There may be minorities we have not yet discovered.
Delegate at SDP conference (1982)
LADY MARY EVANS: The penis these days attracts no envy whatsoever.
Malcolm Bradbury, Porterhouse Blue (1987)
MATTHEW FAIRCHILD: My life is going to be earnest, joyless, sexless and humourless. I reckon I’m definitely ready for the Young Socialists.
John Stevenson & Julian Roach, Brass (1983)
There was a joke that became very familiar over the course of the Thatcher years. An early sighting came in a 1979 episode of Not the Nine O’Clock News in a sketch where Chris Langham plays a businessman seeking a new appointee to his board: ‘We’re looking for a pregnant woman who is black, blind, deaf, tall, epileptic, in her late-50s and an ex-convict.’ In 1980 it turned up in Yes, Minister, with Sir Humphrey Appleby explaining that ‘The ideal quango appointee is a black, Welsh, disabled, female trade unionist. We’re all looking around for one of them.’ The joke proved remarkably resilient, so that in 1986 the Sun was parodying the policies of Labour councils: ‘Sack all council workers who are white, able-bodied heterosexuals’. And the following year John Mortimer’s character Horace Rumpole was talking about ‘the leader of the South-East London Council widely known as Red Ron Probert’, and saying that ‘His ideal voter was apparently an immigrant Eskimo lesbian, who strongly supported the IRA’.
By this stage, with every permutation seemingly wrung from it, the gag had become rather tiresome, but more importantly there had been a notable shift in the target. Where the early versions had ridiculed big business and the civil service, seeking to tick boxes for the purposes of public relations, the obsession with minorities was now seen exclusively in terms of Labour local councils; what had been a mockery of the right-wing establishment had been turned on the left. Or rather on the ‘loony left’, this being the tabloid shorthand for Labour councils that had become universally adopted by the mid-1980s.
The phrase ‘loony left’ was even more venerable than the diversity joke with which it was so frequently linked, though its frame of reference also underwent a change. In 1974 Simon Jenkins had written in the Guardian that ‘popular worries about Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn appear to be less that he is a leftie than he may be a loony,’ and the following year the phrase itself was in use, as left-wing MP Les Huckfield warned fellow members of the Tribune group that if they continued to criticize Harold Wilson, they ran the risk of looking like ‘the loony left’. There were a few other references in the next few years, mostly within the Labour Party, but the real start of its popularity came when it was picked up by outsiders; a 1980 guide issued by the Conservative Party to their candidates in the forthcoming GLC elections warned: ‘Political interference in the police could ultimately lead to a totalitarian state. Included in the proposals of the “loony left” are the disbandment of the Special Branch, the Special Patrol Group and the illegal immigration unit.’
Thus the 1970s uses of the expression had concentrated on those who opposed Wilson’s watering down of Benn’s attempted industrial legislation; to this, the Conservatives had added the allegedly undemocratic proposal that oversight of the Metropolitan Police might be transferred from the home secretary to the local authority (as elsewhere in the country). However radical some might think these ideas, they were at least within the mainstream of political activity. What transformed the phrase was the arrival of Ken Livingstone as the leader of the GLC and a new focus on what were known as ‘minority interests’. Arguing that politics had long been the near-exclusive preserve of white middle-aged men, the GLC began an attempt to open itself to representations from other groups, principally from women, the working-class, ethnic minorities and homosexuals but also from children and the elderly. This was a real break from traditional politics as practised centrally by both major parties (though some local councils had already introduced positive discrimination policies), and it attracted hostility from all sides.
Much of the ensuing barrage of criticism, which continued for most of the decade, was concentrated on two targets: first, on the awarding of grants, however small, to community groups that contained in their names dangerous trigger-words such as black, Asian, peace, women or lesbian and gay; and second, on a new awareness of the political power of language. It was the latter that seemed particularly to offend opponents, though a sensitivity to language was not exactly unprecedented: it had its roots in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s that had gradually supplanted the word ‘negro’ with ‘black’ (which was itself now giving way to ‘African-American’), and it had been developed by the women’s movement the following decade. As early as 1977 Daily Mail journalist Anne Batt had been arguing the case for the use of non-sexist language by the media, though that newspaper was not noticeably at the forefront of the struggle for diversity, as Livingstone pointed out: ‘In addition to distorting our policies, papers such as the Daily Mail invented new ones. A typical example was the story that we had forbidden staff to ask for black coffee, as this was racist. However many denials we issued, one paper after another ran the story without checking the facts.’
A spate of media myths did indeed emerge, and became self-perpetuating. ‘Most of the stories about councils banning black dustbin bags and making children sing “Baa Baa Green Sheep” were actually made up by the tabloids,’ wrote John O’Farrell, ‘but I witnessed people taking their cue from these fictitious examples and starting to condemn people for asking for black or white coffee.’ During the 1987 Greenwich by-election, a child was sent home from a nursery in Islington, north London, for singing the nursery rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, apparently because there had been so many stories about it being banned that a nursery worker had believed this to be official policy. It wasn’t, and the next morning Glenys Kinnock went along to a Greenwich nursery to be filmed singing the rhyme. Nonetheless the story persisted and, at the subsequent general election, the SDP filmed the comedian John Cleese telling the tale all over again for a party political broadcast. The fact that it was Islington attracting attention was again no surprise; conveniently situated for Fleet Street, it had long had a reputation for being the looniest of boroughs, and former Labour MP George Cunningham had campaigned, unsuccessfully, as an SDP candidate in 1983 under the nudging slogan: ‘You’d have to be mad to vote Labour in Islington now.’
There was also media censure of such lunatic concepts as anti-racist history and non-sexist maths being taught in London schools, though little coverage of what they might actually mean to the children involved. ‘We were set a question that asked: “If a student is cycling from X to Y, and covers a distance of three miles, travelling at fourteen miles an hour, how long does it take her to arrive?”,’ remembered sometime Labour MP, Oona King, a north London pupil in the early 1980s. ‘I remember bursting with wonder and amazement. It was the first time in my life that an unidentified active person was a girl. It could have been a boy, but for no particular reason it was a girl. A girl who did something.’
Beyond the myths and misrepresentations, there was a serious issue about the composition of Labour’s constituency. ‘We recognized that the narrow definition of the working-class as white skilled workers was no longer appropriate to describe the diversity we saw around us,’ wrote Livingstone. ‘We saw that the black youth who has never had a job, the mother working in the home harder than most men work outside it, and the gay couple whose lives are circumscribed by the ignorant fears of others, are all part of the working class as it exists in our city.’
There were those on the liberal left who worried that this agenda was encouraging people to be seen as first and foremost members of a specific group, rather than as individuals, and there were those on the more old-fashioned left who also had problems with both the language and practice of what were becoming known as identity politics, seeing it as diluting the traditional focus on class. ‘I would no more expect phrases such as “blind as a bat” to be eliminated from usage, than “blackboard”,’ insisted David Blunkett, then the left-wing leader of Sheffield Council. (The ‘blackboard’ story was a frequently cited example of lunacy; one of the characters in P.D. James’ novel Devices and Desires is an ex-teacher, sacked for refusing to use the new terminology of ‘chalkboard’.) Blunkett himself was frequently lumped in with the loony left, for no better reason than the fact that he was blind and could therefore be counted as a member of a minority, though in reality he had little truck with what he considered to be London faddism. Livingstone remembered a 1982 meeting in Sheffield when Valerie Wise announced the creation of the GLC women’s committee; Blunkett whispered to Livingstone: ‘You’re not really setting up a women’s committee, are you?’ and then ‘chuckled so much that he almost fell off his chair when I confirmed that this was the case’. Four years later Sheffield did create a women’s unit, but it was buried in the personnel department and had neither the autonomy or authority of its equivalent in the GLC.
Even more distant was the attitude of Liverpool City Council, then in the control of members of the Trotskyist group Militant, who were always happy to sneer at, in the words of their most media-friendly figure Derek Hatton, ‘the London boroughs with their obsessions about anti-racist and anti-sexist issues’, though such deviationist indulgence was apparently not confined to Islington, Lambeth and Camden: ‘even Manchester, Sheffield and other Labour councils across the country could sometimes display the same attributes.’ Indeed in this analysis, even Neil Kinnock exemplified the same tendency. These ‘middle-class intellectuals’ were ‘the true “loony left”,’ Hatton insisted, ‘more concerned that we called the chairman the chair person or a manhole cover a personhole cover, than they ever were about the real issues.’ (‘Manhole’ was another popular story, though such structures had always been known officially as inspection chambers.) Mark Steel, a member then of the SWP, saw the whole endeavour as a product of powerlessness: ‘It was as if the councillors worked out they couldn’t change the world, or even the borough, so the one thing they could change was the language, or whether the person carrying out the cuts was a man or a woman.’
From the right of the Labour movement, Joe Ashton was furious at a world in which ‘Any loony cause could get a grant’, while Eric Hammond, who replaced Frank Chapple as general secretary of the electricians’ union, denounced the GLC for supporting ‘terrorist groupies, lesbians and other queer people’. Kinnock himself tended to avoid the phrase ‘loony left’ in favour of his own, more homely formulations, as when commenting on a school students’ strike in 1985: ‘The kids are being exploited by a bunch of dafties.’
The emergence of a new left, that drew in groups from outside the Labour Party with no political allegiance, and that was most powerfully articulated by Ken Livingstone, was thus distrusted right across the political spectrum. Amongst the few exceptions was Tony Benn, who had spotted that the nature of politics was changing as far back as 1971, when he had called on pressure groups, single-issue campaigners, churches and others to enter a debate about Labour’s future. (‘Why not add Women’s Lib and the “gay” groups?’ sniped a party official, whose ideological descendants were still very much in evidence a decade and a half later.) Benn’s endorsement of a politics of diversity did much to legitimize the new approach, particularly amongst activists in trade unions, though he sometimes struggled to engage with the emergent groups: ‘They had no socialist analysis,’ he wrote after meeting a group of women peace campaigners; ‘they were just deeply morally committed, and they felt that everyone had a duty to contribute directly and that all representative government and even CND itself tended to diminish people’s sense of personal responsibility.’
Despite the initially hostile reception that they received, it appeared over the following years that the London left had not been as misguided as was commonly assumed at the time, but merely ahead of the game. But perhaps the most radical aspect of the loony left, the one that really threatened the established concept of politics, proved less durable; the desire for direct personal involvement, as espoused by the peace women that Benn met, slowly withered in the wake of repeated Conservative election victories, and did not outlast the decade in any major way.
At the time, however, there was a genuine excitement about the idea of participation. At its simplest, this was manifested in the huge CND demonstrations and the massive rise in the membership of that organization, mirrored by other groups, including the likes of Greenpeace and Amnesty International. It produced a new militancy on the issue of animal rights, from the growing cultural unacceptability of wearing fur, through the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism, and up to the actions of hunt saboteurs, of whom it was estimated in 1981 there were more than four thousand, with numbers growing. It could be seen too in the consumer campaigns against apartheid, particularly in the boycott of South African goods and of Barclays Bank because of its involvement in that country; the fact that this latter tended to be primarily the concern of student unions attracted some scorn, but probably made it more rather than less effective, since it held out the threat that the next generation of high-earners would be taking their custom elsewhere.
The same issue provoked one of the more extraordinary demonstrations of the era, when the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group announced in 1986 that they would be demonstrating outside the South African Embassy in London’s Trafalgar Square twenty-four hours a day, every day, until Nelson Mandela was released, a seemingly absurd proposition at the time. Despite repeated police attempts to close the protest down, however, and despite the group being expelled from the mainstream Anti-Apartheid Movement, they were still there when Mandela finally walked free in February 1990, having maintained an unbroken presence throughout and having, in the words of a chargé d’affaires, regularly caused ‘disturbance to the normal functioning of the Embassy’.
More impressive still was the demonstration on Greenham Common in response to the announcement that American cruise missiles were to be situated at the RAF base there. Some forty demonstrators marched from Cardiff in 1981 and established a women-only peace camp that was to remain even longer than the missiles themselves. The group initially met with some sympathetic coverage in the media, and a 1982 demonstration that involved thirty thousand women encircling the base, and hanging photographs and personal mementoes on the fence, proved to be one of the most moving protests of the era. ‘It really gives you a lump in the throat,’ commented a Press Association journalist, while Alison Whyte from CND described a ‘hard-bitten Sun reporter staring at mile after mile of baby clothes, toys and family photographs, with tears streaming down his bearded face. He said he had never seen anything like it in his life.’
The sympathy was short-lived, however, and by 1983 the press was awash with stories of lesbianism, squalor and degradation: ‘Whatever idealism first inspired the anti-nuclear sit-in at Greenham Common, it is fast being overwhelmed by rancour, intolerance and, sadly, sheer bitchiness,’ claimed the Sun, while the Daily Express summed up the Greenham women as ‘this ragtag and bobtail of politically motivated harpies’. One of the few to offer any support on Fleet Street was the future television presenter Anne Robinson, then of the Daily Mirror, when she visited the camp: ‘Most of the women I could just as easily have bumped into in a bus queue,’ she wrote. ‘What Greenham Common women suffer from more than anything else is a distorted public image and they are too proud and weary to improve it.’ The public perception was indeed poor, attracting hostility not only from the right but also – because of its refusal to allow male participation – from many on the left. Nonetheless, the political effect of the demonstration was impressive; more than any other campaign, it put the issue of cruise missiles on the public agenda, while the experience changed the lives of its participants, especially in regard to perceptions of the police. ‘At first, women who were predominantly white and middle-class and unused to political activity were horrified at how quickly the police could be turned into an attacking force, fuelling rather than defusing potential conflict,’ wrote Rebecca Johnson. ‘I remember the real shock of hearing them lie under oath during trials. Childhood conditioning to respect and trust the police had gone deep, and acknowledging the reality caused some painful readjustment.’
The sheer longevity of the peace camp burned it into the public consciousness, and into fiction. Adrian Mole’s mother went to Greenham, while Inspector Wexford’s daughter, Sheila, in Ruth Rendell’s detective series was arrested for cutting the perimeter fence at a military base. ‘When peace is so beautiful,’ she asks her father, ‘and what everyone wants, why do they treat workers for peace like criminals?’ And, by providing a visible example of women’s self-organization, Greenham also brought public awareness to feminist separatism and even to lesbianism, hitherto seen in the mass media – when acknowledged at all – either in terms of Eton-cropped androgyny or of pornographic fantasy, but now reborn as a political force. There was some gentle satire in the 1980s (Robyn Penrose in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work joins a women’s group at Cambridge University, where ‘Several members of the group were lesbians, or tried to be’), but mostly there was furious denunciation by the press, which suggested that some real boundaries were being challenged.
By the end of the decade, snapped a character in Denise Danks’ crime novel Better Off Dead, lesbianism had come to represent a new set of clichés: ‘slogans, sisterhood, feminism, the struggle against sexual stereotypes and male dominance, dungarees, militant socialism, the loony left, the campaign against nuclear disarmament, Greenham Common, green issues, save the whale, and maybe, right at the end of the list, porn movies.’ And, she adds bitterly, the new perception is that: ‘Passion, romance and sex between two women don’t really come into it because lesbianism’s fundamentally a political statement against a heterosexual society’s conditioning of the sexes.’ The world of Danks’ series of novels, depicting an alternative London of hard-to-let council flats, computer hackers and market stalls selling bootleg cassettes, was offset by the explicit references to Enid Blyton, with the heroine Georgina Power based on George from the Famous Five books: ‘I wondered what sort of character George would be, having had that father and that insufferable cousin Julian,’ explained Danks. The answer appears to be that times have changed and she’s now a hard-drinking, cannabis-smoking journalist with a hyperactive and varied sex life, though she is – perhaps surprisingly – heterosexual. Her ‘insufferable cousin’, the respectable and responsible Julian Kirren, however, has fared less well in adult life and doesn’t survive the first chapter of the first novel: he’s found hanging from the ceiling in women’s underwear and a rubber mask, after a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation goes wrong.
The growing awareness of lesbianism was reinforced by the BBC2 television adaption in 1990 of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Stripping away most of the allegorical matter and narrative discursions that were present in the novel, the television version – also written by Winterson – was a much more direct tale, focused exclusively on the central story of a young girl being brought up in the 1970s by a strictly religious mother and discovering that she is homosexual. There was here no ambiguity, no question of which side the viewers were expected to take as a teenage girl’s early sexual experiences were counterposed with the rigid, fundamentalist faith of her mother: in one particularly distressing scene of exorcism, the girl is tied down and gagged while a Pentecostal pastor straddles her body and prays for her deliverance from the demons that are said to be possessing her.
The series attracted not only enormous critical praise (it won a BAFTA for best drama series), but also a substantial audience, with around six million viewers. An even more powerful image was to come later in the year, however, as the Czech-born tennis star Martina Navratilova won a record-breaking ninth singles title at Wimbledon and celebrated by climbing through the crowd to embrace her team of supporters, including her lover, Judy Nelson. Diane Hamer, who had worked on the Channel 4 series Out, was amongst those who saw a major breakthrough in the visibility of lesbian relationships: ‘I thrilled to the knowledge,’ she wrote, ‘that tens of millions of viewers around the world were at that moment watching two lesbians publicly display their love for each other.’
Also present for the occasion was Billie Jean King, whose outing in 1981 had started a scare about lesbianism on the tennis circuit: ‘Many of today’s top women players are homosexual,’ declared the little-known British player Linda Geeves, ‘and a good percentage of them are actively recruiting new talent.’ Much press attention was directed towards the precocious American star Tracy Austin, who had in 1979 become the youngest-ever winner of the US Open at the age of sixteen; she ‘had to have a bodyguard to protect her from lesbian advances in locker rooms,’ reported the Daily Telegraph, and though her agent dismissed such claims (‘That’s ridiculous!’), the spate of stories in 1981 illustrated two ideas that were then fixed firmly in the minds of public, press and politicians alike: that homosexuals preyed on the young, and that if a young person were to be exposed to homosexuality, he or she would almost inevitably renounce the attractions of heterosexuality. Much of the political fire that would be directed during the decade at lesbians and gay men was rooted in such assumptions, and the response to Navratilova’s embrace of Nelson suggested that they were firmly in place as the new decade dawned: MARTINA TURNS GIRLS INTO GAYS read the Sun headline, over an article in which Australian tennis legend Margaret Court expressed her concerns.
For despite Denise Danks’ checklist of new left clichés, in the wider culture more traditional depictions of lesbianism still persisted. In 1988 Cissy Meldrum, played by Catherine Rabett in You Rang M’Lord, became Britain’s first lesbian in a mainstream sitcom (Sarah B’Stard in The New Statesman had previously been seen in bed with another woman, but she was definitely bisexual). Cissy was ‘a member of the Communist Party and a bit of a tomboy,’ remarked writer David Croft. ‘This character gave us a chance to touch gently on lesbianism.’ But, gradually eclipsing Cissy, the dungaree-clad feminist who was assumed to be lesbian even if she wasn’t became a stock image of the 1980s. The stereotype that was portrayed came with a strait-laced attitude to sex of which Mary Whitehouse might almost have approved, a caricature that some found wasn’t entirely divorced from reality. John O’Farrell tells the story of a woman sleeping on his sofa after a party. When she then got into bed with him, he assumed that his luck was in, only to be told off for his sexist attitudes to women. ‘When a man is looking for signals that a woman might be interested in him, her climbing into his bed in her underwear might reasonably be interpreted as minor encouragement,’ he mourned. ‘But not in the world of the new puritans. Eve tempted me with the apple and then told me it was South African.’ Others were less respectful. ‘Dungarees are quite sexy in their own way,’ mused journalist Andrew Collins, looking back on his student days in the 1980s. ‘Something in the knowledge that if you unhooked the straps the trousers would fall to the floor in a heap.’
The essential worthiness of much of the new left was summed up for some by the case of the novel Down the Road, Worlds Apart by Rahila Khan, which explored the experience of Asian schoolgirls in Britain. Listed for publication in 1987 by the feminist firm Virago, eight thousand copies of the book had been printed before it was discovered that the author’s name was a pseudonym, concealing the identity of the Reverend Tony Forward, a 37-year-old white Anglican vicar. Virago were unamused by the revelation and, rather than celebrating Forward’s creative leap of imagination, withdrew the novel.
There was much that could be mocked, but there was too an alternative concept of participatory democracy being built by those working outside the established system, such that, as Bruce Kent put it, campaigners ‘took the discussion out into the market-place and made it possible for ordinary people to join in’. Such a development was largely due to frustration at the slow movement of mainstream politics, for the feminist wave that had been building in Britain throughout the previous decade showed little sign of making an impact on Westminster, even if a woman were now prime minister. ‘She’s an honorary man,’ says a character in Edward Fenton’s Scorched Earth. ‘Probably when she dies they’ll discover she was really a man.’ It was scarcely an original remark, for jokes about Margaret Thatcher’s alleged lack of femininity were as common on the left as those about one-legged aboriginal lesbians were on the right; actor Steve Nallon even made a career playing her on comedy shows like KYTV and The New Statesman and providing her voice on Spitting Image. But repetition did not make it any more accurate.
A lot of such comments were often rooted more in class and geography than in gender. ‘I’m a plain straightforward provincial,’ Thatcher insisted, and she showed absolutely no interest in a feminism that was still essentially metropolitan, and that was largely populated by those much younger than herself. The age difference was crucial in how Thatcher was perceived by the products of the demographic bulge of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those who were the beneficiaries of the expansion of tertiary education: it wasn’t simply her policies that failed to register with so many; culturally too, there was no point of contact. She was born in 1925, thirteen years before David Steel and David Owen, seventeen years before Neil Kinnock, and twenty years before Ken Livingstone. She was thus a student at university during the Second World War, and was already thirty years old, a mother of two and twice an election candidate, by the time rock and roll and independent television appeared. So when she appeared on Desert Island Discs, the closest she got to a pop song was Irene Dunne’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ from the 1935 movie Roberta. Kinnock, on the other hand, a former member of the Gene Vincent Fan Club, went for the much more obvious choice of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ when he was invited on the programme. Thatcher herself recognized that there was an age factor that needed addressing, telling Norman Tebbit that the party needed as chairman ‘someone young, to counter the Steel-Owen image,’ though her choice was perhaps a little wide of the mark: John Selwyn Gummer was always going to look more at home in the pages of the Church Times than in those of The Face. (Michael White in the Guardian put it best: ‘Mr Gummer is 43, but sounds about 17 and what comes out suggests that he has been 52 since he was about eight.’)
Perhaps some of the same misguided thinking lay behind Thatcher’s appearance on the children’s BBC1 show Saturday Superstore in 1987, where she reviewed the new single releases. (She worried that Pepsi & Shirley’s ‘Heartache’ didn’t have a strong enough melody, while the Style Council’s ‘It Didn’t Matter’ also failed to impress.) It was a surreal episode, in which she descended on kids’ TV like the goddaughter of Lord Reith, completely out of context in this new, slightly chaotic world, but refusing to compromise her style at all. Subsequent party leaders – Neil Kinnock, John Major, Tony Blair, David Cameron – worked hard to make a virtue of their supposed normality when appearing on television; they were the kind of people, one was supposed to believe, whom one might meet in the pub, or at least at a dinner party. Thatcher, on the other hand, was never natural on screen; she addressed the nation not as an equal, but as if it were a child or a slightly confused elderly relative. Or, in Keith Waterhouse’s magnificent phrase: ‘She talks to me as if my dog had just died.’
Simply on a personal level, then, she appeared to the new left as something akin to an antediluvian alien. The fact that she also had no allegiance to the women’s movement, probably wasn’t even aware of the ideological split between radical feminism and socialist feminism over the issues of patriarchy and class, came as no great surprise. Perhaps this was part of the reason why the gender gap that had traditionally favoured the Conservatives – in the 1950s they had scored eight percentage points higher amongst women than amongst men – disappeared entirely in her election victories. She was certainly reluctant to include women in her cabinet, though Baroness Janet Young did have a brief spell as leader of the House of Lords, but then the opposition was little better: in the annual elections to the shadow cabinet in 1985, Labour MPs found no room at all for even a token woman to be included alongside the fifteen men, and the rules were subsequently changed so that all ballot papers had to include votes for at least three women.
The shortage of women MPs in senior posts was partly a structural issue in the way the Commons organized itself, as future cabinet minister Tessa Jowell pointed out in 1980: ‘There are lots of practical difficulties facing women. There is no crèche at the Commons and the hours are designed for out-of-town MPs who wouldn’t know what to do with their long and lonely nights if the House sat all day.’ Teresa Gorman, who replaced Harvey Proctor as the Conservative MP for Billericay in 1987, recalled that the problems began with the constituency meeting to select a parliamentary candidate – at one of which, she records, a woman candidate was asked ‘What will your husband do for sex when you get to Westminster?’ – and continued onto overtly sexist comments and sexual harassment in the House of Commons, ‘a workplace full of hostile, elderly gentlemen who still believed in their heart of hearts that Parliament was no place for a woman.’ There remained a perception, in many quarters, that women in the main shouldn’t concern themselves overmuch with politics. ‘It is doubtful if Neil Kinnock has made a major pivotal decision all his married life which has not had the approval, and frequently the lead, of his wife Glenys,’ opined the Daily Mail in 1986. And in case anyone should misunderstand and conclude that this described a desirable and proper marital relationship, the language of the Mail made it clear that it thought otherwise: ‘Her influence on him, and on the shape of the Labour Party and therefore the very history of the nation, is unrelenting.’
There was even greater distrust in political and press circles of overt homosexuality. Maureen Colquhoun, the first out lesbian MP, had lost her seat in 1979 and, although in 1984 the newly elected member for Islington South, Chris Smith, became the first male MP to come out, there was no sign of a rush to follow him. The Conservative Matthew Parris had earlier made a speech in the House leaving little doubt that he was gay, but it had gone entirely without notice. And that was it. There were plenty of other gay MPs, of course – even Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary, Sir Peter Morrison, was, remarked Edwina Currie, ‘what they call “a noted pederast” with a liking for young boys’ – but the subject of homosexuality was considered too politically sensitive to discuss openly. Attempts to get Labour’s national executive committee to commit itself to equalizing the ages of consent for heterosexual and homosexual acts were voted down, and the best that the famously all-embracing 1983 manifesto could offer was: ‘We are concerned that homosexuals are unfairly treated. We will take steps to ensure that they are not unfairly discriminated against.’ (Which seemed to leave open the possibility of fair discrimination.) In 1985 the Labour conference debated lesbian and gay rights for the first time, and called for a full policy to be developed, but when at the end of the decade, Ken Livingstone again raised the question of the age of consent at the NEC, it was again defeated.
If Westminster politics was reluctant to take up the issue of gay rights, it was still far ahead of many other areas of public life. It wasn’t until 1990, for example, that a professional footballer was to come out. Justin Fashanu had emerged as a precocious talent at Norwich City, for whom he scored Match of the Day’s Goal of the Season in 1980, and had become the first black player to command a million pound transfer fee, but his career largely lost direction during the decade and he never realized his early promise. The revelation of his homosexuality did nothing to make his life any easier and in 1998, shortly after his retirement from the game, he committed suicide. At the time of his death, he was still the only out footballer.
As with so much else in the 1980s, the subject of how far one could combine a public role with being out as a lesbian or gay man was addressed in crime fiction. In Peter Robinson’s A Dedicated Man Inspector Banks ‘had known a sergeant on the Metropolitan force for six years – a married man with two children – before finding out at the inquest into his suicide that he had been homosexual’. In the next generation, however, Sergeant Wield, in Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels, has a happier experience. ‘When he first joined the Force, there had been no debate about concealment. But time and times had changed things, and now, though he did not delude himself that coming out would not still harm his own career, he felt a growing dissatisfaction with the path of secrecy he had chosen.’ He does finally come out to his colleagues and is met with a variety of responses from his colleagues and superiors; significantly, the most important figure, Dalziel, is sympathetic and even gives him advice on manners, warning him not to out a councillor who’s also gay: ‘Just because you’ve come up on deck, don’t rock the boat for them as prefer to remain down in the hold.’
Little of this translated into the screen adaptations of detective fiction, but television did offer the most deliberately provocative gay imagery of the era in Stephen Frears’ Channel 4 film My Beautiful Laundrette, which showed Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young man of Pakistani heritage living in south London, and his childhood friend Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), now a recovering racist, with whom he has an affair. The centre of the film lies in Omar’s attempt to resolve where he stands between the rival positions of his despairing father Ali (Roshan Seth), who wants nothing to do with his adopted country – ‘They hate us in England’ – and his uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), who can see nothing but opportunity: ‘In this damned country, which we hate and love, you can get anything you want,’ he explains. ‘That’s why I believe in England. Only you have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.’ Nasser is a Thatcherite entrepreneur, revelling in the ascendancy of money – ‘There’s no question of race in the new enterprise culture,’ he insists – and as he exults, so does Ali despair of seeing his intellectual socialism ever make progress: ‘Oh dear,’ he laments, ‘the working class are such a great disappointment to me.’ But it was the interracial gay scenes, rather than the political observations, that attracted most attention at the time, a fact that was probably not unanticipated by writer Hanif Kureishi: ‘I like sex in the movies,’ he said, ‘and I wanted this film to be entertaining. Most British films are as slow as watching Geoff Boycott batting.’
In real life it was still largely left to entertainers to make the running. Two of the biggest pop stars of the early 1980s, Boy George and Marc Almond, made little attempt to conceal their sexuality in their stage personae – though they were both much more cagey in interviews – while pop’s willingness to play with issues of gender and sexuality caused a steady stream of both outrage and confusion: the cross-dressing imagery adopted by Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics was so convincing that MTV in America demanded to see a copy of her birth certificate before screening the band’s videos, so they could be assured she was genuinely a woman. And in 1983–84 debut hit singles for Frankie Goes To Hollywood (‘Relax’) and for Bronski Beat (‘Smalltown Boy’) were not only created by gay men, but addressed gay subjects in their lyrics. Even more influential was the arrival on television of comedian Julian Clary, who took the camp tradition of comics like Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson and made it explicitly homosexual; when he delivered a double entendre, there was no possibility of mistaking his thrust, and there was little point left in the limp-wristed caricature of gay men by the time he had parodied it out of existence. When the ex-footballer Jimmy Greaves said on TV-AM that he thought Clary was ‘a prancing poofter’ who shouldn’t be allowed on family television, Clary responded with mock indignation that he didn’t prance, he minced; and Greaves gracefully backed down, sending a dozen red roses in apology.
Clary was sufficiently established on the comedy circuit to appear on the Channel 4 series Saturday Live, which took over from The Young Ones to become the cult television comedy of Thatcher’s second term. Primarily associated with Ben Elton (though the first series had a succession of hosts, including Michael Barrymore, who was definitely not out at the time), the series attracted an audience of little more than two million, but in certain circles it was required viewing. Apart from anything else, the message of the new comedy was still largely being carried around the country by television, and Saturday Live ‘was more or less the only place people from outside London could see alternative comedy,’ as Frank Skinner from the West Midlands remembered. As such it was eagerly seized upon by its devotees. ‘Ben Elton speaks directly to me, he speaks directly to all of us from his pulpit on Saturday Live,’ wrote Andrew Collins, reliving his student days. ‘I’ve never seen the hall’s coffee bar as packed as it is now.’ Sometimes, he added, ‘we’ve all found ourselves clapping the TV.’
Elton made an unlikely hero – with his single-buttoned, spangly suit jacket, narrow tie, mullet haircut and large glasses, he looked like nothing so much as a bassist in an American new wave pop band from 1980 – but his impassioned, breakneck monologues berating the state of modern society (‘basically fast food is rubbish, I don’t know why they don’t just flush it down the toilets, cut out the middleman, eh?’), and his attacks on Thatch, as he referred to the prime minister, were a unifying element for anyone under the age of thirty who had any sympathy with the new left. As Mark Steel was to point out, these rants ‘became hugely popular, though few people said they enjoyed them because they were funny, more because “at least someone’s having a go at the Tories”.’ Or, in Boy George’s words, ‘Watching Ben Elton was like, yeah, good, I’m glad there’s someone out there who’s having a go about it.’ Steel similarly recalled a gig he played at a Labour club in Watford in 1985, where he was told: ‘We’re so looking forward to your show; we could do with a really good laugh about how terrible the Tories are.’ The fictional Phil First, in Martyn Harris’s novel The Mother-in-Law Joke, has much the same analysis of why alternative comedy enjoyed its boom years in the middle of Thatcher’s era: ‘There is so little in the way of effective political opposition. A loss of faith in seventies radicalism; the lack of any new agenda for the left. So people express their distaste for the government by laughing at it.’ It didn’t sound much like the basis for comedy with any lasting appeal, and for the most part it wasn’t.
Others were unconvinced at the time by the Ben Elton school of comedy. ‘He lacks a sense of humour, taking himself very seriously indeed,’ wrote Anthony Thorncroft in the Financial Times: ‘He is also a bigot. You can attack men, not women; whites, not blacks; the middle class, not the workers.’ The review opened with probably the most offensive insult that the critic could have delivered: ‘Ben Elton is the Bernard Manning of alternative comedy.’ Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times was no more impressed: ‘You can reduce some young audiences to hysterical applause just, in effect, by saying you don’t like Margaret Thatcher. If satire is that easy, why work harder?’
Attacks from such quarters, of course, did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the ‘young audiences’, though the charge that, despite alternative comedy, the left had little sense of humour was not entirely inaccurate. And it was a charge that was frequently levelled. In the novel Exterminating Angels (1986), written by Peter Busby and Sarah Dunant, a revolutionary group adopt an imaginative approach to terrorism: blowing up the house of a property speculator, filling the swimming-pool at an oil tycoon’s house with oil, and kidnapping a racist Tory MP for the purpose of injecting him with a pigment that turns his skin black. As a result, they attract the support of the public, who see them as Robin Hood figures. ‘They are entertaining,’ admits one character, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Rather surprising, isn’t it? You don’t expect the extreme left to have a sense of humour. They’re usually relentlessly fierce and dull, like feminists.’ But by amusing the middle-classes, the terrorists find themselves up against the ultimate power of the British state to absorb threats: ‘We’ve been integrated into the structure,’ worries the group’s leader. ‘Either we deromanticize our image and make the establishment take us seriously, or we’ll be castrated by it.’
The imagery was exactly the same as that used by Jonathan Miller back in 1961, when warning about the dangers of assimilation faced by the satire boom of that era: ‘It is the threat of castration by adoption; of destruction by patronage.’ And, inevitably, such was ultimately the fate of alternative comedy. ‘The Tories had won two elections and were going to win a third,’ says Phil First in The Mother-in-Law Joke, ‘while all the left had to offer was an Unpopular Front of ill-assorted “isms”. Reg and I were getting rich on a Tory-engineered consumer boom, and to pretend otherwise was the self-indulgent posturing of a superannuated student Trot.’ By the end of the decade, Ben Elton was filling in for Terry Wogan as host of his primetime BBC1 chat-show, and starring in his own series on the same channel, cosily entitled The Man From Auntie, now part of the light entertainment establishment against which he had railed.
If many on the left were indeed somewhat humourless by nature – the ‘new puritans’ described by John O’Farrell – then perhaps they were no more than a reflection of the period. For the 1980s in Britain were not years characterized by great outpourings of joy and warmth. Both left and right had drawn their own conclusions about the crises that racked the nation in the previous decade, and both were grimly determined that radical changes needed to be wrought. Consequently the campaigns by peace women, anti-apartheid protesters, anti-racist activists, hunt saboteurs and others, were more noted for stridency than for lightness of tone; this was serious business and, in common with the Thatcherite revolution, it was pursued with an earnestness and fervour that frequently failed to connect with a wider public, the people Peter Mandelson referred to as the ‘average, unpolitical, non-aligned voters’.
As that comment suggests, the perception of the Labour leadership under Neil Kinnock was that the new left posed a threat to its attempt to re-position itself. It wasn’t that Kinnock necessarily disagreed with, say, the idea of women playing a greater role in society, more that the media’s relentless hostility, leavened only by its mockery of activists, made certain issues look too hot to handle. And so, although more people might turn out for a CND demonstration than could be motivated to join the Labour Party, there was little attempt to build on the campaigns developing outside parliament to expand the party’s base.
The conflict between the new identity politics and the Labour leadership was evident in the issue of black sections that arose in the middle of the decade. Black activists, particularly in London, began to call in 1983 for separate sections to be organized within constituency Labour parties, based on the model of the existing women’s sections, but they met with immediate opposition, both from the left – Eric Heffer and Militant were opposed in their own ways – and from above: ‘It would create significant problems of racial definition which could lead only too easily to endless unproductive acrimony,’ pronounced Kinnock in 1984. The following year, two of the of the leading campaigners, Sharon Atkin and Diane Abbott, met him to press their case, but again found themselves rebuffed. He asked who would be eligible to join, and was told that the sections would be open to anyone who considered themselves black. ‘Can I consider myself black?’ he asked, and they replied: ‘Patently not, because you’re so obviously white.’ He later told the press: ‘I consider, and so do most other people, the idea of a segregated section on the basis of colour or racial origin to be repellent.’
Despite the opposition, several local parties did set up unofficial black sections, starting with Vauxhall and Lewisham East in London, though their contribution didn’t always seem to be characterized by compromise and comradeship. ‘The Labour Party itself perpetuates racism,’ claimed a booklet produced by the Vauxhall branch for the 1984 conference. ‘It is an institution rooted in a racist society and its own routine practices, customs and forms of organization exclude black people from the structures of power as effectively as if they were barred from membership.’ A conference resolution that year to set up official black sections was rejected by the union block votes.
It was a contentious issue and one that produced a series of anomalies. The Enfield and Barnet branch of the far-right National Front passed a resolution welcoming the idea ‘as the first stage in the realignment of British politics on racial lines,’ adding that: ‘These sections clearly indicate both the inability and unwillingness of blacks to integrate into British society.’ Meanwhile a selection meeting in the Brent South constituency chose Paul Boateng as its parliamentary candidate, but was faced by a demonstration led by Sharon Atkin because the local party didn’t have a black section, even though all those on the shortlist were themselves black. The gradual adoption of leading black figures as parliamentary candidates – Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz, Russell Profitt (who had been the party’s only black candidate in 1979) – took much of the steam out of the campaign, leading some to conclude that all along it had been, in Roy Hattersley’s words, ‘really a vehicle for promoting the parliamentary ambitions of metropolitan, middle-class professionals’. Militant came to much the same conclusion. The one major casualty amongst the leading lights of the movement was Atkin; chosen as the candidate for Nottingham East, she was removed by the national executive following a public meeting in early 1987, at which she angrily replied to criticism that she’d become part of the system: ‘I don’t give a damn about Neil Kinnock and the racist Labour Party.’ The presence of television cameras at the meeting ensured that her message was widely disseminated.
By now a general election was imminent, and nerves were getting strained. In February 1987 all the issues about the new left resurfaced in a by-election for the Greenwich constituency in south London, held until his death by Labour’s Guy Barnett. ‘Our candidate would ordinarily have handled the campaign quite adequately,’ wrote Bryan Gould, now one of the key Labour strategists. ‘The media spotlight, however, focused on her political past, as an extreme left-winger, and exploited her uncertainty in handling the press.’ Actually the candidate, Deirdre Wood, wasn’t particularly extreme at all, just a local politician, a former GLC councillor, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The media had evidently decided it was time to re-run the Bermondsey campaign and she was cast as this month’s whipping boy. Lacking evidence of any serious charges of extremism, the Daily Mail instead got excited by discovering that she was living with a man who wasn’t the father of her children and who had been a shop steward during the winter of discontent. She had also said she was ‘forty-ish’, and the News of the World took great delight in revealing that actually she was forty-four; this was run under the somewhat misleading headline DEIRDRE’S BIG FAT LIE, which hinted at where much of the media coverage was heading: she simply wasn’t svelte enough. Certainly she was no match for the much more cheerful-looking figure of the Alliance’s Rosie Barnes, who won the seat with a 28 per cent swing, though virtually all of this came from the Conservatives rather than from Labour. It was the SDP’s first by-election gain in nearly three years and, followed shortly by the Liberals retaining their Truro seat after the untimely death of David Penhaligon, it gave the Alliance a major boost at Labour’s expense as the general election approached.
Amidst the dismay that ensued, a memo written by Patricia Hewitt, Kinnock’s press secretary, was leaked to the Sun: ‘The gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners, and fear of extremism and higher taxes is particularly prominent in the GLC area.’ It was an unexpected charge from a former general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties, let alone from someone who had voted for Tony Benn in the 1981 deputy leadership contest, and it was an argument that Ken Livingstone was keen to refute, pointing out that, although there had indeed been a swing to the Conservatives in London in the 1983 general election, it had been considerably lower than the national average.
And that general election had been held at a time when the GLC was plumbing its lowest depths of bad press and unpopularity; since then the Conservative Party had done everything in its power to change the public’s perception of the council. The Tories’ 1983 manifesto had been quite explicit about its intentions: ‘The metropolitan councils and the Greater London Council have been shown to be a wasteful and unnecessary tier of government. We shall abolish them.’ And so the government duly introduced a bill to close down the offending authorities, though Norman Tebbit perhaps gave a truer picture of the reasoning behind the move, when he denounced the GLC as being ‘Labour-dominated, high-spending and at odds with the government’s view of the world’. Livingstone similarly pointed out that there was ‘a huge gulf between the cultural values of the GLC Labour group and everything that Mrs Thatcher considered right and proper’. This was a conflict of political values, much more than it was a question of penny-pinching.
The GLC immediately launched a campaign to promote itself, to draw attention to the services it provided and to campaign against the abolition proposal. Brilliantly conducted, the strategy focused on the simple question of democracy, under the slogan: ‘Say No to No Say’. It was one of the great advertising success stories in a decade that was itself increasingly dominated by advertising. By March 1984 a poll in London’s evening newspaper, the Standard, was showing a massive turnaround, with 52 per cent now saying they were satisfied with the GLC and with Labour enjoying a 10 per cent lead over the Conservatives in the capital, at a time when the party was trailing by 2 per cent nationally. To compound the issue, the government realized that abolition could not be completed before the next GLC elections were due in May 1985, and that the Tories were likely to take a pasting. ‘The 1985 elections cannot be allowed to go ahead,’ wrote environment secretary, Patrick Jenkin, to Thatcher in a state of high panic. (The letter was leaked to the GLC by a transsexual dominatrix, who had found it in a client’s briefcase while he was tied to a bed.) And the elections were indeed cancelled, allowing Livingstone the opportunity to ramp up the message that the whole abolition programme was an abuse of democratic process; newspaper adverts showed a picture of him with the message: ‘If you want me out, you should have the right to vote me out.’ In the face of huge public support for the campaign, most of the hostile coverage in the papers began to tail off, with even the Daily Mail, under the headline THE MAN RUNNING RINGS ROUND MAGGIE, admitting that ‘When it comes to the propaganda war, Livingstone is much too fast for her’.
The reinvention of Livingstone, now no longer the bogeyman figure lurking stage-left, but instead a cheeky chappie standing up for the democratic rights of Londoners, played to his strengths in bucking the trend: here was a leading left-wing figure who self-evidently did have a sense of humour and who, having settled into his public role, enjoyed teasing the media. ‘Marxism? I’m not sure what it means,’ he said. ‘I’ve never even read Karl Marx: I prefer science fiction.’ He promoted his ‘belief that the personal was political and politics affected every aspect of our daily lives’ and made it popular, setting out an alternative social agenda for a future Britain. The public relations operation that facilitated the transformation in image, however, didn’t come cheap. Livingstone admitted as much when pointing out that the GLC’s campaign helped prepare the way for the Kinnock-led Labour Party to take advertising seriously: ‘The Party could not spend on anything like the scale of the GLC between elections.’ The Tories railed against ‘propaganda on the rates’ and the 1986 Local Government Act prohibited local authorities from spending money on political advertising, but by then the damage had been done.
With the huge Conservative majority in the Commons, all the legislation easily passed through parliament (though a handful of senior Tories, including Patrick Cormack, Ian Gilmour, Edward Heath, Francis Pym, Geoffrey Ripon and Peter Tapsell, voted against) and the GLC was duly abolished in March 1986. The final concert at the Royal Festival Hall under the GLC’s administration ended with a candlelit performance of Joseph Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, a piece in which, as each musician finishes their part, they snuff out their candle and leave the stage, until the hall descends into silence and darkness.
It was, for the government, a largely pyrrhic victory, denting the image and reputation of the Conservative Party much more than it harmed the political platform promulgated by the council, or the career of its chief protagonist. The following year Livingstone was elected as MP for Brent East, and had become sufficiently acceptable that his services were being sought out by advertising agencies: most famously he appeared in a television promotion for British cheeses, espousing the virtues of Red Leicester. By the end of the decade he had succeeded Tony Benn as the leading figure on the left, as Benn himself recognized in 1989: ‘There is no doubt that Ken will be the left candidate against Neil if we lose the next election.’ In case there was any confusion about how deeply he had penetrated the national psyche, confirmation of his status came the same year in the sitcom Birds of a Feather, in a scene set in a job centre. ‘Everyone here looks so downtrodden,’ says Tracey (Linda Robson) and Sharon (Pauline Quirke) replies, ‘That’s ’cause they are, Tracey. Welcome to the backside of Thatcher’s economic miracle.’ To which Tracey retorts: ‘Oh, don’t start getting all Ken Livingstone with me.’