Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  It was noticeable that when she did emerge as Heath’s successor, in February 1975, it was the handful of women Labour MPs who were the first to celebrate the achievement. ‘I am very pleased,’ said Gwyneth Dunwoody, while Joyce Butler went further: ‘Absolutely splendid. I am delighted. It is time we had women in the top jobs.’ And Shirley Williams added, ‘I cannot help admitting privately, as a woman, being pleased to see that in the Tory Party, of all parties, a woman has broken through.’

  This latter argument, that somehow it was a remarkable step for the Tories in particular to have taken, was exploded by Barbara Castle, who had followed Joseph as social services secretary. Reflecting in her diary on the consequences of Thatcher, she wrote of the Labour Party: ‘There’s a male-dominated party for you – not least because the trade unions are male-dominated, even the ones that cater for women.’ She went on to identify what was to become a key problem for Labour: ‘The battle for cash wage increases is a masculine obsession. Women are not sold on it, particularly when it leads to strikes, because the men often don’t pass on their cash increases to their wives. What matters to women is the social wage.’ And she concluded, in very unBennite terms, that: ‘To me, socialism isn’t just militant trade unionism. It is the gentle society, in which every producer remembers that he is a consumer too.’ Two years later, an opinion poll was to show that Thatcher’s strongest lead over Labour was amongst working women.

  Thatcher’s victory in the 1975 leadership contest was no great endorsement of monetarism. Indeed it is doubtful how many of those who voted for her in the first ballot (when she defeated Heath), let alone in the second, when she saw off all other challengers, understood or believed her deeply held, if newly acquired, convictions on economics. The support was instead predicated on her courage in volunteering to bell the cat: ‘She’s the only man among them,’ was the phrase going around Westminster. ‘Suddenly Mrs Thatcher stands out among the Tory dwarfs like a life-size Snow White,’ editorialized the Daily Mirror before the first ballot. ‘A very tough Snow White.’ But it warned that if she became leader, the Conservatives would be taking on an image that was ‘Dominatingly middle-class. Suburban. Anti-union. Even more Southern English than it is now.’ It was precisely this image that excited those who sought hope in Thatcher’s election. The Daily Mail leader column that welcomed her arrival put it in the context of the great enemy of the right: ‘The majority of the British people do not want socialism. They do not want Bennery.’ The only question was whether this bold experiment of having a female leader might misfire and inadvertently hand the future to Benn.

  Thatcher’s appeal was to two separate, and perhaps contradictory, constituencies. On the one hand, she articulated the intellectual monetarism of right-wing groups such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, led by Ralph Harris, and the Centre for Policy Studies, which had Alfred Sherman as its director of studies. But to the country at large, she was also the woman who espoused common-sense virtues of good housekeeping, the embodiment of the old adage to be neither a borrower nor a lender. Where Benn offered the masculine logic of centralized planning, the state as rational father figure, Thatcher countered with the no-nonsense, class-defying home truths of matron. Meg Richardson, one felt, would have gone to hear her speak, while Ena Sharples would be watching on television at home, nodding in approval. Though her vision was not dissimilar to that of Powell, his had been predominantly a male following, while she brought to the kitchen table the superficially moderating fact of femininity.

  She spelt out that vision in her first conference speech as leader: ‘A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance.’ And she concluded with a peroration that explicitly turned its back on the post-war cross-party consensus: ‘We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stop, and with a decisive act of will we can say “Enough”.’ Joseph’s speech on the same occasion elaborated on the theme, arguing that what was needed was a move not to the centre ground, but to the common ground.

  Despite the support of right-wing think tanks, Thatcher, like Enoch Powell, was venerated primarily by a public that was mistrustful of intellect, and she took care to emphasize her remoteness from the political elite: ‘I’m a plain straightforward provincial,’ she told Anthony Sampson in 1977. ‘I’ve got no hang-ups about my background, like you intellectual commentators in the south-east.’ And her image as the suburban hat-wearing lady, a woman who could have been Margo Leadbetter’s other next-door neighbour in The Good Life, was balanced by her perceived position as an outsider in Westminster, purely by virtue of her gender. This fact, that she was not part of an old school tie network, that she was not one of the boys, was a huge part of her attraction, and it played into one of the great myths of the 1970s: that of the outsider, the individualist, the rule-breaker with no time for bureaucracy and unearned authority.

  The rebel was, of course, far from being a new theme in popular culture, but it was one that acquired a much wider currency in the period, moving from the cultic fringe into the mainstream. It became, for example, central to the culture of British sport. One could see it in boxer John Conteh, who won the world light heavyweight title in 1974, but discovered that partying was preferable to training. (When asked why, as world champion, he didn’t work harder at boxing, he replied with admirable economy: ‘It hurts.’) Likewise a rebellious, mercurial brilliance was at the heart of the appeal of Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, who arrived from nowhere to take the world snooker title in 1972 at his first attempt, and to win over a huge new audience for the game with a persona that mixed the gladiator with the kamikaze pilot, the soul of a poet with the appearance of a glue-sniffer. The following year, in response to his arrival, the BBC acquired the rights to the tournament, and the process of turning snooker into a major armchair sport was under way.

  Higgins was following in the path of his fellow Belfast boy George Best. In the 1960s Best had been celebrated as the Fifth Beatle, but the off-pitch legend was really built later, amidst the alcoholic excesses and unpredictable brilliance that culminated in him being sacked by Manchester United in 1974. The boy wonder was transformed into self-destructive genius, and thereby acquired a much greater celebrity than he would had he followed his team-mate Bobby Charlton into elder statesmanship. A playground rhyme of the period was adapted from Jesus Christ Superstar:

  Georgie Best, superstar,

  Walks like a woman and he wears a bra.

  His successors as the icons of the terraces were similarly nonconformist figures. There was Chelsea’s Peter Osgood, the King of Stamford Bridge, whose fame was captured in the T-shirt worn by Raquel Welch that proclaimed ‘I Scored With Osgood’. There was Rodney Marsh, whose England career ended when Sir Alf Ramsey threatened to pull him off at half-time, provoking the reply, ‘Crikey, Alf, at Manchester City all we get is an orange and a cup of tea.’ And there was Arsenal’s Charlie George, the idol of the skinheads, despite his inappropriate haircut: ‘They hate the opposition, and so does Charlie. They adore him for his V-signs and his tantrums, just as they adore kicking in the teeth of an enemy fan.’

  Above all there was Brian Clough, the manager who took Derby County into the top tier of English football and then won the league title. The fact that he repeated the feat with Nottingham Forest (the first man to take the title with two clubs since Herbert Chapman), and went on to win the European Cup twice, convinced every England fan that he should be the next national manager, an opinion loudly shared by Clough himself. He was the single most opinionated figure in the history of English football, convinced, with good reason, that he was also the greatest manager of them all. And though much of what he stood for – old-fashioned virtues of team spirit, rigid discipline and a refusal to allow misbehaviour by his players – have come to look ever more appealing in ensuing years, his absolute arroganc
e and intolerance of any higher authority ensured he would never be appointed to the England job; the FA, as he admitted, wanted a diplomat, not one who denounced the Juventus team after a controversial European Cup semi-final as ‘cheating, fucking Italian bastards’. He was wooed by the Labour Party, keen that he put himself forward as a parliamentary candidate, but fortunately for football – and perhaps for Labour – he turned them down. Intelligent and nonconformist, he spoke his mind at a time when football was generally considered mindless.

  Similarly, in February 1975, the same month that Thatcher was elected Tory leader in the teeth of the old boy establishment at Westminster, The Sweeney started its first series on ITV. Here, in a radical break with previous TV police shows in Britain, John Thaw played Jack Regan, a maverick cop closer in spirit to Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan than he was to Sgt Dixon of Dock Green. The Sweeney had little or no interest in conventional themes of police procedure, detection or criminal master plans; instead it adopted a more aggressive, even bellicose, attitude, with protracted chases, shoot-outs and fist fights. ‘You’re building an image, Jack,’ his boss warns him. ‘A broken marriage, drinking, deliberate flouting of authority . . .’ But Regan has no patience with older, more senior officers who don’t approve of his style. ‘They don’t understand,’ he snaps. ‘It’s war, it’s bloody war now. When you stop a kid in a stolen car, you can’t be sure he isn’t tooled up and ready to blow your face off.’

  At the emotional heart of the show was the male bonding of Regan and his sidekick George Carter (Dennis Waterman), as they lived cheek by jowl with London’s criminals, and as they fought villains, cop-baiting journalists and even their own hierarchy on the fifth floor, to whom their immediate boss Frank Haskins (Garfield Morgan) is always answerable when they overstep the line yet again. ‘I sometimes hate this bastard place. It’s a bloody holiday camp for thieves and weirdos, all the rubbish,’ Regan says of London. And then he gets personal: ‘You try and protect the public and all they do is call you fascist. You nail a villain and some ponced-up pinstriped amateur barrister screws you up like an old fag packet on a point of procedure, then pops off for a game of squash and a glass of Madeira. He’s taking home thirty grand a year, and we can just about afford ten days in Eastbourne and a second-hand car.’ This was the world of James Barlow’s The Burden of Proof replayed on a much bigger stage and inflated for more cynical times: the heroes are still the thin blue line, but now they are deeply flawed human beings, battling not only the criminal classes, with their bent lawyers and politicians, but also pen-pushing superiors who don’t understand how desperately corrupt the world has become. In the words of the original brief for writers of the series: ‘Regan is contemptuous of the formality and bureaucracy which characterizes much of the police service. His basic philosophy is “Don’t bother me with forms and procedures, let me get out there and nick villains”.’ Or, as Carter was later to put it, ‘You can’t operate unless you break the rules. Everybody knows that.’

  If the anti-authoritarian individualist was one of the key 1970s archetypes, then another was the malcontent, a figure particularly associated with sitcoms and derived directly from Tony Hancock’s persona in the ’50s; at a time when Harold Macmillan was telling the nation that they’d never had it so good, Hancock represented those who felt that they’d never had it at all. His descendants included Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers and, most brilliantly, the seedy landlord Rigsby in Rising Damp, played by Leonard Rossiter: ‘I think he really caught something about the English in Rigsby,’ commented co-star Don Warrington of Rossiter, ‘a sort of emotional incontinence which one can see in pubs. The one who knows it all and actually knows nothing.’ All these were right-wing, quasi-Powellite characters, but the dissatisfied and disgruntled cynic, the personification of raging impotence, also had his counterparts on the traditional left, including the racist trade unionist Eddie Booth in Love Thy Neighbour and the intriguing figure of George Roper, portrayed by Brian Murphy.

  Roper first appeared in Man About the House as a middle-aged, infantile miser. Living off his young lodgers, he spends most of his life, and all of his ingenuity, trying to avoid the clutches of his sex-starved wife, Mildred (Yootha Joyce), whilst still finding time to nurture a wide range of bigotries. In one of the best shows in the series – pre-dating the more famous Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ – the regular characters invite to dinner a German named Franz Wasserman (played by Dennis Waterman), which gives Roper the opportunity to indulge one of his most cherished prejudices. When he learns that Wasserman’s father was in the Luftwaffe, he immediately asks, ‘Was he ever over Putney on a Monday, bath night?’, a reference to an alleged incident in Roper’s childhood when a German bomb hit the area and blew him out of the bath. (‘Always reckoned Hitler knew when it was bath night round our way,’ he reflected. ‘Very ruthless, these Krauts.’) Throughout dinner, he needles Wasserman with tales of two world wars and one world cup, until the latter eventually explodes in rage and spits out the uncomfortable, and seldom spoken, truth: ‘You’re nothing but a bloody fascist!’

  When the Ropers were given their own series, George and Mildred, they moved out of their Earl’s Court home (compulsorily purchased by the council) and bought a new house in the distinctly middle-class Hampton Wick, despite George’s misgivings about suburbia: ‘All BBC2 and musical toilet rolls.’ A new element was added to the existing mix in the form of naked class war between Roper and his next-door Tory neighbour, Jeffrey Fourmile (Norman Eshley). ‘I’m working-class and bloody proud of it,’ declares George, and the resultant tension between his determination to cling to his class roots and his wife’s desperation to escape hers provided many of the series’ sharpest lines. When Mildred tries to persuade him to join the local Conservative association – in the hope of getting a cheap holiday – she insists that the Tories are essentially a social organization who just organize events, at which he spits, ‘Yeah, whist drives in aid of the death penalty.’ Meanwhile the estate agent Fourmile was sitcom’s first overt Thatcherite; ‘Socialism: The Way Ahead,’ he says, reading the spine of a book as he sorts out a stall at a jumble sale. ‘Hmm, put that with the fiction, I think.’

  Despite his protestations, it’s not hard to see Roper secretly putting his cross on the ballot paper for Thatcher, nor to see him joined in the polling booth by Garnett, Fawlty, Rigsby and even perhaps Eddie Booth. Alongside them would have been not only Fourmile, but also Margo in The Good Life and – from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? – Bob Ferris, an aspirant member of the middle class who might have voted Liberal in 1974, but would surely have opted for Thatcher in 1979. Against these massed ranks, British sitcoms in the ’70s could offer few genuinely left-wing characters: possibly Wolfie, the parody of a revolutionary in Citizen Smith, certainly Mike in Till Death Us Do Part, who would ostentatiously read copies of the Morning Star, Militant and Workers Press in front of Alf Garnett, but there were very few others.

  The numerical imbalance was striking. ‘I certainly do notice,’ mused Tony Benn in 1975, ‘how wildly hostile the press is to everything to do with working people, trade unions and young people. It is an extremely dangerous tendency which I have noticed building up over the last few years. Whether it is a move towards fascism is perhaps too early to say.’ He was, of course, referring to news coverage – Benn was seldom aware of anything as trivial as TV sitcoms – but his point had a wider application. Erstwhile critic Kenneth Tynan had earlier pointed out that the BBC drama series The Trouble Shooters, set in the boardroom of the Mogul International oil company, was ‘naked propaganda for capitalism’. The same could have been said of others, including the 1960s ITV series The Power Game, which had started on the shop floor before shifting its focus to Patrick Wymark as the managing director of an aircraft company. Even when a new drama was launched in 1972 under the title The Brothers, it turned out to be not the story of trade unionists that one might have expected, but y
et another tale of boardroom power struggles, this time in the context of a transport firm; the first series hinged on a dockers’ strike, but it was presented almost entirely from the point of view of those prepared to break picket lines. There was no shop-floor equivalent to these shows, labour being instead relegated to the one-off play favoured by the politically committed dramatists; such work, though it tended to be more controversial and to attract more attention from critics, was marginal compared to the huge audiences guaranteed to the likes of The Brothers, with its prime-time slot on BBC1. As Tynan noted: ‘“Will he become boss?” is the question raised by this kind of series. “Will he go on the dole?” is a question raised by no TV programme known to me.’

  Despite these product placements for capitalist enterprise, it was still the twin figures of the maverick and the malcontent that dominated much of ’70s fiction. United by a feeling that Britain had been taken over by officious time-servers and placemen, they had something in common with the real-life equivalents of George Shipway’s The Chilian Club, men like the retired NATO commander General Sir Walter Walker and SAS hero Colonel David Stirling, who proposed the creation of private armies of ‘volunteers on call to the government in the event of a crisis’. Indeed the crisis was apparently pretty much upon us already: Benn’s ‘steady encroachment on the public enterprise system, together with the forcing of trade union members on to the executive board of companies’, wrote Stirling, constituted a ‘realizable threat of a magnitude this country has never faced before’. The fantasies of would-be power-brokers lusting after coups had been prefigured by newspaper proprietor Cecil King in 1968, when he made an abortive attempt to persuade Earl Mountbatten to lead such a rebellion, but again they became more prominent in the ’70s. ‘Two years ago we could have easily faced a coup in Britain,’ wrote Jack Jones in 1977. ‘The fear of hyper-inflation was strong. There was talk of private armies being assembled. There was talk of the end of democracy.’