The definition of a human being is one who hates and fears and wants to be rid of nuclear weapons. Because they’re the evil, they’re the modern equivalent of the devil, of Antichrist – they are all we’ll ever know of hell.
Ruth Rendell, The Veiled One (1988)
Calling generals and majors:
Your World War III is drawing near.
XTC, ‘Generals and Majors’ (1980)
When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit. We are all Falklanders now.
The Times (1982)
The Eurovision Song Contest did not enjoy a particularly vintage year in 1982. Staged in Harrogate, following Bucks Fizz’s triumph with ‘Making Your Mind Up’ the previous year, the competition included a high proportion of off-the-peg Eurovision songs (‘Bem-Bom’, ‘Halo Halo’, ‘Video Video’) and was dominated by Germany’s Nicole singing the rather insipid ‘A Little Peace’, which became an international hit after it won the tournament by a record margin. More interesting was the appearance by Finnish rock star Timo Kojo, performing ‘Nuku Pommiin’, whose chorus was translated as ‘Don’t drop, don’t drop, don’t drop that neutron bomb on me’. Regrettably it finished in last place, having failed to score a single point.
Despite the lack of recognition by the international juries, the fact that an anti-nuclear song had reached Eurovision at all was entirely typical of the times. For the political pop of the early 1980s concerned itself not merely with unemployment and deprivation, but with the impending fear of nuclear war; hit songs that addressed the subject ranged from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s jaunty electronica on ‘Enola Gay’ (the name of the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb), through Haysi Fantayzee’s playground pop of ‘Shiny Shiny’ and Nena’s bubblegum protest ‘99 Luftballons’, to Iron Maiden’s hard-rocking ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’.
The root cause of this spate of records was ultimately the election to the American presidency in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, a man who aroused more hatred internationally than perhaps any previous incumbent had achieved. From an American perspective, he was the obvious choice for a country that had suffered unexpected economic and military defeats in the 1970s, had seen the presidency besmirched by Watergate and had ended the decade with foreign relations disasters in Iran and Afghanistan. In the midst of this national identity crisis, Reagan appeared as a populist figure who evoked simpler times and the uncomplicated values of mom, apple pie and overwhelming military force. Which, of course, was precisely the same combination that worried much of the rest of the world. His denunciations of communism echoed those of Margaret Thatcher, who had made her international name with an anti-Soviet speech while in opposition that earned her the sobriquet the Iron Lady, and the two made for a formidable partnership, leading the West into a ratcheting up of the Cold War into what amounted virtually to a crusade.
Their work was not confined to rhetoric. In the autumn of 1979 the government confirmed that Britain’s ageing nuclear weapons system, Polaris, would be replaced by a new system, Trident, as planned by the previous Labour administration. And that December the defence secretary, Francis Pym, announced that Britain would shortly be hosting 160 American nuclear-armed cruise missiles at bases in Greenham Common and Molesworth, and sparked what was to become perhaps the biggest single-issue struggle of the 1980s.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been founded in Britain in 1957 and had enjoyed some considerable popularity until the signing of the 1963 Test Ban Treaty began to erode its support. By 1979 the membership had fallen to little more than two thousand, and the group appeared moribund. But the decision on cruise missiles reignited the popular passion and gave the left a standard around which to rally. In 1980 the Labour Party adopted CND’s proposals – the dismantling of Britain’s nuclear weapons system, and a refusal to accommodate American missiles – as official policy, membership of the organization began to climb rapidly towards one hundred thousand, and a wave of mass demonstrations followed, with quarter of a million congregating in October 1981. ‘I should think it was the biggest political meeting ever held in the history of British politics,’ wrote Tony Benn, one of the leading advocates of nuclear disarmament, ‘unless you include the Peasants’ Revolt, and even then I’m not sure as many came out at any one time.’ That total was exceeded eighteen months later when four hundred thousand congregated in Hyde Park to witness, amongst the usual speeches, the debut live performance in the capital by the Style Council, the band formed by Paul Weller after he split up the Jam.
Aside from pop music, popular television series were also doing their bit to promote the issue of nuclear war, often reflecting the serious and widespread concerns that existed at the time. In ‘Coins’, a 1980 episode of Juliet Bravo, George A. Cooper played Major Adams, a retired man building up a huge stash of tinned food in his shed. ‘I was in the war. The next one won’t be fought with guns,’ he warns. ‘When Russia does come, I’ll have everything down here necessary – I won’t be caught.’ The three heroes of the sitcom Only Fools and Horses went a step further and built their own fallout shelter in the 1981 episode ‘The Russians Are Coming’, a show that also revealed that Rodney Trotter had staged a hunger strike in protest at the arrival of cruise missiles, even if it did last only a day and a half. And the Doctor Who series ‘Warriors of the Deep’, although set a hundred years in the future, was based on the premise that nothing had changed in the intervening century: ‘There are still two power blocs, fingers poised to annihilate each other,’ sighs the Doctor.
This level of commentary went largely without adverse criticism, but a string of more heavily promoted screen dramas attracted serious controversy. They were prefaced by a 1981 BBC revival of John Wyndham’s science-fiction classic The Day of the Triffids, written thirty years earlier. Largely faithful to the original novel, still it articulated contemporary fears, particularly when speculating that the meteor shower that has blinded most of the human population was caused by malfunctioning weapons. ‘We were walking on a tightrope for a hell of a long time,’ comments one character. ‘Sooner or later, a foot had to slip.’ Another expresses the fear of surviving the apocalypse: ‘It’s going to be a pretty strange sort of world that’s left to survive in. I don’t think we’re going to like it a lot.’
These two themes – of the inevitability of disaster and of the horrors that will follow – were the staples of the nuclear blockbusters that appeared in the mid-1980s. The Day After (1983) was an American television film considered so important by ABC, the network responsible, that on its first broadcast it was screened without any commercial breaks (though this was perhaps due in part to the difficulty of getting anyone to sponsor such a depressing message), attracting a claimed 100 million viewers. Set in and around Kansas City in the build-up to and aftermath of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, it followed a traditional disaster movie structure: Act I introduces us to a disparate cast of characters, whose personal fortunes we then follow in Act II as catastrophe strikes – the full extent of the horror is revealed, the fragility of civilization ripped apart, and then the struggle begins to bring order to a world turned upside-down. All that was missing was the final act of redemption, when normality should be restored. Instead the movie ended with a wish-fuelled and slightly pompous caption: ‘It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day.’ They didn’t. But the film did provoke a lively debate between those on the right, who denounced it as pro-Soviet propaganda, and those on the left, who insisted that it was far too cheery: in particular, complained disarmers, the concept of nuclear winter was not even mentioned. ‘It wasn’t a very good movie,’ admitted its director Nicholas Meyer, saying that the chief feature of the script was its ‘seductive banality’, but he also insisted that that was the point: he didn’t want viewers to be distracted from the central message by their appreciation of its aesthetic qualities.
A month later the film arrived on ITV in Britain, to a similarly mixed reaction and to confusion in the government ranks. Weeks before its screening, Michael Heseltine, the defence secretary, was quite clear that it was a valuable contribution: ‘I hope people watch that film, because it is the single strongest argument for nuclear deterrence that I know, because the Soviets must never be in a position to believe they could inflict that on us.’ A week later, however, having now seen the film, he made a formal complaint to the Independent Broadcasting Authority (the IBA was then the regulatory body for the ITV network), insisting ‘that it provided an unbalanced portrayal of the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence’ and ‘that there was quite obviously a political message in the film.’ He demanded that there should be balance, leaving ITV executives bewildered: ‘The Day After is basically a dramatized story about the nasty after-effects of a nuclear bomb. What do you do to balance it? Show the nice after-effects?’
The self-appointed guardian of broadcasting morality, Mary Whitehouse, also objected to the screening of the film, on the grounds that it might upset ‘immature minds’, a concern that might have seemed borne out by a TV Times poll revealing that half of those aged between fifteen and eighteen expected to see a nuclear war in their lifetime. Except that it wasn’t just the ‘immature’: a 1980 poll for the BBC showed that 40 per cent of the adult population believed nuclear war to be likely in the next ten years.
Whitehouse also objected to the BBC’s Threads (1984), made by Mick Jackson. It too covered the effects of a nuclear strike on a provincial city, in this instance Sheffield, but if The Day After was a disaster movie writ large, Threads took as its model the tradition of The Wednesday Play, a much smaller canvas. Indeed it opened almost as a parody of the problem plays of the 1960s with a working-class lad getting his girlfriend pregnant and the couple deciding to get married rather than have an abortion. Thereafter, despite some entertaining observations about modern British values (artworks are stashed away safely before the attack, a union leader calls for a strike to protest against the imminent holocaust), it became a much bleaker proposition. Where the American version had given us Jason Robards, playing an everyman role as a decent doctor retaining standards in the face of adversity, Threads offered no hope for humanity: it showed a world reverting to a brutal hunter-gatherer life, with language and society disintegrating, and with radiation sickness damaging the next generation and then the one after.
In the wake of Threads, the BBC finally abandoned its twenty-year ban on Peter Watkins’ anti-nuclear film The War Game, an early target of Whitehouse’s campaigning. Commissioned but never broadcast in 1965 (though it did win a BAFTA and an Oscar), the play, delivered in the form of a documentary, had claimed that nuclear war was ‘more than possible’ before 1980. Officially it had been proscribed because it was considered ‘too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’, but government pressure – and, more significantly, fear of government pressure – also had a part to play. Now it was finally screened as yet another horrific vision of the consequences of nuclear war. The government was still hostile to such work, but it seemed to have less sway now over a BBC that was clearly determined to explore such issues, and also prepared to look beyond the weaponry to the related industry of nuclear power.
The BBC series Edge of Darkness (1985) started with Detective Inspector Craven (Bob Peck) seeing his only daughter, Emma, gunned down in front of him. Initially believing that the killer was after him, possibly in retaliation for his involvement with IRA informers in Northern Ireland, he subsequently discovers that Emma’s work as a scientist had involved her in conflict with the nuclear power industry, and the trail gets complicated. As he’s drip-fed information and misinformation by the British and American secret services, by a Trotskyist group called Socialist Advance, by a corrupt trade unionist, and even by the ghost of his dead daughter, Craven uncovers a massive conspiracy to take over the world by the nuclear industry. ‘This future nuclear state,’ warns one of the characters, ‘will be an absolute state, whose authority will derive not from the people, but from the possession of plutonium.’ If all this seemed a bit paranoid, commented the series’ writer Troy Kennedy Martin in 1989, that’s because ‘it was written in paranoid times’ when ‘born-again Christians and Cold-War warriors seemed to be running the United States.’ And, with privatization firmly on the political agenda, ‘it was only a matter of time before Mrs Thatcher’s entrepreneurs would get their hands on the nuclear waste business.’ Chris Mullin, looking back on the television adaptation of his novel, A Very British Coup, could only agree with Kennedy Martin’s assessment of the era: ‘There was a lot of paranoid talk going on.’
Similar conspiracy themes turned up in Martin Spellman’s screenplay for the film Defence of the Realm (1985). A Labour MP, former chairman of the Commons defence committee, is revealed to have been seeing a woman who is also seeing a KGB agent, in what appears to be a re-run of the Profumo affair, but the reporter sent to cover the story discovers that this is merely an establishment smear campaign, intended to cover up the crash in East Anglia of an American plane carrying nuclear weapons.
Despite all protestations at objectivity and balance, there was a clear anti-nuclear theme running through these works, as the Thatcher government bitterly complained to anyone who would listen. Previously the thesis underlying most popular fiction on nuclear conspiracies had been that the Soviet threat was all too real and was being aided by collaborators, fellow travellers and foolish dupes in Britain. Typical was Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s 1978 novel The Westminster Disaster, in which a small group of terrorists assemble a nuclear bomb in London on orders from Moscow, with the assistance of a Marxist academic at Imperial College, London, a former Labour MP and a trade union activist. Britain was widely portrayed as being betrayed by the spinelessness, at best, of its ruling elite; in Gavin Lyall’s thriller The Secret Servant (1980), a retired wing commander is described as ‘one of the few MPs who still think this country’s worth defending’. This tendency was also to be found in the 1982 film Who Dares Wins, celebrating the work of the SAS, whose role in successfully ending a terrorist siege at the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 had brought the regiment to widespread public attention for the first time. Here the state was pitted against a CND-type grouping called the People’s Lobby: ‘We must remember that the vast majority of the People’s Lobby are sincere pacifists,’ explains a senior police officer. ‘We are dealing with the hard-core revolutionaries who are using the peace movement as a cover.’
But Who Dares Wins was something of an exception to the tenor of the times, and it couldn’t be denied that most of the screen fiction dealing with issues of war and peace had a very different message, one summed up by Harry Perkins in A Very British Coup, as he makes a televized prime ministerial broadcast to announce the realization of Labour’s and CND’s hopes that Britain could again set an example for the world. ‘In two weeks’ time,’ he says, ‘experts will dismantle and destroy a one-megaton Polaris warhead. With this action, we will also be dismantling the idea that our freedom somehow depends on the fear of annihilation. It is an absurd, an obscene idea. We want no part of it.’
The assumption was that all reasonable, humane people must surely agree that nuclear weapons were inherently evil; the only real issue was whether one supported unilateral disarmament by the British, reaching for some kind of moral high-ground, or whether Britain’s weapons should be negotiated away in a bilateral or multilateral deal that would see the Soviet Union remove an equivalent number of theirs. It was an assumption that came close to orthodoxy in artistic circles. ‘Poets must be allowed to feel the full horror of nuclear warfare even more than ordinary mortals,’ observed Lord Longford, thinking of his dramatist son-in-law, Harold Pinter, though he might also have looked to the likes of Edward Bond, whose six-hour trilogy The War Plays was staged at the Barbican Centre in 1985, or Martin Amis, whose Einstein’s Monsters (1987) was a collection of short stories all concerned with nuclear weapons.
But the government was evidently not run by writers or artists. And the government was very firmly in favour of nuclear weapons, arguing that they were the only reliable defence against Russian aggression; for those believed in a potentially imminent invasion of Britain by the Soviet Union, the nuclear option was the sole guarantor of peace. After watching The Day After and similar films, Heseltine concluded: ‘Whatever the horrors portrayed, the essential fact remained: Soviet nuclear weapons were targeted on Western cities.’ And his job was clear: ‘We had to win the argument and turn the tide.’
It was not a simple task, for by now even the language of the debate was against him, the word ‘peace’ having effectively been claimed by anti-nuclear campaigners as their own, much as the expression ‘pro-life’ was subsequently annexed by anti-abortionists. But Heseltine was one of the more adaptable politicians of the time and, when government research showed that the framing of terms was crucial to winning the propaganda battle, he adopted a new linguistic policy: CND were henceforth referred to as ‘one-sided disarmers’, the names of specific weapons systems were avoided, and the phrase ‘Britain’s independent deterrent’ became standard.
While it remained on this general level, with its undertones of patriotism, the government proved effective in arguing its case. It was less impressive when the discussion moved back to the realities of nuclear war, finding itself out of tune with the times. The 1980 pamphlet, Protect and Survive, explained ‘how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack’, and was roundly derided as soon as it became public, since few really believed in the possibility, let alone the desirability, of surviving a nuclear strike, even if one did whitewash one’s windows. When a nuclear missile is found in the kitchen belonging to The Young Ones, Neil follows what he understands to be official guidance and paints himself white, while the animated film of Raymond Briggs’ 1982 book, When the Wind Blows, mocked the absurdities and inconsistencies of government advice; its central character, James Bloggs’ displays levels of optimism and faith in central authority that Candide would have admired: ‘Ours not to reason why,’ he says, as he constructs his safe haven, ‘ours but to, er, something or other.’
Meanwhile, the home office minister, Douglas Hurd, attempted to reassure MPs that they shouldn’t rely on American studies of the effects of nuclear attack, because ‘British houses tend to be somewhat more solid than American houses’, and then had to break off to deal with the laughter that ensued. ‘Why the giggles?’ he demanded, puzzled that his faith in the construction industry to save humanity wasn’t universally shared. And behind the scenes a script was being drafted for the first broadcast in the aftermath of an attack on Britain. ‘This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service,’ it was to begin. ‘This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons.’ It went on to give advice on how we should deal with these new circumstances, recommending that we stay at home, close the windows, turn off the gas and conserve our water stocks: ‘Water must not be used for flushing lavatories; until you are told that lavatories may be used again, other toilet arrangements must be made.’ Just as helpfully, some thought, Viz comic offered IMPROVE YOUR GOLF AFTER THE BOMB, a handy guide to how a nuclear holocaust may impact on your game: ‘After a nuclear explosion you may find that some of your fingers have dropped off. This will almost certainly affect your grip.’
If the government couldn’t count on film-makers, playwrights or musicians to support the fight back against the rise of CND, it did at least have the vast majority of newspaper circulation on its side. In the immediate face of overwhelming cultural hostility, however, this wasn’t always enough. Few developments, for example, were as roundly ridiculed by the mainstream press as the concept of the nuclear-free zone, intended to demarcate areas through which nuclear weapons and waste would not be allowed to pass, and where there would be no participation in civil defence exercises based around nuclear war. First propounded by Manchester council in 1980 and subsequently adopted by dozens of other local authorities, the nuclear-free zones were depicted with tiresome regularity by their opponents as Canute-like attempts to halt the progress of radiation at city borders; yet a 1983 opinion poll in London showed majority support for the idea, with even Conservative voters splitting narrowly in favour. But, as the general secretary of CND, Bruce Kent, was later to acknowledge, ‘the steady drip of the main-line media’ did eventually make an impact.
And the battle lines were by now stretched so wide that the conflict favoured those with greater resources at their disposal. A new government offensive came with the rise of peace studies as a subject in secondary schools. Peace studies had been a part of university life for some time, but they hit the headlines in 1982 when a number of local educational authorities were discovered to have authorized their introduction into the school curriculum. The education minister Rhodes Boyson, himself a former headmaster, led the charge against the proposal: ‘It is the teaching of unilateral disarmament, which is an open invitation to the Soviets to take control of the world by threatening nuclear war,’ he thundered, ‘an encouragement to lay down our arms and let anyone walk over us and destroy our society.’ Political propaganda, insisted the government, had no place in the classroom, though the Ministry of Defence somewhat undercut that line of attack by issuing its own leaflet aimed at the classroom; titled How to Deal with a Bully, it put the case for Nato and for a strong defence policy to counter the Soviet threat.
Despite the controversy, when a 1983 study polled half the education authorities in the country, it found that peace studies had rapidly secured a foothold in school life: 12 per cent of Conservative and 31 per cent of Labour authorities offered the subject. Whether it should be taken seriously as a cause for alarm, however, remained doubtful. In 1986 Dr Armando Galfo, a former colonel in the US Air Force but now a professor of education, conducted a survey of thirty thousand British schoolchildren and concluded: ‘Pupils in the schools where peace studies have been introduced did not display signs of the indoctrination feared by the government.’ In fact it tended to work in reverse, with CND support strong in independent schools where the curriculum was considered right-wing, and anti-CND opinions most vociferous in schools that taught peace studies. As ever, children were proving remarkably resilient when confronted with the wisdom of their elders. Nor were teachers quite so extreme as their critics maintained: a poll for the Times Educational Supplement shortly before the 1983 general election showed that 44 per cent intended to vote Conservative, a long way ahead of support for the Alliance and for Labour. (‘Like mice voting for cats’, snapped Labour’s education spokesperson, Neil Kinnock.)
Perhaps more worrying was the concern expressed by a delegation of teachers who met Douglas Hurd in 1982: that children were becoming so frightened by the threat of nuclear war that it was, apparently, disrupting their ability to learn and causing nightmares. A report in the mental health magazine Inside Out supported such claims, with Dr James Thomson of Middlesex Hospital insisting that ‘Children’s worries, anxieties, nuclear nightmares and terrors are getting worse.’ It was far from clear whether the existence of peace studies ameliorated or aggravated this trend, but even the nation’s most famous schoolboy was affected. ‘I keep having nightmares about the bomb,’ Adrian Mole wrote in his diary. ‘I hope it isn’t dropped before I get my GCE results in August 1982. I wouldn’t like to die an unqualified virgin.’
As in so many other areas of British life in the early 1980s, the issues raised by nuclear weapons, the questions of war and peace, revealed a divided country, increasingly split between two diametrically opposed positions, squeezing out the compromise for which – if the Alliance poll results were to be believed – a substantial section of the people yearned. There was no unifying thread that brought the nation together, no single narrative that could be shared by a clear majority. This was a development that had been apparent since the divisive days of the 1970s, and was now growing more evident month by month. ‘Britain needs another war,’ wrote the political journalist Tom Nairn, more in irony than anger. ‘This alone would recreate the peculiar spirit of her nationalism, rally her renegade intelligentsia (as in the 1930s), and reconcile the workers to their lot.’ He added: ‘Unfortunately, war of that sort – like her empire – is a lost cause.’ What he hadn’t calculated was that in these desperate times, a full life-or-death struggle in which the country’s existence was threatened was not needed; a mere approximation would suffice. So it would prove with the conflict over the Falklands Islands in 1982.
Situated three hundred miles off the southern tip of Argentina in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands had long been the subject of rival claims to sovereignty. Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833, and the couple of thousand inhabitants in the early 1980s unanimously wished to remain British, but Argentina had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and was growing increasingly vocal in its demands. Recognizing the difficulty of defending the place militarily, given the huge distance from Britain, Whitehall sought a diplomatic solution that involved the handing over of ownership of the Islands to Argentina in exchange for being allowed to lease them back. Nicholas Ridley, as a minister in the foreign office, twice visited the South Atlantic, produced a plan along these lines and proposed it in parliament in December 1980, only to be met with the fury of the Tory backbenches. Having recently seen the former colony of Rhodesia transformed into Zimbabwe in a deal sponsored by Britain, they saw the voluntary relinquishing of one of the last remaining trophies of empire as being a step too far, and the Ridley plan fell. Argentina began to express impatience at the collapse of the talks.
Six months later, a review of the defence forces – by which was meant an attempt to find cuts in public spending – saw the announcement of the withdrawal of HMS Endurance, the Royal Navy vessel that had been stationed in the South Atlantic as a token symbol of Britain’s obligations to the Falklands. The scale of the economy was so small as to be trivial – Endurance cost £3 million a year, set in the context of a defence budget that allowed £8 billion for the Trident nuclear programme – and several elder statesmen, including Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary, and James Callaghan, cautioned against the withdrawal of the ship (‘I beg you, prime minister, not to scrap the Endurance,’ urged Callaghan), but to no avail. If the move was considered to be without significance by the British government, Argentina read it as a lack of commitment.
None of this registered with the general public, very few of whom had then heard of the Islands. When the Central American state of Belize finally got full independence from Britain in September 1981, for example, the Daily Mirror helpfully provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands. It forgot even to mention the Falklands. Even many of those who regarded themselves as being reasonably well-informed about the world would have struggled to identify the location of the Islands, though some might have recalled that when a dissident in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands.
The attention given in government to the issue was scarcely more substantial; there were so many more pressing domestic matters to be addressed. Margaret Thatcher herself had no particular interest in the Falklands (she didn’t like the Ridley plan, but did nothing to stop him proceeding, and it was her insistence on cuts that had caused the Endurance decision – ‘a military irrelevance,’ she declared in her memoirs), and she subsequently faced considerable and reasonable criticism for allowing the crisis to develop. But ultimately none of that really mattered. When things began to go wrong, the British people were hardly surprised to find that their government had been incompetent and had taken their eye off the ball – such was only to be expected; what was entirely unforeseen was the ruthless determination to put the matter right, once the mistake had been discovered.
In December 1981 General Leopoldo Galtieri became president of Argentina at the head of a junta in a coup against the existing military president, Roberto Viola. Faced with an economic recession that put Britain’s in the shade, he saw the unresolved dispute as a way of deflecting public hostility towards the government. The first move came in March 1982 with the raising of the Argentine flag by civilians on South Georgia, part of an island group east of the Falklands. Again it provoked little interest in Britain: ‘The news was all rubbish,’ wrote comedian Kenneth Williams in his diary, ‘apart from a scurry in the Falkland Islands where some impertinent Argentineans are pinching scrap metal or something.’ On 2 April Argentine troops landed on the Falklands themselves to seize control of the Islands, and suddenly it became impossible to ignore what was happening. The foreign office, however, did its best; lacking up-to-date information, one of its ministers, Humphrey Atkins, issued a flat denial in the Commons, and when the press desk was contacted by the BBC for confirmation of the news, the night duty officer laughed off the suggestion of an invasion: ‘Believe me, if anything was happening, we would know about it.’
The response in Westminster was to reinforce the differing perceptions of where Britain now stood in the world, as seen in the entries made that day by the two principal political diarists of the time. ‘It’s all over. We’re a Third World country, no good for anything,’ despaired Alan Clark, the right-wing Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton, who had once looked like he might become a serious military historian. ‘I have a terrible feeling that this is a step change, down, for England. Humiliation for sure and, not impossible, military defeat.’ From the other end of the political spectrum, Tony Benn was unconvinced that any of it really mattered: ‘Some 1,800 British settlers do not constitute a domestic population whose views can be taken seriously, or rather whose views can be allowed to lead us into war.’
There was some uncertainty quite what the mood would be when the House of Commons convened the next day for an unscheduled Saturday sitting to debate the situation. Thatcher spoke first, aware that she had a great deal of ground to make up, that having British territory invaded on her watch did not enhance her status as prime minister. ‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,’ she said, sounding a Churchillian note that would become very familiar. ‘They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.’ She announced that a military and naval task force was already being assembled that would shortly depart for the South Atlantic, though there was no indication whether or not it was expected to see action. It was Michael Foot’s response, however, that won the greatest praise from the government benches; in the absence of his foreign spokesman, Denis Healey (away on a trip to Greece), Foot was notably bellicose: ‘There is the longer-term interest to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands but to people all over this dangerous planet.’ Edward du Cann, chairman of the Tory backbenchers, promptly congratulated him: ‘The leader of the opposition spoke for us all.’
Support from his own side was less forthcoming for Foot. From the right, Callaghan thought that ‘it was important to find a way out, short of a full-scale amphibious assault with all the casualties that might accompany it.’ From the left, Benn made a political calculation: ‘We should not tie the Labour Party to Thatcher’s collapse. Public opinion would shift very quickly if there was a humiliation.’ And the Old Etonian maverick Tam Dalyell, who predicted that ‘the Falklands could become a British Vietnam in the South Atlantic’, challenged his leader soon after the debate, only to be slapped down: ‘I know a fascist when I see one,’ snapped Foot, for whom memories of Franco and Hitler were still fresh.
The Conservative Party too was split, though, as was its fashion, it didn’t parade its divisions in public in quite the same way as Labour. As the task force spent the next few weeks sailing towards the Falklands, and as American-led negotiations ground away into futility, there were many who saw an opportunity finally to be rid of Thatcher, the leader who had aroused such hostility within her own party. ‘They are within an ace, they think, of bringing her government down,’ seethed Alan Clark. ‘If by some miracle the expedition succeeds they know, and dread, that she will be established for ever as a national hero. So, regardless of the country’s interest, they are determined that the expedition will not succeed.’ The journalist John Cole also noted a reluctance to follow through the military option: ‘I estimated towards the end of April that up to one-fifth of Conservative MPs wanted a diplomatic settlement on the best terms Francis Pym could negotiate.’ Pym, Thatcher’s greatest rival, was now foreign secretary, replacing Lord Carrington who had resigned in the immediate aftermath of the Argentine invasion, and was thus in pole position for the race to succeed, should the venture end in disaster.
In the event, these doubts in the darker corners of Westminster counted for little, for the nation took to the prospect of conflict with much greater alacrity than many predicted. ‘In a strange way the British people had decided that they were not going to be pushed around by Argentina,’ remembered William Whitelaw, and he was perfectly correct. Partly the public response was determined by the nature of the enemy. The military dictatorships that were then so characteristic of South America had long been perceived with a vague but nonetheless real suspicion, as summed up in ‘Blood Sports’, a 1980 episode of the television drama series The Professionals: ‘The haves have it all; the peasants have what they stand up in,’ says George Cowley (Gordon Jackson), describing an unnamed Latin American country, and Bodie (Lewis Collins) snorts, ‘Maybe they should try democracy.’ But there was also the feeling that Britain had had about as much as it could take of decline, and that it was time to assert its historical power.
There were, of course, many who opposed what seemed increasingly likely to be a military conflict – an anti-war demonstration organized by CND attracted quarter of a million people – but their voices were scarcely heard as a kind of war fever gripped the country from top to bottom. Conservative MP Matthew Parris missed the Saturday debate, being in his constituency: ‘When I did return to Westminster on Monday, something seemed to have come over the whole place. All other concerns were forgotten, all other business relegated. It was as though we were fighting for our national life.’ Similarly Roy Greenslade, features editor at the Sun, was away on holiday at the time of the invasion. When he suggested on his return that the whole enterprise was stupid, he was sharply rebuked by Wendy Henry, one of his journalists: ‘You’ll have to watch that. That’s a very unpopular view to hold round here.’ And, despite some assumptions, it wasn’t just older generations who were affected; an opinion poll at the time showed that ‘young people were more in favour of military action than were their elders’. Even so, there was not quite the hysteria that critics claimed, for there were plenty capable of keeping a sense of perspective. Jim Davidson, a working-class London comedian who was the alternative to alternative comedy and whose enthusiasm for the Falklanders’ cause was greater even than that of Thatcher herself, was then a director of Bournemouth football club. He remembered being in the boardroom at half-time during a match against Wigan when news came through that HMS Sheffield had been hit, the first British loss: ‘After the newsflash, everyone just started quietly talking again, and carried on nattering about football,’ he wrote in horror. ‘I couldn’t believe that they had just pushed the news to one side.’ The headlines might be dominated by a nation at war, but everyday life continued as normal.
Of these various responses, it was the one represented by Wendy Henry that was to prove most controversial in the long-term. Indeed it was Henry’s reaction to the news that the first Argentine ship had been hit that was to provide the most famous headline of the decade, the one word GOTCHA. Unfortunately, by the time the paper reached the newsstands, it had become clear that the cruiser General Belgrano had been not merely hit, but sunk with a loss of over three hundred lives. Subsequent editions changed the headline, but it remained long in the memory to symbolize what some saw as the over-jingoist, blood-lustful attitude of the right-wing press, and particularly of the Sun, ‘the lunatic nationalistic pride’ that was later condemned by Admiral Sandy Woodward, the commander of the task force. Much of the rest of the Sun’s coverage, however, was no more than crudely humorous – including offers of T-shirts bearing slogans like STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA and BUENOS AIRES IS FULL OF FAIRIES – and, though some doubted the taste of such jokes in the face of a real war, there was truth in David Owen’s analysis that it should be seen ‘more as an amusing morale booster than a sign that jingoism was running rife in the UK’. In this light, it was perhaps not much different to Flanagan and Allen singing ‘We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ or Spike Jones and His City Slickers laughing at ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ during an earlier conflict.
It was also noticeable that, despite its gung-ho fervour, the Sun actually lost sales during the course of the Falklands War, while the Guardian, which remained steadfastly sceptical about the whole episode, increased its readership. But with only sporadic and partial information being received from the South Atlantic, the media coverage became a major part of the story. In particular the BBC came under fierce attack for refusing to refer to ‘our ships’ rather than ‘British ships’, and was condemned by the right for aspiring to impartiality: ‘The elaborate even-handedness jarred cruelly with those whose lives were at risk, with those of us who took ultimate responsibility for committing our forces, and with the general public,’ wrote Norman Tebbit. But he was wrong, on the last count at least; a survey revealed that 81 per cent of the country approved of the BBC coverage. And Prince Charles, delivering a speech to the Open University, made it clear that so too did he. Nor was it only liberal-inclined commentators who were prepared to utter uncomfortable truths even during the conflict: ‘If the Falkland Islanders were British citizens with black or brown skins, spoke with strange accents or worshipped different gods,’ wrote Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘it is doubtful whether the Royal Navy and Marines would today be fighting for their liberation.’
In military terms, it was a far from straightforward operation. To begin with, there was the sheer distance involved. The Falklands were some eight thousand miles away and although there was a British territory, Ascension Island, around the halfway point that could be used as a staging post, the base there was on lease to America. Even when permission for its use had been given, the facility still required a major refit to cope with the traffic it would have to handle, and it remained sufficiently distant to mean that any planes flying to the South Atlantic would require mid-air refuelling: to launch a raid against the airfields in southern Argentina that were supplying the invading forces, it was calculated that seventy-six refuelling tankers would need to take to the skies to service a flight of four bombers. Establishing air superiority was always going to be a problem. Control of the seas was less so, though even here there were serious dangers: the task force included not only vessels of the Royal Navy, but also the cruise liners Queen Elizabeth II and Canberra, pressed into service as troop ships – they had hurriedly been fitted with some defences, but remained desperately vulnerable. Beyond that there was the ultimate issue of staging a landing on the Falklands. The only real objective was Stanley, the capital of the Islands (now renamed Puerto Argentina by the occupiers); if that could be captured then it was assumed the war would be won. But Stanley had been heavily fortified, there were still many civilians living there, and the British assault force was vastly outnumbered by Argentine troops.
There were also political considerations. World opinion was overwhelmingly on Britain’s side – a United Nations resolution had unequivocally condemned the Argentine invasion, and support was also forthcoming from NATO and from the European Community – but that could change in the event of protracted hostilities. So too could support at home, where there was nervousness in the highest quarters. ‘A lot of my job,’ recalled Sir Terence Lewin, the chief of the defence staff, ‘was trying to give the cabinet confidence that the services would deliver what they said they could deliver, because we hadn’t had a war for a long time.’ Even those with military experience themselves – William Whitelaw and Francis Pym had fought in the Second World War, and John Nott, the defence secretary, had served as a Gurkha officer in Borneo – expressed doubts at various points of the campaign. It was mainly to address these concerns that the first operation was the retaking of South Georgia, a militarily insignificant target but one where victory might produce a morale-boosting propaganda victory. So it was to prove: a naval bombardment was followed by the Argentine troops surrendering even as British troops were landing. Asked to comment, Thatcher was visibly relieved that the operation had gone so well. ‘Rejoice!’ she replied. ‘Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces.’ The papers duly obliged, with the headlines reading: REJOICE! REJOICE!
A week later the hostilities commenced in earnest. A series of long-range bombing raids from Ascension Island, further than any comparable mission that had ever been undertaken, saw the airport at Stanley hit, though not put decisively out of action. The General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine – causing some controversy amongst those who were opposed to the war, since the ship was, despite initial government claims, not within the exclusion zone that had been declared around the Islands – and then, two days later, the Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile. The fact that this latter was an aerial attack was a sobering revelation: it was known that Argentina possessed Exocets, not that it had the capability of firing them from its Etendard aircraft.
Back in Britain, news of these initial engagements was sporadic. The journalists who had sailed with the task force were severely limited in the reports they were able to send, since communications were dependent entirely on the military, whose priorities seldom coincided with those of the press. There was no live television coverage and footage – even photographs in many instances – could only be sent back by boat; unlike Vietnam, and certainly unlike the conflict in Kuwait at the end of the decade, this was not a media war. Instead the country was reliant on the press conferences given daily by the ministry of defence, whose official spokesman, Ian McDonald, became a familiar figure, slowly and carefully intoning the limited information that the government deemed appropriate to share with the public; he was frequently compared to a speak-your-weight machine in tribute to the dryness of his delivery.
Finally (as it seemed to those at home) on 21 May, seven weeks after the Argentine invasion, and following ten days of heavy bombardment from air and sea, British troops landed on the Falklands, establishing a bridge head at San Carlos on the west coast of East Falkland, some sixty-five miles away from Stanley. Over the next couple of days, with the fleet now in close proximity, four more British ships were lost to Argentine attack. Where the Argentine air force was proving highly effective, however, the troops on the ground were much less so. In the most celebrated battle of the war, four hundred and fifty men of the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment recaptured the settlement at Goose Green in the face of an Argentine force that outnumbered them by nearly four to one. Amongst the sixty-four British troops who lost their lives in the engagement was the battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert ‘H’ Jones, who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Again the target was not of great military relevance – it lay some way south of the route from San Carlos to Stanley – but again it was a major propaganda victory, establishing the over whelming superiority of the British troops over their Argentine counterparts.
There was one major reverse to come: an Argentine air attack on the landing craft Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram in Bluff Cove cost nearly a hundred dead and injured in Britain’s worst day of casualties. It was not sufficient to halt the advance on Stanley, however. On 13 June British forces took the key defensive positions around the capital, most famously Tumbledown Mountain, and on the following day white flags were raised in the town to signify the final Argentine surrender.
All through the protracted build-up to hostilities, there had been considerable doubt about the possibilities for success of the mission, and the Sunday Times was not alone in warning that to try to regain the Falklands by force would be ‘a short cut to bloody disaster’. In the aftermath, however, following what had been a remarkably swift and efficient operation, there were some on the left quick to downplay the significance of the achievement. ‘After thirty-seven years of post-war decline, Britain had finally been able to beat the hell out of a country smaller, weaker and even worse governed than we were,’ wrote Ken Livingstone, while Labour MP Joe Ashton belittled the endeavour with a football metaphor: ‘the equivalent of Arsenal beating Brentford’. These judgements were less than fair. Britain was certainly a stronger country militarily, but this was primarily because it was a nuclear power, possessing weapons that were of no use in this conflict at all, and in the name of which the conventional forces had been starved of funds. (The fact that a non-nuclear nation was prepared to invade British territory, some felt, somewhat undermined the argument for a nuclear-based defence policy.) The Argentine forces occupying the islands were far from negligible, the enemy air force was formidable, and the proximity of the mainland gave them support that the British troops lacked; even if they had been the equivalent of Brentford, they were at least playing at home.
The political risk too was considerable. Had British losses been much higher than the 258 fatalities that were sustained, if, say, all the Argentine shells that hit British ships had exploded, it would have become increasingly difficult to retain support in the country. And anything less than military victory would surely have ended Thatcher’s premiership, so totally had she identified herself with the war. While some in her cabinet had wavered, displayed signs of hesitancy as military action became ever more probable, she had remained firm, insisting that this was a defining moment in British history. Her attitude was summed up in an exchange with Alexander Haig, the American secretary of state, when she pointed out that the desk at which she sat was the same one used by a predecessor when abandoning Czechoslovakia to its fate in 1938: it was a mistake she was determined not to repeat, for her model was very definitely Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain.
The fact that the conflict could not be mentioned without evoking her image was, of course, one of the reasons why the left was so damaged by the Falklands. At the time, few Western nations had much experience of war since 1945, and those that did had hardly covered themselves in glory as they pursued colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial adventures, whether it was France in Algeria, Britain in Suez or the USA in Vietnam. The Falklands was different: a rapid, decisive response to invasion by a foreign power. And it had Thatcher’s name all over it. She ensured that this remained the situation, taking the salute at the victory parade in London, making an early visit to the Islands, and referring to it in seemingly every speech for years to come. ‘We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,’ she told a rally that summer, and this was essentially the interpretation of the war that most of the nation shared. ‘We fought with the support of so many throughout the world,’ she added, though she was unable to resist the Churchillian echoes of 1940: ‘Yet we also fought alone.’
And perhaps it really was her finest hour. What had previously been seen as terrible political faults – her stubbornness in following her own course, her refusal to listen to other points of view – were now magically transformed into the greatest of her virtues: rigidity had become resolution, pig-headedness had become perseverance. The Falklands defined Thatcher, in the eyes of her supporters and detractors alike, both for the three hundred thousand people who turned out for the victory parade and for the band Crass, whose single asked: ‘How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead?’ Just as the Falklands without Thatcher came to be unthinkable, so too did Thatcher without the Falklands.
The other reason why the successful outcome of the war so demoralized the left was that the campaign had exposed an uncomfortable truth. In the Labour Party, wrote John O’Farrell, the war ‘split activists directly along class lines: working-class members in favour and middle-class members against. On reflection the same split happened in my family: Dad who put HP sauce on his chops was in favour, Mum who put mint sauce on hers was against.’ Or, as Julie Burchill pointed out rather more provocatively in The Face at the time: ‘the left will have to learn that craven pacifism does not appeal at all to the proletariat.’ The internal problems of Labour – its arguments over party democracy, the departure of the SDP, the deputy leadership contest – had already served to alienate many of the party’s natural voters; now Thatcher’s unashamed populism seemed likely to draw off yet more support. Despite Foot’s enthusiastic support for the government’s actions, Labour benefited not at all, for Foot was still seen as the man from CND, leading a party that was openly split on the correct response to the Argentine actions. Even after the surrender, the continuing controversy over the way the government had lied about the position and course of the General Belgrano when it was sunk (which Tam Dalyell, in particular, turned into a long-running crusade) did more to harm Labour than the Conservatives, since any mention merely gave the Tories the opportunity to talk yet again about the Falklands victory. And anyway, as Alan Clark pointed out: ‘What does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it’d been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted.’ His assessment was undoubtedly correct: for most people, the facts that the country was at war and that an enemy cruiser had been torpedoed were sufficient.
In the more rarefied circles of the left, the explosion of public patriotism and flag-waving was considered to be so vulgar as to be unacceptable in polite society. ‘Now they are singing “Britannia Rules the Waves” outside Downing Street,’ shuddered Alan Bennett in his diary on the day of the Argentine surrender. ‘It’s the Last Night of the Proms erected into a policy.’ The novelist Salman Rushdie, meanwhile, could not help returning to the imagery of the governess: ‘Hers are the politics of the Victorian nursery: if somebody pinches you, you take their trousers down and thrash them.’ But elsewhere the Falklands entered British mythology with little difficulty. In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses an expatriate south Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: ‘The stench of defeat’s everywhere,’ he says. ‘The old place has got no guts anymore.’ And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: ‘Somebody else said that a little while ago. A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.’
One other consequence of the war was, inevitably, a legacy of suspicion between the two nations involved. In popular terms, this was symbolized by the meeting of England and Argentina in the quarter-final of the football World Cup in 1986. Footballing relations had been poor for twenty years, since a controversial encounter in the 1966 tournament, but the Falklands had given an added edge, as seen in the Sun’s front-page headline on the day of the match: IT’S WAR SENOR!, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media. The fact that Argentina went on to win with two contrasting goals by Diego Maradona in the space of five minutes – the first a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century – did nothing to restore harmony between the rival supporters, though the Sun did have the wit to echo its earlier headline: OUTCHA! Maradona became the great pantomime villain for England supporters (and something of a hero for Scotland fans), particularly since he offered no apology for cheating on the first goal, explaining that it was scored ‘a little with the hand of Maradona and a little with the hand of God’, but his attitude was not unprecedented. As a player with Barcelona, he had faced Manchester United in the 1984 Cup-Winners’ Cup and made it perfectly clear where he stood: ‘I would want to beat the English, even if we were playing marbles,’ he declared. ‘I am very much Argentinean.’ (His relationship with English fans might have been different had Sheffield United been successful in their attempt to lure him to Bramall Lane in 1978.)
The tense relationship also surfaced, more unexpectedly, in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library, in which the central character, William Beckwith, cruises a young Latin-American in a bar and only discovers back in the man’s hotel room that he’s Argentinean. ‘But what about the war?’ he asks, and his pick-up, Gabriel, hastens to reassure him. ‘That’s all right,’ he says. ‘You can suck my big cock.’ Even so the subject can’t be entirely avoided, and later on Gabriel suggests, ‘I could whip you for what you did to my country in the war.’ But Beckwith demurs: ‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ he replies.
In the real political world, it was clearly the Tories who emerged victorious from the war. On the eve of the Argentine invasion, the polls had showed all three parties running neck-and-neck, but a by-election in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, conducted during the fighting, showed which way the wind was blowing. It produced the only by-election swing to the Tories of the entire decade as they retained a safe seat; the Alliance did increase their share of the vote, but only at the expense of the Labour candidate, who, despite being a personable young moderate named Tony Blair, managed to lose 10 percentage points and his deposit. Thatcher, having recorded the lowest-ever satisfaction rating for a prime minister – just 25 per cent of the population – now saw that figure climb above 50 per cent; she was still a long way short of the 79 per cent once achieved by Harold Macmillan, but it was a major improvement.
When, in the aftermath of victory, Thatcher called an early general election for June 1983, she was condemned in some quarters for riding on the army’s coat-tails but no one was greatly surprised. There were, after all, few other concrete achievements on which the Conservatives could call. Certainly the worst of the recession was over – indeed, in technical terms the economy was no longer in recession at all, since gross domestic product was now on the rise, though it had not yet returned to the levels of 1979 – and inflation had been falling for over a year, reaching a fifteen-year-low by the election. But the recovery was hardly built on the most secure foundations. Immediately following the Falklands, the government had stimulated a consumer boom by abolishing hire-purchase restrictions and other credit regulations, encouraging the public to spend its way out of recession, and there were some who argued that the resultant feelgood factor was not sustainable, since the collapse of manufacturing meant that this demand was soaked up in imports. (Interest rates went up immediately after the election.) Others were keen to point out that the economic improvement came as a result of the abandonment of monetarism – the money supply grew well beyond the stated targets as billions of pounds were pumped into the economy – and from an unplanned devaluation of the pound, both of which had long been policies advocated by Peter Shore, the Labour Party’s shadow chancellor. It was not entirely clear, some reflected, what the monetarist experiment had achieved: despite the benefits of North Sea oil, the recession in Britain had been longer and deeper than in comparable countries that imported their fuel.
Even so, for most of the population the twelve-month period leading up to the election was a welcome relief from the dark days of 1981, and the government could reasonably claim that the corner had been turned. ‘National recovery has begun,’ claimed the Conservative manifesto, and set out what it called the stark choice for the country: ‘either to continue our present steadfast progress towards recovery, or to follow polices more extreme and more damaging than those ever put forward by any previous opposition.’ The Thatcherite project was presented as a work in progress, with the good times soon to come. ‘The rewards are beginning to appear,’ urged the manifesto. ‘If we continue on our present course with courage and commonsense, those rewards should multiply in the next five years.’
Thatcher’s boldest political move during the campaign was to skate over the fact that the numbers of the unemployed had officially reached three million. Unemployment had been such a huge factor in British politics since the 1930s, and particularly as the dole queues had so relentlessly lengthened in the last few years, that it seemed heretical to pay it so little attention. Yet Thatcher’s calculation proved to be entirely correct; a Gallup poll in 1983 showed that only 13 per cent of the electorate were themselves hit by unemployment, and by the time of the election, as Labour MP Austin Mitchell pointed out: ‘The standard of living of those in employment had risen since 1979. The national decline in living standards was wholly concentrated on the unemployed. An issue Labour was counting on to turn the people against the government had also turned them against each other.’
The election campaign was marked by an overwhelming vote of confidence in the government from Fleet Street. The Mirror Group papers were the only ones to endorse Labour (if not its policies) throughout the campaign, though the Guardian, Observer and Daily Star at least remained neutral until the last few days. All the others enthusiastically backed the Tories, who could thus count on the support of daily newspaper sales of 11.4 million, somewhere around 75 per cent of circulation, massively out of proportion to the share of the vote they would win. And the coverage in those papers was personal in a way that it had never previously been, much of it targeted directly at Michael Foot. Clive James in the Observer called him ‘a floppy toy on Benzedrine,’ while the Sunday Telegraph referred to him as ‘an elderly, ranting pamphleteer waving a stick in Hampstead’. The Sun settled for ‘an amiable old buffer, his jacket buttoned too tight, his collar askew, his grey hair falling lankly,’ while its headline summed up the general Fleet Street attitude: DO YOU SERIOUSLY WANT THIS OLD MAN TO RUN BRITAIN?
Apart from personal abuse, the other line of attack was the accusation that Foot was just the front man. ‘The party’s leftwing wanted Michael Foot as a figurehead, a ventriloquist’s dummy who would repeat whatever message was fed into his head,’ insisted the Sun. ‘In him they found a willing dupe.’ In a subsequent attack they identified THE LEFTIES WHO WOULD RUN BRITAIN IF LABOUR WON POWER THIS WEEK naming all the usual suspects – Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Arthur Scargill – as well as trying out a few new names, including Michael Meacher and Paul Boateng, neither of whom ever graduated to become serious bogeyman figures.
In any event, the Labour campaign was disastrous: thoroughly disorganized, focused on preaching to the faithful in public meetings rather than to the unconverted through the media, and with a spectacular level of disunity that allowed a hostile press to focus on disarmament and Europe to the exclusion of more core themes: unemployment, health and education. When Labour did try to concentrate on these issues, Thatcher effortlessly turned the spotlight back on their weak points, so that when Denis Healey accused the Tories of trying to dismantle the NHS, Thatcher’s response was that she had ‘no more intention of dismantling the National Health Service than I have of dismantling Britain’s defences’. Even worse was James Callaghan’s contribution: he considered an election campaign the ideal time to air again his view that his party’s defence policy was dangerous nonsense.
Nor was the campaign helped when two front-bench spokespeople, Healey and Neil Kinnock, broke ranks and made off-the-cuff comments about the Falklands that were seized upon by the newspapers; Healey suggested that Thatcher ‘glories in slaughter’, while Kinnock replied to a comment that ‘Mrs Thatcher’s got guts’ with a quip that didn’t really work: ‘It’s a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green in order to prove it.’ Back on safer, if less specific, ground, Kinnock redeemed himself a little with a magnificent speech at the end of the campaign, denouncing what he saw as Thatcher’s abuse of power, ‘toughened by Tebbitry and flattered and fawned upon by spineless sycophants, the boot-licking tabloid knights of Fleet Street and placemen in the quangos.’ He went on: ‘If Mrs Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.’
Elsewhere, the Alliance campaign suffered from having two leaders, Roy Jenkins and David Steel, with the former nominated as prime minister designate in the highly unlikely event that they won power. He was undoubtedly the senior figure, but did little to enthuse the electorate outside north London; Steel, despite having no ministerial experience at all, was by far the more popular, offering the kind of clean start that many sought from the centre alternative. The combination of the two men was attractive to some, but confusing to many more.
And Thatcher, secure in the knowledge that the opposition was fatally split, proceeded serenely around the country, giving a masterclass in how to stage-manage an election campaign. Her progress culminated in a rally for youth staged at Wembley that attracted a 2,500-strong audience, consumed by wild enthusiasm. ‘It will be seen as a remarkably adept piece of political salesmanship,’ judged The Times, though the ‘youth’ theme was perhaps overstretching things a little: the comperes were Bob Monkhouse and Jimmy Tarbuck, with a combined age of ninety-eight, while the only pop star they could attract was Lynsey de Paul, who hadn’t troubled the top ten in nearly a decade; she debuted a new number entitled ‘Tory, Tory, Tory’. Also attending was a motley collection of sports figures including swimmer Sharron Davies, judo champion Brian Jacks, Arsenal manager Terry Neill, boxer Alan Minter and world snooker champion Steve Davis. ‘That was probably my biggest mistake, getting involved in that,’ reflected the last, five years on. ‘It was bad for my image.’ The most famous contribution came from disc jockey and comedian Kenny Everett, whose jocular suggestions (‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away’, ‘Let’s bomb Russia’) attracted much adverse criticism. ‘Mr Everett may be the foolish face of Toryism. But his audience was the ugly one,’ reflected the Daily Mirror. ‘The kind of mind which enjoys rightwing extremist support is the kind of mind that laughs at Mr Everett.’ The criticisms were met head-on by Thatcher. ‘They were just cheering because they were having tremendous fun,’ she retorted. ‘I really just begin to wonder what has happened to a British sense of humour.’ It was an interesting reversal of what was perceived to be her own humourless nature.
(It wasn’t noted at the time, but little of this was new, even in the choice of venue. Back in September 1964 Harold Wilson had launched Labour’s election campaign with a rally at what was then called the Empire Pool, Wembley, with contributions by a Welsh male-voice choir, Vanessa Redgrave, Harry H. Corbett – in his sitcom incarnation as Harold Steptoe – and Humphrey Lyttelton’s Jazz Band.)
When the returns came in, they showed a low turnout – always a sign that the result is a foregone conclusion – and a landslide victory for the Conservatives in terms of parliamentary seats, with a majority of 144 over all other parties, though its share of the vote actually went down slightly from 1979, and was even lower than Alec Douglas-Home had achieved when losing in 1964 to Wilson. The Alliance, cheated as third parties tend to be by the electoral system, got 25.4 per cent of the vote and just 3.5 per cent of the seats, the main losers in the partnership being the SDP who returned only six MPs, a far cry from the twenty-nine with which it had gone into the election. But the real story was the humiliating disaster that befell the Labour Party; for a moment during the campaign it looked as though it might even slip behind the Alliance in terms of the popular vote and, though it avoided that calamity, it ended up just two percentage points in front.
The scale of the débâcle was frightening. Under the electoral rules of the time, a candidate needed to secure 12.5 per cent of the constituency vote in order to retain his or her deposit: Labour lost its deposit in 119 seats, more than one in six of those contested, most of them in the south, where the party had virtually disappeared. By way of comparison, it had lost a total of eighty-four deposits in the previous eleven general elections, and in 1983 the Alliance lost just twelve deposits and the Tories only five. Looked at another way, Labour got a lower average vote per candidate than at any election since 1900. Even amongst its core support, little was certain: Labour won the support of only 39 per cent of trade unionists, with the Tories hard on their heels on 32 per cent, while in Wales the party won just 38 per cent of the votes, where in 1960 it had topped 60 per cent. Bryan Gould, who had lost his Southampton seat in 1979, was one of the lucky ones, returning to the Commons for the Dagenham constituency, where a previous candidate ‘had in one post-war election campaigned on the slogan “Give him a 40,000 majority”’; Gould got a majority of under three thousand.
Unless one were a hardcore Thatcherite, the election was a catastrophe, not merely for the Labour Party, but for the country that was clearly going to be deprived of an effective opposition for another four or five years. But given the behaviour of the previous period, and given the appallingly inept campaign, only the most absurdly optimistic Labour supporter could have expected anything different. There was at least one. ‘The Alliance is beginning to grow at the expense of the Tories,’ wrote Tony Benn, a week before polling day, ‘and it is possible that enough Tories will vote for the Alliance to allow Labour to slip in.’ He was wrong, and in the wipe-out he himself lost the seat which he had held – with a brief interruption while he fought to renounce his peerage – since 1950. Re-entering a world outside parliament was fraught with small difficulties, as the former postmaster general discovered to his horror that ‘the cost of stamps is astronomical’. There was a brief consolation when he indulged his love of gadgets to buy an answerphone – ‘an absolutely amazing invention’ – before he realized it was ‘also a bit of a curse because you have to ring people back, and that increases the phone bill.’ The following month he found that his telephones had been cut off; in the disruption to his routine, he had forgotten to pay the bill.
Benn’s defeat was the highest-profile loss of the election, and seemed entirely appropriate to the occasion. The party had fought on a platform of his devizing – had he been the leader, the manifesto would have remained the same – and it had been comprehensively routed. But still, Benn’s optimism remained undimmed: ‘for the first time since 1945 a political party with an openly socialist policy had received the support of over 8½ million people,’ he wrote triumphantly in the Guardian. But it wasn’t the best image to evoke, for in 1945, with a much smaller electorate, the Labour vote stood at just under twelve million; in the intervening years, the party had fallen 22 percentage points in the share of the vote. A more accurate appraisal came from Austin Mitchell, who wrote of Labour ‘rescuing disaster from the jaws of defeat’. And there could be little argument with Alan Clark’s gleeful summary: ‘a government majority of 140 and no opposition of any kind in sight.’