Posts
"Everyone can climb the ladder as high as their talents will take them" - Margaret Thatcher.
He's conspired with a friend to have a journalist beaten up, he's taken backhanders to promote JCBs, he's refused to divulge why the police were called to an altercation with his girlfriend this summer, he's refused to divulge how many children he has, he's made false claims about Turkey joining the EU, and he's waved kippers around in the air while lying that EU laws on packaging were affecting their price.
So BBC2's recent Thatcher:A Very British Revolution (though I thought a better title would have been The Tories:A Warning From History) was a timely, much needed look at how we got ourselves into this impasse, into this bloody mess, and to find out how a "grocer's daughter" (more of that later) from Grantham in Lincolnshire was able to so successfully redraw the battle lines of politics that she managed to render a division and disharmony that is not only still being felt now, but is felt more strongly than ever now.
You could watch it as historical documentary, it'd work for sure, but there's far more to it than that. Over five expertly plotted hours we see the country before Thatcher's rise to power, we see how she shaped the country - and it her (if less so), and how she left the country when she was forced down in 1990. We pass through wars, strikes, IRA bombs, but, more than anything, this is a story of Tories plotting against other Tories, stabbing each other in the back, breaking deals in back rooms of the Houses of Parliament, and making craven grabs for power. It's a real life House of Cards except the only difference is, we the public, are the ones that pay the prize. Plus ca change!
The series makers have certainly pulled out all the stops when it comes to the talking heads they've got in. Take a deep breath and marvel at the star quality of Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Bernard Ingham, Norman Tebbit, Jonathan Aitken, Kennth Baker, Shirley Williams, Norman Lamont, Neil Kinnock, Maurice Saatchi, Chris Patten, Norman Fowler, John Nott, Nigel Soames, Nigel Lawson, David Owen, Miriam Stoppard, Matthew Parris, and Michael Dobbs - the author of the actual House of Cards.
Add in vintage footage of David Frost, Ian McKellen, Robin Day, Terry Wogan, Hugh Scully, Brian Walden, Eamon Andrews, Angela Rippon, Valerie Singleton, Cliff Michelmore, a young Andrew Neil (Andrew Neil was once young?), and Mike Yarwood doing an impression of Parkinson and you've got a cast list that pretty much spans the entire era. Some good, many bad, and a few downright ugly.
That gripe aside, nobody could doubt Thatcher's greatness - at least if you read greatness as importance rather than kindness. How did she, aged 45, became the second woman to sit in a Conservative cabinet and then less than a decade later the first ever female PM, before going on to become the longest standing in the job since The Earl of Liverpool retired in 1827? The Earl of Liverpool took charge during the Napoleonic Wars and oversaw the Peterloo massacre just to give you some sense of how long ago that was!
There's some of the usual stuff about her being a workaholic (only good if you're working for the greater good) before we get to the "grocer's daughter" cliche. It's not untrue. She was a grocer's daughter (as an aside, why do we hear so much about the occupations of the fathers of female politicians and so little about how the male equivalents dads earned their crust?) but Tory myth makers tend to be a bit quieter when it comes to her marriage to wealthy businessman Denis Thatcher and the seven bedroom, five acre home they owned in rural Kent.
Money to fall back on is always nice - and Thatcher, despite her ambition, was a dutiful wife to Denis. She liked ironing and cooking, Coronation chicken her signature dish apparently, and providing for the family. Nothing wrong with that but she wasn't quite so generous when it came to others.
Her first brush with notoriety was in 1971 when, as Education Secretary, she withdrew free school milk for children over seven (less famously, Labour's Shirley Williams took it from the under sevens six years later and another Labour Education Secretary, Edward Short, had removed it from secondary schools in 1968). She looked so anachronistic in her bright blue outfits among all these grey suited grey haired men that you could have been forgiven for wondering at the time if she'd done this to prove, like Elizabeth I or something, that she had the heart of a man.
Although 'heart' was not Mrs Thatchers, the baby milk snatcher's, strong suit. As we now all know. In times of austerity a case could be argued for the removal of school milk but footage of MPs of the time pissed up on subsidised Westminster booze made it as clear then, as it is now, that austerity only means austerity for the less well off.
We can't be certain if it was the drink talking but Ted Heath and Thatcher famously did not get along. Heath had planned to sack Thatcher following the milk uproar but he was dissuaded from sacking the only woman in his cabinet. As political pundits would opine these days, the optics would have looked bad for him.
It wasn't just milk that wasn't in plentiful enough supply to go around in the early seventies. Electricity too. Owing to industrial action by coal miners, Edward Heath had to go on television to announce a three day week to conserve electricity. Many in the country, stoked by the tabloid press, come to believe the unions had the upper hand on the government and Tebbit felt he had to steer what he considered a too soft Tory party back to true Conservative values.
Not so they could help the nation but so they could stay in power. Not for the last time the Tory party would prove itself to be, above all things, self-serving. October 1974 sees a General Election called, the second that year. Wilson wins but, remarkably by today's standards, Heath stays as Tory leader despite now having lost three out of four elections.
Tories who possibly could have beaten Wilson felt too loyal to Heath so didn't challenge his position as leader. Margaret Thatcher, now taking on lefties as well as children, felt no such loyalty and felt she had to stand up (not Stand Down as The Beat later neatly put it) and a fascinating character, Airey Neave, enters into the Thatcher story.
Neave had escaped from Colditz during WWII and was later to die in a car bomb planted by the Irish National Liberation Army outside the House of Commons but, in 1974, his great passion was for Edward Heath. He hated him with an intensity and wanted him removed as Conservative leader. He'd tried, and failed, to get Keith Joseph, Willie Whitelaw, and Edward du Cann to stand against Heath but when he heard Thatcher would rise to the challenge he approached Norman Tebbit, always a Thatcher man, and asked to be added to Thatcher's team.
Neave became Thatcher's campaign manager and soon he and Tebbit were resorting to counter information and 'black propaganda' to get Thatcher on to the leadership ballot. In a foreshadowing of Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 victory in the Labour leadership election very few expected Thatcher to actually win.
She blatantly lied on television that there was "no machine" behind her, Jonathan Aitken (who went out with Thatcher's dopey daughter Carol) says Maggie was "not good at expressing emotions and love" (no shit!), and Michael Heseltine calls her intolerant, suspicious, bigoted, and over-simplistic.
Endorsements that would be less than glowing in many spheres of life but not when it comes to leading the Tory party (as we can see again now). Thatcher beat Heath by eleven votes, no clear majority, forcing a second ballot in which Heath withdrew from the race and his loyalists piled in to try to prevent a Thatcher victory.
Their man, and clear favourite, Willie Whitelaw was beaten by Thatcher by a resounding 67 votes and Thatcher took over, inheriting a cabinet filled with Heath's power base. Initial performances at the House of Commons didn't go well either. Backbenchers got tetchy but Thatcher's performances improved so they allowed her to stay in place. The Tory party will always eat its own when it's beneficial for them to do so.
In the early years of Thatcher's leadership a key influence, possibly THE key influence was Keith Joseph. A firebrand lecturer who was so determined that the Tories regained the narrative that he felt was beginning to be taken over by Socialism that he went on the 'warpath', travelling up and down the country to give impassioned speeches in favour of not just Conservatism but what would come to be seen as Thatcherism.
With Joseph as a huge inspiration, Thatcher became interested in free market economics and visited the USA, meeting Henry Ford II - grandson of Henry Ford and then president of the Ford Motor Company, to see how things were done there. She liked the idea of cutting welfare and claimed it would incentivise the poor to work harder.
Which might be true if we lived in a more equitable society, one where the dice is not always loaded in favour of the wealthy. Thatcher would dress up her explicit espousal of inequality by claiming she was interested in an "equality of opportunity" while Norman Tebbit veers fairly close to eugenics by comparing human beings, actual human beings, to racehorses and racing cars and saying that competition between us is a natural state of affairs.
It's survival of the fittest writ large and will illustrate why the Tory party genuinely don't give a fuck about poor people and in examples like Jacob Rees-Mogg would be quite happy for them all to die. These ideas remain fringe except in times of crisis and hardship in which they come to the fore as people seek easy answers and simple solutions to difficult problems and tough questions.
The late seventies was one of those times. Wilson's government was struggling and in 1976 he resigned and was replaced by James Callaghan (who narrowly edged out Michael Foot). Callaghan, like Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson (so far) never won a General Election and, by now, Thatcher was warming to her role as leader of the opposition and had Callaghan in her sights.
Ronnie Corbett lookalike Gordon Reece was employed as a political strategist for Thatcher and he soon told her that people didn't like her voice, that it was too shrill, and arranged for her (I'm not making this up) to have humming lessons at the National Theatre. When aseed, on television, if this was true Thatcher, of course, lied.
Reece told Thatcher what clothes to wear, he told her how to talk, and he told her to embrace the Soviet diss term of 'Iron Lady' but he did not affect her political standpoint. He employed Saatchi & Saatchi who came up with the iconic 'Labour Isn't Working' poster. Maurice Saatchi says his policy was to "hit first, hit hard, and keep on hitting".
Nice guy! Hardly a surprise he's a Tory. As Labour imposed wage caps, as more jobs were lost, as more strikes took place, the country saw fuel shortages and the flow of raw materials slowing down many were joining Saatchi and Thatcher as Tories. Labour, for many, really wasn't working. The winter of discontent saw twelve foot high piles of rubbish in Berwick Street market and Leicester Square employed as a makeshift dump.
Beleaguered, Callaghan called a General Election and Thatcher immediately started banging on about World War II. Which had as much relevance to a General Election in 1979 as it does to Brexit now but Tories know it plays well to morons and nationalists, especially to moron nationalists.
As Neil Kinnock correctly attests, and again we have echoes of the Brexit shitshow, the past Margaret Thatcher was evoking wasn't the real past. It was an imagined one. When people start going on about how we survived the war they conveniently overlook the nearly half a million Britons who very much did not survive the war. Being dead, they're not here to remind us of that.
Norman Tebbit goes back even further and starts banging on about the Industrial Revolution. The fact it took place one hundred years before the Chingford skinhead was even born doesn't stop him almost taking personal responsibility. You're not Thomas fucking Telford, you prick, and your myth of English (always English, never British) exceptionalism is a poison that is doing untold harm to this country as well as its neighbours.
But it played well with disillusioned voters and, as we all know, in 1979 Margaret Thatcher won the General Election and became Britain's first female Prime Minister. Her priority was to rebuild the economy and to reduce trade union power so, naturally, she quotes that well known anti-unionist and economic maestro St Francis of Assisi in her opening speech as PM:-
"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope"
She resolutely failed to do any of these things - which would be bad enough in itself - but, worse still, she never meant the fucking words when she said them in the first place. She was playing to the gallery in much the same way as the bumbling blond oaf quotes Latin when he can't think of anything else to say. Tories lie very easily but these lies are meant purely as distraction.
Only four of Thatcher's first cabinet are still alive now but it was, surprise surprise, dominated by Etonians. People described by one observer as having an "attitude of supercilious disdain". They think they're better than us. Eton doesn't so much give you a great brain or superb education as much as it gives you a sense of arrogance, a feeling of superiority, and a belief that you are somehow chosen to lead. Despite how unsuitable your talents or temperament may be to the task in hand.
At least Thatcher was a grafter. She got stuck in. She'd meet Helmut Schmidt in the day and be back at Number Ten doing the dusting that evening. She'd be donning combat jackets, riding in helicopters, and visiting Northern Ireland but she was impatient with others and stilted and people, even those in her own party, had grave doubts about her suitability for the job.
Evidence suggested they were not incorrect. Inflation doubled in her first year as sterling rose, petrol prices started rising, and both the manufacturing and shipbuilding industries soon found themselves in deep trouble and the textile industry was pretty much destroyed. The economic theory was monetarism and Thatcher and Joseph were aiming to change Britain's course.
Thatcher spoke about how difficult it is to make money, a point that was undermined completely by the fact that she was speaking to a room full of people in dinner jackets puffing on cigars. May sound familiar to those that remember David Cameron's launch of his austerity programme.
It didn't sit well in juxtaposition with footage of steelworks being destroyed and entire communities forced out on to the dole. Thatcher claimed 'change can't be painless' but neither she, nor many Tories, suffered much of the pain. That was for other people.
Thatcher took a Darwinian view on British industry and felt it was a species that should be left to die out rather than preserved at what she would have considered too high a cost. So unemployment rose to two million (one in twelve people out of work). It's almost impossible to say how many people are unemployed currently as the figures are so obfuscated and massaged by bullshit jobs, zero hours contracts, and fitness for work assessments.
David Owen is one of many observers who opine that Thatcher's lack of empathy meant that she was unable to understand the need for a welfare state and nor could she comprehend issues of mental health. Not all in her cabinet felt the same as her. Most, like Jim Prior, an old style consensus MP and a One Nation Tory who Thatcher at least respected for arguing to her face instead of muttering behind her back, didn't. They became known as the 'wets'. At the Brighton conference, where she did that shitty u-turn joke, she had very few on her side.
Geoffrey Howe, her Chancellor, was one and in his 1981 budget Howe announced further spending cuts as the Tories, as so often, turned their backs on the poor so that they could help the rich. Robin Hoods in reverse. Every time. It was hard to feel sympathy for the Tories as protests broke out all over the country and eggs were lobbed at them in Glasgow.
As riots broke out in Brixton Southall, and Toxteth and as the National Front started to gain traction, Mrs Thatcher could not countenance, could not even comprehend, that her policies could have been a factor in this civil unrest. She was jeered in Liverpool and tomatoes and potatoes were chucked at her. Across the country the Tory party had an astonishing two thirds disapproval rate.
The party spoke of getting rid of her and she was widely viewed as a one term PM but instead of accepting her fate or changing her policies she, instead, changed her cabinet. A night of the long knives in September '81 saw Jim Prior demoted from Employment to Northern Ireland) and Tebbit brought in to replace him. Christopher Soames was moved out as Lord President of the Council and in came Francis Pym (to replace Soames), Nigel Lawson (Energy - his department, not his nickname), and, no surprise this, Keith Joseph as Secretary of State for Education and Science.
It shored up her place as leader in the party but didn't do much for her popularity in the country. As more factory closures meant more redundancies, by 1982 Margaret Thatcher was the most unpopular Prime Minister since polling had begun. The situation was so dire and it was going to take something pretty drastic for her to stay at Number Ten. It came in the unlikely form of a small group of Argentine scrap metal merchants who'd landed on the south Atlantic island of South Georgia.
Messages were intercepted and it was discovered that, following two centuries of squabbling over ownership of the Falkand Islands - a mere 1,500 miles away, Argentina, under General Leopoldo Galtieri, were planning to take them back. An invasion.
The government sent the Task Force over there to, nominally, defend British territory (and the penguins) and though this was, no doubt, part of the aim the bigger picture was that if they could win this war it'd save the Tory party and Margaret Thatcher's career.
The General Belgrano, an Argentine navy light cruiser, was sunk outside the exclusion zone killing 323 people (an event that The Sun celebrated with its infamous 'GOTCHA' front page) but was it really a threat to the Task Force. Britain, of course, went on to win the war but it cost 255 lives (649 Argentine lives in total were lost and three Falkand Islanders died in 'friendly fire') so it could be described as something of a Pyrrhic victory as the total amount of deaths was equal to more than 25% of the population of the archipelago.
For those who died, those who were maimed and injured, those who suffered poor mental health as the result of what they experienced the worth of the war could be disputed but for Thatcher it was manna from heaven. She became an international phenomenon and, conveniently enough, it wasn't long before she was calling a General Election.
1983 would see her take on Labour's famously dishevelled looking Michael Foot and she won by an absolute landslide (most decisive victory since Attlee beat Churchill in 1945). I was fourteen years old and it was at this point that I vowed never to vote Conservative in my entire life (even though it was over three years before I was even entitled to vote), something I'm proud to say I never have. Even at that young age I could see that the Tories ruled for the party and its rich backers and not the country.
You'd think everybody would realise that now but it seems the tabloids have been happy to constantly provide scapegoats in the 'dole dosser', the scrounging immigrant, and the nasty and amoral EU so that working class people are constantly blinded as to who the real enemy is.
Having defeated the left in Britain, Thatcher turned to a larger, more global, 'enemy'. Communism. On 1st September 1983 , following a navigational error by the pilots, the Soviet military shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 killing all 269 people on board. This was seen as a threat to the West and soon cruise missiles were being moved into Molesworth and Greenham Common. I grew up very near Greenham Common and saw one being delivered once!
CND had formed in 1957 but the deployment of US cruise missiles on British territory saw a major revival in the fortunes for campaigners for nuclear disarmament (including a famous women's camp in Greenham). Thatcher, of course, distrusted CND, suspecting many of them to be 'commies'.
Some of them probably were to be fair. I remember the women's camp, I remember cafes in nearby Newbury refusing to serve 'peace protestors', and I remember the excitement when huge protests came to my town and people linked arms round Aldermaston, Greenham, and RAF Burghfield. I knew what side I was on and, like all teenagers in my area, I also knew that should there ever be a nuclear war we'd be among the first to go so close to so many strategic locations were we.
We genuinely thought this a possibility too. Eighties teenagers nights were plagued with nuclear anxiety dreams and the showing of The Day After and then, the far scarier, Threads didn't do much to alleviate our fears. The policy of the West seemed to be that we should just wait for the elderly Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov to die and then hope that the more reform minded Mikhail Gorbachev to hopefully come to power.
Remarkably, it worked. Brezhnev, Andropov, and then Konstantin Chernenko all died in fairly quick succession and Gorbachev found himself installed as leader of the USSR. He was invited to London for a meeting with Mrs Thatcher just as she was faced with another large internal problem. The miners' strike.
In protest at a wave of pit closures, Arthur Scargill (President of the National Union of Mineworkers) was giving firebrand speeches at rallies but Thatcher had seen what strikes had done to Britain in the seventies and was determined not to give an inch. She called Scargill a dangerous Marxist and Scargill didn't help himself by calling a national strike without a ballot.
We all soon became familiar with the language of 'flying pickets' and 'scabs' and the violence that erupted on both sides. Thatcher thought the miners were attempting to enforce mob rule and use intimidation to achieve their goals. She may not have been completely wrong but that's a fairly rich accusation coming from someone who'd just had a war, primarily to keep her job.
Things were exacerbated in Orgreave on 18th June 1984. The police weren't, as normal, blocking roads but were, instead, showing flying pickets where to park their cars. There were more cops than normal too. Soon the horses, the 'cavalry' if you'd rather, went in on the peaceful protesting miners and the footage does not look dissimilar to that of Peterloo.
Unliked Peterloo, nobody died but 95 were arrested and 123 were injured and even though the police, on instruction of Thatcher's government, instigated the battle, Margaret Thatcher was able to juice the event for all its worth. Putting blame on the victims in a way that will be familiar to any critical observers of today's amoral crop of venal populists.
I was sixteen in October 1984 when, at the Tory party conference, a bomb went off in the Grand Hotel at 3am in the morning, a 'gift' from the IRA. I found it hard to sympathise at the time but I guess I've softened. I still loathe the Tories but I can't endorse murder and five people died in this horrible incident. Masonry fell in Thatcher's bathroom, the chandeliers came down, and her room was left in total darkness.
In a nearby room Norman Tebbit and his wife got it even worse. They drifted in and out of consciousness and must have wondered if they'd survive. Tebbit's wife, also Margaret, was left permanently disabled. It takes a lot to make me feel sympathy for the Tories but the IRA (whose aims I support but methods I certainly don't) managed it.
I wouldn't even knock Thatcher for a decision that could easily be condemned as heartless. She decided to continue with the conference at 0930am the next morning as planned. The IRA issued a statement that said, basically, "today you were lucky" and Thatcher took to the stage to say terrorism can't defeat democracy.
It's the first, and last time, I found myself in accordance with her beliefs. December that year, twenty months after being invited, Gorbachev and his wife Raisa arrive in Britain. Gorbachev wooed Thatcher, he wooed the Tories, and, to be fair, he wooed just about everyone. The Shamen released an album called In Gorbachev We Trust and my vinyl copy contained a free Mikhail Gorbachev mask.
I wish I still had it. As Gorbachev and Thatcher made the first steps towards the end of the Cold War, in Wigan striking miners lined up for food parcels and on 3rd March 1985 Arthur Scargill announced that the miners would return to work. Scargill blamed the government, the judiciary, the police, and the media all uniting against the miners and he very probably had a point.
Individuality had conquered community, planting an awful acorn of selfishness that has now grown into the mighty oak tree of greed in whose shade we are now all forced to live under. The first chance I got to vote against the Tories, against selfishness, and against greed was in the 1987 General Election when Thatcher took on Neil Kinnock for Labour.
With Thatcher's personal approval ratings, again, plunging and over 3,000,000 people on the dole it seemed like Labour would, this time, win though a Liberal alliance with the newly formed SDP (Social Democratic Party - think a more successful Change UK) and jointly headed by Davids Steel and Owen was muddying the waters and potentially turning it into a three horse race.
Footage of protests in Glasgow allow us to revisit the days of the ubiquitous "Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out" chant but Thatcher was starting to seeing that using her unpopularity and sheer bloody mindedness could work in her favour. In today's parlance she was playing to her base and decided the TBW ('that bloody woman') factor could actually work for her.
Norman Tebbit, still not fully recovered either physically or mentally from the Brighton bomb, was put in charge of Thatcher's re-election campaign but Thatcher, perhaps herself affected by the bomb - or perhaps exhibiting the paranoid behaviour of so many powerful people, had become suspicious of people, even close allies like Tebbit, and their relationship deteriorated.
We even hear an anecdote of Thatcher, at this time, making her daughter hide in a cupboard for having the audacity to wear jeans when the family had a visitor. Behind in the polls Thatcher did what she'd done before and had a reshuffle. In came the unelected (think Dominic Cummings) David Young, Baron Young of Graffham as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and a former, little known, backbencher called John Major who the papers said, incorrectly, had failed to pass a test to become a bus conductor. Wonder what became of him!?
Young and Tebbit had a difficult relationship, both competing for Thatcher's ear. Young, like Jeremy Hunt, used to like boasting of having been an 'entrepreneur' but its unclear how that would benefit an administration interested primarily in privatisation and denationalising state owned industries. With an 'entrepreneur' on board, her government set about selling off BT, British Airways, Jaguar, Sealink, and British Steel. Worse still it was the taxpayer that footed the bill for these sell offs and the City that picked up the profit. Stealing from the poor to make the rich richer, a method Jacob Rees Mogg has made his modus operandi his entire life.
Back in the eighties, these sell offs led to a big bang in the stock exchange and deregulation led, predictably, to corruption and great riches for the few (but certainly not the many). Scenes of yuppies in bow ties drinking champagne, barking into brick mobiles, and other arrogant displays of wealth that Harry Enfield would base his Loadsamoney character on are accompanied by a voice over telling us that Margaret Thatcher simply couldn't imagine that rich people would be greedy, grasping, or parasitic. Her mindset was that this was the behaviour of the poor, not the rich.
Once again her lack of empathy had both failed and divided the nation. At the time the divide was seen as being between north and south but it was, of course, between rich and poor and Thatcher, even more predictably,completely disputed that this was even happening.
If Thatcher had wanted an example of rich people being greedy she need only have looked to her own son. Mark Thatcher, the chosen one unlike his sister Carol, turned up in Oman to feather his own nest on the back of his mother's fame. Alternatively she could have simply looked in the mirror. Margaret herself became the first female political leader to visit the dictators of Saudi Arabia (despite their appalling treatment, which maintains 'til this day, of women) and though it's unclear exactly what kind of deal she struck every deal struck with the House of Saud, of any note, is tainted with corruption and the selling of arms.
Despite all this, and because if I remember rightly at the time the promise (which couldn't be trusted anyway) to not raise tax, the Conservatives edged marginally ahead of Kinnock's Labour in the polls. To push on with this Thatcher and the Tories launched into an absolute media blitz. There's no footage of her kissing babies (would you allow Margaret Thatcher to kiss your baby?) but she's seen driving a JCB and that now most cliched electioneering photo op:- wearing a hard hat.
Of course she won, and she won with a majority of over one hundred seats. Margaret Thatcher became the first PM in over 160 years to win three successive terms of office, a feat that would be repeated by Tony Blair eighteen years later. But, perhaps as with Blair, all this success was going to her head. Her downfall was as much down to her increasing paranoia (although the example of her thinking Michael Heseltine was vying for her job isn't a great one as he almost certainly was) and losing touch with 'normality' as it was to do with unpopular and unfair policies like the Poll Tax.
Unpopular and unfair policies had worked for Thatcher before. In fact, they're the Tories stock in trade. She was scratchy and acrimonious towards European leaders like Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterand and adopted such an aggressive stance towards them that the she managed to unify other European nations against her. A warning from history so stark this sentence barely needs inclusion!
Fanned by media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black (the power of the press in this country is a disaster that lasts 'til this day even if much of it has now moved over to social media) she railed against the European bank and the single currency and this caused ructions with the pro-EU Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson.
Thatcher treated Howe appallingly, bullying him in public, sacking him, and then giving him the non-job of Deputy PM. She replaced Lawson, as was her style, with a yes man, Alan Walters, when he resigned but the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was seen as a major crisis and murmurs of insurrection got louder and louder. Anthony Meyer came forward as a 'stalking horse'.
It was the first time I'd ever heard of Anthony Meyer and it was the first time, but not the last, I ever heard the term stalking horse. Bernard Ingham may have thrown shade on Meyer by calling him a 'stalking donkey' but the 5th December 1989 leadership challenge saw 66 Tory MPs opt not to vote for Mrs Thatcher (33 for Meyer, 3 abstentions, and 24 spoilt papers - like a school election or something).
As recession hit further and homelessness doubled in London (though perhaps nothing as to what it is now) the public joined those 66 Tory MPs in their fidgetiness. In retrospect it was probably not the best time to introduce the retrogressive, unfair, and very very unpopular Community Charge, better known as the Poll Tax. Even some Tory voters, particularly the poorer floating ones in vital marginal constituencies, didn't like the idea of the less well off paying the same tax as rich people.
A week before its introduction, riots broke out in London (I remember them well, I attended the march but was sat in a park drinking cider during the riots and sadly missed them) and, of course, Thatcher responded with further aggression just as she was doing over the issue of Europe.
Geoffrey Howe, the last surviving member of Thatcher's original cabinet, became the worm that turned and resigned his non-job. That's the thing with the bullied. You can bully them for years and years but when they turn on you they can really fuck you up and so it proved with Howe and Thatcher. Good, she deserved it. Thatcher said of Howe "I never thought he'd do it". She'd taken his obsequiousness for granted for too long and we should never make the mistake of feeling sorry for bullies.
Howe served his dish of revenge ice cold and now a serious leadership challenge, forget stalking horses, was on. Some interesting footage shows John Major sat close, and pally, with Thatcher at the time. Heseltine decided to challenge Thatcher with the idea that he could win a general election and she couldn't (she'd made too many enemies, not least in her own party).
Ingham defends Thatcher and blames her cabinet. It was the cabinet she'd installed and filled with yes men but so many yes men were there, and so many plain speakers had been removed, that there was nobody left to tell her the game was up. Thatcher was, by this time, so far to the right that she considered Michael Heseltine a socialist!
She treated him like a miner, a European, or an Argentine and showed him no respect whatsoever. Yet she expected plenty of respect from her own party. They wouldn't ditch her. How could they after all she'd done for them. Ten years leader of the Tory party and she was still surprised to find out that they could be cruel. How could anyone be so naive?
Of course Thatcher, like most Tories and Tory voters, felt if they practiced a policy of cruelty that cruelty would only be dished out to others and not to themselves. We can only hope Johnson and Gove find themselves on the receiving end of the same tough lesson - and hopefully very very soon.
20th November 1990 saw the first election ballot and Thatcher beat Heseltine by 204 votes to 152 (sixteen abstentions) which meant there had to be a second ballot. Thatcher quickly 'confirmed' that she would be on that second ballot but that was not how it was to play out. At this point even her own loyalists, the likes of Malcolm Rifkind and Chris Patten, told her it was time to go.
Thatcher was hurt. She was shocked. She called it treachery. Ingham, of course, stuck by her and Charles Powell (a key foreign policy advisor to Thatcher and, later, Blair) seemed to think the 'fact' that the Cold War was ending with 'a victory for the West' (!) made it somehow unfair that Thatcher should go at this time.
But on the 22nd November 1990, Margaret Thatcher resigned. Like Theresa May after her, she cried and, like Theresa May after her, she cried only for herself. She didn't cry for all the people whose lives had been ruined and lost due to her policies, her lack of empathy, her aggression, and her determination to crush all opposition. Every single tear that ran down the side of that heartless woman's face was a tear for herself and for the nasty selfish party she'd somehow managed to make even more nasty and even more selfish.
Her tears meant nothing. Her cruelty and mean spiritedness had meant everything. Some sent flowers to Number Ten, some had parties to celebrate, and five days later John Major beat Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd in a second ballot to become her successor. Something not many had predicted which at least gives us some hope for the future and getting out of the mess we're in now.
It's a reminder that the future is less clear than we might think. We couldn't see Major winning and during that glorious Olympic summer of 2012 who could have imagined seven years later that the United Kingdom would not just be more divided than ever but that its very existence be in peril? Tents lining the streets of big cities, racially aggravated hate crimes up, and Operation Yellowhammer (drawn up by the government itself) warning of food and medicine shortages and civil unrest. Who could see the rise of UKIP, Brexit, and a unique strain of British fascism that has so thoroughly discoloured our politics and our national debate that much that of it seeps into our everyday conversation and even breaks up families?
We all could have done if we'd looked back to Thatcher and her right wing government of the eighties. The clues were there and this programme made that abundantly clear from the start and continued to do so until the every end.
Margaret Thatcher died in the Ritz hotel in London in 2013 but there was no need for the parties some said they'd have (and some did have) following her death. There was no need for the discos and no need, as Elvis Costello memorably sang, to tramp the dirt down on her grave. For Thatcher herself was dead but the far worse Thatcherism was still alive and was already giving birth to something much much worse.
I won't be able to watch the documentaries about what eventually happens to and with Johnson and his even more selfish, greedy, cruel, and nasty government than Thatcher's and I won't be able to write lengthy blogs about them either. That's because I'll more than likely be dead by the time it's all resolved. It only remains to be seen how many people Johnson, Farage, Gove, Patel, and Cummings plan to take down with them. Warnings from history only work if people take heed of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment