Britain After Blair
This history has told the story of the defeat of politics by shopping. The political visions of Attlee, and Churchill in his romantic-nostalgic mood, were overthrown by
the consumer boom of the fifties. People generally wanted colour, variety and new tastes, not austere socialist egalitarianism or thigh-slapping New Elizabethan patriotism, though a large minority was drawn to each of these. In the Wilson and Heath years, politicians promised a newly scientific, planned future, all straight lines and patriotism, drawn up in
Whitehall with everyone sitting down together ‘backing Britain’. Their Britain collapsed and Margaret Thatcher’s revolution shovelled away the rubble. Her boot-sale of state
enterprise, defeat of the unions, and her abandonment of politicians’ controls over money led to a new boom. The old state retreated and the consumer society advanced. Far from remoralizing
the British with the Victorian values of frugality, saving, orderliness and continence as she had hoped, Thatcher gave many of us the licence and credit to behave like Regency rakes on a spree. The
country went shopping again, as it had in the fifties and sixties and would again in the nineties and beyond.
The new great powers in the land were organizations that had barely been noticed before the war. In 1924 an East End barrow boy called Jack Cohen had used part of his surname and the initials of
a tea supplier to market his own-brand tea under the title Tesco. Five years later he opened his first shop, then the country’s first all-purpose food warehouse and in 1956, when Tony Blair
was three, a self-service store. Tesco leaped ahead. In the eighties Cohen’s daughter, Dame Shirley Porter, became leader of Westminster Council and, after a highly controversial ‘homes
for votes’ scandal, left the country. By the time Blair left office, Tesco was the country’s leading retailer with 1,780 stores, sales of more than £37 bn and profits of over
£2 bn. It was gaining one pound in every three the British spent on groceries and there was talk of Britain becoming a ‘Tescopoly’. Asda, set up by Yorkshire farmers in 1965 and
now owned by Wal-Mart, the American behemoth and the world’s biggest company, came second to Tesco, but was still serving more than 13 million people a week. Sainsbury’s, which had
originated in a Victorian dairy shop and had launched the first self-service supermarket in 1950, had sales of £17 bn, and more than 750 stores. Such companies dominated farmers and other
suppliers exercised great power in planning disputes, and were becoming increasingly controversial. Meanwhile, to enjoy the consumer economy, the British were borrowing: the average adult had
credit card, finance-deal and unsecured personal loans amounting to more than £4,500.
Apart from generous planning laws, the shopping boom required the ‘great car economy’ lauded by Margaret Thatcher, which was now restrained only by
rising petrol prices and congestion. London had deployed its own congestion charge and a national debate had begun about road pricing. Car use was huge by historic standards. At the beginning of
the sixties when supermarkets first took off, there were 9 million vehicles on the roads; by the mid-2000s, there were 30 million. It was not all shopping, of course. Commuting by car had become
mundane and the number of journeys to school by car had doubled in ten years. By the standards of the forties or fifties, the British now led strikingly privatized lives. They mostly shunned public
transport and were far less likely to shop shoulder to shoulder with neighbours, using shopkeepers they knew by name. With television, digital or analogue, and the computer boom, entertainment was
much likelier to remain in the home. The British were afloat on a tide of cheap imported goods, easy credit and new labour, both skilled and unskilled. House prices had by now nearly tripled in the
Blair years. But politicians, still taxing vigorously, still struggling to deliver popular and efficient public services, were not given any credit for that.
Politics shrivelled – as an activity, as a source of status, as a way of ordering life that was respected or trusted. Lady Thatcher found no truly effective way to run the public services.
Nor did her successors, John Major and Tony Blair. The great middling layer of public life, the independent-minded managers of schools, hospitals and towns, who had real freedom to manage, and the
self-confident local politicians who could make waves, had gone. By most measures overall crime had fallen from the late nineties, at the cost of overcrowded prisons. But violent crime was as much
feared as ever, and as present on the streets of the main cities. All this had a direct effect on people’s hopes and fears about the country. One commentator from a conservative-minded think
tank explained the exodus of 1,000 people a day to other countries: ‘People are emigrating because of a sense of hopelessness . . . nothing is ever done about the big problems like education,
health, crime. There is a growing sense that politicians will never deal with the problems.’18 That was only one voice, and others
had different views, but it reminds us why the policy problems discussed at length earlier are so critical to the country’s notion of its future.
Yet, at the end of this story, the need for true politics seems to have returned. Towards the end of his time in office Tony Blair unveiled a report by an economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, which he
described as more important than any report to government during the New Labour years – more important, therefore, than the debate over Iraq, or pensions,
peace in Ireland or the future of Britain’s health service. Few questioned this bold assertion. For the report was about climate change. We have already seen how radically new waves of
migration were changing Britain but they were as nothing compared to what a new climate might do. An overwhelming preponderance of scientists believed not simply that the climate was changing
(there was no room left for doubt about that) but that the change was man-made and potentially catastrophic. The polar ice was melting, weather patterns were disrupted around the globe, species
were disappearing and yet, as China and India advanced, the gases causing these changes continued to pour upwards. Blair had tried to persuade his partner in Iraq, George Bush, to alter in some way
his hostility to carbon limits but to no avail: compared to the agreements he had won on Africa, Blair’s effort on climate change had been a failure.
American self-interest overrode what to others seemed proper and fair. And there was no bigger cultural challenge to Britons’ sense of proportion and fairness than the one thrown down by
militant Islam. After 9/11 and the London bombings, there were plenty of angry, narrow-minded young Muslim men running amuck, either literally or in their heads. Their views, and the veiled women
of Arab tradition, provoked English politicians to ask whether their communities wanted to fully integrate. Britain did not have as high a proportion of Muslims as France, but large parts of the
English Midlands and the South had long-established and third-generation urban villages of hundreds of thousands of Muslim people. Muslims felt they were being watched in a new way and they were
perhaps right to feel a little uneasy. In the old industrial towns of the Pennines, and in stretches of West London near Heathrow there were such strong concentrations of incomers that the word
ghetto was being used by ministers and civil servants. White working-class people had long been moving, quietly, to other areas: Essex, Hertfordshire, the towns of coastal Sussex, even Spain.
They were a minority, if polling was any guide: only a quarter of Britons said they would prefer to live in white-only areas. Yet multi-culturalism, if it was defined as more than simple
‘live and let live’, was being questioned. How much should new Britons integrate, and how much was the retention of traditions a matter of their human rights? Speaking in December 2006 Blair cited forced marriages, the importation of sharia law and the ban on women entering certain mosques as being on the wrong side of the line. In
the same speech he used new, harder language. After the London bombings, ‘for the first time in a generation there is an unease, an anxiety, even at points a resentment that our very
openness, our willingness to welcome difference, our pride in being home to many cultures, is being used against us.’ He went on to try to define the duty to integrate: ‘Our tolerance
is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don’t come here. We don’t want the hate-mongers . . . If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to
stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us.’ Though Blair chose security as his ground, for others it was about more than the struggle against
terrorism. Britain’s strong economic growth, despite a weak manufacturing base, was partly the product of a long tradition of hospitality. The question was now whether the country was
becoming so crowded – England had the highest population density of any major country in the Western world – that this tolerance was eroding. It would require wisdom from politicians
and efficiency from Whitehall to keep things on an even keel.
Just the same is true of that larger threat, climate change. This threatened reshaping was physical, not demographic, the waves of water, not of people. It promised to alter the familiar
splatter of Britain as she is seen from space or on any map. Nothing is more fundamental to a country’s sense of itself than its shape, particularly when the country is an island. Rising sea
levels could make Britain look different on every side. They could eat into the smooth billow of East Anglia, centuries after the wetlands were reclaimed with Dutch drainage, and submerge the
concrete-crusted, terraced marshland of London, and drown idyllic Scottish islands and force the abandonment of coastal towns which had grown in Georgian and Victorian times. Wildlife would die out
and be replaced by new species – there were already unfamiliar fish offshore and new birds and insects in British gardens. All this was beyond the power of Britain alone to deflect, since she
was responsible for just 2 per cent of global emissions. Even if the British could be persuaded to give up their larger cars, their foreign holidays and their gadgets, would it really make a
difference?
Without a frank, unheated conversation between the rest of us and elected politicians, who are then sent out into the world to do the bigger deals that must be
done, what hope for action on climate change? It seems certain to involve the loss of new liberties, such as cheap, easy travel. It will change the countryside as grim-looking wind farms appear. It
will change how we light and heat our homes and how we are taxed. All these changes are intensely political, in a way the British of the forties would have recognized. Politics is coming back as a
big force in our lives, like it or not. It will require more frankness, less spin, and a more grown-up interest in policy, not scandal. Without this frankness, without trust on each side, what hope
for a sensible settlement between Muslim and Christian, incomer and old timer? Without a rebuilding of strong local structures, what hope for better-run schools, councils or hospitals? Without
level-headed politics, how will the future shape of the UK, if it continues, be negotiated? In the course of this history, most political leaders have arrived eager and optimistic, found themselves
in trouble of one kind or another, and left disappointed. Such is the nature of political life. (Indeed, perhaps it is the nature of life.) But the rest of us need those optimistic politicians, the
next leaders, the ones whom we’ll laugh at and abuse. And we need them more than ever now.
The threats facing the British are large ones. But in the years since 1945, having escaped nuclear devastation, tyranny and economic collapse, we British have no reason to despair, or emigrate.
In global terms, to be born British remains a wonderful stroke of luck.
Notes
Prologue
1. See Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, Eyre Methuen, 1972.
2. George L. Bernstein, The Myth of Decline: The Rise of Britain Since 1945, Pimlico, 2004.
Part One: Hunger and Pride
1. William Harrington & Peter Young, The 1945 Revolution, Davis-Poynter, 1978.
2. Norman Howard, A New Dawn, Politico’s, 2005.
3. Ibid.
4. W. K. Hancock & M. M. Gowing, The British War Economy, HMSO, 1949.
5. All quotes from Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory, Macmillan, 1995.
6. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes. Volume 3: Fighting for Britain, Macmillan, 2000.
7. Ibid.
8. See Desmond Wettern, The Decline of British Sea Power, Jane’s, 1982.
9. Vice Admiral Sir Louis le Bailly, From Fisher to the Falklands, Institute of Marine Engineers, 1991; and Eric J. Grove, Vanguard to Trident: British Naval Policy since World War 2, The Bodley Head, 1987.
10. Dan Van der Vat, Standard of Power, Hutchinson, 2000.
11. N. A. M. Rodger, The Admiralty, Terence Dalton, 1979.
12. Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister, Allen Lane, 2000.
13. Quoted often but see ibid.
14. Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years, Muller, 1957.
15. Story recounted to the author by Gordon Brown, who showed me the very same mahogany lavatory.
16. Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, Oxford U. P., 1985.
17. Ibid.
18. Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, Heinemann, 1952.
19. Dean Acheson, Sketches from Life (1961), quoted in Bullock, op. cit.
20. For this and further material in the following paragraph, see Paul Addison, The Road to 1945, Jonathan Cape, 1975.
21. George Orwell, ‘England Your England’, from Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Victor Gollancz, 1940; repr. Penguin, 1962.
22. Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves, Hodder, 2004.
23. See Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951, Jonathan Cape, 1992.
24. CAB 134/1315 PR (56)3, 1 June 1956, reproduced in British Documents on the End of Empire, ed. David Goldsworthy, HMSO, 1994.
25. Labour Party, Fair Shares of Scarce Consumer Goods, London 1946, quoted in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, Oxford U. P., 2000.
26. See Susan Cooper, ‘Snoek Piquante’, in Age of Austerity 1945–1951, ed. Michael Sissons & Philip French, Hodder & Stoughton, 1963.
27. Simon Garfield (ed.), Our Hidden Lives, Ebury Press, 2004.
28. See Peter Hennessy, Whitehall, Secker & Warburg, 1989.
29. Most of this information comes from Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners, Abacus, 2004.
30. See Juliet Cheetham, in Trends in British Society since 1900, ed. A. H. Halsey, Macmillan, 1972.
31. Jean Medawar & David Pyke, Hitler’s Gift, Richard Cohen Books, 2000.
32. For instance in adverts warning of the dangers of VD.
33. Quoted in Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants, HarperCollins, 1995.
34. Ibid.
35. Graham Payn & Sheridan Morley (eds), The Noël Coward Diaries, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982.
36. See Gyles Brandreth, Charles and Camilla, Century, 2005.
37. Ben Pimlott, The Queen, HarperCollins, 1996.
38. Richard Chamberlain, et al (eds) Austerity to Affluence, British Art and Design, 1945–1962, Merrell Holberton, 1997.
39. See Maureen Waller, London 1945, John Murray, 2004.
40. See Paul Addison, Now the War is Over, BBC/Cape, 1985.
41. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, op. cit.
42. Waller, op. cit.
43. See Nigel Walker in Halsey, op. cit.
44. Peter Hitchens, A Brief History of Crime, Atlantic Books, 2003.
45. Timmins, op. cit.
46. For all this, Timmins, the best single account of the Beveridge report easily available.
47. See Christian Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, Aurum Press, 2005.
48. Barnett, The Lost Victory.
49. Godfey Hodgson, ‘The Steel Debates’ in Sissons & French, op. cit.
50. See Peter Hennessy, Never Again, Jonathan Cape, 1992; and Timmins, op. cit.
51. For a full description of the Prefab story, see Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003.
52. Quoted in Miles Glendinning & Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block, Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press, 1994.
53. Quoted in ibid.
54. David Hughes, ‘The Spivs’ in Sissons & French, op. cit.
55. Quoted in Addison, op. cit.
56. Anne Perkins, Red Queen, Macmillan, 2003.
57. Susan Cooper, ‘Snoek Piquante’ in Sissons & French, op. cit.
58. Pearson Phillips in ibid.
59. Ruth Adam, A Woman’s Place, 1910–1975, Persephone Books, 2000.
60. Quoted in: Addison, op. cit.
61. Interview, The Stage, 2005.
62. Dominic Shellard, British Theatre Since the War, Yale U. P., 1999.
63. John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, Faber & Faber, 1991.
64. Arthur Miller, quoted in Terry Coleman, Olivier: The Authorised Biography, Bloomsbury, 2005.
65. Quoted in Max Hastings, The Korean War, Michael Joseph, 1987.
66. Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jonathan Cape, 2005.
67. Hastings, op. cit.
68. James Cameron, Point of Departure, Arthur Barker, 1967; repr. Granta Books, 2006.
69. See Jung Chang & Halliday, op. cit.
70. Tom Hickman, The Call-Up: A History of National Service, Headline, 2004.
71. Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, HMSO, 1990.
72. Betty Vernon, Ellen Wilkinson, Croom Helm, 1987.
73. B. L. Donoughue & G. L. Jones, Herbert Morrison, Portrait of a Politician, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.
74. Michael Frayn, and Francis Boyd of the Manchester Guardian.
75. Michael Frayn, ‘Festival’ in Sissons & French, op. cit.
Part Two: The Land of Lost Content
1. For these figures, see Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain Today, Hodder & Stoughton, 1965.
2. For Balcon see Matthew Sweet, Shepperton Babylon, Faber & Faber, 2005; Michael Balcon, A Lifetime of Films, Hutchinson, 1969; and Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, Cameron & Hollis, 1998.
3. The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950–1957, Macmillan, 2000.
4. Edward Heath, The Course of My Life, Hodder & Stoughton, 1998.
5. Ibid.
6. See Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, Little, Brown, 2005.
7. D. R. Thorpe, Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897–1977, Chatto & Windus, 2003.
8. Quoted in Peter Hennessy, The Secret State, Penguin, 2002.
9. Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot, Macmillan, 1998.
10. See Alistair Horne, Macmillan, vol. 1, Macmillan, 1988.
11. Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good, Allen Lane, 2006.
12. R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible, quoted in Hennessy, ibid.
13. Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955.
14. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Wheels Within Wheels: An Unconventional Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
15. Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956.
16. Spike Milligan, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall, Michael Joseph, 1971; Penguin, 1973.
17. In a 1957 interview, quoted by Humphrey Carpenter, Spike Milligan, Hodder & Stoughton, 2003. The following quotes are also from this book.
18. D. R. Thorne, Eden, Chatto & Windus, 2003.
19. Brian Lapping, End of Empire, Granada, 1985.
20. Ben Pimlott, The Queen, HarperCollins, 1996.
21. See, for all this, Tom Hickman, The Call-Up: A History of National Service, Headline, 2004.
22. Thanks to Rick Richards of Christchurch and Jean Webber of Burghclere, Newbury, for this information to the author.
23. Jean-Raymond Tourneaux, Secrets d’Etat, Paris, 1960, quoted in Herman Finer, Dulles over Suez, Heinemann, 1964.
24. Quoted in Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell, Hutchinson, 1996.
25. See Gerald Frost, Antony Fisher, Champion of Liberty, Profile Books, 2002.
26. Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, HarperCollins, 1994.
27. Gillian Bardsley, Issigonis: the Official Biography, Icon Books, 2005.
28. See Barbara Castle, Fighting All the Way, Macmillan, 1993; and Anne Perkins, Red Queen, Macmillan, 2003.
29. See Sandbrook, op. cit.
30. Keith Middlemass, Power, Competition and the State, vol. 1, Macmillan, 1986.
31. Quoted in Sandbrook, op. cit.
32. Ibid.
33. Quoted in Perkins, op. cit.
34. Crossman’s account, quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, Jonathan Cape, 1979.
35. Quoted in Patrick Hannan, When Arthur Met Maggie, Seren, 2006.
36. Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Jonathan Cape, 1956; see also Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, Jonathan Cape, 1982.
37. Letter of Harold Macmillan to Sir Robert Menzies, quoted in Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006.
38. James Chuter Ede, quoted in Mike & Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, HarperCollins, 1999.
39. Quoted in Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain, Oxford U. P., 2000.
40. See Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners, Abacus, 2004.
41. Sandbrook, op. cit.
42. A. G. Bennett, quoted in ibid.
43. Phillips & Phillips, op. cit.
44. Hansen, op. cit.
45. Winder, op. cit.
46. For this, and other material here, see Hugo Young’s This Blessed Plot, op. cit.
47. See ibid.
48. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991.
49. Horne, Macmillan, vol. 2; also for the Birch Grove meeting.
50. Heath, op. cit.
51. Quoted in Hennessy, The Secret State, op. cit.
52. Hennessy, ibid.
53. Brian Lavery, Journal of Maritime Research: his article on Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Holy Loch affair is by far the best account.
54. Mark Amory, in his preface to The Letters of Ann Fleming, Collins Harvill, 1985.
55. Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Cohen Books, 1996.
56. Ibid.
57. For Cliveden and the following, see Derek Wilson, The Astors, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993.
58. Harry Thompson, Peter Cook: A Biography, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997.
59. R. H. S. Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Hamish Hamilton/ Cape, 1975.
Part Three: Harold, Ted and Jim
1. See Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, HarperCollins, 1992.
2. Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life, Oxford U. P., 1997.
3. Lord George-Brown, In My Way, Victor Gollancz, 1971.
4. Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, in Dictionary of Labour Biography, ed. Greg Rosen, Politico’s, 2001.
5. R. H. S. Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol. 1, Hamish Hamilton/Cape, 1975.
6. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991.
7. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, Jonathan Cape, 1982.
8. See Nick Timmins, The Five Giants, HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Hugo Young, One of Us, Macmillan, 1989.
10. Edward Heath, The Course of My Life, Hodder & Stoughton, 1998.
11. See Giles Radice, Friends & Rivals, Abacus, 2002.
12. Roy Jenkins, op. cit.
13. Alwyn Turner in The Biba Experience, Antique Collectors Club, 2004, from where much of this paragraph derives.
14. See Bob Spitz, The Beatles, Aurum Press, 2006.
15. Parkinson, quoted in Max Decharne, Kings Road, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005.
16. Quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, Little Brown, 2005.
17. Ray Davies, X-Ray: the Unauthorised Autobiography, Viking, 1994; see also Andy Miller, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Continuum, 2003 and Neville Marten & Jeff Hudson, The Kinks, Sanctuary Publishing, 1996.
18. Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, Pimlico, 2002.
19. See Dave Haslam, Not Abba, Fourth Estate, 2005; and Robert Hewison, Too Much, Methuen, 1986.
20. See Brian Lapping, End of Empire, Granada, 1985.
21. Quoted in Pimlott, op. cit.
22. Pimlott, ibid.
23. Tony Benn, The Benn Diaries, Arrow, 1996 (entry in February 1966).
24. Jenkins, op. cit.
25. Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974.
26. The Cecil King Diaries: 1965–1970, Jonathan Cape, 1972.
27. Philip Ziegler, Wilson: The Authorised Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993.
28. Jenkins, op. cit.
29. Richard Crossman, op. cit.
30. Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration Post-war Britain, Oxford U. P., 2000.
31. Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
32. See Ruth Dudley Edwards, Newspapermen, Pimlico, 2003; and The Cecil King Diaries.
33. Dudley Edwards, ibid.
34. Ziegler, op. cit.
35. See Morgan, op. cit.
36. Susan Crosland, op. cit.
37. See Heffer, op. cit.
38. Ibid.
39. Roy Hattersley, Fifty Years On, Little, Brown, 1997.
40. See Ziegler, op. cit.
41. The Benn Diaries.
42. Clem Jones, quoted in Mike & Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, HarperCollins, 1999.
43. Nicholas Mayhew, Sterling: The Rise and Fall of a Currency, Allen Lane, 1999.
44. Heath, ibid.
45. Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot, Macmillan, 1998.
46. Quoted in Ziegler, op. cit.
47. The Times, 3 May 1971.
48. See Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming, Faber & Faber, 1991.
49. See Arthur Seldon in Arthur Seldon & Stuart Ball, Conservative Century, Oxford U. P., 1994.
50. Robert Elms, The Way We Wore, Picador, 2005.
51. Bernard Donoughue, Downing Street Diary, Jonathan Cape, 2005.
52. Pimlott, op. cit.
53. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, Michael Joseph, 1989.
54. See Young, This Blessed Plot.
55. Heffer, op. cit.
56. Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot, Victor Gollancz, 1994.
57. Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, Fontana Press, 1995.
58. Letter to Anthony Seldon, quoted in Cockett.
59. See Haslam, op. cit.
60. Claire Wilcox, Vivienne Westwood, V&A Publishing, 2004.
61. Haslam, op. cit.
62. Healey, op. cit.
63. Quoted in Kevin Jeffreys, Finest and Darkest Hours, Atlantic Books, 2002.
Part Four: The British Revolution
* Thatcher’s favoured measurement of the money in circulation, and hence shorthand for monetarism.
1. See Hugo Young, One of Us, Macmillan, 1989.
2. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, 1993.
3. Quoted in Young, op. cit.
4. Thatcher, op. cit.
5. See Robert Harris, The Making of Neil Kinnock, Faber & Faber, 1983.
6. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, Michael Joseph, 1989.
7. See Max Hastings & Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, Michael Joseph, 1983; Lawrence Freedman, Britain and the Falklands War, Oxford U. P., 1988; Kevin Jeffreys, Finest and Darkest Hours, Atlantic Books, 2002; and Thatcher, op. cit.
8. Hugo Young & Anne Sloman, The Thatcher Phenomenon, quoted in Young, op. cit.
9. From Patrick Hannan, When Arthur Met Maggie, Seren, 2006.
10. Hannan, op. cit.
11. All this, and the preceding information, is taken from the fourth volume of David Kynaston’s wonderful history of the City of London: A Club No More, 1945–2000, Chatto & Windus, 2001.
12. Interviewed in Kynaston, ibid.
13. Jill Treanor, Guardian, 27 October 2006.
14. Kynaston, op. cit.
15. A comparison made by Christopher Harvie in Fool’s Gold, Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
16. Keith Aitken in Magnus Linklater & Robin Denniston (eds), Anatomy of Scotland, Chambers, 1992.
17. See Harvie, op. cit.
18. Tony Benn, The Benn Diaries, Arrow, 1996 (entry for 7 January 1976).
19. Nigel Lawson, The View from Number 11, Bantam Press, 1992.
20. Ibid.
21. Quoted in The Times, 31 January 2006.
22. John Davies, A History of Wales, Allen Lane, 1990.
23. Martin Westlake, Kinnock: The Biography, Little, Brown, 2001.
24. Michael Fallon & Philip Holland, The Quango Explosion, Conservative Political Centre, 1978.
25. Quoted in Andrew Marr, Ruling Britannia, Michael Joseph, 1995.
26. Thatcher, op. cit.
27. Evan Davies, Schools and the State, Social Market Foundation 1993; see Marr, op. cit.
28. Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, Allen Lane, 2006.
29. Thatcher, op. cit.
Part Five: Nippy Metro People
1. See Andy McSmith, John Smith: Playing the Long Game, Verso, 1993.
2. McSmith, ibid.
3. John Major, The Autobiography, HarperCollins, 1999.
4. Christian Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, Aurum Press, 2005.
5. Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, Allen Lane, 2006.
6. Major, op. cit.
7. See Malcolm Balen, Kenneth Clarke, Fourth Estate, 1994.
8. See Mark Lawson, Media Guardian, 21 October 2006.
9. Anthony Seldon, Blair, The Free Press, 2004.
10. Robert Peston, Brown’s Britain, Short Books, 2005.
11. All quotes from Peter Hyman, 1 out of Ten, Vintage, 2005.
12. See Jenkins, op. cit.
13. Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People, Penguin, 2001.
14. Lance Price, The Spin Doctor’s Diary, Hodder & Stoughton, 2005.
15. Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying, The Free Press, 2005.
16. National Statistics website, 2006.
17. Peston, op. cit.
18. Robert Whelan of Civitas, interviewed Daily Mail, 3 November 2006.
Index
7/7 ref1
9/11 ref1
abortion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Abortion Law Reform Association ref1
Abse, Leo ref1, ref2, ref3
Acheson, Dean ref1
acquired immune-deficiency syndrome (AIDS) ref1
Adam, Ruth ref1
Adams, Gerry ref1, ref2
Admiralty, the ref1
Afghanistan ref1
Africa ref1, ref2, ref3
agriculture ref1
AIDS (acquired immune-deficiency syndrome) ref1
airliners ref1
Aitken, Jonathan ref1
Aldermaston ref1
Allawi, Ayad ref1
al-Qaeda ref1
Amin, Idi ref1
Amis, Kingsley ref1
anarchy ref1
Anatomy of Britain (Sampson) ref1, ref2
Anderson, Ian ref1
Anderton, James ref1
Angry Brigade ref1
‘Angry Young Men’ ref1
animal rights movement ref1
anti-Americanism ref1
anti-Semitism ref1, ref2
anti-war movement ref1
Anti-Nazi League ref1, ref2
Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) ref1
appeasement ref1
Apprentice Boys of Derry ref1
Arab nationalism ref1
arms race ref1
art colleges ref1
Argentina see Falklands War
Arts Council ref1
ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) ref1
Asda ref1
Ashdown, Paddy ref1
Astor, Lord ‘Bill’ ref1
Astor, Nancy ref1
A Streetcar Named Desire ref1
Aswan, High Dam ref1
asylum seekers ref1, ref2
see also immigration; multiculturalism
Attlee, Clement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Austin, Herbert ref1
Austin Seven ref1
AWACS ref1
Baker, Kenneth ref1
Balcon, Michael ref1
Balls, Ed ref1, ref2
Banda, Hastings ref1
Bank of England ref1, ref2, ref3
Barings Bank ref1
Barnett, Correlli ref1, ref2
Barry, Gerald ref1
BBC ref1, ref2
Beadle, Hugh ref1
Beatles, the ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Beaton, Cecil ref1
Beaumont, Hugh (Binkie) ref1, ref2
Beckett, Samuel ref1
Beeching, Richard ref1, ref2
Behan, Brendan ref1
Belgrano ref1
Bell, Martin ref1
Benn, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Bentine, Michael ref1
Bentley, Derek ref1
Berger, Vivian ref1
Berners-Lee, Tim ref1
Bernstein, George ref1
Bevan, Nye ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Beveridge Report ref1
Beveridge, William ref1, ref2
Bevin, Ernest ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Bevins, Reggie ref1
Beyond the Fringe ref1
Biba ref1, ref2
Bicknell, Franklin ref1
‘Big Bang’, City deregulation ref1
‘Big Brother’ ref1
Bin Laden, Osama ref1
bio-metrics ref1
Birch, Nigel ref1
Birthday Party, The (Pinter) ref1
Blackburn Technical College ref1
Black, Cilla ref1
black market ref1
Black Wednesday ref1
Blair, Cherie ref1
Blair, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Blake, George ref1
Blake, Peter ref1
Blaney, Neil ref1
Blue Streak ref1
Blunkett, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
‘Bloody Sunday’ ref1
Blunt, Antony ref1, ref2
Blunt, Maggie Joy ref1
BMC (British Motor Corporation) ref1
BNOC (British National Oil Corporation) ref1
Bono ref1
Boodles Club ref1
Booker, Christopher ref1
Boothby, Lord ref1
Borges, Jorge Luis ref1
Bose, Subhas Chandra ref1
Bosnia ref1
Bourne, Alec ref1
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) ref1
Boxer, Mark ref1
Bowe, Collette ref1
Bowie, David ref1
Braddock, Bessie ref1
Braithwaite, Rodric ref1
Bramley, Ted ref1
Bretherton, Russell ref1
Britain Can Make It (1946) ref1
British Aeroplane Company ref1
British Airways ref1
British Antarctic Survey ref1
British Empire ref1, ref2
British Gas ref1, ref2, ref3
British Guild of Creative Designers ref1
British Housewives’ League ref1, ref2
British Leyland ref1
British Medical Association ref1, ref2
British Motor Corporation (BMC) ref1
British Nationality Act ref1
British National Oil Corporation (BNOC) ref1
British National Party see National Front
British Rail ref1, ref2, ref3
British Steel ref1
British Telecom (BT) ref1, ref2
British Transport Commission ref1
Brixton ref1
Broccoli, Albert ‘Cubby’ ref1
Brodie, Tom see Glorious Glosters
Brown, George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) ref1
B-Specials ref1
BT (British Telecom) ref1, ref2
Buchan, Norman ref1
Bulger, James ref1
Bupa ref1, ref2
Burgess, Guy ref1, ref2
Bush, George ref1
Bush, George W. ref1, ref2, ref3
Butler, R. A. (Rab) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Butlin, Billy ref1
Buxted Chickens ref1
Byers, Stephen ref1
Cairncross, John ref1, ref2
Callaghan, Jim ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Cameron, David ref1, ref2
Cameron, James ref1
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) see CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
Campbell, Alastair ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
cannabis ref1
Caplin, Carole ref1
Cardus, Neville ref1
cars ref1, ref2
Carmichael, Stokely ref1
Casino Royale ref1
Castle, Barbara ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Catling, Susan ref1
Caulcott, Tom ref1
CCTV ref1, ref2
celebrity ref1, ref2, ref3
censorship ref1, ref2, ref3
see also Lady Chatterley trial
Central African Federation ref1
Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) ref1
centralism ref1
Chamberlain, Neville ref1
CERN ref1
Chevaline ref1, ref2
child-centred teaching ref1
Child Poverty Action Group ref1
Chirac, Jacques ref1
Churchill, Winston ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
on the atomic bomb ref1
on social class ref1
cinema ref1, ref2, ref3
Citizen’s Charter ref1
City, the ref1
City Technology Colleges (CTCs) ref1
civil liberties ref1, ref2
CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) ref1
Clapton, Eric ref1
Clark, Alan ref1
Clarke, Charles ref1
Clarke, Kenneth ref1, ref2, ref3
Clarke, Otto ref1
Clash, the ref1
class, social ref1, ref2, ref3
Clause four ref1
Clayton, William ref1
cleanliness ref1
climate change see global warming
Clinton, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Cliveden, Buckinghamshire ref1
clothes ref1, ref2
Clwyd, Ann ref1
CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) ref1
Scottish ref1
see also unilateral nuclear disarmament
coal industry ref1
cocaine ref1
Cockburn, Claud ref1
coffee bars ref1
Cohen, Andrew ref1
Cohen, Jack ref1
Cole, E. A. ref1
Colonial Office ref1, ref2
Commission for Africa ref1, ref2
Commonwealth ref1, ref2
Commonwealth Immigrants Act ref1, ref2
Communism ref1
Communist Party of Great Britain ref1
Compton, Denis ref1
computers ref1
Connery, Sean ref1
Connolly, Billy ref1
Connolly, Cyril ref1
Conservative Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Constitutional Convention ref1
consumerism ref1, ref2
‘control orders’ ref1
Cook, Frederick ref1
Cook, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3
Cook, Robin ref1, ref2
Cotton, Jack ref1
council houses ref1
Council of Industrial Design ref1
council tax inspectors ref1
counter-culture ref1
Country Life ref1
Countryside Alliance ref1, ref2
Cousins, Frank ref1
Coward, Noël ref1, ref2, ref3
CPRS (Central Policy Review Staff) ref1
crack cocaine ref1
Craig, Christopher ref1
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) ref1
cricket ref1
crime ref1, ref2
Cripps, Stafford ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Critchley, Julian ref1
Cromer, Lord ref1
Crosland, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Crossman, Dick ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
CTCs (City Technology Colleges) ref1
Cuban missile crisis ref1
culture ref1, ref2, ref3
Daily Mirror ref1
Dalton, Hugh ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Dalyell, Tam ref1, ref2, ref3
Davies, Gavyn ref1, ref2
Davies, Ray ref1, ref2
Davies, Ron ref1
DEA (Department of Economic Affairs) ref1
Dearlove, Richard ref1
Debord, Guy ref1, ref2
dept cancellation programme ref1
debutantes ref1
decimalization ref1
decolonization ref1
defence ref1
Delors, Jacques ref1
democracy, local ref1
demography ref1, ref2
Denning, Lord ref1
Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) ref1
Desert Fox ref1
Deutschmark ref1
devaluation, of the pound ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
devolution ref1
Devine, George ref1
Dewar, Donald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Diana, Princess ref1, ref2
Diana – the True Story (Morton) ref1
Dior, Christian ref1
directive 10/65 ref1
divorce ref1, ref2
Divorce Reform Act ref1
DNA ref1
Dobson, Frank ref1
Dome of Discovery ref1
domestic policy ref1, ref2
Donovan, Terence ref1
‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ ref1
Draper, Derek ref1
Driberg, Tom ref1, ref2
drugs ref1
du Cannes, Edward ref1
Dulles, John Foster ref1, ref2, ref3
Duncan Smith, Iain ref1
Dury, Ian ref1
Dyke, Greg ref1, ref2, ref3
Ealing studios see Balcon, Michael
Ecclestone, Bernie ref1
Economist, The ref1
economy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
under Callaghan ref1, ref2
under Churchill ref1
City, the ref1
Europe, payments to ref1
France ref1
under Heath ref1
Joseph ref1, ref2
under Lawson ref1, ref2, ref3
under Macmillan ref1
New Labour ref1
and North Sea oil ref1
and Powell ref1
under Thatcher ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
United States of America ref1
wartime ref1
under Wilson ref1, ref2
Eden, Anthony ref1, ref2
education ref1
New Labour ref1
reform ref1
see also faith schools; public schools
Edwardes, Michael ref1
Egypt ref1
Einstein, Albert ref1
Eisenhower, Dwight ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
electric guitars ref1
eleven plus examination ref1
Eliot, T. S. ref1
Elizabeth II ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
and the death of Diana ref1
Elizabeth, Princess see Elizabeth II
Ellis, Ruth ref1
Elms, Robert ref1
emigration ref1, ref2
energy ref1
Enfield, Harry ref1, ref2
English Stage Company ref1
Ennals, David ref1
Eno, Brian ref1
Enragés, Les ref1
environment see global warning
Epstein, Brian ref1
ERM ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Establishment ref1
Establishment Club ref1
ethnic cleansing ref1, ref2
Eton, Peter ref1
euro, the ref1
Blair and ref1
Brown and ref1
see also ‘hard ecu’
Eurodollar ref1, ref2
Europe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
European Economic Community ref1
European Exchange Rate system see ERM
Evans, Gwynfor ref1
Evans, John ref1
Everton, Marcel ref1
Ewing, Winnie ref1
Exodus ref1
Fairlie, Henry ref1
Fairport Convention ref1
faith schools ref1
Falkender, Lady see Williams, Marcia
Falklands War ref1
Farouk ref1
fashion ref1, ref2
Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love (Abse) ref1
Festival of Britain (1951) ref1, ref2
Fidler, Sheppard ref1
finance, North Sea oil ref1
Financial Times ref1
First of May group ref1
Fisher, Antony ref1, ref2
Fisher, Jack ref1
fishing ref1
Fleming, Ann ref1
Fleming, Ian ref1
folk music ref1, ref2
food ref1, ref2
football ref1
Foot, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Foot, Paul ref1
Forbes, William Francis see Semphill, Master of
Ford, Henry III ref1
foreign policy ref1, ref2
Forster, E. M. ref1
Forte, Charles ref1
Fowler, Norman ref1
fox hunting see hunting
France
Francis, Dai ref1
Fraser, Hugh ref1
Fraser, Lord ref1
Frayn, Michael ref1, ref2
Free Officers Movement ref1
Free Wales Army ref1
French, Godfrey ref1
Friedman, Milton ref1
Frisch, Otto ref1
Frognal Set ref1
Frost, David ref1
fuel, protests about duty ref1
Funding Agency for Schools ref1
Future of Socialism, The (Crosland) ref1
Gaitskell, Hugh ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Galtieri, Leopold ref1
gardening ref1
Gaulle, Charles de ref1, ref2
Geilgud, John ref1
Geldof, Bob ref1
general election
General Strike (1926) ref1
George VI ref1
German Central Bank ref1, ref2
Ghandi, Mohandas Karamchand ref1
Gibbs, Humphrey ref1
Gibson, David ref1
Gibson, William ref1
Gilligan, Andrew ref1
Gladstone, William Ewart ref1
global warming ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Glorious Glosters ref1
Goldfinger, Erno ref1
Golding, William ref1
Goldsmith, James ref1
Good Friday Agreement ref1
Goodison, Nicholas ref1
Goon Show, The ref1, ref2
Gorbachev, Mikhail ref1
government ref1
Gould, Philip ref1
Gow, Ian ref1
GPS systems ref1
greyhound racing ref1
Griffith–Jones, Mervyn ref1
Griffiths, Jim ref1
Grimond, Jo ref1, ref2, ref3
Grundy, Bill ref1
Guinness, Alec ref1
Gulf War see Iraq
Gummer, Cordelia ref1, ref2
Gummer, John Selwyn ref1
Haig, Alexander ref1
Hailsham, Lord ref1
Haines, Joe ref1
Halifax, Lord ref1, ref2
Hall, Peter ref1
Hamilton, Neil ref1
Hamilton, Richard ref1
Hammer, Armand ref1
Hampstead Set ref1
hanging abolition of ref1, ref2
‘hard ecu’ ref1
Harper’s Bazaar ref1
Hattersley, Roy ref1
Hatton, Derek ref1
Haughey, Charles ref1
Harvey, Ian ref1
Hayek, Friedrich von ref1
Healey, Denis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
health ref1
Heath, Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Heathfield, Peter ref1
Heffer, Eric ref1
Hello! ref1, ref2
Henderson, Hamish ref1
Hennessy, Peter ref1, ref2
Heroin ref1
Heseltine, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Hewitt, Patricia ref1
Higgins, Terry ref1
High Dam, Aswan ref1
Hill, David ref1
H. M. Tennant Ltd ref1
Hobson, Harold ref1
holidays ref1
Holidays with Pay Act ref1
Holtham, Gerald ref1
Holy Loch ref1, ref2
Home, Alec Douglas- ref1, ref2, ref3
homosexuality ref1, ref2
legalization of ref1
purge of ref1
in the theatre ref1
see also AIDS
Horizon ref1
Hornby, Lesley ref1
housing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
see also council houses; tower blocks
Housing Action Trusts ref1
Howard, Michael ref1, ref2
Howe, Geoffrey ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Howell, David ref1
Howells, Kim ref1
Hulanicki, Barbara see Biba
human rights ref1
Hume, John ref1
humour ref1
Hunter, Anji ref1
hunting ref1
Hunt Saboteurs Association ref1
Hurcomb, Cyril ref1
Hurd, Douglas ref1, ref2, ref3
Hussein, Saddam ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Hutton Enquiry ref1
Hutton, Len ref1
Hyman, Peter ref1
Hyndley, Viscount ref1
ID cards ref1, ref2
IEA (Institute for Economic Affairs) ref1
Iki, Lieutenant ref1
IMF (International Monetary Fund) ref1
immigration ref1, ref2, ref3
immigration and nationality department (IND) ref1
India
industry ref1, ref2, ref3
see also car industry; coal; rail system
inflation ref1, ref2
Ingham, Bernard ref1, ref2
Ingrams, Richard ref1, ref2, ref3
Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) ref1
International Monetary Fund (IMF) ref1
internet ref1, ref2
IQ tests ref1
IRA (Irish Republican Army) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Iraq ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Iran, Shah of ref1
Ireland, Republic of ref1
see also Northern Ireland
Irish Republican Army (IRA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Irvine, Derry ref1, ref2
Islam, militant ref1
Isle of Skye bridge ref1
Israel, and Suez ref1
Issigonis, Alec ref1
Ivanov, Yevgeny ref1
Jam, the ref1
James Bond ref1
jazz ref1
Jenkins, Roy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Jenkins, Simon ref1, ref2, ref3
Jews ref1, ref2, ref3
Jinnah, Mohammad Ali ref1
Johnstone, Tom ref1
Jones, Clem ref1
Jones, Jack ref1
Jordan, model ref1
Joseph, Keith ref1, ref2
Joseph Rowntree Trust ref1
Keeler, Christine ref1
Kelly, David ref1
Kemp, Alex ref1
Kennedy, Charles ref1, ref2
Kennedy, John F. ref1
Kennedy, Ludovic ref1, ref2
Kenya ref1
Kenyatta, Jomo ref1, ref2
Keynes, John Maynard ref1, ref2
Khrushchev, Nikita ref1, ref2, ref3
Kilmuir, Lord ref1
King, Cecil, and Wilson ref1
King, John ref1
Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, The (The Kinks) ref1
Kinks, the ref1, ref2, ref3
Kinnock, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
leadership election ref1
and the militants ref1
and the miners’ strike ref1
and Scargill ref1
and unilateral nuclear disarmament ref1
on Welsh devolution ref1
Koestler, Arthur ref1
Korean War ref1
Kosovo Liberation Army ref1
Kuanda, Kenneth ref1
achievements ref1, ref2
conference, 1945 ref1
and devolution ref1
internal conflict ref1
public spending ref1
reform of ref1
see also New Labour; Scottish Labour Party
Lady Chatterley trial ref1
Lamont, Norman ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
landowners ref1
Laski, Harold ref1
Lawson, Nigel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Leach, John ref1
League Against Cruel Sports ref1
League of Empire Loyalists see NF
league tables, police ref1
Leathers, Lord ref1
Lee, Jennie ref1
Lend-Lease ref1, ref2
Lennon, John ref1, ref2
lesbianism ref1
Levy, Michael ref1
Lewis, C. S. ref1
Liberal Democrats ref1
Liberal Party ref1, ref2
Liddle, Roger ref1
LIFFE ref1
Lilley, Peter ref1
Limehouse Declaration ref1
Litterick, Tom ref1
Littlewood, Joan ref1
Live Aid ref1
Live8 ref1
Live and Let Die (Fleming) ref1
Liverpool City Council ref1
Liverpool Parks and Cemeteries ref1
Lloyd, Selwin ref1, ref2
London ref1
terrorist attacks on ref1
London Stock Exchange ref1
Look Back in Anger (Osborne) ref1, ref2
Lovelock, James ref1
LSD ref1
Lubetkin, Berthold ref1
MacArthur, Douglas ref1
Macaulay, Sarah ref1
MacColl, Ewan ref1, ref2
Macdonald, Ian ref1
MacDonald, Margo ref1
MacGregor, Ian ref1
MacGregor, John ref1
Maclean, Donald ref1, ref2
Macleod, Iain ref1, ref2, ref3
Macmillan, Harold ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
mad cow disease ref1
Major, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
majority verdicts ref1
Make Poverty History ref1
Malawi see Nyasaland Malaya ref1
Manchester, Moss Side ref1
Mandelson, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
manufacturing ref1
Mao Tse-tung ref1
marches ref1
Marcuse, Herbert ref1
Marples, Ernie ref1, ref2, ref3
Marshall Plan, the ref1, ref2
Mates, Michael ref1
Mathew, Theobald ref1
Matrix Churchill ref1
Matthews, Stanley ref1
Mau Mau rebellion ref1
Maxwell Fyfe, David ref1, ref2, ref3
Mayer, Louis B. ref1
McCartney, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3
McCullin, Don ref1
McGahey, Mick ref1, ref2
McGuinness, Martin ref1, ref2
McMahan Act ref1
McLaren, Malcolm ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
McNulty, Graeme ref1
McNulty, Tony ref1
means-testing ref1
Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) ref1, ref2
Melody Maker ref1
Meyer, Anthony ref1
Microsoft ref1
Middle East ref1
Middlemass, Keith ref1
migration, Jewish ref1
Migration Watch UK ref1
Mikardo, Ian ref1
Milburn, Alan ref1, ref2
Miliband, David ref1
Militant Tendency ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
military ref1, technology ref2
Millennium Dome ref1, ref2
Miller, Arthur ref1
Miller, Jimmie see MacColl, Ewan
Milligan, Spike ref1, ref2
Millington, Ernest ref1
Milosevic, Slobodan ref1
miners, strikes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Mini-Minor ref1
minimum wage ref1
mini-skirts ref1
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food ref1
Ministry of Economic Expansion see DEA
Ministry of Production see DEA
Mitchell, George ref1
Mittal, Lakshmi ref1
Mitterand, François ref1
mobile phones ref1, ref2
Mods ref1
Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich ref1
monarchy ref1
Monckton, Walter ref1, ref2
Monday Club ref1
monetarism ref1, ref2
Montagu, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3
Montgomery of Alamein ref1
Moore, Jeremy ref1
Moore, Jo ref1
morality ref1
Morris, Estelle ref1
Morris Minor ref1, ref2
Morrison, Herbert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Morrison, Van ref1
mortgages ref1
Morton, Andrew ref1
Morton, H. V. ref1
Mosley, Oswald ref1
Mossadeq, Mohammed ref1
motorbike manufacturing ref1
Mowlam, Mo ref1, ref2, ref3
Mountbatten, Louis ref1, ref2
Mountbatten, Philip, later Prince Philip ref1
MTFS (Medium-Term Financial Strategy) ref1, ref2
Mugabe, Robert ref1, ref2
Muir, Edwin ref1
multi-culturalism ref1
see also asylum seekers; immigration
Murdoch, Rupert ref1, ref2
Murray, Len ref1
music ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
see also folk; jazz; punk
music hall ref1, ref2
Myth of Decline, The (Bernstein) ref1
National Audit Office ref1
National Coal Board ref1, ref2
National Enterprise Board (NEB) ref1
National Front (NF) ref1
National Health Service (NHS) ref1, ref2
National Health Service Trusts ref1
National Identity Register ref1
National Insurance ref1
nationalization ref1, ref2
National Party of Scotland see SNP
National Plan ref1
National Service ref1
National Theatre ref1
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) ref1
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) ref1
Neave, Airey ref1, ref2
NEB (National Enterprise Board) ref1
Neighbours ref1
Nehru, Jawaharlal ref1
Neophiliacs, The (Booker) ref1
New Deal ref1
New Democrats ref1
New Labour ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
New Look ref1
News of the World ref1
New Statesman ref1, ref2
NHS (National Health Service) ref1, ref2
Niemasz, Hendrick ref1
‘Night of the Long Knives, the’ ref1
Nixon, Richard ref1
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ref1
Northern Ireland ref1, ref2, ref3
North Sea, oil ref1
Nott-Bower, John ref1
Nottinghamshire, miners ref1
Notting Hill ref1
Novello, Ivor ref1
nuclear power ref1
nuclear weapons ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
see also unilateral nuclear disarmament; weapons of mass destruction
Nuffield, Lord ref1
NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
NUPE (National Union of Public Employees) ref1
Nuttall, Jeff ref1
Nutting, Anthony ref1
Nyasaland ref1
Obscene Publications Act ref1
Office for National Statistics ref1, ref2
oil, North Sea ref1
OK! ref1
Old Vic Centre ref1, ref2
O’Leannain, John see Lennon, John
Olivier, Laurence ref1, ref2, ref3
Olympics, London ref1
Omagh bombing ref1
O’Neill, Terry ref1, ref2, ref3
Open University ref1
Operation Desert Fox ref1
Orwell, George ref1, ref2
Osborne, John ref1
Owen, David ref1, ref2
Oxbridge ref1
Oxfam ref1
Oz ref1
Paisley, Ian ref1
Pakistan ref1, ref2
Palestine ref1
Parkinson, Cecil ref1
Parkinson, C. Northcote ref1
Parnes, Larry ref1
Parsons, Anthony ref1
Passport to Pimlico ref1
Patten, Chris ref1, ref2, ref3
pay deals ref1, ref2
peace process, Northern Ireland ref1
Peierls, Rudolf ref1
Penney, William ref1
pensions ref1, ref2
PEP (Political and Economic Planning) ref1
PFI (public finance initiative) ref1
Philby, Kim ref1, ref2
Pierrepoint, Albert ref1
Pike, Magnus ref1
Pimlott, Ben ref1
Pink Floyd ref1, ref2
Pinter, Harold ref1
Pinwright’s Progress ref1
Piper Alpha ref1
Plaid Cymru ref1
Polaris ref1, ref2
Poles ref1
Police, the ref1
police, performance league tables ref1
Political and Economic Planning (PEP) ref1
politics ref1
Pollitt, Harry ref1
poll tax ref1
Pompidou, Georges ref1
Porter, Shirley ref1
Portillo, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3
potteries ref1
pound ref1
poverty ref1
Powell, Colin ref1
Powell, Enoch ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Powell, Jonathan ref1
prefabs ref1
Prescott, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
press, the ref1
Price, Lance ref1
Priestley, J. B. ref1, ref2, ref3
Prior, Jim ref1
privacy ref1
Private Eye ref1
privatization ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Profumo affair ref1, ref2
Profumo, John ref1
prostitution ref1, ref2
Provisional Army Council ref1
‘Provos’ ref1
public finance initiative (PFI) ref1
public schools, influence on humour ref1
public spending ref1, ref2
Punch ref1
punk ref1
Pym, Francis ref1
Quant, Mary ref1, ref2
Quinn, Kimberley ref1
racialism ref1
Radcliffe, Cyril ref1
radio ref1
Radio Luxembourg ref1, ref2
Radley, school ref1
rail system ref1, ref2
Railtrack ref1, ref2
Railway Executive ref1
rates ref1
rationing ref1
Rattigan, Terence ref1
Ray, Robin ref1
Reagan, Ronald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Redwood, John ref1, ref2
Rees-Mogg, William ref1
referenda ref1, ref2
Regina v. Penguin Books ref1
Reid, John ref1, ref2
Reid, Richard ref1
religion ref1
Rent Act ref1
Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) ref1
Resolution 1441 ref1
retail ref1
revolution ref1
Revolutionary Socialist League ref1
Reynolds, Albert ref1
Rhodes, Cecil John ref1
Rhodesia ref1
Rice-Davies, Mandy ref1
Richards, Keith ref1
Ridealgh, Mabel ref1
Ridley, Nicholas ref1
Riley, Bridget ref1
Rimmer, Victoria ref1
riots ref1
‘rivers of blood’ speech (Powell) ref1
roads ref1
Road Safety Act ref1
Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek) ref1
Robbins, Lionel ref1, ref2
Robbins Report ref1
Roberts, Alfred ref1
Roberts, Frank ref1
Robinson, Geoffrey ref1
ROBOT ref1
Rock Against Racism ref1
Rodgers, Bill ref1, ref2
Rolling Stones ref1
Rolls-Royce ref1, ref2
Rooke, Dennis ref1
Rooke, Pamela ref1
Rosen, Tubby ref1
Ross, Willie ref1, ref2
Rothermere, Lord ref1
Rothschilds Bank ref1
Roxy Music ref1
Royal Navy ref1, ref2
Royal Ulster Constabulary ref1
royal wedding (1947) ref1
RPM (Resale Price Maintenance) ref1
rubber see Malaya
Rupert Bear ref1
Rumsfeld, Donald ref1
Rushton, Willie ref1
Russell, Bertrand ref1, ref2
Russia see Soviet Union
Sainsbury’s ref1
Salisbury, Lord ref1
Salmond, Alex ref1
Saltley ref1
Sampson, Anthony ref1, ref2
Sanderson, Paul ref1
Sands, Bobby ref1
Sandys, Duncan ref1
Sangatte ref1
satire ref1
Saved (Bond) ref1
scandals, New Labour ref1
Scanlon, Hugh ref1
Scargill, Arthur ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Schmidt, Helmut ref1
Schuman, Robert ref1
science ref1
Scotland
Scott, Derek ref1
Scottish Labour Party ref1
Scottish National Party see SNP
SDP (Social Democratic Party) ref1, ref2, ref3
SEAQ ref1
Secombe, Harry ref1
security ref1, ref2
Seldon, Anthony ref1
Sellers, Peter ref1
Semphill, Master of ref1
Serbia ref1, ref2
SERPS (State Earnings Related Pension) ref1
services, public ref1, ref2, ref3
Sex Pistols ref1, ref2
Sexual Offences Act ref1
Sexual Offences Bill ref1
Shakespeare, William ref1
shareholding ref1
Sherman, Alfred ref1
Shinwell, Manny ref1
Short, Clare ref1, ref2
Shrewsbury School ref1
Shrimpton, Jean ref1
‘Sid’ campaign ref1
Sikorsky ref1
Sillars, Jim ref1, ref2
Simon, Lord ref1
Single European Act ref1
Silverman, Sydney ref1, ref2
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ref1
‘Situationists’ ref1
sixties, the ref1
see also celebrity; drugs; music
Skegness ref1
skiffle ref1
Skybolt, missiles ref1
sleaze ref1
‘slim’ see AIDS
Smith, Ian ref1
Smith, John ref1, ref2
Smith, T. Dan ref1
SNP (Scottish National Party) ref1, ref2, ref3
Social Contract ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Social Democratic Party see SDP
socialism ref1, ref2, ref3
Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) ref1, ref2
Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (Spuc) ref1
songs ref1
Soskice, Frank ref1
South Georgia see Falklands War
sovereignty ref1
Soviet Union ref1, ref2, ref3
Churchill’s attitude to ref1
and Suez ref1
Spaak, Paul-Henri ref1
‘special relationship’ see United States of America
Special Roads Act ref1
Specials, the ref1
speedway ref1
spies ref1
spin ref1
Spitting Image ref1
spivs ref1
Springfield, Dusty ref1
Spuc (Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) ref1
squatting ref1
Stalin, Joseph ref1
State Earnings Related Pension (SERPS) ref1
Steel, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
steel industry ref1
Stern, Nicholas ref1
Stewart, Donald ref1
Stewart, J. L. ref1
‘stop the war’ demonstrations ref1
Storer, Sharon ref1, ref2
Strauss, George ref1
Straw, Jack ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Strawbs, the ref1
strikes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Strummer, Joe ref1
Suez ref1, ref2
Sun ref1
‘surveillance society’ ref1
Sure Start ref1
SWP (Socialist Workers’ Party) ref1, ref2
Taliban, the ref1
tax ref1, ref2, ref3
fuel ref1
see also poll tax
Taylor, A. J. P. ref1, ref2
technology ref1
Teddy boys ref1
television ref1, ref2
Templer, Gerald ref1
Temple, William ref1, ref2
Temporary Housing Programme ref1
Terrence Higgins Trust ref1, ref2
Tesco ref1
Thalidomide ref1
Thames Today ref1
Thames Water ref1
Thatcher, Denis ref1, ref2
Thatcher, Margaret ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Thatcherism ref1, ref2
That Was the Week That Was ref1
theatre ref1
Theatre of Action see Theatre Workshop
Theatres Act ref1
Theatre Workshop ref1
This Morning ref1, ref2
Thomas, Richard ref1
Thompson, Harry ref1
Thompson Scottish Petroleum ref1
Thornycroft, Peter ref1
Thorpe, Jeremy ref1, ref2
three-day working week ref1
Tickell, Crispin ref1
Times, The ref1, ref2, ref3
Todd, Garfield ref1, ref2
tower blocks ref1
Toxteth ref1
trade unions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
transport ref1
travel ref1
Treasury, the ref1
Treaty of Rome ref1
Trimble, David ref1
Tryweryn reservoir ref1
‘tripartism’ ref1
Truman, Harry S. ref1, ref2
Tull, Jethro ref1
TURNSTILE ref1
TVam ref1
Twiggy ref1
Tynan, Kenneth ref1, ref2
Tyndall, John ref1
UBS ref1
UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) see Rhodesia
Uganda, immigrants from ref1, ref2
unemployment ref1
Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) see Rhodesia
unilateral nuclear disarmament ref1
see also CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
United Nations ref1
United States of America
economy ref1
and the Falklands War ref1, ref2, ref3
and Great Britain ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
and Iraq ref1, ref2
music ref1, ref2
and North Sea oil ref1, ref2
nuclear weapons ref1
and Serbia ref1
and Suez ref1
terrorist attacks on ref1, ref2
and the Westland Helicopter crisis ref1
university system ref1
Uranium 235 ref1
Ure, Midge ref1
utilities ref1, ref2
Varela, Marquesa de ref1
Varley assurances ref1
Vassall, John ref1
V-bombers ref1
Verwoerd, Hendrik ref1
Vicious, Sid ref1
Vietnam ref1
Vietnam Solidarity Committee ref1
Vinson, Fred ref1
Waiting for Godot (Beckett) ref1
Walden, Brian ref1
Wales
Walters, Alan ref1, ref2
Wanless, Derek ref1
war ref1
and Churchill ref1
and Major ref1
on terror ref1, ref2, ref3
see also Falklands War; Gulf War; Korean War; World War II; Yom Kippur War
Ward, Stephen ref1
Watton, Harry ref1
Waugh, Evelyn ref1
Wavell, Archibald Percival ref1
wealth, redistribution of ref1
weapons of mass destruction ref1, ref2, ref3
Webster, Martin ref1
Welensky, Roy ref1, ref2
Welfare State ref1, ref2
West Indies, immigrants from ref1
Westland Helicopter crisis ref1
Westwood, Vivienne ref1, ref2
Whelan, Charlie ref1, ref2
Whisky Galore! ref1
Whitehouse, Mary ref1
Whitelaw, Willie ref1
White Panthers ref1
Who, the ref1, ref2
Wigg, George ref1
Wilde, Oscar ref1
Wildeblood, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3
Wilkinson, Ellen ref1
Williams, Marcia ref1, ref2
Williams, Shirley ref1, ref2
Williams, W. E. ref1
Wilson, Harold ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Winchester Castle ref1
Windscale ref1
Winston, Robert ref1
winter, 1947 ref1
winter of discontent ref1
Wolfe, Billy ref1
Wolfenden, John Frederick ref1, ref2
Wolmer, Christian ref1
women ref1
Wood, Kingsley ref1
World Health Organization ref1
World War II ref1
Yom Kippur War ref1
Young, Hugo ref1
Young, Michael ref1, ref2
Zimbabwe see Rhodesia
Zuckerman, Solly ref1
Acknowledgements
I would particularly like to thank three people who gave me an early and lasting love of history, and of good writing: my mother, Valerie Marr, and two of my teachers at Loretto
School, David Stock and Peter Lapping.
This book would not have happened had I not been badgered three years ago by Peter Horrocks, now the BBC’s head of television news, to write and present a television history of post-war
Britain. It was his idea and I’m very grateful.
Despite a delay caused by a snapped tendon, the series was a delight to make, thanks to the wonderful team, led by Chris Granlund, the series producer, and Clive Edwards. The individual films
were produced by Tom Giles, Fatima Solaria, Francis Whately and Robin Dashwood, filmed and recorded by Neil Harvey, Chris Hartley and Tim Watts, and researched by Charlotte Sacher, Jo Wade, Jo
Dutton, Jay Mukoro, and Stuart Robertson. I would like to thank them all, and in the office, Rachel Bacon and Libby Hand.
The research for the book was done separately, and I take full responsibility for any mistakes I have made. That said, two people had a big influence, Philippa Harrison who hacked, shaped and
re-ordered it and Peter Hennessy who, entirely out of kindness, read much of it for me and saved me from some horrible howlers.
I leaned heavily, as ever, on my wonderful agent Ed Victor, who has kept me going with gossip, suggestions, amusement and some excellent food on the way.
As with my earlier books, this owes a great debt to the London Library.
The team at Macmillan was headed by my editor Andrew Kidd, who has been endlessly patient and tolerant, and by Kate Harvey, with the excellent Jacqui Graham dealing with festivals and publicity.
Josine Meijer chose the pictures.
The really tolerant people, as ever, have been my long suffering family, above all Jackie.
Andrew Marr
London, 18 March 2007
Picture Acknowledgements
Credits are by page number in order from left to right and top to bottom.
1 – Getty Images (both). 2 – Getty Images (both). 3 – The Advertising Archive; Corbis. 4 – National Portrait Gallery. 5 – Jane Bown / Camera Press; Ronald Grant Archive. 6 – Getty Images; Corbis. 7 – Time Life / Getty Images; Getty Images. 8 – Getty Images (both). 9 – Illustrated London News; Getty Images. 10 – The Advertising Archives; Popperfoto. 11 – Courtesy of British Motor Industry Heritage Trust (both). 12 – Popperfoto; Getty Images. 13 – Arnold Newman / Getty Images. 14 – Getty Images (all). 15 – Time Life / Getty Images. 16 – Getty Images (both). 17 – Getty Images; Petra Niemeier / Redferns. 18 – Getty Images (both). 19 – Getty Images (both). 20 – Getty Images (both). 21 – Getty Images (both). 22 – Getty Images; PA Photos. 23 – David Dagley / Rex Features; Getty Images. 24 – Getty Images; PA Photos. 25 – Peter Jordan / Getty Images; PA Photos. 26 – Michael Cummings / Daily Express, 6 February 1980, courtesy of the British Cartoon Archive; Time Life / Getty Images. 27 – P. J. Arkell; Howard Davies / Corbis. 28 – Time Life / Getty Images; Getty Images; PA Photos. 29 – PA Photos; Getty Images. 30 – Don McPhee / Guardian; Getty Images. 31 – Stephen Hird / Reuters / Corbis; AFP / Getty Images. 32 – Getty Images (both).
List of Plates
1. New Dawn: Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins in uniform at Labour’s 1945 party conference.
2. Clement Atlee, driven by his wife Violet, was advised to jump in his car and head for Buckingham Palace to be made prime minister before plotters could put in Herbert Morrison instead.
3. and 4. John Maynard Keynes, possibly the cleverest man in Britain, died after struggling desperately to save his country from bankruptcy. But he could not do a deal with the Americans good enough to avoid the grim austerity of the post-war years, including bread rationing, the subject of the 1946 demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
5. British women were hectored constantly about their clothes, and would soon revolt.
6. Temporary pre-fab homes, often built using German and Italian prisoners of war, were one answer to the huge housing shortage. Some were still being used in the seventies.
7. Despite Labour’s triumph, and fearing socialism, the old order quickly reasserted itself: Cecil Beaton poses on the set of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1946.
Hero of the working classes: Joan Littlewood (8) was one of the most radical voices in British theatre. But her influence in conveying the spirit and dilemmas of a new Jerusalem was far less than that of Ealing Studios, with films such as Passport to Pimlico (9).
10. and 11. Bitterly disappointed by his 1945 rejection, Churchill endured his exile writing, speaking, painting – and hunting, here, four days before his seventy-fourth birthday. He would be back in 1951, proclaiming a new Elizabethan age.
12. and 13. Old Labour’s greatest prophet? Nye Bevan in full Welsh flow, presumably unaware that he’s being mimicked by a small boy.
14. The comprehensive vision, pushed by Tories too: a new school in Anglesey, 1954.
15. The Skylon at the 1951 Festival of Britain: people said that it, like the country, was suspended without visible means of support.
16. Simpler pleasures: a honeymoon couple at Billy Butlin’s hotel near Brighton, 1957.
17. and 18. In the Tory years, there were dreams of a super-technological British future: just along from Parliament, this is the planned London Heliport, complete with passenger helicopters, as pictured in 1952. Instead, ‘the great car economy’ was getting underway: in 1964 London’s Chiswick flyover was an early glimpse of the real future.
19. and 20. Alec Issigonis, an immigrant from Turkey, was the design genius of post-war British car-making. His first huge success, the 1948 Morris Minor, was condemned by his company boss as ‘that damned poached egg designed by that damned foreigner’.
As the mass car market developed, Issigonis worked on sketched for an even more radical car (21), which would become the Mini. Late sketches (22) for ‘the small car of the future’ are strikingly like the rounded city runabouts of today.
23. Cold war: RAF crews practise a scramble for their Vulcan nuclear bombers in Lincolnshire, 1960. The V-bombers were Britain’s first line of attack but they were quickly made obsolete by improved Russian defences.
24. By 1958, the anti-nuclear marches were mobilized and CND’s logo was on its way to becoming one of the most recognizable symbols of all.
25. The working classes begin to be heard: Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey was a breakthrough play set in Salford, and written when she was just nineteen.
Chaps dapper and chaps disgraced: the well-connected Soviet spy Kim Philby (26) and the man who split Britain over Suez, Anthony Eden (27), knew how to put on a good front. Stephen Ward (28), the man at the centre of the greatest scandal of the early Sixties, barely bothered. Christine Keeler is to his left.
29. If the reality is disappointing, weave a different one: Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, at the card table, 1962.
30. and 31. The enigma and the optimist: Harold Wilson, reflective with pipe, in 1963 and Edward Heath, campaigning in exuberant mood, 1966.
32. and 33. British Cool? The actor David Hemmings in Swinging London, 1966, and the Kinks, struggling with trousers and ruffles.
34. The Liberal Hour: the flamboyant MP Leo Abse was one of the Labour backbenchers who led reform, in his case to legalize homosexual acts between men.
35. In 1971, the editors of the underground magazine Oz were prosecuted for obscenity. A libidinous cartoon Rupert Bear was at the centre of the case; the significance of the whip is unclear.
Violence becomes a theme: Catholic demonstrators (36) in Londonderry/Derry after the killing of thirteen civil-rights marchers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ 1972, and (37) the nearest Britain came to left-wing terrorists, the Angry Brigade, outside the Old Bailey a few months later.
38. and 39. When the country failed: a boy stands outside his school, closed because of a lack of fuel during the miners’ strike of 1972. The miners were badly paid, and went on to humiliate Heath and the Conservatives.
40. and 41. It’s the beans, stupid. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Common Market, both sides campaigned more about the cost of food than about the constitutional implications of surrendering sovereignty.
Two men as influential as most prime ministers, Enoch Powell (42), opponent of immigration, and (43) Denis Healey, chancellor during Britain’s economic storm, making a characteristic point to his opponents.
44. Punk gets cheeky: Vivienne Westwood (centre), Chrissie Hynde (left) and Jordan advertise Westwood’s King’s Road punk shop Sex, in 1976.
45. But nothing was sexy about the economy: rubbish piles up in London during the ‘winter of discontent’, 1979.
46. Michael Foot, the most literate and radical man to lead Labour, points in the general direction of the political wilderness. But his harshest critics, the SDP’s Gang of Four, failed to return to power, either.
47. Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Roy Jenkins plot over a glass of wine or two in 1982. The fourth member of the gang was not, as this photograph below suggests, surprisingly well-endowed but was Mrs Shirley Williams.
48. The Iron Lady on manoeuvres. Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her power, with tank and flag, 1986.
49. The Tories had another blonde who felt the call of destiny: Michael Heseltine, Conservative conference darling.
50. and 51. When Thatcher took on the moderate ‘wets’ in her own cabinet, she could rely on the support of much of the press. But it was the Falklands that changed everything: a soldier aboard the 1982 task force waits for the shooting to start.
52. and 53. Rebel faces: picketing miners caught and handcuffed to a lamp-post by police, 1986, and the notoriously violent poll-tax riot of 1990 in Trafalgar Square.
54. and 55. Two lost leaders: Labour’s Neil Kinnock attacking left-wing Militants at the party conference in 1985 and his successor John Smith, who would have become prime minister in 1997, but died of a heart attack.
56. In June 1988, 185 men died when a North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up – yet the extraordinary story of the oil boom is little mentioned in politicians’ memoirs.
57. Bitter-sweet: Tory chairman Chris Patten helped John Major win a triumphant electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat at Bath, and was sent as the last governor to Hong Kong.
58. The death of Diana in 1997 produced an almost Mediterranean outpouring of grief across the country. A small field of flowers lies outside Kensington Palace.
What’s waiting in the wings? Alastair Campbell guards his master’s back (59). New Labour was famously image-obsessed, but (60) by 2005 neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown could be bothered to disguise their mutual enmity.
Tony Blair’s legacy? Anti-war protestors became a familiar sight on the streets of Britain (61), while British troops did their utmost in the devastated and violence-plagued world of post-war Iraq. By 2007 (62) they were still not welcomed by many Iraqis.
63. More than four-million closed-circuit television cameras now watch the British: a surveillance society that echoes the wartime world of identity cards and observation with which this history began.
64. The biggest social change continues to be migration, latterly from eastern Europe: Polish road signs to help drivers in Cheshire, February 2007.
1. New Dawn: Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins in uniform at Labour’s 1945 party conference.
2. Clement Atlee, driven by his wife Violet, was advised to jump in his car and head for Buckingham Palace to be made prime minister before plotters could put in Herbert Morrison instead.
3
4
3. and 4. John Maynard Keynes, possibly the cleverest man in Britain, died after struggling desperately to save his country from bankruptcy. But he could not do a deal with the Americans good enough to avoid the grim austerity of the post-war years, including bread rationing, the subject of the 1946 demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
5. British women were hectored constantly about their clothes, and would soon revolt.
6. Temporary pre-fab homes, often built using German and Italian prisoners of war, were one answer to the huge housing shortage. Some were still being used in the seventies.
7. Despite Labour’s triumph, and fearing socialism, the old order quickly reasserted itself: Cecil Beaton poses on the set of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1946.
8
9
Hero of the working classes: Joan Littlewood (8. was one of the most radical voices in British theatre. But her influence in conveying the spirit and dilemmas of a new Jerusalem was far less than that of Ealing Studios, with films such as Passport to Pimlico (9..
10
11
10. and 11. Bitterly disappointed by his 1945 rejection, Churchill endured his exile writing, speaking, painting – and hunting, here, four days before his seventy-fourth birthday. He would be back in 1951, proclaiming a new Elizabethan age.
12
13
12. and 13. Old Labour’s greatest prophet? Nye Bevan in full Welsh flow, presumably unaware that he’s being mimicked by a small boy.
14. The comprehensive vision, pushed by Tories too: a new school in Anglesey, 1954.
15. The Skylon at the 1951 Festival of Britain: people said that it, like the country, was suspended without visible means of support.
16. Simpler pleasures: a honeymoon couple at Billy Butlin’s hotel near Brighton, 1957.
17
18
17. and 18. In the Tory years, there were dreams of a super-technological British future: just along from Parliament, this is the planned London Heliport, complete with passenger helicopters, as pictured in 1952. Instead, ‘the great car economy’ was getting underway: in 1964 London’s Chiswick flyover was an early glimpse of the real future.
19
20
19. and 20. Alec Issigonis, an immigrant from Turkey, was the design genius of post-war British car-making. His first huge success, the 1948 Morris Minor, was condemned by his company boss as ‘that damned poached egg designed by that damned foreigner’.
21
22
As the mass car market developed, Issigonis worked on sketched for an even more radical car (21., which would become the Mini. Late sketches (22. for ‘the small car of the future’ are strikingly like the rounded city runabouts of today.
23. Cold war: RAF crews practise a scramble for their Vulcan nuclear bombers in Lincolnshire, 1960. The V-bombers were Britain’s first line of attack but they were quickly made obsolete by improved Russian defences.
24. By 1958, the anti-nuclear marches were mobilized and CND’s logo was on its way to becoming one of the most recognizable symbols of all.
25. The working classes begin to be heard: Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey was a breakthrough play set in Salford, and written when she was just nineteen.
26
27
28
Chaps dapper and chaps disgraced: the well-connected Soviet spy Kim Philby (26. and the man who split Britain over Suez, Anthony Eden (27., knew how to put on a good front. Stephen Ward (28., the man at the centre of the greatest scandal of the early Sixties, barely bothered. Christine Keeler is to his left.
29. If the reality is disappointing, weave a different one: Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, at the card table, 1962.
30
31
30. and 31. The enigma and the optimist: Harold Wilson, reflective with pipe, in 1963 and Edward Heath, campaigning in exuberant mood, 1966.
32
33
32. and 33. British Cool? The actor David Hemmings in Swinging London, 1966, and the Kinks, struggling with trousers and ruffles.
34. The Liberal Hour: the flamboyant MP Leo Abse was one of the Labour backbenchers who led reform, in his case to legalize homosexual acts between men.
35. In 1971, the editors of the underground magazine Oz were prosecuted for obscenity. A libidinous cartoon Rupert Bear was at the centre of the case; the significance of the whip is unclear.
36
37
Violence becomes a theme: Catholic demonstrators (36. in Londonderry/Derry after the killing of thirteen civil-rights marchers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ 1972, and (37. the nearest Britain came to left-wing terrorists, the Angry Brigade, outside the Old Bailey a few months later.
38
39
38. and 39. When the country failed: a boy stands outside his school, closed because of a lack of fuel during the miners’ strike of 1972. The miners were badly paid, and went on to humiliate Heath and the Conservatives.
40
41
40. and 41. It’s the beans, stupid. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Common Market, both sides campaigned more about the cost of food than about the constitutional implications of surrendering sovereignty.
42
43
Two men as influential as most prime ministers, Enoch Powell (42., opponent of immigration, and (43. Denis Healey, chancellor during Britain’s economic storm, making a characteristic point to his opponents.
44. Punk gets cheeky: Vivienne Westwood (centre), Chrissie Hynde (left) and Jordan advertise Westwood’s King’s Road punk shop Sex, in 1976.
45. But nothing was sexy about the economy: rubbish piles up in London during the ‘winter of discontent’, 1979.
46. Michael Foot, the most literate and radical man to lead Labour, points in the general direction of the political wilderness. But his harshest critics, the SDP’s Gang of Four, failed to return to power, either.
47. Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Roy Jenkins plot over a glass of wine or two in 1982. The fourth member of the gang was not, as this photograph below suggests, surprisingly well-endowed but was Mrs Shirley Williams.
48. The Iron Lady on manoeuvres. Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her power, with tank and flag, 1986.
49. The Tories had another blonde who felt the call of destiny: Michael Heseltine, Conservative conference darling.
50
51
50. and 51. When Thatcher took on the moderate ‘wets’ in her own cabinet, she could rely on the support of much of the press. But it was the Falklands that changed everything: a soldier aboard the 1982 task force waits for the shooting to start.
52
53
52. and 53. Rebel faces: picketing miners caught and handcuffed to a lamp-post by police, 1986, and the notoriously violent poll-tax riot of 1990 in Trafalgar Square.
54
55
54. and 55. Two lost leaders: Labour’s Neil Kinnock attacking left-wing Militants at the party conference in 1985 and his successor John Smith, who would have become prime minister in 1997, but died of a heart attack.
56. In June 1988, 185 men died when a North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up – yet the extraordinary story of the oil boom is little mentioned in politicians’ memoirs.
57. Bitter-sweet: Tory chairman Chris Patten helped John Major win a triumphant electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat at Bath, and was sent as the last governor to Hong Kong.
58. The death of Diana in 1997 produced an almost Mediterranean outpouring of grief across the country. A small field of flowers lies outside Kensington Palace.
59
60
What’s waiting in the wings? Alastair Campbell guards his master’s back (59. New Labour was famously image-obsessed, but (60. by 2005 neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown could be bothered to disguise their mutual enmity.
61
62
Tony Blair’s legacy? Anti-war protestors became a familiar sight on the streets of Britain (61., while British troops did their utmost in the devastated and violence-plagued world of post-war Iraq. By 2007 (62. they were still not welcomed by many Iraqis.
63. More than four-million closed-circuit television cameras now watch the British: a surveillance society that echoes the wartime world of identity cards and observation with which this history began.
64. The biggest social change continues to be migration, latterly from eastern Europe: Polish road signs to help drivers in Cheshire, February 2007.