Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (26 page)

Away from the fists flying amid the plumbing and porcelain, Healey remained under the glare of the conference-hall lights, trying to appear unflappable while rethinking the complicated electoral
calculations in his head. He knew he could count on the support of the overwhelming majority of MPs. But this advantage was cancelled out by the equal weighting given to the constituency activists,
80 per cent of whom cast their votes for Benn. How was the horse-trading between the union brothers working out? The final result, when it was declared, was met with audible gasps, cheers and
shock. Tony Benn had secured 49.574 per cent of the vote. Healey’s margin of victory was 0.852 per cent, the statistical equivalent of a hair’s breadth.

Breaking the Mould?

Those who assumed the SDP would be the real losers from the battle of Brighton were in for a surprise. While Healey’s victory may have persuaded some wavering Labour MPs
to give their party a second chance, it was wishful thinking to hope that it would silence the telephones at SDP headquarters. Far from it – having stalled somewhat since the exciting
post-launch days, the SDP was about to enjoy a second surge. During the summer, Labour recovered to almost a 10 per cent lead in the opinion polls, while in the race for second place the Tories and
the SDP–Liberal Alliance interweaved within two to three points of each other. All this changed during the autumn. Driven both by the Conservatives’ failure to bring spiralling
unemployment under control and by Labour’s internal bloodletting, the Alliance began to move into a comfortable lead. What especially aided its fortunes at this time was a succession of
by-elections which allowed it to show its vitality and to garner support as a protest vote against the perceived extremism of the two traditional parties.

During the early eighties, the media still treated by-elections as major political events. Fleet Street pundits and sketch writers enjoyed the opportunity to get out and about in parts of the
country that would not otherwise command their attention. Most of all, the BBC invested considerable time, energy and the talents of its by-election specialist Vincent Hanna in turning
by-election campaigns into a form of entertainment. Cameras followed the candidates and their front-bench minders around as they solicited votes, kissed babies and dodged the
occasional flying egg. Lacking roots and institutional history, the SDP was especially dependent on this sort of publicity to stay in the public eye, and it was fortunate that during 1981 and 1982
they were able to capitalize on a number of by-elections.

The first to come up was in Warrington. Located between Liverpool and Manchester, it was a traditionally northern and working-class constituency, where Labour had enjoyed a 62 per cent share of
the vote in 1979. As such, it seemed unfertile ground for a new party to take root. Rather than flunk this challenge, Roy Jenkins courageously stepped forward. There was some doubt that Warrington
was really the place for the claret-loving
bon viveur
, but he seemed refreshingly unabashed. ‘I have represented one of the most industrial seats in Birmingham for twenty-seven
years,’ he beamed amiably, ‘I believe I had happy relations with them. I certainly won nine elections there.’
³⁸
Still, it was a
risk letting him loose on the streets without the protection of a Labour rosette. A much-retold story had it that, as Home Secretary, Jenkins had once visited a prison and attempted to strike up a
conversation with an inmate with the guileless salutation: ‘How nice to see you here.’ Another anecdote maintained that when he stood for the Labour leadership in 1976 his campaign
manager told him to go to the Commons bar and buy a wavering fellow Labour MP a pint. He took the instruction literally, leaving the bemused elderly member to sup the beer on his own.
³⁹
It was therefore to the surprise of his detractors that Jenkins proceeded to pound the streets of Warrington with determined vigour, showing himself far more
approachable and at ease with ordinary people than the popular caricature of him suggested. When the result was declared, it was a sensation – and not because the Tory candidate lost his
deposit. Labour’s majority shrunk from over ten thousand to just 1,759. Jenkins had come close to defeating Labour in its own heartland, achieving a swing to the SDP of 23 per cent. It was,
as Jenkins admitted from the returning officer’s platform, the first time he had lost an election and it was the best result he had ever achieved. No more the insouciant loner in the Gang of
Four, he had in the space of a few tumultuous weeks of old-fashioned campaigning made himself the first among its equals.

By the time the next by-election was underway, the Liberal–SDP Alliance was up and running. The electoral pact was overwhelmingly endorsed at the Liberal Party conference in Llandudno in a
mood of such heady excitement that David Steel ended his rallying speech with the triumphant assertion (subsequently the butt of much ridicule): ‘I have the good fortune to be the first
Liberal leader for over half a century who is able to say to you at the end of our annual assembly: go back to your constituencies and prepare for
government.’
⁴⁰
The following month came what seemed like proof of the Boy David’s power of prophecy in a by-election
fought in the Conservative marginal of Croydon North-West. It was decided that a Liberal would contest it, partly because the candidate already selected, a local activist – complete with
beard, if not actually sandals – named Bill Pitt, stubbornly refused blandishments to step aside. When Pitt had been the Liberal candidate there in 1979 he had managed less than 11 per cent
of the vote. This time, as the Liberal–SDP Alliance candidate, he won the seat with a 40 per cent share and a majority in excess of three thousand. If the Alliance could win with Bill Pitt,
his SDP helpers conceitedly bitched, it could win with anybody.
⁴¹

In November, Crosby came up. A prosperous constituency outside Liverpool, this seemed a rock-solid Conservative seat, even with the difficulties currently battering the party in government. It
was far from an ideal seat for Shirley Williams, but aware that, having ducked the opportunity to stand in Warrington, she could not be seen to be running away from another tough challenge, she put
herself forward. In doing so, she achieved what was the biggest turnaround in British parliamentary by-election history. A Conservative majority of 19,272 was overturned and Williams, who had spent
weeks traversing the constituency to the strains of the soundtrack to
Chariots of Fire
, was sent to Parliament with a majority in excess of five thousand. Little wonder that in her victory
speech she announced: ‘This is not for us a party but a crusade.’
⁴²
At any rate, it was beginning to take on the aspect of a great
American religious revival, offering hope and excitement to all those caught up in it.

Warrington, Croydon and Crosby were three different sorts of seats and the Alliance’s level of success in them all suggested its appeal was neither sectional nor regional. Psephologists
noted that if a Crosby-style swing was repeated at the next general election, the Parliament returned would consist of 533 Alliance MPs, seventy-eight Labour MPs and four lonely – and
doubtless fractious – Conservatives. The mould of British politics looked ready to be smashed to smithereens.

The Last Good-Old-Fashioned War?

Despite the fact that mainland Britain enjoyed a half-century of generally peaceful conditions after 1945, two of the dramas that best illustrate her changing fortunes over the
period were both wars. More than any other event, the 1956 Suez crisis demonstrated that Britain was no longer a front-rank power: the political and economic consequences of trying to secure a
Middle Eastern canal and destabilize an Arab dictator were more than the country could manage. Decision-makers and opinion-formers spent the next quarter-century gripped by a sense of wounded
pride, impotence and a belief that the task of statecraft was successfully to manage the nation’s all too apparent decline. The second defining conflict was the Falklands War of 1982.
Logistically and militarily, success in the South Atlantic was more difficult to pull off than at Suez. Yet victory was absolute and the result was an injection of positive thinking into the
British psyche that had been quite absent after Suez.

How and why did this rediscovery of British resolve come about? The character of the prime minister was one obvious difference. Resolute, determined, quickly mastering her brief, Thatcher
conducted herself during the critical weeks of 1982 in a manner wholly at variance with that of the nervy and neurotic Anthony Eden in 1956. Overcoming the opposition of her Foreign Office and the
instincts of much of Whitehall, she did not flinch and was subsequently rewarded by the electorate for showing she was
man
enough for the tough decisions that some of her critics – not
least in her own party – seemed temperamentally inclined to funk. There was also the question of the cause. The Falkland Islanders were a quiet, inoffensive folk who had never done anyone any
harm. The British objective was as clear as it was limited: to liberate them and their islands from a neo-fascist military junta notorious for murdering those who spoke out against it. As such, the
mission had rather more of the cause of righteousness about it than engaging in a deceptive manoeuvre aimed at Middle Eastern regime change.

Nor was this all. Britain was economically weak in 1982, in different but no less serious ways than she had been in 1956. However, a mixture of market liberalization and
high interest rates, fortified by increasing oil receipts, ensured she had a floating – but strong – currency. By contrast, Eden’s government had found itself trying to support a
fixed exchange rate under such daily assault that the run on the pound risked exhausting the Treasury’s reserves. This difference leads on to a yet greater consideration. Over Suez, Britain
had acted against American wishes and duly discovered that it was subject to that higher power. Washington looked both ways in the first weeks of the Falklands crisis, yet lent valuable logistical
assistance to Britain in the critical phase of the war. Thus, while the natural response to victory in the South Atlantic was a renewed sense of national resurgence, one aspect had not changed
since 1956 – anything might be possible, so long as the Americans were onside.

Far from being a distant distraction that happened to have major domestic political ramifications, the Falklands War was, first and foremost, a significant military event. Its origins owed more
to the preoccupations of the nineteenth century than to the Cold War in that it was about ownership of a territory rather than a contest for ideological supremacy. Notwithstanding the American
logistical assistance, it proved to be (at the time of writing) the last major engagement that Britain fought on its own, rather than as merely a partner – and usually a junior partner
– in an international coalition. It also marked the end of an era in the manner in which it was fought. The major conflicts in the decades after 1982 were asymmetric, which is to say that
they involved a glaring mismatch between one side – for instance, Chechens, Iraqis or Islamist fighters – using low-grade weapons and guerrilla tactics against front-rank military
powers deploying cutting-edge technology, overwhelming firepower and unchallenged air supremacy. The battle for the Falklands, in contrast, was between two armed forces using roughly the same
quality of weaponry against each other. Indeed, with the exception of the missiles fired from out at sea, the weapons the British and Argentine soldiers aimed at each other were not especially
different from those used in the Second World War: artillery shells, mortars, machine guns and even fixed bayonets.
¹
Except for what limited satellite
imagery the British could beg from the Pentagon and the Argentines from the Soviets,
²
neither side enjoyed the technology to spy from space on what
the other was doing. If the combatants on the Falklands wanted to know what was on the other side of the hill, they had to stay camouflaged, sneak up close, get out their binoculars and hope an
unseen marksman was not drawing a bead on them.

Nothing could be more mistaken than the notion that the British forces’ professional superiority was such that once they had secured a bridgehead on the islands their victory over badly
equipped and ill-trained Argentine
conscripts would be inevitable. The British troops were fitter and better trained, displayed tighter discipline and used superior radio
communications.
³
But that was about the extent of their advantage. Conscripts or not – and many were crack troops – the Argentines
possessed the benefit of time to select the most advantageous terrain, to dig in, to lay minefields and to entrench their positions. When battle was first joined, they outnumbered the British by a
margin of three to one, a direct inversion of the odds usually deemed necessary to cancel out the advantage of defending rather than attacking. With fresh cargoes being landed at Stanley airport
almost until the end of hostilities, they were often better supplied and better fed than the British. To win, all the Argentine troops needed to do was to delay British success beyond the onset of
winter, when the weather would make it impossible for the British to remain in the South Atlantic. Thus the British had to secure victory at rapid speed – in reality, about three months
– or lose the war. Logistically, the British were in a far weaker position, having to be supplied by a floating, and highly vulnerable, armada of ships thousands of miles from secure bases,
in a war zone where, for most of the conflict, it was the Argentine air force that retained the edge in controlling the skies. Indeed, besides Britain’s better strategic thinking and superior
soldiering, pure luck proved among the deciding factors. If only a few more bombs had detonated when they hit their targets, the British task force could have been crippled. As with the Duke of
Wellington’s famous assessment of Waterloo, the battle for the Falklands was ‘the nearest run thing’. And, for all that, it was no less decisive.