‘Caught by the fuzz’
DEAKIN: The Met has never been cleaner, I can tell you that for a fact. It’s also a fact that our clear-up rate for crime is at an all-time low. What conclusion you draw, Mr Gordon, is entirely up to you.
J.C. Wilshire, Between the Lines (1992)
GUS: If this government can’t even privatise things properly, it makes you wonder what’s the use of having them at all.
Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin, Drop the Dead Donkey (1994)
State schools, I used to joke, were so-called because they were in a ‘right old state’.
Jenny Eclair, Camberwell Beauty (2000)
There is a scene in A Parliamentary Affair, the first novel by Edwina Currie, in which a Conservative MP is out canvassing and finds herself in a house being used as a brothel, where the inhabitants prove to be unusually receptive to her call for their votes. ‘You can put us girls down. We’re in favour of free enterprise, we are,’ one of them tells her. ‘Citizens’ Charter and all that: looking after the customer, innit?’ It was a rare sighting of someone with a good word to say about the Citizens’ Charter, the big idea (or, at least, said John Patten, the ‘medium-sized idea’) that was intended to form the centrepiece of John Major’s premiership.
Major launched the Charter project in a speech in March 1991, at a time when he was still expected to call an early election that summer, promising that it would reinvigorate the public services and restore their position within society. At its core was the simple principle that services should be run for the benefit of their users, not of their providers, and that there should be a clear statement of intent in each field of activity, against which performance could be judged. ‘People who depend on public services – patients, passengers, parents, pupils, benefit claimants – all must know where they stand and what service they have a right to expect,’ he explained, as he also raised the possibility that institutions like British Rail might be obliged to refund passengers in the event of particularly poor delivery. Charters were to be drawn up and published by all public services.
It wasn’t an entirely new concept, nor was it confined to any one part of the political spectrum. Bryan Gould had already floated a Labour Party proposal that local councils should provide ‘customer contracts’, while Paddy Ashdown’s 1989 book Citizen’s Britain: A Radical Agenda for the 1990s had addressed the idea of enshrining the rights of individuals when dealing with the state. From the Conservative right, too, there was a growing demand – articulated by John Redwood amongst others – that the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s should be extended into the public services, with a refocusing on ‘customers’ and an evaluation by results rather than by expenditure.
Much of the existing debate, however, had the appearance of being rather theoretical and, particularly on the left, of being tied so closely to the constitutional reforms that had become fashionable in recent years – the demand for a written constitution, a new bill of rights and so on – that it looked more like an afterthought than a guiding principle. For Major, by contrast, it was a personal issue and one on which, to the bewilderment of many of his colleagues, he displayed a genuine passion.
It was hard not to see in this commitment an expression of his own story. John Major was the first prime minister to have grown up with the welfare state; he was just five years old when the NHS was created in 1948, by which time his predecessors were already adults, and he made his personal experience clear from the outset. ‘I know that for millions of people in this country the National Health Service means security,’ he said in his first conference speech as leader. ‘I understand that because I am – and have always been – one of those people.’ Unlike many of his cabinet colleagues, he remained an NHS patient rather than opting for private medical care.
More than this, though, his early years ‘as a young man without money or privilege’, including a period of unemployment, had left him dissatisfied with poor standards of customer care and frustrated by the petty reality of dealing with ‘anonymous voices and faces’ at the local council and the labour exchange. His account would have been recognised by much of the country, if not by many politicians and commentators: ‘Offices where correspondence or calls never seemed to be dealt with by the same person and you had to begin from first base, time after time after time.’ His suspicion that things had got worse, not better, in recent years lay behind his determination to make the Citizens’ Charter a key plank of his appeal to the nation.
He faced, however, two entrenched forces of opposition. First there was the cynicism of the media, many of whose leading figures still yearned for the fundamentalist iconoclasm of Margaret Thatcher’s permanent revolution, and who saw all this as being pretty small beer. Much of the criticism was concerned with the everyday triviality of the policy. Was it really that big a deal that driving tests should be available on Saturdays, that parents should be guaranteed a yearly report on their child’s educational progress (one child in four didn’t get a school report at this stage), or that people shouldn’t have to wait so long for a passport to be issued?
Major’s argument was that for motorists, parents and holidaymakers, these things were indeed important. He insisted that having areas of the motorway coned off for repairs that were clearly not taking place was a source of unnecessary stress for commuters stuck in the resultant traffic jams. He argued that passengers on the London Underground should be informed when the next train was due; consequently electronic boards began to appear on platforms carrying the information, an innovation later extended to bus stops. And he drew attention to the fact that one of the biggest drains on the social security budget was trying to rectify mistakes in benefits claims; efficiency would save money, as well as removing a cause of misery in claimants’ lives.
The mundane nature of these concerns failed to inspire commentators and some aspects were simply ridiculed out of existence. The Radio 2 disc jockey Terry Wogan made great fun of the motorway cones and of Major’s response, a phone number, dubbed the Cones Hotline, to which motorists could report unnecessary coning where no work was in progress. For much of the media, that part of the initiative came to symbolise the whole, and when it was announced in 1994 that the Cones Hotline had taken 8,000 calls of complaint in its first two years, but that just three had resulted in cones being lifted, the sound of hollow laughter filled the columns of the press: ‘a bad miscarriageway of justice for the long-suffering motorist,’ giggled the Daily Mirror. The Hotline was quietly phased out.
Nonetheless, the Charter reforms continued, setting new standards, some of which inadvertently revealed the urgent necessity of reform. A target was set, for example, that no one should wait more than two years for treatment on the NHS. This was later reduced to eighteen months, but even so it could be seen only as an indictment of the impoverished level of the existing service that such an aspiration had to be articulated in the first place. Similarly the suggestion that 92 per cent of British Rail trains should arrive within five minutes of their scheduled time looked arbitrary if not overly onerous, but it was not met. In fact, even the BR Charter itself was two months late in arriving.
More significant than the targets, though, was the idea of providing information to consumers. And here Major ran into the second force resisting his initiative, with schools the main battleground. The educational establishment had fought the culture of Thatcherism in the 1980s more successfully than perhaps any other institution and was vociferously opposed to the proposals coming out of the Citizens’ Charter. In particular, objections were raised to the testing of pupils in basic areas of literacy and numeracy at key stages in their education, and to the publication of league tables of schools based on this testing and on examination results. These tests, and indeed exams themselves, were said to be too crude a measure of the work done by schools – they provided, for example, no indication of ‘added value’ in places where there were particularly difficult intakes – and would give parents a distorted picture.
There was also opposition from teachers’ unions and, initially at least, the Labour Party to the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), formed as an extension of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools to oversee the new regime; all schools would now be inspected on a regular basis and the reports of the inspectorate published. Ruffled feathers were not exactly smoothed with the appointment in 1994 of Chris Woodhead as head of OFSTED. Woodhead’s ability to infuriate the teaching profession was unparalleled: during his tenure as Chief Inspector of Schools, which was renewed when Labour came to office, his abrasive character and fierce denunciations of bad teachers – some 15,000 of them, it was claimed, spread equally between primary and secondary schools – were to loom large in the public debate, leaving many educationalists with the feeling that their work was undervalued and unappreciated. ‘Chris Woodhead had many qualities which he did his best to hide,’ noted Labour’s education secretary David Blunkett, ‘but collegiality and modesty were not among them.’
This was one area in which the Conservative government felt that it was in tune with the public and it pressed on, despite the dissent, so that the testing and the league tables became a routine feature of British life. Many parents warmly embraced the reforms, and much of the media was happy to have statistical evidence that appeared to confirm its poor opinion of comprehensive schools.
Eighty per cent of state secondary-school pupils were now educated within the comprehensive system, but when the A-level league tables were published in 1992, they showed that 70 per cent of the highest performing institutions were grammar schools. A disparity between selective and nonselective schools was to be expected, but the gap revealed was greater than many had chosen to believe. And beyond that was the gulf that separated private from public: when The Times compiled a list that same year of the 100 establishments with the best A-level results, all but five were independent. ‘My overriding aim is to improve opportunity for all children of whatever background in our state system,’ explained the education secretary, John Patten, in 1993. ‘So much so that by the end of the century the borders between the state and independent sectors will be blurred. Excellence will be available to all.’ The same platitudes were to be echoed by Labour ministers and were no more believable from their mouths. State education had been chronically underfunded – a fact that was evident in the physical infrastructure of too many schools – and it seemed deeply implausible that the investment per pupil would ever match that in the private sector.
That assumed, of course, that finance was the primary issue. Plenty of commentators argued that there were deeper problems, that expectations and standards were too low and that there was a desperate need to raise them, in the interests both of pupils and the wider society. Amongst such critics was the newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips, whose 1996 book All Must Have Prizes launched a sustained assault on virtually all aspects of current educational theory, from the emphasis on creativity over knowledge to the collapse of moral authority. It was a controversial book (‘crap by anybody’s standards’, in the elegant phrasing of educationalist Professor Ted Wragg), but some of the basic facts it reported were more difficult to dismiss: ‘the first tests for 11-year-olds held in 1995 revealed that half were not up to scratch in English or maths’, while the proportion of British pupils gaining three GCSE grades between A and C in maths, English and a science was less than half the equivalent in Germany or France. Elsewhere, research in 1993 by the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit found that 40 per cent of those in colleges of further education needed help with literacy and numeracy. Such outcomes were hardly a resounding endorsement of the existing system.
There was little popular clamour for the widespread return of the previous tripartite division between grammar, secondary modern and technical schools, complete with the eleven-plus exam, but many felt that state education was simply failing to deliver. Moreover, the left, both in the Labour Party and the unions, was perceived as accepting the decline in standards – whether it were relative or absolute – and to have no coherent strategy for how it might be reversed. Opposition to change looked like little more than a stubborn defence of an unsatisfactory status quo, allowing the terms of the debate to be set by the reforming agenda of the right.
The campaign against testing and tables reinforced a widely held view that the teaching profession had become complacent and averse to scrutiny. There existed a belief – fuelled by tabloid tales of the loony left and trendy teachers – that education was the last refuge of the politically motivated scoundrel. John Morton’s comedy series People Like Us, starring Chris Langham as a hopeless television journalist, parodied modern teaching methods where ‘the pupils actually own the ownership of their own knowledge. What happens is, they sit in groups and interview each other, and then they go on to cut out things from magazines, draw graphs, so that they can establish for themselves that they don’t know what the questions are.’ So what does the teacher do in such a system? ‘Well, he hands out the glue.’
The anecdotal experience of some parents seemed to back up this perception of wilful underachievement. When the future Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable visited his local comprehensive in the 1980s, at a time when his oldest son was due to move into secondary education, he discovered that the school’s pupils had failed to gain a single O-level in science or languages the previous year. ‘When I asked to speak to a head of department about this deficiency,’ he later wrote, ‘I was confronted by a character modelled on Dave Spart from Private Eye who harangued me on the subject of pushy middle-class parents obsessed by “irrelevant” exam results.’ Cable sent his son to a private school instead.
That denunciation of the ‘pushy middle class’ ran right through the debate on education. There were few groups, it sometimes seemed, to whom educationalists objected more than middle-class parents, especially if they took an interest in their children’s schooling, and one of the complaints about the league tables was that they would encourage well-off parents somehow to manipulate the system. John Major had some sympathy with such a judgement, though he drew different conclusions. In his 1994 conference speech, he denounced those who opposed his reforms: ‘They are the people who can afford the good things of life, who chortle away about our emphasis on basic standards and the three Rs – and then move to a catchment area with better schools for their own children.’ When David Blunkett became education secretary, he also blamed the middle class, this time identifying them as having a stranglehold on the profession itself: ‘I wasn’t prepared to put up with the middle-class claptrap which assumes that everything will be well if we would just leave teachers to get on with what they were doing.’ No matter one’s political position, the target remained the same.
Cable’s option of a private school was less palatable within the Labour Party, where the comprehensive system had become one of the defining tenets of the left, associated especially with Caroline Benn and Glenys Kinnock, the wives of Tony and Neil respectively. It was an issue that cut to the core of the modern party, in which some 60 per cent of delegates to the annual conference were said to be either teachers or school governors. Previous leaders, including Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, had sent their children to private schools, but that was no longer an acceptable option. There was, however, some room for manoeuvre, and Tony Blair discovered a compromise when he sent his son halfway across the capital to the London Oratory school, much to the horror of many Labour Party activists.
The Oratory was a Catholic comprehensive within the state sector, which had no selection procedure based on ability, but was nonetheless a grant-maintained school, a new category of establishment created by the Conservative government in the late 1980s, operating outside the control of the local education authorities and receiving funds directly from Westminster rather than from their councils. Such schools were few in number – less than 1 per cent had taken this route by 1992 – but they accounted for over a quarter of the best performing state schools at A-level, and places at the Oratory were much sought-after by parents, particularly those in the part of North London where the Blairs lived; state education in Islington had a particularly poor reputation. But official Labour Party policy was at that stage opposed to institutions opting out of local government control, and Blair’s decision was deeply resented by some, especially since Islington was a Labour-controlled authority. This was, recognised Alastair Campbell, the political weak point: ‘a Labour leader shipping his kids out of a Labour area because he thought the schools weren’t good enough.’ Blair was unrepentant. ‘I am not going to make a choice for my child on the basis of what is the politically correct thing to do,’ he insisted, and there were many even on the left who, despite their principles, quietly nodded in agreement with his decision.
The dispute within Labour about the future direction of state schooling surfaced at the 1995 conference, where Blair declared that his priorities for government were ‘education, education, education’. Not necessarily convinced, the former deputy leader Roy Hattersley – hitherto regarded as a right-winger – revealed how far the party had travelled when he became something of a leftish hero merely by restating a long-held faith in the comprehensive system. In what a Daily Mirror leader column called ‘the most unpleasant, blinkered attack on Labour’s education policy’, he called in vain for all grant-maintained schools to be returned to local control, and won huge cheers with his passionate plea: ‘For God’s sake, let us stop apologising about comprehensive schools.’ Offstage he was less restrained: ‘Tony has targeted middle-class votes for the last year,’ he told Peter Mandelson. ‘Well, I say fuck the middle class.’
His contribution was not much welcomed. In private, Blair was contemptuous – ‘fat, pompous bugger’ – while in public, David Blunkett sketched the outline of what was to become a familiar argument, denouncing Hattersley for daring to dissent: ‘When socialists fall out, it’s the Tories who rejoice.’
A few months later, in January 1996, the story broke that Harriet Harman, Labour’s shadow health spokesperson, had sent her son to a school that not only enjoyed grant-maintained status, but was also a grammar school, still selecting its pupils on ability. Worse yet, it wasn’t in the authority where she lived, the Labour-run London Borough of Southwark, but in neighbouring Bromley, which had the benefit of a Conservative council. This truly was beyond the pale for much of the party, and many who had bitten their lips over Blair’s personal decision took the opportunity to attack Harman instead.
So too did many who had never really taken to Harman herself, a privately educated, well-connected feminist who didn’t always mix well in male-dominated, old Labour circles. ‘Not the most well-liked soul at Westminster,’ according to Edwina Currie, she was seen as too middle class, too worthy, too serious, even if the latter complaint failed to recognise her particular sense of humour. When the Labour MP George Foulkes once compared Margaret Thatcher to a fishwife, Harman corrected his terminology, pointing out that the correct term was ‘fishperson’. It was surely a good self-deprecating joke, though there were some who insisted that it wasn’t meant as such.
Harman’s choice to back educational selection in practice, whatever her party said about it in principle, was greeted with fury. John Prescott was distinctly unimpressed (‘I’m not going to defend any fucking hypocrites’), and many of the older MPs, from Tony Benn to Roy Hattersley, were similarly incensed. A rare exception was Mo Mowlam, who was prevailed upon to defend Harman on television after Alastair Campbell threatened to ‘reveal her stepchildren were at a public school’. Others in a similar position to Harman were annoyed that she wasn’t making the same sacrifice as they had. ‘I suppose Lisanne and I feel upset because we have been through the comprehensive schooling process with our five children,’ confessed Giles Radice, while Glasgow MP Michael Martin stressed the therapeutic effects of living by one’s principles: he ‘had exactly the same choice to make as Harriet and, although the kids had a difficult time, it made us a better family’.
For the Tories, this was manna from heaven. Over the last few years, their traditional areas of political superiority had been cut from under them. Black Wednesday had destroyed their reputation for managing the economy, Blair as shadow home secretary had successfully colonised the issue of crime, and the fall of the Soviet Union had removed the ultimate bogeyman. Now they were back on safe territory and John Major enjoyed one of his most successful sessions at prime minister’s questions, flinging Blair’s favourite soundbite back at him: ‘I just want to be tough on hypocrisy, tough on the causes of hypocrisy,’ he protested.
The attacks on Harman culminated in a crowded meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, where several MPs added their voices to that of the Daily Mirror in calling for her to resign from the shadow cabinet. There was little chance of that, however, for Blair had decided to stand by her on tactical grounds. When challenged on his own children’s education he had argued, ‘let’s not fight the war that the Tories want us to fight,’ and he applied the same logic to Harman’s position: ‘I’m not going to allow the Tories the pleasure of crucifying any member of the shadow cabinet. That’s the only issue.’ It had become a trial of strength, a test of whether he would bow to pressure from the left and thereby validate the charge, repeatedly levelled at him by the Conservatives, that in office he would be unable to contain the extremists in his party.
With that much at stake, and still new to his job, he won the day, however grudging the support. Harman herself then went on to lead an opposition-initiated debate on the health service and performed so well that she took the wind out of the Tory sails. ‘She is a doughty Commons performer under pressure,’ noted the Independent, while The Times said she ‘won genuine cheers from her own side’. It was not the last time that she would display such resilience in difficult circumstances.
One of the less expected contributions to the debate in the parliamentary party was made by Bernie Grant. MP for Tottenham since 1987, Grant was still best known for his controversial comments as leader of Haringey council at the time of the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985, when he had blamed the police for the troubles and said that, in the eyes of local youths, they had got ‘a bloody good hiding’. Widely, though wrongly, believed to be on the hard left of the party, he came out in defence of Harman’s choice and went on to spell out his position in public: ‘The comprehensive schools in inner-city areas of London are very bad indeed, and are failing our children.’ He added that many of his black constituents were sending their children to the West Indies to get a better education, where their impoverished schooling was starkly revealed: ‘When they get to the Caribbean, they are put in classes two years younger than them.’
He had a point. Nationally 7.4 per cent of children were in private education, but in the capital that figure stood at 11 per cent. This could have been the consequence of higher earnings, except that the same discrepancy wasn’t evident in the South-East outside London. There was a sense of desperation about the quality of state schools in the capital that even overrode the professed beliefs of liberal parents. The writer Blake Morrison lived in South London: ‘Ten years ago I would not have imagined forking out for my children’s [schooling]. But though defensive and shamefaced, I’m not in a minority. Most of my friends in the area have begun drifting from state education as well.’
For all the controversy, the incident of Harriet Harman’s son helped focus minds in the Labour Party on a historic failing. ‘I don’t criticise the Harmans for their choice,’ said Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the teachers’ union the NAS/UWT. ‘What I criticise is the Labour Party for ignoring until recently the fate of inner city comprehensives.’ In his memoirs, Blair admitted the scale of the problem (‘In my heart of hearts I knew I wouldn’t send my own children to most inner-city secondary schools’), and hopes were high that a future Labour government would act decisively on education. The question of public services, which Major had chosen to highlight with the Citizens’ Charter, was now firmly at the centre of political debate, even if not in the form that he would have wished.
The general suspicion was that, in the first instance, more investment was probably required, rather than endless initiatives. In Drop the Dead Donkey a character announces that there’s a ‘new government policy on education’, and is met with a bored reply: ‘Course there is. It’s a Tuesday.’ But the initiatives kept coming, and more kites were flown in pursuit of positive headlines. The situation approached farce in 1996 when the home secretary, Michael Howard, and the education secretary, Gillian Shephard, suggested they were in favour of reintroducing the cane in schools, ten years on from the banning of corporal punishment. Within hours, Shephard had been told by John Major to pull back from such talk; it wasn’t government policy and would anyway be illegal under European law. But the issue, once raised, attracted widespread support on the Tory right, and the prime minister was obliged to offer a free vote on the subject in order to defuse the row.
The move was defeated in the Commons but over a hundred MPs, the vast majority of them Conservative, voted in favour. It was a foolish episode that did the government no good at all; those who supported harsher discipline in schools were annoyed that no progress was made, and that Shephard had been obliged to vote against her own views, while the contributions of some of the pro-caners merely reinforced the image of Tory MPs as a slightly odd collection of individuals. ‘It was degrading,’ remembered John Carlisle of his own childhood punishments, sounding rather more enthusiastic than was healthy, ‘it was painful. Weals were actually put on one’s buttocks, blood actually did come. And that was on the basis that because of the punishment, one did not do that particular offence again.’
Of all the public services, the highest levels of dissatisfaction were probably to be found amongst passengers using British Rail, the company that had been running the country’s railways since the private companies were nationalised in 1948. For years the only predictable aspect of rail travel had been the misery of the experience, and the service offered by BR had long been a rich vein of jokes for stand-up comedians, much of the humour focused on catering, the inevitable delays and the excuses offered for late or non-running trains. For years ‘leaves on the line’ was the front runner in the latter category, though inclement weather in 1991 brought forth the new explanation that trains couldn’t operate because they were faced with ‘the wrong kind of snow’.
A new variation on an established theme appeared in 1994 when the Channel Tunnel was opened, providing a rail link from London to Paris. The contrast between the high-speed trains in France and the antiquated network in Britain could hardly have passed without notice. The 1992 Labour Party manifesto promised to end that disparity through the use of private finance, a policy that had been developed by John Prescott.
As the party’s transport spokesperson, Prescott was aware of the need for spending on infrastructure, but also knew that it wouldn’t feature very high on the list of a future Labour government’s priorities. He came to the conclusion that ‘there was an argument for private-public financing and leasing of assets in the public sector’ and successfully argued his case within the party; the manifesto committed a future Labour government to ‘mobilise private capital for large-scale public transport investment’. Other proposals of his included reducing the speed limit on motorways to 50 m.p.h. during peak hours, and a reduction in the permitted alcohol limit for drivers, though these failed to win many converts, possibly undermined a little by Prescott’s own example; in 1991 he was banned from driving after his third speeding offence in four years.
The idea of encouraging investment by private firms, who would then lease back the new-built infrastructure to the state, was more successful. It proved to be immensely popular with politicians of both parties, who saw in it a way of increasing spending without incurring too great a short-term impact on the government’s balance sheet, in effect paying for public services on the never-never. Rebranding it the Private Finance Initiative, Norman Lamont picked up the concept, much to its creator’s annoyance. ‘You buggers have pinched our public-private financing plans,’ Prescott said to Lamont, and Lamont replied, ‘Well, it’s your own fault for having a good idea.’
The Tory manifesto in 1992, however, had other plans, promising to end British Rail’s monopoly and displaying a distinct whiff of nostalgia for the pre-war days of the railways: ‘We want to restore the pride and local commitment that died with nationalisation.’ Major’s original vision had been a recreation of the big regional companies – the Great Western Railway, the London and North Eastern Railway and so on – that dominated the 1920s and 1930s, but by the time the process of privatisation had passed through the government’s policy-making machine, the result ended up very different. The network itself, the thousands of miles of tracks across the country, together with the associated signals, tunnels, bridges and stations, was separated from the services that ran on those tracks. The network was passed to a new publicly floated company, Railtrack, while the various services were split into dozens of franchises that were sold off to private companies. It was hard to see the logic of the split, or how it would inculcate ‘pride and local commitment’ when the company that owned the train on which you were travelling had no responsibility for the station at which you had embarked.
‘I used to be a closet supporter of privatising British Rail,’ observes the hero of David Lodge’s 1995 novel Therapy, ‘before the transport minister announced his plans to separate the track from the companies that run the trains. You can imagine how well that will work.’ He was not alone, and the government found that they had created a system so complex that it even succeeded in provoking warm glances back to the days of British Rail. That company’s role as the butt of easy jokes was inherited by Virgin Rail, as Richard Branson found that his normally infallible feel for popular ventures was unable to overcome the problems of running a modern railway.
Some of the previously privatised services – most notably British Telecom – had improved enormously once they were taken out of state control, and Labour’s belated conversion to the cause recognised the fact, but the new rail companies remained heavily dependent on subsidy, which some felt was the worst of both worlds; it certainly wasn’t an easy task to tell the public that their taxes were being passed on in dividends and bonuses. Reservations were expressed even within Conservative ranks. ‘Privatising the railways was described as a “Thatcherite” policy,’ observed Chris Patten, now happily remote from the fray. ‘But I doubt whether she would have pursued it – too messy and likely to be too unpopular.’
If British Rail was a privatisation too far for many people, the idea of breaking up the Post Office and Royal Mail was complete anathema to the nation, even though, as its proponent Michael Heseltine pointed out, a large part of the network – some 19,000 sub-post offices, the friendly village service so beloved of romantics – was already owned privately. His enthusiasm for the project of privatising one of the country’s oldest institutions was not matched by that of his cabinet colleagues at a time when the Maastricht debate was making every initiative difficult, and the proposal was quietly dropped, much to Heseltine’s disappointment. ‘I had been responsible for council house sales and for privatising the coal and nuclear industries, the Stationery Office and numerous smaller public services,’ he later wrote, ‘but this would have been the jewel in the crown.’
Even the fact that plans were drawn up upset many who felt that too much of the nation’s fabric was being unravelled. As Nick Marshall, a character in Michael Palin’s novel Hemingway’s Chair (1995), explains: ‘The Post Office is part of national life. Part of our national identity. It’s our legacy and I’ll be damned if I’ll sit back and see it kicked around like the railways, the coalmines and shipping.’ But Marshall is actually an arch-privatiser, who has infiltrated the Post Office hierarchy somewhat in the manner of Militant embedding itself in the Labour Party. Secretly he’s determined to impose progress even where it isn’t wanted, resolved to ‘Fight everyone out there who wants to keep the Post Office small and cosy and cuddly.’
The novel is set in an East Anglian town and centres on the conflict between Marshall’s restless pursuit of change and the values of our hero Martin Sproale, who sees community, continuity and tradition as the foundations of public service. Inevitably Marshall wins the argument and, although privatisation fails to materialise, a programme of ruthless, soulless modernisation finally ensures that the local post office is relocated and computerised: ‘It was more like a freshly landed spacecraft. A stopgap environment on the road to automation and eventually the final eradication of the human element from the whole process.’ The changes are symbolised in the training given to staff: ‘The full greeting, as laid down in the Customer Charter, is “Good morning”, before twelve, and “Good afternoon” after twelve, followed by personal identification and the Assistance Information Request.’ In other words: ‘Good morning, my name is Steve. How may I help you?’
The image of the pirate raider of public services became a commonplace of fiction. He was to be found too in Christopher Brookmyre’s debut novel, Quite Ugly One Morning (1996), a crime thriller centring on Stephen Lime, the crooked and murderous chief executive of an NHS hospital trust, a splendidly evil character who keeps a vicious Alsatian named Tebbit. As one character explains: ‘No matter what they get their PR people to say, or whatever slogans they put under their logos, the Trusts don’t give a shit about patient care. They only care about pounds, shillings and pence, and that’s why they were set up in the first place, and filled with accountants and bankers and a whole legion of grey zeroes in suits.’ Lime has an Achilles heel, however; his enemies find that his computer proves remarkably easy to hack into, since his passwords are so predictable: Tebbit, Thatcher, Portillo.
Coming from a different direction but arriving at much the same place, Michael Atkins’s popular sitcom Waiting for God, which first aired on BBC One in 1990, derived most of its humour from the attempts by two elderly dissidents, Diana Trent (Stephanie Cole) and Tom Ballard (Graham Crowden), to frustrate the efficient running of Bayview retirement village. This is a private concern, owned by a group of doctors and run by Harvey Baines (Daniel Hill), whose remit is simply to keep costs down and whose incompetence as an administrator matches that of contemporary sitcom creations like the broadcasting bureaucrat, Gus Hedges, in Drop the Dead Donkey and Gordon Brittas, manager of a leisure centre in The Brittas Empire.‘I’ll have you know I trained for over three weeks to run this place,’ exclaims Baines, as he seeks to justify his stewardship of this run-down outpost of what he calls ‘the age management industry’. He can’t comprehend why his efforts are so unappreciated. ‘I don’t understand,’ he wails. ‘What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t anyone like me?’
Meanwhile Diana is busy raging against his management and against politicians who seek to fob her off with token gestures. ‘All we want is to be treated like human beings, respected, not patronised,’ she insists. ‘So you can stick your free bus passes and your free televisions right up where the sun don’t shine.’ In one of the best storylines, a new arrival, Daisy Williams (Jane Downs), the widow of an army officer, wants to organise the residents as though they were members of her late husband’s regiment: ‘More togetherness, more planning, more organisation, so we can all rattle along as one big happy family.’ She naturally takes strong exception to Diana and regards her as a trouble-maker: ‘I know the type. Fifth columnists. It was people like her – freethinkers – that lost us the Empire. No team spirit.’ Eventually Diana and Tom defeat her, and as they reflect on their narrow escape, Tom mentions Daisy’s appeal to community spirits. Diana corrects him: ‘Appeal to jingoistic spirits. Forming teams, a desire to inflict your views on all around you. Fascism.’ He suggests that maybe it’s patriotism, and she concedes: ‘It’s a fine line.’
Running through it all was the sense that a social infrastructure was being eroded through the pursuit of profit, a perception that was unlikely to be transformed by the Citizens’ Charter. Regardless of what had happened in the polling booths in 1992, the public were becoming angry that there was no apparent increase in state spending, even if the government had been returned to office promising no such thing.
The same feeling was evident in other shows of the era. In Sickness and in Health saw Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), the great comedy anti-hero of the 1960s, now a pensioner and surviving on food that has passed its sell-by date. ‘Rationing, the good old days – we was better off then,’ laments his sometime fiancée, Mrs Holingbury (Carmel McSharry). ‘We was far better off when we were fighting the Germans.’ Inevitably, One Foot in the Grave presented an even bleaker depiction. In a 1993 episode, an elderly man in a care home is seen being knocked to the ground by staff and viciously kicked while he lies helpless, before being locked in a cupboard under the stairs for the night, all as a punishment for having nightmares. The sequence was sufficiently horrific that it was edited when given a pre-watershed repeat.
Nowhere was sensitivity to the state of the public services more acute than in relation to the NHS, the condition of which was memorably summed up in the comedy The Day Today: ‘What was once the healthy bouncing boy child of Ernest Bevin is now barely more than a disease-racked, breathless corpse.’ (Characteristically, the show managed to hit two targets in a single sentence, denouncing underinvestment even as the misattribution of Aneurin Bevan’s NHS satirised the vacuity of media experts.)
The problem for the government was that the NHS was essentially seen as Labour territory; there were few votes in health for the Conservatives, only a widespread suspicion that – despite Major’s protestations – they didn’t have much commitment to the institution. The more thoughtful Tories might complain of the sentimental British attachment to outdated institutions, but they struggled to find a way of dealing with a health service that was, in Michael Portillo’s words, ‘amazingly inefficient, yet popular’.
One option was to find efficiency savings by subcontracting to private companies what were seen as non-essential parts of the service. John Patten argued that one of the government’s successes was the privatising of laundry, cleaning and food in the NHS: ‘This approach also means that the state or local authority can concentrate more on their core business.’ The subsequent deterioration of diet and hygiene in hospitals – aspects that many felt were integral to a decent health system – did nothing to improve the image of a decaying service. Nor did the opening of a restaurant by McDonald’s in Guy’s Hospital in south-east London, the first such outlet in a European hospital.
Meanwhile any attempts at wider structural reorganisation were met with outright hostility. During Virginia Bottomley’s time as health secretary, she attempted to rationalise London’s hospitals, which had grown up in a haphazard fashion over several centuries, resulting in a structure that no one would have chosen if starting from scratch. Her plan included the closure of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London, founded in 1123 and the oldest surviving hospital in England. The ensuing outcry, and the popular campaign against closure, was successful in reversing the proposal, but the plan left a bitter legacy and Major was later to cite it as ‘a factor in our dismal 1997 general election showing in London’.
That aborted scheme also helped make Bottomley one of the least popular politicians in parts of the country that were seeking a female hate figure to replace Margaret Thatcher. She wasn’t an obvious choice for the role. Her background as a children’s psychiatric social worker and with the Child Poverty Action Group was hardly the stuff of heartless-Tory mythology, while her public image – ‘fragrant, intelligent, capable’, drooled the Sunday Times – made her eminently suitable to represent the new, caring Conservative Party that Major wished to create.
Nonetheless, Edwina Currie regarded her as being ‘insufferably patronising’, and when the neo-punk band S*M*A*S*H released a single ‘(I Want to) Kill Somebody’ in 1994, listing the targets of their hate, they saved a special place for her: ‘Margaret Thatcher, Jeffrey Archer, Michael Heseltine, John Major – Virginia Bottomley, especially’. Others saw her femininity as a cunning trick. ‘The only reason Virginia Bottomley gets away with her destruction of the health service,’ suggested comedian Jeremy Hardy, ‘is that she is the only person in the Conservative Party with whom anyone can imagine having sex.’ But that, according to John Redwood’s adviser Hywel Williams, didn’t reflect the feelings aroused in some of her Westminster colleagues: ‘She was the kind of assured, attractive and bossy woman whom a certain type of English professional male wants to harm physically.’
Redwood himself was then the secretary of state for Wales and seized on his position to explore a full range of policy areas, including an alternative, and possibly more pragmatic, approach to the NHS. In a 1993 speech he argued that the ‘search for economies should often begin with the consultancy contracts, computer procurement, the paperwork and administration’. He also identified a ‘restlessness amongst some of the medical staff about the number of men in grey suits’. It was, however, a difficult proposition for a party who were so closely associated with the growth of bureaucracy in the public services, and it was never pursued with any enthusiasm by Redwood’s colleagues.
Instead the public perception was simply that the Tories were trying to close down hospitals and reduce services. And the fragility of the government majority in the Commons meant that campaigners could put pressure on local MPs which proved irresistible. In 1996 two Tory members – John Gorst and Hugh Dykes – successfully threatened to resign the whip if there was no climb-down on a proposal to close the casualty department at Edgware Hospital. Tony Blair took the opportunity to revive an aged, but still damaging, taunt: ‘The prime minister’s policies are determined by the imprint of the last person to sit on him.’
The reality was that spending on the NHS continued to rise every year, but the results were seldom obvious to the users. This was even more true in the one public service that seemed entirely immune to any constructive reform. In the twelve years after Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, spending on the police had risen by 87 per cent in real terms, and there were 27,000 more officers in the force. Yet still the crime rate rose remorselessly, while efficiency continued to fall. In 1993 it was revealed, under the remit of the Citizens’ Charter, that the Metropolitan Police had solved just 12 per cent of crimes committed on their patch, and that half the forces in the country had a clear-up rate below 20 per cent. As David Mellor observed of the police: ‘They are overpaid, we’ve thrown money at them and we have the highest level of crime in our history.’
The crime rate, at least, was to be addressed. In the cabinet reshuffle that followed the departure of Norman Lamont in 1993, Michael Howard was promoted to home secretary and lost no time in making clear his intention to match Tony Blair’s anti-crime rhetoric. ‘The silent majority has become the angry majority,’ Howard told a Tory conference, which really needed no telling. ‘In the last thirty years, the balance in the criminal justice system has been tilted too far in favour of the criminal and against the protection of the public.’ The centrepiece of his hardline new stance was a powerful soundbite to rival Blair’s ‘tough on crime’. ‘Let us be clear,’ he spelt out. ‘Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.’
Under previous home secretaries, the numbers in jail had been falling, with a move towards community-based sentencing and the introduction of early-release schemes, but Howard began a process of reversing that trend. By the end of the decade there were around a third more prisoners than at the start, with the greatest proportional increases coming amongst those given short sentences of up to six months and young offenders aged under eighteen. There were costs attached to this development, both in economic and social terms: prison was still an expensive option, crime rates in jail were calculated to be eight times higher than on the outside, and ex-prisoners reoffended at only marginally lower rates than did those given community sentences.
To keep the pressure on Howard, amongst Blair’s first acts when he became Labour leader was the appointment of Jack Straw to succeed him as shadow home secretary. ‘Jack was sensible and no softie on lawbreakers,’ noted Blair in his memoirs, and the Sun’s columnist Richard Littlejohn – not a noted liberal – purred with pleasure when Straw got the real cabinet job: ‘one of our most impressive home secretaries.’ Others were less convinced: Paddy Ashdown made clear that, if the Liberal Democrats were offered a coalition with Labour, one point would be non-negotiable: ‘none of us could be part of a government in which Jack Straw was home secretary.’
Straw made his name with a 1995 speech attacking graffiti artists, ‘winos and addicts’ and ‘squeegee merchants’, insisting: ‘We have literally to reclaim the streets for the law-abiding public citizen; make street life everywhere an innocent pleasure again.’ There was little here that dissented from a similar speech by Major the previous year, urging the public to report beggars to the police and calling on the courts to use the full sanctions of the law, including fines of up to £1,000. ‘It is not acceptable to be out on the street,’ said Major. ‘There is no justification for it.’ The concept of ‘zero-tolerance policing’ – based on the theory that the acceptance of low-level but visible anti-social behaviour adversely affected community confidence, and thereby permitted an escalation in more serious crime – had made its way across from America, and both parties were eager to claim it as their own.
But, following his master’s soundbite, Straw was not content to sit back and wait for crime to happen, and in 1996 he launched himself into a series of speeches, articles and interviews in which he appeared to suggest that if only parents brought up their children with more discipline, then Britain would be a much more law-abiding country. It was time to break the taboo on talking about parenting, he insisted, calling for a curfew to be imposed on those under the age of ten, and then branching out into questions such as the time children should be in bed. He hastened to add a mild disclaimer to this latter theme: ‘It is not exactly for politicians to tell parents what time to impose. But my experience is that parents would welcome more discussion in schools and the media.’
By now, some people were finding it rather difficult to take him seriously. Linda Smith began to refer to him as ‘the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, while in Sue Townsend’s books, Adrian Mole used Straw as a latter-day bogeyman to terrify his son, telling him that ‘if he didn’t behave in future, a man called Jack Straw would get him and put him in prison’. Straw’s image was such that at one point he had to make clear to the shadow cabinet his position on flogging (‘we’re against it’), a revelation that prompted his colleagues to burst out laughing, much to his annoyance. ‘Ooo, Jack, you’re getting soft on crime,’ one of them teased.
The impact on the Conservative government, however, was more serious; as William Waldegrave revealed, one of the great taunts thrown at cabinet members on the more moderate wing of the party was: ‘So you’re to the left of Jack Straw, are you?’ In constant danger of being outflanked, Michael Howard pressed his ‘prison works’ strategy harder still. He could soon boast that the crime rate had begun to fall for the first time in living memory, though some pointed out that the decline also coincided with an economic upturn and a consequent drop in unemployment. It was all too late for Tory stalwart Peter Cadbury, the businessman whose grandfather had founded the chocolate company; he resigned from the party in protest at their lack of action on law and order, explaining that he himself was a victim of crime: one of his outbuildings had recently been broken into, and some garden tools had been stolen.
There was in any case some doubt about what the true crime figures were. In 1995 the police recorded just over five million crimes in England and Wales, while the British Crime Survey estimated the number to be just over nineteen million. Faced with such a massive discrepancy, the public chose not to place any faith at all in statistics, and it was generally assumed that the figures had somehow been fiddled. The opposition could also point out that, despite the recent fall, the number of recorded crimes had doubled under the Tories, though this merely followed the depressing post-war trend: in 1950 there had been 6,000 violent crimes reported; by the mid-1990s this had risen to nearly a quarter of a million.
Something of that longer view was captured in one of the most acclaimed television drama series of the decade. Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North(1996) explored thirty years of British history, depicting the slow crumbling of hope and faith on the left, ending in the present with a thirteen-year-old taking up joyriding, just as his gun-toting father had a decade earlier. The story centred on Newcastle, but made excursions to London, where corruption was depicted as endemic within the police force. ‘Nobody will ever clean up the Met,’ shrugs a character in 1966. ‘Nothing will ever change.’ Four years later, as an inquiry into the force is abandoned on the instruction of a Conservative home secretary, the decent Geordie officer, who was called in to investigate, resigns in disgust: ‘I’ve been a copper for twenty-five years,’ he says. ‘I never dreamed. They’ve made a mockery of it.’ Viewers were expected to draw parallels with the present.
Some things had changed, however, and a signal of sorts was sent when the Metropolitan Police Force was rebranded as the Metropolitan Police Service in 1989, following a report into the ‘corporate identity’ of the police. The change was accompanied by a ‘statement of common purpose and values’, to be displayed in stations across the city. ‘We must be compassionate, courteous and patient,’ it read. ‘We need to be professional, calm and restrained in the face of violence and apply only the force which is necessary to accomplish our lawful duty.’
There were developments too in the fictional portrayal of the police. In the television series Between the Lines (1992), the main character, Detective Superintendent Tony Clark (Neil Pearson), has a taste for neat whisky, excessive smoking and philandering, the latter providing plenty of opportunities to take his clothes off, thus displaying an attractive range of cuts and bruises from the numerous times he gets beaten up in the course of his duty. This much would have been recognisable to Clark’s predecessors in the 1970s series The Sweeney, but the basis of the show was fundamentally different. Where The Sweeney had argued that good coppering depended on bending the rules to get a result, and that the work of the police was hamstrung by bureaucracy, Between the Lines believed that it was important to play by the book, that banging up villains was no excuse for cutting procedural corners. Clark even argued that, despite the boozy culture of the force, officers should refrain from interviewing suspects who are over the drink-driving limit, since it would be taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable state.
The subjects under scrutiny by Clark and his colleagues in the Complaints Investigation Bureau are the police themselves, and specifically the kind of officers seen in The Sweeney.‘He was out of step,’ a constable explains of a former colleague. ‘We can’t afford the hard men, sir, not any more. Not when we’re living and working in a goldfish bowl. Dinosaurs like Steve, they get the job done, fair enough, but the cost is too high.’
Despite such protestations, and despite the premise underlying the show, the cumulative effect of the series was to give the impression that every police station was ruled by fear, secrecy and bullying, and that virtually every officer in the Metropolitan Police over the rank of sergeant – together with most of those below – was bent, violent and contemptuous of the public whose interests they were supposed to serve. If they weren’t taking bribes, they were fitting up innocent men, and if they weren’t actively breaking the law themselves, it was only because they were neglecting their duties. And this time it wasn’t just the capital’s police who were depicted as failing. ‘Think of the police as a solid block of male attitudes,’ explains one of the country’s senior female officers, based in the East Midlands. ‘Prejudiced, sexist, racist, ignorant, violent, a culture based on unchallengeable certainties.’
Much the same conclusion was reached in Lynda La Plante’s acclaimed series Prime Suspect (1991), which starred Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison, encountering incompetence, sexism and racism in the Metropolitan Police. Jackie Malton, the real-life officer on whom the character was based, and who acted as adviser to La Plante, was keen to stress that things had changed, and that the degree of resentment and resistance Tennison encounters from her male colleagues was becoming a thing of the past. ‘That level of obstruction wouldn’t happen today,’ she said in 1991. ‘But it might have done five years ago.’ She had no doubts about the drama’s accuracy, however: ‘It’s painful for me to watch because that’s my experience. I suffered that prejudice, and if other women in the police say they didn’t, I’d say they’re liars.’ Alan Eastwood, chairman of the Police Federation, was more dismissive, insisting that the sexism seen on screen was ‘overplayed’.
Between the Lines and Prime Suspect weren’t, of course, the only visions of law and order on offer. Conventional detective fiction continued to be broadcast, including a remake of Maigret (1992), this time with Michael Gambon in the title role, as well as variations on old themes, such as Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1990), in which Patricia Routledge played a retired working-class woman who solves crimes in a quiet, harmless kind of way. There were also some new detectives comfortably in the old tradition: David Jason in A Touch of Frost, John Nettles in Midsomer Murders.
And there was always Inspector Morse, though his depictions on television were starting to diverge a little from those on the page. In the later novels by Colin Dexter, such as Death Is Now My Neighbour (1996), Morse is still ‘arrogant, ungracious, vulnerable, lovable’ and still revels in the old-fashioned aspects of detection: ‘hypotheses, imaginings, the occasional leap into the semi-darkness’. But he has become a more respected, establishment figure, so much so that he’s on friendly terms with real-life senior officers, including Peter Imbert, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the current incumbent, Paul Condon, who apologises at one point that he can’t stop for a chat. ‘Press conference,’ he explains. ‘It’s not just the ethnic minorities I’ve upset this time – it’s the ethnic majorities, too. All because I’ve published a few more official crime-statistics.’ And Morse nods in sympathy.
On screen, however, portrayed by John Thaw, he was confronting a changed world, full of women priests, acid house ravers and devil-worshipping rapists. As Morse himself became ever more reminiscent of Eeyore in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, shaking his head sadly at the state of modern society, the series seemed to be acknowledging a new breed of fiction that was, in the jargon of the day, more ‘edgy’.
This trend was represented for most by Ian Rankin, who had, by the end of the decade, become the country’s biggest-selling detective novelist, and whose character Inspector Rebus, an ex-SAS hard man policing the mean streets of Edinburgh, finally made it to television in 2000. Earlier rumours of adaptations had suggested that the title role might be played by Leslie Grantham, Robbie Coltrane or Bill Paterson, though it turned out to be the 38-year-old John Hannah, fifteen or so years younger than the character in the novels. The age was important, giving the show a grittier, tougher feel than its rivals.
In fact it threatened to be too edgy, and the opening scene of the first episode had to be heavily edited. ITV felt that the proposed sequence was a little strong for transmission immediately after the nine o’clock watershed, since it depicted a man tied to a chair with a plastic bag on his head, just about to be tortured, who then throws himself out of a window to be impaled on railings. ‘It was a shame,’ lamented Rankin. ‘It would have been a great opening.’ But even with the cuts, the mass television audience commanded by Morse was not apparently inclined to switch on to this younger brand of crime. The series ran for just four episodes, dashing the hopes of those in the tourist industry who had predicted that ‘Rebus will be for Edinburgh what Inspector Morse was for Oxford.’ When the character returned to television five years later, he had aged rather rapidly and was now portrayed by the 52-year-old Ken Stott.
Rebus was essentially the traditional police detective, tricked out in the world-weary cynicism of the hardboiled tradition represented by Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard and relocated to present-day Scotland. Perhaps the most unusual feature was that he was still a police officer, for the dominant fashion of the 1990s was to find alternative ways to explore the same themes of murder and mystery. Detectives were increasingly outnumbered by their civilian counterparts, including lawyers (Kavanagh QC), customs officers (The Knock) and police surgeons (Dangerfield), even chefs (Pie in the Sky) and a conjuring consultant (Jonathan Creek). One of the central characters in Holding On was Shaun, played by David Morrissey, an investigator from the Inland Revenue who is portrayed in a sympathetic light, chasing down tax fraud in major companies and amongst the wealthy elite. ‘People say there’s one law for the rich,’ he sneers. ‘That’s rubbish. They abide by quite a few actually, the ones in Liechtenstein, Panama, Switzerland.’
Much of this was television chasing after novelty, but it also suggested an underlying dissatisfaction with the police force, a suspicion that audiences were less willing to trust the traditional guardians of the state. Certainly this was true of Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker (1993). Here, to the full police-show panoply of identity parades, autopsies and dysfunctional private lives, was added Robbie Coltrane as Fitz, a criminal psychologist who is addicted to nicotine, alcohol and gambling, as well as possessing an extraordinary gift for penetrating, psychological monologues in the interrogation room that provoke confessions from the guilty. Fitz was a return to the days of the gifted amateur, and without his assistance, the police were as helpless and incompetent as Inspectors Lestrade and Gregson had been without Sherlock Holmes to guide them.
The popularity of Cracker massively raised the public status of the speculative science of criminal profiling at a time when traditional detective work was coming under close scrutiny. After confirmation that a series of miscarriages of justice had occurred in relation to the IRA terrorist campaigns of the early 1970s, the Guildford Four were released in 1989 and the Birmingham Six in 1991; in the latter year the convictions of the Maguire Seven were also quashed. All seventeen innocent men and women had served, or were serving, long jail sentences after being convicted of involvement in the bombing of pubs, and the revelation that they had been wrongly imprisoned reinforced a belief, long held in some quarters, that was expressed by Fitz in an early episode of Cracker: ‘Good old-fashioned British justice, where a man is innocent until proven Irish.’
But these cases, we were assured, lay far in the dim and distant past, when different standards applied. Such episodes were extremely unlikely now under the reformed rules of police enquiries. There was a certain irony therefore that the success of Cracker fed so comfortably into what nearly turned out to be yet another such case.
The murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in July 1992 was a particularly horrific crime, both in the severity of the attack – she was sexually assaulted and was stabbed forty-nine times – and in the fact that the only witness was her two-year-old son, found clinging to his mother’s dead body. A massive police investigation narrowed down to one man, a thirty-year-old named Colin Stagg who lived nearby and regularly walked his dog on the common. The evidence against Stagg barely deserved to be credited with the word ‘circumstantial’: he had been on the common that day, his older brother had earlier been convicted of rape, and he had once written a mildly obscene letter to a woman he had contacted through a lonely hearts advert. A search of his home revealed a half-hearted interest in paganism, a black-handled knife and some soft pornography, including a few copies of Razzle and Escort magazines. He was, in short, the classic ‘loner’ so beloved of thriller writers.
As far as the police were concerned, this tied in perfectly with the profile of the murderer they had been given – and which they had broadcast on the ever-accommodating BBC One programme Crimewatch – by the country’s leading forensic psychologist, Paul Britton, ‘the man dubbed Britain’s real-life Cracker’ by the press. The investigating officers concocted a scheme whereby a policewoman would go undercover and befriend Stagg, trying to draw out his ‘extreme sexual personality’ with the aim of prompting a confession.
For seven months she stuck to her task, recording every conversation and writing letters directed by her superiors as she became a proxy penpal, urging the suspect to develop ever more lurid fantasies that he might satisfy her pretended interest in extreme sex. The lack of reciprocation was farcical, at times resembling the 1970s sitcom George and Mildred, with its depiction of a sexually voracious siren and her timid husband. She ‘revealed’ a past relationship that involved inflicting pain, and he was baffled. ‘I do not understand,’ he wrote back. ‘Please explain as I live a quiet life.’ In a later phone call, he began to glimpse what she was going on about: ‘Is it kind of, what are they called, sadomasochism kind of thing?’ But even then, he needed clarification: ‘Is it of a sexual nature?’ Finally, she made it explicit: she would have sex with him – he was a virgin – if only he would admit to being the Wimbledon Common murderer. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not.’
Despite the complete absence of a confession, or of any forensic or eyewitness evidence, the police somehow persuaded the Crown Prosecution Service that a charge of murder could be brought. Stagg, they claimed, had demonstrated a personality indistinguishable from that of the kind of person who murdered Nickell; according to Paul Britton, the chances that two such people had been on the common at the same time were ‘vanishingly small’. In September 1994 the case came to court and the evidence collected by the policewoman was thrown out in short order by a judge who was clearly horrified by the undercover operation: ‘a blatant attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind’. Stagg was acquittted and released after thirteen months in custody, displaying some understandable bitterness: ‘My life has been ruined by a mixture of half-baked psychological theories and some stories written to satisfy the strange sexual requests of an undercover police officer.’
Those responsible for his prosecution were less coherent. Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and Paul Condon, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, gave a joint press conference in which they defended the ‘honey trap’ operation and insisted that there had been sufficient evidence to bring charges, no matter what the judge might think. There was, however, a growing suspicion that the police were becoming seduced by pseudo-science at the expense of traditional methods. ‘In the old days, we’d be searching for the evidence,’ explains a detective, hot on the trail of burglars in the drama series Hamish Macbeth.‘But nowadays it’s all psychological profiling. What do we know about these characters? We’ve got to get behind them, know their hopes, their fears, where they go, what they do.’ Stagg was also quoted as saying: ‘I hope that now the police – the fat, lazy bastards – will go out and find the real killer.’ Unfortunately, it was already too late. Even before Stagg came to court, Robert Napper, the man who eventually confessed to the killing of Rachel Nickell, had murdered again, his victims a young woman and her four-year-old child.
A subsequent case, the murder of an eighteen-year-old A-level student, Stephen Lawrence, in South London in 1993, revealed another aspect of police failings. Five white youths – all of whom lived locally – were identified as the prime suspects in the killing, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence on which to proceed, and the case did not come to court. A private prosecution was subsequently mounted, though it did not secure a conviction. For many, the failure of the police and the CPS to bring anyone to account compounded the original crime and merely confirmed the widespread perception that racism was endemic to the judicial system; it seemed unlikely that, had the colours of the victim and the alleged perpetrators been reversed, there would have been a similar level of inaction.
There had been similar cases in the past, but what made the difference in this instance was the dogged determination of the Lawrence family – particularly Stephen’s parents Neville and Doreen – to fight an establishment that denied them justice. Their cause received a massive boost in February 1997 when, following an inquest verdict of unlawful killing, the Daily Mail, in an unprecedented act either of journalistic courage or trial by media (depending on one’s perspective), devoted its front page to named photographs of each of the five men with the unequivocal headline: MURDERERS. It added: ‘The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.’ From here on, the campaign could scarcely be ignored, and later that year the incoming home secretary, Jack Straw, set up an inquiry into the case, headed by the impeccably establishment figure of William Macpherson, a retired judge who had served with the Scots Guards and the SAS.
Macpherson’s report was published in February 1999 and told a depressingly familiar tale. The police handling of the murder had been incompetent (though there was no finding of corruption), lessons had not been learned from the 1981 Scarman Report about relations between the police and members of ethnic minorities, and the Metropolitan Police were declared to be ‘institutionally racist’. This last finding was something new in an official inquiry. Scarman had shied away from such a damning verdict, but Macpherson heard evidence from, amongst others, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, who admitted that ‘internalised’ prejudice affected the behaviour of officers, and concluded that there was such a thing as institutional racism at work, even if it were difficult to pin down: ‘It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amounts to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people.’
The charge went down extremely badly with much of the press. A phrase previously confined to what had been dismissed as ‘the loony left’ was now being given legitimacy by the state, and many were not prepared to accept the inevitable implication articulated by Ian Jack in the Independent: ‘The loony left weren’t so loony after all.’ Even before the publication of the report, Times columnist Michael Gove had compared the behaviour of the Lawrences’ lawyers to that of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and had denounced the idea of institutional racism as ‘making sweeping assumptions about groups instead of forming reasoned judgements about individuals’. Within the force itself, there was said to be a severe fall in morale and, as the findings were digested, Paul Condon, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, came under intense pressure to resign; he survived, having belatedly accepted the concept of institutional racism.
The impact of Macpherson was considerable and prompted a season of soul-searching in other institutions. In cabinet, the health secretary Frank Dobson claimed that it wasn’t just the police, but that ‘the NHS was riddled with racism’ as well, while Herman Ouseley, chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, said that the same was true of the education system. A spokesperson for the Church of England joined the breast-beating: ‘We have recognised for a long time there is some degree of institutional racism. We are working on it.’
But it was in the police force that the effects were felt most profoundly. Straw was determined that the report should be implemented in full and could justifiably boast in his memoirs that ‘Sixty-seven of the seventy recommendations had a concrete result, in changes of practice, or law.’ A long process of rebuilding trust commenced, though the size of the task was made clear by an opinion poll conducted for the Guardian before the report’s publication; it showed that a quarter of the public thought that ‘most police officers tend to be racist or very racist’, while a third felt that, regardless of personal intentions, the operations of the force discriminated against ethnic minorities.
Evidence that such feelings might be based in fact had come in 1995 with an edition of World in Action that addressed racism in the force. It included, most controversially, secretly filmed footage of the comedian Bernard Manning entertaining four hundred off-duty officers from Manchester at a police charity dinner. Manning had made his name on the series The Comedians in the 1970s, but had found television work increasingly hard to come by as the tide turned, both in comedy and society, against material deemed to be sexist and racist. Undeterred, he upped the offensiveness of his live performance, revelling in his status as the least politically correct entertainer in the country to the extent that, despite being a very gifted comedian, for much of the time he simply gave up on the pretence of being humorous. Amongst the jokes about ‘shooting niggers’ that got the police laughing, were also some simple statements about identity: ‘They actually think they’re English because they’re born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable it’s a horse.’ Manning’s routine was roundly denounced, not only by the usual suspects but also by the likes of the News of the World, though it did rather feel as if the wrong target had been chosen: Manning told gags, those laughing at them were responsible for policing the country.
For now, major reform of the police remained a step too far for the Conservative government. Instead Michael Howard was promising to abolish the centuries-old right to silence for defendants, even though – given the spate of miscarriages of justice – some might have concluded that it was the behaviour of the police, not that of the accused, that required attention.
As John Patten surveyed the state of modern Britain in his book Things to Come (1995), and considered where we went from here, he also noted that ‘the undermining of institutions in the United Kingdom seems in the mid-1990s to be endemic’, and pointed to the urgent need to ‘rekindle respect for our institutions’. After sixteen years of Tory government, much of which had been devoted to attacking the establishment of the country both on left and right – from the trade unions and the BBC to the Church of England and the professions – it was perhaps unsurprising that little respect still remained.
Even in those areas of public service that had the wholehearted support of the government, things were far from rosy; the use of the police for political ends in the miners’ strike and the attacks on New Age travellers and those attending raves had not done much to enhance the force’s standing in society. And although the NHS continued to enjoy widespread public approval, its image too was damaged by two of the most sensational murder cases of the decade. In 1993 a nurse named Beverley Allitt, working in a Lincolnshire hospital, was given multiple life sentences for the killing of four children in her care and the attempted murder of several others. Five years later Dr Harold Shipman, a GP in Manchester, was arrested and was found guilty on fifteen counts of murder, though it transpired that this was little more than the tip of the iceberg: an inquiry reported that he had probably killed around 250 of his patients over a career that lasted more than a quarter of a century. These were, of course, exceptional examples of a betrayal of trust and could be seen as isolated cases. The same was not true of the discovery late in the decade that human tissue, including the organs of hundreds of children, had been retained by Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool without the consent of the patients or their families. A subsequent investigation revealed that the unethical practice was not confined to that institution alone.
Nor could individual members of the public be exonerated in the breakdown of social relationships that had once been taken for granted. A generation earlier, the family doctor had enjoyed unquestioning esteem, but in 1991 a study published in the British Medical Journal showed that over 60 per cent of GPs had been abused or assaulted by patients or by patients’ relatives in the previous twelve months. Similarly, a 1997 survey of clergymen in London found that 70 per cent had been assaulted or threatened with violence, while schools were found to be ‘at a higher risk of arson than any other buildings used by people’.
Moreover, there was a nagging feeling on the part of many that long-term underinvestment in the physical infrastructure of public services was eroding the quality of life in Britain. The story was not, of course, quite so simple. Much work was done in regenerating some parts of the country: in Manchester, for example, not only was the notorious Hulme estate redeveloped but a velodrome, a swimming pool and a new concert hall were also constructed. (The sports facilities, part of a failed bid to stage the Olympics, were later important in the successful attempt to secure the 2002 Commonwealth Games.)
There were also new initiatives to revitalise areas that had festered for decades. In 1988 the government had brought forward the idea of allowing council residents to vote on whether they wished to remove their estates from local authority control and pass them to a newly constituted Housing Action Trust. The legislation to create these bodies struggled initially – the Labour opposition scored one of its few victories of the Thatcher years when the House of Lords voted against the proposal – but it was subsequently passed and the first of the new organisations was approved in 1991. By the end of the decade the Labour minister Chris Mullin was visiting one such trust, which had taken over some of the worst council housing in Liverpool and, having demolished the existing high-rise horrors, had replaced them with good quality low-rises. Mullin noted in his diary: ‘I can’t remember what Old Labour’s line on Housing Action Trusts was, but I bet we were opposed. Something else the Tories were right about.’
But such was the Conservatives’ reputation by the mid-1990s that these successes passed by mostly without mention and certainly without credit. The impression had taken root that public services were being neglected because the Tories believed there was ‘no such thing as society’. And it was because John Major recognised the problem more clearly than any of his colleagues that he had proposed the Citizens’ Charter; by giving people the right to information, they would gain a stake in society, would cease to be merely units in the erratic functioning of the state and would become involved.
Had it been communicated with sufficient enthusiasm, the Citizens’ Charter could genuinely have been a big idea. But there seemed little appetite for it amongst Major’s senior colleagues, some of whom seemed more inclined to join in, albeit discreetly, with the sneering of commentators. Initially Labour attacked the entire project as, in the words of Gordon Brown, ‘a cosmetic public relations exercise’, but it was hardly that. After a flurry of excitement in 1991, the media simply lost interest in the entire enterprise, and although over half a million pounds was spent on press advertising in 1993, it did little to compensate for the Charter’s absence from the news columns. Perhaps the problem was with Major himself. His appeal had largely rested on the fact that he seemed like a normal human being, and the Charter had been built in his image, but as his position crumbled in the aftermath of Black Wednesday, so too did the everyday concerns of the Charter come to seem merely trivial.
‘We don’t want a leader who is ordinary,’ fretted Gyles Brandreth, after meeting the prime minister towards the end of September 1992. ‘We want a leader who is extraordinary – and decent, determined, disciplined, convincing as he is, JM isn’t that.’ A few months later Brandreth watched Major being interviewed on television by David Frost and could only express the exasperation felt by many in the Conservative Party: ‘Maastricht, Mellor, the ERM, unemployment, the pits; we judder from shambles to catastrophe to disaster and still our leader speaks of the Citizen’s Charter.’