Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (34 page)

To opponents of the war in Britain and, indeed, to those disturbed by anything that smacked of a returning sense of national assertiveness, the scenes of jubilation at the victory were, as Tony
Benn put it, ‘utterly distressing’.
⁶⁵
He found Michael Foot’s expression of satisfaction at the success of the campaign, and the
compliment he paid the prime minister, ‘odious and excessive’.
⁶⁶
The conflict coincided with the historic first visit of a pope to
Britain, and on 29 May, while the battle of Goose Green was drawing towards its denouement, the contrasting image was beamed across the television networks of Pope John Paul II attending a service
at Canterbury Cathedral. Neither his nor anyone else’s prayers for peace were answered except through force of arms. Vast crowds lined the banks of naval towns to cheer the returning warriors
and wave Union Jacks, and these displays of semi-delirious patriotic exuberance – and relief – came to represent popular opinion far more memorably than the placard-waving protesters
who had marched on 23 May and 6 June. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had tried to draw together those opposed to the war with those alarmed at the possibility of nuclear Armageddon – at
one rally, the CND vice president, Professor Mike Pentz, prophesied that Thatcher would surely launch a nuclear strike on Argentina if Prince Andrew was harmed. Surprisingly, when it came to the
victory march through the City of London in October, it was Thatcher, rather than the prince’s mother, who took the salute.

Cast as the new Boudicca, or even Britannia, Thatcher could be forgiven her sense of pride in British arms and satisfaction in her own role, even if her annoyance at the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s prayers for the Argentines displayed a vindictive streak. She ought to have been reminded that the archbishop, unlike herself, had actually fought in a war and had been decorated
with the Military Cross. Nevertheless, her outward display of Churchillian resolve was not the whole story. She had let Pym pursue the chimera of diplomatic solutions far beyond what she personally
felt was
workable. Those working closely with her during the crisis attested that news of British casualties regularly reduced her to tears.
⁶⁷
She made a point of writing personally to the families of every dead serviceman, starting a tradition that her successors were to follow. Publicly, however, her role was
easier to explain. Her toughness in war had been vindicated and, by implication, so it would be in domestic matters too. Her own position in the country and in the Cabinet was immeasurably
strengthened. The assumption was that the ‘wets’ would never have seen the crisis through to its conclusion. This was, of course, a simplification: two monetarist ‘dries’,
the Foreign Office minister Nicholas Ridley and the defence secretary, John Nott, had played their part in unintentionally fostering the Argentine belief that Britain wanted rid of, or would not
defend, the islands. But the perception was clear: hard decisions were not taken by ‘wets’. Ironically, those most affected by this perception were the generation of Cabinet ministers
who had fought in the Second World War, their authority duly seeping away to a younger, post-war generation (Parkinson, Lawson, John Moore, Tebbit) of Thatcher loyalists (plus the independently
minded Heseltine), who appeared likely to represent the party’s future.

The grandest conclusion was, however, drawn by the prime minister herself. In July 1982, she summed up at a Conservative rally at Cheltenham Racecourse what she believed to be the legacy of the
Falkands:

The Resolute Approach

‘The issue is Thatcher,’ declared
The Economist
at the beginning of the 1983 general election campaign.
¹
That
this looked likely to play into the Tories’ hands would have seemed all but unimaginable a year and a half earlier. A Gallup poll in October 1981 had put Thatcher’s approval rating at
24 per cent – the lowest ever recorded for a prime minister.
²
At that time, with the surge of the SDP and its formation of the Alliance with the
Liberals, it seemed a racing certainty that Britain’s two-party system was over. Political and constitutional experts like David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor began writing books with titles
like
Governing Without a Majority
and
Multi-Party Politics and the Constitution
. The task of government would be especially difficult given how far polarized the two main parties had
become and, consequently, how difficult it would be for the Alliance to sustain a coalition with either of them. Nobody factored in the unforeseeable – that a war in the South Atlantic would
be viewed as vindicating a woman who – literally – stuck to her guns in the face of terrible odds. It made her the embodiment of what she began describing as the ‘resolute
approach’.
³

Yet while the ‘Falklands factor’ might explain the scale of the Conservative Party’s landslide in the June 1983 general election, it was not exclusively the reason why the
party won a majority. The opinion polls suggested that, on the eve of General Galtieri’s desperate bid for glory in April 1982, the Tories’ fortunes were already recovering.
Unemployment was continuing its rise, albeit at a slower rate. The black spots of deprivation were not shrinking, but neither were they growing. Those still with jobs had reason to start to feel
secure. Consumer confidence was returning and, for the employed, living standards were rising. The economy was turning round and inflation seemed almost conquered, offering Thatcher grounds for
claiming her policies were being proven right. Just before the Falklands were invaded, Labour, the Alliance and the Conservatives were all but tied on the same opinion poll rating. Yet it was the
Conservatives who drew most cheer from this, for the trend was in their direction: having bottomed out in the autumn of 1981, their ratings had thereafter been on a continuous upward slope, while
the
two opposition parties had seemingly peaked and were in decline. With two years to go before an election had to be held, the final result was not predetermined, even if a
hung parliament remained the most likely possibility.

While it is certainly conceivable that the Conservatives might have sneaked a second term on the back of modest economic recovery, Labour ‘extremism’ and a divided opposition, it was
the Falklands that transformed Thatcher into their prime electoral asset. In a ‘Ten reasons to vote Conservative’ leaflet issued during the campaign, the final, tenth, point read
simply: ‘Mrs Thatcher’. The flyer’s reverse listed ‘Mr Foot’ as the concluding reason for not voting Labour. Vigour and vitality were pitched against infirmity and
impotence. The principal parties seldom mentioned the Falklands War directly during the election campaign – and when it was raised, it was more often clumsily brought up by Labour. Yet it
scarcely needed to be discussed, for it self-evidently represented a fundamental change in perceptions both of Britain’s fortunes and of its warrior-queen prime minister. In 1979, Britons
were the least optimistic out of thirty-one nationalities sampled by Gallup. By 1983, they were the eighth most optimistic.
⁴

For her part, Thatcher resisted the temptation to call a snap general election to get the most out of the post-Falklands bounce in her popularity. Doing so in the autumn of 1982, just over
midway into a term of office, would have looked scandalously opportunistic. In any case, there were good tactical reasons for delaying into the summer of 1983. The Conservatives had won in 1979 on
old constituency boundaries that were advantageous to Labour. The Boundary Commission was at work trying to iron out some of the iniquities in a redrawing which, it was estimated, would add thirty
seats to the Conservatives. These changes came into effect in March 1983. Positive local election results at the beginning of May made up Thatcher’s mind and the general election was called
for 9 June.

In one of his least astute judgements, the
Guardian
’s political correspondent, Peter Jenkins, concluded that the Conservatives’ manifesto demonstrated that ‘Thatcherism
is dead – at least for the present.’
⁵
In fact,
The Challenge of our Times
, drafted by Adam Ridley (Sir Geoffrey Howe’s
political adviser) and Ferdinand Mount (head of the Policy Unit at No. 10), succinctly set out the stall for extending Thatcherism far beyond its core monetarist values of sticking to the current
economic policies, prioritizing the fight to keep inflation down and further reductions in income tax. It heralded the next wave of ideas – ones that Thatcher had scarcely dreamt of when in
opposition but which the conquest of inflation and the chipping away of trade union privileges had created an opportunity to purse. Thus the manifesto announced the intention to roll back the
state’s control of major sections of the economy, with the privatization (in whole or in part) of British Telecom, British
Airways, British Steel, British Shipbuilders
and Rolls-Royce. Furthermore, the assault would be taken into the Labour heartland: union leaders were to be elected by secret ballot and Labour’s municipal fiefdoms were to be broken up,
with the Greater London Council and six metropolitan authorities abolished and power returned to borough and district level. The balance between central and local government would be shifted, with
what became known as ‘rate capping’ introduced to prevent high-spending (Labour) councils setting very high local tax rates. This was an effort to remove the fiscal burden from
ratepayers, but at the cost of making local government less responsible for its own actions – with consequences that should have been foreseen.
⁶

For radicalism, these proposals were exceeded only by the Labour manifesto. This document was clumsily structured, the inevitable consequence of its having been drafted by the party’s
National Executive Committee, which presented it to the shadow Cabinet as a fait accompli rather than as a rough copy awaiting discussion and amendment. But its ideas were startlingly bold. It
promised unilateral nuclear disarmament and Britain’s withdrawal from the European Community. The country would be protected from the winds of competition through a form of siege economy. For
politicians who claimed to be international socialists, the outlook was surprisingly compatible with that of age-old zealots for ‘little England’, ready to close the national drawbridge
and defend the moat against the challenging world beyond. Market forces were to be curtailed. Quotas and tariffs would be imposed to restrict imports. Exchange controls were to be brought back to
curb the international flow of capital and the major clearing banks were threatened that if they refused to ‘cooperate with us fully . . . we shall stand ready to take one or more of them
into public ownership’. State planning of the economy would return, with a new corporatist Department of Economic and Industrial Planning, tasked with drawing up and implementing a five-year
plan. The limited privatization that had taken place already would be reversed. Indeed, sweeping new nationalizations were deemed essential. Electronics and pharmaceutical companies were to be
largely nationalized, along with ‘other important sectors, as required in the national interest’. For many businessmen, this last promise seemed alarmingly vague, its broad sweep all
but an enabling act to allow the state to seize any profitable private business at will. Private health care would be stopped in its tracks. Private schools would be stripped of charitable status
and ‘integrated’ into the local authority sector ‘where necessary’.
⁷
This sounded close to abolition through indirect means.
In contrast, trade unions would regain their former powers and privileges. The manifesto’s official title was
The New Hope for Britain
, but the description by which it was to be
remembered was provided by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman: ‘the longest suicide note in history’.

The remarkable scale of the Labour manifesto’s ambitions provided easy targets for the Tory campaign, which rushed out an advert, ‘Like your manifesto,
Comrade’ – pointing out eleven areas of common policy between the Labour Party and Communist Party manifestos, including the reintroduction of exchange controls, withdrawal from the
Common Market, the abolition of parents’ right to choose their children’s schools and opposition to secret ballots in union leadership elections. Detailed opinion polling suggested that
it was on defence that the Conservatives enjoyed the greatest lead over Labour (plus 38 per cent) and that they were almost as far ahead on ‘inflation and prices’ (plus 35 per cent) as
well. But much depended upon how the question was phrased. The party of defence was only 13 per cent ahead on ‘nuclear disarmament’ (perhaps because many respondents were not even sure
they agreed with the proposition), and while Labour was 16 per cent ahead on ‘the NHS’ it was only 2 per cent ahead on ‘hospitals’, and 13 per cent ahead on
‘unemployment’ but just 7 per cent on ‘jobs’.
⁸

Almost everything was slicker about the Tories’ campaign, from the adverts devised by Saatchi & Saatchi to the attitude and demeanour of the party chairman, Cecil Parkinson, a northern
grammar-school boy who embodied the aspirational generation with which Thatcher wanted to be associated. Indeed, Parkinson represented the social changes she was bringing to her party (he was
certainly a contrast to the previous chairman, the Old Etonian amateur watercolourist, Lord Thorneycroft) and was tipped to be Thatcher’s next Foreign Secretary – until he informed her
that he had got his former personal secretary, Sara Keays, pregnant (after the election Thatcher made him
only
secretary of state for trade and industry, but he felt obliged to resign amid
the popular uproar that followed the revelations about his ‘love-child’). Such mishaps were for the future – the only moment during the campaign when the choreographed performance
almost came unstuck was in a television encounter organized by the BBC’s
Nationwide
programme which allowed viewers, linked up by camera from regional studios, to put questions to the
leaders. Thatcher found herself aggressively cross-questioned by a Cirencester housewife, Mrs Diana Gould, who refused to believe her claims that the torpedoing of the
Belgrano
was not also
intended to sink the Peruvian peace deal, despite Thatcher’s protestation that the details of the proposal were not even known to London at the time the order was given. Catching out the
prime minister on one factual slip – Thatcher had contested Mrs Gould’s opening statement that the
Belgrano
was ‘sailing away from the Falklands’ – the
questioner made the prime minister appear temporarily flustered and evasive. The professional interrogators found her less flappable. The reality, however, was that raising the Falklands War
remained a risky strategy for her tormentors and backfired on two Labour politicians who did so. On 1 June, Denis Healey claimed Thatcher’s response
to the conflict was
one of ‘glorying in slaughter’; while on the eve of the poll, Neil Kinnock, responding to a heckle from someone in a television audience that Thatcher ‘had guts’, retorted
sharply: ‘And it’s a pity that people had to leave theirs on Goose Green in order to prove it.’ At this provocation, the defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, leapt in, describing
Kinnock as ‘the self-appointed king of the gutter of politics’, to which Kinnock retorted: ‘If I was in the gutter, and I ain’t, he is looking at me from the sewer.’
It was not quite Oscar Wilde. Somewhat archly, Thatcher tried to rise above it with: ‘I think in politics, as in life, some things are best left unsaid.’
⁹