When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (22 page)

But, in general, the City was no nicer about industry than industry was about the City. Another banker said that, instead of sitting around complaining about the City, industry should be quicker to put its own house in order. It was far too slow to innovate markets and produce new products. British industry had, until recently, been in a dismal spiral, with lack of success leading to lack of money for investment, and lack of investment leading to lack of success. Although performance was improving quite markedly, industry had its poor reputation to overcome, which ‘unfortunately will take a hell of a lot more time than the improvement in the product.' ‘Had industry had the money, would it in any case have invested it wisely?' asked my interlocutor. Thinking of the record of my own newspaper industry in the pre-Wapping era, I had to answer ‘No.' Change, he said, was inevitably painful, which is why it comes so slowly. The London docks – now the back yard for
‘
Big Bang' – were one hundred years out of date before they closed. The problem for the well-run individual company, such as I had in mind, was often lack of financial knowledge, he said.

An official at the Bank of England put it more bluntly. He said: ‘Industry has a mind-boggling ignorance of what the City is capable of doing if asked. The assumption is always that the answer will be “No,”' The Bank published a booklet,
Money for Business
, the sort of publication that sat in the lobby of Department of Trade and Industry offices unread by all but 1 or 2 per cent of businessmen. He said he resisted the notion that the City had an obligation to the rest of society, like some branch of welfare. People don't ask in the same manner, he said, what the chemical industry does for the rest of the economy. The City was a sector of the economy making big profits in free competition. Tongue in cheek, he added: ‘Perhaps in some future recession, the City will be a depressed zone, qualifying for regional assistance from Tony Benn as it collapses under the impact of Japanese competition.' However, he agreed that the policies of the clearing banks often don't percolate through to the branch officers, where the attitude remains that loans are based on your assets and securities. I had found that companies are certainly often ignorant; however, a small outfit, which may require an injection of capital only once every twenty years, can scarcely be blamed for not having up-to-the-minute knowledge of the capital markets.

The rest of us also remain woefully ignorant about capitalism. Of those who have bought shares in one of the privatized industries, many are likely to have put the certificate in a drawer along with family photos. Banks have been slow to offer financial services in the high street – I suspect there might be a killing for the first bank to make it as easy to buy shares as it is to buy foreign currency. We may not be natural capitalists any more, but we are natural gamblers, and banks are often conveniently close to bookmakers. Geoffrey Jones, the banker who had had the heart attack, said: ‘In Britain, selling a new concept is bound to be a slow and laborious process. Unless the British can relate to something they are familiar with, they are loath to give it serious consideration, let alone cough up any money. We're fifteen to twenty years behind the Americans in terms of familiarity with financial markets. Only in the last two years have the British been allowed to become more enlightened. The attitude is “Let's get involved, but not too involved.”' My feeling is that as long as a rising market persists, and capitalism appears to be about something for nothing, a piece of a safe monopoly, John Bull will continue to shell out for new issues of privatized shares. But once the first disaster occurs, there will be a swift change of mood. There may even be demands for government compensation for people who have lost money!

The people's capitalism will, I suspect, be one of Mrs Thatcher's legacies that, when it has genuinely worked its way into the national psyche, will be seen to be as significant as the sale of council houses. My sadness is that the concept is being marketed as a ‘get rich quick' formula. Owing to the undervaluing of the initial privatized stock, it has indeed been risk-free, which explains why voracious yuppies like the former Conservative MP, Keith Best, put their careers in jeopardy to get their paws on more than their fair shares. The
Daily Mail
in a profile described the curly-haired, baby-faced Mr Best as the ‘archetypal yuppy – never afraid of hard work if it was essential to get him where he wanted, never short of ambition, always with an eye for the main chance'. He is, in short, the perfect Thatcherite, and it is an indication of the temper of the times that neither his fall nor the City scandals that by early 1987 had become part of the national wallpaper appeared to touch the electoral popularity of the woman in whose name all this striving after ‘serious money' took place. In the United States it was reported that it had become socially chic to have as a dinner guest someone of dubious financial morality. However, the average punter, having taken his money out of the building society and stuck it into British Gas – thereby buying a piece of something he had previously owned as a taxpayer – was still light years away from investing in new developing industry.

In the week I was in the City, a survey revealed that the directors of a private company in Scotland were being paid an average of £783,600 each. Increases for all British directors were running at more than twice the rate for the rest of the workforce. That same week nurses received a pay rise bringing the salary for a newly qualified staff nurse to £7,300. The most recent Inland Revenue statistics showed that the post-war trend towards greater equality in wealth had been halted – and in some cases reversed – since Mrs Thatcher came to power. The wealthiest 1 per cent of Britons still own 21 per cent of the national marketable wealth (up 1 per cent since the election of Mrs Thatcher); 5 per cent own 39 per cent; and the richest 50 per cent own 93 per cent. The figures for the Thatcher years contrasted with the experience of the previous half century, during which the richest groups lost about 4 per cent of their total wealth each decade.

Money, class and work are inextricably mixed and linked in the British mind. Most Britons, even though they recognize intellectually that the rewards are handed out on an uneven and not very logical basis, emotionally accept as inescapable the divisions and inequalities that can trap them into a narrow corner of life. ‘It's not for the likes of us' in its many guises is still a familiar cry. It is newspapers read by the less wealthy that have the most juicy news about the doings of the rich. (I had once thought that a serious revolutionary party in this country should dispense with its mind-numbing meetings and its dreary slogans, and load the industrial poor into buses and drive them round Mayfair, pointing out the contrasts between what they could see and their own lives. However, I now suspect they would return to Merseyside, or wherever, agog with what they had seen – especially if they had caught sight of the hem of a royal skirt – encouraged to buy yet more magazines with ‘Fergie' or ‘Princess Di' on the cover.)

Nesting luxuriously at the apex of the pyramid of national privilege is the royal family. It was a blessed relief to live in a republic for four years, to escape the incessant rubbish that is peddled about the British royals. There may be too much chit-chat about Nancy Reagan, or, in Jimmy Carter's day, his brother Billy, but American presidents do not create dynasties. Even Anglophile foreigners are sometimes driven from Britain by the mindless drivel we read and talk about royalty. ‘When I've had it up to here with people telling me that … the royal family are overworked and underpaid … then I figure it's high time I took myself away on a good vacation,' wrote the American Paul Theroux. He's lucky; he had Cape Cod to which to escape. The rest of us are stuck with the Charles and Di show.

I am a believer in a constitutional monarchy. I do not wish to be presided over by ‘President' Harold Wilson or ‘President' Margaret Thatcher, nor by some deadbeat compromise from the House of Lords cross benches. There are admirable constitutional presidents like Richard von Weizsäcker of West Germany, but the odds against finding and electing such a person in a politically polarized society like Britain seem to be regrettably long. But the flummery that surrounds the royal family underpins the claustrophobic snobbery and divisions that mar society in Britain. Brian Walden, the television presenter, scarcely a radical these days, wrote: ‘Instead of all the magnificent contributions Britain has made to the world, holding centre stage, we are characterized by our snobbery, patronage, resentment, envy and social distinctions.' Auberon Waugh, arguing in favour of the present arrangements, commented: ‘By her existence [the Queen] reassures us that we need not be guilty about such privilege as may attach to our separate conditions, since this is but a tiny reflection of the quasi-divine privilege which reposes in the monarchy. Far more effectively than Mrs Thatcher, she convinces us that there is nothing wrong in inequality, that even wealth itself is not necessarily evil (or “obscene”, as left-wing MPs may put it).' The Waugh thesis is pure sophistry. What the present opulent and privileged monarchy ‘legitimizes' is not man's right to be unequal – that can be enshrined in such words as ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' – but an unequal society that has insufficient social, educational and economic mobility effectively to thrive either as the pleasant, evolving country it might be, or as a successful international trading power.

The adulation we offer the royal family conditions us for passive acceptance of things we should rise up against, such as the inequalities in education and the brainwashing diet of soap operas like ‘EastEnders' on television. We live in the wings of a permanent, live, glossy soap opera, which is about as relevant to our lives as the weekly shots of ‘Dallas' or ‘Dynasty'. We accept bromides, like the one that Theroux was walking out on, without challenge. Another canard is that the Queen, owing to her long service, is the accumulation of statecraft, political wisdom and constitutional knowledge. This may or may not be so – we are not so ready in other walks of life to equate long service with exceptional capacities – but there is simply no way its assertion can be justified by the known facts. Certainly the proliferation of her younger relatives, most of them – like the Princess of Wales – glorifying in their undereducated Sloane dizziness, is a significant encouragement to the Hooray Henry world of polo,
Gatecrasher
balls and indolent ostentation at Ascot and Henley. The British social structure of titles and gradations, our conditioned instinct that one person is ‘better' than another by reason of birth or class, our bobbing and curtseying – all of which look faintly ridiculous from outside the country – take their justification from a privileged and remote royal family. Prince Charles may look like an ‘ordinary bloke' when he hobnobs with inner-city youths, but his genuine friends – as opposed to advisers like the architect Rod Hackney – are drawn from as narrow a circle as his mother's. The proximity of a ‘royal' personage like ‘Fergie' sends most Britons weak at the knees, and turns their brains to cotton wool. Television interviewers like Sir Alastair Burnet, of twice the age and achievement of the royal princes they are questioning, call them ‘sir'. The royals are, people say in their Pavlovian way, national ‘symbols'. But of what? They go to exclusive schools, join the armed forces, mix with a limited and unrepresentative group of people, travel by limousine and helicopter.

Thirty years after Malcolm Muggeridge and Lord Altrincham (as he then was) seriously risked lynching by parading republican tendencies in public, the royal family is still seldom criticized. For one thing, most editors calculate, it would be bad for circulation, and might even cost them a knighthood down the road. After a fire at Hampton Court smoked out the existence of grace and favour residences, the
Sunday Mirror
, under the ironic headline ‘
AMAZING GRACE (AND FAVOUR) OF OUR CARING QUEEN
', attacked the privilege involved and its cost to the taxpayer. After quoting an elderly brigadier who lived rent-free in a four-storeyed house within Windsor Castle walls, the reporter commented: ‘Snobbery, need I add, flourishes in its most virulent form at these best addresses in the world.' It was a rare tilt at a royal windmill in the popular press.

Most papers, given a choice between a picture of a ‘real' news story and Princess Michael of Kent, will plump for the princess. One of the few ways a scribbler can become seriously rich – like Robert Lacey, author of
Majesty
– is by writing about the royal family. Thereafter they are licensed to make a fat living churning out all sorts of guff. On the morning of Prince Andrew's marriage to ‘Fergie', one royal biographer informed readers of
Today
that the Queen would not confer the title of ‘Duke of York' on the prince. Within a few hours of readers getting their paper, she had done precisely that, yet the royal ‘expert' thrives, his ‘insider' knowledge of the royals and the workings of the Queen's mind as much in demand as ever. Since no one knows the ‘truth' about the royals, anything goes. It's like writing about the Kremlin. It is scarcely surprising that canny politicians like Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, whose Garter knighthood has just been announced, wrap themselves as nearly as they can in the royal standard. One of the few weak spots in Mrs Thatcher's political armour is the public suspicion that HM cannot abide her, fuelled as it was in the summer of 1986 by a ‘leak' that cast the Queen as a ‘one nation' ‘wet' anxious about the divisive road down which the new Conservatism was taking her kingdom.

The fuss raised by these apparent conflicts between sovereign and premier showed just how fallacious is another piece of Pavlovian wisdom about the royal family – that they are above politics. Prince Philip has never hidden his saloon bar views – from his exhortation a quarter of a century ago to workers to pull their fingers out, to his recent indiscretions about ‘slitty-eyed' Chinese. Now there is interest and anxiety about his strange son, who is popularly believed to talk to plants and be an all but paid-up member of the SDP or ‘caring' classes. He chafes, we are told, at the limitations placed upon him when his contemporaries are well launched on satisfying and rewarding careers. Most of those contemporaries would probably swap their careers for his – there is no shortage of young women prepared to marry into the royal family – but this popular wisdom about the prince is another example of the universality of unverifiable presumptions about the royals. Ah yes, we say, poor Charles, trapped in such an unenviable position.