Communism 179
Jews 622
mastery of briefs 39
paintings at Number 10 35
prejudices 36
unpopularity 54
Wets 190, 192
Williams, Shirley 364
Young, Jimmy 144
Young, John 681
The Young Ones 164, 280, 334, 398
Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) 470–71
Youth Training Scheme (YTS) 471
youth unemployment 162, 468, 469–71, 520
Yugoslavia 165
ZX80 computer 713–14, 725–6
ZX81 computer 727, 729
ZX Spectrum computer 708–10, 718–19, 722, 727–8, 729
owners sneered at by George Osborne 709
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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1: Whatever Happened to Britain?
1 The talking shop of the seven richest Western nations, namely Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, which had been set up after the 1973 oil crisis.
2: The Line of Duty
1 For younger readers, I suppose I should point out that Henry Root did not exist, but was a hoax created by the satirist William Donaldson. Contrary to what is often thought, this was a golden age of political humour, from the letters of Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher to the diaries of fictional creations such as Adrian Mole and Tony Benn.
2 Better known today as Demons.
3 This is a very odd comparison. A half-decent Black Forest gateau is much more socially useful than lots of paradoxical books.
4 A monetarist economist who became her chief economic adviser at the beginning of 1981.
5 Havers was no fool. Having served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he was made Queen’s Counsel in 1964. He was the father of the professional charmer Nigel Havers.
6 Members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
7 Why Hall’s interpretation is still so influential is mystifying. It is not as though it was especially revelatory, since almost all Conservative governments have had some element of ‘authoritarian populism’. What is more, his essay was published in January 1979, so it says nothing about what she actually did. For example, he devotes pages to crime and education, which were pretty tangential during her three administrations. Yet he barely mentions the trade unions, has little to say about economics and does not mention inflation once.
3: You’d Look Super in Slacks
1 Actually, she is an undercover agent for the CIA. But of course that only makes her all the more impressive.
2 But there were exceptions: Nigel Lawson records that whenever his wife was ill, Mrs Thatcher sent her a handwritten note, sometimes with flowers.
4: No Money, Margaret Thatcher!
1 In reality, a Canadian actor probably best known for Mrs Miniver (1942) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
2 Root copied this letter to McMenemy, who wrote back a few days later. He was ‘very flattered’, he said. ‘Seriously, I think she might have chosen her Cabinet by now and, like yourself, I do hope she does a good job.’
3 An inspired creation, the Eye’s Denis wrote a fortnightly letter to his friend Bill, filling him in on life at Number 10. Legend has it that after a while, the real Denis began deliberately playing up to the caricature.
4 Milton Shulman was, in fact, a columnist and theatre critic for the Evening Standard.
5 The obvious comparison is with Denis Healey, who did cut spending in real terms in 1976–7 and 1977–8.
5: The Word Is … Lymeswold!
1 It is true, of course, that coronation chicken was not officially invented until 1953. But it was inspired by a very similar dish, jubilee chicken, created for George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935, when the young Margaret Roberts was 9.
6: You Are Mad and We Hate You
1 When Tony Benn visited the town to join a steelworkers’ demonstration against the threat of closure, he did not have the courage to tell them that ‘the Labour Cabinet had decided in February this year to support the closure of Corby … I felt tremendously guilty.’
2 In a closed shop, all the workers in a given firm had to join the union, whether they wanted to or not. The Conservatives had long abhorred the closed shop, regarding it as an attack on individual freedom.
3 On British Leyland, see chapter 13.
7: Who Needs Enemies?
1 ‘Mr Primm’ certainly sounds like a Thatcherite minister, but she was probably conflating Francis Pym and Jim Prior.
2 ‘There speaks the real grocer’s daughter.’
3 In fairness, when Charles Moore asked Giscard about it years later, he denied it. But it sounds pretty plausible.
4 It is often said that she asked for ‘my own money back’, but this is an exaggeration. She used the phrase ‘our own money back’ eight times, but ‘my own money’, which was probably a slip of the tongue, only once.
5 The fact that she came out with this stuff at a Youth for Europe rally says a great deal about what she thought Europe was for.
8: Mrs Thatcher’s Final Solution
1 This might be a tolerable argument from, say, a Daily Mail columnist, but surely not from a Cabinet minister, who ought to have something constructive to say.
2 That is, the steel strike of early 1980.
9: Your Boys Took a Hell of a Beating
1 It has to be said that this is quite an odd list. Nelson, Churchill and Diana were obvious choices, and Eden and Attlee make some sort of sense. Even Henry Cooper was still quite famous. But Lord Beaverbrook? Lillelien had once studied journalism. Perhaps he had specialized in the history of the Daily Express.
2 With those mocking quotation marks, we are perilously close to ‘no such thing as society’ territory here – and in the Guardian, of all places!
3 Buford gives no date for this incident. But the clues (a cold Saturday evening, after Liverpool had played in South Wales) suggest it was either 2 January 1982, when Swansea hosted them in the FA Cup, or 18 September 1982, when the two sides met in the First Division.
4 Cullis was an indubitably mighty man. Quite apart from his record at Wolves, he was the only Englishman who refused to give the Nazi salute when England played Germany in Berlin in 1938.
10: A Bit of Freedom
1 In office, they stuck to their guns: housing cuts accounted for 75 per cent of the government’s spending reductions between 1980 and 1984.
11: She’s Lost Control
1 But as Edmund Dell remarked, if they had left it in the ground, ‘where would the government [have got] the revenue from which to subsidize British Leyland?’
12: Nice Video, Shame about the Song
1 By the time ‘Cars’ was released, Tubeway Army had been relegated to backing musicians, so the single went out under Numan’s name.
2 Sorry: that should read ‘individual self-reinvention, self-expression and gender fluidity’.
13: High Noon at Leyland
1 Since this covers a decade of very high inflation, it is tricky to give a modern equivalent. Somewhere between £14 billion and £20 billion seems about right.
2 In fairness, the level fell in the second half of the decade to just 1.7 per cent, so she did get there ev
entually.
3 A very similar thing once happened to Paddington Bear. In the story ‘A Disappearing Trick’ (1958), Paddington smashes Mr Curry’s watch with a hammer. Paddington’s excuse is that he ‘forgot to say Abracadabra’.
14: A Really Angry Brigade
1 After the inevitable journey back to the centre, she became a New Labour minister and ended up as a baroness.
2 Lansman was later a key figure in Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership, and founded the Corbyn fan club Momentum.
3 In fact, the new rules had so many inconsistencies that the party’s lawyers warned that they would not withstand a legal challenge. So mandatory reselection would have to wait for confirmation at the following year’s conference.
4 Parliamentary Labour Party. Even by its own standards the Labour Party was then in the grip of initialism-mania: the PLP, the NEC, the CLPD, the LCC, the TULV, the RFMC …
15: Another Day of Feud and Fury
1 Later, the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky told MI5 that in the 1960s Foot had been a KGB ‘agent of influence’. Foot, he said, had dined regularly with a Russian contact and accepted donations worth a total of £37,000 today, which he probably handed on to the left-wing paper Tribune. When the story came out, Foot successfully sued the Sunday Times for reporting it. But Gordievsky had no reason to lie, and it sounds plausible enough. It does not, of course, mean that Foot was a traitor, or even a KGB agent in any meaningful way. It probably just means he was very naive.
16: When the Wind Blows
1 Nott was Mrs Thatcher’s second Defence Secretary: he replaced Francis Pym in January 1981 and was at the helm, famously, during the Falklands War.
2 According to Tony Benn’s diary, Callaghan explicitly told his senior colleagues that he and his Defence Secretary, Fred Mulley, had secretly ‘prepared for Cruise missiles to be introduced to this country’.
18: Up Yours from the Chancellor
1 According to his Telegraph obituary, St John-Stevas once ‘asked to be excused from a meeting because he had a reception to go to’. ‘But I’m going to the same function,’ Mrs Thatcher said. ‘Yes,’ St John-Stevas replied, ‘but it takes me so much longer to change.’
2 In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher claims that she forced Howe into a change of heart. But the documents show that this is not true. In fact, she had already agreed to accept £11¼ billion. It was the Chancellor’s own decision to settle on £10½ billion the next day.
3 Of course inflation did make a last lurching reappearance between 1988 and 1991, after the Lawson boom. But this was a one-off rather than a return to the old pattern.
19: One in Ten
1 Between 1980 and 1984, the Guardian and Observer invoked Orwell’s legacy on no fewer than 435 occasions, once every four days. By contrast, they had mentioned him barely 300 times in the whole of the 1970s.
23: The March of Death
1 They were called ‘H-blocks’ for the banal reason that the cells were arranged in four wings, linked by a central administrative section.
24: The Commissar of County Hall
1 The buses were run by South Yorkshire County Council, rather than Sheffield City Council. But there was obviously an extremely close relationship between the two. The city council strongly supported the subsidized fare scheme, and it was Sheffield’s rates that paid for most of it.
2 Although Blunkett became an unofficial leader of the rebellion against rate-capping in 1984–5, he did back down eventually – an early sign that he was much more pragmatic than his reputation suggested.
3 Dr Mackay complained vociferously that the paper had put words in his mouth. He said he had been talking about a hypothetical character type, not a specific individual, and had never even heard of Livingstone until he read the article.
25: Attack of the Sloanes
1 Why Romsey? It was the location of the late Louis Mountbatten’s country house Broadlands. Charles’s parents had spent their honeymoon there, and he was keen to do the same.
2 Soames was as good as his word. Thirty years later, as chief executive of the power generation firm Aggreko, he earned almost £8 million in a single year.
3 In fact, the show’s production team had decided on Davison’s outfit in the spring of 1981. Perhaps they had taken the TARDIS for a spin to find out what was coming. Tellingly, the other options for his new costume included a morning suit with a top hat and a polo outfit with matching jodhpurs.
26: The British Are Coming!
1 For comparison, the all-time peak came in 1936, when Britain produced 192 films.
2 He was consciously echoing the legendary words of the American independence fighter Paul Revere, though Revere never actually said them.
3 In a later interview, Thompson remembered that there was one other black child at the school, but the basic point stands.
4 This is not a misprint. The seaman wanted Botham to take his autograph, not the other way around.
27: She Came, She Saw, She Clobbered
1 Presumably the Mail meant Harold Macmillan’s purge of seven Cabinet ministers in 1962, not the goings-on in Germany in 1934.
30: Tomorrow’s World
1 Not everybody liked it, though. Many BBC Micro owners tended to dismiss the Spectrum: the 11-year-old George Osborne, who spent his weekends painstakingly typing in the free programs in the magazine Micro User, reportedly regarded Spectrum owners as ‘irredeemable dilettantes’.
2 The Iron Cross, that is, not the shirt. He was a ‘character’, not a Nazi.
3 A reference to the car rental firm’s then-famous advertising campaign, in which Avis claimed that, because they were second to their arch-rivals, Hertz, ‘we try harder’.
4 He came last, winning just 885 votes. In fairness, this was a lot more than any of the party’s other twelve candidates managed.
5 Broadcasts for schools began as expected on the morning of 11 January 1982, but weekend broadcasts were postponed until 14 February and evening repeats until 22 March.
6 The Californian firm had introduced the Apple II as early as 1977, but at a cost of £1,200 it generally appealed only to businesses.
31: Strangers in the Night
1 As assignments go, Winchester’s trip to the South Atlantic was remarkably eventful. Having been thrown off the Falklands after the invasion, he was arrested in Tierra del Fuego for spying and held in an Argentine prison for the next seventy-seven days, before being released at the end of the war.
2 The real Denis, not the Private Eye one, though they were so similar it hardly matters.
32: We’ll Show ’Em We’re British
1 Actually, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to Heston Aerodrome, which is in Hounslow – not Croydon.
2 In a conflict virtually hidden from the general public, some 17,000 British troops had served in Borneo during the mid-1960s, defending Malaysia against its neighbour Indonesia.
3 That word ‘settlers’ is very revealing. Many of the islanders were not, in fact, settlers, since they had been born on the Falklands, as had their parents and grandparents.
4 Greenslade also noted, though, that MacKenzie was straightforward, good-humoured and ‘rarely held grudges … He was far kinder and more understanding in private than in public.’
33: The Day of Reckoning
1 No British lives were lost. The only Argentine killed was Petty Officer Felix Artuso, a prisoner shot by a Royal Marine who thought he was trying to sabotage the Santa Fe.
2 Actually only one Vulcan: the other had to turn back.
3 ‘She’ in this case means Britain, not Mrs Thatcher.
4 Thompson was in charge because his superior officer, Major-General Jeremy Moore, was still sailing south on the QE2 with 5 Infantry Brigade. Moore did not take over command of land operations until 30 May, when the Battle of Goose Green was over.
5 To 2 Para’s fury, the BBC World Service effectively gave away their position, telling listeners that they had moved towards Darwin before
they had actually done so. The soldiers naturally felt that the BBC had betrayed them to the Argentines, but it probably made no difference to the course of the fighting.
34: We Are Ourselves Again
1 Some sources give the figure as 255, but Sir Lawrence Freedman’s Official History suggests 253. Of these, eighty-five served in the Royal Navy, twenty-six were Marines, one belonged to the RAF, eighteen were civilians serving with the fleet and 123 were serving in the army. Argentine casualties were much higher: 649 killed, more than 1,600 wounded and 11,313 taken prisoner. Of the Argentine dead, almost exactly half had been on the Belgrano.
Who Dares Wins Page 144