Authoritative, Mr Kinnock is not. But nobody should underestimate his appeal – especially to women and to young voters. The freckle-faced scamp with a heart of gold is a cliché of the silver screen.
Daily Mail (1984)
Who will be watching football in ten years’ time?
Terry Cooper, player-manager of Bristol City (1984)
British industry looks more and more like a museum, with old, rusty equipment and men in overalls looking like creatures from a past industrial era.
Tony Benn (1984)
Its official title was The New Hope for Britain, but the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1983 election is best remembered by the phrase used by Gerald Kaufman to describe it: ‘The longest suicide note in history.’ In fact, it wasn’t quite as lengthy as that suggests – around 20,000 words, compared to the 25,000 words in the manifesto prepared by the Sheffield Labour Party for the local government elections in the same year – but it was remarkably wide-ranging, covering policies on everything from forestry to the Falkland Islands, from a minimum wage to water-based sports. Or, as Roy Hattersley put it, ‘it only seemed interminable’. The accusation at the time was that the manifesto was of such an extreme left-wing nature that it was bound to alienate voters, particularly on withdrawal from Europe without a new referendum, on further nationalization of industry, and on defence (though the actual wording on the latter showed signs of a fudge that was never destined to hold: ‘Unilateralism and multilateralism must go hand in hand if either is to succeed’). It was, in short, a rounding up of every last detail of The Policies, with little regard for coherence or priority.
And yet by this stage the left had already suffered key setbacks: the 1981 defeat for Tony Benn in the deputy leadership contest had been followed at the 1982 conference by a clutch of right-wing victories in the elections to the National Executive Committee. Benn himself had lost the chairmanship of the NEC’s home policy committee, which he had held for eight years and which had been the base of his power within the party; he had been replaced by John Golding, an MP who was also a senior trade unionist and very much on the right of the party – he was said to regard political theory as being ‘in the same league as crossword puzzles’. Which left a query about why the manifesto, this ‘list of meaningless promises’, as Peter Shore called it, was so readily adopted by the new regime. And the answer appeared to be that, along with most of the country, Golding realized that the election was lost even before the polling date was announced, and had concluded that the strategic interests of the Labour Party were best served by blaming the defeat on the left: ‘Why not lose it on Benn’s terms and teach him a lesson?’ as he said to Hattersley.
If that wildly risky slash-and-burn tactic suggested that the right had regained control of the party, the public were hardly aware of the development. Indeed the immediate aftermath of the election suggested that normal business was being resumed. Michael Foot was obviously expected to step down as leader, given his age and the humiliating nature of the defeat, but he was not accorded the courtesy of announcing the move himself; instead Clive Jenkins, leader of the ASTMS union, informed the media that Foot was resigning and that his union would support Neil Kinnock as the successor. Other unions swiftly joined in, declaring for Kinnock, frequently without balloting their members, and the race was as good as won almost before the starting-pistol had been fired. Other candidates did enter – Hattersley, Shore and, in the absence from parliament of Benn, Eric Heffer for the left – though none of them had a hope of winning, and the impression given was that Labour remained firmly under the control of the trades unions, as Heffer pointed out: ‘Prominent trade union leaders had decided who would get the job in advance of the election being declared.’ Nor did the fact that Kinnock’s major backers were Jenkins and Moss Evans, leader of the TGWU, both of them Welsh, as was Kinnock, offer much point of contact with the southern English seats that Labour needed to win. (Kinnock was the third leader in a row to represent a Welsh constituency.)
In the SDP there was also a backstage coup to remove the incumbent leader. Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers had failed to keep their seats – in the case of Williams, it was for the second general election in a row – and David Owen simply informed Roy Jenkins that it was time for a change. Rather than engage in a divisive contest, and probably lose, Jenkins stood aside and Owen finally became the leader of a party, even if he did only have five MPs sitting alongside him. David Steel too decided to stand down as leader of the Liberals, but was talked out of it by his colleagues, and instead took a short sabbatical from politics.
So comprehensive was Margaret Thatcher’s victory, then, that she came close to an extraordinary triple-crown performance that would have seen the departure of the leaders of all three opposition parties. Instead she had to comfort herself with finally seeing off the man once considered her principal rival. Francis Pym had taken a step too far during the campaign when he asked the voters not to give the Conservatives too big a majority (‘Landslides, on the whole, do not produce successful governments,’ he pointed out on the BBC programme Question Time), and after the inevitable landslide he was removed from the front-bench. Thatcher’s own position now seemed virtually unchallengeable. The successes in the Falklands and then at the ballot-box, combined with an opposition that was still divided, left her stronger than any prime minister for decades, at least within the political classes in Westminster, Whitehall and Fleet Street. In the country, it was a more mixed picture. She was still more admired than loved, and still as hated as she was admired, but she sailed on regardless, untouched by those who refused to agree with her.
She was untouched too by the caricatures that became more savage, and more personal, as her authority grew. Most famously there was Spitting Image (1984), an ITV series created by Peter Fluck, Roger Law and Martin Lambie-Nairn which featured grotesque puppets caricaturing public figures and appearing in short, satirical sketches. Much of the early media outrage was reserved for the very fact of the programme’s existence, and for its irreverent treatment of the royal family – TV’S CRUELLEST SHOW TAKES A SWIPE AT THE QUEEN MOTHER, revealed a horrified Daily Mirror – but over the next few years it became the main purveyor of satire to the nation, popular enough to provide the cast with a No. 1 single in the shape of ‘The Chicken Song’ in 1986 (the second No. 1 to rhyme ‘Eskimo’ with ‘Arapahoe’, to the delight of those who wrote trivia questions). It was, however, somewhat hit or miss: the puppets, everyone was agreed, were magnificent, but it took some time for the quality of the jokes to catch up. And it was never quite certain that the attacks were very well directed: Thatcher was initially depicted as a ranting bully dressed in a man’s suit, but the portrayal did her no harm, since it merely emphasized her strength, an attribute that was much vaunted by her supporters.
Nor did the parody in the film Whoops Apocalypse (1986) hurt her, though possibly this was because it failed to attract much of an audience. The film starred Peter Cook as a fictional prime minister Sir Mortimer Chris, who wins a minor conflict in Latin America and then goes mad, denying that unemployment is caused by his government’s policies, and arguing instead that it’s the work of ‘pixies, sprites, elfin folk, all manner of goblinery’. But he has a solution: if ten thousand workers jump off a cliff every week, it will create ten thousand new jobs. And so popular has he become that the proposal is greeted with enthusiasm. ‘Well, I think he’s bloody marvellous. He brought us through the war, and I think he can do the same for the economy,’ says one of those just about to be sacrificed. ‘I’m proud to leap to my certain death for Britain.’ As Sir Mortimer puts it: ‘A prime minister has to be resolute. But you can’t be resolute without showing you’re strong. And you can’t show you’re strong without blowing people up.’
This was, despite the attacks, the economic highpoint of Thatcher’s period as prime minister. The repeated claims that she wanted to build a land fit for entrepreneurs finally appeared to be bearing fruit and, if some worried that the success stories seemed to be based in the retail, services and financial sectors while manufacturing was still struggling, their opinions were mostly lost in the media babble of voices belonging to those who were making more money, and paying less tax, than for a very long time. And it wasn’t simply the rich who were celebrating; for the most part, the middle classes and the upper sections of the working classes also benefited in financial terms, even if this was largely based on the way that credit, in terms of both cards and mortgages, had become easier to obtain than ever before.
Of the personnel changes in parliament, the most significant was the arrival of Kinnock since, despite the continuing threat of the Alliance, Labour was still the only plausible alternative government in the short term. Despite his alleged apostasy in the deputy leadership contest, when he had abstained rather than vote for Benn, Kinnock was considered to be on the left, and an enormous amount of faith was vested in him as the man who could reverse the party’s declining fortunes. He won the leadership by a huge margin in the electoral college, but closer analysis revealed a worrying inconsistency: he secured large majorities amongst the trades union and constituency sections, but fewer than half the MPs voted for him, and conspicuous amongst those who looked elsewhere were not only the rival candidates but other senior figures in the parliamentary party, including James Callaghan, Denis Healey, Gerald Kaufman, Merlyn Rees and John Smith. He did enjoy the support of two newly elected MPs of whom big things were expected – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair – but his shadow cabinet was necessarily formed of people who not only had a good deal more experience than he had of government (for he had none), but had also in the main voted against him, leaving him a sometimes isolated figure: ‘He was widely regarded by his senior colleagues as a lightweight,’ remembered his former trade and industry spokesperson, Bryan Gould. ‘He had few friends he could trust.’
The press picked up on this insecurity and exploited Kinnock’s perceived immaturity to great effect. FUNNYMAN KINNOCK IS JESTER A BORN LOSER, said the Sun, insisting that he was out of his depth, however likeable he appeared, however good his jokes were. The attacks were seen to hurt, for he seemed remarkably thin-skinned for a senior politician, and were therefore redoubled. Gould met him one evening in 1984, after he ‘had had a few drinks’ and ‘was dismayed at what I saw of his state of mind. It was clear that media criticism was getting to him. He talked of throwing it all in.’ As Healey remarked to Hattersley: ‘It’s all right for us. We’ve been up to our eyes in shit for years. He’s not used to it.’ Nor was his cause helped by his first photo-opportunity as leader; walking along Brighton beach hand-in-hand with his wife, Glenys, he fell over and was almost drenched by an incoming wave.
Nonetheless, Kinnock brought to the job some important attributes for Labour. During the general election campaign, Foot had expressed his regret that there were too many intellectuals in the senior ranks of the party at the expense of the working class, and had added in this context that Kinnock would be a good leader; as the party’s press officer, Andy McSmith, later pointed out, he ‘had a working-class background which, in that particular phase of Labour Party history, was an immense advantage’. Furthermore, in an era that was increasingly dominated by 20-second soundbites designed for television consumption, he was by far the best platform speaker of his generation, and one of the few genuine orators left in the country. In the eyes of the Labour Party, nurtured on Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot and Tony Benn, a facility with, and love of, words didn’t make Kinnock the ‘Welsh windbag’ so often portrayed in the media, but rather a man who connected with a great tradition. And the fact that he was a man steeped in Labour history undoubtedly helped him in his mission to re-orient the party. It was an aspiration he spelt out early on; during the leadership campaign, he had not only defended the policies of the manifesto, but also hinted that he had done the electoral arithmetic and was prepared to appeal beyond the Labour heartlands: ‘We can only defend the have-nots of our country and the world, if we secure the support of the “haven’t-got-enoughs”, yes, and in addition, those who “have enough”. That is not retreat, that is realism. It is not caution, it is calculation.’
Over the course of the parliament, he began slowly to steer a new course that would ultimately see Labour turn its back on virtually every major proposal of that 1983 manifesto. It was a process that, ironically, was greatly helped by the internal reforms for which the left had fought so hard. For Kinnock was the first leader to be elected under the new rules of the electoral college, and within the movement in the country, he thereby enjoyed a degree of authority and legitimacy that had been denied to his immediate predecessors. Furthermore, the power that had been given to the leadership of the unions, at a time when they were flirting with the left, was now thrown firmly behind him. A series of policy documents in the middle of the decade began to reposition the party and to unveil the language that would in the next decade become associated with Tony Blair’s rebranding of ‘New Labour’; they included ‘A New Partnership, A New Britain’, ‘People at Work: New Rights, New Responsibilities’ and ‘Modern Britain in a Modern World: The Power to Defend our Country’.
Much of this was subsequently attributed to the work of Peter Mandelson, a grandson of Labour legend Herbert Morrison, who was appointed the party’s director of communications in September 1985. His role was often exaggerated (by him as much as by anyone) to the detriment of, say, Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt, Kinnock’s chief of staff and press secretary respectively, who arguably made equally significant contributions to reforming Labour, and he became, for better or worse, the personification of what was happening to the party; for the right, he was seen as a necessary evil; for the left, who disapproved both of his politics and of what was seen as his self-regarding pomposity, he was simply evil.
The term ‘spin doctor’ had yet to make its way across the Atlantic – as late as 1989 the Sunday Times felt obliged to provide a definition for readers (‘a person who gives a slant or “spin” to a proposal, policy etc’) – but when it did, Mandelson was ready to be acclaimed as such a figure, appearing to revel in his role as the one Labour man who knew how to manipulate the media, who valued public relations and stage management while all around were obsessing over detailed policies. He himself had worked in the media, as part of the team that produced LWT’s current affairs show Weekend World, and undoubtedly his efforts did a great deal to sharpen the party’s image at a time when it had never been worse, but claims that he was interested only in presentation were wide of the mark; there was also a strong political agenda. Despite being a former member of the Young Communist League, he was firmly on the right of the party – early on he had a ‘political crush on Shirley Williams’, according to his biographer Donald Macintyre – and few would have been surprised had he been amongst those defecting to the SDP. But a familial loyalty to the Labour Party ran deep within him, and he remained. And now that he was in a position of influence, he did all that he could to frustrate the left.
But the changes were already happening before Mandelson’s arrival. Tony Benn re-entered parliament as MP for Chesterfield in March 1984, following a by-election when Eric Varley resigned his seat (Varley had earlier stepped down from the shadow cabinet, becoming the first British politician to utter the phrase ‘I want to spend more time with my family’). On his return, he found the parliamentary leadership very different; in June he noted in his diary that he had received a letter from Kinnock ‘suggesting that we should use certain “buzz” words to emphasize the Tory link with waste and incompetence and Labour’s compassionate approach. It was just written by advertising agents, no hard political content.’ Even as Mandelson was settling into his new job, Benn was already losing some of the optimism that had sustained him over the years: ‘what a misery it is to be in the Labour Party,’ he lamented.
The most commented-upon aspect of the new-look party was the ditching of the traditional logo of the red flag and the substitution of a red rose, launched at the 1986 conference, a gathering that ended with Kinnock and his wife throwing armfuls of red roses into the audience in what was hoped would be a voter-friendly photo-opportunity. (A ‘triumph of image over substance’ was Mandelson’s honest appraisal of the adoption of the red rose.) Journalist Robin Oakley of The Times suggested that a new version of ‘The Red Flag’ should be adopted in keeping with the new logo:
The people’s flag is deepest pink,
We’re really nicer than you think.
Benn, suitably inspired, produced his own version, with a promise that the struggle was not yet over:
The people’s rose in shades of pink
Gets up my nostrils and it stinks,
But ere our limbs grow stiff and cold
Our old Red Flag we shall unfold.
As Kinnock began to abandon the imagery and positions that had come to characterize Labour, it was not just Benn who felt himself cheated. Here, it seemed to many on the left, was yet another case of a supposedly socialist leader selling out his principles, the only difference being that he was doing it without even waiting to move into Downing Street. He insisted that he was trying to restore a sense of realism to replace the impotent protest that had previously prevailed – ‘Better to light a candle, than curse the darkness,’ as he wrote – but his approach was not always appreciated. Comparisons were instead sought with previous leaders, Ramsay MacDonald being evoked in a version of the Redskins’ 1985 single ‘Kick Over the Statues’ that was titled ‘The Ramsey McKinnock Mix’, while comedian Alexei Sayle combined personal abuse with more recent memories: ‘I haven’t got much faith in Neil Kinnock,’ he observed. ‘If I’d wanted a bald Harold Wilson, I would have asked for one.’ (A particularly cruel comparison, this, since Kinnock had, as recently as 1983, denounced Wilson as ‘a petty bourgeois’, adding ‘he will remain so in spirit even if made a viscount’.) Of more substantial concern was the way that opinion polls, despite an early boost following Kinnock’s election as leader, and despite the way that he was clearly taking much of the movement with him, showed he wasn’t yet touching the population beyond. He was, as Robert Barnard put it in his novel Political Suicide, ‘a red-haired, smiling man, whom everybody seemed to like, but nobody much wanted to vote for’.
The arguments for modernizing the party were rooted in the perceived decline of the industrial working class that had traditionally formed the bedrock of Labour support. The recession officially over, there were now jobs being created, even some manufacturing jobs, but they weren’t necessarily in the places where the losses of the early 1980s had hit hardest – by 1986 it was estimated that there were as many people employed making pleasure-boats in the south as there were building ships in the yards of the north – and it seemed as though whole cites, indeed whole regions, were being written off, as though the boom years that were being promised would bypass large parts of the country, perhaps permanently. Thirty per cent of the jobs lost in the course of the first Thatcher government had been in the south-east; in the recovery of the second administration, three-quarters of the new jobs that were created were in the same region.
In 1984 the Daily Mirror journalist Anne Robinson returned to her hometown of Liverpool for a report on the state of the city as the slump continued: more businesses were still closing than were opening, and a quarter of the workforce had no job, with youth unemployment in some areas reaching 90 per cent. The world she found was already far removed from the rebellious days of 1981: ‘There isn’t any anger left in Toxteth. The spirit of revolution has vanished,’ she wrote. ‘Talking to ordinary people in Liverpool is like interviewing the recently bereaved.’ Instead there was simply a grim resignation, a belief that things were unlikely ever to get better, an attitude epitomized by an unemployed 21-year-old, who spoke wistfully about losing her childhood dreams of travelling, though her ambitions even then had not stretched far: ‘I wouldn’t have minded going to Manchester for the day,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably never go now.’ She was living with the father of her 3-year-old child, and he too was unemployed. It was a far from unusual position, and some women were prepared to see the positive side, that at least their men were at home to help with the childcare: ‘No question of my husband going drinking or gambling,’ one woman told Robinson.
A year or so earlier, the writer Beatrix Campbell had recreated George Orwell’s odyssey through the Depression-hit north of the 1930s that had produced his book The Road to Wigan Pier. In her own account, Wigan Pier Revisited, she observed the same phenomenon: ‘one of the first things you notice in northern cities hit by unemployment is babies, lots of babies, with very young parents. Unemployed men in denims and trainers pushing buggies. The sight of teenage fathers is striking because it is in such stark contrast with the role of their own fathers.’ As Robinson wryly pointed out: ‘They’ve discovered equality in a way feminism never intended.’ (It wasn’t simply the young who were affected as Michael Elphick’s unemployed character, Sam, explained in the sitcom Three Up, Two Down when he volunteered to look after his new-born grandson: ‘Mrs Thatcher has given me plenty of free time for babysitting.’)
And the reason for there being so many babies, an older woman in Sunderland told Campbell, was that having a baby was the only alternative to the exhausting futility of trying to look for work: ‘You don’t need to get a job when you’re a mam. When you’re a mam, somebody needs you.’ The economic consequences of such a decision were harsh. The benefits system had been devised as a stop-gap measure to tide people over periods of hardship; it was not intended provide long-term care, and made little provision for one-off costs such as, say, a pair of shoes, but there were many who could see no prospect of any other source of income ever materializing.
The most memorable illustration of the limitations of the welfare state was provided by a 1984 World in Action programme, designed to see if a Conservative MP – in this instance Matthew Parris – could live for a week in Newcastle-upon-Tyne at the level of benefit deemed sufficient for an unemployed man by his government. Parris lasted for just five days before the money ran out. ‘Perhaps the sharpest lesson I drew from that experience,’ he wrote, ‘was that unemployment is not only a problem of the pocket but of the spirit; and that once the spirit is broken neither money nor training can easily help.’ The same year Alan Clark, not widely known for his bleeding heart, was greeted on a visit to Leicester by a group of unemployed demonstrators and got out of his ministerial car to hear their complaints: ‘Gravely I listened. At intervals I asked them questions. I told them that if there was no “demand” no one could afford to pay them to make things. They quietened down. But that’s a glib point, really. It’s foul, such a waste.’
The riots earlier in the decade had produced one notable result: the direct involvement of Michael Heseltine, the environment secretary, in what he hoped would be the regeneration of Liverpool. A self-consciously energetic politician, and one of the very few businessmen to reach cabinet rank under Margaret Thatcher, he attempted to secure the involvement of major companies and private sector finance, knowing that public funds were not readily available; and he concluded that the city’s decline might be reversed by planting thousands of trees and staging a garden festival to reclaim derelict areas in the docks. The festival, staged in the summer of 1984, was a success in terms of tourism – it attracted more than three million visitors – but Anne Robinson found little enthusiasm for it in the period leading up to the opening; the work was going to outside contractors, she was told, and there were few jobs for local people. The only ones who seemed to be benefiting were those who made their own opportunities: ‘In broad daylight I watch three teenagers cart away a hefty cement mixer.’ A woman passing by saw the same sight and simply laughed, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ When asked what she thought of the regeneration work, the woman shrugged: ‘The dogs are made up with the trees. That’s all that happened.’ Even Heseltine himself recorded that, ‘“Give us jobs, not trees” was the word on the streets of Toxteth,’ though his own perception of the people of Liverpool didn’t seem to incline him in that direction: ‘Their instant sense of humour at least in part explains a certain ill-discipline that makes them difficult to organize in manufacturing industries.’
As the hard times continued outside the south-east and the midlands, as union membership continued to decline, so too it appeared that a whole way of life was dying, a self-sufficient culture that had had Labour running through its veins. And Labour’s long tradition of being the party of the industrial working class meant that it too was looking in danger, representing an ever-shrinking base, linked in the public perception with the past, not the future.
Symbolic of the changes being wrought in society was the state of the national sport, which was already showing signs of drifting away from its working-class heartlands. In the 1982–83 season, as the Football League announced that it would in future be known as the Canon League, having embraced sponsorship, Tottenham Hotspur became the first British football club to be floated on the stock market – both developments were early indications of the serious money that would soon come into the game. The following season, the distribution of gate money in League matches was changed: previously a share of receipts had gone to the visiting club, so that a smaller club, say Swansea City or Brighton and Hove Albion, benefited from the much larger attendances possible at Anfield or Old Trafford; now that was amended to allow the home club to keep the entire proceeds, helping to institutionalize wealth inequality in the sport.
At the end of that season Keith Burkinshaw resigned as the manager of Spurs, partially in protest at the new business culture at the club; as he walked away, he nodded back at the ground where he had spent eight years and was quoted as saying mournfully, ‘There used to be a football club over there.’ Around the same time Terry Neill, manager of north London rivals Arsenal, was reacting badly to the attitude of his overpaid players in a 3-0 loss at Leicester City: ‘What use is a £250 win bonus when they’re on £1,500 a week,’ he snapped. ‘They don’t know what it is to hunger for goals and glory. On days like today I think they just want to pick up their money and go home.’
If a new-found cupidity was afflicting football, it couldn’t entirely obscure more established failings, including lack of investment and self-inflicted violence, symbolized by the twin catastrophes of May 1985. First came the death of fifty-six fans in a fire at Valley Parade, the Bradford City ground, followed less than three weeks later by the death of thirty-nine fans, mostly Italian, at Heysel Stadium in Belgium, during the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus. In both instances, the poorly maintained and outdated structures of the stadiums were implicated in the high death tolls, but there was no avoiding the fact that in the latter case the trigger for the disaster was the violent behaviour of some Liverpool fans. The hooliganism that had blighted the game for twenty years had finally reached its inevitable tragic outcome. All English clubs were promptly banned from European competitions – seventeen clubs were to be affected before the ban was lifted five years later – and there were suggestions that the national team might also be excluded from competitions. ‘Heysel was a horrible, horrible shock,’ said the England manager, Bobby Robson. ‘You felt ashamed.’
That shame, combined with the nightmare of Bradford, proved disastrous to the state of English football, with plummeting attendances in the 1985–86 season: a fall of 9 per cent in the opening months, ending with a total of just eighteen million passing through the turnstiles, a far cry from the post-war peak of forty-one million in the days of Clement Attlee’s government. This was despite the absence from the television of highlight programmes for the first half of the season, as the League bickered with the broadcasters, the latter increasingly dissatisfied with the return on their investment. Match of the Day had once attracted up to thirteen million viewers, but that had fallen in the mid 1980s to just six million. As a television spectacle football was a fading attraction, and not just because of the unflatteringly short shorts that were then fashionable, nor because of Jimmy Hill’s increasingly self-parodic and sanctimonious presentation; rather it was the fact that, despite the excitement of watching players like Glenn Hoddle, Ian Rush or Gary Lineker, the crowd shots of fans penned in like cattle behind security fences were hardly the stuff of which entertainment is made. Meanwhile Canon announced that they were ending their sponsorship of the league as soon as contractually possible. ‘The season following Heysel was the worst I can remember,’ wrote Nick Hornby; ‘everything seemed poisoned by what had gone on in May.’
In the place of football came a new-found television interest in other sports. A public appetite had already been detected by schedulers for ice-skating and bowls, while darts was proving the most unlikely of ratings-winners, largely thanks to the cult appeal of commentator Sid Waddell, who delivered pithy summaries in a Northumberland accent: ‘There’s only one word for that – quintessential!’ So familiar did darts-players become that when Dexys Midnight Runners appeared on Top of the Pops to mime to their hit ‘Jackie Wilson Says’, a song about the American soul singer, they did so in front of a huge photograph of the chubby face of Scottish darts champion Jocky Wilson. The incident entered pop mythology as one of the programme’s most preposterous mistakes, though the truth was somewhat different. ‘For a laugh, we told the producer to put a picture of Jocky Wilson behind us,’ remembered the band’s singer, Kevin Rowland. ‘He said, “But Kevin, people will think we’ve made a mistake.” I told him only an idiot would think that.’
But if there was one sport that really benefited from the abrupt decline in football’s standing, it was snooker. The game had been steadily growing in popularity since the explosive arrival of Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, who had won the world championship at his first attempt in 1972, but the 1980s were to prove its golden age, coinciding with the rise of Higgins’ arch-enemy, Steve Davis. The two men represented polar opposites in the sport – Higgins the self-destructive, emotionally charged, temperamental genius, Davis the poker-faced automaton who also happened to be the best player the game had ever seen – and their rivalry was pure box-office.
They were supported by a cast of characters so diverse that for a while they made snooker look like the new wrestling: Cliff ‘the Grinder’ Thorburn, David ‘the Silver Fox’ Taylor, Willie ‘Mr Maximum’ Thorne, Ray ‘Dracula’ Reardon, ‘Steady’ Eddie Charlton and the enormous ‘Big’ Bill Werbeniuk, a Canadian man-mountain suffering from a neurological disorder that apparently required him to drink vast quantities of lager: a pint a frame, to top up the six pints he consumed before each match. Then there was Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White, a south London street-waif so pale and emaciated he looked as if he hadn’t seen daylight since he gave up formal education at the age of eleven; he had both form and style, having been arrested during the Brixton riots, and having got into trouble with snooker’s governing body for his unauthorized wearing of the logo of Savile Row tailor Tommy Nutter during a televized match. Indeed so redolent was snooker of professional wrestling that G.F. Newman’s script for the film Number One suggested that everyone thought the game was similarly rigged, that matches were fixed in advance: ‘This isn’t a sport, son,’ says manager Mel Smith to his talented young star, Bob Geldof, ‘any more than horse racing or boxing.’
There was initially some uncertainty about how television should package snooker. For several years the most popular incarnation had been Pot Black, launched by the BBC in 1969 in the dawn of colour television, though it was hampered by being a one-frame knockout event, which did scant justice to the game. A doubles tournament was staged for several years, as was a national team-based competition (though the fact that England entered two teams suggested the appeal wasn’t quite international enough to make this worthwhile), and there was even an attempt at pro-celebrity snooker, with Higgins being partnered by rock and roll guitarist Joe Brown, and Davis teaming up with Radio One disc jockey Dave Lee Travis. But once it became clear that the principal appeal stemmed from seeing individuals being put under unrelenting pressure for hours on end – nearly fifteen million viewers watched Thorburn grind down Higgins in the 1980 world final – the gimmicky formats fell by the wayside, and the focus was placed solely on the mano-a-mano mental combat at which snooker excelled. The precision required to perform at the highest level was such that every note of tension was amplified by the cameras, so that the viewers could watch a player crumble under the pressure. It was the perfect television sport, with a restricted playing area that fitted neatly on the screen and with unbearable reaction shots of players slumped disconsolately in their chairs, waiting for an opportunity to return to the table, as they tried to forget the missed shot that had let their opponents in.
The huge television audiences drew from right across the social and age spectrum, with a particular appeal to female viewers (more than 70 per cent of the fan mail received by snooker stars was said to be from women). The sport benefited from the way a tournament could fill hour upon hour of daytime broadcasting, thereby attracted the unemployed, housewife and pensioner constituencies, and from the scheduling of the world championships, timed to climax on a bank-holiday weekend in spring to maximize its potential market. There was something here for the whole family to watch together, in a way that football simply couldn’t match any more.
The key moment was Davis’ first world title in 1981, the prelude to his subsequent domination of the game; he went on to win five more titles in the decade and to spend seven years as the world’s number one. Unlike his competitors and predecessors, he was an advertiser’s dream: a clean-cut, responsible and reliable young man, incapable of causing offence. More than that, he was managed by the Essex-born accountant Barry Hearn, who might almost be seen as the embodiment of the decade: a hustler on the make in relentless pursuit of success, status and publicity. Hearn was perhaps the first man in Britain to see where the real money was to be made in sport: not simply in winning tournaments, or even appearing in the occasional advert for Brylcreem or Brut aftershave, but in the corporate world that was largely invisible to the mainstream public: ‘Davis’s work is endorsements, company days, promotion back-up,’ he explained. This was a very different beast to the old concept of snooker being the product of a misspent youth; this was the very embodiment of Thatcherite values: the cult of the entrepreneur and the celebration of big money deals.
Other players, who didn’t speak the same language of enterprise, found it hard to keep up with the new commercialism, particularly Terry Griffiths, a former postman from West Wales who joined the Matchroom management stable fronted by Hearn and Davis. ‘Being with them a lot has changed me as a person,’ he reflected, as he struggled to fulfil the promotional duties required of him, and to get back to anywhere near the form that had made him world champion in 1979. ‘We’ve got different views on so many things. Our lives are so different. I tried to mix the two lives up together as best I could, and I found it very difficult.’ He added: ‘I think a lot about it and I’ve changed a great deal over the last few years. And really, being truthful, I don’t really like the kind of person I’ve turned into.’
Griffiths’ problems encapsulated the confusion that reigned within snooker in the first half of the 1980s. This was a traditional working-class pastime that was now becoming a lucrative cross between light entertainment and hard-nosed business. On the one hand, it was virtually the only sport where smoking was banned in the audience but was permissible (almost compulsory) for the participants, a game that was historically fuelled by alcohol and gambling; on the other, it was being celebrated by the Daily Mail for the ‘charm, politeness and unpatronising talk’ of the players, for the way that ‘they dress beautifully’, and for the fact that ‘they do not cheat: therein, in an era when the public is tired of the tawdry, the ugly, the sly and the banal, is the secret of their astronomical success’. By the middle of the decade, it seemed as though family-friendly finance had triumphed over the game’s seedy roots, with Davis said to be the highest-paid sportsman in Britain, and to be appearing on television more than anyone else save for newsreaders. So big had the game grown that even its peripheral figures were in demand for adverts: commentator ‘Whispering’ Ted Lowe provided the voice-over for a Davis-fronted baked beans commercial, and match referee Len Ganley pushed Carling Black Label lager. Meanwhile Hearn’s stable were collectively promoting Matchroom, a range of men’s toiletries from Goya (‘for men who play to win’).
The sport’s appeal was such that even Ken Livingstone said he relaxed from politics by playing snooker on the quarter-sized table he had installed in his bedsit, while Pete Davies in his dystopian novel of the near-future, The Last Election (1986) could only see further growth; in a country run by the Money Party, the green baize has become the opiate of the people, as a cable television channel called 147 entertains the unemployed mass-millions ‘with a twenty-four hour a day diet of non-stop snooker, snooker, snooker’.
The onward march was not entirely without problems. Davis was world champion, but the outlaw Higgins branded himself ‘the people’s champion’, with some justification, for he remained hugely popular, largely because of his unpredictability: one could never be sure whether he would leave a tournament in disgrace, having headbutted a referee, or in glory, having swept all before him in a breathtaking display of implausible potting. He stood valiantly against the gentrification of his sport, gloriously winning the world title again in 1982 and, after beating Davis in a 1985 match, turned to the television cameras to announce: ‘We are fucking back!’ In case anyone should misunderstand his enmity with Davis, he spelt it out on TV-AM the next day: ‘I hate him.’ He became a tabloid fixture, with colourful tales of his personal and professional lives – he was ‘a walking time bomb who could literally explode without warning, causing serious injury to anyone nearby,’ according to Viz. And there were further scandals involving the amorous pursuits of ‘Randy’ Tony Knowles (‘the snooker player who pots more birds than balls’) and the addiction to cocaine of the young Canadian star Kirk Stevens, who tended to wear a black shirt with white waistcoat and flares, as favoured the previous decade by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. But all of this was forgotten in the excitement of the 1985 world championship final, when Dennis Taylor, long considered a journeyman on the circuit, overcame an 8-0 deficit in frames to beat Steve Davis on the final ball of the final frame to win 18-17. Eighteen and a half million viewers stayed up past midnight to watch the victory of the slightly podgy, bespectacled David over a gaunt and ashen Goliath, shredding television viewing records with every frame.
That match was snooker’s finest fifteen hours, and it came just weeks before the disasters at Bradford and Heysel. Soon after, the brewer John Courage – who had a one million pound endorsement deal with Davis – announced that they were discontinuing their sponsorship of the England football team. The following year, Davis lost again in the final, this time to the 150-1 outsider, Joe Johnson, whose victory, as an unglamorous, mixed-race northerner from Bradford (his father was Asian), gladdened the hearts of anti-Thatcherites everywhere. Neither Taylor nor Johnson, however, was in the same bracket as the cheerfully disreputable devil-may-care likes of Higgins, White, Knowles or Stevens; rather they epitomized the triumph of hard work, honesty and perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. They were more akin to Dire Straits, a pub rock band who had survived the punk explosion by keeping their heads down and producing competent, tasteful, if uninspiring, music and were rewarded with a sequence of four albums in the first half of the decade that spent an average of 200 weeks each in the charts, one of them – Brothers in Arms – becoming the biggest album of the 1980s in Britain.
There was, perhaps, a lesson in here for the Labour Party, in terms of the reinvention of working-class culture for a new era: ‘traditional values in a modern setting,’ as Tony Blair would put it the following decade. But there was too a lesson for the Conservative Party. In later years, particularly after the advent of the even duller, even more talented Stephen Hendry, Davis began to win the popularity and affection that he undoubtedly deserved, but at his peak he was not much loved by fans. The former Labour MP now turned broadcaster, Brian Walden, saw in the lukewarm reception he was accorded a symbol of where the country was going wrong. ‘Order, method, discipline, plus a stern control of eccentricity, is the passport to triumph in the modern world,’ he wrote, but ‘the marvellously proficient Davis is clapped with some reluctance. Does this not prove what an essentially frivolous people we are?’ Instead the public warmed to the perpetual underdog Jimmy White, six times a world championship finalist, never a winner, perpetually undone by his addiction to the glamour of the flamboyant shot at the expense of craftsmanship and safety-play. If there was truth in Walden’s analysis, it should have worried Margaret Thatcher, suggesting that despite her apparent political triumph at the polls, the nation remained unconvinced by the values she held so dear. Where she had once been seen as the rebel, kicking against the dominant orthodoxies, she now looked like she was the establishment, and if the new order she was ushering in really did require the ‘stern control of eccentricity’, then it was by no means clear that the British people were eager to embrace it.
At the same time that Steve Davis was being beaten by Joe Johnson in the biggest upset that snooker had witnessed, the government too was experiencing for the first time defeat in the House of Commons. As home secretary, William Whitelaw had had his own version of the old actors’ adage about not working with children and animals: ‘I was well known for my reluctance to become involved in legislation over Sundays, alcohol, animals and sex – subjects which tended to arouse fierce passions and cause immense parliamentary difficulties, usually without solving the problems.’ But the much less astute Douglas Hurd was now in the home office, and in 1986 he brought the Shops Bill to Parliament, intending to relax the restrictions on Sunday trading in England and Wales that had been imposed by the 1950 Shops Act. The existing law was, as Hurd pointed out, ‘confused and widely ignored’: fish and chip shops, for example, were prevented from opening on the Sabbath, but Chinese takeaways were not, since no one in 1950 had foreseen their rise, and though it was legal to sell newspapers and periodicals, the sale of books was banned, so one was prohibited from buying a copy of the Bible, but could happily stock up on pornographic magazines. Meanwhile many shops – DIY stores and garden centres prominent amongst them – were simply ignoring the law, and local councils, who were responsible for enforcing it, lacked the resources and the will to stop them. To make the situation yet more absurd, these regulations did not apply north of the border, for Scotland was not covered by the legislation.
The Bill proposed sweeping away all the restrictions, and it met with substantial opposition both from church groups led by Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who were determined to protect Sunday as a day of worship, and from the shop workers union, USDAW, who were equally determined to stop their members’ hours being extended. The former won over large numbers of Conservative backbenchers, the latter convinced the Labour Party, and the Bill was rejected at its second reading, a highly unusual fate for a piece of government legislation; sixty-eight Tory MPs defied a three-line whip to vote against the measure. ‘The trade unions, churches, small shopkeepers and the women’s movement have all been campaigning against Sunday opening,’ exulted Tony Benn in his diary. ‘It was the first time that the supremacy of market forces had been thwarted, and it sort of indicated that the Tories can’t be certain of getting away with the rest of their policies.’ He was a little premature – if it was the first Commons defeat for the Thatcher government, it was also the last – but there was a feeling abroad that the government was losing touch with a crucial section of its support, not merely the regular churchgoers, but also the traditionally minded people who may have grumbled about restrictions on Sunday shopping, yet still had an instinctive attraction to the rhythms of life that had been accepted for centuries. And Benn was right to identify that the focus on market forces was the key to why the Thatcherite coalition was showing signs of strain: the veneration of profit did not sit easily with many of those who were natural Tories.
Elsewhere the crusade to establish a moral hegemony, to inspire the nation with the traditional virtues of thrift, decency and sound defence, was not helped by a series of scandals that punctuated Thatcher’s second term in office. The first sign of trouble came on election day itself in 1983, when Cecil Parkinson, the chairman of the party, told Thatcher that he had had an affair with his secretary, Sarah Keays, and that she was pregnant with his child; he had been pencilled in as the next foreign secretary, but was now shuffled off instead to the department of trade and industry. In due course the story broke in the media and, unable to hold on to even that less sensitive post, he was obliged to resign. When Thatcher was challenged on how Parkinson’s decision not to seek a divorce in order to marry Keays chimed with her much-vaunted Victorian values, she responded: ‘What is more Victorian than keeping the family together?’
It wasn’t much of a scandal, in truth, for the talk of family values was always more a question of convenience than commitment. All of Thatcher’s cabinets contained a number of divorcees (she was married to one herself) and even, in the case of Nigel Lawson, the new chancellor of the exchequer, a man who had indeed left his wife for his mistress, with whom he had already had a child. But Parkinson was implausibly being talked about as Thatcher’s political son and heir – ‘He is big already, but he is going to be very big,’ wrote journalist Edward Pearce, shortly before the election – despite his chief attribute appearing to be that he looked like a matinee idol manqué in a British B-movie about airline pilots (unlike Norman Tebbit, who actually had been a pilot, but didn’t have the requisite image). Consequently his departure was seen to cause Thatcher some collateral damage.
So too was the behaviour of Jeffrey Archer, who, having already upset some by claiming that many unemployed young people were ‘quite unwilling to put in a day’s work’, went on to add to the gaiety of the nation with a hugely entertaining libel case. In 1986 the News of the World published a story alleging that the best-selling novelist, who doubled as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, had paid money to a prostitute named Monica Coughlan, though it stopped short of saying that the two had ever had sex. The Daily Star followed up the story, but took less care with its wording, and made it clear that, in their view, there had been a sexual relationship. Thatcher was reportedly worried by the signals that were being sent out to the public: ‘We can take one or two people running off the normal track but when everybody starts doing it, it’s far more difficult to sustain the position,’ she told her friend, Woodrow Wyatt. ‘When behaviour like this becomes the norm then the public don’t like it.’ Archer issued writs against both papers, but while the News of the World swiftly settled out of court, the owner of the Star was reported to have been less willing to cede to demands for a front-page apology: ‘Why should we give in to that little shit?’ And so it proceeded to the courts.
The trial was chiefly celebrated for the summing up by Justice Caulfield, who gave every sign of having been smitten by the charms of Mary Archer, appearing as a character witness for her husband: ‘Your vision of her will probably never disappear,’ he told the jury. ‘Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband, Jeffrey?’ And, he wondered, would Archer, a man married to such a goddess, really be ‘in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel, round about a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning, after an evening at the Caprice with his editor?’ (The implication that a writer who had spent several hours with his editor might have little left in the way of libido was one of his few genuine insights.) Despite the widespread mockery that greeted the summing up, the jury at least were convinced, and found for Archer, awarding him record damages of half a million pounds; the final bill, including costs, for Express Newspapers, owners of the Star, amounted to more than double that. Fourteen years later, Archer was himself in the dock, being sentenced to four years in gaol for perjury during the libel trial, though it was too late to be of any comfort to Lloyd Turner, the editor of the Daily Star, who had lost his job as a result of the earlier verdict and had died in 1996 from a heart attack brought on, his widow believed, by the stress of the libel trial.
There were other shorter-lived scandals, including comments by ministers Alan Clark, who claimed that black British people were worried about being ‘sent back to Bongo Bongo Land’, and John Butcher, who suggested that northerners ‘tended to be workshy’. There was the 2nd Earl of Gowrie, who resigned as arts minister in 1985 because it was, he insisted, impossible to live in London on a salary of just £33,000 per annum (the average wage when Thatcher fell from power was still nearly £20,000 short of that figure). There were Conservative MPs Keith Best and Eric Cockeram, obliged to announce they wouldn’t seek re-election after being discovered to have improperly made more than one application for British Telecom shares. And then there was Harvey Proctor, forced to step down not because of the extremity of his views, but because of his predilection for acquiring the services of male prostitutes and spanking them if they got the answers wrong when playing the board-game Trivial Pursuit. There was even a spate of leaks of supposedly classified material by civil servants (Clive Ponting, Sarah Tisdall) and security officers (Cathy Massiter). And, most destructive of all for the government, was the Westland affair, though few were sure whether this was truly a scandal at all, or indeed quite what it was supposed to be about.
Westland Helicopters was a company hitherto mostly unknown to the general public, save for those who kept an eye out for product placement in the television action series The Professionals. But in late 1985 it hit the front pages when it transpired that the firm was struggling and that a dispute over its future had arisen between Michael Heseltine, the defence secretary, and Leon Brittan, the trade and industry secretary: the former wished to see a European-based consortium salvage the firm, while the latter, backed by Thatcher, favoured a merger with the American company Sikorsky. The details were lost on many, who responded in the same way as a character in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work; seeing a headline that reads LAWSON DRAWN INTO FRAY OVER WESTLAND, she doesn’t bother to read the story because: ‘It is enough for her to know that things are going badly for Mrs Thatcher and the Tory party; the details of the Westland affair do not engage her interest’. Instead the whole case was seen – probably correctly – in terms of Heseltine jostling for political position, and of Thatcher being determined to put him in his place.
For, with the departure of Pym, Heseltine had emerged as the most convincing rival to Thatcher. Just about the only senior Conservative who could appeal both to the faithful and to wavering Alliance voters, he had achieved a strong standing in the party by siding with neither the Thatcherites nor the wets; his involvement in Liverpool appealed to the One Nation Tories, while his resolute performance on defence in the face of CND had won over those that Alan Clark called ‘the Union Jack buffs’. He had also been for some years the most popular speaker at the annual conference, for reasons outlined by Jon Akass in the Sun: ‘He can tell a good joke, for a start. He also represents the kind of golden lad that every Tory mother sees, or hopes to see, in her son. Very few Tory mothers want their sons to grow up like Ted Heath.’
Part of his appeal was that he was a self-made millionaire, a fact that also provoked many of the patronizing attacks on him by the more patrician elements in the party, from agriculture minister Michael Jopling’s comment that he was a man who ‘bought his own furniture’, to William Whitelaw’s horror-struck realization that he was ‘the sort of man who combs his hair in public’. The hair was a particular source of amazement in a profession not noted for tonsorial extravagance; journalist Frank Johnson wrote that ‘He’s about seven foot tall and he’s got blond hair that looks a wig’, Simon Hoggart defined the verb ‘to heseltine’ as meaning ‘to build up a monumental pile of blonde hair, fix it in place with a complicated system of scaffolding and webs, and then spray it with lacquer’, while television presenter Robin Day refused to believe that he could ever be appointed defence secretary: ‘His hair is too long.’
Nonetheless, he did become defence secretary and was one of the major successes in Thatcher’s government until the Westland crisis blew up. At a cabinet meeting in January 1986, after months of negative press coverage, Thatcher announced that, in order to calm the situation, all future statements about Westland should be approved in advance by the cabinet office, and Heseltine replied that, if that were the case, ‘Then I must leave this cabinet.’ He stalked out of Number Ten and told a journalist outside that he had resigned, a development that was not yet apparent to his erstwhile colleagues in the cabinet room, who had shrugged at his departure and moved on to a discussion about Nigeria. At a subsequent press conference, Heseltine explained that the way the affair had been conducted was ‘not a proper way to carry on government and ultimately not an approach for which I can share responsibility.’
Two weeks later, Leon Britten also resigned, though somewhat less willingly than Heseltine, and Thatcher’s ability to hold her government together was being called into question, giving an impression that events were slipping out of her control. When Labour then choose Westland as the subject of a Commons debate, there was a genuine belief, including in her own mind, that she herself might not survive. Fortunately for her, Neil Kinnock, seldom one of the great parliamentary performers, delivered an opening speech that was unanimously considered to be amongst his worst (‘long-winded and ill-considered,’ reckoned Thatcher; ‘unbelievably incompetent and windy,’ agreed David Steel) and let her off the hook. ‘For a few seconds Kinnock had her cornered, and you could see fear in those blue eyes,’ wrote Alan Clark in his diary. ‘But then he had an attack of wind, gave her time to recover.’ When Heseltine made his own contribution to the debate, and didn’t strike directly at Thatcher, it was evident that the crisis had passed.
By any normal political standards, Heseltine’s career should then have been at an end, but he refused to slink away from the fray. Instead he went into a form of internal exile, waiting for the chance to strike a more decisive blow, while protesting his loyalty to the party and the leadership in speech after speech as he became a fixture on the constituency circuit. And he did retain a high level of support in the country. His 1987 book Where There’s a Will was a No. 1 best-seller, despite being some way short of gripping, and opinion polls consistently found that he was the public’s choice of next Conservative leader (though amongst Tory voters, he was regularly outpolled by Norman Tebbit). All this despite the fact that no one quite understood why he had actually resigned, save that there had been a clash of egos and style: there was no clearly delineated policy difference or point of principle that could be discerned. It was later pointed out, however, that after Heseltine walked out of the cabinet that morning, the meeting continued and ultimately turned to the vexed question of the proposal to replace the rates, as a means of funding local government, with a new system that would become known as the poll tax; as Heseltine’s confidant Michael Mates was to observe ruefully: ‘Perhaps that would have been a better issue.’
Meanwhile few tears were being shed over Brittan’s departure from government, mostly because, in Thatcher’s words, ‘so many people think he comes over extremely badly on television and he is not a good communicator. They find him awful to look at. He’s very clever but he is really not an alert politician.’ Or, as Alf Garnett put it in the sitcom In Sickness and In Health: ‘Looks like Morrie the fishmonger, that one does.’
Those comments, alongside the snide attacks on Heseltine, suggested that snobbishness was still rife in the party, despite Thatcher’s own beliefs. ‘As Mrs Thatcher had gone up in the world, so the Conservative Party had come down in it,’ wrote Tory MP Julian Critchley in his novel Hung Parliament, and Alf Garnett agreed: ‘The leader of a spiv government,’ he ranted. ‘She’s ruined the Tory Party, she has. Her and people like her.’ Somewhat more unpleasantly, the former prime minister, Harold Macmillan, sniffed that the cabinet seemed to have ‘more Estonians than Etonians’. Leon Brittan and Lord Young did indeed have family origins in the Baltic states, but really this was crude and barely-disguised anti-Semitism, aimed also at other Jews in government, including Nigel Lawson, Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Howard. Nor did Macmillan’s implication that Thatcher had dispensed with the old school tie entirely stand up to examination: of the five men she chose during her premiership to serve as her parliamentary private secretary, four came from Eton, with the exception being the Winchester-educated Ian Gow, while her most committed ideological supporters in cabinet were Etonian Nicholas Ridley and Harrovian Keith Joseph.
More damaging was Macmillan’s remark that the government comprised ‘a brilliant tyrant, surrounded by mediocrities’, for this chimed far too clearly with an increasingly voiced opinion. Denis Healey put it in more robust terms, alleging that she presided over ‘a cabinet of neutered zombies’, while a character in Robert Barnard’s Political Suicide concluded: ‘People always talk about the prime minister as tough, but I don’t think it’s tough to surround yourself with pipsqueaks.’ Chris Emmett, one of those providing the voices for the puppets on Spitting Image, saw it from a professional angle: ‘Look at the present cabinet. From an impressionist’s point of view there couldn’t be a more boring faceless lot in the universe. They all have perfect, plummy, Tory, middle-class voices.’
These judgements were a touch unfair on a cabinet that included in the mid-1980s such heavyweight figures as Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, William Whitelaw, Norman Tebbit and Douglas Hurd, but as the decade wore on, and as the big names began to drop out for one reason or another, they were seldom replaced by people of equal stature, and the criticisms came to seem ever more valid. The 1985 arrival in cabinet of Kenneth Baker, for example, scarcely filled his opponents with fear or his colleagues with admiration – ‘I have seen the future and it smirks,’ commented one of the latter – and yet he would in due course come to look like a major player, so poor did the competition become. (Spitting Image portrayed him as a slug with a human head, which did little to endear him to the programme: ‘It lacked subtlety, wit and all those things that maintained satire over the ages,’ he complained in later years.)
The cabinet as it stood in 1983, however, was strong enough to resist the temptations proffered by the Central Policy Review Staff when they set out a radical agenda for the next term, including the abolition of the National Health Service, the ending of index-linked benefits and the removal of state funding from further education. Though she was talked out of them, Thatcher was in sympathy with the ideas, an indication perhaps that her claims to represent the silent majority were not always matched by reality; certainly any party that went to the country in the 1980s proposing to charge for visits to a GP – let alone for dismantling the NHS entirely – would have got short shrift at the polls. In the absence of such radical policies, however, there was a certain lack of direction to the second term. Despite the economic successes that were loudly trumpeted, the middle years of the decade were dominated not by new initiatives, but by conflicts with a series of old enemies: the miners, the IRA, local councils. And what seemed like a period of political drift was accompanied by the inescapable sound of grumbling over cuts in public services.
This latter was considered particularly unfair by those in government. Having come to power pledged to curb public expenditure, the Tories were now caught in a trap of their own making, finding it almost impossible to make the overall savings they had promised, but nonetheless being judged by their rhetoric. ‘Our opponents had convinced the great majority of the electors that we had “cut” the National Health Service, and most other things beside, when in fact never had so much been spent on the social services,’ complained Norman Tebbit in his memoirs. ‘We were getting neither the bun nor the halfpenny in this controversy.’ Nicholas Ridley was similarly keen in his memoirs to emphasize that, while GDP rose by 25 per cent during the decade, spending on health rose by 37 per cent (even allowing for inflation) and on social security by 35 per cent, though he skipped over the fact that much of the latter was the result of increased unemployment.
However much they protested, the reality was that ministers simply weren’t believed, and the imagery of cuts entered deep into the public psyche and into popular culture. In Ruth Rendell’s novel The Veiled One, the action springs from a blackmailer who is trying to raise money so that her husband can have a hip replacement. As Inspector Wexford explains: ‘If he was to have this operation on the National Health Service, it was possible he would have had to wait up to three years, by which time she feared he might be totally crippled. Three or four thousand pounds would pay for the replacement to be done privately and for hospitalization.’ More powerful still was the BBC television series Casualty, set in the accident and emergency department of a general hospital in the fictional city of Holby. Its very first episode set out the agenda unequivocally, with complaints voiced about lack of resources, low pay and a shortage of hospital beds. Meanwhile some unemployed men are seen moonlighting at the docks, where they get injured in a gas leak from a broken canister containing materials that are intended for use in chemical weapons; these are being exported illegally to the Middle East by a woman who boasts that she’s ‘one of the new entrepreneurs’. As the series progressed, the government became so exercised by what it saw as anti-Tory propaganda that Edwina Currie, then a health minister, was dispatched to see Bill Cotton, the managing director of television at the BBC, to explain that the NHS wasn’t really facing cuts at all. ‘It is a rather inaccurate representation of what happens in an accident and emergency department,’ she told the press, displaying little sign of understanding the nature of drama, though to her credit she had distinguished herself from many other politicians by refraining from comment until she had watched the series: ‘I do not believe in criticizing something I have not seen.’
There was truth in the government’s claims that public spending was increasing faster than inflation, and truth too in the insistence that the economy was in a rude state of health – as long, that is, as one lived in the south of England or in the midlands, where many were enjoying the good times. But even in those regions, there remained areas of great deprivation, and nationally the unemployed figures remained stubbornly above three million, with the rate being 60 per cent higher in the north than in the south. And for all the prosperity that was being celebrated by the media, it was hardly an era of calm and comfort, for the country remained dangerously divided. This was a time of a renewed spate of riots, and of two of the longest-running and most bitter industrial disputes of the century, in the miners’ strike and the Wapping dispute, none of which suggested that a new, stable Britain was being built by the Thatcherite revolution. And then, in the words of Penny Rimbaud, the drummer with Crass, ‘having struck a decisive blow to the heart of the British working classes by crushing the miners and their union, Thatcher and her cronies turned their interests towards their next “enemy within”: alternative Britain’.
For several years a free festival had been staged at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice, attracting tens of thousands to one of the last surviving remnants of the underground culture of the 1960s. By the early 1980s the original hippies had been augmented by a new generation, collectively referred to as new age travellers, since many lived in converted vans, buses and caravans, moving around the country as ad hoc mobile communities. In July 1985 the quango English Heritage, which was the official custodian of Stonehenge, and had more interest in tourists than in travellers, obtained a court order banning the staging of a festival that year, and the police set up a four-mile exclusion zone around the stones, complete with roadblocks, to prevent travellers reaching the site. When a convoy of a hundred or so travellers was intercepted by the police, while heading towards the exclusion zone, it was cornered in a bean-field and attacked with considerable force. Kim Sabido of ITN was one of the few reporters who covered the incident, recording a piece in which he described ‘some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I have witnessed in my entire career as a journalist’. (He had previously reported on the miners’ strike and on riots in Northern Ireland.) He concluded: ‘There must be an inquiry.’ There was no such inquiry, and Sabido’s report on what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield was not even carried on television that evening. Further clashes followed over the next couple of years as the police continued to harry travellers, displaying an antagonism that was summed up by the reported comment of the chief constable of Hampshire in 1986: ‘If only they would return to a conventional way of living, there would be no problem.’
Indeed that sometimes appeared to be the prevailing attitude. There was an intolerance of dissident opinion and, particularly, of dissident behaviour and lifestyles. Or perhaps it was simply that there was now more dissident behaviour around to concern the authorities. Back in 1978 William Whitelaw, then in opposition, had warned against the social effects of youth unemployment: ‘If boys and girls do not obtain jobs when they leave school, they feel that society has no need of them. If they feel that, they do not see any reason why they should take part in that society and comply with its rules. That is what is happening.’ Of the millions who had left school since then, many had, of course, moved on to further education or into employment, but many others had not done so, and were finding themselves pushed to the peripheries of society, whether through choice or necessity. The new age travellers were perhaps amongst the more extreme examples of those who turned their backs on ‘a conventional way of living’, but they were far from alone. In 1985, despite the economic recovery in the south-east, unemployment in London boroughs like Hackney, Islington and Lambeth still stood at 20 per cent.
That unemployment rate was even higher amongst young black people, and unsurprisingly the tensions in society remained greatest in those urban areas with a large black population. In 1985 a new wave of riots broke out, fewer in number but more costly in terms of fatalities and injuries than those of 1981. In September two Asian men died of smoke inhalation during a riot in Handsworth, Birmingham, and a report sponsored by the local council concluded: ‘The police are viewed by a substantial proportion of Handsworth residents as an ill-disciplined and brutal force which has manipulated and abused its powers in dealings with the black community over a long period of time.’ Later that month, in a police raid on a Brixton house, Cherry Groce, the mother of the man the officers were seeking, was shot and paralyzed from the waist down; the outrage caused by the shooting provoked a riot that lasted for forty-eight hours. Then, in October, came the most notorious of all the riots, on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London.
Again it was a police raid that sparked the disturbances. Officers illegally entered the house of Cynthia Jarrett without a warrant, having arrested her son and taken his keys. While they were searching the house, Jarrett collapsed and, with no help being offered, died of a heart attack. A protracted and violent confrontation ensued between the youths on the estate and the police, during the course of which one officer, Keith Blakelock, was stabbed to death. He was, perhaps surprisingly, the first police officer to be killed in a riot on the British mainland since Robert Culley in 1833. The inquest jury on that occasion had returned a verdict of justifiable homicide, ‘indicating that the violent charge of the police deserved to be met with violence’; the verdict was later overturned. This time, six residents of the estate were charged with murder, amidst hysterical media coverage. Three had the charges dismissed by the trial judge, largely because of their treatment by the police; the remaining three were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the sentences were quashed in 2001 after the court of appeal accepted evidence that the alleged confessions, the centrepiece of the prosecution case, had been tampered with. Meanwhile an inquiry into the disturbances, conducted by Lord Gifford, had suggested that, despite the Scarman Report, little had changed and that there was a ‘factor of racialism in the response of the rank and file of police’.
The day after the riot, Sir Kenneth Newman, chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, blamed the violence on ‘leftwing infiltrators’, and the press eagerly ran with his suggestion. The Daily Telegraph noted the presence of ‘white, bearded men in sandals, many accompanied by girls,’ which suggested they weren’t fully up to speed with developments in the look of the revolutionary left. The Daily Express had an even more extraordinary story: ‘Street-fighting experts trained in Moscow and Libya were behind Britain’s worst violence,’ it claimed, working itself up into a frenzied fantasy about ‘a hand-picked death squad hell-bent on bloodshed’. It turned out, happily for the nation’s peace of mind, that the story was entirely untrue, being the work of the notorious Fleet Street hoaxer Michael ‘Rocky’ Ryan, a man responsible for planting dozens of fictitious stories in British newspapers; the secret of his success, he used to claim, was ‘Always tell them what they want to hear’, and it’s hard not to see the Express story fitting precisely into that category.
Meanwhile, as Newman was busy speculating about leftist rabble-rousers, Bernie Grant, the leader of Haringey council (the first black politician to become a council leader in Britain), made it clear that in his view the police were responsible for damaging community harmony and for provoking the riot: ‘I condemn the police action and do blame them for the death of Mrs Jarrett.’ The following day, he spoke at a rally and uttered the comment that would make him into a hate figure for the media: ‘The police were to blame for what happened on Sunday night and what they got was a bloody good hiding.’ In fact, although he did use those words, they were prefaced by ‘The youths around here believe . . .’, which gave an entirely different context to his words, and articulated an indisputable truth. He was also to point out the uncomfortable reality that, for those excluded by society and denied a public voice, sometimes violence was an effective shortcut to attracting the attention of national politicians: ‘Had it not been for the disturbances, they would never have heard of the estate and never have visited Tottenham.’
None of this, of course, was what the national leadership of the Labour Party wanted to hear, busy as it was distancing itself from the past. As Peter Mandelson complained, it ‘is very hard when it comes to law and order and Bernie Grant in one sentence eclipses everything we have to say’. Grant was no Marxist, nor was he even particularly left-wing by the standards of the day, but simply by generating hostile press coverage, he clearly represented the kind of person that Neil Kinnock had no wish to see representing the new model party. ‘Kinnock today distanced himself from Bernie Grant over his attack on the police for the death of Mrs Jarrett,’ wrote Tony Benn in his diary. ‘He distances himself from everyone.’