It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot.
Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (1984)
Margaret Thatcher once expressed to me genuine admiration for Shirley [Williams] but implied that decisiveness was not her strength.
Lord Longford (1981)
ANNE JAY: It’s very common, Henry, to confuse stubbornness with strength.
Ron Hutchinson, Bird of Prey (1982)
There were precedents, of course – Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi in India, Golda Meir in Israel – but the idea that staid old Britain, shackled by tradition and nostalgia, might choose a woman as prime minister was a major international story, covered by news outlets all round the world. In fact just about the only major journal not to mention the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979 was The Times, which was then in the midst of an epic industrial dispute. It hadn’t appeared since November the previous year, and the doubts that existed about whether the world’s most famous newspaper would ever be published again seemed somehow symbolic of the crises and chaos of the passing decade. Similarly, the fact that two years later it was to be bought by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born owner of the Sun and the News of the World, seemed symbolic of the 1980s’ triumph of meritocracy over establishment. When the paper did eventually re-emerge after nearly twelve months of silence, Thatcher was amongst the first to greet it: ‘The absence of The Times has been tragic and overlong,’ she told the Lord Mayor’s banquet on the night that the presses started to roll again. ‘I welcome its reappearance with enthusiasm.’
It wasn’t the first occasion on which The Times had failed to report the big news story; back in 1955 a month-long dispute had caused it to miss the resignation of Winston Churchill as prime minister, the politician, coincidentally, with whom Thatcher was most eager to seek association. That, however, was for the future; no one in 1979 was thinking of comparisons with Churchill. Indeed no one was quite sure what a suitable comparison would be, so uncertain were the commentators of the new prime minister. To start with, Thatcher herself was not noticeably popular as an individual. In personal terms, she had trailed the incumbent, Labour’s James Callaghan, right through the election campaign, but had nonetheless scored an extraordinary victory: the biggest swing against a government since the war, producing Labour’s worst share of the vote since 1931, when it had been smarting from the self-inflicted wounds of Ramsay MacDonald’s defection. And, despite a series of effective posters from Saatchi & Saatchi, and despite a few memorable photo-opportunities (the one that saw her holding a new-born calf was particularly striking, if devoid of any discernible meaning), the media feeling at the time was that she had failed to articulate Tory policy with any degree of conviction. Certainly that was the perception on election night in the BBC studios, as the likes of Peregrine Worsthorne and Peter Jenkins pored over the results.
But there was something about Thatcher that defied traditional analysis, something more to do with tone and image than with political content. In an election populated by overweight, pasty-complexioned, middle-aged men in crumpled suits, and with political memories still dominated by media images of the public sector strikes just a few months earlier, Thatcher stood out. ‘How did she get elected prime minister?’ reflected Shirley Williams, the most high-profile casualty of Labour’s defeat. ‘Because Mrs Thatcher – bandbox neat, with Saatchi & Saatchi smoothly organizing fields and factories, cars and calves around her – was such a contrast to the winter of discontent, the chaos, the disorder and mess.’ Even if the electorate weren’t entirely certain about the nature or advisability of her policies, she at least looked different.
Perhaps inevitably for the first woman to lead a major party in Britain, this question of image was central to selling the new brand of Conservatism. When she had stood against Edward Heath for the leadership of the party in 1975, she had employed the television producer, Gordon Reece, to advise on her campaign, and following her success, he remained as director of communications at Conservative Central Office. Amongst other contributions attributed to Reece, not always correctly, were a simplification of line in her dress, a new approach to microphone technique, and the lowering and softening of her voice. There was a marked change in her style in the first years, when she was still opposition leader. At its most basic, there was the adoption of the diminutive ‘Maggie’, a name that no member of her family or close circle had ever used, but which fitted well into a tabloid headline, and which had a more homely tone; it became universal, employed by friend and foe alike. (The alternative, Mrs T, was only used by supporters, even if it did make her sound as though she were part of a witness protection programme.)
There were also attempts to suggest that there was more to Thatcher than the slightly dated suburban woman that she sometimes appeared. Following a Conservative rally and concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1976, the press was informed that she was really very keen on music: ‘She does like New Orleans jazz, especially Duke Ellington,’ an aide pointed out, leaving it unclear whether it was he or she that didn’t know Ellington was born in Washington, made his name in New York, and most certainly did not play New Orleans jazz. Two years later she was a guest of the Football Association at the FA Cup final; invited to select the man of the match, she chose Trevor Whymark, which caused some consternation amongst officials since Whymark wasn’t playing that day – it turned out that she really meant David Geddis, who was a late replacement and who provided the cross for the single Ipswich goal that settled the match in favour of Bobby Robson’s team.
To some extent these were the traditional mistakes made by politicians when trying to play to the agenda of popular culture. But there was too a sense of her being slightly more removed from the common grain of humanity than were most MPs, a feeling that was encapsulated by what appeared to be a complete absence of humour. In a 1979 episode of the sitcom Fawlty Towers, even before she became prime minister, a character comments on the guide-book What’s On in Torquay that it must be ‘one of the world’s shortest books – like The Wit of Margaret Thatcher’. It was a judgement that survived her choice of a sketch by American comedian Bob Newhart as one of her Desert Island Discs, and one that even her closest allies were to confirm: ‘One has to remember that she has little sense of humour,’ noted William Whitelaw, her deputy leader, ‘and therefore if you have a sense of humour, you are always suspect with her.’ But then Britain in 1979 was not necessarily in the mood for a jokey politician, or even for one as relaxed and unflappable as Callaghan; for many people, the country had felt for years as if it were stumbling into chaos, and the British tendency to mock, its willingness to sink giggling into the sea, was looking as though it might be part of the problem, not the solution. The Labour peer Lord Longford found himself secretly agreeing when someone suggested, in the context of Thatcher’s lack of humour, that ‘we in Britain had been suffering from an excess of humour’, and he was not alone.
If the nation was agreed on her seriousness, it was less certain about her sex appeal, though – again inevitably – it was very much a topic of conversation in a world where female politicians were few and far between. (The number of women MPs actually went down in the 1979 election from twenty-seven to just nineteen, representing 3 per cent of the House of Commons.) Not many were prepared to agree entirely with Tory MP Alan Clark’s 1980 assessment – ‘she is so beautiful,’ he drooled, ‘quite bewitching, as Eva Peron must have been’ – but there was an appeal that, for some men at least, couldn’t quite be pinned down. ‘Cette femme Thatcher! Elle a les yeux de Caligule, mais elle a la bouche de Marilyn Monroe,’ as French president François Mitterrand famously claimed. Or, in the words of Sue Townsend’s schoolboy creation, Adrian Mole: ‘She has got eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice like a gentle person. It’s a bit confusing.’ Perhaps more common was the opinion of Colin Dexter’s detective, Inspector Morse; encountering a ‘grimly visaged, tight-lipped’ Scottish ward sister, he characterizes her as ‘an ideal of humourless efficiency: a sort of Calvinistic Thatcherite’. Images of matrons, as well as governesses and nannies, became commonplace.
It was possibly no coincidence that the arrival of Thatcher in Downing Street was followed swiftly by the appearance of several female authority figures on television. After several successful books on training animals, for example, Barbara Woodhouse became a national star in 1980 with the series Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way, intimidating dumb creatures (and their pets) with a voice once described as ‘Joyce Grenfell crossed with Lady Bracknell’. She was not, however, without her critics, particularly when she endorsed the use of choke-chains that were disapproved of by the RSPCA – like Thatcher, she was sometimes seen as being too strict, and not entirely in step with more modern liberal ways. Then there was Mrs McClusky, who took over as head teacher in the children’s school soap Grange Hill. Her advent too attracted controversy as the prices went up in the tuck shop, thanks to a new tax known as the School Surcharge, and as she responded to a spate of vandalism and arson by introducing a prefect system, despite complaints that it was a draconian measure. When two boys are caught running an unauthorized cake stall on school premises, they are given a detention with the task of writing an essay on ‘the problems of private enterprise in an authoritarian society’. Even the nightmarish, overcontrolling mother of Ronnie Corbett’s character in the sitcom Sorry! (played by Barbara Lott) had a hint of Thatcher about her.
And, after years of all-male fictional police forces, two series in 1980 finally broke the mould. Jill Gascoine appeared as Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes in the ITV drama The Gentle Touch, followed a few months later by the BBC entry in the field, Juliet Bravo. Set in a small northern town decimated by the closure of its mills, Juliet Bravo starred Stephanie Turner as Jean Darblay, a uniformed officer whose husband has been made redundant but who finds herself promoted to Inspector. ‘Yours is a very important appointment, Jean. Very few women in England are running a town like this,’ her superior tells her, adding: ‘There are quite a few around who’d be pleased to see you fail. In any way.’
The same warning could have been applied to Thatcher, and behind much of the conspiratorial whispering that accompanied her early years was, as so often in British politics, an issue of class. As a would-be rival for her job, Francis Pym, once pointed out, the trouble with the Tories from his perspective was that ‘we’ve got a corporal at the top, not a cavalry officer’. Thatcher actually came from a more elevated social background than her predecessor as Conservative leader, but, unlike Edward Heath, she made little attempt as she rose through the ranks to adapt and to fit into the highest echelons of her party, dominated as they still were by the public schools and the land-owning classes. She made no pretence of being anything other than provincial middle class, displaying an assuredness and a self-confidence that was to inspire a new generation of Tories, even as it infuriated her opponents within the party.
And opponents there undoubtedly were, chief amongst them Heath himself. In the build-up to the 1979 election, there had been much speculation about whether he would be invited to join the cabinet in the event of a Conservative victory (as he had himself welcomed his predecessor Alec Douglas-Home into his cabinet in 1970), and when asked directly about the possibility by Robin Day on election night, he had chuckled, ‘It depends’, with a self-satisfied air. It was to be the last occasion for some time that he appeared on television in a good mood. Thatcher decided she’d be safer with him a long way outside the tent, and offered him the job of being British ambassador to the USA; he turned it down, instead lurking on the backbenches for the remainder of her premiership, ‘like a sulk made flesh,’ as the journalist Edward Pearce put it.
Nonetheless, Thatcher’s first cabinet was largely composed of Heath’s men. The only members who hadn’t served under him in 1970-74 were John Biffen, Nicholas Edwards and Angus Maude, and there were even fewer who had voted for Thatcher against Heath in the first ballot of the leadership election in 1975: just her mentor Keith Joseph and, more surprisingly, Norman St John-Stevas, a delicate soul who had served as Heath’s arts minister. Importantly, however, two of those who had entered that leadership contest had now come onside: home secretary William Whitelaw and chancellor of the exchequer Geoffrey Howe. Whitelaw was the very model of a patrician Tory, but also possessed ‘a sort of military loyalty to the commander-in-chief’ and, having lost to Thatcher, could be relied upon for absolute support. In parliament, this was invaluable, for he was credited with having a sure touch when it came to judging the mood of the party and with being an astute political analyst (‘every prime minister needs a Willie,’ as Thatcher once noted). In the country more widely, it counted for little; clearly a decent man, he might, in another age, have been considered a safe pair of hands, but in the turbulent times of the first Thatcher government, his bumbling delivery and his flabby, watery-eyed face, normally bearing a doleful expression, were unlikely to win over a doubting electorate. Nor was Howe any more inspiring in the eyes of the general public. There was a story that his wife had once claimed that, ‘When I married Geoffrey, he was a fiery Welshman,’ but no one gave the tale any credence – a less fiery politician, it was impossible to imagine. His image was that of a plodder, a man whose most intriguing feature was the gap between his evident dullness and the extremity of the economic policies he pursued. Even when, in 1982, it was reported that he had contrived to lose his trousers while travelling on a train, the details of the story turned out to be much less interesting than the headlines: he had undressed in a sleeper compartment and the trousers had been stolen (they were subsequently recovered, minus his wallet).
Even with these allies, though, the divisions in the party and the cabinet meant that Thatcher had a desperately insecure base from which to operate, and particularly to launch anything resembling a radical programme for government. Undeterred, she proceeded to do precisely that, determined that there could be no compromise. The principal enemy was inflation, and she was quite clear how it was to be fought: ‘To master inflation,’ the election manifesto had declared, ‘proper monetary discipline is essential, with publicly stated targets for the rate of growth of the money supply.’ Quite what that meant was never to be entirely clear to much of the population. Even Sir Desmond Glazebrook, a banker in the television sitcom Yes, Minister was confused: ‘Took me thirty years to understand Keynes’ economics,’ he complains. ‘Then, when I’d just cottoned on, everyone started getting hooked on these new monetarist ideas. You know, I Want to Be Free by Milton Shulman.’ (The reference, of course, should have been to the American economist, Milton Friedman, not to Shulman, the celebrated theatre and film critic.) Nor was it ever certain whether monetarism was much more than a theoretical construct – the intention was to control the amount of money in circulation, but opinions differed on how that was to be measured: a succession of different versions of this elusive concept passed through the financial pages of the more weighty newspapers, meaning little or nothing to anyone without an economist in their immediate family.
Instead the policy came mostly to be seen by the public as involving lower income tax, an unfettered market, no state intervention to assist industry, and cuts in public spending. It was an interpretation that Thatcher actively encouraged, with a rhetoric designed to appeal to the housewife, using what she called ‘the homilies of housekeeping, the parables of the parlour’. The Labour MP Austin Mitchell saw it in similar terms, though obviously from an opposite standpoint; it was ‘essentially a counter-revolution against 1945 carried through by a small town Poujadist brought up to scrimping, saving and the politics of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and Hayek under the bed-clothes’. A media-friendly Tory dissident, Julian Critchley, reached for the same imagery: ‘an uncongenial blend of Samuel Smiles and Pierre Poujade.’ (It was somehow symptomatic of how dogma-driven politics had become that references were being so casually tossed around to something as remote as Poujadism, a short-lived petit bourgeois movement in 1950s France, whose main claim to fame was giving the world Jean-Marie Le Pen, later to found the Front National.)
In fact the groundwork for monetarism had been laid by the previous Labour government, as it was hit by yet another currency crisis and was obliged to go to the International Monetary Fund for a loan to bail the country out of its difficulties. The change in policy had been spelt out by Callaghan in his speech to the 1976 Labour Party conference, explicitly turning his back on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes that had shaped the post-war consensus: ‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,’ he declared. ‘I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.’ When he came to write his memoirs a decade later, Callaghan insisted that his words had been ‘misused by Conservative spokesmen to justify their malefactions in refusing to increase public expenditure at a time of recession, of low investment and low inflation, and of record levels of jobless’. His reluctance, as an old-fashioned Labour man, to be associated with the effects of what had by now become known as Thatcherism was understandable, but it was hard to see quite where his prescription was not followed. For the first Thatcher government did precisely as he proposed. And carried on doing so, despite what Callaghan himself saw as calamitous consequences.
The first budget, in June 1979, set the tone for the next few years. The basic rate of income tax was reduced from 33 to 30 per cent, and the top rate from 83 to 60 per cent. To fund this, the two rates of VAT (previously standing at 8 and 12.5 per cent) were combined and set at 15 per cent – a move that just about fulfilled Geoffrey Howe’s promise in April that ‘We have absolutely no intention of doubling VAT’, while honouring a manifesto pledge to simplify the tax. This shift from direct to indirect taxation, one of the key planks of Thatcherism, was to prove increasingly important, with a squeeze on everything that looked squeezable, from National Health Service charges (prescriptions rose by 600 per cent in Thatcher’s first term, NHS lenses by 150 per cent, dental charges by 170 per cent) through gas and electricity prices to school meals and council rents. None of which did much for public perceptions of the Tories. A parody of the budget on the comedy series Not the Nine O’Clock News saw Howe putting 100 per cent tax on items such as wheelchairs, white sticks and false limbs, and commenting: ‘Observers will notice I have deliberately chosen to penalize those members of the community who can’t hit back.’ (‘So, no change there,’ murmurs the commentator.)
In that first budget, too, interest rates were put up by two percentage points, and were to be raised further to reach a record level of 17 per cent in November 1979, just as inflation – fuelled by the VAT rises – was hitting 18 per cent. These pressures on industry were compounded by a rise in the value of the pound, at the expense of exports, stemming from the abolition of exchange controls that autumn (AT LAST THE £ IS FREED, exulted the Daily Mail) and from sterling’s new status as an oil currency. This latter was of particular significance in the wake of the revolution that had overthrown the Shah of Iran in February 1979, and seen his replacement a few months later by the Ayatollah Khomeini; the consequent rise in the oil price plunged the world into its worst recession since the 1930s. In the first three years of Thatcher’s premiership, oil rose from $14 to $35 a barrel, and so dire did the global situation look that books like The Downwave: Surviving the Second Great Depression by the economic broadcaster Bob Beckman proved hugely popular, prophesying gloom on a grand scale.
The result of this combination of international recession and government policy was devastating. Inflation reached a peak of 22 per cent on the first anniversary of Thatcher’s election victory, while other effects were later summarized by Ian Gilmour, a cabinet minister at the time: ‘Company profits fell by 20 per cent during 1980, output fell by nearly 6 per cent, manufacturing output fell by 15 per cent and unemployment rose from 1.3 million to over two million.’ As a Conservative Party political broadcast put it: ‘We did not promise you instant sunshine.’ By the end of the year, unemployment had risen by 836,000, the largest rise in a single year since 1930, exacerbated by the bulge in the population. With the million-plus Britons born in 1964 hitting school-leaving age, it would have required the creation of large numbers of jobs just to keep up with demand; instead jobs were being cut in vast quantities by major employers in both the private and public sectors, while many smaller companies were going out of business altogether. ‘The baby boom of the ’60s has turned into the youth gloom of the ’80s,’ noted the Daily Mirror.
And, while other countries were also suffering, there was an awareness that Britain was being hit disproportionately hard. That discrepancy was at the heart of the hit television series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983), which followed a group of seven British construction workers employed as Gastarbeiter on a building site in Germany, reluctant to leave home but made desperate by the lack of jobs. ‘Unemployment – we’re very big on that in England,’ Wayne (Gary Holton) tells a German woman in bitter resignation. ‘It’s one of our few spectacular successes. We’ve managed to put more people out of work than any of our European counterparts.’ And, as they discuss where to go next, with the changing of German regulations, Oz (Jimmy Nail) sums up the peripatetic pursuit of work in characteristically blunt fashion: ‘The English have become the Irish of Europe.’
Amongst the sectors worst hit was the fashion industry, with the symbolic collapse of several of the best known names from the heady, optimistic days of the 1960s. Bus Stop went into receivership, Biba (which had re-opened in 1978, backed by Iranian money) closed for a second time, and Jean Varon, centred on the designer John Bates, went into voluntary liquidation. ‘I could have wept,’ lamented the dress designer Jean Muir, on hearing about Jean Varon. ‘It’s such a devastating blow for the industry.’ In 1983 the upmarket lingerie firm Janet Reger, as famously worn by Joan Collins in the film The Stud, crashed, with the name being sold off to Berlei; Reger was later to buy the company back, but in the interim her marriage had fallen apart under the stress, and her husband, Peter Reger, who had handled the financial side of the business, had committed suicide.
Meanwhile cheaper imports and changing patterns of life were also affecting employment. In 1979, after more than a century, Singer closed its sewing-machine plant in Clydebank (an area already hit by the decline in shipbuilding) with the loss of 3,000 jobs – it appeared that, recession or no recession, women simply weren’t making clothes at home as they once had. And, in warning of further technological shifts, Stephen Lowe’s television play that year, Cries from a Watchtower, depicted a watchmaker driven out of business by the arrival of cheap digital watches; the impact of the electronics revolution had yet to be fully felt, but it was already causing concern. Elsewhere pubs were suffering (a billion fewer pints of beer were sold in 1980), premiums for home contents insurance soared in response to a rise in burglaries, and mortgage interest hit an all-time high – the rate averaged 13.3 per cent during Thatcher’s first term, compared to an average 10.7 per cent under Labour in the 1970s. Times were so tight that it was even reported that local authorities had been ordered to lower the temperature in public swimming baths by 2° centigrade.
By the end of 1980 Labour were 24 per cent ahead in the opinion polls and Thatcher was well on her way to becoming the most unpopular prime minister in the history of polling. Even the Tories’ natural allies in the Confederation of British Industry were panicking, with the director general, Terence Beckett, threatening a ‘bare-knuckle fight’ with the government if interest rates weren’t soon reduced. No such fight emerged, but it was symptomatic of the alarm being felt throughout the establishment, let alone amongst the population more widely.
The one truly popular policy the government possessed was the right to buy scheme, the obligation placed on local authorities to sell council houses to their tenants if this was requested. This had actually been a policy of Harold Macmillan’s government as far back as 1957, and had been revived in 1970 by Edward Heath’s environment secretary, Peter Walker, but sales had then still been at the discretion of local councils, to the distress of a newly elected Conservative MP named Norman Tebbit, who called for ‘government action to ensure that councils did not gratuitously nor arbitrarily prevent tenants from purchasing their houses’. He had his wish granted at the election of 1979, when the Conservative manifesto was quite explicit about its intentions, even to the extent of spelling out the concession on market prices that would be available to reflect the purchasers’ status as sitting tenants: ‘Our discounts will range from 33 per cent after three years, rising with length of tenure to a maximum of 50 per cent after twenty years. We shall also ensure that 100 per cent mortgages are available.’ Walker himself had an even more radical proposal that would have seen any tenancy of more than twenty years be automatically converted into ownership, with nothing to pay, but that suggestion was dismissed by Thatcher for fear of arousing the resentment of mortgagees – those ‘whom she regarded as “our people”’ – towards those who were being given properties without the burden of mortgages.
Even without this radical element, the scheme, when introduced in the 1980 Housing Act, was one of Thatcher’s great successes. When she came to power, just under a third of British families lived in council accommodation, five million tenancies, a fact that she believed was evidence of the way that ‘socialism was still built into the institutions and mentality of Britain’. By the time she left office, nearly one and a half million of those tenancies had been converted to mortgages, most of them to the enormous benefit of the occupants: the discounts, combined with the rises in both house prices and council rents, meant that most had got themselves a bargain. (‘Money for old rope,’ as David Jason’s character Del Trotter explains in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses.) By 1984 it was being reported that ‘council tenants pay more, on average, than the average mortgagee pays in repayments’.
There were, of course, opponents of the scheme, principally Labour councils, who vehemently opposed the idea both in the principle and the practice, and who angrily denounced the fact that the regulations forbade the spending of the monies received on building new properties to replace those that had been lost. But since the intention had always been to reduce the nation’s stock of public housing, their pleas fell on unresponsive ears in Westminster. Even worse, those who opposed the policy found the public were little more receptive. The 1983 Labour Party manifesto promised to stop the compulsion upon councils to sell, to remove the discounts and to allow local authorities to repurchase any homes that had been sold on by their former tenants, but by 1987 this had been amended to read: ‘we will maintain the right to buy’. The latter manifesto also made pledges to ‘the millions who choose to remain council tenants’, though it was by no means clear that such people existed: with the exception of a few ideologues, those who remained council tenants did so out of necessity rather than choice. The millions who were unemployed or who were already in arrears on their rent, for example, were never likely to be affected by the policy, and for many others the housing they occupied was a long way from desirable.
For as the best-quality accommodation was sold off, and as funds for repairs to that which remained grew ever scarcer, it became increasingly obvious which estates remained in the sole ownership of the local authority. ‘There are no fences, trees, shrubs, window boxes, sheds, prams, bikes or washing lines,’ wrote journalist Beatrix Campbell of one such estate in Sunderland. ‘There is no evidence of human habitation, only the appearance of absence. Everything is bare, some windows are boarded up and some broken, all the signs of vacancy and abandonment.’ The families who lived in such conditions were seldom inclined to apply under the right to buy scheme, even if they had been in a position so to do. The suspicion grew amongst some that a whole section of society, and that which was least able to fend for itself, was being jettisoned. It was probably the single most significant step ever taken towards the ‘property-owning democracy’ envisaged by Anthony Eden, but it also entrenched divisions between the haves and have-nots in a way that would have been politically and socially unacceptable just a few years earlier.
This uneasiness was felt even in the higher echelons of the Conservative Party itself. Cabinet members, most notably Peter Walker, James Prior and Norman St John-Stevas, began giving thinly coded speeches about the need for reconsideration of their government’s policies, though they were perhaps handicapped by the fact that they carried little weight with the general public – an opinion poll six months after the election revealed that 40 per cent of people couldn’t name a single cabinet minister apart from Thatcher. So when, for example, their most articulate champion Ian Gilmour denounced monetarism, which ‘because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of community, is not a safeguard of political freedom but a threat to it’, or when he warned that Thatcherism risked ‘the creation of a Clockwork Orange society’ with a huge gulf between the employed majority and the unemployed minority, he attracted less attention than he might have wished.
Almost the only dissident Tory who could command the front pages was Heath, but his remarks tended to come smothered in such an unattractively large dollop of self-justification that his message was often lost. ‘People are realizing the merits of the last Conservative government compared with the catastrophic things they see happening to them today,’ he announced in November 1980, seemingly in the hope that, despite having lost three of the four general elections he had contested as leader, he might yet be invited back for a second stint in Downing Street. And so desperate did things become that even such a bizarre possibility was not entirely beyond imagination; the right-wing MP Alan Clark recorded in his diary a discussion he had with the journalist Frank Johnson, both of them ‘ardent Heath-haters of old’, in which they surprised each other with their ‘growing admiration for Ted’.
Collectively, these Tories who had reservations about the advisability of pursuing monetarist policies at all costs were known, in a term which seemed to originate with Thatcher herself, as ‘wet’, a piece of schoolboy slang intended to denote a lack of resolve. By 1980 the adjective had become a noun and had been taken up by the dissenters themselves, generally being seen to identify those who harked back to the inclusive, One Nation days of Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath; it might be said that it was actually synonymous with the word ‘Conservative’, as opposed to the free-market liberals who sided with Thatcher. Whatever the merits or otherwise of such playground jibes infiltrating the world of politics, the impact of the wets was less than they would have hoped (the BBC political editor, John Cole, dismissed them as ‘articulate, but ineffectual’), primarily because Thatcher showed, in public at least, no sign of weakness or indecisiveness whatsoever. When it came to industrial disputes, for example, strikes that would have caused serious concern to other governments – by civil servants, and by workers in the steel industry, in the NHS and on the railways – came and went without any quarter being given. The wets, as the right wing of a broad swathe of mainstream politics that stretched through David Steel and Roy Jenkins to James Callaghan, probably enjoyed greater public support than did Thatcher, with her talk of conviction over consensus, but in the face of her resolution, their search for compromise and their apparent wish to return to the failed policies of the past simply wilted.
But still there were doubts about how long the prime minister could retain her self-proclaimed convictions, in the context of a country that appeared to be falling apart. In March 1980 Kingsley Amis noted that his friend, the historian Robert Conquest, who was amongst Thatcher’s advisers, was in deep despair: ‘She’s had it according to him,’ Amis wrote. ‘All the fucking wets in the cabinet will stop her being tough enough and the effort will collapse.’ A sense of doubt could even be detected in the public pronouncements of the handful of monetarists in the government. John Biffen, whose credentials were impeccable (he had supported Enoch Powell’s failed bid for the leadership back in 1965, and Thatcher regarded him as ‘a brilliant exponent in opposition of the economic policies in which I believed’), gave a series of interviews in which he defended monetarism, but not quite as wholeheartedly as might have been expected. ‘We are not so stubborn or so ideological that we are blinkered, that we do not admit the possibility that we could be wrong,’ he said in the autumn of 1980, adding a couple of months later: ‘Whether we are in a very much better position to take advantage of the upswing when it comes, honestly, only time will tell.’
One of the few who could be counted on to defend the policies in their entirety was Nicholas Ridley, then a minister in the foreign office. The Eton- and Balliol-educated son of a viscount, and grandson of the architect Edwin Lutyens, Ridley shared little in common with Thatcher save for his fierce espousal of the free market: he too had voted for Powell in 1965, and had gone further by becoming the only person to resign from Heath’s government because of differences over economic policy. In private he was said to be ‘the most delightful and gregarious of companions’, a committed countryman and a gifted painter, but he was best known as a resolute opponent of the nanny state – even when diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s, he refused to give up smoking cigarettes – and as an austere politician who never let himself be deflected by electoral considerations of populism or tact. ‘Bringing down the rate of inflation can only be done by restricting the money supply; and doing that inevitably causes difficulties for business and rising unemployment,’ he argued, before concluding: ‘The high level of unemployment is evidence of the progress we are making.’
Ridley’s logic didn’t convince nervous Tories, let alone those in the country threatened with redundancy notices. And though there were still some staunch Thatcherite voices to be heard in Fleet Street, urging yet stronger policies (‘Mrs Thatcher’s government is still spending too much, still borrowing too much,’ fretted the Daily Mail in September 1980), rather more resonant with the public was the tone adopted from the outset by the Daily Mirror, which had warned as early as July 1979 that the Thatcher government was on the wrong path, as it began to cut subsidies to industry: ‘Mr Heath started down this road in 1970, but had the courage to retreat when faced with the awful reality of his policy. The loss of jobs. The death of firms.’ The paper concluded that ‘It’s better to do a U-turn than to go over the edge of a cliff’.
That expression – the U-turn – so came to dominate political comment in 1980 that Thatcher felt obliged to address it head-on in her speech to the Conservative conference that autumn: ‘To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say,’ she announced, in a passage written by the playwright Ronald Millar. ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.’ It got a big cheer at the time – Thatcher was one of the few leading Tories to enjoy the experience of conference, and her audience tended to respond accordingly – but the steadfast refusal to change course meant that things would continue to get worse for some time. In his autumn statement, and then again in his 1981 budget, Howe tightened the screw still further, cutting interest rates, but also reducing public spending and raising taxes. The budget in particular found few friends. As Thatcher went into the House that day, she said to her economics advisor, the arch-monetarist Alan Walters: ‘You know, Alan, they may get rid of me for this.’ But she was still convinced that it was the only honourable option: ‘At least I shall have gone knowing I did the right thing.’
They didn’t get rid of her, of course, largely because no one knew how to set about such an undertaking. The wets were deeply unhappy, but lacked any game plan and lacked too the support of the most powerful Tory grandees – the likes of William Whitelaw and of Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary – who might have sympathized but were too canny to say so. An open letter to The Times, signed by a total of 364 economists, regretted the harshness of the budget (‘Present policies will deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability’), but their message was simply ignored. Instead, when Thatcher addressed the CBI in June 1981, she reiterated her refusal to contemplate a U-turn: ‘I can do no better than repeat words spoken by US Captain Lloyd Williams when he arrived in Northern France in June 1918 at a time when victory was almost within grasp after years of struggle but a hard fight clearly lay ahead. He said in the graphic language of a soldier: “Retreat? Hell, no! We only just got here.”’ (Actually it was a slight misquote; Williams is normally quoted as having said ‘Retreat? Hell, we just got here.’ Which is at least open to a different interpretation.)
On the other side of the Commons, the parliamentary opposition had by this stage virtually gone awol, the Labour Party being now engaged in both a civil war and a life-or-death struggle with the breakaway Social Democratic Party. The political columnist Walter Terry, writing in the Sun on the occasion of Thatcher’s second anniversary in Downing Street, had it about right: ‘It is staggering that after two years of Thatcherdom the opposition should be so appalling.’ And he warned, correctly, that this was probably the lowest point she would face, the perfect opportunity for the opposition to make hay: ‘Her good times are to come: vote-winning tax cuts as the election nears, the prospect of economic improvement in time for polling day.’ The Daily Mirror, Labour’s most loyal friend in Fleet Street, largely agreed, its political editor, Terence Lancaster, despairing of the party’s prospects for the next election: ‘Labour, clear favourite in anybody’s book to win without sweat, is in the process of nobbling itself. All it has to beat is a discredited government, high on hardship and low on achievement, crammed with doubters and beset by leaks.’
But Labour was now in deeper crisis than the country itself. In the early days of Thatcher’s premiership, she was so unpopular that almost any opposition party would have been capable of attracting support; Labour took an opinion poll lead over the Conservatives in August 1979 and stayed there, even touching a 50 per cent share, for the next fifteen months. But 1981 was disastrous, with the elderly and media-unfriendly Michael Foot having replaced James Callaghan as leader of the party and with the SDP offering a less extreme alternative: Labour started the year at 46 per cent in the opinion polls, and ended at 23 per cent, the biggest fall ever recorded in a single year by any party. Even worse was the realization that the pace of decline seemed to be accelerating: 17 percentage points were lost in the second half of the year.
If the parliamentary wing of the labour movement was struggling in its efforts to articulate public discontent with Thatcherism, so too was the industrial wing. The Trades Unions Congress had, over a period of decades, become accustomed to meeting ministers and being consulted by government, but now found that the invitations had dried up. In an attempt to make its voice heard, the TUC designated 14 May 1980 as a ‘day of action’, when union members would be encouraged to demonstrate their opposition to the social and economic policies of the Thatcher government. It was not a conspicuous success. The most militant sectors of industry – the Liverpool docks, the Yorkshire coal mines, Fleet Street – saw major disruption, but much of the rest of the country continued to work normally, with the hundred or so rallies in various towns and cities attracting only small crowds. Even within the highest echelons of trade unionism, there were doubts about the tactic, with Frank Chapple, leader of the electricians’ union, the EETPU, denouncing it as unacceptable politicking: ‘Democracy cannot function if government policies are to be changed, not through the ballot box, but through the disruption of industry through political strikes. If that happens, a real can of worms will be opened up and the way paved for either a right- or left-wing dictatorship.’ Looking somewhat diminished by the experience, Len Murray, general secretary of the TUC, declared himself ‘not dissatisfied with the total result’ of the day, which was as close to accepting defeat as he was likely to come.
As the opinion polls demonstrated, the lack of support for the TUC’s initiative stemmed not from any sense of contentment with government policies. Rather there was a feeling of powerlessness; if the steelworkers couldn’t make any impact in a thirteen-week strike, there seemed little chance of an isolated day of rallies changing anything much. And, of course, the massive rise in unemployment did much to dampen down dissent, as Alan Clark acknowledged privately: ‘[Tony] Benn is absolutely right, the trade union movement is disciplined by the fear of being put on the dole and this is a considerable, though brutal, achievement.’
The word ‘brutal’ seemed entirely apposite to the times. Thatcher’s continued insistence that the medicine might taste foul, might even have unpleasant side-effects, but would ultimately cure ‘the British disease’ of poor industrial relations, carried less and less weight as factories closed, dole queues lengthened and rioting broke out in towns and cities across the country. It was as though the government were wilfully pursuing a Year Zero approach that would wipe the slate clean and facilitate a new start. In the process, however, the nation seemed to be in danger of losing some thing of itself, a sense of hope and optimism, perhaps, or even of community, however impossible that might be to measure.
And there were signs of concern at the loss. The Glasgow-born writer and director Bill Forsyth was a critical and box-office success with Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983), evoking memories of the social cohesion that had been standard in British cinema in the post-war years. The veteran actor Burt Lancaster starred in Local Hero as an American oil boss seeking to build a refinery on the site of a fishing village on the north-west coast of Scotland, before ultimately deciding to found an astronomical observatory instead, allowing the village to survive with its simple charm intact. Key to his decision is Ben, an old beachcomber played by Fulton Mackay, who, it transpires, owns the beach, it having been given to an ancestor of his by the Lord of the Isles. No matter how much money Ben is offered, he has no desire to go anywhere else, no ambition to do anything but live on his beach, and it is on his intransigent contentment that the aspirations of a Texas-based oil company founder. Lancaster appeared in the movie because, he said, it was reminiscent of ‘all those lovely Ealing comedies’ of the 1940s and ’50s; that, of course, was precisely why Forsyth’s work also appealed to audiences.
Meanwhile BBC1 was broadcasting the early episodes of the series that would become the most cherished sitcom of the decade. Only Fools and Horses (1981) was written by John Sullivan and centred on two brothers – Del (David Jason) and Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst) Trotter – living on a housing estate in Peckham, south London with their grandfather (Lennard Pearce). Working in the black economy as fly pitchers in the local street market, Del and Rodney seldom stayed on the right side of legality, and there was some initial concern that it was all a bit too raw for a family audience. ‘I dare say the BBC’s switchboard was hot with outraged viewers complaining about bad language in Only Fools and Horses, Tuesday’s new lowlife comedy,’ wrote Hilary Kingsley, television critic of the Daily Mirror. ‘Well, I hope no one tampers with the series, it promises to be the liveliest for ages.’ What emerged, however, was a strong moral vein that excused all the roguery, for in the world of the Trotters, family loyalty is everything, the last bulwark against a disintegrating society. Del likes to see himself as a shrewd operator, always out for the big deal that will make his fortune, but, as the older brother, his actions are restrained by his need to honour their dead mother’s wishes and look after his kid brother; in compensation, he regularly invokes her memory as the clincher to win any argument with Rodney. And as the cast of associated characters grew ever larger to embrace Trigger, Boycie, Mike, Denzil, Mickey Pearce and others, it became clear that this was an extended family that formed a bantering, bickering but ultimately self-supporting unit.
Similarly Auf Wiedersehen, Pet drew most of its strength and popularity from its portrayal of personal loyalties holding strong, even as the working-class communities from which the characters were drawn were falling apart at the seams. And in a 1980 episode of Coronation Street, a soap whose appeal was based largely on its depiction of traditional British values, Elsie Tanner addressed the subject directly: ‘We’ve still got a community here, at least a bit of one. We’ve still got the bush telegraph, for instance. Something happens in Arkwright Street, and they know in Jubilee Terrace two minutes later.’ But Ken Barlow was unconvinced: ‘Yeah, but go another couple of streets further on and you’re in a different country.’
Towards the end of 1980 two deaths appeared to symbolize the passing of a kindlier, more familiar Britain. In October the 62-year-old Lady Isobel Barnett, who had become an early television star on the panel show What’s My Line?, and who had represented for many the gentle dignity and deference of the 1950s, was found guilty of shoplifting goods to the value of 87 pence. Four days later, she was found dead in her bath, having taken an overdose of painkillers.
Then, in December, John Lennon, the ultimate embodiment of the Swinging Sixties, was shot dead outside his New York home. (The playwright Alan Bennett was eating in a New York restaurant when he heard the news and recorded in his diary the characteristically stoical attitude of the locals: ‘“This country of ours,” sighs my waiter. “May I tell you the specials for this evening?”’) There had been many deaths in the short history of rock and roll, but they had generally tended to be self-inflicted or accidental – the murder of the most famous living rock star caused genuine horror and grief, and Lennon’s current single ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, his first release for five years, which had been slipping down the charts, went back up to the top. To keep a sense of perspective, it was replaced at No. 1 the following week by St Winifred’s School Choir with their song ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ – a fact which caused shudders of embarrassment in later life to actress Sally Lindsay, one of the choirgirls: ‘We knocked John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” off No. 1 a week after he was shot dead – how fucking shit is that?’
The establishment looked no more secure. The last time a British man had been stripped of a knighthood had been in 1918, but within twenty months of Thatcher’s premiership two names were added to the roll of shame: the art critic and former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, lost his knighthood after he was publicly revealed to have been a communist spy, and the raincoat manufacturer Joseph Kagan – raised to the peerage by Harold Wilson – lost his on being convicted of theft (though he kept the title of Baron and his seat in the House of Lords).
And for those who felt that the country was – despite all Thatcher’s exhortations – continuing to lose international status, as it had been right through the 1970s, confirmation seemed to come in September 1981, when the England football team lined up against Norway in a World Cup qualifying match. Norway was subsequently to fight its way up the food-chain of European football, but at the time it undoubtedly swam with the minnows: only five of its players were professionals, and England had never before failed to score fewer than four goals against them. The 2-1 defeat in Oslo was therefore considered a national disaster, made even worse for fans by the manner of the players’ capitulation: ‘I cannot remember a more inept performance by an England team in thirty years of watching them,’ wrote Frank McGhee of the Daily Mirror in disgust. The humiliation did though produce one of the most famous pieces of sports commentary, as the Norwegian journalist Bjørge Lillelien celebrated the victory in splendidly unrestrained fashion: ‘We are the best in the world! We have beaten England! England, birthplace of giants! Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana – we have beaten them all!’ The somewhat eccentric list of English icons culminated in a phrase, delivered in English, that was to enter the language: ‘Maggie Thatcher, your boys took a hell of a beating!’
But the underachieving performance of the national team gave a distorted view of English football, and of British sport more generally. For this was something of a brief golden age, sporting achievement being the one area of public life that offered relief from the gloom that had settled elsewhere. This was the period when English club teams were almost unassailable in Europe, winning the European Cup for six years in succession from 1977 to 1982, with three clubs (Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa) sharing the honours. This was too the era when Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett were similarly dominant in middle-distance running, casually swapping world records with each other in the 800 metres, 1500 metres and mile, though even here there were signs of a divided country, with the two men popularly perceived in quasi-political terms: Coe as a smart young Tory, Ovett as a more anti-authoritarian rebel. Both won gold medals at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, alongside decathlete Daley Thompson, sprinter Allan Wells and swimmer Duncan Goodhew. In a break with tradition, however, none were recognized in the next honours list, punished for not heeding Thatcher’s demand that British athletes boycott the Games, as a protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
And in terms of sporting inspiration, little could rival the performance of the England cricket team in the 1981 Ashes series. After two matches of the six-Test series, England were 1-0 down and Ian Botham was ignominiously removed as captain, having seen a catastrophic collapse in his form (he had failed to score a run in the second Test). Mike Brearley returned to the captaincy and, freed from responsibility, Botham took six for 95 in Australia’s first innings in the third Test at Headingley, scored 50 and 149, and then saw Bob Willis take eight for 43 to complete one of the greatest of all Test victories. It was only the second time ever that a match had been won by a team forced to follow-on – the first had been as far back as 1894 – and at one point Ladbrokes had been offering odds of 500-1 against England winning. Similar, if not quite such extraordinary, heroics followed, and two weeks later the Ashes had been retained by a score of 3-1, the series becoming universally known as Botham’s Ashes. In the absence of any comparable contribution by the country’s footballers, those matches made Botham England’s most popular sporting hero, an unpredictable individualist whose career seemed entirely appropriate for Thatcher’s Britain: a comprehensive school boy triumphing in the most establishment of sports. The fact that later in the decade he was suspended after admitting that he’d smoked cannabis ensured that his anti-establishment credentials remained intact for a while longer, as well as prompting one of the better T-shirt slogans of the time: ‘From Ashes to Hashish’.
Botham was also, alongside the Radio One disc jockey Jimmy Savile, to popularize endurance charity events in the 1980s, a trend that made a popular institution of the London Marathon. (‘What a wonderful change from all the protest marches we have seen in the past few years,’ enthused a Daily Mail reader from Weymouth, after the first race in 1981. ‘Perhaps this may help to restore a bit of the old selfless spirit that made this country great.’) That victory at Headingley, meanwhile, coming after a change in team leadership, even provoked the Tory backbencher Charles Morrison to speculate in the Commons: ‘Was this not a good example of a change of tactics which we might emulate?’
There was another contemporary example of the desirability or otherwise of decapitating the leadership, this time in the world of soap matriarchs. ATV caused outrage in June 1981 by announcing that they wouldn’t be renewing the contract of Noele Gordon, who had played Meg Richardson in Crossroads in over three thousand episodes since the show’s inception in 1964, and around whom the entire series revolved: Meg’s word in the Crossroads Motel was as final as was Maggie’s in the cabinet. The coup appeared to come, symbolically enough, on Guy Fawkes night, when a firework set the motel ablaze, with the assumption that Meg had been killed; happily, it turned out that she had survived the blaze, and she lived to sail off into the distance on the QE2 as she made a tearful farewell from the series. Fourteen million viewers watched the pivotal episode, suggesting that – despite the relentless carping of critics and despite a lack of support from within the industry for a show that was seen as having no aesthetic value – the series remained hugely popular, as did its central star. (A second body blow to loyal fans came the following year when Ronald Allen, who played David Hunter in the soap, turned up in Channel 4’s comedy Five Go Mad in Dorset, a parody of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, as the somewhat different Uncle Quentin: ‘Your Aunt Fanny is an unrelenting nymphomaniac, and I’m a screaming homosexual.’)
But even if an institution as established as Meg Richardson had proved to be ultimately disposable, there remained for disillusioned Tories the problem of who could plausibly replace Thatcher if she were to be removed from office. Acknowledging the speculation that was in the air, the Sun ran down the list of possible contenders in a leader column in October 1981 and found them all wanting: ‘Willie Whitelaw, noted for agreeing with the last person he talked to. Peter Walker, who thinks and speaks like Ted Heath. Jim Prior, who even looks like him – if people spurn the organ grinder, they certainly do NOT want the monkey! Francis Pym, the original faceless man, who has all the inspirational qualities of a glass of warm water.’ It was a harsh judgement but, as an assessment of public opinion, probably not too inaccurate. So few options presented themselves that out in the country, and particularly out in the Black Country, there were even some still holding out for a hero from the past: ‘He’d make a great prime minister, would Enoch,’ a Wolverhampton woman told New Society magazine in December 1981, but the idea that Enoch Powell, now an Ulster Unionist MP, might take over really was a pipe-dream by this stage. Nor was there anyone, it seemed, who could force a change in approach; Whitelaw acknowledged that he’d like to be able to ‘influence Margaret to change some of her policies, but frankly I don’t see how this can be done. It’s very difficult for me to see a way round that.’
Thatcher’s determination to get her own way, despite the reservations of so many of her senior colleagues, became ever more apparent as 1981 wore on. She started the year by sacking Norman St John-Stevas as leader of the House of Commons, much to the horror of the liberal establishment and at the risk of fuelling his own sense of martyrdom. ‘I argued in the cabinet for a human and compassionate Conservatism,’ he pleaded, though in truth her motivation was rooted not so much in ideology as in a desire to reduce the authority of Francis Pym, the most plausible leader of the wets; Thatcher removed Pym from the ministry of defence and, while keeping him in the cabinet, isolated him as leader of the House, with St John-Stevas simply discarded to make room. As the novelist Michael Dobbs, who worked closely with her, noted: ‘She was ruthless when she had to be – and often when she didn’t have to be as well.’ In a way that was to become characteristic of dismissed wets, St John-Stevas was a couple of months later to be found presenting Dizzy: A Man for All Seasons, a BBC2 programme about Benjamin Disraeli, the man who originated the concept of One Nation Conservatism, in what was presumably intended to be a coded signal about where Thatcher was going wrong. And, as was to become equally characteristic, Thatcher ignored him entirely.
In autumn 1981 she engaged on an even more serious reshuffle of her cabinet that damaged the standing of the wets irretrievably. Pym held on, but Ian Gilmour was dismissed, much to his displeasure (he was ‘huffy’, according to Thatcher’s account), and James Prior was sent in disgrace from the department of employment to the Northern Ireland office; having made it clear that he wouldn’t accept such a posting, his subsequent acceptance of it did nothing to enhance his stature. And though the whispering against Thatcher continued, her merciless handling of her internal opponents was an unmistakable statement of intent.
Into the cabinet instead came a trio of politicians who would become absolutely identified with the Thatcherite era: Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson and Norman Tebbit. Of these, the most significant, in terms of public profile, was undoubtedly Tebbit. Already described by Michael Foot as ‘a semi house-trained polecat’ while still on the opposition backbenches, he had acquired a reputation as an uncompromising right-winger who dispensed with the niceties of political discourse in favour of full-frontal attack. He was particularly effective in articulating the aspirations of the southern working class, whence he had originated, and never more so than when it was at the expense of those in the Labour Party who hadn’t shared his experiences: ‘It was a childhood of living in bits of other people’s houses in fairly uncomfortable circumstances, and being very hard up,’ he reflected of his upbringing, soon after his promotion. ‘Certainly not the kind of childhood enjoyed by Mr Foot, Mr Benn and a great many others of their party.’ The rather more patrician socialist, John Mortimer, was later to echo this judgement and to draw his own conclusions about the modern Tories: ‘There was a time when gents used to be in the Conservative Party, but that is no longer the case. Foot, a gent; Benn, yes; Tebbit, not a gent.’
Even more than Thatcher herself, Tebbit represented skilled and semiskilled workers in parts of the country like Essex (his constituency was Chingford), and his elevation to the cabinet, where he took over from Prior as employment secretary, set the tone for the next period of domestic politics. Though, in the event, domestic politics weren’t where the survival or otherwise of Thatcherism was to be determined.