Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (82 page)

In this, Barr and York were assisted by the sudden public interest in the woman whose picture adorned the handbook’s cover. Before her marriage, Lady Diana Spencer had seemed a stereotype
Sloane, and while the perceived attractiveness of her personality may have owed much to her combination of shyness and good intentions, the admiration it generated also generated interest in her
background, look and lifestyle. Combining an aristocratic lineage and ambivalence towards intellectualism – she was, as she famously put it, ‘thick as a plank’ – the future
princess had left school without any O-level qualifications to pursue a cookery course, followed by nannying and assisting at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico. Alongside secretarial
courses, degrees in fine art and internships with auction houses, such was the standard
curriculum vitae
of the classic young female Sloane. Her wedding to Prince Charles in July 1981
provided a reassuring distraction from the mounting unemployment and urban riots of that summer and was accompanied by nationwide celebrations. This was hardly surprising. At a time when the
present day seemed beset with fear and uncertainty, the manifestation of tradition in the marriage of the heir to the throne to an engaging English aristocrat appeared to offer something
comforting, rooted and stable. Three months later, nostalgia for the British aristocracy received a second fillip when ITV’s eleven-episode adaption of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead
Revisited
attracted eleven million viewers. Simultaneously, the content of newspaper and magazine fashion pages, the success of the country look promoted by the clothing chain Laura Ashley and
the waxed-jacket maker Barbour, the shifting aesthetics of interior design, where chintz
and heavy curtains were back in vogue, and the return – at least superficially
– of classical detailing to the exterior of new architecture all suggested that ‘reactionary chic’ was undergoing a cultural renaissance.

This was the context that ensured the
Sloane Ranger Handbook
would be far more than a novelty guide to upper-class manners. In its first two years of publication, it went through fourteen
impressions, selling more than a million copies and becoming the best-selling trade book of the decade.
⁷⁵
Filled with advice about ‘what
really matters’, where to shop and how to dress and behave like a Sloane, its sales extended far beyond the social group it depicted and suggested the presence of a considerable audience
motivated by – or at least attracted to – social aspiration. By 1985, theatregoers were streaming into the West End for
The Sloane Ranger Review
, co-written by Ned Sherrin. The
show, like the people it lovingly parodied, divided the critics, an acerbic
Times
reviewer insisting: ‘How much more rewarding this show would be if it consisted of a march past of
real Sloanes being pelted with real bread rolls.’
⁷⁶
With their distinctive patterns of speech and sensibly traditional dress sense, the
Sloanes were a stereotype easily sent up in mass advertising campaigns – most memorably and incongruously for Heineken lager in 1985 – and the presumption that they typically ended
their sentences with the searching acknowledgement ‘OK, yah?’ bequeathed them the additional epithets ‘yahs’ or ‘rahs’, while their more boisterous,
dinner-partying male counterparts came to be dubbed ‘Hooray Henrys’. The Sloane, it seemed, was becoming as readily identifiable a feature of the first half of the eighties as were
punks in the mid-seventies or Teddy Boys during the 1950s.

For all their reverence for ‘old money’, few could depend upon it to the extent of remaining wholly idle. During the early eighties, Sloane-ish figures were readily identifiable in
the City. ‘There’s something about the way the City works,’ the
Sloane Ranger Handbook
explained, ‘the old-ness, the public-schoolness, the merchant bank
“word-is-my-bond” code of honour – that makes it all seem like an ancient profession, not business at all. Even the dodgy side is a bit dashing and roguish, like
eighteenth-century gambling. And the City is the last Empire, still controlling things everywhere, linked up with marvellous places like Hong Kong.’
⁷⁷
This, however, was the clubbish, conservative and nepotistic City that Big Bang helped blow open to wider competition. After 1986, demand for the gentleman amateur –
perhaps third or fourth in a line of close relations to have worked in the same venerable partnership, and proffering nothing higher than a 2:2 degree – slackened considerably. Those who came
from Sloane-ish backgrounds who proved able to compete in the new environment tended to do so by dropping the act – at any rate, until the weekend’s escape to the countryside. This
changing mood in the City was in evidence elsewhere, too. Indeed, the woman who had helped propel the Sloane Ranger to prominence at the beginning
of the decade came
ultimately to exemplify the rejection of its values and prejudices. By the decade’s end, Diana, Princess of Wales was mixing with an international jet-set that recognized no obvious
distinction between an earl and a rock star or fashion designer. That thereafter she dated the Muslim son of the Egyptian businessman who – to Sloane-ish horror back in 1985 – had
bought the Harrods department store underlined how much in the ascendant was the new admiration for wealth regardless of the social baggage with which it came.

This less class-bound attitude was embodied in the other aspirational social group to which the lingo of the eighties gave definition. ‘Yuppie’ was a term coined in the United States
in 1984 as a part-acronym of ‘young urban professional’, though by the time it had achieved something approaching household recognition in the UK, round about 1986–7, it was
widely interpreted as standing for ‘young upwardly mobile professional’.
⁷⁸
Thus in Britain the yuppie was assumed not to have
inherited wealth or status but to be self-made. Those brought under the umbrella term – willingly or otherwise – included almost anyone perceived to be youthful and brazenly making
large sums of money, be they City traders, estate agents, advertising executives (the definition of ‘executive’ was undergoing grade inflation), public relations consultants or those
lucratively engaged in any of the other fast-growing service sectors. The breadth of this sweep inevitably scooped up many who, far from starting from scratch, had actually enjoyed a middle-class
upbringing, perhaps with an expensive education included – for it was really an unapologetic attitude towards personal success, rather than social origin, that was the yuppie’s
hallmark. The sight of City traders, many of whom had recently grown up on council estates, volubly enjoying their good fortune over chilled champagne buckets in the bars around Leadenhall Market
was unsettling to those – whether snobs or socialists – who regarded such behaviour as the product of social disorder. Nor was there any shortage of those happy to play up to the Harry
Enfield-created stereotype of the newly prosperous plasterer boasting about his ‘loadsamoney’.
^EN40
Such behaviour also appeared on
university campuses. At Exeter University, Professor Ted Wragg complained that ‘these coves become leading lights in the Federation of Conservative Students. Some time ago they hired a white
Rolls-Royce and drove it ostentatiously around the campus to demonstrate that some students have lots of money.’
⁷⁹
The professor assumed
that they were the product of his university’s high public-school intake. Their behaviour, though, more closely resembled the nascent yuppie rather than the thoroughbred Sloane approach to
irritating others. After all, for all their Tory sentiments, Sloanes were rarely political activists and were not likely to
admit to having to hire a Rolls-Royce – or
to imagine that one painted white was a symbol of patrician taste.

The yuppie attitude displayed none of the old British coyness about making money or concealing success behind a mask of amiable self-effacement, and in this respect it was a distinctively
transatlantic outlook. It was especially identified with the boom years of the eighties, and was propelled by the sort of individualistic energies supposedly unleashed by Thatcherite policies
(which might explain why the term fell out of use after Thatcher’s fall, even though there were plenty of young people who continued to make money and to act obnoxiously in the twenty years
thereafter). The traditionally minded, ‘High Tory’ editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
, Peregrine Worsthorne, condemned such displays of affluence as ‘bourgeois
triumphalism’ and urged Thatcher publicly to dissociate herself from them.
⁸⁰
Naturally reluctant to condemn those being rewarded for their
enterprise (who were, after all, her natural constituency), the prime minister did not take up Worsthorne’s suggestion. But such was her sensitivity to Labour charges of growing inequality
that when she selected 11 June 1987 as the date for the general election, the journalist Robin Oakley noted that she ‘was determined to rob Labour of the chance of exploiting the conspicuous
consumption at the Ascot race meeting in the week of June 18’.
⁸¹

Given their association with the mood music of Thatcherism, yuppies were predictably hate figures for those who regarded the ‘Lawson boom’ either as a mirage or as an insult to those
who remained poor. By 1987, the expression ‘yuppie scum’ was easily tripping off tongues, for while Sloane Rangers were usually the subject of parody, yuppies were widely treated with
loathing by the left. The basis of this contempt appeared to rest upon the notion that they were not the successes of a genuine meritocracy but merely latter-day spivs, making profits without
creating the physical products they bought and sold. Problematically, this definition could easily embrace a large section of the workforce in an increasingly post-industrial economy. The more
stereotypical yuppies, however, tended to make themselves readily identifiable not just by a cocky manner but also by adopting a dress code designed to amplify their unapologetic self-confidence:
men wearing bold chalk-stripe suits with the trousers held up by pillar box-red braces, while women opted for power-dressing, often involving shoulder pads, primary colours and tailoring that
appeared to have been inspired either by the military uniforms of the Napoleonic Wars or by the cut of the smarter sort of air stewardess. The yuppie accessory of a Filofax
^EN41
became so ubiquitous as to be a source of comic ribaldry. There was even bemusement at how their sense of self-importance was revealed by their belief that they
needed the newfangled mobile phone to stay in touch while on the move – literally and metaphorically.

It was as estate agents and property developers that Sloanes and yuppies intermingled professionally. Yet, whatever the social timbre of those organizing property sales, they were engaged in the
market that during the period – even more than the expansion of share ownership – did most to broaden and deepen the asset base of the greatest number of Britons. The average house
price rose from around £20,000 in 1979 to £34,000 in 1985, before peaking at £62,000 in 1989.
⁸²
Indeed, the increase between
1985 and 1989 represented a 70 per cent gain above inflation, and at their most feverish (and unsustainable) in the first half of 1988 house prices rose by 30 per cent. In 1987, there was
widespread incredulity in the press, and even in Parliament, that a converted broom-cupboard in Knightsbridge, with dimensions smaller than a snooker table, could be sold to a secretary for
£36,500.
^EN42
This proved to be a sign not that the market was at its peak but rather that there was still money to be made from even the most
unpromising investments (at least if they were in desirable areas). Furthermore, the increasing valuations were crucially important to an ever larger number of individuals. The proportion owning
their own homes went up from 55 to 67 per cent between 1979 and 1989. The scale of this widening of home ownership was clear when put into historical perspective: only one tenth of homes were
privately owned in 1910, and renters still made up half the market as recently as 1970, when one third of the population lived in council accommodation. ‘Buying their own home is the first
step most people take towards building up capital to hand down to their children and grandchildren,’ declared the Conservatives’ 1987 manifesto, neatly aligning the aspiration with Tory
philosophy. ‘It gives people a stake in society – something to conserve. It is the foundation stone of a capital-owning democracy.’
⁸³
The rapid increase in home ownership in the eighties was made possible by three clear strands of Conservative policy: the sale of council houses, the extension of mortgage
interest relief, and the encouragement given to banks and building societies to relax their lending criteria.

During the 1970s, it had not been impossible for tenants to buy their own council houses in areas where Conservative-controlled town halls actively facilitated the process, but the opportunities
were patchy or non-existent where Labour held sway. It was only with the passage of the Housing Act 1980 that the ‘right to buy’ became a statutory right regardless of the political
outlook of local councillors. The strength of demand immediately became apparent and of the more than 5 million council homes occupied at the start of the decade, 1.2 million had been sold to their
(now) owner–occupiers ten
years later. The scheme the former tenants took advantage of offered them a reduction on the market price proportionate to the number of years
they had paid rent on the property (a reduction of between 33 and 50 per cent, depending on the length of tenancy beyond three years), though that deduction would have to be largely repaid if the
home was then sold within five years. Such discounts cost the Treasury an estimated £2 billion, but the sales raised £18 billion, representing 43 per cent of the total receipts made
from privatizations during the decade.
⁸⁴