52

The Big Bang

The prime minister realized that it would be opportunistic to call an election on the merits of the victory in the Falklands War, but there were other ways of taking advantage of the situation. In the words of her new chancellor, Nigel Lawson, ‘she came to believe in the media presentation, and to act in a quasi-presidential style’. Norman Tebbit, though fiercely loyal, had to admit that ‘she could be merciless’. Her bullying rose to the surface, with the gentle Howe as its chief victim. They had once been allies, sharing a methodical rigour and an insatiable appetite for work. Perhaps she saw him as her true rival in diligence. Almost supernatural qualities began to be ascribed to her. It was rumoured that she subsisted on coffee and vitamins alone, and that she bathed in an electric bath. The writer Iain Sinclair suggested half-facetiously that she was a latter-day witch.

It was in this period that Thatcher began to espouse the imprecise notion of ‘Victorian Values’. There were already signs of intrigue against her. A leak from the Central Policy Review Staff suggested large budget cuts, but her landslide victory in 1983 did nothing to mitigate her zeal. Steady privatization was maintained without much comment. The sale of British Telecom was continued, and local government spending came under scrutiny. Her victory in the Falklands had increased her confidence. Her opponent, Michael Foot, had been committed to a manifesto of socialist retrenchment so radical that it was dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. At the beginning of 1984, she stripped the unions at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of their rights, imposing upon them the secret ballot and a prohibition on secondary picketing.

In the same year, she began yet another confrontation. Three years ago, she had been forced to back down in the face of a miners’ strike. Now another threatened, and the National Union of Mineworkers saw nothing to suggest that they should not win again. Moreover, their leader was now Arthur Scargill, who had so triumphantly routed Edward Heath. For Thatcher, it was a fight between democracy and militant trade unionism, against an attempt to ‘substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law’. For Scargill, the aim was not merely to win, but to ‘roll back the years of Thatcherism’. For Tony Benn, perhaps the only Labour politician fully to back the miners, it was Thatcher’s war on the strongest union. If it was won, then the others would be cowed.

The battle took on familiar lines. The NUM refused to hold a national strike ballot and the Nottinghamshire miners carried on working. They belonged to another union and proved to be Thatcher’s inadvertent and even unwilling allies – she could claim that it was miner against miner. Moreover, having learned from her predecessors’ mistakes, she had enough coal to withstand any strike. At the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’, mounted police dispersed the flying pickets on which Scargill had placed such hopes. The nation watched and concluded that this was a barren cause, which brought out the worst in everyone. The strike ended on 13 March 1985, though the majority of miners had returned to work long before that. The banners of the unions flew in the breeze and brass bands played as men rejoined the ranks of those they had termed ‘scabs’. Although it was not seen as a defeat, it presaged one. The Nottinghamshire miners, to whom Thatcher had sent her thanks in writing, were to lose everything they had fought for under her successor. A Conservative government would still eventually close their pits.

She went back to the first principles of privatization. Her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had written to her in 1983 warning that the new life of the private companies would impinge upon ‘the giant utilities and unprofitable companies’, but nothing could stop her now. Twenty-three enterprises, including the British Gas Corporation, British Telecom and the National Coal Board, were up for sale. Half of the shares of British Telecom were put on sale in November 1984 at a low price, which rose by 43 pence on the first day and never dipped. For the first time in its history, the stock exchange seemed a benevolent institution, and it spread a sparkle over the late period of capitalism that socialists could not overcome. In effect it changed the whole attitude of the country: private and public wealth now went hand in hand. The first mobile telephone sets were sold, and the proportion of homes that were owner-occupied rose from 55 per cent to 67 per cent. It was an extraordinary metamorphosis, though it went largely unnoticed at the time. But on 27 October 1986, the fissures of the financial volcano merged and created a mighty explosion which became known as the ‘Big Bang’.