst unemployment records in the country. When the plant opened two years later, Mrs Thatcher was the guest of honour. The choice, she said proudly, was ‘confirmation from Nissan after a long and thorough appraisal, that within the whole of Europe, the United Kingdom was the most attractive country – politically and economically – for large scale investment and offered the greatest potential’.54
As British Leyland disintegrated, Nissan’s Sunderland factory, supported by hundreds of millions of pounds in regional aid and tax breaks, went from strength to strength. Within five years the plant, with a workforce of just 3,500 men, was making a profit. By the twenty-first century it had become the most productive car factory in Europe, making more cars every year than all British Leyland’s plants put together at the turn of the 1980s. There was no better example of Britain’s newfound ability to attract foreign investment. To the general public, however, the plant was best known for having never lost a single minute to industrial action. ‘Will the British worker be obedient enough for Nissan?’ the Guardian had once asked. Now it had the answer.
Some observers credited the culture of the Japanese workplace; others pointed to Mrs Thatcher’s union reforms. But Nissan’s pioneering single-union deal, which made strikes impossible as long as both sides were still talking, had an awful lot to do with it. At the time, some trade unionists, as well as plenty of critics on the left, had been appalled. But there had been intense competition among the unions to get the contract to represent Nissan’s British workers, and in the end it went to the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. As it happened, that was Derek Robinson’s old union. But by then Red Robbo was ancient history.55
14
A Really Angry Brigade
This area used to be really OK till my parents turned it into an urban village. I’m sick of lentils, old denim, Batik prints … my parents’ obsession with sex & their endless rapping about the boring old Sixties when Dad joined student sit-ins & Mum was a Flower Child and Earth-Mother.
Belinda Weber, in Posy Simmonds, Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
Anthony Wedgwood Benn is no fool. He’s a persecution maniac, and a dangerous aristocratic drop-out who’ll publicly spit the silver spoon out of his mouth if it kills him. And ruins the country.
Jean Rook, Daily Express, 7 November 1979
It was the afternoon of 8 December 1980, and across the Atlantic probably the best-known Englishman in the world was holding forth in his New York apartment. On the brink of middle age, John Lennon was no longer the iconoclastic rebel of the Beatles’ heyday. Although he looked worn and gaunt after a decade of personal turbulence, he seemed calmer now, settled in his life with Yoko Ono, content with his lot as a husband and father. And when a team from a San Francisco radio station arrived to record an interview about his new album, Double Fantasy, they found him in reflective mood.
The record was not really meant for teenagers, Lennon said. It was made for people like himself, ‘the Sixties group that has survived. Survived the war, the drugs, the politics, the violence on the street – the whole shebang – that we’ve survived it and we’re here.’ And as they talked, Lennon kept returning to the past and what it meant, all these years later. ‘Maybe in the Sixties we were naïve, and like children everybody went back to their room and said, “Well, we didn’t get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate and … it wasn’t just pretty and beautiful all the time,”’ he said earnestly. ‘And that’s what everybody did … everybody went back to their rooms and sulked.’ Still, although recent years had been full of disappointment, Lennon still held true to ‘the possibility and the responsibility that we all had’. Perhaps, he said brightly, ‘in the Eighties everybody’ll say, “Well, OK, let’s project the positive side of life again”, you know?’1
When the interview was finished, Lennon and Ono went out to mix a song at a nearby recording studio, sharing a cab with the San Francisco radio crew. They did not get back to their apartment building until just before eleven. Lennon was looking forward to saying goodnight to his 5-year-old son, Sean. As he got out of the car, he noticed a man in the shadows by the archway, a copy of the new album under his arm. The man stepped forward. ‘Mr Lennon,’ he said softly, levelled a revolver, and fired.2
Lennon’s murder by a twisted loner made front-page headlines in almost every country on earth. When Britain awoke to the terrible news, Radio One played Beatles records all day, while local phone-ins were deluged with callers choking back tears. Across the country, shops reported huge demand for all the Beatles’ records, while both Double Fantasy and Lennon’s latest single, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, headed straight to the top of the charts. And in his home town of Liverpool, so badly scarred by deprivation and disappointment, there was a palpable sense of shock. In Mathew S
treet, where the Beatles had played at the Cavern Club, hundreds of people gathered in ‘pathetic hushed groups’, many in tears. When the council organized a peace vigil in his memory, some 20,000 people stood in silence for ten minutes, among them the Archbishop of Canterbury. Afterwards, several dozen people, mostly teenage girls, had to be treated for ‘fainting and hysteria’. There could have been no more poignant reminder of the lost innocence of the 1960s.3
‘He was just my John,’ his devastated Aunt Mimi told the press. But the Beatles were ‘more than just pop minstrels and Lennon was more than just their leader’, said an editorial in the Mirror. ‘They changed styles of dress and behaviour as well as music. They symbolised the end of dutiful respect for authority, whether of parents or of governments. They were classless and almost ageless.’ Lennon was ‘not just a nostalgic reminder of our lost times and selves’, said the Express, ‘but more, much more … With the Beatles, he uplifted a whole generation, helping them break through the low cloud barriers of their frustrations to a universe of limitless possibilities.’ Even The Times agreed that Lennon had personified the spirit of the 1960s, ‘when England truly emerged from its postwar depression and became a country of joyful and envied excitement … His death, untimely and inappropriately violent, commits to history the decade that so utterly changed British society.’4
But not everybody was prepared to bury the hatchet. ‘The eulogies bestowed on John Lennon were uncalled for,’ Frederick Jackson wrote to the Express. ‘Did he not insult the Queen by returning the MBE bestowed on the Beatles … and also was he not charged with the illegal use of drugs?’ And while H. L. Hillman was sorry that Lennon had come to ‘such a tragic end’, he agreed that the ‘current hysterical emotion’ was over the top. ‘The Beatles’ social habits, including the taking of drugs, were not exactly the right examples to set’, he wrote, ‘and they lost a golden opportunity to give their fans the correct lead.’ Nor had Mr Hillman forgiven Lennon for his notorious bed-in for peace, which he considered ‘foolish’. ‘If the Battle of Britain pilots stayed in bed during the Nazi bombings in the last war,’ he pointed out, ‘I am sure there would never have been The Beatles or anyone else left to enjoy our freedom today.’ Some things never changed.5
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