Rejoice! Rejoice!

‘The only way is up’

How Thatcherite must Labour become in order to appeal to the new working class?

Peter Mandelson (1987)

You don’t have to be a member of the Militant Tendency to feel that there is something wrong when a hospital doctor makes less in a week than an inexperienced stockbroker can pick up before lunch on Monday.

David Thomas, Daily Mail (1987)

That’s what makes the Phelans frightening. They have nothing. Jack Phelan was the new underclass: riotous, savage, with nothing to lose. It frees you from an awful lot of restraints and inhibitions.

Robert Barnard, A City of Strangers (1990)

‘This is the most successful campaign in the history of the party,’ Neil Kinnock told the parliamentary Labour Party, at its first meeting after the general election of 1987. ‘It has been recognized as such by our opponents and the pundits.’ He continued to list the achievements for some time, before turning to the negative side of the balance sheet: ‘I must mention some failures. One is that we failed to win the election.’ That was certainly true, but it wasn’t quite the whole truth. The result was appalling for Labour, the second worst general election defeat since the Second World War, as the party recorded just 31 per cent of the national vote (compared to the 37 per cent managed in 1979) and again failed to make any serious impression in the south-west and south-east of England and in East Anglia, in all of which the Conservatives gained an outright majority of votes cast. And it still managed to attract just 3.5 million votes from trades unionists, a long way from the block vote at conference, which stood at six million. The Conservative majority in the Commons was reduced, but still stood at a huge 102 seats. By any normal historical standards, this was failure on a grand scale.

But then this wasn’t an election that was judged by normal historical standards. Evaluations were instead conducted in the shadow of the catastrophe of 1983, and seen in that half-light, Kinnock could indeed claim some successes – primarily that Labour had come a clear second, beating the SDP-Liberal Alliance by eight percentage points. The threat that Labour’s slide might see them eclipsed as the major opposition party had been defeated, and while asserting the right to be runner-up in a three-horse race wasn’t much to brag about, it did at least keep alive hopes for the next contest. Meanwhile the immediate future for politics was summed up in an election night Spitting Image special, broadcast as polls closed, which ended with assorted Conservative MPs singing the Nazi song ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ from the film Cabaret. It was presumably intended as a chilling warning from history, though it was hard to be satirical when Alan Clark had already identified the original as one of his favourite movie sequences (‘that wonderful, uplifting scene in the beer garden when the young SA boy leads the singing’).

The election campaign itself had been centred almost entirely on Kinnock himself, with the opening party political broadcast, directed by Hugh Hudson of Chariots of Fire fame, devoted exclusively to him. The film, known as Kinnock – The Movie, hinged on two major speeches: the attack on Liverpool council in 1985 (complete with reaction shots of Derek Hatton, an unusual appearance by Militant in a Labour broadcast), and a performance in Llandudno, when he abandoned his prepared text for an impromptu and impassioned defence of equality and fairness. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock for a thousand generations to go to university?’ he demanded and, though it was easy to find faults in his logic – universities had only existed for around thirty generations – it was inspiring at the time. Footage was also included of Neil and Glenys walking along cliffs by the sea, perhaps in an attempt to erase the earlier coastal imagery of the couple, when he fell over on Brighton beach.

It was a slickly-made piece of work which got a mixed reception from his opponents. ‘Packaging which owed a lot to Andrex,’ David Owen declared loftily, but his SDP colleague Bill Rodgers was more impressed. ‘It was a film worthy of Leni Riefenstahl at her most dangerously persuasive,’ he reckoned, saving his criticisms for an Alliance broadcast which featured Rosie Barnes, the heroine of Greenwich, alongside a pet rabbit: ‘Her well-meaning chatter about the family could have been a commercial for shampoo or sliced bread.’ More importantly the broadcast gave Kinnock a personal boost in the polls, and became the first election film to get a repeat screening, due – it was claimed – to public demand; it replaced a planned broadcast on the NHS scheduled for the end of the campaign. This, believed Norman Tebbit, now chairman of the Conservative Party, was a major error: ‘to repeat the film, as they did, drew attention to its lack of substance.’ He was right, of course, but then it wasn’t clear that Labour wanted to see much emphasis placed on substance, for Kinnock didn’t always look comfortable with some of the policies he was articulating. ‘You don’t think I believe in this shit?’ he asked Peter Mandelson privately. ‘Peter, it’s crap, it’s crap.’

Subsequent analysis of the election showed that Kinnock’s personal standing rose by six percentage points during the campaign, but that both Labour and the Conservatives ended with almost exactly the same share of the vote with which they had started. A Fabian Society pamphlet also pointed out that ‘The increase in the Labour vote in 1987 came from a higher turn-out amongst Labour supporters rather than from any growth in identification with Labour’. For all of Labour’s much-heralded professionalism in presentation, nothing had really changed: Kinnock could appeal to and sometimes inspire Labour traditionalists, but was still unable to broaden the brand appeal. And the Conservatives, despite a somewhat lacklustre campaign, could still count on the affluent south and midlands to return them to government. There was no headline-grabbing youth rally at Wembley this time round, though Andrew Lloyd-Webber did write a theme tune for the campaign, and a family-orientated event did bring out some old favourites including Adam Faith and Frank Ifield; also present was Errol Brown, formerly the singer with the band Hot Chocolate, who performed John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, in what might well have been an act of subversive irony. The most effective single element in the campaign, which ran under the slogan ‘Britain’s booming – don’t let Labour wreck it’, was a typically negative Saatchi & Saatchi poster showing a soldier with hands raised in surrender and the strap-line: ‘Labour’s Policy on Arms’.

But if Labour could take hope from the election, and the Conservatives could take control of the country, the Alliance could take nothing positive at all. Its share of the popular vote was down by less than three percentage points, but there was a fine line between respectability and disappointment, and they had stepped backwards over it. Some seats were lost, including that of Roy Jenkins, beaten by Labour’s George Galloway in Glasgow Hillhead, and of the twenty-two MPs remaining, just five belonged to the SDP, with David Owen the sole parliamentary survivor of the valiant gang of four who had set out to break the mould of British politics. They had come remarkably close to achieving their objective, but it had been a tall order at the best of times, and in the increasingly bitter class warfare of the mid-1980s, it seemed that the middle-class Alliance had simply been squeezed out of contention.

Immediately the demand was raised from David Steel and others that the six-year betrothal should now be solemnized, and a formal marriage of the two parties be conducted. Owen was vehemently opposed to any such union, believing that the radical left-of-centre SDP he was trying to build would be sacrificed on the nuptial altar, but there was an inescapable logic to the process that was hard to escape. Under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it was tough enough for a third party to keep its head above water, but it merely made things harder if it confused the issue by choosing to have two heads, particularly when they belonged to men as uncooperative as Owen and Steel appeared to be. The popular perception of the pair was largely set by their Spitting Image portrayal, where Steel was represented by a puppet small enough to be slipped into the pocket of the dominant and bullying Owen, but the reality was almost exactly the opposite. Steel, despite his youthful appearance and his taste in junior-executive striped shirts with white collars, was a competent and experienced politician, who had led his party for eleven eventful years, from the spectacular downfall of Jeremy Thorpe, through the Lib-Lab pact in the latter days of James Callaghan’s government, to the building of the Alliance. Owen, on the other hand, was constantly being outmanoeuvred by those he appeared to consider unworthy of being his equals. And so he was again.

The call for a merger of the two parties was put to a vote of the members, with Owen leading the ‘no’ campaign, along with most of his parliamentary colleagues. Indeed Charles Kennedy was the only SDP MP to support the merger; he begged the party not to lose itself ‘in a welter of self-indulgence and self-destructive recrimination’, but it did so anyway and, though the result saw the proposal approved by 57 per cent of SDP members, the bitterness of the debate led some to reminisce unhappily about the behaviour of the Labour Party in 1981. ‘I feel ashamed,’ one member wrote to Rodgers. ‘If those at the centre are incapable of demonstrating that consensus can be a reality, we deserve the scourge of extremism. Internal warfare, fratricide – where is the party of partnership?’ The Liberals meanwhile, who had never before been in the position of abandoning their party to form a new one, were considerably more enthusiastic, an attitude helped by the suspicion that this was less a genuine merger than a takeover. Owen decided not to go along with the majority, and together with two other MPs – John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes – withdrew from the process, leaving Robert Maclennan to lead the party into merger talks. (This was something of a turnaround for Maclennan, since he had been firmly in the Owenite camp and had earlier been reported, in his days as a Labour MP, to have believed ‘that the Liberals were poison and should be avoided’.)

Following extensive and exhaustive negotiations, the new party came into existence in March 1988, though it wasn’t as clean a break as might have been hoped; the Owenite rump remained behind, clinging on to the identity of the SDP, while a handful of Liberals also split to keep the name of their party similarly alive in a much-reduced fashion. The new entity adopted the name of the Social and Liberal Democrats (the label Liberal and Social Democrats would have been more accurate, but the initials more loaded) and chose Paddy Ashdown as its leader. This latter was probably the wisest decision it took in its first years. Ashdown had only been elected to the Commons in 1983, but he had a more interesting background than most of his colleagues – he had served with the Royal Marines and the secret services – and his lack of political baggage was, in the circumstances, an advantage: the arguments over the future of the Alliance had done substantial damage to an endeavour whose chief selling-point had been its lack of dogmatic in-fighting; a clean break was more than welcome.

While Ashdown was finding his feet, however, there was the very real possibility that the SLD might find themselves outflanked by the SDP, for Owen remained a major public figure, with a standing far in excess of the forces he now commanded. His future role became one of the great political conundrums of the time. In a system akin to the American model, he would have been a credible presidential candidate, but in the tribal world of Westminster, he was seen to be a bit adrift, and rumours abounded that he was keen either to join the Conservatives or to rejoin Labour. Of these, the second option was highly unlikely: Labour had strayed too far from its chapel roots for there to be much rejoicing over this particular sinner, even if he were to profess himself repentant, which he showed no signs of doing. And there wasn’t much love lost between him and Kinnock, with the Labour leader accusing him of possessing ‘an ego fat with arrogance and drunk with ambition’. The idea of pursuing his career amongst the Tories was more plausible; Rupert Murdoch had suggested in 1986 that Margaret Thatcher make him deputy prime minister, with the idea that he might one day inherit the top job, and in 1988 Thatcher herself took his wife, Debbie, to one side after a Downing Street dinner and confided: ‘Your husband has a big choice to make and it can no longer be avoided. There are only two serious parties in British politics and we women understand these things; it is time he made up his mind.’

But long before these kites were flown, Owen had explicitly ruled out the possibility of joining forces with the Tories, and to renege on that would have been a difficult political step to take. And so he kept his ever-decreasing party going, contesting by-elections against the SLD to the detriment of both, in what he described as a ‘battle of the mice’. In the 1989 contest in Richmond, North Yorkshire, caused by the departure of Leon Brittan to become a European commissioner, the SDP and SLD candidates scored more than half of the vote between them, but split their support sufficiently to allow the Conservative candidate, William Hague, to emerge as the victor, despite recording a 24 per cent drop in support, the worst performance by a Tory candidate since Thatcher had come to power. The coup de grâce came the following year at a by-election in Bootle, where the SDP candidate polled a derisory 155 votes, beaten not merely by the Liberal Democrats (as the SLD had now renamed themselves) and by the Green Party, but also by the candidate from the leftover Liberal Party. Even worse, the rock and roll singer Screaming Lord Sutch, who had long been contesting seats under the banner of the Monster Raving Loony Party, attracted two and a half times as many votes. Faced with such public humiliation, Owen announced that the party was to dissolve itself, though even now he was not quite prepared to throw in the towel. ‘He said that while his party might now be dismissed as a joke, he believes that he personally still has credibility,’ recorded future Conservative MP Gyles Brandreth in his diary, after encountering Owen in the studios of TV-AM. His hopes appeared to depend on the weight that his backing would add to Labour’s cause in the next general election: ‘in the event of a narrow Labour victory he can see himself as a possible foreign secretary.’ Few others shared his vision.

While David Owen, the gang of one, was thus providing a stark demonstration of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure, the Labour Party was taking the next steps down the road of reinvention. Following the third consecutive election defeat, Denis Healey – the man who really should have been foreign secretary, if not prime minister – finally retired from the frontbench after more than two decades, and other established figures, including Peter Shore, also stepped aside. In the subsequent vote by MPs for the shadow cabinet, Bryan Gould, a leading modernizer, came top with John Prescott second, while Gordon Brown and Jack Straw made their debuts in the list, and Tony Blair only narrowly missed out. There was a sense of a changing of the guard, of a new generation taking charge. And its first task was to ditch as much as possible from the legacy of The Policies.

Accordingly, a series of policy review groups were set up, which in due course reported back with the findings expected of them. Published in 1989 as Meet the Challenge, Make the Change – a document whose title seemed aimed more at the party than at the electorate – the reviews revealed that Labour no longer saw state ownership of industry as a key ambition, that its taxation aspirations were now a Thatcherite 20 per cent basic rate and a modest higher rate of 50 per cent, and that most of the trade union legislation introduced by the Tories was to be accepted, including secret ballots for strike action and leadership elections. (Blair, as employment spokesperson, threw in a rejection of the closed shop as an afterthought later in the year.) On the other key issues, withdrawal from Europe had already been dropped in the 1987 manifesto, while defence was held over for the moment, since it was such an explosive subject, though Kinnock made no secret of having abandoned his belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament. Frontbench spokespeople now made sure that all pledges and proposals were now followed by the cautious phrase ‘as resources allow’ or, more long-windedly that everything depended on ‘the situation we inherit in each case and on the constraints of finance and legislative time.’

None of this was achieved painlessly. Everything the party had stood for just six years earlier had been cast aside, and its place taken by everything that the hated SDP had stood for. ‘The distance between the leadership and the rest of the movement is, at best, rather sad,’ wrote David Warburton, a far-from-extreme union official. ‘At worst it is demoralizing.’ Bryan Gould expressed the same opinion when he came to write of the period: ‘there was a growing disillusionment and apathy as regards the direction in which the policy review and other changes were taking the party.’ Ron Todd, who had succeeded Moss Evans as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, put it rather more directly at the 1988 conference: ‘Nye Bevan is spinning in his grave as the last vestige of controversy, of political opinion, of socialist content, is ground out of the election literature, in favour of glossy pink roses, a sharp suit and a winning smile.’

And from the left, there was simple despondency, as expressed by Benn: ‘I think the Labour Party may be in a state of terminal decline.’ Such apocalyptic fears were not as exaggerated as they might appear. Membership of the party was continuing to decline (though Richard Attenborough did rejoin in 1990, presumably having received fresh instructions from Gandhi), while the activist base was shrinking, and even in electoral terms there was no obvious benefit being gained: in the first two years of the new parliament, Labour failed to take any new seats at by-elections (in fact, they lost one to the Scottish Nationalist Party), while opinion polls continued to show the Conservatives in a strong lead, at one stage touching a 50 per cent share. What was the point of all the reforms if they weren’t matched by public acceptability? What, indeed, was the point of the Labour Party, if not even its leadership knew what they believed in any more? Kinnock was fast coming to be seen as a man who, having sold his soul to the devil for electoral preferment, was likely to be cheated on the deal. Or, as Jim Sillars of the SNP put it: ‘To get into Downing Street, Neil Kinnock would boil his granny down for glue.’

On the other hand, there was an equally valid question: What was the alternative? Certainly there seemed no appetite within the party for a return to the old days. In 1988 Tony Benn finally challenged Kinnock in a leadership contest, the first time he had stood for the leadership since Harold Wilson’s resignation twelve years earlier, but as an event it generated none of the excitement of the 1981 campaign for the deputy’s position – it was more a question of history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as nothing very much at all. Kinnock won 89 per cent of the vote, and though Roy Hattersley did less well in a simultaneous election for the deputy leadership, he still secured two-thirds of the vote as he saw off both Eric Heffer, Benn’s running-mate, and the more substantial challenge of John Prescott. In the process, Labour’s standing in the polls took another knock, such was the lingering public suspicion of Benn, but he was by now a largely peripheral figure. The second stage of the Kinnock project was failing to win the affection of the party, let alone the country, but there was clearly no great desire to join battle for the cause of socialism, just an atmosphere of cowed submission: the left’s agenda had been rejected in 1983, now the right’s alternative was facing the same fate and no one knew quite what to do next, save to trudge gloomily onwards in the Micawber-like hope that something would turn up.

The signs were not good. The economic boom continued through after the election, fuelled further by Nigel Lawson’s budget in 1988, which cut the basic rate of income tax from 27 to 25 per cent and the top rate from 60 to 40 per cent. Amongst the public justifications offered for this renewed assault on higher tax rates was that paradoxically it increased revenue, since the wealthy would then make less effort to avoid paying, but in private Lawson was prepared to admit: ‘I like that argument but it isn’t true. More tax would have come from the top one to five per cent in any case because the salaries of the top earners have been put up so enormously. But still, let’s go on using the argument.’ Indirect taxes were still on the rise, of course, with eye-tests and dental examinations now attracting charges for the first time (though neither raised quite the same furore as had the imposition in 1984 of VAT on fish and chips and other takeaway food). But interest rates were low, unemployment fell below 10 per cent in November 1987 for the first time in six years, and house-prices were booming – up 40 per cent in some areas in the eighteen months following the election (YUP! IT’S JUST LIKE A WIN ON THE POOLS, enthused the Sun), so that the average house-price now equalled four-and-a-half times average earnings. ‘Mr Lawson has a lot to be complacent, smug and arrogant about,’ wrote the veteran political journalist Colin Welch.

During the same period, however, came the first warnings that not all was as secure as it seemed. The stock market was also booming in the summer of 1987, and there were those who were getting suspicious. ‘Stock market is up again,’ wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary in July 1987. ‘I don’t trust these endless rises! It has got to fall quite drastically soon. The world’s economic state is parlous in view of the enormous budget deficit of the USA and the endless debts of South America and East Europe.’ Three months later came Black Monday, when the Dow Jones recorded its biggest-ever percentage fall for a single day, and the rest of the world, including London, responded in similar fashion. It was, despaired The Times, ‘the unthinkable – the roaring Eighties, the years of easy prosperity, could be over’. Class War was more succinct, capturing the moment when reality seemed to catch up with the City yuppies in the headline FILO-FUCKED!

Coming so soon after the celebrated Big Bang of financial deregulation, the speed and scale of the crash was blamed by some on the new era of international, 24-hour-a-day markets and on program trading, in which computer systems took the place of human judgement. Indeed one of the best crime novels of the decade, Denise Danks’s The Pizza House Crash, centred on the idea of computer hackers trying to tweak the market by sending subliminal messages to the screens of traders, brainwashing them with the single word ‘SELL’, thus provoking a wave of panic that got out of control. It was a surprisingly plausible hypothesis.

The timing of the crash was particularly poor for the government, which was in the process of selling off the remainder of its stake in British Petroleum. The offer price for the shares had been pitched at what was considered a bargain level, in pursuance of the privatization ideal, but in the aftermath of Black Monday the shares fell below that price, leaving the investment banks that had underwritten the offer in serious danger of being out of pocket. This was, one might have assumed, precisely the kind of unforeseen circumstance for which underwriters were employed, but the prospect of losing money proved sufficiently intolerable that they demanded the state take action to protect their position – and the Bank of England duly obliged. Free market enterprise, it appeared, was not actually in the business of taking risks at all; at least not when it had a government that, despite its aversion to subsidizing industry, could be relied upon to bail out private finance. Indeed, the government’s main concern at the time appeared to be that the Bank was trying to take all the credit for the decision: ‘there has been an attempt to knock the gilt off the chancellor’s gingerbread,’ as a Downing Street statement put it.

Lawson’s inflationary 1988 budget was all the more extraordinary for coming not only early in a parliament – politically an unusual time for giveaways – but also in the wake of Black Monday, just at a time when it looked as though the self-congratulatory office blocks sprouting up in the City might actually be castles built on sand. In the short term his injection of further cash and credit into the system worked, but there was bound to be a comedown and, in the second half of 1988, it duly came; interest rates, having been cut three times following the budget, began to rise steadily again, and in October 1989, two years on from the stock market crash, they reached 15 per cent. Inflation too was rising, so that by November 1988 Labour frontbencher Gordon Brown could mock Lawson’s earlier claims that his target was zero inflation: ‘Does he think that that promise is still credible when, after five budgets and six autumn statements, inflation is now higher than when he became chancellor?’ And so the tide began to turn against the government. A parody of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ that circulated around the City of London at Christmas 1988 captured the prevailing mood that the boom years were slipping away:

Dazed from many a drinking-bout,

Your yuppie’s now a lager lout.

See him, failed, tired and boozy,

Shedding tears in his Jacuzzi;

Life’s no longer full of glee –

He’s on the shelf at twenty-three.

It wasn’t simply the economy. There was a wider sense that things weren’t quite right in the country, symbolized by a spate of disasters. In March 1987, 193 people lost their lives when the Herald of Free Enterprise cross-channel ferry capsized as it left Zeebrugge. Many of the passengers were Sun readers on a trip sponsored by the newspaper, which was offering a £1 return fare for a day of buying cheap alcohol and cigarettes. Allegedly the event was subsequently known in the Sun offices as ‘drowned for a pound’, but the paper’s public response was slightly less callous: it organized a benefit event at the London Palladium, starring Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, while a version of ‘Let It Be’, produced by Stock Aitken and Waterman and performed by ‘the usual hotch-potch of clashing celebrity vocals’ (as one of the participants, Boy George, put it) was released on the Sun’s own record label, and went to No. 1 under the name Ferry Aid.

In August that year an unemployed man named Michael Ryan shot dead sixteen people before killing himself in Hungerford, Berkshire in an act of mass-murder hitherto unknown in Britain. Then in October the south-east of England was hit by the worst storm for nearly three centuries, killing eighteen people and destroying more than fifteen million trees. The following month, eleven were killed when the IRA detonated a bomb at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen, an act so extreme that even the official Soviet news agency, Tass, condemned it as ‘barbaric’, while Sinn Fein itself was moved to apologize. In November, a fire at King’s Cross underground station in London cost thirty-one lives, and Paul Johnson described 1987 in the Daily Mail as THE YEAR OF DISASTER. It was unfortunately not the end, for the following year proved even more costly with an explosion on the Piper Alpha oil-rig in the North Sea in July claiming 167 lives, and in December, a terrorist bomb exploded onboard a jumbo jet, Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York, killing 270 in the air over Lockerbie and on the ground. January 1989 saw a further 47 deaths near Kegworth in Leicestershire, when a passenger plane suffered an engine failure and crashed into the embankment of the M1 motorway.

The media struggled to make sense of many of these incidents, since they appeared to be isolated, disconnected from the established narratives of news. But then, in April 1989, came a disaster that fed directly into a set of time-honoured prejudices. Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, Hillsborough, when an overcrowded section of Liverpool supporters, overwhelmed by an influx of further fans, resulted in a deadly crush that killed ninety-six people. Tapping into the long-running story of football hooliganism, the Sun in particular caused great offence with a front-page editorial headlined THE TRUTH. ‘Drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers,’ it asserted. ‘Police officers, foremen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon by a hooligan element in the crowd. Some thugs rifled the pockets of injured fans as they were stretched out unconscious.’ None of this was true – hooliganism had no part to play in the events that day – and, in the ensuing outcry, sales of the paper on Merseyside collapsed by nearly 40 per cent, staying low for months and years to come. The broadcaster Brian Hayes captured the mood of many when he directed a diatribe against the paper’s editor Kelvin MacKenzie on live television, challenging him to phone in to justify his coverage: ‘Mr MacKenzie, you’re living in a cartoon land where no one ever gets hurt and nothing lasts for longer than a moment. But the pain you and your paper cause to many people lasts much longer than the moment it takes to read the page. Titillation for a few column inches destroys lives, Mr MacKenzie.’

Some other reporting was more accurate, with the Economist magazine directing its fire at the football authorities: ‘For complacency and incompetence, there’s nothing like a cartel; and of Britain’s surviving cartels, the Football League is one of the smuggest and slackest.’ The subsequent report by Lord Justice Taylor was clear that the immediate blame for the disaster lay with the police’s failure to handle the situation, but went on to recommend that the terraces on which generations of fans had stood should now be removed, in favour of all-seater stadiums, and that the fences erected at the front of stands (introduced as an anti-hooligan measure to stop pitch invasions) should now be removed. The resultant changes to the grounds of clubs in the top divisions changed the face of football for ever, beginning a long process of social rehabilitation for the sport.

Thatcher’s third term in office was marked too by a series of health scares around the farming of food. In 1986 the government admitted that Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) had entered the British beef industry, and early jokey stories about ‘mad cow disease’ soon turned to alarm with the realization that it might cause an outbreak of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans. In 1989 the sale of cows’ brains for human consumption was banned, but by then the disease had spread into the breeding stock and the following year France became the first country to ban the import of British beef. Soon afterwards, the agriculture secretary, John Selwyn Gummer, staged a photo-opportunity in which his daughter Cordelia supposedly bit into a burger to demonstrate the safety of British beef and, though it later transpired this was a set-up and she hadn’t herself eaten the burger, Gummer’s public standing – which had never been particularly high – took a knock from which it never quite recovered. BSE remained an issue for over a decade, and provoked a massive cull of infected cattle, though scores of human deaths from vCJD did occur.

Meanwhile, an entirely separate story had broken in relation to the dangers posed to humans by modern farming. In 1988, Edwina Currie had her attention drawn to a massive rise in the incidence of food poisoning caused by Salmonella enteritidis, which was now being found not merely in chickens but in their eggs. There was even an outbreak of the infection in the House of Lords that year, while the bacterium had also hit the headlines when the meat snack Peperami had a nationwide recall in response to the discovery of contamination. A series of warnings, advising people about the safest ways of cooking eggs, was issued by the department of health, but was little heeded until Currie in a television interview commented that ‘most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now infected with salmonella.’ In fact, most production was not infected, though there had already been more than twenty deaths that year, but the phrase scarcely seemed a catastrophic error, except for the egg industry, whose sales had already been falling and now collapsed overnight. Caught in a massive media storm, Currie resigned and her career in government came to an abrupt end.

Bernard Ingham, the prime minister’s press secretary, was later to write that 1988 saw the end of the good times for the government: ‘At the time, it could scarcely go wrong. All this ended in December that year when Edwina Currie, a junior minister at the department of health, scrambled her eggs with excessive amounts of salmonella. After that nothing went right for the government.’ It was an unfair charge to lay, however implicitly, at Currie’s door – and seemed to skate over the impact of, say, rising interest rates – but it was certainly the case that there was a perceptible shift in public opinion as the year drew to a close. There had been an economic boom that was supposed to have heralded a rebirth of the nation and yet, as the signs appeared of an incipient new recession, it seemed that much had been left undone during the good years.

For some, this feeling was encapsulated in the increased numbers of visibly homeless people on the streets, ‘the sort of people you step on when you come out of the opera,’ as Conservative minister Sir George Young ill-advisedly put it. ‘At the beginning of the war,’ wrote Ian Gilmour, ‘beggars vanished and were not seen for forty years. Then in the 1980s they reappeared on the streets of London.’ Justin Cartwright’s novel, Look at It this Way (1990), shared the same perception: ‘They were everywhere. They begged at stations, outside supermarkets and in the streets. There were tens of thousands of them loose on the streets. Most of them were mental or alcoholic. A few seemed simply to be suffering from a complete loss of self-esteem. Some muttered and swore, some gathered in convivial groups drinking. Some busied themselves obsessively collecting scraps.’ Stories began to appear in the media about those for whom begging had become a lucrative career option, replacing the tales that had once been prevalent of benefit scroungers, and echoing the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ from a century earlier.

Undoubtedly there were such cases, but they amounted to a drop in a rising ocean. By 1989, according to the Salvation Army, there were 75,000 homeless people in the capital, most of them in hostels, bed-and-breakfast hotels and squats, and other cities were proportionately suffering even steeper rises in the numbers involved. The expression ‘cardboard city’ came into use in the middle of the decade to describe the congregations of rough sleepers sheltering in cardboard boxes in parts of London such as Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the South Bank Centre and the Embankment, while doorways in many of the chief shopping streets of the city were also occupied after dark by those with nowhere else to go. When Mother Teresa of Calcutta visited London in 1988 and toured the sites, she was horrified at what she saw: ‘I didn’t know what to say. There were tears in my eyes.’

It was scarcely a new issue – a deputation of homeless people had marched to see Sir Keith Joseph when he was housing minister back in 1962 – but it was exacerbated in the late 1980s by the house-price bubble, by the discrepancy in wealth between the capital and other parts of the country, and by the policy of care in the community, which had seen thousands of long-stay patients discharged from mental health institutions without sufficient funds being provided for their rehabilitation. The problem of homelessness hadn’t been so visible in living memory, and it added to a feeling that the fabric of the nation was fraying.

So too did the spread of the term ‘the underclass’ from America. The idea that a self-perpetuating stratum might emerge with no stake whatsoever in society, save for the claiming of benefits, had been touted by Joseph himself in 1974: ‘A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up,’ he had said in a speech at Edgbaston. ‘Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness, which are more important than riches.’ Identifying a potential problem and resolving it, however, were entirely separate questions, and there had been little in the way of government policy to address the emergence of an underclass.

If, indeed, there was such a thing, and there were many on the left who regarded such talk as a dangerous irrelevance in the analysis of class. ‘What the Labour Party has done,’ wrote Tony Benn in late 1987, ‘is to accept the Tory description of class – that there are the employed affluent workers on the one hand and the unemployed no-goods on the other – and to say the latter are an “underclass” which just has to be catered for in some way.’ But by the end of the decade, a Gallup poll revealed that 85 per cent of the population believed that there truly was an underclass, and there were some commentators prepared to broaden the assault into a more generalized critique of modern Britain. ‘The working class has come a long way in recent years, all of it downhill,’ wrote Tony Parsons in 1989. ‘Something has died in them – a sense of grace, all feelings of community, their intelligence, decency and wit.’ Amongst the symptoms he identified were the drinking on the streets of cans of high-strength lager, tattoos on women and the ownership of large dogs given names such as Rambo, Rocky and Napalm. The trend towards big dog breeds – German shepherds, rottweilers, dobermans – would lead in later years to a media panic and the passing of the Dangerous Dogs Act, but as early as 1985 they were being recognized by some as a worrying development. ‘It’s a guide to the changing mood of the country,’ reflected Ferelith Hamilton, editor of Dog World magazine. ‘I think the rise of the guard dog is very much a reflection that we are a more violent, more fearful society.’ By the end of the decade there were stories of illegal dog-fighting in various parts of the country, featuring pit bull terriers and similar breeds, and even of man-versus-rottweiler bouts.

Others were expressing similar fears over the impact of arcade video games, which had rapidly been gaining in popularity since the launch of Space Invaders in 1978. Initially this new form of recreation was seen as being probably neutral, perhaps even beneficial, so that an early press portrait of snooker player Steve Davis could claim: ‘he has brought to the game a boyish freshness and enjoyment, the kind which he himself finds in playing the electronic games of Space Invaders. This could be the root of his calmness.’ Even at that stage, however, there were warning signs, for it wasn’t just the clean-living Davis but also the more disreputable Alex Higgins who was attracted to the game; predictably enough, Higgins went too far and was docked world ranking points when he arrived late for a tournament, having spent too long shooting screen aliens out of an electronic sky. In 1981 there were press reports of a 13-year-old in Dudley who was put in local authority care after he stole £300 to feed his Space Invaders habit, while the 1983 pilot episode of Taggart saw the eponymous detective challenged about wasting his time playing Pac-Man in a pub, and shrugging: ‘Sherlock Holmes had his violin . . .’ Increasingly the perception was that of the characteristically apocalyptic Martin Amis in his novel Money (1984): ‘In the arcade the proletarian ghosts of the New York night, these darkness-worshippers, their terrified faces reflected in the screens, stand hunched over their controls. They look like human forms of mutant moles and bats, hooked on the radar, rumble and wow of these stocky new robots who play with you if you give them money.’

The change in attitude was partly the result of a shift in the nature of the games themselves in the middle of the decade. In the early titles the player was cast in the role of defending Earth from alien hordes (Space Invaders), of being in a spaceship shooting down flying saucers and asteroids (Asteroids, 1979), or of flying through an alien environment under attack (Defender, 1980). Variations came with being chased through a maze by malevolent ghosts (Pac-Man, 1980) and saving a woman who had been kidnapped by a giant ape (Donkey Kong, 1981). This latter title introduced the character of Mario, an unimposing Italian plumber who lacked any of the normal attributes of the superhero, save his ability to jump enormous heights and distances; his everyman image proved popular and he went on to appear in more than two hundred video games, becoming the mascot of the Nintendo corporation. What was common to all of these early games was that the player was essentially on the side of good in a conflict against evil, however loosely defined these concepts were. But in the mid-1980s a new genre emerged that was based on close combat: Karate Champ (1984), Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), Street Fighter (1987). Inherently amoral and seen as more violent – or, at least, more immediately physical in their violence and thus more easily mimicked in real life – these attracted wider criticism; there was as yet no outcry comparable to that which had greeted the video nasties, but there were concerns that these games had nothing constructive to add to society. There was also the worry, implied by Amis, that this was yet another depressing aspect of American culture destined to come to Britain.

Margaret Thatcher had arrived in Downing Street with a clear mandate for change, even if her ability to deliver hadn’t always been trusted. But implicit in that mandate, and central to her appeal for many voters, was a belief that she was at root old-fashioned, a throwback to an earlier image of Britain. And yet, as the smoke from the battles of the mid-1980s cleared, and as the feeling of affluence began to be threatened even in the midlands and the south, it became clear that this wasn’t entirely the case. Rather the country seemed to have imported from America not merely a reverence for wealth, but an untidy collection of social problems that were likely to last much longer than the economic recovery, as well as a pursuit of the advertising chimera of a new, improved world. Britain had changed, and it was not entirely convinced that it liked what had happened. Many of the changes were incremental and almost imperceptible, but together they amounted to a radical transformation of society and culture, away from the solid, if imperfect certainties of the post-war era to something akin to a state of permanent revolution, in which traditional values of respect, loyalty and consideration for others appeared to hold little sway.

On a perhaps peripheral level, this could be seen in the discarding by television of an entire era of British comedy. Some of the biggest stars in the field – Dick Emery, Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe, Kenneth Williams – died during the decade, but for those established figures who remained, the going was about to get difficult. In 1985 Eric Sykes was given a special award at the Festival Rose d’Or in Montreux for his outstanding contribution to television comedy, and after the ceremony approached BBC executive Bill Cotton with some ideas for programmes, only to be told: ‘Your day’s gone, Eric. We’re now into alternative comedy.’ It was a first blast of the chill wind about to blow through the industry, and others too were noticing its effects. ‘I was still contracted to the BBC, but I had an uneasy feeling that such was the change taking place in light entertainment generally that it wasn’t an alliance destined to last,’ wrote Les Dawson of the period, and sure enough in 1990 he was informed (by a journalist, not by the BBC) that both the series he hosted – Blankety Blank and Opportunity Knocks – had been scrapped. The following year Russ Abbott was dropped from the BBC schedules, after six series with the corporation, as were Little and Large, after eleven series. Things were little better on the commercial channels: Thames TV terminated the contracts of Benny Hill in 1989 and of Jim Davidson in 1990. ‘Political correctness was taking over,’ remembered the latter; ‘I actually thought that that was the end of the line for my type of comedy.’ Ian Tough of the Krankies, also cast aside by the BBC, was more philosophical: ‘It was just the end of that style of variety entertainment.’ As time went on, it seemed ever more appropriate that Tommy Cooper had collapsed with a fatal heart attack while appearing onstage on a live broadcast of the variety show Live From Her Majesty’s in 1984.

For there was little discernible future in the strand of comedy that had emerged from the variety tradition, with the very notable exception of Victoria Wood, who had first appeared on television in 1974 (and subsequently turned down the offer to join Not the Nine O’Clock News), but who had to wait until the 1980s to achieve real success. The roots were now withering, and there had been a noticeable drop in quality over recent years: Little and Large had their place, but few believed they were the new Morecambe and Wise, while Jim Davidson’s sitcoms (Up the Elephant and Round the Castle and Home James!) are rarely remembered with any great fondness. By the same token, of course, Hale and Pace, of whom London Weekend Television held such great hopes, didn’t turn out to be the new Morecambe and Wise either, and Rowland Rivron’s series (Set of Six and The Groovy Fellers) seldom make the lists of great television comedies. Few critics shed any tears at the passing of the light entertainment tradition, but many of the acts who found themselves unceremoniously cleared from the listings pages were still attracting substantial audiences, and – in the case of Sykes and Dawson – were highly revered. Nor could it be said that those making the decisions were entirely sure of their ground in this new world of classless anti-racism and anti-sexism. In the late 1970s Bill Cotton ordered the removal of the dance troupe Ruby Flipper from Top of the Pops on the grounds, remembered choreographer Flick Colby, that ‘the British public didn’t want to see black men dancing with white women’. And when in 1981 the Krankies, hired to host the children’s series Crackerjack, asked why the audience seemed only to consist of ‘upper-class, plummy kids,’ they were told by another executive, Robin Nash, that they were recruited from a public school because: ‘You need to have discipline in the studio.’ Nash went on to become head of comedy at BBC television.

In the circumstances, it is less than surprising that television, though fascinated by alternative comedy, didn’t know quite what to do with it. In terms of stand-up, the personal, quasi-confessional nature of the comedy club circuit struggled to find a sustainable television format, while the sitcom genre demanded a level of writing that – with the outstanding exception of Blackadder – was seldom in evidence, and it was not clear how mainstream television was going to accommodate the new generation of performers.

The most obvious talent to emerge from the early days of the Comedy Store, for example, was Alexei Sayle, a ferocious, fast-talking comedian who specialized in abusing the audience, but when he relocated to television in Alexei Sayle’s Stuff (1988), he emerged as a far more traditional performer. His monologues to camera continued to sneer at middle-class lifestyles, but in the absence of a live audience lacked some of their bite, while the sketches were strongly reminiscent of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with their surreal juxtapositions of high and low culture (Einstein writing scripts for George Formby, Giorgio de Chirico and William Shatner sharing screen space) and their parodies of television discussion shows. At its best, Stuff was amongst the funniest sketch shows ever, and did contain some of the most memorable gags of the decade: ‘In the old days, people used to be named after what they made – like Carter if they made carts, Cooper if they made barrels, Thatcher if they made people sick’. But it felt as though it were falling between two stools: more conventional than Sayle’s early fans would have wanted, without ever seeming likely to breakthrough to a mainstream audience as Not the Nine O’Clock News had.

In fact the format that would provide employment for stand-up comedians was being quietly established elsewhere, with the improvizational game show Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1988), hosted by Clive Anderson on Radio 4. When it transferred to television on Channel 4, it made stars of Paul Merton, Tony Slattery and others, and established that panel games were the ideal environment for new comedians to make their mark. A deluge of such series followed over the next couple of decades.

The other option was, ironically, a re-embrace of the comedy traditions that were proving so unfashionable amongst commissioning editors in television companies. Armed with the success of Loadsamoney, and his other character from Saturday Live, a Greek kebab-shop owner named Stavros, Harry Enfield and his co-writer Paul Whitehouse created in Harry Enfield’s Television Programme (1990) and then The Fast Show (1994) a revival of the format purveyed in their childhood by Dick Emery: sketches featuring a recurring cast of characters, most of whom amounted to little more than a single catchphrase. In essence it was not unlike a less rude television version of Viz and indeed when Channel 4 screened an animated version of that comic’s Roger Mellie – The Man on the Telly in 1991, it was Enfield who provided all the voices save for that of Mellie himself, who was voiced by Peter Cook.

Meanwhile Channel 4 was screening a version of Vic Reeves Big Night Out (1990), starring the double act of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, which had been building a fanatical live following for some time. An anarchic parody of a variety show, complete with silly catchphrases, slapstick violence and terrible speciality acts, it looked like alternative comedy, but was equally indebted to the music hall tradition and even to the great humorist J.B. Morton (particularly in ‘the twisted court of Judge Nutmeg’). It also showed the influence of Morecambe and Wise in the bickering relationship between the two stars, and of Les Dawson in its love of high sounding but meaningless language: ‘A small eighteenth-century Shropshire village,’ Reeves would begin portentously, bathed in a sinister green light as thunder crackled and leaves blew across the studio. ‘The gables creak uneasily, spitting forth the venom of the judicial system, right bent on bias and dogmatic prejudice. Rickets, illegitimacy and scurvy is the peasants’ lot, while the rich grow fat on sexual gratification, veal and arbitrary decisions. Reason leads to death, truth holds no sway. Magnets, currants and junket are held sacred.’ The series was a magnificent folly that restored much of the subversive, amateurish chaos that British comedy had lost with the move to television in the 1950s.

In this new world, there were established comedians who were more than capable of holding their own. The Sunday Times television critic, Patrick Stoddart, was not alone in appreciating series by both Alexei Sayle and Les Dawson, while concluding: ‘if you care for fat comics doing slightly off-centre stuff, I prefer Dawson’s to Sayle’s any day, if only because he has such immaculate timing.’ The programme he was reviewing, however, The Les Dawson Show, was the last comedy series the star was to make. ‘Everything must change,’ shrugged Ian Tough, but there was something deeply regrettable about a system that left a great talent like Dawson sunk in misery. ‘I began to feel that nobody wanted me any more,’ he remembered. ‘When the television was on, I’d moodily watch the new wave comedians and that would plunge me into a deeper hole of depression.’ But he was resilient enough to survive such setbacks, and he returned to stand-up glory at the 1990 Royal Variety Show, where he found his old form, and even some of his old jokes from the early years of Thatcherism. This was Dawson at the Variety Club Awards in 1982: ‘The recession hasn’t affected me: I was a flop when there was a boom.’ And this was him at the 1990 Royal Variety Show: ‘It’s been a disappointing year for many people. As we all know, this great nation of ours is going through a severe economic depression. Not that depression bothers me: I was a failure during the boom.’ There was a sense that things were coming round full circle.

11

The Third Thatcher Government

‘The only way is up’