But the so-called ‘Chingford Skinhead’ was a more interesting figure than the caricatures suggested. Crucially, he was one of the few Thatcherite ministers who had been a trade unionist, having served as an official in the pilots’ union in the 1950s. That, Critchley thought, gave him an understanding of ‘people who were once automatically trade union members’: the kind of people who had bought their own homes, or wanted to, who felt squeezed by inflation and incomes policies, and who were wary of moral and cultural change. As an aspirational suburban Conservative, Tebbit ‘looked at the working-class shoppers wheeling their laden trollies to the boots of their cars in the supermarket car parks and knew that here were Tory voters’. In this respect, he was a thoroughly modern politician, an instinctive populist with a keen sense of ordinary voters’ hopes and fears. By the mid-1980s, that made him Mrs Thatcher’s likeliest successor. The irony, wrote Critchley, is that ‘if Tebbit had entered politics a decade earlier, the Conservative Party would have been embarrassed by him’.22
If Tebbit seemed a Dickensian embodiment of social aspiration, then what would the novelist have made of his friend Cecil Parkinson? Nothing in the new party chairman’s matinee-idol looks, his Brylcreemed hair or his suavely reassuring tones hinted at the truth of his background. Yet Parkinson, too, was a working-class grammar-school boy, the son of a Lancashire railwayman and an Irish Catholic immigrant. At school he belonged to the Labour Party and refused to join the cadet corps. But at Cambridge, where he studied English under the formidable critic F. R. Leavis before switching to law, he began to shed his Lancashire accent. Then, after moving into the City, he reinvented himself as a Home Counties Tory, forming a close alliance with the similarly ambitious Tebbit. To the delight of subsequent profile-writers, the two men climbed the local politics ladder together; supposedly Parkinson would get his friend to sit at the back and heckle him to enliven their public meetings.
The irony is that, in their public personas, the two men could hardly have been more different. Tebbit was rough, Parkinson smooth. Tebbit sought confrontation, Parkinson relied on charm. Tebbit retained his accent, Parkinson lost his. But like his friend, Parkinson was an irresistibly symbolic figure, a self-made man with a ten-bedroom Queen Anne rectory and an apartment in the Bahamas. In many ways he was like the hero of a novel by Arnold Bennett: he even wore monogrammed Turnbull & Asser shirts, because a friend had told him it was ‘the most nouveau riche thing you could possibly do’. All this made the old guard sniffy, but Mrs Thatcher adored him. Like Ronald Reagan, Parkinson spoke to her as a man to a woman, courteous and respectful with just a hint of flirtation. Satirists mocked him as an oleaginous womanizer, but Hugo Young thought Parkinson was one of the few ministers whom she genuinely respected. He had, Young wrote, ‘excellent instincts for assessing any situation, and going straight to the heart of the Conservative interest in it’. And, in the heat of battle, he had the crucial knack of calming Mrs Thatcher down, making ‘a fussing, worried, preoccupied woman feel rather luxuriously at ease’.23
The promotion of Lawson, Tebbit and Parkinson was a key moment in the Thatcherite project. As the sons of, respectively, a Jewish commodities trader, an Enfield jeweller and a Lancastrian railway worker, none of them fitted the traditional Tory mould. Yet in the political imagination, Tebbit and Parkinson, in particular, became figures of vast symbolic importance, perfectly capturing the ambition and energy that supposedly defined the age. Even their names told a story of social change. They had grown up, wrote Critchley, ‘in an England rich with Normans and Cecils, where young men Brylcreemed their hair and the excitement of the week was going to the pictures on Saturday night’. That gave them a connection to ambitious young voters that patricians like Soames and Gilmour could never understand. For ‘out there in the suburbs’, wrote Critchley, ‘the party was being run by the Normans and the Cecils who knew that the Lord helps him who helps himself’. Still, not everybody approved of the new meritocracy. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ Willie Whitelaw told his friends. ‘I’m sitting around the Cabinet table with the most ghastly people.’24
Reshuffles are always risky, but Mrs Thatcher’s purge was a political triumph. Even the Mirror, under the tremendous headline ‘All Mopped Up’, thought that she had ‘squelched’ the Wets, while the Mail thought it ‘the most magisterial demonstration of a prime minister’s authority since the Night of the Long Knives’.fn1 Yet it came when, thanks to her government’s abysmal public standing, she ought to have been most vulnerable. That speaks volumes about the weakness of the Wets, as well as her resilience and opportunism. Inside the Cabinet the momentum had very clearly shifted in her favour. For with Gilmour and Soames in the cold, Prior in exile and Whitelaw isolated, there was no hope now of persuading her to accept a one-way ticket back to Grantham. From now on, recalled Geoffrey Howe, ‘her instinct, her thinking, her authority, was almost always present, making itself felt pervasively, tenaciously and effectively. It came gradually to feel, as the months went by, as though the Prime Minister was present, unseen and unspeaking, at almost every meeting.’ She was the boss. And if she went down, she would go down fighting.25
Summer gave way to autumn, and every week brought little signs of cultural and economic change. The first women arrived at the Greenham Common peace camp, drivers caught their first glimpse of Ford’s new Sierra and the first episodes of Postman Pat and Only Fools and Horses went out on BBC1. Soft Cell reached number one with ‘Tainted Love’, Granada unveiled Brideshead Revisited and Bryan Robson broke football’s transfer record, moving from West Bromwich Albion to Manchester United for what seemed a staggering £1½ million. And yet all the time, week after week, month after month, thousands of people were still losing their jobs. In July the official unemployment total was 2.85 million. In August it was 2.94 million. In September it was 2.99 million. And although, strictly speaking, the recession was over, it did not feel like it. When asked, almost half the country expected things to get worse in 1982.26
That autumn The Times ran a series investigating the state of British industry in the aftermath of the recession. The picture could hardly have been gloomier. The machine-tools industry was in a state of virtual collapse, with production down by half in just ten years. In the appliances market, about half of all new washing machines and fridge freezers were now made abroad. Hoover, having already announced plans to close its Perivale factory, was preparing to shed a quarter of its workers. Thorn had already laid off one in five; Electrolux had cut its staff by half. And then there was one of the saddest stories of all, the textile industry, once synonymous with the Industrial Revolution. Only a quarter of a century earlier, it had employed some 200,000 people; now it employed 45,000, a total falling all the time. ‘About 700 workers a month are joining the dole queues’, said The Times, ‘as the mill doors slam shut for ever.’ Managers did not blame Mrs Thatcher alone: the textile industry had been in deep decline for years, squeezed by excess world capacity and cheap imports. But its products, they insisted, were better than ever. Unfortunately, high interest rates, high labour costs and the cripplingly high exchange rate meant nobody was buying them.27
On 14 September, alarmed that sterling was falling too quickly, Howe put interest rates back up by two points to 14 per cent. Two weeks later, he raised them to 16 per cent. That same day, 1 October, the Tories’ latest private poll found that fully two-thirds of voters said they disapproved of the government’s record, some seven out of ten were dissatisfied with Mrs Thatcher, and just 16 per cent said they would vote Conservative at the next election. Even by Mrs Thatcher’s own standards, these figures were practically off the scale. And now, for the first time, there was a sense that the bonds of partisan loyalty had disintegrated. In The Times, the disgruntled Gilmour published a call to arms, warning that Mrs Thatcher’s ‘erroneous convictions’ had ‘left the centre ground of politics wide open to the SDP’. And at a dinner in the Commons, the backbench dissident Hugh Dykes told a Conservative meeting that they were he
ading either for ‘the sharpest, most involuntary U-turn in history’ or for crushing electoral humiliation.28
Early October found Mrs Thatcher in Australia, where the Commonwealth leaders had assembled for their biennial row about South Africa. And it was now, with impeccable timing, that her most dedicated enemy sailed back over the horizon. Having been laid low for several months with a thyroid problem, Edward Heath resurfaced on 6 October to address the Federation of Conservative Students in Manchester. Ordinary people, Heath said bitterly, had been pushed to breaking point by the ‘unacceptable’ price for Mrs Thatcher’s monetarism. How was it that ‘more than three million unemployed are necessary to get inflation down to a level higher than it was two and a half years ago’? There was an alternative: a ‘dramatic change in policies’ which would involve Britain joining the European Monetary System, restoring exchange controls, cutting interest rates, spending more on capital investment and funding a ‘massive retraining programme’ to get youngsters off the streets. Of course this would mean more borrowing and higher inflation. But ‘how dare those who run the biggest budget deficit in history reproach others with the heinous crime of “printing money”’?29
Although Mrs Thatcher was on the other side of the world, word of Heath’s attack reached her soon enough. Hoping to forestall her likely reaction, Sir Geoffrey Howe sent her a message urging her to ‘avoid making too much of all this’. He had discussed it with Whitelaw and Parkinson, he said, and they all thought it was best ‘not to raise the temperature’.30
He was wasting his time, of course. Giving a speech at Monash University, Mrs Thatcher added a new section pouring scorn on one of Heath’s most hallowed principles:
I count myself among those politicians who operate from conviction. For me, pragmatism is not enough.
Nor is that fashionable word ‘consensus’ … To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.
What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?
To the left of the Conservative Party, this was a declaration of war. Two days later, Heath’s old ally Geoffrey Rippon told Tory students that the only ‘alternative to consensus is confrontation. That way lies disaster for us all.’ It was time, Rippon declared, for ‘the younger generation’ to ‘stand up and fight’ against the ‘simplistic, deeply irrational, inherently divisive and ultimately destructive’ dogmas peddled by Mrs Thatcher – a woman who, by a complete coincidence, had sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet the day after she became leader.31
Mrs Thatcher flew back from Australia to a party in ferment. She was, said the Guardian, facing the ‘nearest thing to a co-ordinated Conservative revolt’ since the start of her premiership, reflecting a growing panic that dozens of MPs could be swept away in a rush to the Alliance. In the Mirror, a Jaws-themed cartoon showed Heath as a shark poised to devour a bikini-clad Mrs Thatcher. In the Observer, the former Conservative peer John Grigg wrote that unless she ditched the ‘masquerade of doctrinal purity … she will be condemning her party to one of the most comprehensive defeats in its history’.
To make matters worse, on 12 October the BBC screened a special edition of Panorama to mark the midpoint of her five-year term. The programme focused entirely on young skilled workers who had voted Conservative in 1979, many of whom were women. They had voted for Mrs Thatcher because they liked the idea of a woman, wanted a change, hated the unions and were sick of strikes. But now their voices were a chorus of disappointment: ‘She didn’t fulfil any of those promises she made. She fell down on nearly all of them … She won’t take advice from her advisers … Callous … I don’t think she cares … She doesn’t care about the consequences … Diabolical … Unbendable … Dreadful … Lousy.’ Not one was planning to vote for her again.32
She did, of course, still have her supporters in the Tory tabloids. The Sun ran the rule over her potential replacements and found them all wanting:
Willie Whitelaw, noted for agreeing with the last person he talked to. Peter Walker, who thinks and speaks like Ted Heath. Jim Prior, who even looks like him – if people spurn the organ grinder, they certainly do NOT want the monkey! Francis Pym, the original faceless man, who has all the inspirational qualities of a glass of warm water.
But, as The Times noted, the fact remained that she was now ‘the most unpopular Prime Minister since polls began’. Only a ‘super-optimist’, said the young Tory MP Chris Patten, could expect victory at the next election. ‘The prospects for a full Conservative recovery’, agreed the elections expert Ivor Crewe, ‘now look very slim.’ And it was against this background, with excruciating timing, that the action moved to Blackpool, where the Tory faithful were gathering for their annual conference.33
Mrs Thatcher flew into Blackpool on the afternoon of Monday 12 October, a few hours before the BBC’s damning Panorama went out. Perhaps judging that she could do with a bit of the tickling stick, her staff had arranged for her to spend the evening watching Ken Dodd’s Laughter Spectacular at the Opera House. But although he did his best to cheer her up, the mood among the party faithful was awful. As at Brighton a year earlier, the Winter Gardens felt like an armed camp, with lines of policemen protecting the sleekly prosperous delegates from the crowds outside. Writing in her journal, John Hoskyns’s wife Miranda captured the atmosphere:
Hundreds of police were there lining the route, and trying to keep the Right to Work marchers at bay; but as they spotted us they began to throw things, as well as abuse, and I found myself looking into the faces of young fellows who spat, stuck out their tongues and thumbed their noses at me …
Even stranger was one older man who’d got inside the cordon and was standing quietly outside the doors as we went in. Very quietly, under his breath, he said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, coming to this conference, wearing a Tory badge, at a time like this.’
The media, however, were more interested in the enemies within. The conference theme, said the Express, was ‘Thatcher at Bay … Her popularity is at its lowest ebb. Many in her party doubt the wisdom, many others lack the courage, of her convictions.’ For this the paper blamed Ted Heath, a Tory in ‘name and ambition’ alone, and his ‘wet, gutless and disloyal’ supporters. ‘This week’, it said firmly, ‘the Iron Lady must steel herself to crack the whip.’34
Funnily enough, flogging did dominate the first day, with speaker after speaker urging the government to bring back the birch to deter future riots. But the next day’s headlines belonged to, of all people, Norman St John-Stevas, who had not forgiven Mrs Thatcher for booting him out at the turn of the year. Now, belying his foppish reputation, St John-Stevas struck back with interest. The Tory Party, he said, should be a broad church, ‘not a sect and … not a community of saints following a Messianic vision’. If they had any sense, the Thatcherites would abandon their ‘callous chatter about a leaner, fitter British industry’. Instead, unthinkingly ‘sticking to the carcasses of dead policies’, cocooned in the ‘ignorant pride of a false consistency’, they were facing ‘an electoral catastrophe’.35
This was strong stuff by any standards. The fact that it came from St John-Stevas, usually such a prize drip, made it all the more biting. But he was merely the warm-up man for Edward Heath, who addressed a fringe event the next day. Monetarism, Heath said, had now had a fair test, and everybody could see the results: ‘massive unemployment of over 3 million and still rising, and a massive number of liquidations and bankruptcies’. This kind of unemployment was ‘morally unjustified. No society can tolerate that position and as a party we have to be absolutely clear about this … That is not what we want in the Conservative Party and not what many of us have devoted our political lives to working for.’ Indeed, if they were not careful they would soon be presiding over a se
cond Great Depression, with high unemployment resurrecting the corpses of the dictators. ‘That is not the path any of us want to tread again.’36
Mrs Thatcher’s allies did not take this lying down, and her young guns immediately returned fire. What the Wets were offering, Nigel Lawson said scornfully, was higher borrowing and higher inflation, with no mention of the costs. It was ‘little more than cold feet dressed up as high principle … bribery dressed up as statesmanship’. They should ‘drop their high moral tone, because there really is nothing that is moral or compassionate in prescribing policies which would engulf this country in a holocaust of inflation’. But the speaker who really seized people’s attention was Norman Tebbit, who reminded the conference that the government was already spending some £1½ billion on special employment measures to keep people out of the dole queues. It was outrageous, Tebbit said, for their critics to claim that high unemployment had caused the riots in Brixton and Toxteth. ‘I grew up in the Thirties, with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’
Contrary to what is often thought, Tebbit did not tell the modern-day unemployed to get on their bikes. He was using his father’s story to defend the government against the accusation that unemployment inevitably meant rioting. But his phrase hit home. To the government’s supporters it became a symbol of Mrs Thatcher’s commitment to individual self-reliance. To its critics it captured her callous disregard for the poor and unlucky. For Tebbit himself, his father’s bicycle became a central element of his abrasive image. Only a few weeks earlier, the Observer had called him a ‘hard-faced man who did well out of the class war’. Now the Guardian declared that he had the ‘air of a prison office manqué’. That was a bit unfair, but in a single sentence he had cemented his position as the man the chattering classes loved to hate.37
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