Rejoice! Rejoice!

‘I will be your preacher teacher’

SIR HUMPHREY: It could well be argued that the Sermon on the Mount, had it been a government report, should certainly not have been published. A most irresponsible document. All that stuff about the meek inheriting the Earth! Could do irreparable damage to the defence budget.

Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay, Yes Minister (1981)

Instead of seeking like good Tories, as Disraeli adjured, ‘to maintain the institutions of the country’, Thatcherites were indifferent or hostile to them. They behaved, indeed, like some unscrupulous property developer bulldozing listed buildings that stood in the way of a quick profit.

Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma (1992)

SCULLION: I don’t want a new life; I want my old one.

Malcolm Bradbury, Porterhouse Blue (1987)

While others were busy sprouting new heads, the single most important media institution in Britain spent the decade under attack from politicians of all sides, but particularly from the government. The BBC had been created in the 1920s by a Conservative government, becoming the first nationalized industry, but in later years the Tories grew wary of its monopoly position, and introduced first commercial television and then commercial radio in an attempt to provide competition. It was not apparently sufficient, for the deep distrust remained and grew to a level almost of paranoia during the latter part of the Thatcher era. ‘She disliked the BBC,’ was the terse summary of Douglas Hurd, who as home secretary was responsible for broadcasting at the time, while Norman Tebbit was characteristically more colourful, insisting that the corporation was ‘a sunset home for the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, weak and pink’.

Perhaps more accurate was Tony Benn’s remark that the BBC was ‘an agency of the SDP’, an institution that was deeply distrustful of dogma, whether of left or right, and that hoped thereby to avoid too much controversy. In this aspiration, of course, it was almost entirely unsuccessful, instead finding itself embroiled in political quarrels on a regular basis, though the source of the criticism did noticeably shift during the decade.

In 1981 the BBC invited the socialist historian and anti-nuclear campaigner E.P. Thompson to deliver the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Lecture, with a projected theme of the Cold War. But as the date for the talk approached, despite widespread support within the corporation (even within the Dimbleby family), the choice of Thompson was vetoed by Sir Ian Trethowan, director general of the BBC, and the tenth annual lecture was instead cancelled. Undoubtedly the talk would have been politically partisan – Thompson was never less than ideologically committed – but scarcely more so than, say, Roy Jenkins’ use of the same platform two years earlier as a political broadcast for the party he wished to launch, and many suspected that the BBC had been leant upon by a pro-nuclear government. The belief that the corporation was susceptible to establishment pressure seemed confirmed the same year with the eventual broadcast – a year later than scheduled – of Blood Money, a six-part thriller series written by Arden Winch. The delay was the result of an intervention by Buckingham Palace, who objected to the storyline (reflected in the original title, Blood Royal) of a schoolboy earl, 17th in line to the throne, being kidnapped and held for ransom; this, it was argued, by those who supposed modern terrorists to be devoid of inspiration, might spark the imaginations of bad men. Sensitivities in the royal family were obviously running high, following the murder of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 by the IRA, and in the version that was eventually screened, the boy had become instead the son of a United Nations official, leaving the impression that UN diplomats were assumed already to be on the agenda of extremists everywhere, or perhaps that the international community had more difficulty in obtaining the ear of the BBC than did the throne.

A change in government attitude came with the Falklands War and the BBC’s refusal to accept without question the official propaganda line, an attitude that, depending on one’s position, was either an honourable attempt to retain a sense of perspective or the most unforgivable treachery. Issues over the treatment of the war were to resurface periodically through the decade, with a particularly heated debate accompanying Tumbledown, a drama written by Charles Wood and broadcast in 1988, that told the story of Lieutenant Robert Lawrence MC of the Scots Guards, who had been severely wounded in the conflict. Advance publicity focused on the play’s criticism of the standard of care accorded to injured servicemen, and on Lawrence’s reflection that the war had not been worth the sacrifice, themes that had been perennial complaints in the services since at least the Napoleonic Wars. Nonetheless, even before it was screened, George Younger, the defence secretary, was still moved to say that it would cause ‘great offence’ and that he was ‘deeply unhappy’ about it all.

In fact when it did appear, it turned out that the piece was more traditional than might have been expected. Although the climactic – and most disturbing – scene was explicitly about the dehumanizing effects of war, showing Lawrence repeatedly bayoneting an Argentine soldier despite his pleas for mercy, much of the drama concerned Lawrence’s extraordinary recovery from a gunshot wound to the head, and could almost have been mistaken as an orthodox hospital drama about, say, the victim of a drunken driver. And in one way at least, the play supported the official position on the war by scotching the idea that the Argentine army had been comprised simply of 17-year-old conscripts and that the victory had therefore been a walkover. But by breaking the silence that had surrounded the human consequences of the war, Tumbledown did threaten to drag reality into an increasingly mythical conflict, especially when other former soldiers from the Scots Guards lined up behind the drama: ‘Mr Lawrence is telling the truth,’ insisted one such, Chris Murley. ‘The aftercare was non-existent.’ And another, John Clark, agreed: ‘We feel we were just used and discarded. I’m chuffed that at last the horrors of the war and the way we have been treated are coming out.’

While most critics applauded the dramatic strengths of the play, and Colin Firth’s magnificent performance as the unlikeable, if charismatic, Lawrence, many also expressed reservations about the political dimensions, though Christopher Dunkley, writing in the Financial Times saw it as a necessary counterbalance: ‘In a period when the government is so unassailably strong and most of the national press joins in proselytising its views it is, surely, particularly important that broadcasters – and especially the BBC – should do everything they can to maintain a diversity of opinion.’ Equally, it might be added, a government that demanded only approval for its actions ran the risk of appearing deeply insecure. And the idea that a single drama, albeit a BAFTA-winner, could counterbalance the almost daily supply of pro-war movies screened on British television was patently absurd.

The BBC’s position was not helped by the fact that it also commissioned dramatist Ian Curteis to write The Falklands Play and then decided not to film his work, allegedly for being jingoistic. Again, when it finally did appear – in a truncated form in 2002 – it proved to be not quite the piece that had been trailed. Centred on the Westminster side of the conflict, it showed Margaret Thatcher as a woman who knew the right course of action, but who was not always as resolute in private as she appeared in public. There was humour, particularly in Thatcher’s contemptuous treatment of Francis Pym, and there were even suggestions that the differences between Argentina and Britain were more quantitative than qualitative: ‘Public sector spending frozen totally, personal taxation up by 90 per cent – the whole country’s going up in smoke,’ reflects Lord Carrington on the situation in Argentina. ‘There’s a leader in La Prensa which says that the only thing that can hold this government together now is a war.’ Ultimately, however, the play hinged on whether Britain still had the resolve to fight its corner, an angle that would certainly have found favour in Downing Street. ‘Do we still believe what we certainly believed in in 1940, or is that now just the romance of history?’ asks Thatcher of her cabinet colleagues. ‘Nothing to do with the cold realities of Britain in 1982? Part of a nation that has actually, quietly died?’

The cancellation of The Falklands Play inevitably led to charges of left-wing bias from the right, but the allegation of pusillanimous capitulation from the other side was also still being heard. In 1987 the New Statesman journalist Duncan Campbell made a series titled Secret Society, one episode of which covered the intelligence-gathering satellite codenamed Zircon and the way that the project had avoided the scrutiny of the Public Affairs Committee. The government demanded that the programme not be broadcast, on grounds of national security, and the BBC somewhat cravenly complied. When Campbell then published an account of the story in the New Statesman, he found the police searching his flat, the offices of the magazine and the BBC offices in Scotland, in a move clearly intended to intimidate investigative journalists for the future. The government was condemned by Roy Jenkins for looking ‘as though they were running a second-rate police state, infused equally with illiberalism and incompetence,’ and the Labour frontbencher Robin Cook arranged for the programme to be shown in the Houses of Parliament under privilege laws, but Neil Kinnock, keen to be seen on the side of patriotic resolution, was less supportive, demanding in the Commons: ‘Why did the government delay until yesterday seeking to take action against Mr Campbell? Why did they fail to secure the prevention of the publication in a magazine?’ It was not his finest hour.

The same could not have been said when, later the same year, the government announced that they were banning the representatives of eleven organizations in Northern Ireland from speaking on television and radio, in a move aimed primarily at Sinn Fein. The intention was to remove what was generally described as ‘the oxygen of publicity’ from the political wing of the IRA, but the effect was to make the government a laughing stock; footage of Sinn Fein leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness continued to appear, but with the sound of their voices removed and with the film overdubbed by actors, speaking exactly the same words, frequently with an approximation of the original voice.

It was thus issues of war and security that attracted the greatest controversy in broadcasting. Another BBC play, Airbase (1988) by Malcolm McKay, didn’t face attempts to prevent it being broadcast, but was greeted by much hostility for its portrayal of American servicemen in Britain as being prone to alcohol and drug abuse. The manufacturer of Gannex raincoats, Lord Kagan, recently emerged from his jail sentence for theft, was apoplectic, letting it be known that ‘Not since the days of Goebbels had he seen such a vicious and tendentious misrepresentation of a group of people’, while Mary Whitehouse felt moved to write personally to President Ronald Reagan to apologize on behalf of the nation. And it wasn’t merely modern conflicts that were capable of stirring up such strong emotions. Alan Bleasdale’s 1986 series The Monocled Mutineer was set during World War One, and depicted a mutiny amongst British army recruits. It was a ‘tissue of lies,’ stormed the Daily Mail, which wouldn’t normally be much of a denunciation of a drama series, except that in this instance the BBC had erroneously claimed that it was a true story, thus handing ammunition to its enemies.

The brief media storm about The Monocled Mutineer reflected a wider battle about the nature of British history that ran through the decade. Early on, Thatcher had given her views on the country’s imperialist past, talking about ‘a British empire that took both freedom and the rule of law to countries that would never have known it otherwise’, and the education secretary, Keith Joseph, had argued for schools to foster ‘through the teaching of history a sense of pride in one’s country and its achievements’. In reality, as he knew, many schools were now doing precisely the opposite; the trend was towards an anti-imperialist and anti-racist approach to history, and there was a move away from the doings and dates of princes and politicians in favour of an empathetic approach centred on the experiences of more humble sectors of society.

In the 1988 Education Reform Act, Joseph’s successor at the department of education, Kenneth Baker, finally realized a long-held Tory hope for a centralized national curriculum, to which all state schools in England and Wales would be expected to teach, though the results were not all that had been hoped. When it came to history, Baker was said to have been disturbed by finding that more children could tell the difference between a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus than could distinguish Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, while Thatcher, a former education secretary who involved herself fully in the debate, was adamant that British history should be at the centre of ‘the initially tedious but ultimately rewarding business of memorizing what actually happened’. But the guidelines that emerged never met their expectations, and Thatcher became ‘thoroughly exasperated with the way in which the national curriculum proposals were being diverted from their original purpose’. Meanwhile complaints were voiced by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, rightly fearful that Greek and Latin were going to be squeezed out of the curriculum, and by those who vainly hoped to see the teaching of English grammar included – a petition to this effect was presented to Baker by the comedy writer Frank Muir and the actor Michael Hordern.

Credit for frustrating the government’s wishes lay with the educational establishment, which had been developing on independent lines for the last two decades, drifting ever further from the wishes of most politicians. It was the one major area in which egalitarian principles, so long out of fashion in the political world, continued to thrive happily, and most educational theorists were determined to fight their corner, even in this new post-1988 world with its grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges, outside the control of local authorities (polytechnics were also made independent of councils). Despite all attempts at reform, the influence of what the tabloids liked to call ‘trendy teachers’, advocating, for example, non-competitive sport, seemed to continue unabated; the awareness of such trends spread beyond Britain’s shores, so that by 1990 it was being reported that Parisian schools staged novelty races known as the Course à l’Anglaise, in which the slowest runner was declared the winner. Coincidentally, 1988 also saw an impressive rise in ‘A’ Level examination results, which could have been the result of the Education Reform Act. Or it could have been a change in the way that exams were marked. Under the previous system for ‘A’ Levels, grades were awarded in proportion to pupils, so that the top 10 per cent in any one year would receive an A grade, the next 15 per cent a B, and so on. In 1988 this was changed to a system based instead on marks, which would, it was claimed, allow for a more objective measure, though critics argued that it actually allowed for greater subjectivity and for the manipulation of results. Over the following decade the proportion of pupils receiving an A or B grade at ‘A’ Level rose by 30 per cent.

Whether this improvement in results signalled the arrival in universities and workplaces of better educated students was to remain a subject of fierce debate for years to come. But for those who had been born too early to benefit from Baker’s reforms, Thatcher’s renewed rhetoric about British history prompted the opening of a new front in the right’s war against liberalism, then at a peak with the passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act. Earlier in the decade there had been a spate of big-budget television series and films set in the days of empire – Brideshead Revisited (1981), Chariots of Fire (1981), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), The Far Pavilions (1984) – which, some worried, ran the risk of sanitizing the imperial past, though others saw different causes for concern; Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun, was reported to have said of the film Gandhi that he wasn’t interested in going to see ‘a lot of fucking bollocks about an emaciated coon’ (thankfully that was before Gandhi’s SDP affiliations were revealed, or the phrasing might have been less temperate). At varying points over the next couple of years the Sun gave its views on Britain’s colonization of Australia – ‘The Aboriginals were treacherous and brutal. They had acquired none of the skills or the arts of civilization’ – and of India: ‘It was Britain which civilized the entire sub-continent. Built her railways. Gave her, for the first time in her history, an efficient administration and honest judges.’ The paper was also amused to find copies of the novel Biggles and the Dark Intruder selling well in airports in India, and chortled: ‘Clearly the Indians are missing the great days of the Raj. Bring back the Empire?’ This latter report confirmed the suspicions of those who had concluded that the Sun was never knowingly informed; since the novel was written, and set, in 1967 and concerned prisoners escaping from Dartmoor gaol, its relevance to the Raj was perhaps a little overstated.

The subtext of such articles was of a piece with the media’s broad support for the England cricket captain, Mike Gatting, on a 1987 tour of Pakistan, when he became involved in an unseemly row with the umpire, Shakoor Rana, that sparked a minor diplomatic incident (Gatting called him a ‘shit-awful umpire,’ Rana responded that he was a ‘fucking cheating cunt’). ‘Whack the Pakistanis out of sight,’ urged the Sun, when the match was resumed after a day’s suspension. And the tabloids had further sport when in 1990 Norman Tebbit suggested that ‘A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’ Tebbit’s cricket test was widely attacked by the left as being deliberately offensive, though in fact he was (unwittingly) echoing comments made by the unimpeachably anti-racist Bishop Trevor Huddleston some twenty years earlier: ‘I know West Indian families who regard themselves as wholly and absolutely English; the children will support, so to speak, the English test team against the West Indian one, because they are so English.’

The Sun was perhaps the most extreme in its defence of the legacy of empire, but others too were prepared to voice regrets over its passing. The first major foreign policy success of the Thatcher government had been the deal struck at the Lancaster House conference on the future of Rhodesia, allowing racially inclusive elections for the first time, and producing the modern state of Zimbabwe. To the surprise of most observers, those 1981 elections did not result in the anticipated arrival of a moderate coalition government run by Joshua Nkomo and Bishop Abel Musorewa, but in the elevation of Robert Mugabe to the position as prime minister, and there were some tears shed at the loss of another former colony, albeit one that had unilaterally declared itself independent some sixteen years earlier. ‘We of the white tribe,’ said a Daily Mail editorial, ‘cannot but be moved by an undertow of melancholy.’ Others, however, were jubilant at Mugabe’s success; the Catholic newspaper the Tablet announced that ‘an exemplary government has emerged’, and Tony Benn wrote in his diary: ‘It is a fantastic victory and I can’t remember anything that has given me so much pleasure for a long time.’ Given subsequent events in Zimbabwe, some may have later concluded that the Mail’s romantic nostalgia was as valid a note to strike as were the celebrations.

The fact that it was a Catholic publication so enthusiastically welcoming Mugabe was something of a surprise, for a gulf was opening up between the two major Christian churches in Britain when it came to politics, and the Catholic establishment was far less inclined to take up such left-leaning positions than was the Church of England. Bruce Kent, general secretary of CND and perhaps the most famous Catholic priest in the country, repeatedly found himself frustrated by a church that was ‘conservative, top-down and middle-aged’, and that never got further than mealy-mouthed equivocation when it came to what he saw as the moral horror of nuclear weapons: ‘The contrast between these statements and the specific comments made by the bishops on a complex subject like embryo research could not have been more striking,’ he despaired. In 1987 he finally left the priesthood, unable to take the conflict of loyalties any longer; he subsequently married and emerged as a Labour parliamentary candidate.

The Church of England, on the other hand, nurtured a much broader strand of dissent, so that members of the group Clergy Against Nuclear Arms included such senior figures as Edward Carpenter and Alan Webster, the Deans of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral respectively. Carpenter in particular, a pacifist who once refused to read a prayer at a memorial service for wartime RAF chief Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, could generally be relied upon to rock any boat in which he found himself: he took up the cause of Chinese-occupied Tibet at a time when it was receiving little attention, and was vocal in support of the campaign against factory farming. On this latter issue he was joined by Hugh Montefiore, the Bishop of Birmingham, who had earlier distressed some traditionalists by suggesting that Jesus might have been homosexual. And then there was David Sheppard, the former England cricketer who became Bishop of Liverpool and who, according to Paul Johnson in 1980 was soon ‘providing his colleague Hugh Montefiore with hot competition for the title of Britain’s silliest bishop’; the following year, Sheppard was in the forefront of those seeking an understanding of the root causes of the riots in his adopted city. These turbulent priests were somewhat in the media mould of John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, whose 1963 book of liberal theology, Honest to God, had spurred Mary Whitehouse on to launch her crusade against filth and communism, and they aroused similar indignation.

All of them were put in the shade, however, by the appointment in 1984 of David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham, a man whose very existence was seen as an affront to the right. On the occasion of his enthronement, his address expressed support for the miners in their strike and criticized the government for appearing not to care about the human cost of their policies: ‘Such a government cannot promote community or give hope in the very difficult days we are faced with,’ he said. ‘There must be no victory because the miners must not be defeated.’ The usual cast of rent-a-quote Conservative MPs lined up to tell him, in the words of Nicholas Fairbairn, that: ‘His duty is to save souls and not to preach socialism. If he wishes to worship earthly gods like Arthur Scargill, let him forsake the post to which he has just been wrongly appointed.’

By that stage Jenkins was already a figure of great controversy, having had the temerity to doubt the historical accuracy of traditional Christian myths such as the virgin birth of Jesus and His physical resurrection after death; these were not exactly radical views amongst theologians (a poll of thirty-one bishops found that ten agreed with him on the virgin birth), but they did constitute an attack on precisely that cultural form of Christianity about which even the most materialist media commentators could feel sentimental when warmed by a few Christmas drinks. Those who enjoyed being outraged duly professed their indignation in newspaper columns and television studios. Jenkins’ consecration was staged at York Minster, where the service was twice interrupted by protesters, and when, three days later, the Minster was seriously damaged by fire, theories abounded that it could have been a case of arson committed by those who disapproved of his appointment; even better, the fire turned out to have been the result of a lightning strike, which some then attributed to ‘divine intervention’.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, joined Jenkins in commenting on the miners’ strike, suggesting that, although he supported Thatcher’s declared aims of economic growth, ‘if the human consequences of such aims mean unemployment on an unprecedented scale, poverty, bureaucracy, despair about the future of our communities, inequitable sharing of the sacrifice called for, then the objectives must be called in question’. This was by way of being a warning shot across the government’s bows, prior to the arrival of a report into the Church’s role in the inner cities, which had been commissioned by Runcie and was published in 1985 under the title Faith in the City. Inevitably, all the recommendations relating to the Church itself were ignored by commentators, and attention focused instead on its analysis of the causes of social decay: unemployment, inequality and poor standards in healthcare, education and housing. Above all, it argued for the fostering of a greater sense of community and, in so doing, it called down upon its authors, and upon the Archbishop himself, the wrath of those in the Conservative Party who regarded religion as a purely personal issue of individual salvation, with no contribution to make to social policy. ‘The Church of England seems now to be run by a load of communist clerics,’ exploded Conservative MP John Carlisle, while Norman Tebbit dismissed the report as ‘a political plea to return to the Butskellite policies which had created the desolate council estates.’

There was some truth in Tebbit’s assertion, for few churchmen had a great deal new to say in the political arena, simply restating what had been orthodoxy a few years earlier, just as there was little new in anything that the likes of Mary Whitehouse and James Anderton had to say on questions of public morality. In 1981 Clifford Longley, the religious correspondent of The Times, had written that ‘The political face of British Christianity has for at least half a generation been “social democratic” and is still tending that way.’ Some of the changes experienced by the Church of England in the 1980s merely confirmed that opinion, suggesting a vain pursuit of modernity and contemporary relevance at the expense of almost everything else.

It was the decade that saw the rise in influence of the evangelical wing of the Church, resulting in what novelist Margaret Yorke described as ‘family services, where children ran freely about the aisles and played in the chancel, and strange, jolly hymns were sung’. William Whitelaw, on visiting St Aldates Church in Oxford, found himself in the midst of just such a service, as recounted by Alan Clark: ‘To his great alarm he found that the church was filled to bursting and the atmosphere evangelical in the highest degree. He described how the entire congregation mimed the words of each hymn, raising both hands to heaven at such words as “arise” etc.’

Clark himself reserved his fiercest displeasure for the Alternative Service Book that was introduced in 1980. ‘I am completely certain that this degradation of the ancient form and language is a calculated act, a deliberate subversion by a hard core whose secret purpose is to distort the beliefs and practices of the Church of England,’ he exploded, before indulging himself in the violent imagery of the video nasties: ‘All too well do I understand the rage of the Inquisitadores. I would gladly burn them, those trendy clerics, at the stake. What fun to hear them pinkly squealing. Or perhaps, as the faggots kindled, they would “come out”, and call on the Devil to succour them.’ Many others shared his opinion, with journalist Edward Pearce commenting that the language in the new services resembled a ‘departmental memo to God’. And indeed it was hard to find any clear-cut reason for replacing the majestic beauty of the Book of Common Prayer (‘We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father’) with the flat banality of the new liturgy: ‘We are truly sorry, and repent of all our sins.’ Or, as in Not the Nine O’Clock News’ parody of the Apostles’ Creed: ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty; or at least it stands to reason there has to be some sort of greater power; you know, like electricity sort of thing . . .’ In the Book of Common Prayer, its defenders pointed out, ‘the words themselves are worth their weight in glory’; the same could hardly be said of the Alternative Service Book.

There were those who objected on liturgical grounds, that the theology underpinning the new services was ill-considered and betrayed the Anglican traditions of Archbishop Cranmer, but for most churchgoers it was above all a linguistic issue, and writers in particular were not slow to voice their displeasure. Amongst them was the novelist Beryl Bainbridge: ‘A belief in God requires an act of faith, and the sustaining of such an implausible proposition requires that the language and ritual of prayer, of baptism and burial and communion, should be both mystical and difficult.’ Marghanita Laski argued that the greatest threat was not to the main body of believers, whose faith did not necessarily require poetry to be part of worship, but to those who regarded the Church of England as being a key component in the public life of the nation, and who would find that the rituals to which they had become accustomed were now being jettisoned. If the new forms came to dominate, she warned, ‘then the Church of England will have opened a new cultural schism in our already over-divided society. We shall lose our common historical language of religious reference. And there will be no need or reason any more for the outsider to go to church.’

In P.D. James’ novel A Taste for Death, she described a right-wing Conservative cabinet minister as someone who ‘wasn’t even particularly religious. He usually went to church on Sundays and on the major feast days because he enjoyed the liturgy – he wouldn’t attend if they used the new Bible or Prayer Book.’ That was certainly the position of many High Tories, but Margaret Thatcher’s own attitude towards religion, coming from a Methodist background, was more low church and tended rather towards the practical than the spiritual or aesthetic. In her first major television interview after her election, she had explained the meaning of Jesus’ most familiar parable: ‘No one would remember the good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.’ And in 1988 she addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, quoting from St Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘If a man will not work he shall not eat’. Though, as Ian Gilmour pointed out, she didn’t proceed to the next verse condemning busybodies: ‘For we hear that there are some which walk amongst you disorderly, but are busybodies.’

Thatcher ended that speech by citing ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ (‘that beautiful hymn,’ as she called it, though a poem that addresses itself to a nation is scarcely a hymn), and there was, unsurprisingly, conflict between her government and the Church when it came to what she perceived to be simple questions of patriotism. In particular the service of thanksgiving for the Falklands War at St Paul’s Cathedral caused some tension when Runcie asked the congregation to share the grief of those on both sides who had been bereaved. She was said to have been furious, though Denis Thatcher’s response was somewhat milder; he snorted that Runcie’s sermon was ‘better than expected’, which was ‘more than can be said for the rest of the bloody service’. In fact it could have been far worse, with reports that Alan Webster, the Dean of the Cathedral, had wanted the Lord’s Prayer to be said in Spanish.

Runcie himself, as a veteran of the Second World War, in which he had won the Military Cross, had been supportive of the enterprise from the beginning, arguing that ‘within the complexities of an imperfect world, self-defence and the use of armed force in defence of clear principles can sometimes be justified’. His expressed concern over the loss of life in the South Atlantic, however, led some of Thatcher’s more fervent supporters to suggest that he was somehow being disloyal to his country. Just as the Falklands had led to a split between the government and the BBC, so too did it set the scene for later conflicts with the Church, with every speech by the Bishop of Durham, every mention of Faith in the City, serving to fuel the fire further. Even so, it appeared to be of little significance to Thatcher, who found no room in her memoirs for any of this, or even for a mention of Runcie. When approached by Humphrey Carpenter, who was writing a biography of the now retired Archbishop in the mid-1990s, she was at a loss to know why she was being asked to comment: ‘there were no great church things during my time.’ She was wrong; there was plenty of controversy to be found in religious affairs, but from her perspective it paled into insignificance when compared to her great crusade against entrenched interests and restrictive practices.

This had, in the first half of her premiership, primarily been directed against the trade unions and the nationalized industries, but with the defeat of the miners and the printers, and with the privatization programme well underway, attention could be diverted to other areas. The problem was that there was much less of a definable target when it came to, say, the civil service. The government was pledged to reduce public spending but the Whitehall mentality expressed in the first episode of Yes, Minister (in which Sir Humphrey Appleby says of the newly appointed minister of administrative affairs, Jim Hacker: ‘We’ll have him house-trained in no time’) proved almost impossible to shift. When Alan Clark was an employment minister, he rejoiced at learning that the department’s projected spending was below its budget, only to be corrected by an under secretary: ‘It’s important to get as close as possible to last year’s provision in order to have a firm base from which to argue for increases this year.’ Clark fumed to himself – ‘This was crazy. Nightmare. Kafka’ – but the block remained. Like the education industry, the civil service had developed its own mechanisms for dealing with what Robin Day famously called here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians, and was adept at delaying real reform with endless inquiries and committees. The concept of the Royal Commission may have disappeared (Thatcher appointed not a single one during her time in Downing Street, to the great discomfort of the great and the good accustomed to sitting on such bodies), but the spirit of putting reform on the backburner lived on.

In fact much of the existing establishment, beyond the fields of politics and business, proved remarkably resilient to the attacks launched upon it, and equally resilient in its opposition to government, even in those rare cases where it proved to be the beneficiary of public policy. There were, for example, few quite so splenetic in their denunciations of Thatcher as the writers. ‘Of all the elements combined in the complex of signs labelled Margaret Thatcher,’ claimed the novelist Angela Carter, ‘it is her voice that sums up the ambiguity of the entire construct. She coos like a dove, hisses like a serpent, bays like a hound.’ Alan Bennett declared that she was a philistine ‘typical of the people who go to the Chichester Festival’. And the television dramatist Dennis Potter could barely contain himself: ‘Mrs Thatcher is the most obviously repellent manifestation of the most obviously arrogant, divisive and dangerous British government since the war. All that really counts is to get these yobs and louts away from the swill bucket.’ Such hostility was hardly assuaged when Thatcher was reported to have replied to a question about her favourite books that she was currently re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Fourth Protocol, a novel in which she herself featured. ‘The prime minister must be the only person in Britain who has read a whodunit, knows who has done it and then has to read it again to make sure,’ mocked Norman Buchan, the former Labour Party arts spokesperson.

And yet of all the arts, it was literature – normally the poor relative when it came to state money – that did best out of the Thatcher government, seeing at last the introduction, after decades of lobbying, of the Public Lending Rights scheme, which rewarded writers when their books were borrowed from public libraries. Approval was also given for the building of a new British Library, next to St Pancras railway station in north London. The fact that the construction period for this project ran way over schedule and that the resulting building was desperately inadequate to its task – wasting vast amounts of space on an atrium, exhibition rooms and a shop, rather than on its primary function of housing books – was unfortunate, but not directly attributable to the government of the late 1980s.

Other state initiatives tended to concentrate on encouraging private sponsorship to replace public money, and occasionally even to introduce new areas of funding, as in the Per Cent for Art scheme initiated by the Arts Council in 1988, which sought to persuade property developers to spend 1 per cent of their contract budget on public art. It never really caught on as widely as had been hoped and, when implemented, often amounted to little more than a sculpture at the bus stop servicing a Tesco superstore in Slough, but it was in the spirit of the times. For the visual arts, above all other areas of artistic creativity, embraced the 1980s ethos of the free market with some enthusiasm. In May 1980, J.M.W. Turner’s Juliet and Her Nurse set a world record for a painting when it sold for $6.4 million; exactly a decade later, a new benchmark was set by Vincent Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet at $82.5 million. As Gordon Gecko says in Wall Street: ‘This painting here. I bought it ten years ago for sixty thousand dollars. I could sell it today for six hundred. The illusion has become real.’ By the end of the decade, the Australian critic Robert Hughes, whose 1980 television series The Shock of the New had done much to make twentieth-century art accessible to a wider public, was gloomy about the future of both society and art: ‘The year 1900 seemed to promise a renewed world, but there can be few who watch the approach of the year 2000 with anything but scepticism and dread. Our ancestors saw expanding cultural horizons, we see shrinking ones.’

The new mood, assiduously fostered by Thatcher, of a young country that owed no deference to established institutions tended to be seen most clearly in peripheral areas of culture. The lack of respect was evident, for example, in the Sun’s long-running battles with the royal family, which saw the paper break the traditional embargo on the honours list by running an advance story that two of those who had shown extraordinary courage at Zeebrugge were to receive the George Medal. It committed an even greater breach of protocol when it printed the Queen’s Christmas card in October 1988, though a threat by the Palace to sue for infringement of copyright produced a swift apology and the payment of £100,000 to charity. But the decline of etiquette and the reduction of the royals to the status of soap stars did little during the decade to dent public support for royalty; the enormous success of Hello! magazine, with its uncritical, almost hagiographical, celebrations of the upper classes alongside showbiz celebrities revealed an unabated appetite for reading about minor royalty and the aristocracy. Indeed more damage was probably done to the image of the upper classes themselves in their attempt to find a role in this new world and, particularly, on television.

At its most entertaining, this produced a 1981 edition of the television game show Family Fortunes, hosted by Bob Monkhouse, showing a contest between the Bath family of Longleat and the Montague family of Beaulieu. It wasn’t an entirely successful exercise, for none of the assembled aristocrats seemed to have fully comprehended the programme’s format, in which contestants had to guess the most popular answers given by the public to various questions. The trick therefore was to think oneself into the persona of an ordinary person, and give the answer that he or she would in the circumstances, so that if asked to name a food with an edible skin, one should ideally reply ‘apple’; Lady Sylvie Thynne, on the other hand, responded, ‘haggis’. Asked to name a high-street store, Lord Bath answered ‘Harrods’, and when asked to name a kind of bird seen in an English garden, Lord Montague replied ‘peacocks’. None were amongst the answers given by the general public.

Nor was the royal family much better at handling television. The Grand Knockout Tournament in 1987 was essentially a celebrity version of the old slapstick game show It’s a Knockout, but with the added attraction of the presence of Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and the Duchess of York, appearing as team leaders. It was successful in terms of gaining an audience and of raising money for charity, but the excruciating embarrassment of it all did the institution of the monarchy no good whatsoever. Slightly better, in that they were simply dull, were two documentaries the same year about the Queen Mother’s love of racehorses (Royal Champion) and about the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme (The Duke’s Award). But the only 1987 programme that enhanced the public perception of the royals was the panel show A Question of Sport, hosted by David Coleman, in an episode of which one of the team captains, the former Liverpool footballer, Emlyn Hughes, was shown a photograph of a mud-spattered Princess Anne taken at the Badminton Horse Trials and incorrectly identified her as the jockey John Reid, to his great discomfiture. The following week, which happened to be the 200th edition of the show, Anne appeared as a contestant on Hughes’ team and won over most of the record audience of nineteen million viewers; they tuned in to watch him being humiliated all over again, and came away concluding that she was more fun than her public persona had previously suggested.

While these frivolities occupied the minor members of the royal family, the two most significant members of the younger generation of royals were each in their own way trying to find new roles for themselves. Princess Diana used her status as the most famous woman in the world to highlight causes that had previously been less than fashionable – leprosy, homelessness, the elderly – and became particularly associated with AIDS around the same time as the government’s information initiative; her involvement in AIDS charities did as much as anything in the short term to help turn around public opinion about the condition, and her televized meetings with patients helped destroy myths about the syndrome being spread by normal social contact, though she was not the first public figure to be filmed shaking hands with a sufferer – that distinction belonged to health minister John Patten in 1985 (a man nicknamed ‘the minister for gays’ by his colleague, Kenneth Clarke).

Diana’s then husband, Prince Charles, also pursued various campaigns, with a common thread running through them to the effect that the modern world had lost its way in some vague, ill-defined way. ‘Much of British management doesn’t seem to understand the importance of the human factor,’ he explained in 1979, but he didn’t linger long in the world of business, concentrating instead on environmental themes, on inner-city youth, through his Prince’s Trust charity, and on architecture.

It was the latter interest that provoked greatest comment when he used the occasion of a speech at the 150th anniversary banquet of the Royal Institute of British Architects to attack a proposed new wing to the National Gallery, describing it as being ‘like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’. The timing was poor – ‘It was an outrageous speech to make at a celebration,’ wrote sometime director general of the RIBA, Bill Rodgers – but the content struck home. The Daily Express welcomed Charles’ denunciation of the ‘shoddy, thoughtless, trendy, incompetent work’ of architects, and added, with a curious sense of priorities: ‘No body of men deserves censure more.’ In the ensuing arguments (mostly conducted by those who were, like the Prince, blessed with elegant friends), the proposal was withdrawn and a new design commissioned, this time by the post-modernist American architect, Robert Venturi. In the circumstances, it caused no great surprise that when Charles’ much-touted scheme for the development of Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, was unveiled, it was roundly ridiculed in architectural circles as being little more than pastiche. Nonetheless, he had something of a case when he said he wanted to get beyond experts to address ‘the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country’, and some of his other contributions were more welcome, particularly his endorsement of the kind of community architecture propounded by Rod Hackney and others, seeking to put human beings back at the centre of design.

Charles’ distaste for modernist architecture was echoed by Margaret Thatcher, one of the few areas in which they appeared to agree, for more generally he appeared to represent everything she stood against – he was, after all, the most vocal representative of the ultimate monopoly, the most exclusive closed shop of all. But when there was a need for the renovation of some of the interior at 10 Downing Street, she called on the neo-classicist Quinlan Terry, the great hero of traditionalist architecture. And when she and her husband bought a house in Dulwich, it was a new-build mock-Georgian affair that caused even her devotee Woodrow Wyatt to admit: ‘She has no taste. Nor does Denis.’ Like Charles, Thatcher shared the general mood of public dissatisfaction with what architecture had wrought. There had been a time in living memory when architects were celebrated as heroic figures, building a new world for a new age (the town-planning visionary played by David Farrar in the 1960 British film Beat Girl was entirely typical); now it was almost as though they were being collectively charged with crimes against humanity, blamed for forcing people into the despised high-rise blocks that blighted the inner cities, while they themselves were more likely to be found ‘in a Georgian rectory with a walled garden’. Social engineering, which had been part of their post-war brief, had become an accusation to be flung in their face, even if they argued that the central issue was not their designs but the lack of money available – after all, the Barbican estate in central London was every bit as brutal as Broadwater Farm, but suffered from none of the same social problems since it was not council housing. The stock of the architect was therefore already falling fast by the time Prince Charles joined the debate, but he undoubtedly hastened its decline.

Other professions also felt under attack, if not from the public, then from politicians. Universities that had once prided themselves on independent thought and academic research now felt undervalued and mistreated by a government apparently more interested in the skills required by business than in knowledge for its own sake. In the early 1980s major funding cuts were made to the higher education budget and thousands of jobs were lost; the results were satirized in Malcolm Bradbury’s 1987 novella Cuts, in which a vice-chancellor tries to reform his university by getting sponsorship for lecturers and by introducing degrees in Snooker Studies. In 1984 the governing executive of Oxford University, where Thatcher had studied, proposed to award her an honorary doctorate and provoked a noisy rebellion by those seeking some form of retribution for her policies; the dons rejected the idea by a majority of two to one, though, remaining aloof from the fray, she merely issued a statement saying: ‘If they do not wish to confer the honour, I am the last person who would wish to receive it.’ To many commentators on the right, the campaign to refuse her the honour was the epitome of petty-minded spite, but the reality was that this was one of the few ways in which academics could make their displeasure clear. As a character in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work explains when he’s invited to join a one-day walkout by lecturers, the more traditional forms of industrial action simply weren’t applicable: ‘Who will notice? It’s not as if we’re like bus drivers or air traffic controllers. I fear the general public will find they can get along quite well without universities for a day.’

That novel also had great fun lampooning the growing academic obsession with theoretical constructs. In 1981 structuralism, a theory that had usurped existentialism in the hearts and minds of French intellectuals, suddenly became newsworthy when a dispute broke out in the English literature department at Cambridge University. Colin MacCabe, an assistant lecturer with a penchant for the new approach to literature, was denied a permanent position, despite the recommendation of an appointments board, and the entire faculty seemed to degenerate into a civil war that left most of the country simply baffled. In the fall-out, the casualties included one of Britain’s best-known literary critics: ‘Things have happened in the faculty that have sickened me,’ commented Frank Kermode, as he announced his premature retirement from the King Edward VII Chair of English Literature, ‘and that is putting it fairly mildly.’ To anyone looking in from the outside, this obsession with structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and other delights appeared to be little more than a pleasantly distracting, if dull, intellectual exercise, slightly more rarefied than watching Countdown on Channel Four, but very much of the same nature. (Not that there were very many people looking in from the outside, for Richard Whiteley ultimately proved a bigger draw, in Britain at any rate, than Jacques Derrida.) The art establishment was similarly taken over by theorists, at the expense of the art, so that in 1988, as Robert Hughes noted, ‘when the British Council tried to find a New York venue for its Lucian Freud exhibition, no museum there would take it: the work of this great realist was not “modern”, still less “post-modern”, and did not fit their aesthetic ideology.’

Even as the cuts were being felt, the student body was finding itself equally antagonized by government policy, especially when Keith Joseph proposed in 1984 that, in order to fund an expansion of scientific research in universities, the then mandatory grants to students should be cut for those with well-off parents, and tuition fees introduced. The suggestion went down very badly with middle-class Tory voters, who saw student grants as one of the few returns they got from taxation – ‘The middle classes are the meanest, most griping people,’ as one cabinet minister put it – and a meeting of backbench MPs forced Joseph to back down. ‘It will not be lost on the rest of the House,’ pointed out David Steel in the Commons, ‘that a Conservative backbench rebellion has for the first time been half successful where the interests of the better-off constituents are involved.’ The idea returned, however, and by the end of the decade plans were underway for student loans, intended first to supplement, and then to replace, grants.

Even the legal profession, so heavily represented in the ranks of professional politicians, was finding the 1980s a somewhat bracing experience. In Frances Fyfield’s novel Shadows on the Mirror, an old-fashioned solicitor has built a large and successful practice, employing forty-five other solicitors, by relying ‘on common sense, pats on shoulders, a large handkerchief, tea, sympathy and stiff drinks’, but now finds that ‘he doesn’t really belong anymore in a big commercial partnership full of whiz-kid lawyers’. The era of the avuncular lawyer, grown rotund with high-living, appeared to be passing in the face of a new generation who ‘haven’t even got time for lunch’. Even the chambers of the most famous representative of the type, Rumpole of the Bailey, became infected by a young barrister named Hearthstroke, who immediately set about trying to modernize the practice: ‘he was one of those persons who took the view, one fashionable with our masters in government, that we were all set in this world to make money,’ grumbled Rumpole. ‘He might have made an excellent accountant or merchant banker; he wasn’t, in my view, cut out for work at the criminal bar.’ In 1989 the government brought in proposals for the reform of the legal profession, allowing, for example, solicitors to appear in higher courts, and encountered almost total hostility, including that of many who were naturally Conservatives. ‘It cannot be right to annoy all one’s friends at once,’ worried Tory MP Winston Churchill.

But by her third term, Thatcher had managed to accumulate a more considerable body of establishment foes before her than any previous Conservative prime minister: the BBC, educationalists, the Church of England, the arts institutions, the professions and – many believed, though the evidence was never conclusive – the royal family. The blame for ‘the government’s clash with large sections of the middle classes’, insisted the Daily Mail’s Andrew Alexander, lay squarely with those professionals who were opposed to ‘the enterprise ethic’, a verdict with which Rupert Murdoch would have agreed, for he had predicted such a conflict back at the start of the decade: ‘It is the very simple fact that politicians, bureaucrats, the gentlemanly professionals at the top of the civil service, churchmen, professional men, publicists, Oxbridge and the whole establishment just don’t like commerce.’ Now that commerce had its own party in power, the dislike was being amply reciprocated, and many on the establishment right found their sympathies drifting, increasingly horrified by the rise of what Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, identified as ‘bourgeois triumphalism’.

In the heady days after Thatcher’s 1983 landslide election, Worsthorne had identified himself firmly with the new order: ‘Old fashioned Tories say there isn’t any class war. New Tories make no bones about it: we are class warriors and we expect to be victorious.’ But now that those professing themselves his allies were camped out on his lawn, he took fright, appalled at the lack of dignity and manners on display: ‘The yuppies feel confident enough to shed all inhibitions about enjoying the spoils of the class war which they think Mrs Thatcher has fought on their behalf.’ That was in 1987, and he was not alone in his sense of distaste. ‘The Tory Party runs the real risk of sleek, complacent, self-applauding, grand apathy,’ warned the Daily Express, while the Daily Mail was keen to move the agenda on: ‘It is time for free-market capitalists to prove that this is not just a flint-hearted creed of greed and grab.’ The Daily Telegraph was similarly worried: ‘The lack of any evident moral underpinning for Mrs Thatcher’s rule persists. Public opinion about the supposed materialism and selfishness of Thatcherism will grow if it is not addressed.’

These were sentiments previously voiced by the wets, but now heard from Conservatives who had been initially supportive of Thatcher. And their concerns were matched by some of her cabinet colleagues. ‘The fruits of economic success could turn sour unless we can bring back greater social cohesion,’ warned Douglas Hurd in 1988. Even her cheerleaders were expressing doubts. ‘Like the extension of affluence, the weakening of paternalist bonds and the old social restraints has exacerbated many problems,’ admitted Tebbit the same year. ‘The development of responsibility, which should go with the enjoyment of what was once privilege, has lagged and anti-social behaviour has been on the increase.’ Increasingly, it seemed, the suspicion was growing right across the establishment that Auberon Waugh might have had a point when he wrote in 1984: ‘Everybody agrees that the Tories’ public image is a national disaster. Personally I feel that it is probably quite an accurate public image and they are genuinely rather horrible people.’

13

Establishment

‘I will be your preacher teacher’