When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (4 page)

In Washington, I had toyed with the idea of starting a business, which in retrospect was little more than a
jeu d'esprit
. However, I mentioned it to my accountant while he was doing my dreary (and to him piffling) tax returns. Immediately he came alive, thrusting the tax bumph to one side. Where were the premises? What was the pedestrian ‘traffic'? ‘How much capital could I raise?' I said I had a modest London suburban home. ‘Good, sell it.' He called another client in the same line of business to organize a meeting. My problem, he was telling me within twenty minutes, was going to be keeping my eye on the ball once the business was up and running. One had to be careful of managers. That night, at a party, I told the story to a man I knew slightly – mainly through having children at the same school. He was in the head-hunting business, but apparently also had access to venture capital. How much would I need to get launched? My best guess was $100,000. ‘I could raise you $200,000 within seven days.' ‘On what basis?' ‘Because I know you.' If I had told my English accountant that I was thinking of starting a business, he would probably have called for men in white coats. But, at the very least, like a detective warning me of my rights, he would have pointed out that I had no experience of that or of any other sort of business; that four out of five new businesses go bust within two years; that by selling my home, I would ensure not only that I would be bankrupt, but that my family would be homeless.

The American bond is the pursuit of success. Reagan could state without being howled down: ‘What I want to see above all else is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich. That's the thing we have, and that must be preserved.' What he meant was not just the log-cabin-to-mansion American Dream of writers such as Horatio Alger, but something like the pioneer concept of the right to bear arms. Individual wealth in the American mind is a defence against tyranny. Reagan would probably replace ‘the pursuit of happiness' in the American Constitution with ‘the pursuit of riches'.

I knew that whatever Thatcherism might have achieved in bringing greater efficiency to British industry, it could not in so short a time have changed the fundamental nature of a deeply cautious and anti-entrepreneurial people. In simple terms, an American, watching a Cadillac drive by, is likely to say to himself, ‘In ten years I'll have one of those'; a Briton, seeing a Rolls-Royce, will spit and say, ‘Bloody capitalist'. (He'd probably be wrong: it was no doubt bought with inherited money, still the largest source of wealth in a country in which, when it was last counted, 1 per cent owned 21 per cent of the wealth, and 50 per cent owned 93 per cent of the national goodies, which doesn't leave a great deal for the rest.) A Washingtonian in a full-time job – on Capitol Hill, in an attorney's office, as a journalist – may well have a part-time commercial interest, a share perhaps in a restaurant, or be expanding his options, like one White House reporter I knew who was taking a business course. A British middle-manager will sit tight in his job and carry on commuting, unlikely to do anything bold unless his hand is forced, as it increasingly has been, by impending redundancy. ‘Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension,' wrote Louis MacNeice, and it is ever so.

I knew all this, and the Gatwick journey had reminded me, if I needed it, that I was returning to an overcrowded, dirty, sluggish corner of Europe. ‘Isn't everything small?' my children said when they returned. The road at the bottom of our street is designated the ‘South Circular', and bears all the through traffic from south London to the west (and back again): it is an ordinary shopping street, two carriageways wide, narrower than one of the suburban roads we had lived on in Washington. The London ‘supermarket' seemed Lilliputian, with inadequate space between the aisles, and a pathetic square foot on which to heap intended purchases. Washington garages were bigger than London living rooms.

Britain had obviously been changed by the often dramatic events of the previous four years. One assumption that I had been raised on – that no government would long survive if unemployment rose above one million – was dead and buried. Weren't you surprised, several leftish acquaintances asked, not to find Britain in flames? No, I could answer in all honesty. We may have begun to hate with a frightening intensity those with whom we disagree, but we will endure real privations with bovine patience. Orwell had watched the poor coping with the Great Depression: ‘Instead of raging against their destiny, they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.'

But what I was not ready for was the deterioration in the daily quality of life, in people's tolerance for each other. The national cohesion that had been built so painstakingly in the post-war years was fragmenting fast. People were harder, more selfish, less caring, less ‘wet'. The hard right had captured not just the political high ground, but also the ‘intellectual' and moral high ground. Whatever the economic gains of Thatcherism, they appeared to carry a high human price tag. To be poor was to have failed: pensioners and the unemployed, drawing their money from the Post Office, were a legitimate object of scorn, even hatred, to the stamp-buying classes who read Auberon Waugh. Comfortable Britain did not wish to know of the privations of these failures. Waugh himself wrote that ‘those of us who live in happier circumstances would prefer to forget, or at any rate shelve [society's backwaters], just as we tend to forget or shelve the daily horrors of life in Chile or the Soviet Union'.

There had been stirring events while we were gone. The Falklands War had been fought and won – an enterprise for which I had little stomach but for which I nonetheless found myself congratulated in America. (I was also congratulated, even less logically, on the birth of Prince William. Strangers in lifts, hearing my English accent, would grip me by the hand or slap my shoulder. It seemed churlish to say that I had nothing to do with either triumph.) Mrs Thatcher, who did enter my life from time to time when she came to lecture Ronnie (on one occasion at Camp David it was reliably reported that she spoke for forty minutes without the Great Communicator getting a word in), had been re-elected with a wondrous majority. Miners had staged their futile strike against the forces of history, bringing the worst out of themselves and out of Mrs Thatcher. Teachers, reflecting the sour spirit of the times, had withdrawn their enthusiasm, which, in many cases, appeared likely to remain withdrawn. And the political leaders of Liverpool and certain London boroughs had retracted their consent to be governed, plunging their communities into anarchy and destitution.

All this I had seen through foreign eyes, taking my news from the American papers, which had treated the Falklands like a Gilbert and Sullivan revival. The American superpower cheered itself hoarse at the sight of British fighting men sailing halfway round the world to defend the sovereignty of inhospitable rocks. (Not for them the cynicism of Jorge Luis Borges: ‘It's like two bald men fighting over a comb.') Lord Carrington – much admired in the States for his aristocratic sang-froid – actually resigned, an acceptance of responsibility almost unknown in Washington. Maggie's war was like a clarion call from another age.

American journalists headed for the British pub, where they found all manner of wondrous British dramatis personae who knew what was wanted of them. ‘When I was a lad, England was a large, powerful country,' analysed a factory inspector, ‘now we're not.' The report continued: ‘He spoke, caressing a pint of beer. Then he looked up sharply, “If Churchill was still in the government, there'd have been some trouble,” he said with conviction.' There had been a certain amount of trouble even without Churchill. A reporter on
The New York Times
travelled to Cornwall, where he found Heather Crosbie: ‘white-haired and pink-cheeked, who put down her glasses and said she was “shattered.” Sitting in her little whitewashed Cornish inn, with a swan floating silently past on the creek outside, she told a visitor that she and her friends had “never thought it would come to this, in our day, over something so very far away.”' Little old ladies, lovable cockneys, who chided the Yanks for being late once again, stout-hearted yeomen who wouldn't take an Argie invasion lying down: this was the Britain of Pinewood Studios, of the tourist posters. An expatriate would have to be abroad for a lifetime to swallow that lot.

But once the bunting had been taken down, and the United States had staged its own little island triumph with the invasion of Grenada, the American media returned to another image. ‘
BRITAIN IN THE 1980S: PORTRAIT OF A SOCIETY IN DECLINE
' ran the headline over a long analysis in
The New York Times
. I began to notice that the word ‘decline' was seldom far from the word ‘Britain' in headlines. The articles were built with common materials – union bloody-mindedness, wooden-headed management, idle, unmotivated workers, antiquated technology, loss of empire, loss of pride, ridiculous class barriers. The aristocracy were no longer quaint: Britain had become impoverished and backward, the industrialized community's first candidate for Third World status. Mrs Thatcher was depicted as right-minded and tough, but overwhelmed or betrayed by the frailties and intransigence of her people.

By the time I returned, the focus had become sharper, ‘
A DIVIDED SOCIETY
' had become the new headline over stories which drew comparisons between north and south, between private and public, between rich and poor. ‘The contrasts', wrote one journalist, beneath the headline ‘
LUXURY AND BLEAKNESS IN BRITAIN
', ‘are stark in Britain today … wealth pouring into central London fuels a real estate boom to rival anything in New York or Boston. Estate agents talk of family houses, nothing special, going for the pound equivalent of $1 million and up. The shops have never seemed so full of luxuries. But in the north of England, only 150 miles from London, the unemployed loiter in bleak streets.'

Britain was being painted as a country that had not just lost its way, but had also lost its charms. Transatlantic television audiences were horrified by the nightly violence and hatred of the miners' strike. Institutions that liberal Americans admired, like the health service and universities, were reported to be cracking up. This decline, said the writer quoted above, ‘has led middle-class people increasingly to seek private substitutes'. The Heysel Stadium disaster, when Liverpool football fans ran amok and dozens were killed, added a further unpalatable dimension. British youth had become violent and antisocial. Dan Rather, the anchorman for CBS News, argued in an emotional (and self-righteous) broadcast that Americans should no longer look to Britain for leadership in civilized values.

Only seven years earlier, another American journalist, Bud Nossiter, had concluded a posting to London with a book with the title of
Britain: A Future That Works
. In 1978 Nossiter thought we had it right – first into the industrial revolution and first out. Such priorities had seemed sane then: better to fish on a Saturday morning than to bust a gut earning overtime payments. That was the theory that had been cosily adopted since the discovery that the inefficient manufacturing industries of Britain could not compete internationally. Perhaps we would not have as many television sets as the Japanese, cars as the Germans, or such fine homes as the Americans, but we would muddle through, feeling superior to those regimented foreign workers. Services – they were the answer – pop music, fashion and banking. Something would come along.

My generation – I was born during the Second World War – had subscribed to the Nossiter thesis. It did seem possible to live well without unseemly effort. There was a further assumption: Britain was moving, even though more slowly than most would have wished, towards certain shared goals. An unparalleled spirit of common purpose had been created by war and austerity – we, the British people, were, at last, all in it together. This time, unlike the twenties – ‘homes fit for heroes', and all that – we would not squander our chances. The welfare state and the mixed economy underpinned fundamental expectations. Everything was going to get better. The ‘something' that Edward VIII when Prince of Wales had so quixotically wanted was at last being done: slum dwellers were moved to live amongst green fields; children were liberated from satanic secondary-modern schools; working-class families swapped Blackpool for the Costa del Sol; cars all but replaced trains and buses. Full employment for those who wished to work and the abolition of poverty were taken for granted. We may, as the historian Corelli Barnett has argued, have been putting the cart before the horse, creating Utopia before we had created the means to pay for it, but we had a great deal of collective sin to expiate – child labour, sweat shops, slums, the Great Depression – and we wished to get on with it.

People would become healthier, better educated, more cultured; class divisions would erode, creating a modern, technocratic, meritocratic society, softened by retaining the best of our traditions. It was unwise to take it too far – unwise to take anything too far: look at the Swedes with their high suicide rate – but forty years after the war there would be in Britain a new society as close to an earthly paradise as flawed humanity could achieve. As people became healthier, the cost of the National Health Service (the NHS) would diminish; as schools improved, there would cease to be a market for fee-paying education. Owning the means of production would instil diligence and pride into the working man. Britain would never again be a world power, but we could show the rest of the world the middle way between the materialism of the United States and the dismal, totalitarian equality of the Soviet Union. Equality of opportunity would be a reality – scholarship boys like playwright Dennis Potter and television presenter Brian Walden had broken from their under-privileged redoubts to the commanding heights; now every girl and boy of ability would pour through the breach.