When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (50 page)

A few miles away beside a much less well-kempt field, a very different bunch of Englishmen had just finished another cricket game. A barrel of Whitbread's bitter on the verandah of the battered white pavilion drew appreciative drinkers, and a Yorkshireman in a flat cap called out, ‘'Ow's it going, Norman?' If you'd shut your eyes, you could have been in Barnsley. That night, these expatriates – heat conservation engineers, a fork-lift truck repairer, a textile salesman, a cost accountant, and the rep for a small manufacturer from Lancashire – ate fish'n'chips and drank more British beer in the Dickens Inn, an ‘English pub' near the river in old Philadelphia. In and around the city, the expatriates have a choice not only of two cricket teams, but also of a variety of other societies such as the Daughters of the British Empire, the English Speaking Union, the Royal British Legion, a British Officers' Club, St George's and St Andrew's societies and a Pickwick Club.

Most of the newly arrived Britons were workaday people seeking a prosperous and congenial environment in which to advance careers well launched before they arrived. The paradox was that, despite their high-profile imported habits, they had embraced essential American values. In Britain they had despaired of ever being part of a vibrant, entrepreneurial society. They embodied the spirit of get-up-and-go invoked by Mrs Thatcher, only – sadly for her and for the prosperity of Britain – they had indeed got up and gone. Their common observation about the States was: ‘If you put some effort in, you'll get something back. You can achieve very quickly.'

Dudley Pugh, a cost accountant from Derby, who had arrived in 1971 at the age of twenty-three, said: ‘I was living at home and going nowhere. By the time I had paid my parents board, the bills on my car and gone out twice a week, there was nothing over.' To many, America was an escape from the frustrations imposed on them in Britain by education, class or simply the philosophy that, on the whole, problems outweigh possibilities. Val Sauri, a dentist who had been in the United States since 1961, all his working life, said: ‘I thoroughly enjoy going back, but, by the end of a visit I'm frustrated. The attitude is “You can't do it”.' Richard Stephens, a hotel concierge, said: ‘I went home for a week and stayed three days. People were sitting in the same chairs as they were ten years ago, and carrying on the same conversations.'

Mary Griffiths had been in America fifteen years, her husband having been recruited when there was demand for skilled British labour. In Philadelphia she had founded and was running
UK Magazine
, a bi-monthly publication which carried useful information, such as details of cheap charter flights, and relayed gossip about Britain. She had missed these things herself, and thought, ‘Don't complain; do something about it.' Had she stayed in her native Coventry, she believed she would have remained a secretary. ‘It's a man's world in Britain: I still feel it when I go back,' she said.

The expatriates' view of Britain tended to be locked into the era when they left home. Peter Stone, a steel company executive and linchpin of the Merion Cricket Club – he kept the score wearing the full club regalia – left Sheffield when Harold Wilson renationalized steel. An ex-army officer, he dressed whenever the occasion arose in the ceremonial kilted uniform of the Queen's Own Highlanders. He revelled in what he called British ‘bullshit' and ‘putting on a damn good show'. He recounted with gusto stories of fierce verbal clashes with Philadelphia's well-organized Irish community. He said: ‘My loyalties are to Britain, but I couldn't stand the unprofessional way of carrying on business. That's why Sheffield went downhill. The MD would wander in at 9.30, coffee at 11.00. In Detroit he's in at 7.30, and lunch is a quick hamburger. Sheffield did nothing to develop the product and was weak on marketing. A son of a company chairman without much to offer might say, “I think I might do a little bit of selling.” It was the old boy net, what bed you were born in.'

John Knowles, an architect, said he had been depressed on a recent visit home to find how downcast young people were: ‘England is still class-conscious and doesn't offer the opportunities it should. On a train to Liverpool I met five young men who had just been interviewed for a job and had all been turned down. They blamed their failure on not having the right accent.'

John McNamara, a Londoner in his early fifties, lived in a log cabin beside a dark creek, from which the ‘plop' of jumping fish occasionally broke the silence. I visited him at dogwood and azalea time, when the gardens and woods were bright splashes of red and orange, pink and white. Mr McNamara had been living in London, married to an American. When they decided to move to the States, he wrote to eight hundred British companies, seeking to represent them, received seven hundred replies, and one hundred interview invitations: he saw forty firms, negotiated ten agencies, and, in the end, made his living out of one. That went broke, and he switched to represent R.J. Draper, who make sheepskin-lined slippers in Glastonbury. Three years later the firm – having won the Queen's Award for Exports – and Mr McNamara were doing very well indeed. ‘I get across to Americans because of my accent, which hasn't changed, thank God. I get to people who normally would be difficult to see. I try to appear in some senses as if I had just got off the plane,' he said. He was divorced soon after his arrival, but had remarried. ‘I live here much as I would in England – dinner with friends, squash, general socializing.' He took me to the Philadelphia Racquet Club (founded 1889) to watch two of his friends play real tennis. Old retainers laid out the players' clothes, and took them away after the game. It could have been Victorian London.

James Batt, in his early thirties, was manager of a major Philadelphia Hotel, the Plaza. He had worked in Saudi Arabia, Dallas and Miami, and ‘liked the egalitarian nature of American society, and the idea that success buys privilege.' People who came to charity balls at the hotel were a ‘good cross-section, not all Hooray Henrys as they would have been in London.' Americans trusted him to understand about protocol, and the hotel regularly put up celebrities. His ambition was to build a track record on which he could borrow the money to start a similar hotel of his own. He found it much easier to cross social barriers than he had in Britain, and he admired the way ordinary people worked. Many of his staff had two jobs: the night bellman drove a school bus and the garage attendant played in a band. ‘To them, it is perfectly normal to work that hard, and they live well as a result,' he said.

I met Peter Leigh in London. An Oxford graduate, then in his early forties, he had first fallen for the United States when taking a vacation job. Back at Oxford in the early sixties he had found it highly suspect to be enthusiastic about America. ‘There was a noticeable streak of resentment against Americans. The leadership class in Britain had not got over the fact that their country was not Number One any more. The rules had been changed without their permission, and they were still sulking. Coming to terms with no longer being top dog implies that the system will be different in future, something they were reluctant to take on board.' He had returned to the Harvard Business School, and now worked as ‘corporate controller' for a Californian biological research and genetic engineering company.

He was in Britain to supervise the takeover of a small high-tech company at Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which had been developing an innovative idea, but had spread its energies too thinly. He was struck, as he always was in London, by the capital's inefficiencies. He was staying in a major hotel, which was apparently incapable of taking decent messages. An assistant manager had told him that they had been waiting three months for message pads – ‘as if he were helpless, like a victim.' Messages were therefore on scraps of paper that would ‘be understandable if taken by Aunt Millie who had flour all over her hands when the phone rang.' People in the front line just hadn't been trained.

But he was more struck by the rigidities of class. ‘Too few people here believe they can make a difference. There is a kind of caste system, with expectations set very early in life. In the States most people believe most of the time that tomorrow will be better, and that they can contribute: here it is enough if tomorrow is no worse,' he said. In the States people are valued more highly. He had had two months on the dole shortly after his arrival, and ‘I was still treated like a human being, and not as an agent of a communicable disease.' He had recently visited a vice-president of a large paper-making company. As they were touring the works, a man covered in grease had made bowling gestures to the vice-president. It turned out that the two men were members of the same club, and were going tenpin bowling that night. There was probably a gap of $100,000 between their salaries. The night before we met, Mr Leigh had been having a drink in a Covent Garden bar where he fell into conversation with two stonemasons. When they learned that he had emigrated to the States, one said with genuine bewilderment: ‘You speak all right; why did you have to go?'

Many Americans who live in Britain like the feeling of being wrapped in a cloak of known history. They enjoy walking on streets where men who spoke their language have trod for several centuries. The continuity gives their inherited cultures a framework. American mezzo soprano La Verne Williams said: ‘You're closeted in the States. In London you feel more the pulse of the world. Once you have the taste, you really don't want to lose it. You can reach out and touch the great people, and, if you are lucky, work with them.'

Expatriate Americans also like the small scale of Britain. Choreographer Robert Cohan, a director of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre who came to London from New York nearly twenty years ago, said: ‘London is like a small town: everything seems to move in slow motion. You get a great deal done until your speed slows down.' A journalist friend said he was amazed that he could not get Britons to meet him for breakfast, or, if he could, that they would suggest a 10.30 meeting and eat their way through bacon and eggs. Working lunches were also inflated meals, stretching into the afternoon with puddings and brandies.

Bing Taylor, a founder of the
Good Book Guide
, who has lived in London for nearly twenty years, said he admired the freedom from conformity in Britain, but he was, nonetheless, contemplating going home for the sake of his children, who, he believed, were being dragged down by English schooling. ‘Children want to be stretched, to be curious, to learn,' he said, and he contrasted the negative attitude his children were beginning to adopt with the ‘brightness and enthusiasm' of their American-raised cousins. He thought Britain needed an imaginative leader like John F. Kennedy, and was appalled by the staying power and destructiveness of the class system, ‘It is so divisive. It is frightening that people cannot find a way to rid themselves of these attitudes,' he said, observing that the British adapt even the minutiae of life – vocabulary, topics, attitudes – to the perceived class of the person to whom they are talking.

Americans often arrive with the romantic notions about Britain that are still cherished by many British, and they, naturally, resent change. They also usually are comfortably off. Stanley Olson, biographer of the painter John Singer Sargent, who has an English accent, wears suits lined with red silk and affects a languid air, said he found it ludicrous to seek to impose American solutions on English problems, as he suspected Mrs Thatcher was trying to do. ‘To look up from a computer to see the Irish state coach pass by is high comedy,' he said.

Anti-Americanism is, as Mr Leigh observed at Oxford a quarter of a century ago, evidence of Britain's relative political and economic decline. The Labour front-bench spokesman, Michael Meacher, suggested to his constituents in the spring of 1987 that the issue of sovereignty was the most important one facing the electorate – ‘the right of the British people to run their own affairs in their own way, which is now being massively encroached upon by American interests and power … Mrs Thatcher is the leading protagonist of the American hegemony. She has been a willing, even a deliberate, conduit of American colonial power.' He added: ‘Not for centuries have British interests been so humiliatingly subordinated to a foreign power.'

We are, it is true, inextricably linked to the United States, occasionally in ways that are unacceptable – like the US extra-territorial laws cited by Mr Meacher. But for most Britons, access to American ideas and aspirations (and I'm not talking about politics) has a liberating influence. Go to Gatwick Airport, and talk to people returning from short American vacations, and you will find them to be charged up and alive from their experiences. No leading post-war American politician would have dreamed of saying of his people, as Ernest Bevin said of his, that they ‘had been crucified on the poverty of their own desires'. Forty years on the persistence of two Britains remains a bleak indictment of that poverty.

A few days after I had finished the hardback version of
The Return of a Native Reporter
, Margaret Thatcher called the 1987 general election. It was a defiant and arrogant gesture, summoning the people to the polls a year before she was required to and when she enjoyed a Commons majority of 136. She was saying to her disorganized and demoralized opponents, ‘Put up or shut up,' knowing full well that the arithmetic of British politics then would give her a comfortable mandate on the basis of a minority vote. She got her vote – the lowest proportion of those cast for a winning prime minister since the Second World War – and claimed her mandate. Thatcherism, having won the economic arguments, was ready to sweep onto the commanding heights of the social agenda. The shift in ideology that had been so apparent since my return was to be translated into concrete political terms.

By early 1988 Thatcher had expunged all but nominal opposition in her own ranks; had down-graded the Cabinet; had abolished tiers of government – such as the metropolitan councils – that harboured opposition; had misused instruments of government like the Official Secrets Act for political advantage; had presided approvingly over a growth in inequalities in such basic areas as health and education. She seemed content to use her minority support at the polls to ride roughshod over the wishes of the dissenting majority. The mandate was to bring us the universally disliked ‘poll' tax; Kenneth Baker's education ‘reforms', which were to place unprecedented powers in the hands of the Secretary of State; the abolition of the University Grants Committee; and the untrammelled growth of executive power, as the House of Commons struggled under the heaviest legislative programme since the war. Fleet Street, which would have blown a tempest had a left-wing Labour government sought to embrace similar authoritarian powers, was vocal only when the lash of Thatcher's authority fell across its own buttocks.

The self-proclaimed task for Thatcher's third term was to roll back the welfare state; the beleaguered and the broken – some of those people I had been meeting while I was writing this book – were to have the drip feed of dependency ripped from their arms. What could be privatized would be; schools with articulate, socially competent parents were to be encouraged to ‘opt out' of local- authority control, threatening to create three tiers of education – the private, the directly funded and ‘sink' schools for children of the impoverished; prudent citizens would be well advised to take out private health insurance.
Sauve qui peut
became the watchword of the hour. For a few summer months we lived in Panglossian times: unemployment came down; the Stock Exchange indices soared beyond man's most avaricious yearnings; production improved. A City merchant banker dealing in Japanese shares was revealed to be earning £2.5 million a year – or over £10,000 for each working day. To those who had it all already, the perks flowed ever more generously – a top-of-the-range company car was said to be worth £29,000 a year. Thatcher lectured the Americans on their economic management.

I have not argued in this book that Thatcherism has been wholly bad for Britain. I endorse the virtues she preaches – hard work, enterprise, self-sufficiency – and salute many of her achievements, such as the far greater control over inflation. We had grown slack; too many people believed that they had a right to do well out of life without requiring the skill or effort to put anything back in. We had long suffered from a football-pool mentality; we believed that the way to get rich was to put crosses on a piece of paper and sit back. But, despite the greater realism of many, after eight years of Thatcherite governance the reward system seems just as perverse, with little to do with knowledge or culture. Why struggle through night school to become a teacher when your native wits might be worth six figures dealing or speculating in foreign currency? Affluence has become all and, with it, a coarsening of national sensibilities. The sixteen million on or near the poverty line should look to their bootstraps and not to the rest of us for succour.

The political disaster is that there is no one to gainsay Thatcher. I had spent much of the election campaign wandering remote regions in the yellow ‘battle buses' chosen by the two-party Alliance [the Liberals and the Social Democrats, the forerunners of the Lib Dems] to convey its twin leaders on their futile missions. The question I posed myself as the bus bumped through the West Country or twisted down narrow roads in the Scottish Borders was why it was apparently so difficult to sell a moderate and reasonable package to the British people who – for all the intolerance at either extreme of politics – themselves remain centrist and balanced. I knew from writing this book that there was in the country a fatigue with the old, polarized ways; the common sense of the Alliance was very much the common sense of middle England. But what the people I had met also wanted in public life was passion and vision. Where Thatcher proclaimed her programme for the millennium, David Owen and David Steel, the Alliance leaders, offered six-point plans. The dual leadership with its incompatibilities was a disaster. Steel's capacity for self-destruction was apparent from the moment he volunteered to me the phrase ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee' as we drove through his constituency one Saturday morning. He was a man for the margins. When he joined the Liberal Party, it commanded just 2.5 per cent of the popular vote; his expectation was of a lifetime in guerrilla politics.

David Owen had a stubborn streak. Although he was in the American sense the most packageable of British politicians, he failed to exploit his own potential. He told me he did not admire Jack Kennedy, who had been more ‘style than substance', and that he disdained the cheapening of complex issues. Like Coriolanus, he would not – as he would see it – pander to the public appetite for meretricious campaigning. The passion that his cause and his despairing supporters so badly needed was, for him, a private virtue. ‘When you are a doctor, you have to learn to control your tears, your grief,' he said. Without passion the political centre could not – and did not – hold.

On the Saturday after the election I was in Edinburgh to hear Neil Kinnock address the Scottish Miners' Gala. Having until then only seen gobbets of his speeches on television, I had not realized how devoid of content they were. The empty phrases rolled round the interior of a damp marquee. His audience, which had been warmed up by some formidable old-timers like Mick McGahey of the National Union of Mineworkers, was in a nostalgic mood. The occasion was like stepping back three decades in British political life. This was unreconstructed cloth-cap Britain. Outside in the drizzle, families huddled over picnics; inside, Mr Kinnock invoked a world of ‘them and us' in a setting that had already been a caricature when Peter Sellers starred in
I'm All Right, Jack
. Could, I wondered as I sprinted up an Edinburgh hill in search of a working phone box, this ramshackle party ever be modernized? What, anyway, did party functionaries like Brian Gould, a senior Labour MP, mean by ‘modernization'? Show or substance? Was the fragrance of a million red roses all that that wet tent needed? It seemed unlikely. What – aside from her own arrogance – was left to unseat Thatcher now? The talk of the possibility of her still being in power in the year 2000 did not seem so fanciful in the soft rain of that Scottish afternoon.

In the now two years since my return from the United States I have not been able to divorce Britain's social, economic and political problems from its class structure. The radical right likes to have it both ways. It pooh-poohs the notion that we are a class-ridden society; yet it remains intrinsically snobby and continues to take full advantage of the privileges that our caste system affords those at the top. It is fashionable in such circles to accuse liberals of hypocrisy and of oppression – the imposition, that is, of their liberal views on those who are not liberal. John Rae, the former headmaster of Westminster characterized the contemporary liberal as ‘an upper-class twit with his heart on his sleeve and his stomach replete with roast pheasant'. In my experience, the pheasant, the claret and all the other goodies were far more likely to be in the bellies of the Thatcherites, who had the further advantage of being able to enjoy them without being overly troubled by conscience. In the meantime, class divisions continue to bedevil Britain. The young people of a middle-class, suburban area, such as the one I live in, are segregated into two camps from the minute their parents decide which form of education they should have. Within a very short time, formerly best friends with a great deal in common walk metaphorically and literally on opposite sides of the street. The division is a tragic microcosm of the geological fault that runs through British society.

The Royal Family remains a national obsession, its younger members clammering for incessant attention. They also want it both ways; they succumbed to the fallacious yuppy idea that ‘you can have it all', revelling in the publicity their antics attract, yet complaining of intrusion when those antics stimulate inevitable press curiosity. Too late they discovered that those who mount tigers can seldom dismount. Right-wing commentators suggested that the press was bringing disrepute on its own head by the activities of the royal ‘rat pack', but there was at least as much evidence that the young royals themselves were losing respect. A survey of young people elicited the following comments: ‘They're on a cushy number. All that money just for shaking hands and cutting pieces of string,' and ‘They live off us. Big cars, big houses and loads of horses.' The royals reached a nadir at which even royalists cried ‘enough' when several made fools of themselves by appearing in a special staging of
It's a Knockout
– the perfect game for a nation that scoffs at intellectuals. In the same idiom an army captain shot a champagne cork 109 feet 6 inches and had a colour-supplement feature devoted to his achievement. The ultimate accolade in Thatcher's new Britain was, it seemed, to gain an entry in
The Guinness Book of Records
– preferably for something entirely trivial. Class tentacles reach even here; had the record-breaker been a corporal rather than a captain, his achievement would have had something to do with beer. It was not necessary to worry our heads about more important matters: those could safely be left to our leader.

This was the prevailing mood in which this book was first published in September 1987. On the right it had, therefore, a gloomily predictable reception, which reinforced much of what I had been trying to say about the polarized nature of the country I came home to. I was struck again by the closed minds we bring to arguments or analyses with which we do not automatically agree – the left, of course, is equally guilty. Under the headline ‘Britain's Breed Apart', the
Sunday Times
attacked the notion that there was anything left to criticize. ‘Britain's intelligentsia has become the lost tribe of the 1980s ... so it has retreated to its own left-wing laager, where erudite moaning is taken for wise critique ... Rarely have the ideals of the country's intellectual elite been so out of kilter with the aspirations of plain folk.'

This was the unvarnished advocacy of populism. I tell in the foreword to this present edition how I was lumped together in this context as an out-of-touch leftie and (worse) a Montrachet drinker alongside other misguided liberals like Hanif Kureishi and Ian McEwan. What the
Sunday Times
writer – and those unswerving Thatcherites he stood for – appeared to be saying was that in these stirring times those who were not whole-heartedly for us (by which he meant the dominant political philosophy) were against us. He was seeking to create a national mood music familiar to all who have lived under authoritarian governments. It was not what we have been accustomed to in Britain. Thatcher was already assaulting the last redoubts from which effective opposition could be deployed – education authorities and turbulent councils; now her acolytes were turning on the freedom to think differently. Although celebrated as the advocate of such liberties as the right to buy shares (and to drink in pubs all day), Thatcher was proving reluctant to tolerate the bedrock freedom – the right to oppose.

She did manage to unite the media by her obsessive pursuit of the former MI5 man Peter Wright's memoir
Spycatcher
. Two or three separate issues were cynically rolled into one in order to suppress both public knowledge and discussion of the power and accountability of the security services and of specific allegations, such as whether Roger Hollis, the former head of MI5, had been a spy and whether elements within MI5 had tried to destabilize Harold Wilson's government. Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary (ennobled the moment he stepped from office), trotted round the world being ‘economical with the truth'. What the
Spycatcher
affair did – and continues to do as I write in the early days of 1988 – was to strip bare the prime minister's intolerant way with opposition.

As I write this, Thatcher is passing Herbert Asquith's record as the longest-serving prime minister this century: ‘She has raised this country from its knees,' opined
the Daily Telegraph
. As she becomes more millennial in her utterances – we shall go ‘on and on and on' – and more clearly determined to stamp Thatcherism indelibly on the nation she leads, commentators are already looking to the year 2000, in which she would – if she survives that long – overtake Robert Walpole as the longest serving premier of all. She would then still be considerably younger than Gladstone was when he formed his third administration, and younger than Ronald Reagan is today. The possibility appears all too real.

But even as she has been sketching her grandiose vision, the foundations of both her economic and her political security have been shaken. The notion that in the City money could make money indefinitely – breeding incestuously like gerbils – without regard for whether it was helping to make anything else of a more useful nature was severely dented by the stock market crash of 19th October 1987 that came to be dubbed ‘Black Monday'. The government had to pull the BP privatization flotation, and millions of new capitalists woke up to the truth that share-buying is not a game in which investors inevitably get something for nothing. Some were so besotted by the incessant propaganda of the previous years that they still queued on the deadline morning to pay way over the odds for heavily devalued shares. As the temple of Mammon came tumbling down, it was the small man who got most hurt. The victims included a twenty-three-year-old trainee accountant who lost £1 million gambling with other people's money, and a schoolboy, whose £20,000 deficit on dealings put his family's home in jeopardy. Despite its technology, ‘Big Bang' failed to keep pace with itself, and a massive backlog of settlements accumulated. Few stockbrokers – even those who advertised their services to the small investor – could any longer be bothered with tiny deals; corporate raiders ignored the petty capitalist, who therefore could not take advantage when prices were momentarily forced up. Within a few weeks the prospects for a widely based share-owning democracy were set back years.