When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (3 page)

ROBERT CHESSHYRE, APRIL 2012

It was 7.00 a.m., not a good hour when one has just flown the Atlantic economy class. I was stiff from spending eight hours in a seat like a straightjacket, shivery from lack of sleep, and vaguely queasy from inhaling the stale air that gathers in a Jumbo towards the end of a long flight. Half the lavatories, as ever, had been out of action, and somnambulant passengers had lined the aisles from the Irish coast till the seatbelt sign went on. Our sense of slumming it had been rubbed in by the occupation of the first-class cabin by mail bags and their escort of two security men slumbering in the wide luxury of their seats. That put
us
in our places. But if there is one thing worse than travelling through the night, it is the chaos of arriving before dawn.

‘
BRITISH RAIL WELCOMES YOU TO GATWICK
' read a big sign; ‘London Victoria, trains depart every 15 minutes'. It was still dark, and a cutting wind drove along the buried platforms as if propelled by icy bellows. Someone – vandals? British Rail itself? – had skilfully removed the seats: the holes where the bolts had been showed mockingly in the tarmac. A loudspeaker barked: ‘British Rail regrets …' It was one of those deliberately articulated third-person announcements that make the inefficiencies of public transport appear like acts of God. Not one but three Victoria express trains had been cancelled.

I had always enjoyed coming home. I recalled – as our train, filling with unknown yet familiar people, pursued its slow way towards London – the contentment I had felt as a small boy more than thirty years earlier when flying into Northolt Airport aboard a
DC
-3 of British European Airways. Then, as the plane made its approach, I had peered with high excitement to catch sight of the red-tiled roofs of Middlesex suburbia, which – drear though they might have been – to me were like a lighthouse to the returning sailor, the first glimpse of an anxiously sought land. My parents lived then in France, and it was a journey I had made three times a year for three years to return to school in England, and I had never been disappointed. My last, very much more recent, return had also been a great pleasure – a sun-filled August holiday in a borrowed house on Richmond Hill. But this was my first journey to Britain for two years, and shortly I was to resume living at home again after an absence of nearly four years.

Nothing could have tested my nerve more than arriving on a commuter train at the height of the rush hour on a bleak, cold February morning. Commuting everywhere depresses the spirit; passengers exist in limbo, their personalities temporarily on hold. Once the obviously resented disruption of the air travellers – several of them over-apologetic Americans whose tartan bags blocked the gangway – and their luggage had been absorbed, that morning's London-bound workers resumed their quotidian routine. The elderly dozed, the young listened to headphones, from which the ‘boom-de-boom' rhythm of percussion leaked, and those of in-between years read newspapers suitable to their station in life.

Looking round, I realized with a shock that, although I had been living in the United States for over three years, I could nonetheless make a shrewd guess at the circumstances of most of my fellow travellers – their education, their income, their prejudices, their place in the pecking order, even perhaps where they took their holidays. It was not something I had been able to do in the States – neither, several friends told me later, could Americans – and I had grown accustomed to being amongst people less easy to read. George Orwell, in his study of
The English People
written after the Second World War, had reached a similar conclusion: ‘The great majority of the people can still be “placed” in an instant by their manners, clothes and general appearance.' The reminder that so little had changed was both comforting and alarming. I had been stimulated by living in an unpredictable and – by me at least – still largely unexplored society, but I had missed deeply the sense of belonging, of being amongst familiar, small-scale landscapes and buildings, of being with people whose outlook had been shaped by the same influences as mine had been, and of being wrapped in history and traditions that stretched in the mind's eye back almost to the beginning of recorded time. I had, I confess, briefly considered staying in the States and seeking a further job there, but it had been a whim rather than a serious exploration of the idea. The United States had been an adventure, but Britain was home.

That Gatwick arrival was in fact the start of a preliminary visit, rather than my eventual return. I had gone ahead to scout out the territory for myself and my family; inspect our house; warn local head teachers to expect our children; dip a toe into office politics. We were due to return permanently six months later from Washington DC, where I had been the
Observer
's correspondent. But this for me was the psychological moment of re-entry. From now on the questions for which there had been little time for thought for three and a half years would become incessant. What kind of a country was I returning to? What was the future for my children – at school and after? Had the British found cohesion and direction under Mrs Thatcher's leadership? Were we a more open society? Were we less class-ridden? Were we still compassionate and tolerant? And, for me personally, how long would it take for the momentum of the United States to slow? Spies who had gone ahead, other Britons returning either to live or on holiday, deeply imbued with the expatriate outlook, had sent back dismal dispatches of overcrowding, filth, sour attitudes, inefficient shops and services, vandalism. (Twelve months later it took Mrs Thatcher a mere week in Israel to be sufficiently struck on her return by the physical squalor of the country she had then ruled for seven years to summon Richard Branson and order a national clean-up. Nearly twelve months after that, as I write this, the place is just as filthy.)

However, there was another national characteristic which I feared more than the physical squalor that I knew awaited: if anything dampened my enthusiasm for home, it was, without doubt, British insularity. Watching the commuters that morning; eavesdropping on conversations about late trains – ‘I went for the five-oh-seven last night, but they'd cancelled it'; the perils of winter holidays abroad – ‘the change in temperature's too great. You come back and within a few days get a stinking cold'; I felt a degree of panic. A study of the news-stand at Gatwick Airport had brought to mind Ernest Bevin's observation of forty years earlier that ‘the working class had been crucified on the poverty of their own desires'. The papers carried front-page headlines about Princess Michael; stories on football thugs; pictures of royal children; hue and cry over ‘sex fiends'; stories about ‘Dirty Den', a television character rather than a sex fiend; one tabloid led its front page with a ‘he deceived me' story about a professional footballer. A hurried perusal of the shelves turned up six magazines with front-page pictures of Princess Diana. Little had changed, certainly not the names. Little had changed either, so I was to discover, at the ‘serious' end of public affairs. I woke on my first morning to a sycophantic radio interview with a complacent junior minister, bound to his interlocutor by a cosy conspiracy of first-name terms. Apart from Mrs Thatcher herself, there appeared then to be only three figures in British public life whose opinions were worth airing – Roy Hattersley, Norman Tebbit and (most over-exposed of all) David Owen – who were interviewed on every topic that arose, appeared, often together, on every discussion show, wrote leader-page articles, and between them set the national agenda. There was only one man of greater national consequence, Terry Wogan, the apotheosis of the prevailing national infatuation with glitz. (I am writing this eighteen months later, and the national appetite for inconsequential distraction remains insatiable. The
Star
, the most woeful of all our papers, yesterday ‘splashed' with a massive picture of Princess Diana meeting the cast of ‘EastEnders' – the ultimate ‘pop paper' story.)

These were the symbolic irritations of coming from a capital city where events of real significance to the world took place, to one that had lost its power, but not all its delusions. In its obsession over the royal family, the nation seemed to have taken leave of its senses: ‘What's it all in aid of?' a character in John Osborne's
The Entertainer
had asked nearly thirty years earlier. ‘Is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?' The answer, it appeared, was an emphatic ‘Yes'.

The other, countervailing, national obsession was, without doubt, ‘yobbism'. Inner-city districts had become ‘no go' areas for milkmen, council workers, postmen, social workers, and (though they denied it) the police. The respectable poor trapped in these horrific zones lived nightmare lives, locked indoors after dark, mugged on their way to buy food, with drug addicts on their landings and human excrement on their stairways. The yobs themselves emerged into public view when they travelled from one ghetto to another to support soccer teams. They were vicious, ignorant, cruel, unemployable, drunk, criminal, uncaring, anti-social, beyond the pale.

The questions, as Britain struggled to come to terms with this monstrous alienation, were who was responsible and what had gone wrong? The denim-clad yobbo, with his narrow horizons and anti-social activities, was the ugly symbol of a society that had failed to fulfil its benign aspirations. The right wing, led by Tebbit, blamed the permissive sixties: the left-wing blamed the hopelessness of the yobs' stunted lives under Thatcherism. The middle classes had begun to build American-style ghettos: a friend had just bought a flat in a ‘safe' area behind electronic gates – symbolically within view of the Chelsea Football Club ‘shed', a yob citadel. The only native industry with boom potential, said one wit, was burglar alarms. Surprising though it seemed to friends reared on stories of American crime and violence, where we had lived in Washington we had seldom locked our car doors at night, and neighbours went on short holidays leaving their front door unlocked.

A wise temporary expatriate might take the precaution of living with the implications of pending return to his native land throughout his years abroad, taking them out of mental storage occasionally, and pondering upon them. I didn't. The new life in the United States drove out the old. I had had time for only the occasional glance over my shoulder at Britain. Of course, I missed family and friends, and the easy familiarity of being with people with whom one can take up after years as if one had simply left the room to put on the kettle. But the regret I anticipated at the loss of small pleasures – cricket, English beer, the countryside – faded swiftly before the impact of new preoccupations. (I never dreamed that baseball could take the place of cricket, but eventually it did.) Living abroad, even in an English-speaking country, was akin to plunging into a foreign language and allowing one's own, perforce, to grow rusty. Coming home, one had to learn again the native idiom.

I knew the aspects of American life I was going to miss – the optimism, the classlessness. It is a canard, put about by apologists for the British class system, that the United States is a class-ridden society, with snobberies undreamed of even by the English. There are small pockets of virulent class, money and ‘who-do-you-know?' consciousness, but they mean nothing to most Americans – the wide variety of the country, the feeling, renewed almost every morning, that anything is possible means that for 70 per cent of Americans equality of opportunity is a reality: they are launched into life with enormously positive impulses. Virtually every child stays in school until he is eighteen: to leave sooner is to be branded a ‘drop-out'. An English schoolteacher, who had worked for many years in the States, wrote to me that in American schools one factor was common, ‘that was a desire to learn, to get ahead (not always perhaps in a manner of which you and I might approve), but the drive was there. And of course class distinction – still nauseously rife throughout Britain – was non-existent.' In our Washington neighbourhood, packed with successful migrants from every corner of the States, educational and ‘class' differences not only did not matter, but also were all but invisible.

Michael Davie, an
Observer
colleague, researching his book on the
Titanic
, interviewed descendants of the survivors of the two working-class groups on board the liner – the steerage emigrants from Italy, Russia and Ireland and the British crew. Seventy years on, the grandchildren of the first group were to be found in law practices, corporate management, doctors' offices across the United States; the stokers' grandchildren were still living in terraced houses on the back streets of Southampton and Liverpool – only now there are no ships left to stoke. Britain was still a nation of village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons.

I was, of course, aware of the harsh realities at the bottom of American society. Under Ronald Reagan, as under Mrs Thatcher, poverty and genuine destitution have grown sharply. As a child I had often wondered what it would have been like to be a Victorian, when the gap between rich and poor was so great. By the time I left America, in some part at least I knew. Other American ‘immigrants' – those brought in slave ships from Africa – had not fared as well as the
Titantic
survivors. Inner-city and rural black people are not among the 70 per cent of equal citizens. A ‘southern' city like Washington is still effectively segregated in many ways. Fellow workers go home at six o'clock to different parts of the town. A study carried out shortly before I left found that a distinctive black argot was becoming more common in urban ghettos. Many black children have not spoken with a white person by the time they go to school. Homeless kids go hungry, and grimy vagrants roam the streets of major cities, cheek by jowl with some of the most affluent people in the world. Many black people are wealthy, but the majority – except those blessed with supreme sporting talents – are still locked out of the American Dream.