When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

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First published by Viking in 1987 as
The Return of a Native Reporter
Second edition including the Afterword, ‘Moaning Minnies and Montrachet' published by Penguin in 1988
This revised and expanded edition published by Alma Books in 2012
Copyright © Robert Chesshyre 1987–2012

Robert Chesshyre asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Printed in England by CPI Antony Rowe

Packaging, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon

Cover photograph © Peter Reimann, Evening Gazette GMC
(Gazette Media Company) Middlesbrough.

ISBN: 978-1-84688-228-9
eBook ISBN : 978-1-84688-229-6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

For Christine, Thomas, Edward and Kate

• Foreword: Plus ça change…
  
• Chapter 1: ‘The Poverty of Their Own Desires'
  
• Chapter 2: ‘My Wife Would Never Leave Surrey'
  
• Chapter 3: ‘On Yer Bike'
  
• Chapter 4: It's No Go the Milkman
  
• Chapter 5: Serious Money
  
• Chapter 6: By the Sweat of Our Brows
  
• Chapter 7: Boom and Gloom
  
• Chapter 8: The ‘New Jerusalem'
  
• Chapter 9: A Little Learning
  
• Chapter 10: ‘A Plastic Lollipop'
  
• Chapter 11: ‘We Are Here to Protect Our Own'
  
• Chapter 12: Damn Yanks
  
• Afterword, 1988: Moaning Minnies and Montrachet
  
• Appendix, 2010: ‘The Past We Inherit/The Future We Build'
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• About the Author
  
• Praise for the First Edition,
  The Return of a Native Reporter
  

Twenty-five years ago I returned from a four-year posting as chief US correspondent of
the Observer
. In 1987 Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp, about to win a third term of office. I wanted to explore again my own country, so I took notebook and pen and set out to report what I found. I travelled widely – from Aberdeen and the already fading oil boom, via the dying, post miners' strike, Durham coalfields, the north-west and a failing new town, sink estates, a successful comprehensive, the homes of affluent immigrants, the bolt holes of victims of race hate, the factory floor, the boardroom and the booming City wine bars immediately after the ‘Big Bang'.

I journeyed with an open mind. I was not bent on ‘Thatcher-bashing', but I soon encountered aspects of British life that alarmed me (and alarm me yet more now). Already the poor were being blamed – as in early Victorian days – for their plight; to be poor was to have ‘failed'; those who could were being encouraged to shift for themselves in vital areas of public life like education; the NHS, buckling under the strain of an ageing population and vastly more expensive treatments and medicines, was becoming the political minefield it is today; the old industrial areas were bleak and declining – our national crisis was that we were fast dividing into ‘them' and ‘us' camps, a vast gulf opening between comfortable and very uncomfortable Britain. The comfortable were taking it for granted that homeless people dossed down for the night in the doorways of West End theatres, while, riots apart, uncomfortable Britain was normally safely out of sight and mind.

Born in the 1940s, I belong to what has been dubbed the ‘lucky generation'. The cards were stacked in our favour: good free education, copious and stimulating job opportunities, affordable homes even for those on modest salaries, a coping health service and longer life expectancies than any previous generation. Our further luck was that, as we became adults, Britain grew more harmonious, more egalitarian, more civilized: it was good to live in these islands. The unity fostered by the second world war, when (within reason) all classes were in the same boat, and the benefits of the welfare state had combined to create a country at ease with itself. Of course, not everything was perfect. Trades unions and poor managements had between them rendered Britain uncompetitive. Millions of days were lost to strikes; innovation lagged; industrial complacency reigned. We had crafted effective political and industrial structures for our defeated enemy, Germany, but thirty-five years on we ourselves had failed to modernize. Something had to be done and someone had to do it. That someone proved of course to be Margaret Thatcher. By 1987 she was, by head and shoulders, the most significant player in Britain. It was her era, and she ruled the roost, bestriding every aspect of national life: young people who grew up during her reign as PM were dubbed ‘Thatcher's children'.

She arrived on the steps of 10 Downing Street in May 1979 mouthing the emollient words of St Francis of Assisi: ‘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.' I already knew something of the lady, and these were not the sentiments I expected to hear from her lips. I had seen her at close quarters steamroller people with whom she disagreed. On the day of her first general election success I was on a beach in Florida trying to catch fish with my children. The local radio station opened its British election report – the third item in the running order after traffic accidents – with the news that actress Vanessa Redgrave (standing for the Workers' Revolutionary Party) had failed to be elected to the British parliament. The newscaster had just time before an ad break to slip in the information that the United Kingdom had elected its first woman prime minister.

Back in London I reported on the first two years of life in Britain under her new government, before heading again for Washington and four years abroad. When I left, Mrs Thatcher was as unpopular as any PM had been in the early stages of an administration. It seemed likely that I would return to a Thatcherless Britain, breathing more easily after the trauma of her short regime. Unemployment was going through the roof, and manufacturing through the floor. The divisions between Briton and Briton, narrowing over the previous thirty-five years, were again widening. Harmony was not the word. However, in April 1982, I was in the office of Senator John Warner, one of Elizabeth Taylor's cast-off husbands and a member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, when he took a phone call. ‘Your country is at war with Argentina,' he said as he replaced the receiver. Mrs Thatcher entered those alarming months when the success of the Falklands conflict hung in the balance as a failing premier: she emerged triumphant, and the ‘Iron Lady' – myth in the making – had been born.

She swept back to office in 1983, and for the next seven years dominated British politics. Lord Hailsham, her lord chancellor, had coined the term ‘elective dictatorship' to describe the British constitutional arrangement whereby a prime minister with a large parliamentary majority can more or less do as he (or she) pleases – although his target had been the then Labour government. Margaret Thatcher was, without doubt (as Tony Blair was to be a generation later), an elected dictator. What she said went: doubters were brushed aside, dandruff on the political collar.

It was, therefore, the Iron Lady's Britain to which I came home. To speak ill of her was to commit (in many eyes) treachery, certainly lack of enthusiasm ran the risk of being condemned as unpatriotic. This book was attacked in a
Sunday Times
editorial (alongside work by Ian McEwan and Hanif Kureishi) as being ‘smugly negative'. We stood accused of gathering at ‘favourite watering holes, where (even in such supposedly hard times) the Montrachet flows freely'. If only. Our sin was to doubt. ‘Rejoice, rejoice,' Thatcher had exhorted the nation as the Argentinians were defeated. The mood persisted: Britain was, so Thatcher's supporters proclaimed, on its way again. Those who were less than enthusiastic about our leader and who failed to rejoice were deeply unfashionable and – if they knew what was good for them, implied the
Sunday Times
– would do well to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Whatever one's views, it was impossible not to recognize that Thatcher was a phenomenal force blowing through British (and world) politics: through the sale of the more desirable council homes she put capital into the hands of a new class of person; she curbed (emasculated might be a better word) the unions; she wrapped the union flag tightly about these islands. But the way she did things was not always pretty, and even her devoted supporters had to acknowledge that she was deeply divisive. The current silly ‘Marmite' test – you either love it or hate it – has nothing on the ‘Thatcher' test. Indifference was not an option. I know people to this day who will not have a word said against her: to them she remains untouchable, on a pedestal with Winston Churchill. I know others who continue to blame her and her legacy for the ills of economic failure and social division that afflict us now. At one stage such people even blamed her (not always jokingly) for bad weather.

I have changed nothing in this book except the title, for what strikes me returning to my own return twenty-five years on is how far Britain has remained unaltered. Add a few noughts for inflation, and 1987 is still with us. The difficulties that beset us now, beset us then. Even the statistics are eerily similar – three million out-of-work then, nearly three million out-of-work now, for example. The film,
The Iron Lady
– a strangely crafted biopic, in which Thatcher, portrayed as a senile woman who labours under the delusion that her late husband, Denis, is still with her, revisits her life and career – is far from accurate. But it does shine a light on her dominance, mistress of all she surveyed, in particular mistress of the pusillanimous Tory wets in her Cabinet. She vowed to go ‘on and on and on', and in 1987 it was easy to believe that she might. One myth, perpetuated by the film, is that Mrs Thatcher's origins were ever so 'umble; if not born in a cardboard box, she nonetheless had had to climb a very greasy pole.
The Iron Lady
shows her serving behind the counter of her father's grocer's shop in Grantham. When Thatcher became Tory leader, I interviewed her prudently low-profile sister, Muriel, an Essex farmer's wife who pooh-poohed this image. ‘Our father had destined Margaret for Oxford, and she would sweep through the shop with her school books under her arm past the girls he employed to serve the customers.' Thatcher may not have possessed swathes of Scotland, as had previous Tory leaders, but her father was mayor of Grantham, alderman, chairman of the grammar school governors, politically successful in the local milieu and fiercely ambitious for his clever daughter. He actually owned two shops. Her disadvantages were exaggerated (as were John Major's some years later) for political ends. She was from many rungs further up the social ladder than her hated predecessor, Edward Heath. She certainly didn't fool the people I met on my journey round Britain, who saw her – with her son Mark at Harrow and a hereditary title for her husband – most certainly as ‘one of them' rather than as ‘one of us'.

Shortly (and this is not to wish her ill, but is inevitable) there will be the Thatcher State Funeral and a flood tide of reassessments. This book, however, is not a reassessment: it is contemporary reporting of what it was actually like to live and work in many areas of British life when Mrs T ruled the roost.

Then we had: rapidly declining manufacturing; holidays, homes and cars financed by mounting debt; overpaid City slickers; insane house prices; a fast-growing underclass of long-term unemployed, economically unwanted; a society divided by education and opportunity; arguments over welfare; inner-city knife crime; a gulf between the north and the south; riots across the country; business struggling for bank finance. Sound familiar? What we sowed then, we reap now. While in Washington I missed key moments of Thatcher's time as PM – the high of the Falklands War and the low of the miners' strike. But before she became prime minister, I had seen her sweep aside views counter to her own arguments. She was invited to a lunch I attended at
The Observer
, and, as she had recently served as a junior Treasury spokesperson, the editor also asked an economics professor from the LSE. As soon as this wretched man said anything with which she disagreed, she pounced: ‘Nonsense. Absolute nonsense, professor.' The overwhelmed academic was rapidly reduced to silence. He had been at the LSE for thirty years: Thatcher had a few months of front-bench experience under her belt. No wonder that Tory Cabinet ministers wilted later.

Throughout my travels, the spectre of Thatcher hovered over the proceedings: her economic policies were destroying old industries like coal and steel-making and hollowing out the communities that depended on this work. It was brutal, and seemed certain to leave as its legacy what Thatcher's present-day successor, David Cameron, has dubbed ‘the broken society'. People in the City and elsewhere were becoming obscenely rich. ‘The Devil take the hindmost' had become the dominant political philosophy. A man who waited at a bus stop in the rain was a fool if he could afford a fast, warm BMW. The greed – and the lack of controls that made that greed possible – had become not just acceptable, but praiseworthy. Twenty-five years on, the chickens have come home to roost: we have both the broken society (starkly revealed in the 2011 riots) and a rampant capitalism that has brought the wider economy to its current plight. Britain (and, to be fair, much of the Western world) is on its knees, and the responsibility here (and to some extent abroad) rests on the record of the elderly woman portrayed by Meryl Streep in
The Iron Lady
to evoke our pity.

The character of the woman as seen through the eyes of the many British people with whom I spoke was better revealed in the photo on cover of this book. Taken in 1987, the year I was writing, by
Middlesbrough Gazette
photographer Peter Reimann, it shows Thatcher alone in the industrial wasteland of the north-east. The occasion remains famous locally as ‘The Walk in the Wilderness'. How she (or her handlers) allowed her to be so utterly exposed among the economic ruins, is a mystery. But there she stands – bouffant hair, power suit, handbag – the woman who was to proclaim that there was ‘no such thing as society'. As a northern professor of politics said: Thatcher's government was ‘foreign' to many over whom it presided.

We write and talk today as if City greed is new. We rolled our eyes when Peter Mandelson said that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich' (a comment he later both modified and regretted), but there were plenty of people saying much the same thing twenty-five years ago. American arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, for one: ‘Greed is all right by the way. I want you to know that you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.' The Big Bang created the first wave of extremely rich City workers, earning by their wheeling and dealing many times the salary of productive professionals such as engineers. Not long after writing this book I went to Oxford University during the recruitment ‘milk round': the city's Randolph Hotel was packed with undergraduates in suits, desperate for jobs in the financial sector. Even I was addressed by these aspirants as ‘sir', in case I was an undercover head-hunter. After the First World War, a confidential government document warned that the ‘foolish and dangerous ostentation of the rich' would create social unrest. In 1987, when the young and privileged partied on their City salaries and on inherited wealth as if there was no tomorrow, that lesson had long been forgotten. Sloanes were in their prime, and the
jeunesse dorée
drank themselves insensible as their elders paraded at Ascot and Henley. My memories of encounters with the Hooray Henries of 1987 are stirred whenever I see a picture of the young royals staggering from the Boujis nightclub. Those troubled by the impact of the fast-widening wealth gap were open-mouthed at the audacity of the young plutocrats of 1987. Like the poor, they remain with us.